2014年阅读笔记

瑜珈

瑜珈 发表于 2014-1-18 20:03
第8本:   光焰不熄：胡适思想与现代中国       周质平

周末的上午，不是百无聊赖地躺床上刷网瞎逛，就是 ...

说到本书的大尺度，竟能得到开恩允许出版，实在是不易的。摘几段增订版自序中的段落，感受一下:

而今我们回看1950年代中国大陆对胡适思想的批判，无非只是一个政权集全国之力，对一个手无寸铁的知识分子，进行长达数十年的诬蔑和歪曲。但有趣的是被批判的，不但不曾被打倒，反而浴火重生。

1949年之后，胡适在中国苦心耕耘了30年的自由与民主，在一夜之间，摧毁殆尽。五四以来，多少知识分子辛辛苦苦培养起来的一点“独立之精神，自由之思想”，成了铲除的对象。换言之，是1949年之后中国的封闭与独裁使胡适由五四时期的“应时之人物”，一变而成了80年代“先时之人物”了。由是推论，不是胡适思想进步了，而是中国社会倒退了。封闭与独裁是滋生胡适思想最肥沃的土壤，也是胡适思想始终不过时最好的保证。


和鲁迅相比，胡适最幸运的是他始终不曾被偶像化过，始终不曾受到党和国家最高领导人毫无保留的赞扬。毛泽东在《新民主主义论》中对鲁迅“三家”－－“文学家、革命家、思想家”，“五最”－－“最正确、最勇敢、最坚决、最忠实、最热忱的空前的民族英雄”的褒扬，把鲁迅扭曲成了一个为共产主义冲锋陷阵的旗手。鲁迅地下有知，也会哭笑不得的。鲁迅自己写过一篇题为《骂杀与捧杀》的短文，值得警惕的是被骂的未必被骂杀，但被捧的已被摔得鼻青脸肿，失了本来面目，成了一个人神之间的怪物。


用政权的力量来迫害知识分子，钳制言论自由，基本上是一种“理”与“势”的斗争。表面上，短时期，“势”往往居于上风，但“理”终将“伸于天下万世”。掌管言论的当道，在禁令下达之前，不妨三复《呻吟语》中的这段话，就能知道“禁毁”的工作是如何的失人心，而又徒劳了。然而这个祖传老法，却依旧在网络的时代进行。


《胡适全集》不能尽收胡适作品，是意料中事，但有意的将违碍文字，剔除在外，而在序言中一字不提。这样的做法，套用一句胡适的话，似有“诬古人，误今人”之嫌…………改革开放30年了，怎么依旧容不下温和稳健，不涉极端的胡适对共产党的一点批评和建议？

所有历代的禁毁、批判、打倒，究其真正的原因都是来自当道对知识思想的恐惧，是枪杆子怕笔杆子。胡适的书至今不能以全貌示诸国人，这正是胡适思想在中国大陆不曾过时最好的证明。一种已经过时的言论是无需禁毁的；受到禁毁，正是表示与当前息息相关。《胡适全集》少了反共的文字，就像胡适在《自由主义是什么》一文中所说，“长坂坡里没有赵子龙，空城计里没有诸葛亮。”

jxkitty

哎呀，有书单吗？咱也要在2014多看些正经小说，以前总是看网络小说，呵呵！

imlucky

龚自珍诗云：九州生气恃风雷，万马齐喑究可哀
可悲的是现在除了“三妈”之类的下流马，其它的统统不敢不喑了。

瑜珈

第9本  Dance of the Happy Shades  与第8本交叉进行，同时读完。

瑜珈

最后一篇为书名，其重要性不可言喻，然后我真的没太看明白真意，于是搜索书评。

书评一：
Now, on to “Dance of the Happy Shades,” which is narrated by a middle-class adolescent girl just beginning to realize how flawed her mother is, how much each of them are shielded by social norms from something special, how empty life can be in this structure. It’s another great critique on a culture that puffs itself up and disdains anything different from itself.
When the story begins, the mother is trying to find an excuse to avoid going to one of Miss Marsalles’ “parties.” Miss Marsalles, the narrator’s piano teacher (and once the narrator’s mother’s piano teacher), is different. Miss Marsalles seems to trust everyone, and her “party” is her sentimental term for a tedious recital where the parents and children showcase hollow enthusiasm. Except for Miss Marsalles, who always looks so genuinely pleased.

