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Fu Beichen/Wen
The last page of each issue of the British weekly Economist is the famous Obituary column. This is a chic column dedicated to the stories of the newly deceased.
In the eyes of the media, the deceased is a big topic that can convey all kinds of remembrance and pretexts. Even in daily life, there are many people who are "good at sex and say ancient", and the subjects of "ancient" are all deceased without exception. In China, when a person dies, it is often secretly called "ancient" – meaning that the person has become an ancient – using the vagueness of the timeline to dilute the mourning of the deceased for a particular group of people, placing the deceased in a quiet history and becoming a complete human specimen. In terms of professionalism, the most suitable for media release after death, because the narrow concept of media refers to the news media, and the "newness" of the news determines the necessary timeliness requirements of the media for the object of reporting. The media in Britain and the United States, especially newspapers, have long formed a tradition of setting up a special edition of the deceased, and this page has an unexpected large number of fans in the market, so a page is popular and becomes a huamao. Typical examples include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Independent, And Times; In the magazine, the "Economist" weekly is the most representative.
In 2008, The Economist published a collection of columns on the dead; In early 2022, Nova Publishing published Chinese translation of the book called Obituary.
The Economist was founded in 1843 with two articles, one is "cautious approach to the cult of personality" and the other is "anonymity", which inadvertently causes most of the articles in the journal to be unknown to the outside world - quite Qian Zhongshu said that "eggs are delicious and do not care about the chicken that lays eggs". When the Deceased column was published in 2008, it became clear that the 201 articles were written by two full-time editors of the journal: Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe, who retired to succeed him until 2018. Now, 14 years later, the original title of the book "The Economist Dead" should now be translated as "The Economist Biography" - at the time it seemed to be gone, and today, looking back, it is legendary.
One
In the eyes of the news industry, the editor of the deceased column of The Economist is also a legend.
For a media, the chief writer is a spiritual leader independent of the executive leadership; The editor of the Economist's column for the dead is the absolute leader of the eulogy version outside of the executive leader and the main writer. Ann Rowe said the editors of the deceased column were exempt from all constraints except for the length of the page of 132 lines, and said one thing was not the same. Colleagues, friends, and families of the deceased often come to offer advice and suggestions, but almost all of them are excluded, because the editors here can fully enjoy this "glorious freedom" without any interference. In China, this kind of is rarely advocated or mentioned, and in 2004, Liu Feng, the editor-in-chief of the Times People Weekly, had to vigorously advocate "elegant writing", that is, to give generous writing time, relatively large amount of freedom and high remuneration, forming a relaxed working environment for journalists, and cultivating elegant writing soil in nature. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of this newspaper has not been suspended, but this environment is undoubtedly crucial to the formation of classic text reports. It is widely believed that the elegant style of the deceased column is inseparable from this environmental mechanism.
Crucial to the quality of The Economist's deceased column is the choice of reporters, which is directly related to the magazine's values. The criteria for the deceased column on candidates, i.e., the people who are covered, are: interesting and thought-provoking. Ann Rowe said, "It doesn't matter much if [the candidate] fits the usual sense of 'goodness'. She is not a mother of positive energy, there is no need to take responsibility for this, she has to bear and adhere to only her own "standards", and all the standard is that the object of the report selected must be interesting and distinctive, and the fragrance and the smell of the past are equal in the selection of materials, so the bad guys, the evil virtues and even the frivolous people will also be the objects of the deceased column. For example, when the article about Anna Nicole Smith was widely criticized after it was published, Ann Rowe did not think so, because Anna's "story of the doomed failure of the pursuit of fame and profit is wonderful and poignant." As for the veteran editor Keith, he has a particular preference for the little ones, and death is unpredictable, so when a big guy and a little guy die in the same week, Keith tends to ignore the big guys.
Due to page limitations, each story in the Deceased Column is a thousand-word article. It is precisely this limitation that makes it possible to become a fine product, because the short length is a double-edged sword, and the smoothness and flaws cannot be hidden. The length of a human life with decades and a thousand words of brevity at the same time seems to be a metaphor for a philosophy in itself. In discussions for publication, Keith suggested that the book be called The Flight of the Sparrow, which comes from a metaphor for life by Bede (672-735, father of English history, historian and theologian)—life is like a sparrow flying through a banquet hall, flying from the black to the black, and shining in the middle. Coincidentally, more than 300 years after Bede's, China's Su Dongpo also wrote a similar analogy, "What is it like to know everywhere in life?" It should be like a Phenom stepping on slush. The snow accidentally left finger claws, and Hongfei recounted things. ”
Obituary
By Keith Corkhorn and Ann Rowe
Xu Longhua / Translation
Reading Library / Nova Press
January 2022
Two
Many of the topics in The Obituary are very interesting.
The most special thing is that the 201 articles did not select 201 people, but 200 people, and the rest of the one was a bird — a bird in the crowd, a kind of British humor — specifically a parrot.
This African grey parrot is the most famous parrot in the history of science, and its name is Alex. It will say 150 words, know the names of objects in the 50, can describe the color shapes and constituent materials of the object, will ask people for things, if it is not what it wants, it will reject and ask again, can understand and discuss concepts such as "bigger", "smaller", "the same", "different" and so on... Dr. Pepperberg of Harvard University randomly bought it in a pet store when it was 1 year old. In the research project of the Bird Learning Experiment, Alex is not only a research object, but also magically, he also acts as an experimental assistant, helping doctors communicate and train other birds. Alex was 31 years old when he died and is said to have the intelligence of a 5-year-old. Its last words were a farewell to the Peppaborg program's off-the-job phrase "You're so nice." I love you. Will you come tomorrow? After Alex's death, both The New York Times and The Economist published memorial articles in the Deceased Edition in memory of the famous parrot, which had millions of followers around the world.
