2015年10月21日 星期三

1022 2015 四


Yale Alumni Magazine 在 The Daily Snap 相簿中新增了 1 張相片。
Alexander Calder’s sculpture "Gallows and Lollipops" on Hewitt Quadrangle is temporarily upstaged by the fall foliage.
亞歷山大 · 考爾德的雕塑"絞架和棒棒糖"上休伊特四邊形暫時搶的秋天的落葉。



台北微雨。八點多出門,超商的報紙之生意,唯蘋果日報獨秀-- 社論似乎續昨日的---北京指示國民黨換柱,"宋(空有蓋世武功,怎奈時運不濟。天命如此,夫復何言。 )....時不我與,......我們可以開始向這位政壇老兵致敬送別了。" 洪則深得國共青睞,前途無量。
麥當勞前自家賣39元"土司"的,孤立.....。
美國的 Howard ,跟我談英文的基本:"以上表示常態,不應用過去式。"
加拿大的Ben,談"中微子振盪,捕捉宇宙空間的變色龍......
日本物理界的壯舉─從神岡微中子到ILC計劃...."http://www.storm.mg/lifestyle/69656
美國的吳學長報導台灣的"學會":"自己的東海,自己救 - - -「大渡山學會」正式登場 !"
 5 個鐘頭過後,自由時報賣掉2/3,聯合報等賣得差。


公寓內有加拿大來的華人傳教士,起初--1年前,幾乎聽不懂他講的普通話。不過他都是最勇於打招呼的人;今午,他可能提著便當上樓。我說今天提早下班了?他說下午還要去桃園。我在電梯內追問桃園那兒?他說內壢,我不禁驚嘆:從1985~1995,除1987-88在竹科,我在Motorora和DuPont,都在內壢,很親切的地方。可惜,沒空問他內壢的那兒,一切可好?

出來,受陣雨困數分鐘。





1012 2015 一陰
從守國兄知道黛安.艾克曼Diane Ackerman的《人類時代:我們所塑造的世界 The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us》已有漢譯。她的書/詩都很可讀,從《感官之旅》開始 (90年代,William Scherkenbach 的《戴明修鍊 II》就引用) 開始,台灣版本都是莊安祺翻譯的---從譯者簡介能知道什麼?

今天在紐約時報看到Paul West的訃文 (85歲),他是名作家,長篇小說24本、散文十來本,他是Diane Ackerman的先生,可惜在華文世界比較默默無聞。 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_West_(writer)

Paul West, Writer Who Shoveled Absurdity Into His Books, Dies at 85
By WILLIAM GRIMESOCT. 21, 2015



Photo

Paul West with his wife, the nature writer Diane Ackerman. He was known for his quirky novels with unusual protagonists. CreditJill Krementz, All Rights Reserved

