http://hippius.blog.tianya.cn/ 打油押韵，描字工整，躲避洋腔，亲近鸟文 锡兵 2006-8-19星期六(Saturday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6481904&idWriter=0&Key=0 首先向《第三号兵站》的各位读者致谢。
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其实关门是早晚的事情。天涯博克操作起来，虽然已经算方便了（如果和blogcn相比较），但由于我用拨号的办法上网，它仍旧显得很迟钝。举例来说，我从来没办法重读自己2005年的贴子！！（也许是因为去年每月帖子都多的缘故）目前我正在寻找一个更为便捷的博克寄主。不过，就算新博克开张，更新频率恐怕也不可能象《第三号兵站》这么高了。可这也算不了什么损失，兵站里的大多数东西都是从网络上“扒”来的。你们与其来读兵站这样的博克，还不如自己去网上冲浪呢。
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再次感谢大家的关注。
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鞠躬，退场。
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]]> 2006-8-21 1:59:00(4) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6430391&idWriter=0&Key=0 大卫.格罗斯曼的儿子20岁
OK，OK，这是最后一帖。
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/world/middleeast/14grossman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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Israeli Author’s Son, 20, Is Killed in Battle
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By NOGA TARNOPOLSKY
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Published: August 14, 2006
JERUSALEM, Aug. 13 — The 20-year-old son of David Grossman, one of the nation’s most prominent writers and peace advocates, was killed Saturday in fighting in Lebanon.
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Skip to next paragraph
Hostilities in the Mideast
Go to Complete Coverage »
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Interactive Graphics
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The Toll After a Month of War
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Attacks, Day by Day
Pummeling the Heart of Hezbollah Aid Convoy in Lebanon More Multimedia: Israel | Lebanon | Middle East The son, Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman, was serving in a tank unit. He was one of 24 Israeli soldiers killed in fierce clashes with Hezbollah on Saturday.
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David Grossman, 52, slight and soft-spoken, is often described as the anguished conscience of Israel. He is the author of best-selling novels including as “The Smile of the Lamb” and “See Under: LOVE” and the book-length political treatise “The Yellow Wind,” about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
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Throughout Israel’s first war in Lebanon, from 1982 to 2000, and during the first intifada in the late 1980’s, Mr. Grossman and his wife, Michal Grossman, were frequent participants in antiwar rallies and demonstrations. Often they were accompanied by their two young sons, Yonatan and Uri.
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Occasionally, said Galia Golan, a founder of Peace Now, David Grossman would declare a “writing strike” and disappear to work on one of his novels or books of essays. “But even then, if something important came up, if olive trees being uprooted or if anything happened in Hebron, he was always, always there,” she said.
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Last Thursday, David Grossman joined two other titans of Israeli letters, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, to proclaim their opposition to continuing the war in Lebanon.
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On Aug. 6, the three released a letter they had written calling for an immediate cease-fire.
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“We supported Israel’s right, when faced with ongoing missile attacks upon its civilian population, to embark upon this war,” said Nissim Kalderon, a literature professor who signed the appeal. “But once Lebanon announced its seven-point plan, including the deployment of Lebanese soldiers in the south, we saw no point in continuing a military campaign, and no point in endangering more soldiers’ lives.”
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Then, Mr. Kalderon said, “the very thing we most feared came to be.”
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Yonatan Grossman, recently released from an armored tank unit, was traveling in Colombia on Sunday and could not be located immediately. So, following Israeli custom, the death was not announced publicly until Sunday night.
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Beneath that formal silence, however, the news floated among the friends of one of Israel’s most reserved celebrities.
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As he left the Grossman home on Sunday, Mr. Yehoshua said: “David is like my younger brother. For some days now I’ve been worried about Uri and calling daily, and this morning, when I called to ask how he is, Michal simply said, ‘He was killed.’ ’’
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Then Mr. Yehoshua stopped, no longer able to speak.
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Mr. Oz, reached at his home, asked to be allowed “to mourn in silence.”
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Menachem Brinker, a literary philosopher, described “The Yellow Wind” as “the worst indictment produced by an Israeli Zionist writer against the occupation, commensurate with Norman Mailer’s ‘Armies of the Night’ in terms of its importance.”
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In “The Yellow Wind,” written when Uri was about a year old, David Grossman wrote: “Into what reality are children to be educated? How fuzzy can the lesson I give to my sons be? Maybe I do them an injustice when I bring them up with certain values and do not prepare them for the brutal life we live here?”