Ulrich Indhospinan, who lived to be 103 years old, was the world's oldest mountain guide, climbing the Matterhorn at 14,700 feet above sea level more than 370 times in his lifetime. Located in Switzerland, matterhorn is famous for its peak of death, while Indhospiana climbs the mountain with the ease of drinking soy milk. He was 20 years old the first time he climbed the mountain, and the last time he climbed the mountain was at the age of 97. George Mallory, an English mountaineer who died on Mount Everest, famously said that he climbed Everest "because the mountain is there" and that Indebina climbed not because the mountain was there, but because he was there — he was born in a small mountain village at the foot of the Matterhorn and died peacefully in his bed.
The people who became famous in The Economist's deceased column are mavericks, at least in the eyes of most readers. His identities and occupations are dizzying: thai sages, American prophets, east German secret police chiefs and traitors; There are the last French infantrymen of world war I, the last person to speak Ejac, survivors of syphilis experiments, suspected of being abducted by aliens; There are former British prime ministers, Dominica prime ministers, patriotic liars, gangsters and India's top bandits, it is difficult to summarize the attributes of these people in one word, each of them is a category. They all ended their lives, spreading their life's rise and fall and prosperity like air in the day and night of the world.
Three
Of course, although the world must die every week, the weekly deceased may not be interesting and unique enough, so there must be a situation in which Liao Hua, the great general of ShuZhong, is a pioneer, even if it is a refined collection of essays, this situation can also be seen. Of course, readers and even authors must not have the luxury of expecting the passages to shake the past and the present.
If the table of contents is read by leaps and bounds, I believe that most readers will first notice the grey parrot, followed by the "musical medium". Psychic is a fictional word, not related to religion, but has other names for canonical religions, such as Shamans in Siberia and Northern Asia and Alaska. In fact, psychics are equivalent to the ancient Chinese witches and magicians, and now the jumping gods — their common feature is psychic, that is, they can communicate with the deceased. Rosemary Brown was one such woman, and her psychicity made her famous overnight in Britain and The United States. Mrs. Brown is limited to communicating with the deceased of famous artists in the field of music, such as Clara Schumann who dressed very carefully after her death; Beethoven was no longer deaf, and she was able to bring back their new work "over there", and the BBC reporter wondered: why could this woman, whose musical talent was obviously limited, play Chopin's work freely on the piano, and importantly, this work had never been heard? Even stranger is the evaluation of the performance of the piece: it must be professional and original, but it is certainly not excellent, let alone a genius. Although Mrs. Brown's psychiatric charm is full of British and American fame, psychiatrists agree that she is hysterical.
The logic of report writing is where the editors of the deceased column have seen their skills. For example, Thomas Fairby, who was the bomber who bombed Hiroshima. He was often asked if he felt guilty about it. The pit was dug plainly and cleverly, for the questioning itself presupposed that Felby was guilty. Here the author begins to write about maggots – if Fairby and the 11 comrades involved in the bombing are guilty, then there are many guilty. Is Oppenheimer, the leader of the team of scientists who developed the atomic bomb, guilty? But it was not he who ordered the bombing, but President Truman, but if the United States did not have an atomic bomb at hand, how could it give the order? The initiator of the "Manhattan Project" for the development of the atomic bomb was Franklin Roosevelt, but Roosevelt was a politician at best, so how could there be a theoretical prediction? Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt saying that atomic bomb development was feasible. Truth be told, this maggot is overwhelming. Finally, the realistic pen turned sharply: "He and Einstein are both historical misfortunes. Coincidentally, sir Mark Oliphant, the scientist involved in the development of the atomic bomb, was also selected for the collection, and he was well aware of the mass destruction of the atomic bomb, but he also publicly said that "as long as you are paid well and the work is exciting... It is not difficult for doctors to develop biological weapons, for chemists to develop chemical weapons, and for physicists to develop nuclear weapons. This naked frankness still seems deafening.
If the deceased are read in comparison, the book should be more interesting—it's the equivalent of Zhou Botong's "left-right fight," which has a style similar to a stray dictionary—and makes them quarrel in the same book.
For example, Oscar Auerbach's label is "doctor who snuffs out cigarettes", because he proves that there is a causal relationship between smoking and cancer, which directly leads to the mandatory addition of the warning word "smoking fatal" on cigarette packaging in Europe and the United States and other countries; Surfing master Joseph Wolfson, who had been a smoker or a drunk all his life, was diagnosed with cancer; Another counter-evidence, also in the book, Benedo Martinez, the world's longest-lived man at the age of 120, is described as "life other than longevity is not worth emulating", and the first example given is that "he smoked, and smoked until he was one hundred and eight years old, and the cheap cigarettes were included in the ration." ”
Speaking of longevity, it goes on to another longevity lady, Benito, who died in 2006, and before that, in 1997, one of the world's longest-lived record holders: Jeanne Carman, lived to be 122 years old. One of her long-lived professional anecdotes is amusing: At the age of ninety, a lawyer valued her apartment and signed an agreement with her to pay her $500 a month for living expenses until her death, on the condition that the lawyer take over her apartment after death. After 30 years of signing the contract, the total cost of living paid has exceeded the value of the apartment, and the old lady's remaining money is enough to live the rest of her life full of food and clothing. What's more, the lawyer hung up... This reading method looks like a passage from Su Wenmao: Pu Songling wrote "Liaozhai Zhiyi", and the reason for its writing is implicit in the book- the first word of its first article is "Yu", and the last word of the last article is "hate", which adds up to "Yu Hate", and Yu Hate is the true meaning of writing Liaozhai . It doesn't matter if that's the case, what matters is that the specious divergent links themselves immerse you in the joy of reading.