Text/cloud also retreats
Legendary Artists and Their Clothing
Terry Newman / Deng Yuexian / Translated by Chongqing University Press, January 2022
Born afraid of horses and had never participated in any agricultural and pastoral labor, Jackson Pollock had been dressed as a cowboy hat and cowboy scarf since his teenage years, and loved the denim fabrics of the ranch; Picasso's image in the photographs was varied, from wearing an Indian feather crown and wearing a striped shirt upside down, to his bare shoulders in his recent later years; Yayoi Kusama had made himself part of her large round-spotted designs; Keith Haring wore geek-style glasses and a patched school uniform jacket, making graffiti wherever he liked; Hannah Miller. Hawke kept his head in his eighties, retaining his boyish temperament until he was old; Marcel Duchamp had always been a playboy dress, and his bearding of the Mona Lisa was not only for fun, but the "mysterious smile" he changed was actually the truth of his own face.
The feeling of clothing is the most difficult to convey in words, and this author Newman wrote it well. In addition to the large photographs, the proverbs inserted in the book are also very eye-catching, such as Gertrude Stein's statement that "the people that some people follow are really fascinating people." In the book Madonna commented on her idol, Frida Carroll, saying that Frida "wanted to establish her identity, and she could do that through dress." Her clothes make her stand out. "This is more or less true of every artist written about in this book.
No.9 《Chalet Hostel》
(Albania) Deanna Churi / by Chen Fenghua / Yihuacheng Publishing House October 2021
The suspenseful character of this novel reminds me of the suspense created by Ismail Kadalay, the most famous novelist in Albania, in Who Brought Back Durandina. In the novel, the person who needs to be sought does not seem to matter much later, focusing on the feelings that this small mountainous and rocky land brings to the people who leave and those who live here. But the difference is that Churi's novels are about elite people who are all mature and not surprised by the disappearance of a person. Moreover, it takes place in an era when people use Skype to connect, where there is a clear convergence in the way people's lifestyles in big cities, and where people's encounters can happen to elites everywhere, and "Eastern European characteristics" are less pronounced.
No.8
Southern and Northern Dynasties of the Wei and Jin Dynasties
(Japanese) Yoshio Kawakatsu / By Lin Xiaoguang / Translated by Houlang Kyushu Publishing House, January 2022
The book that narrates this period of history can rhythmically push up small climaxes in the four flats and eight stability, such as the Rebellion of the Eight Kings, the Battle of Feishui, the Rebellion of Hou Jing, and so on, and it is a good job. Chuan Sheng said in the afterword that he did not have much account of cultural phenomena, did not pay much attention to religion, scholarly thought, art and literature, and "felt very sorry for his selfishness", but I think the mood in this book is still very obvious, for the rise and fall of the nobility, Chuan Sheng has a more obvious empathy, for example, in the Northern Wei Dingguo, he especially talked about Cui Hao's political contributions and his independent thoughts in anecdotal way.
Individual cultural people, used by the author as witnesses of the times, but also used to mark his own historian feelings, such as Yan Zhitui, he is the aristocratic witness in the chaos of Hou Jing, a paragraph in his "Guan I Shengfu" made an expression of his mood when he returned to his homeland and Jiankang, saw the devastation, and later in the text, the author used the "Yan Family Training" to represent the general view of the southern dynasty intellectuals on this period of history, this book "faces the new era, shows the ideal human face", revealing "the way of rebirth of the intellectual man".
No.7
Trilobites and Other Stories
(American) Brith M. D'J. Pan Kaik / by Yao Xianghui / Translated by Folio Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2022
Pankeke's novels are said to be reminiscent of Hemingway, but Hemingway's style really has no value of imitation, and Pankeke has to have his own "cool" method to stand up for himself. Xiao Bo pulled open the zipper of his pants to pee, and the stunned possum stared at him. Steam rose and mingled with the blue mist, and he snorted. He climbed up the shoulder of the road with dead leaves. ...... He heard another truck coming toward him, and he resisted the urge to slide down the slope again. He also didn't know why he wanted to walk, or even if he really wanted to. Is such a statement imitating Hemingway?
The themes of this group of short stories range from alienation and sympathy, to disorder and disintegration, and he writes about characters who can love to read on the one hand and have violent tendencies on the other. This is also the appearance of Pankek himself, the impulsive personality that emerges from time to time in these stories, and even if nothing happens, the undercurrent of violence is always there. For example, the meaning of "their parents drowned in the river", Pankeke will express it as "this river killed their parents", and the characters seem to live in a bright and smooth rhythm, but they simply cannot get rid of some innate predicaments. Just like Pankeke himself can't get out of the lowhood of his birth.