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]]> 2006-8-15 17:14:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6427625&idWriter=0&Key=0 里面有
李大同：《冰点报告》广西师大出版社，05
周勍，中国：《民以何食为天？中国食品安全透视》报告文学 04,9
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“冰点”常听说，从来没有关注。古歌用不起来，奇怪]]> 2006-8-15 13:40:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6425991&idWriter=0&Key=0 
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]]> 2006-8-15 11:25:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6425934&idWriter=0&Key=0 我错了，这才是最后一帖。
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Carey, Peter Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber)
Desai, Kiran The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Edric, Robert Gathering the Water (Doubleday)
Gordimer, Nadine Get a Life (Bloomsbury)
Grenville, Kate The Secret River (Canongate)
Hyland, M.J. Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Jacobson, Howard Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape)
Lasdun, James Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape)
Lawson, Mary The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus)
McGregor, Jon So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury)
Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men (Viking)
Messud, Claire The Emperor’s Children (Picador)
Mitchell, David Black Swan Green (Sceptre)
Murr, Naeem The Perfect Man (William Heinemann)
O’Hagan, Andrew Be Near Me (Faber & Faber)
Robertson, James The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton)
St Aubyn, Edward Mother’s Milk (Picador)
Unsworth, Barry The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton)
Waters, Sarah The Night Watch (Virago)
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]]> 2006-8-15 11:21:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6425318&idWriter=0&Key=0 什么时候读完《但泽三部曲》再说吧
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伯林日报
世界报
南德意志
法兰克福展望
日报
新苏黎士
]]> 2006-8-15 10:35:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6425019&idWriter=0&Key=0 http://www.svobodanews.ru/news.aspx?item=260616
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Лех Валенса осудил Гюнтера Грасса
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Выпуск новостей: RealAudio WinMedia MP3
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14.08.2006 15:57
 Бывший президент Польши Лех Валенса заявил, что писатель Гюнтер Грасс, признавшийся в том, что в юности служил в СС, должен отказаться от звания почетного гражданина Гданьска. Грасс родился в Гданьске в 1927 году и получил почетное звание в 1993-м. Шесть лет спустя он был удостоен нобелевской премии по литературе. Валенса, сам нобелевский лауреат, заявил, что если бы о службе Грасса в СС было известно, он никогда бы не получил звание почетного гражданина. Ряд немецких писателей и критиков осудили Грасса за то, что он сделал свое признание столь поздно. ]]> 2006-8-15 10:11:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6424598&idWriter=0&Key=0 性学专家安菲莎 契呵娃 开办 电视性学栏目
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]]> 2006-8-15 9:33:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-15星期二(Tuesday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6424330&idWriter=0&Key=0 
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]]> 2006-8-15 9:11:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-14星期一(Monday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6417429&idWriter=0&Key=0 笨伯的同盟《confederacy of dunces》精彩好书，胖子令人难忘。
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《case histories》不伦不类，不该把探案书写成文艺书。]]> 2006-8-14 17:13:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-14星期一(Monday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6411320&idWriter=0&Key=0 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1501-2310030-1501,00.html
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The Sunday Times August 13, 2006
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The last man they expected to have an SS secret
Günter Grass
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It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon of the German left, has confessed he was once a member of the Nazi SS.
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The revelation by the Nobel prize winner, now approaching his 80th birthday, has shocked Germany’s literary and cultural world. It was Grass first and foremost who insisted the Germans “come clean” about their history and that his own generation should not try to pose as “victims” of Hitler’s National Socialist ideology.
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Now the great advocate of facing unpalatable truths has lived up to his own standards, but a little late. The revelation came in an interview with Germany’s respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and while it is certain to boost interest in his forthcoming autobiography it has done immeasurable harm to the writer’s squeaky-clean reputation.
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Grass now says that, although he had told the truth to his wife, those he deceived included his own children and his biographer Michael Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times yesterday: “I’m deeply disappointed. If he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17 no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us.”
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It had long been known that Grass, who was only 18 when the war ended, had served in the armed forces and been wounded. But until now he had gone along with the story that he had been drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in his native Danzig. The truth, he now admits, is that he volunteered to join the U-boat fleet, “which was every bit as crazy”, but was turned down and drafted instead into the 10th SS Panzer Division “Frundsberg”, part of the Waffen SS.