It’s almost as if it’s this very pleasure sets Miss Marsalles apart and allows the parents to look down on her. She speaks “of children’s hearts as if they were something holy” and her place is decorated with sentimental objects of the past. Even the gifts she gives to each child who performs “seemed to feature that tender childish nudity which our sophisticated prudery found most ridiculous and disgusting.”
But Miss Marsalles is also set apart by class. This year she’s had to move to a smaller home, and the narrator’s mother hopes perhaps that is excuse enough not to have the “party.” But, that not being something you can say out loud to Miss Marsalles, it turns out not to be a very good excuse. Nothing else works either because, as the narrator says, “my mother is not an inventive or convincing liar, and the excuses which occur to her are obviously second-rate.”

So they go to the party, and the narrator’s mother immediately feels betrayed when her friend, another parent of a student, doesn’t show up. They were supposed to suffer through this together. Still, this doesn’t stop the mother and the other parents from looking around the room, obviously judging everything, communicating disapprovingly to one another. The narrator is embarrassed too. She doesn’t seem to love her teacher (she’s already feeling more sophisticated), but she does realize there’s something wrong with discussing Miss Marsalles and her situation in her own living room while Miss Marsalles attends to each sub-par performance with happiness.

The story shifts focus toward the end. Throughout the story, Miss Marsalles seemed to be waiting for more students to arrive, but, the parents and narrator realize, anyone smart enough not to be there at the beginning is not going to show up late. They’ve escaped. But the students only Miss Marsalles expected do show up. They are students from Greenhill School for handicapped children.

The parents quietly moan as they realize the party is not as close to being over as they’d hoped. And now they have to listen to these students. Miss Clegg tries to lighten the mood while showing just how superior these parents feel: “Sometimes that kind is quite musical.”

As it turns out, one of the girls from Greenhill School performs a beautiful rendition of “The Dance of the Happy Shades” (going by Wikipedia, this may refer to a piece from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice). Everyone is quiet. The narrator says the music “carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness.” When the performance is over, Miss Marsalles “smiles at everybody in her usual way. Her smile is not triumphant, or modest.” After all, says the narrator, “people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when the actually encounter one.”

So who are the shades? Are they the parents who, because of attitudes of superiority and condescension, are often unable to partake in the beautiful connection between people, life, and art? Or are the shades Miss Marsalles and the children from Greenhill School, dancing and happy, obscured by social mores? Either way, the narrator recognizes that she and her mother do not inhabit the same land as Miss Marsalles and these children from Greenhill School, and perhaps she is the lesser for it. But at least here she was able to receive “that one communiqué from the other country where [Miss Marsalles] lives.”

瑜珈

书评二：
Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades” is important.  In this story, Munro shows a typical children’s piano recital, complete with its little sandwiches and elderly teacher, its itchy mothers and bored children. But she adds the surprise at the end of real music played so it “could be felt” by the most unlikely candidate: a teenaged girl with Down syndrome. Thus is everyone confronted with a peculiar challenge to their sense of what is right: somebody who doesn’t really belong, somebody who is a disabled stranger, somebody who at that time would have been mostly cloistered from society, somebody who would have difficulty with speech, is more perfectly communicative than anyone else in the room.
Munro speaks for me. My beautiful, engaging, bookish, athletic, funny, musical, four-year-old grandson has Down syndrome. I recently returned from a conference in Worcester where father and son guitarists Ricardo and Cesar Coloma performed, playing the music “so it could be felt,” as Munro would have said, regardless that the younger Coloma has Down syndrome. See more here.

Serious literature about people with Down syndrome is not common. When this story was published in 1961, there was only one other serious work in which Down syndrome figured – Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, published in 1929. Faulkner’s book beautifully uses Benjy Compson to express every human’s essential need for love.