He was a good storyteller, telling stories of a class to which he did not belong. When reading "Trilobite", remember to look at Pankeke's picture, his premature aging is so obvious that he was at the top of college. Death always threatened him, ending his life in his twenties.
No.6
The Buzzword: The Misuse of Science by Postmodern Intellectuals
Alan Sokal / Jean Bricmont / by Cai Peijun / Translated by Qi zhenguan Zhejiang University Press, February 2022
Someone should take stock of the discursive barriers that Have been erected over half a century of French philosophy, from Foucault to Lyotard, from Lacan to Cristiva, no matter how appealing the subject, basically deduces it in a way that is incomprehensible. Alan Sokaar's book begins primarily with the misuse of scientific terminology by French philosophers, whose works are perused, focusing on quotations from relativity, wave-particle bisimology, Einstein and Thomas Kuhn, to reflect how the fashionable phenomenon of "quantum mechanics in the face of indecision" arose in serious humanities academia. Long footnotes can be daunting, but the value of Sokal's research is immeasurable.
No.5
The Origin of Cool
(c) Joel Dynastein / by Wang Cong / Translated by Zhejiang University Press, March 2022
Words not only name things, but also record how we feel about things. We learned in elementary school that the antonym of heat is cold, the antonym of warmth is cold, and the feeling of saying "cool" is much more relaxed than "cold". The English word "cool" and the Chinese "cool" are the same, but also sensual, like Chinese speak "cold eyes", the English counterpart is called "cool reception".
Shakespeare said that "cool" is a kind of wit, and it is "something that calm reason can never comprehend." When the word became popular in the 20th century, its meaning gradually listed many, a cool person, alienated, self-obsessed, with calm contempt, with sufficient intellectual self-confidence, physical attraction, for others to obtain aesthetic pleasure, and so on. The emergence of the term "cool" merged the original territory of words such as sweet, awesome, and smooth, and because it pioneered and defined a way of life, the place of "cool" in buzzwords is still unbreakable.
Who is cool, who is not cool, what kind of people can be cool models, and why cool is a role model to be imitated, this is the question that Joel Dinastan wants to answer in "The Origin of Cool". There's a string of names of male literary icons exported from the United States: Woody Guthrie, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando. The book begins at the intersection of French existentialism and American cinema, i.e., Camus, Sartre, and Humphrey Bogart. Then there's jazz, rock 'n' roll, black culture, pop... There is simply too much material to deal with in a cultural history work like this.
No.4 Dresden: The Destruction and Rebirth of a City
Sinclair McKay / By Zhang Zhuxin / Translation of New Classic Culture Wenhui Publishing House February 2022
The war ended at the moment of destruction. On February 13-14, 1945, the Allies bombed Dresden, killing 25,000 people overnight, followed by 300,000 dead in Japan, including Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. This is all a bombing of civilians, and women, children and the elderly are all immune. Are these attacks strategically necessary and morally justified? There is no definitive answer, so the argument never goes away.
McKay's basic point in the book is that the decision to bomb was made by Churchill and Roosevelt in late January 1945, echoing the bombing of Leipzig and Chemnitz in order to open the way for the Red Army to advance westward, but in fact it only completed an atrocity and did not achieve its strategic purpose; in addition, the Bomber Command deliberately targeted civilians, they wanted to strike only the railway hub, but this was too difficult to do at the time, and in fact it did not take many hours after the bombing. Traffic lines were also restored.
Dresden has been one of the undisputed centers of European culture since the 19th century, and the book has reached a high cultural standard, and McKay has used a wealth of oral materials to tell many twists and turns, such as a British prisoner of war who escaped with the help of bombing, and an old German couple who collected antique porcelain, protecting their property with their lives. Dresden's Life and Death presents a solid texture in the book, but McKay has a more complex and profound discussion about whether the Dresden people suffered more innocently or deserved more. Far from being a biography of the city, Dresden explores issues that cannot be left out of date.
No.3
Museum of Imaginary Art
Michel Bhutto / Chen Minle / Translated by Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, August 2021
At first glance, this is a famous painting appreciation book, the same type of book, whether it is a so-called "one book to understand" introductory reading or advanced editions have hundreds of thousands. But if one trusts its author, Michel Bhutto, one of the best Writers of the Last Century in France, one can find something particularly advanced. Bhutto chose only one painting for each painter, whether he was Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso, Monet or Magritte; he did not deliberately introduce the life of the painter, nor did he deliberately choose those strange works to highlight personal interests; in particular, he focused his appreciation on the picture itself, which was not related to the "common sense of art history" such as genre, style, content, etc. The picture is the picture.