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“By that stage,” he insists, “the SS were taking anybody they could lay their hands on.” He escaped lifelong identification as an SS member only because by late 1944 the regiments were no longer organised to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
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Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame explanation: “My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write this book. In the end it simply had to come out.”
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But he has not got off lightly. In a separate commentary the FAZ lashed out at him for hypocrisy, recalling in particular his outspoken and now sanctimonious-sounding condemnation of the 1985 visit by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Ronald Reagan to Bitburg cemetery where not only American soldiers but also Waffen SS men were buried. “Wouldn’t the debate have been more honest if we had known that one of those blind followers of the SS had grown up to be, like him, a famous champion of freedom and democracy? “We’re not talking about guilt or crimes here. Grass was still little more than a child,” the FAZ added, noting that at least the great author never pretended to have been part of the anti-Nazi resistance and admitted that he believed in Hitler right up until the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
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But Grass has hidden behind his wall of silence in the post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, now leader of the far-right Republikaner party, published his autobiography Ich War Dabei (I Was There), which insisted former members of the elite units were unfairly stigmatised.
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The debate was heated because Schönhuber made the point that the Waffen SS were exclusively military units, effectively a branch of the regular army, rather than convinced Nazis.
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Grass’s belated revelation will mean a complete revaluation of the career of a man who made himself famous for saying the reputation of Germany would forever be linked with the word Auschwitz.
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Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
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Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
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The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
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His revelations will also fuel the row between Poland and Germany over a new Berlin exhibition dedicated to the worldwide fate of people driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing, concentrating on Germans expelled from what is now Polish territory in 1945.
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Grass is above all celebrated for his evocation of Danzig during the early days of the Nazi regime in The Tin Drum, the 1957 novel that made his name overnight. Yet Danzig is now Gdansk and, since the days of Lech Walesa and the 1981 Solidarity strikes in its shipyards, as important an icon in Polish culture as it once was in German.
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Grass was born in Danzig in 1927 and his father, whom he described as “a typical opportunistic fellow traveller” joined the Nazi party in 1936. At the end of the war, in circumstances that will now have to be re-examined, Grass ended up as an American prisoner of war.
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In one of the most titillating snippets from the forthcoming autobiography, he recalls meeting and becoming friendly with a rather shy 17-year-old lad called Joseph who was also in the Bad Aibling prisoner-of-war camp. “I wanted to be an artist; he wanted to go into the church,” Grass recalls. He is unable, however, to confirm whether the lad was indeed Joseph Ratzinger, who admits to having been in the same camp and is now Pope Benedict XVI.
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On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
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At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
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In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, dedicated to exposing and overcoming Germany’s Nazi past and bringing a new start to literature and society in general. It is certain that his admission into the group would have been far more complicated had he admitted to being a former Waffen SS recruit. Arguably his conversion would have made his contribution all the more valid and important, but the mere fact could at that time have proved an insurmountable barrier.
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But the publication of The Tin Drum and its sudden unexpected global success changed everything. Grass became the voice of the new German literature, surpassing all his contemporaries.
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Its hero Oskar Matzerath, who stopped growing at the age of three in a perverse reaction to everything that was going on around him and forever after beat his childhood tin drum in fury, became a difficult, sinister leitmotif for stunted, emotionally damaged German society.
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Grass’s insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.
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]]> 2006-8-14 8:42:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-14星期一(Monday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6411289&idWriter=0&Key=0 汇报格拉斯访谈]]> 2006-8-14 8:38:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-12星期六(Saturday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6392375&idWriter=0&Key=0 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2307460,00.html
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All shall not have prizes
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With the Man Booker Prize longlist due on Monday, Michael Holroyd recalls some legendary battles with its founder
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DURING MY CAREER AS A writer, the nature of literary prizes has greatly changed. In the 1960s we lived in a world far less cluttered with lists — in particular lists of bestsellers. One result was that judges were seldom blinded by dazzling commercial success. What they were looking for was the tortoise not the hare — a book that, although it might be a slow starter, would still be read 20 or 30 years later, but whose author needed immediate encouragement.
What changed that climate more than anything was the creation of the Booker Prize for Fiction at the end of the 1960s. It gained unexpected attention by virtue of provocative speeches made by its winners, who criticised Booker for its business ethics. When John Berger’s G won in 1972, he handed half his prize to the Black Panthers and attacked Booker for “sweating blacks” in the West Indies.