Munro’s story goes beyond Faulkner’s careful, thoughtful and loving portrait of Benjy, however. In Faulkner’s novel, Benjy is mute, and he is a victim. In Munro’s story, the girl is not mute, in that she plays music, real music, with skill and sensitivity. She is, in fact, a musician, when all the students are just drudges. And despite her probable hospitalization, she is not a victim. She is an actor in her own life, an actor upon the stage of the story, an actor upon the perceptions of the other characters, and upon us, as well.

In “Dance of the Happy Shades” Munro went against the tide of 1950’s accepted beliefs. Most parents of a child with Down syndrome at that time were advised to institutionalize their baby at birth. They were told the child might never talk and couldn’t be taught. (Even Arthur Miller. In an article entitled “Arthur Miller’s Missing Act” in the September, 2007, issue of Vanity Fair, Suzanna Andrews tells the story of how Miller consigned his son Danny, who had Down syndrome, to the Connecticut State Hospital system.)

While Munro’s characters are from an institution, they show promise one could not have easily imagined at that time, and Miss Marsalles shows goodness most people of the time would have called wrong-headed.

Munro’s story is marked by the courage she summoned, for a variety of reasons, to write it.
In the seventies, various court decisions in the United States closed many of the state institutions and simultaneously ordered public schools to educate all children in their jurisdiction. By the eighties, many children with Down syndrome were being educated in public schools. This is the picture now in Boston: students with Down syndrome are often in inclusive classrooms, learn sign language, learn to read, do math, learn sports, learn music, attend community college, have jobs. The Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress has a group of young adult self-advocates who travel to schools and medical schools to deliver lectures and conduct Q & A’s about what it is like to have Down syndrome. There is still much to be done to accomplish full inclusion in ordinary adult life for individuals with Down syndrome, however. Independent living, meaningful work, and marriage are the next frontier, not just for individuals with Down syndrome, but for many with disabilities.

What makes Munro’s story especially important is the way she tells it. The whole episode is seen through the eyes of a young teen who is old enough to observe what adults like her mother are saying and doing, but still young enough to have a mind of her own about what she is observing. The story thus sidesteps sentimentality and mawkishness. Instead, it has the teenager’s straightforward voice, and when the child with Down syndrome finally performs, we are as surprised at her beautiful music as the narrator.

I like the fearlessness of the story: Munro is not afraid to claim, in Miss Marsalles, that goodness exists. She is not afraid to show that goodness is complicated, that it can feel peculiar, unfamiliar, embarrassing, or even strange. Munro sets goodness against whining, carping, backsliding, missing the point, condescension, and blindness. In this story, Munro lets music be its own self, a language, an experience, a gift, a transport, a way of thought, not just a drudgery to be done.

Most of all, Munro gives disability a human dimension: in this story disability has a right to enjoy promise. Here, disability is just a part of being human, not the totality. Here, a person with a disability has her own gifts, her own mentor, and her own right to the pursuit of artistry. Munro allows both love and disability a voice, as well as ignorance and impatience.

If I were still teaching, I would teach “Dance of the Happy Shades.” I’d pair it with “The Sound and the Fury,” the Vanity Fair article, and a little Shakespeare. I’d also show an episode of Glee and one of Life Goes On.  I’d include an excerpt from the papers of seventies activist Benjamin Ricci, who fought the state of Massachusetts on behalf of the son he had placed at the Belchertown State School. We would consider the limitations of the point of view in Of Mice and Men, a widely studied but possibly misleading book. The students would pay a visit to the inclusion nursery school where my grandson is a student; they’d go on a day when the music therapist is there. They’d attend a conference at the NDSS, NDSC, or MDSC. And one of the Massachusetts self-advocates with Down syndrome would come to speak to them. We would consider the question of prejudice: is it easier to accept prejudice if a person looks different? (NDSS data shows that some persons with Down syndrome possess an IQ similar to that of some ordinary, unclassified, people.) We’d consider the way autism, Asperger’s, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities affect the inclusion of children in ordinary life. And then we’d read this story again.