Paul West, a prolific novelist, essayist and critic with an ornate prose style, who managed to write again after a severe stroke reduced his Shakespearean vocabulary to a single syllable, died on Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 85.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, the nature writer Diane Ackerman, said.
Mr. West, a transplanted Englishman, wrote quirky novels with unusual themes and even more unusual protagonists: a dwarf wrestler in “Tenement of Clay”; an astronaut who sees an angel in “Colonel Mint”; a deranged survivor of World War II in “The Rat Man of Paris”; a pair of amnesiac aliens in “Terrestrials”; and, in one of his short stories, a neuron — the 9,999,999,999th cell in Shakespeare’s brain. His characters, often alienated and tormented, navigated a sea of absurdity.
As a stylist, Mr. West pulled out most if not all the stops. “Some creative heads, in order to see the world at all, and to find it worth representing, need to begin by putting it in gaudy colors,” he wrote in the 1985 essay “In Defense of Purple Prose.”
In the 1980s he turned to historical fiction, inhabiting the minds of actual people both marginal — John Polidori, Byron’s physician, is the central character in “Lord Byron’s Doctor” — and celebrated. John Milton and Jack the Ripper take center stage in “Sporting With Amaryllis” and “The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper.” In “The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg,” he reimagined, in a first-person narrative, the life of a German army officer who played a leading role in a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
Mr. West had his debilitating stroke while being treated in a hospital for a kidney infection in 2003. It was not his first stroke. In “A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery” (1995) he had described his recovery from a stroke in 1984. But this time the event was catastrophic, affecting crucial language centers in his brain and making it impossible for him to walk or swallow food.
His wife described the 2003 stroke and its aftermath in a 2011 memoir, “One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing.” Afflicted with severe aphasia, unable to process language, Mr. West could initially only repeat the cryptic syllable “mem.”
Very slowly, words returned, but in unexpected combinations. He was fond of calling his wife by pet names, a habit alluded to in the title of her 2011 memoir. Now they assumed baroque form: Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs, Parakeet of the Lissome Star.
“He would come out of the bedroom and say, ‘Where’s my cantilever of light?,’ ” Ms. Ackerman told The Guardian in 2011. “I suppose you can only know that this means a velour tracksuit when you have been living with someone for four decades.”
Slowly, he began writing again. At his wife’s urging, he set down an account of his stroke. “You know, dear, maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir,” she recalled telling him two months after the stroke. “He smiled broadly, said: ‘Good idea! Mem, mem, mem,’ ” she wrote in a preface to an excerpt from the eventual memoir, “The Shadow Factory,” in The American Scholar. That book was published in 2008.
Mr. West went on to write three self-published novels, “Red in Tooth and Claw,” “The Ice Lens” and “The Invisible Riviera,” as well as two novels and an essay collection that remain unpublished.
Paul Noden West was born on Feb. 23, 1930, in Eckington, a mining town in Derbyshire. His father, Alfred, was partly blinded during World War I and was frequently unemployed. His mother, the former Mildred Noden, was a pianist who once aimed at a concert career but settled for giving private lessons at home for nine hours a day, meanwhile encouraging her son’s literary bent.
“I early on came to appreciate words as what I now realize are repositories of human history,” Mr. West told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 1984. “They were magical things to me, a bit like supercritical helium held with your bare hands.”
Mr. West fictionalized his parents’ relationship in the 1992 novel “Love’s Mansion”; paid tribute to his mother in the 1996 memoir “My Mother’s Music”; and described his father’s combat experience and their shared life during World War II in the 2005 memoir “My Father’s War,” which was published after his stroke but written before.
Eckington provided the setting for a trilogy of early novels: “Alley Jaggers” (1966), in which the title character, a brutalized plasterer with an artist’s soul, turns to murder; “I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon” (1970), which describes the moral awakening of Alley’s pitiable wife, Dot; and “Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas” (1972), which recounts Alley’s experiences in a hospital for the criminally insane.
After earning a degree in English with first-class honors at the University of Birmingham, where he began writing poetry, Mr. West won a scholarship to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 1952 enrolled atColumbia University, where he earned a master’s degree a year later.
He did his compulsory military service with the Royal Air Force and then took a teaching post in English literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. After publishing several volumes of poetry and numerous essays and critical articles, he began thinking of himself as a novelist.
“Looking back, I see myself as a late starter who, between 30 and 40, in a sustained and intensive spell of application, set down half a lifetime’s pondering and moved from a restless contentment with criticism and fairly orthodox fiction to an almost Fellini-like point of view,” he told the reference work World Authors.
In 1963, he began teaching at Pennsylvania State University, where, in the early 1970s, he met Ms. Ackerman, an undergraduate at the time. He retired in 1995. In addition to his wife, Mr. West, whose first marriage ended in divorce, is survived by his sister, Sheila Forster.
Over the years, Mr. West turned his hand to a wide variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, a distinction he eventually grew weary of. “Half the time I don’t know the difference anyway,” he told Contemporary Authors. He added, “A strong imagination will work simultaneously in different moods and different modes.”
He wrote about his deaf daughter, Amanda, known as Mandy, in “Words for a Deaf Daughter” (1969); about learning to swim as an adult, in “Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe” (1983); and about his student experiences, in “Oxford Days” (2002). Family members said that it was not known whether his daughter, with whom he later lost touch, survives him.
Before and after his stroke, Mr. West was intoxicated with words, a sworn enemy of minimalism in fiction and a passionate advocate of extravagant language. The impulse behind purple prose, he wrote, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid.”


保羅西與他的妻子,自然作家黛安·艾克曼。他被稱為他古怪的小說具有不尋常的主角。信用吉爾Krementz,保留所有權利
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保羅西,一位多產的小說家,散文家,評論家與華麗的散文風格,誰管理,寫一遍後,嚴重中風減少了莎士比亞的詞彙,一個單音節,死了上週日在他的家在紐約州伊薩卡他是85。

其原因是肺炎,他的妻子,自然作家黛安·艾克曼說。

西先生,移植的英國人,寫道離奇的小說具有不尋常的主題,更難得的主角:一個矮人摔跤手“粘土礦權”;宇航員誰看到一個天使“上校薄荷”;二戰中的“金鼠人的巴黎”一個瘋狂的倖存者;一對“外星人”失憶外星人的;並且,在他的短篇小說,一個神經細胞之一 - 莎士比亞的大腦9,999,999,999th細胞。他筆下的人物,往往疏遠和折磨,導航荒謬的海洋。

作為一個設計師,西先生掏出大多數,如果不是全部停止。 “一些創造性的頭,才能看到世界上所有的,並發現它的價值代表,必須首先把它在濃艷的色彩,”他在1985年的一篇文章中寫道“在紫散文的防禦。”

在20世紀80年代,他轉向歷史小說,實際居住人既邊際的頭腦 - 約翰·波利多裡,拜倫的醫生,是“拜倫勳爵的醫生”的中心人物 - 而著稱。約翰·米爾頓和開膛手傑克的中心舞台在“體育隨著朱頂紅”和“白教堂的婦女開膛手傑克”。在“的非常豐富的小時數·馮·施陶芬貝格,”他重新想像,在第一人稱敘述,人生誰在陰謀刺殺希特勒在1944年發揮了主導作用,一個德國軍官。