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The following year, when J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur won, the author promised to use his money to research commercial exploitation for his next novel, The Singapore Grip. “Every year,” he announced, “the Booker brothers see their prize wash up a monster more horrid than the last.”
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Would Booker McConnell soldier on or surrender to this unmannerly hostility? It was due largely to the quiet diplomacy of that doyen of bookmasters, Martyn Goff, that the sponsorship continued. In the 1970s I joined the committee that chose the judges and made the rules for the prize. It was then that I met Michael Caine, the chairman of Booker McConnell. He had set up the prize as a way to give back to literature something of what he had gained through buying the posthumous copyright of Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and other successful authors.
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Caine struck me as a formidable character. He was armed with a decisive stutter. I remember how devastatingly he used it to make sure that Philip Larkin, chairman of the judges in 1977, missed his train to Hull. In those days the shortlisted authors received no money — only the winner was handed a cheque at the prize dinner. I argued with Caine that we should give all shortlisted authors at least £1,000 (the winner originally got £5,000, increased to £10,000 in the tenth year). He disagreed. I persisted, goading him by saying that I thought he could afford it. As I raised my voice, quickened my speech, Caine hesitated more dramatically.
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But his hesitations were triumphant. “Do you know, Michael,” he asked, “why the Booker Prize is so successful?” I murmured something about its similarity to the Prix Goncourt in France, but he raised his hand and silenced me. “They love it,” he said, “because it’s so unfair!” I had no answer. I had been so argumentative that I confidently expected to be removed from the committee. I was kept on for eight or nine years. Caine, I discovered, was held in such awe by staff of the multinational conglomerate that no one argued with him. He was delighted by the novelty of opposition.
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Once I understood this, I recommended that the firebrand publisher Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, be invited to join us. She would give him all the opposition he could desire. At an early meeting he volunteered the opinion that the green Virago Classics covers were awful. Carmen shouted: “Are you colour blind?” The rest of us held our breath waiting for her to be sent out like a naughty schoolgirl. After a terrible silence, he said mildly: “Yes. I am a bit colour blind”. And we all began breathing again.
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Our committee was criticised for appointing more men than women judges, resulting, it was alleged, in more male winners (which led eventually to the creation of the Orange Prize). I can reveal, however, that more women than men refused to be judges, less from temerity, I believe, than good sense.
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Men seemed to enjoy the competitive spirit rather more than women. I was at the same dinner table as Anita Brookner in 1984, when she won with Hotel du Lac, and I can remember the look of absolute horror on her face as her name was announced.
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Our most radical decision was to move the judges’ final meeting to the day of the prize dinner. The winner had been announced two or three weeks before the dinner, which seemed rather a second-hand affair full of funeral baked meats. Caine approved — perhaps, I thought uncharitably, because he could see the disappointment on the so-called losers’ faces as they paraded chequeless before the cameras. Several journalists warned us that they would not attend because they could not file in time for the next morning’s papers. In the end all but one turned up in their dinner jackets, ate their dinners and gave extra coverage to the event.
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Shortlisted authors, I am happy to see, do now receive generous cheques. But perhaps I have helped into existence some of the more simplistic features of the present book prize circus. When a little-known writer wins, such as Keri Hulme with The Bone People in 1985, she must be prepared to be insulted. When a celebrated author, such as Martin Amis, fails to reach the short list, he is branded a loser and the judges accused of feminist bias. Little wonder that some, including Graham Greene, John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, refused to let their novels be submitted. At literary festivals these days the epithet “prize-winner” is randomly used to describe all authors. The job of judging has grown so time-consuming and controversial that writers list the prizes they have judged above those they have won in reference works.
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But for all this, I grew very fond of Michael Caine and came to admire his long-suffering, secretly charitable spirit. When he gave a farewell lunch, rising to his feet and with peculiar grace and stammering out his special thanks to Carmen Callil, Martyn Goff and myself, I felt for a moment unexpectedly emotional.
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]]> 2006-8-12 12:03:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-12星期六(Saturday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6392258&idWriter=0&Key=0 我有他的《wonder boy》，目前读到160页，开始有点厌烦。
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IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Rent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay—and the true history of the Escapist's birth—began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived in New York tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"
"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. "He can barely stand on his own two feet."
Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor Josef Kavalier in his baggy tweed suit. He had known, dimly, that he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy's bed. He wasn't sure just how San Francisco fitted into the story.
"There you are," his mother said, standing up straight again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost five inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. "Come here. I want to tell you something." She grabbed hold of his ears as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his cheeks in turn with her lips. "You made it. All right? You're here."
"All right," said her nephew. He did not sound convinced.
She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness. Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out. The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy thud of defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit, damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy presently identified as the smell, on his cousin's breath, of prunes from the leftover ingot of his mother's "special" meatloaf—prunes were only a small part of what made it so very special—which he had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and had said nothing about it to Sammy.
Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly. Josef's breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin spoke.
"As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed," he said. His accent was vaguely German, furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.
"That would be nice," Sammy said. "You speak good English."
"Thank you."
"Where'd you learn it?"
"I prefer not to say."
"It's a secret?"
"It is a personal matter."
"Can you tell me what you were doing in California?" said Sammy. "Or is that confidential information too?"
"I was crossing over from Japan."
"Japan!" Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing more treacherous than that of the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his grandmother's snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In his desk drawer lay - and had lain for some time—the first eleven pages of a massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either (in the Perelmanian mode) Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian) American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours of mute concentration—brow furrowed, breath held—to the development of his brain's latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And he had thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters, ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of fabulous sums of money.
From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists— Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy's closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women's clothing, the dents in men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy—but he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clip-Pings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.
"Japan!" he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. "What were you doing there?"
"Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint," Josef Kavalier said. "And I suffer still. Particular in the night."
Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.
"Tell me, Samuel," Josef Kavalier said. "How many examples must I have in my portfolio?"
"Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam."
"Sam."
"What portfolio is that?"
"My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good."
"To show my boss?" Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother's handiwork. "What are you talking about?"
]]> 2006-8-15 4:23:00(1) 锡兵 2006-8-12星期六(Saturday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6392222&idWriter=0&Key=0 
]]> 2006-8-12 11:47:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-12星期六(Saturday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6392106&idWriter=0&Key=0 
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]]> 2006-8-12 11:36:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-11星期五(Friday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6379647&idWriter=0&Key=0 《the Brooklyn Follies》Paul Auster
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读博学的人写的小说，总可以得到些尽管没用、但还是很有趣的知识。我估计奥斯特是研究文学的，因为在这本书里我得知，Kafka死的时候才四十岁零十一个月，而Poe死的时候是四十岁零九个月。我还学到，Marlow死于29岁（刀子插在眼里，yuk！），Buechner 死于23岁, Byron死于36岁。 还有，Emily Bronte 只活了30岁, Charlotte Bronte 39, Shelley，差一个月30, Nathanael West 37, Wilfred Owen 25, Trakl 27, Leopardi，Lorca和Apollinair 三人都是38, Pascal， Flannery O’Connor 39, Rimbaud 37, 两个Crane―――Stephen 和Hart―――则分别是28和32, Kleist 活到34，是和情妇一起自杀的。