A comment on the title “Dance of the Happy Shades”:  The title appears to refer to a musical piece by Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique. If this is true, the title must be ironic, as the shades who dance in the Berlioz piece are participants at a witches’ Sabbath. Ironically, people with Down syndrome are often seen as happy, although Miss Marsales’ music students with Down syndrome are not particularly happy. What they are, or what one is, is gifted. One has to wonder then, whether the shades in this story are actually the mothers, who in their insularity are half-dead and happy in their ignorance, as they seem to lack a true understanding of either music or people. At the same time, though, the children with Down syndrome indulge their love of music, happily ignorant of the assumptions of ordinary people, who would most likely deny their right to play. Munro’s use of this ambiguous title for the whole book further extends the meaning: In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the little girl delightedly dances with a friend of her father’s, although it will be years before she understands who the friend really is. In “Trip to the Coast,” the repugnant grandmother dies “victorious,” a happy shade. Munro specializes in the half-perceptions of her characters – and their shades of truth.
My deep thanks to Alice Munro for writing “Dance of the Happy Shades.”

瑜珈

全书评论
[size=+0]Reviewed by Brian George


Like all lovers of short fiction, I punched the air when I heard Alice Munro had been awarded the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime’s work. At last, I thought, some proper recognition that Munro, who has concentrated on short stories throughout her writing career, is as worthy of literary plaudits as much better known (but not better) novelists. It’s been interesting, then, to re-read recently her first published story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.

The book was published in 1968, and may at first glance appear to be out of step with its time. After all, this was the year of the May events in Paris, student uprisings across Europe, massive anti-Vietnam war protests on both sides of the Atlantic. In music, Jimi Hendrix spent months reworking Bob Dylan’s bleakly minimalist All Along the Watchtower into his stunning, apocalyptic version of the end of things, and everywhere Dylan’s prescient words about the overthrow of the old order – in politics, culture, society – seemed to be acquiring the force of prophecy. From Munro’s home country of Canada Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young were all emerging at this time.

And here was Alice Munro, writing about an apparently circumscribed world in southern Canada, peopling her fiction with characters whose lives seem never to have been touched by Elvis Presley, let alone Dylan, Hendrix or Young. In most of these stories the turbulent world outside seems completely shut out, as the characters go about their business working in shops, running farms, bringing up children.

This isn’t entirely true, of course. In a few of the stories key social concerns of the late 1960s find an echo. The first person narrator of The Office, a writer who finds it hard to work at home with her husband and family in the background, yearns for a room of her own, a private space where she can do her creative work, reflecting a major theme in feminist thinking of this period. In The Shining Houses the main character takes a quiet stand against the snobbery and intolerance of the new suburban community where she lives, while the title story of the collection satirises a similarly small-minded attitude towards youngsters with learning difficulties.

In the main, though, the stories are set in a slightly earlier time, the 1950s or even 1940s, and must have had a faintly archaic air to readers even in 1968. This is small-town Canada with a vengeance. The context for many of these stories is beautifully encapsulated in these lines from The Peace of Utrecht:

"the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow… dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting towards the town, under an immense pale wash of sky."

And yet this apparently mean, pinched, old-fashioned setting provides Munro with the framework she needs to explore wide themes: love and sex, family relationships, class tensions, growing up and growing old. Like Faulkner before her, restricting her canvas geographically seems to liberate Munro’s imagination.

Some of the descriptive writing in these stories is breathtakingly good. Unobtrusively, Munro often slips an image into an a quiet, unremarkable description, casting a whole new light on a scene, character or object:

"the sky was pale, cool, smoothly ribbed with light and flushed at the edges, like the inside of a shell."

From the same story (A Trip to the Coast) this description of the main character’s grandmother tells us all we need to know about her:

"She was dressed for the day in a print dress, a blue apron rubbed and dirty across the stomach, an unbuttoned, ravelling, no-colour sweater that had once belonged to her husband, and a pair of canvas shoes… She had knobbly fleshless legs and her arms were brown and veined and twisted like whips."

It’s not just in describing characters or scenes that we see Munro’s wonderfully precise observational skills. This is as good a description as you are likely to find of the feeling of getting drunk, very fast, for the first time:

"I did not have in mind the ceiling spinning like a great plate somebody had thrown at me, nor the pale green blobs of the chairs swelling, converging, disintegrating, playing with me, a game full of enormous senseless inanimate malice."