Therefore, from time to time when reading, I will have the feeling of "really having vision". Bhutto wrote da Vinci's painting "The Virgin, the Child and Saint Anne," in which he wrote, "The Virgin Mary sits on the mother's lap." However, she was really heavy, and her mother could not bear it. The image of the mother spans two age groups and has two faces, plus the Holy Child, and in this painting we can see people of three ages. These three people are in the same blood, which can also be understood as the three stages of the same person's life. ”
Beginning with Doumière in the 19th century, the book follows the footsteps of Impressionism into a climax, Renoir's ball, Monet's sunrise, Degas's orchestra, and it can be seen that the momentum is rising, while Bhutto's comments are as restrained as usual, not leaving the picture, but there are one or two "points", such as mentioning that the iconic color of Impressionism is purple when writing about Renoir. In writing Henri-Fontaine Latour's The Corner of the Table, he commented on Rimbaud and Verlaine in the picture: Rimbaud and Verlaine are seen in the eyes of today as more masculine and Weerlen feminine, but the views of those at the time were the opposite, and Maramé said that Rimbaud's hands were "enough to remind one of the most terrible profession a boy could have, that is, a butcher."
No.2 "Luck Bait: Gambling Design in Las Vegas and Out-of-Control Robot Students"
Natasha Do Shure / by Richie / Translated by Republic of Democracy and Construction Press, December 2021
Sociology uses many terms to explain human phenomena, which are highly revealing but also prone to creating dyslexia. In This Book of Luck's Bait, we can see that accurate terminology and readability can not only be combined, but also promote each other. For example, the author describes the relationship between gambling machines and gamblers this way: slot machines are designed to keep gamblers in a state of "continuous production" in order to get the maximum value from long games. By following these machines, gamblers enter a mental-physical state of "self-liquidation."
Everyone knows the truth of "gambling for a long time without a winner", the machine is obviously exploiting people, but people can't do without it, because everyone thinks that they will be the wise one who receives what they see, and all kinds of advertisements that claim "small gambling is pleasant" also say so. Here, Natasha Dow Shure finds an "asymmetrical collusion", where the designers of gambling machines and casinos create immersive environments that put gamblers into a constant loop of feedback. The anomalous relationship of asymmetrical collusion will only become apparent when the gambler throws out the last penny, when the originally energetic machine becomes lazy and unresponsive, and the gambler is forced to return to real life and cut back on food and clothing for a period of time in order to re-enter the relationship.
If the analysis of mechanisms can end the mechanism itself, then the power of sociology is too great. In addition to doing detailed research on gambler psychology, gambling machine design principles, etc., Natasha also devotes a lot of space to explaining the current situation of the gambling industry itself in major Western countries. Its existence is needed by the state and the people, and it is impossible to impose any substantial constraint on it at present, and it also inspires the occurrence and prevalence of things like the "blind box", which firmly grasp a psychological mechanism related to addiction.
No.1
Our Generation: A Literary Lecture by Ginsburg
(American) Alan Ginsburg / by Huiming / Translated by 99 Readers, People's Literature Publishing House, January 2022
I have never felt that the Beat generation is a cultural phenomenon with such a high level, and I think it is all due to the development of Ginsburg. In this book, Ginsburg shows his standard as a proud protégé of the great Critic of New York, Leonor Trilling, who accurately defines the style of "On the Road" as "natural melodicism", making the book not only a momentary hit, but also stylistic value, he narrates the homosexual relationship between himself and Kerouac and a group of other people in a sincere and pure way, both regret and understanding of Kerouac's early death, both sympathetic affection and always expressing his independent personality.
The Beats seemed to be scattered, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Ginsburg, etc., gradually found their own direction in the second half of their lives after entering the sixties, but the formation of this settlement began at the end of World War II. If you re-read Kerouac's Dharma Wanderer and other works, you will find that there are idealistic conversations in the chaotic meditation journey of the young people. They were dissatisfied with the repression of the Eisenhower era, but they did not think of becoming an opportunist, to adapt to the times and gain fame and fortune. Both Snyder and Ginsburg maintained their own clear pursuits when they were involved in fashionable "movements" such as Zen, psychoanalysis, environmental protection, and so on. The friendship between the Beats also has a boyish innocence, and everyone's praise for the others exudes an old-fashioned freedom, like a good brother punching each other in the chest. Ginsburg left the circle of intellectuals and exiled himself into the "road" career, and the pursuit of a more intense and free lifestyle was not simply depraved, debauched, and in this regard, his interviews and speeches were fully "justified" moves.