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书里的第一人称叙述者“我”，名叫Nathan。他做了几十年的人寿保险推销员，因为患癌症，又和老婆离了婚，就心灰意懒，提前退休，到Brooklyn租个房子等死。为了排遣无聊，他开始断断续续地写一本叫《人类的愚行》的书。某天逛旧书店的时候，他碰到了自己多年未见的外甥Tom。Tom本来好好地念着文学系的博士，课程方面的要求全通过了，可是论文硬是写不下去，就退了学，居然沦落到开出租车的地步，幸亏有个好心的旧书店老板Harry，看中了他在旧书方面的才能，请他主持店里的旧书善本部，这才稍稍安定了下来。。。。。
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读完很失望，可能有几方面的原因，但最不满意作者用严格的第一人称讲故事。如果“我”Nathan是个很有趣的人物，第一人称也许是有效的手段，不过Nathan的大部分有趣之处，都在前几十页交待完了，后面的故事大都牵涉别的人物，Nathan只是个肤浅的参与者和旁观者。限于视角，大多数时候作者只能描述这些人物的所作所为，却无法深入到事件和人物的内核中去。我觉得书里很多关键情节不合常理，大部分人物既不有趣，也缺乏心理依据，大都和这种叙述策略有关。
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另一个不喜欢的原因，是书中的真正的细节太少。这本书很少细致地呈现什么东西，无论是心理的还是物理的东西。大部分时间叙述的“分辨率”都嫌太低，就像一部没有近景和大特写的电影。这样做的好处，大概是可以增大情节的容量，不过要是这些情节没有结构和推动力，效果也会适得其反。均匀的“分辨率”，也使得行文更加流畅，但读久了觉得语调太呆板，太一成不变。
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作者似乎同意主人公的观点：人生是不可琢磨的，人生充满了愚行，需要找个“做梦的旅馆”，（就像梭罗和坡各自以不同的方式所做的那样）。因为在这本书结束的时候，旧书店老板Harry意外地死去，给一文不名的Tom留下了大笔财富，连主人公本人，也意外地找了个老相好。可是我要问：So What？
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在这本书的开头，主人公觉得自己的女儿虽然不笨，但她说的话总是充满了陈词滥调（all those exhausted phrases and hand－me－down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom），毕生从没有发表过任何独特的见解（。。。original remark， with something absolutely and irreducibly her own），在读这本书的时候，我一直指望主人公会说些新鲜话，不过我一句也没发现。
]]> 2006-8-11 10:31:00(0) 锡兵 2006-8-10星期四(Thursday)晴 http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=8557&PostID=6366645&idWriter=0&Key=0 http://www.polit.ru/culture/2006/07/31/pekin.html
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Россия – Китай: знаем ли мы друг друга?
Россия – Почетный гость XIII Пекинской международной книжной ярмарки (30 августа – 2 сентября 2006) В рамках года России в Китае, торжественная церемония открытия которого состоялась 21 марта в Пекине в присутствии глав двух государств, Россия станет почетным гостем XIII Пекинской международной книжной ярмарки.
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Пекинская международная книжная ярмарка действует с 1978 г. Традиционно ярмарка открывается в конце августа и считается крупнейшим азиатским книжный форумом. В прошлом году на площади 26 400 кв.м. свои новинки представили около 1 100 участников из 48 стран мира. Традиционно ярмарку посещают более 100 000 человек.
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Особое внимание организаторы обращают на стенд России. Он разместится на площади в 1 000 м2 и будет самым большим стендом нашей страны за всю историю Пекинской ярмарки. Выполнен он будет по эскизам монгольского скульптора, графика и дизайнера Дензена Барсболдта.
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Основная идея предстоящего участия нашей страны в Пекинской книжной ярмарке – не только напомнить о давних традициях российско-китайских культурных связей, но и продемонстрировать многообразие современной русской литературы, ярко отображающей жизнь новой России. Не случайно слоган программы – «Россия. Перелистывая страницы».
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Большую часть экспозиции займут стенды таких российских издательств, как «Олма-Пресс», «Текст», «Терра», «Время», «Вагриус», «Высшая школа». Также в ярмарке примут участие «Ассоциация книгоиздателей России», «Издательские программы правительства Москвы», «Российская библиотечная ассоциация». Заинтересованность в участии в пекинской ярмарке проявили и региональные издательства: «Вешние воды» (г. Орел), «Путь к солнцу» (г. Самара) и другие. Всего в Пекин планируют поехать 80 издательств. Пекинская ярмарка в основном ориентирована на профессиональных посетителей: из четырех дней работы выставки только один день павильоны будут открыты для широкой публики.
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Издательства активно готовятся ко встрече с китайским читателем. Так, например, «Вагриус» при поддержке Федерального агентства по печати и массовым коммуникациям РФ и совместно с китайским издательством «Народная литература» готовит два сборника на китайском языке: «Антология современной российской прозы (рассказы и повести)» и «Антология современной российской поэзии», куда войдут произведения более 50 российских авторов (среди них Василий Аксенов, Максим Амелин, Дмитрий Быков, Александр Кабаков, Римма Казакова, Владимир Маканин, Валентин Распутин).
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Одна из тематических экспозиций «Китай в российских изданиях» представит переводы на русский язык китайских авторов, а также книги о Китае, выпущенные в России за последние 3 года. За период с 2003 года в России было издано 685 наименований таких книг общим тиражом в 2 млн 47 тысяч экземпляров. "Демонстрируя китайскому читателю, что российский читатель тянется к Китаю, мы одновременно хотим его завлечь в мир современных российских авторов", – сказал руководитель Федерального агентства по печати и массовым коммуникациям РФ Михаил Сеславинский, анонсируя программу «Россия – Почетный гость XIII Пекинской международной книжной ярмарки».