This capacity to look, quietly but unflinchingly, at people, places and events, informs all the stories and is possibly Munro’s greatest strength as a writer. Most of the stories involve a girl or young woman as the main protagonist, often seen at a key moment in her life when she is becoming aware of the powerful, chaotic potential of sex and the complexity of gender roles and relations in the society she lives in. This is usually combined with a merciless dissection of family relationships.

In Boys and Girls the young first-person narrator likes to think of herself as her father’s natural helper, much more suited to the "masculine" tasks associated with farming and fox-skinning than her younger brother. She describes the mechanics of skinning foxes in loving detail, and comments about the pervasive smell left behind "I found it reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles." Gradually, though, as she grows towards adolescence, this sense of herself as a tough, unladylike individual is brought into question by the expectations of her family and the society she lives in. Eventually it is her younger brother who is taken with his father, as a rite of passage, when one of their old horses is shot, and the narrator is dismissed with the phrase "She’s only a girl."

What makes Boys and Girls such a memorable story – apart from the vivid, unsentimental, precise quality of the prose, of course and the intelligent use of symbolism to illustrate the dilemma faced by the main character – is the complexity of her development. In one sense, she is indignant at the way she is gradually frozen out of the masculine world, but at the same time Munro shows how she begins to grow, almost in spite of herself, into her mysterious role as a "girl". We see her standing in front of the mirror, "wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up." At the end of the story, she doesn’t even protest the way she is belittled as "only a girl", commenting "maybe it was true."

Like all great writers, Munro, though she writes superbly crafted stories, will often break the "rules" of short fiction writing. Some of the stories take a while to get going: more often than not the opening of a story gives little indication of where it will end up, either in terms of plot or theme. This is not because Munro indulges in cheap twists, but in many of the pieces there occurs what I can only term a "swerve", as the story quietly moves off in an unexpected direction. There are few neatly tied-up endings here: the reader is usually left with something to ponder, or a sense that the world is messy and complicated.

For me, the most haunting ending comes in The Peace of Utrecht (yet another broken rule: this title gives absolutely no inkling of what the story is to be "about"), a story showing the complex relationships between two sisters and their mother, who has a degenerative disease. The story ends with the accidental smashing of a fruit bowl, which seems to symbolise the fractured life of the sister who stayed behind to look after her mother, and her inexplicable inability to move on with her life even after the mother’s death.

The truth is that there are many treasures here for lovers of short fiction. Even a story like A Trip to the Coast, which is not the most successful, for me, contains wonderful snatches of dialogue and description. I can easily forgive Munro for the uncharacteristically melodramatic nature of the "swerve" in the story for lines like this: "In the close afternoon she could smell the peculiar flesh smell of her grandmother who stood over her; it was sweetish and corrupt like the smell of old apple peel going soft."

Readers who know Munro’s later work will find much to admire and enjoy in this collection, while anyone who isn’t acquainted with her writing could very well start the journey of discovery here.

瑜珈

每一篇的评论： http://mookseandgripes.com/revie ... of-the-happy-shade/

打算过些时候再过一遍，先读书评，再读原文，好好体会。

瑜珈

第十本，用一个晚上的时间读完只有八十来页的薄书，胡适《四十自述》，电子的竖排版书。国内现在的版本有第六章逼上梁山—文学革命的开始，我这本没有，是早期版本（自序中有说明，未写完先出版的）。


用了书中关于读古文的一段回复了这个帖子：
http://club.etjy.com/forum.php?m ... =2&extra=#pid101898


自序
序幕 我的母亲的订婚
一、九年的家乡教育
二、从拜神到无神
三、在上海（一）
四、在上海（二）
五、我怎样到外国去

序言
我在这十几年中，因为深深的感觉中国最缺乏传记的文学，所以到处劝我的老辈朋友写他们的自传。不幸的很，这班老辈朋友虽然都答应了，终不肯下笔。最可悲的一个例子是林长民先生，他答应了写他的五十自述作他五十岁生日的纪念；到了生日那一天，他对我说：“适之，今年实在太忙了，自述写不成了；明年生日我一定补写出来。”不幸他庆祝了五十岁的生日之后，不上半年，他就死在郭松龄的战役里。他那富于浪漫意味的一生就成了一部人间永不能读的逸书了！