西先生有他虛弱的中風,而在2003年這不是他第一次中風而住院治療的腎臟感染。在“天才之舉:疾病和自我發現”(1995年),他在1984年描述了他的恢復中風而這次事件是災難性的,影響他的大腦關鍵語言中心,使他無法走路或吞嚥食物。

他的妻子所描述的2003行程及其在2011年的回憶錄之後,“百家名年華:中風,婚姻和治療的語言”患有嚴重的失語,無法處理的語言,西先生最初可能只是重複在神秘的音節“紀念品”。

非常緩慢,話回來,但出人意料的組合。他喜歡用愛稱叫他的妻子的,習慣在她的回憶錄2011的標題提到。現在,他們認為巴洛克形式:早晨哈利路亞的間諜精靈,輕盈的星鸚鵡。

“他會走出臥室,並說,”哪裡是我的光懸臂?'“阿克曼女士告訴衛報在2011年。”我想,你只能知道這意味著當你一直生活在別人絲絨運動服四十年“。

慢慢地,他又開始寫。在妻子的催促下,他開始了他的行程的帳戶。 “你知道,親愛的,也許你想寫第一個失語的回憶錄,”她回憶說,告訴他中風後兩個月。 “他笑容滿面地說:”好主意!紀念品,MEM,MEM,“她在序言中寫道,以摘錄從最終的回憶錄”在美國學者的影子工廠“。這本書出版於2008年。

西先生接著寫三個自費出版的小說,“紅牙和爪”,“冰鏡頭”和“看不見的里維埃拉”,以及兩本小說和散文集仍然存在未公佈。

保羅Noden西出生於1930年2月23日,在Eckington,一個採礦小鎮在德比郡。他的父親阿爾弗雷德,在第一次世界大戰期間被部分蒙蔽,是經常失業。他的母親,前米爾德里德Noden,是誰曾經針對音樂會的職業生涯,但結算給私人的經驗教訓在家裡了9個小時,一天同時鼓勵她兒子的文學愛好鋼琴家。

“我早早就來欣賞的話是什麼,我現在意識到是人類歷史的寶庫,”西先生告訴記者,在1984年的參考書當代作家“他們是神奇的東西對我來說,有點像用裸手舉行超臨界氦“。

西先生虛構的1992年的小說“愛的豪宅”他父母的關係;在1996年的回憶錄“我的母親樂”稱讚他的母親;而在2005年的回憶錄“我父親的戰爭”,這是在他中風後出版,但書面描述二戰期間他父親的實戰經驗和他們共同生活。

Eckington提供的設置早期的小說三部曲:“胡同賈格斯”(1966年),其中標題字符,一泥水匠摧殘與一個藝術家的靈魂,變成謀殺; “我期待著活得很順”(1970年),其中介紹了胡同的可憐妻子,點的道德覺醒;和“貝拉路高西的白色聖誕”(1972年),它講述胡同的經驗,在醫院的刑事責任瘋狂。

獲得學位的英文與一流的榮譽在伯明翰,在那裡他開始寫詩的大學後,西先生獲得獎學金在林肯學院,牛津大學學習,並在1952年就讀於美國哥倫比亞大學,在那裡他獲得碩士學位學位一年後。

他做了他與英國皇家空軍服義務兵役,然後參加了英國文學的教學崗位,在紐芬蘭加拿大紀念大學。出版了幾本詩集和散文眾多和重要文章後,他開始了自己的思維作為一個小說家。

“回想起來,我認為自己是一個起步較晚誰,30和40,在一個持續密集型應用程序的法術之間,放下半生的琢磨和一顆不安分的知足與批評和相當正統的小說,以一個幾乎Fellini-移動類似的觀點,“他告訴參考書世界作者。

1963年,他開始任教於美國賓州州立大學,其中,在70年代初,他遇到了阿克曼女士,本科的時候。他退休了1995年。除了他的妻子,西先生,他的第一次婚姻以離婚告終,是由他的妹妹,希拉·福斯特活了下來。

多年來,西先生把他的手,各種各樣的主題,無論是虛構和非虛構,區分他最終感到厭倦的。 “有一段時間,我不知道其中的差別,無論如何,”他告訴當代作家。他補充說,“一個強大的想像力將同時工作在不同的心情,不同的模式。”

他寫了關於他的聾啞女兒,阿曼達,“一個聾女兒言”(1969年)被稱為小敏,在;關於學習游泳作為一個成年人,在“超出我的深淵:一名游泳運動員在宇宙”(1983年);而關於他的學習經歷,在“牛津天”(2​​002)。家屬說,目前還不清楚他的女兒,與他後來失去了聯繫,是否存活他。

在此前後,他的行程,西先生陶醉的話,極簡主義的小說死敵和奢侈語言的積極倡導者。背後的紫色散文的衝動,他寫道,“是讓一切比生命更大,幾乎overrespond,也許是因為,習慣於生活寫下來,在兩種意義,我們變得習以為常,並必須由一些難以忍受的生動被喚醒。”





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