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Ответная выставка «Россия в китайских изданиях» продемонстрирует издания произведений российских авторов, которых особенно любят в Китае: от Михаила Шолохова до Людмилы Улицкой.
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Организаторы называют еще несколько интересных экспозиций, которые обещают принести успех российскому стенду в Пекине, например, «Россия: от Европы до Азии» (фотографическое путешествие по различным уголкам России), «Россия в миниатюре» (выставка микрокниг, читать которые можно только через лупу), «Книжная иллюстрация из России».
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На выставке проверят и эрудированность китайских читателей. «Говорю по-русски» - так называется краткосрочная программа, в которую будут включены экспресс-тестирование на уровень владения русским языком, а также открытые уроки, во время которых можно будет узнать и выучить первые русские слова.
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Конечно, не обойдется и без демонстрации современных технологических чудес. Экспозиция «Мультимедиа-кафе» будет организована по интерактивному принципу. В этом году специалисты Республиканского мультимедиа-центра обещали представить новую разработку на русском и китайском языках – познавательно-тестовую игровую систему на базе сенсорного киоска. С ее помощью можно будет в игровой форме проверить, хорошо ли мы знаем, например, государственную символику, названия крупных рек и городов, имена писателей и поэтов двух государств. Социологические опросы показывают, что большинство жителей Китая знают русскую классику и советских писателей (Н. Островского, А. Фадеева, М. Горького, М. Шолохова), но назвать имена современных авторов могут немногие.
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На время проведения ярмарки в Пекин направится делегация российских писателей и поэтов. Приглашения уже получили поэт Евгений Бунимович, востоковед Всеволод Овчинников, писатели Эдвард Радзинский, Эдуард Успенский и другие. На российском стенде встретятся российские и китайские авторы для поиска ответа на вопрос «Россия – Китай: знаем ли мы друг друга?», в Доме современной китайской литературы состоится круглый стол на тему «Литература в поисках героя нашего времени», на факультетах славистики пекинских вузов пройдут встречи с российскими писателями, поэтами, журналистами.
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Церемония открытия программы «Россия – Почетный гость XIII Пекинской международной книжной ярмарки» состоится 29 августа 2006 года в 18.30 в Доме народных представителей. В программе церемонии запланировано выступление Секстета Большого театра России под руководством Владимира Кожемяко.
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На интернет-сайте http://russia-bookfairs.com/ru представлена самая свежая и подробная информация о российской экспозиции и культурной программе.
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http://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2006/08/09/a_731189.shtml
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Китай смотрит холодно
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Текст: Вадим Нестеров. Фото: russia-bookfairs.com.
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На видеоконференции, посвященной участию РФ в Пекинской книжной ярмарке, китайцев смутили скандалом между «почвенниками» и «либералами».
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Сегодня состоялась видеоконференция Москва-Пекин на тему: «Российско-китайское сотрудничество в области книгоиздательства». Тема, как обычно, придумана сбоку, на самом деле речь шла об участии РФ в Пекинской книжной ярмарке, где, как известно, Россия будет в этом году «Почетным гостем».
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Тут надо заметить, что быть почетным гостем на книжных ярмарках - это наш новый тренд. Мы как начали несколько лет назад, так и не можем остановиться. В 2003-м мы почетно гостили на Франкфуртской книжной ярмарке, крупнейшей в мире, в 2004 перебрались на Варшавскую ярмарку, в 2005 съездили на Парижский книжный салон, а в прошлом году в качестве почетного гостя посетили Будапештский фестиваль книги. Теперь вот - Пекинская книжная ярмарка, крупнейшая в Азии.
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Нас туда звали давно, но Пекинская и Московская книжные ярмарки обычно проходили в одно и то же время, перебивая и переманивая друг у друга иностранных издателей. Теперь, наконец, разобрались - китайцы из уважения к бывшему «большому брату» сдвинули свой форум на пару недель, и польщенный брат тут же засобирался в гости.
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Представляться мы, как обычно, будем с размахом.
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Российская экспозиция в Пекине будет размещена на площади в 1000 квадратных метров, что является самым большим стендом страны-почетного гостя за всю 28-летнюю историю Пекинской ярмарки. Павильон нам строит монгольский скульптор, график и дизайнер с дивным, как и всех монголов, именем Дензен Барсболдт.