梁启超先生也曾同样的允许我。他自信他的体力精力都很强，所以他不肯开始写他的自传。谁也不料那样一位生龙活虎一般的中年作家只活了五十五岁！虽然他的信札和诗文留下了绝多的传记材料，但谁能有他那样“笔锋常带情感”的健笔来写他那五十五年最关重要又最有趣味的生活呢！中国近世历史与中国现代文学就都因此受了一桩无法补救的绝大损失了。

我有一次见着梁士诒先生，我很诚恳的劝他写一部自叙，因为我知道他在中国政治史与财政史上都曾扮演过很重要的脚色，所以我希望他替将来的史家留下一点史料。我也知道他写的自传也许是要替他自己洗刷他的罪过；但这是不妨事的，有训练的史家自有防弊的方法；最要紧的是要他自己写他心理上的动机，黑幕里的线索，和他站在特殊地位的观察。前两个月，我读了梁士诒先生的讣告，他的自叙或年谱大概也就成了我的梦想了。

此外，我还劝告过蔡元培先生，张元济先生，高梦旦先生，陈独秀先生，熊希龄先生，叶景葵先生，我盼望他们都不要叫我失望。

前几年，我的一位女朋友忽然发愤写了一部六七万字的自传，我读了很感动，认为中国妇女的自传文学的破天荒的写实创作。但不幸她在一种精神病态中把这部稿本全烧了。当初她每写成一篇寄给我看时，我因为尊重她的意思，不曾替她留一个副本，至今引为憾事。

我的《四十自述》，只是我的“传记热”的一个小小的表现。这四十年的生活可分作三个阶段，留学以前为一段，留学的七年(一九一○一一九一七)为一段，归国以后(一九一七一一九三一)为一段。我本想一气写成，但因为种种打断，只写成了这第一段的六章。现在我又出国去了，归期还不能确定，所以我接受了亚东图书馆的朋友们的劝告，先印行这几章。这几章都先在《新月》月刊上发表过，现在我都从头校改过，事实上的小错误和文字上的疏忽，都改正了。我的朋友周作人先生，葛祖兰先生，和族叔堇人先生，都曾矫正我的错误，都是我最感谢的。

关于这书的体例，我要声明一点。我本想从这四十年中挑出十来个比较有趣味的题目，用每个题目来写一篇小说式的文字，略如第一篇写我的父母的结婚。这个计划曾经得死友徐志摩的热烈的赞许，我自己也很高兴，因为这个方法是自传文学上的一条新路子，并且可以让我(遇必要时)用假的人名地名描写一些太亲切的情绪方面的生活。但我究竟是一个受史学训练深于文学训练的人，写完了第一篇，写到了自己的幼年生活，就不知不觉的抛弃了小说的体裁，回到了谨严的历史叙述的老路上去了。这一变颇使志摩失望，但他读了那写家庭和乡村教育的一章，也曾表示赞许；还有许多朋友写信来说这一章比前一章更动人。从此以后，我就爽性这样写下去了。因为第一章只是用小说体追写一个传说，其中写那“太子会”颇有用想象补充的部分，虽然堇人叔来信指出，我也不去更动了。但因为传闻究竟与我自己的亲见亲闻有别，所以我把这一章提出，称为“序幕”。

我的这部《自述》虽然至今没写成，几位旧友的自传，如郭沫若先生的，如李季先生的，都早已出版了。自传的风气似乎已开了。我很盼望我们这几个三四十岁的人的自传的出世可以引起一班老年朋友的兴趣，可以使我们的文学里添出无数的可读而又可信的传记来。我们抛出几块砖瓦，只是希望能引出许多块美玉宝石来；我们赤裸裸的叙述我们少年时代的琐碎生活，为的是希望社会上做过一番事业的人也会赤裸裸的记载他们的生活，给史家做材料，给文学开生路。

胡适
二二，六，二七，在太平洋上。

瑜珈

下一本与民国有关的书　《走，回民国住两天》

下一本门罗的书　　Lives of Girls and Women 　同时阅读参考这里的每篇评论
http://mookseandgripes.com/revie ... of-girls-and-women/

仍然交叉进行，作为第11和12本阅读书目