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Выбор вполне естественен - кому, как не монголу, быть посредником между Россией и Китаем. В своем недавнем интервью господин Барсболдт, великолепно знающий и Россию, и Китай, очень здраво обрисовал сегодняшнюю ситуацию в области наших культурных связей. А она характеризуется тремя словами - долгий временной провал. У китайцев знакомство с Россией остановилось на 60-х годах, на Шолохове и Фадееве, у нас - еще раньше, на Лао Шэ и Лу Сине.
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Как утверждает художник, Россию «как мощную культурную державу помнят только пожилые китайцы. Молодежь же смотрит на Россию абсолютно холодными глазами, даже скорей не любопытными, потому что любопытство у них вызывает Запад.
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Все у них направленно в ту сторону, и задача России заинтересовать их».
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Заинтересовывать собираются масштабно. На открывающуюся 29 августа ярмарку поедут представители порядка 80 российских издательств и несколько десятков российских авторов. Более того - в целях ликвидации информационного дефицита специально к ярмарке крупнейшее китайское издательство «Народная литература» выпускает на китайском языке подготовленные российской стороной антологии современной русской прозы и поэзии - в «живых классиках» Василий Аксенов и Андрей Вознесенский соседствуют с Валентином Распутиным и Александром Солженицыным, представлены писатели всех поколений - от уже упомянутых ветеранов до тридцатилетних Дмитрия Быкова и Алексея Иванова.
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Впрочем, удержать баланс всегда было нелегкой задачей, что и продемонстрировал случившийся на пресс-конференции небольшой скандал.
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Российские журналисты принялись бодро выносить сор из избы, вопрошая организатора российской программы Владимира Григорьева о составе нашей делегации. На самом деле обвинения были не столько несправедливыми, сколько запоздавшими. Сразу после того, как был опубликован первый вариант списка писательской делегации, на оргкомитет посыпались обвинения. Претензии в том, что на книжные форумы ездит «одна и та же либеральная компашка», а писателей-почвенников постоянно обносят, не новы, и разбирались уже на уровне министра культуры. В первом варианте фамилии и впрямь были все те же знакомые «Аксенов-Маканин-Радзинский-Кабаков», но на сей раз привычная отговорка - кого зарубежные издатели просят, того и везем - не работала. В Китае и впрямь большей частью переводят писателей совсем из другой тусовки.
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Как недавно напоминал Валентин Распутин, его книга «Дочь Ивана, мать Ивана» и сборник последних рассказов были оперативно переведены только в одной стране - в Китайской Народной Республике.
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Однако вопрошать про все это на конференции, и смущать наблюдающих конференцию китайцев (а встреча транслировалась в прямом эфире на сайте газеты «Женьминь Жибао») вряд ли было уместно. Хотя бы потому, что крики уже возымели действие, и для устранения перекоса в Китай приглашены, по утверждению организаторов, и наиболее яркие фигуры из другого лагеря, вроде Юрия Полякова и Валентина Распутина.
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Так или иначе, российское «гостевание» в Пекине обещает быть насыщенным. Будет большой стенд «Китай в российских изданиях», где представят российские переводы китайских авторов и книги о Китае - таких за три года было издано более полусотни. Китайская сторона подготовит ответную выставку «Россия в китайских изданиях» - там и посмотрим, кто более популярен в сопредельной империи.
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Интересной обещает быть выставка «Раритет», где будут представлены уникальные книги, в том числе и первый рукописный русско-китайский словарь, написанный еще руководителем Русской Духовной миссии о. Иакинфом (Бичуриным). За современные технологии отвечают мультимедийные издания, представленные на интерактивной экспозиции, плюс круглые столы писателей, издателей, библиотекарей, плюс встречи на факультетах славистики пекинских вузов, плюс вручение государственной премии КНР «За особый вклад в книгоиздание Китая», где в этом году есть и российские номинанты. Ну и когда у нас были визиты без песен и плясок? На этот раз Святослав Бэлза везет в Пекин солистов Большого и Маринки, которые устроят «Вечер старинного русского романса».
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А в следующем году китайцы пожалуют к нам с ответным визитом - Почетным гостем Московской международной выставки-ярмарки 2007 года станет Китай.
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09 АВГУСТА 2006 16:28
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