Interface News Reporter | Xu Luqing
Interface News Editor | Yellow Moon
"Taking Off at Dusk"
Takeoff at Dusk is a book about observation, obsession, time, memory, love, and loss. Nature writer Helen Macdonald, author of In the Name of the Eagle, watches songbird migration from the Empire State Building, tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, and searches for the last oriole in the aspen forests of Suffolk. Taking Off at Dusk is a collection of her essays in which she writes about wild boars, swifts, mushroom picking, migraines, the peculiarities of bird's nests, and unexpected guidance and comfort found while observing wildlife.
Before becoming a nature writer, MacDonald was a historian of science. In her research on the history of science, she has found that people unconsciously use the natural world as a mirror image, reflecting their own worldviews, needs, ideas, and hopes. In this book, she wants people to try to see through the eyes of other beings, to think about what it means to fall in love with "non-your race," to rejoice in the complexity of things, and to understand that the world is not just human, it has never been.
Outside of science, she explains the significance of nature literature this way: "We really need rigorous science to determine the rate and scale of the decline of these species, to speculate about the causes of extinction, and what interventions can be made." But we also need literature, we need to express what these losses really mean. For example, the garden warbler, an orange bird that is rapidly disappearing from British forests, is one thing to cite statistics on the decline of this species, and quite another to give people an idea of what the garden warbler is and what it means to lose it. ”
"The Obligation to Be Lonely"
Yoon Sung-hee is a representative writer of the Mesozoic Dynasty in Korea, who has published six short story collections, two novellas and one novella in his creative career of more than 20 years, and has won a series of awards including the Korea Art of the Year Award, the Modern Literature Award, the Hwang Soon-won Literature Award, and the Dongin Literature Award. Korean writer Kim Ai-rot once commented: "In the novels of Sung Hee's predecessors, not only flawed people often appear, but also worn old things... As a result, the novels of the seniors emit a certain smell, to borrow the words of the seniors, it is the smell of 'collecting apples with insects to make jam'. ”
"The Obligation to Be Lonely" is a collection of ten short stories by Yoon Sung-hee, most of whom are traumatized or trapped in ordinary reality every day, trying to escape loneliness and alienation in their own way. The real protagonists of modern fiction are marginalized people, who are called morale, criminals and madmen. Literary critic Su Yingxian argues that these marginalized people break taboos, question legitimacy, and shake the "problematic existence" of the system. Don Quixote descended, and their character lineage was spectacular. In contrast, Yin Chengji's character existence is weaker and cannot become the protagonist of the novel, which can be barely called "marginal people among marginal people": the sister who lost her twin sister, the city hall clerk who won the title of "Little Careful Calculation King" with the greatest achievement in life, the librarian who pays attention to the color change of the opposite roof every day, the husband who was born on April Fool's Day and has a somewhat absurd life, and the professional thief who was adopted because he was lost at the age of four..." Yin Chengji's novel is as quiet as the abyss. Her novels contain so many stories about dwarfs that it may be difficult for a person who does not have a sensitive sense of hearing to hear them. ”
"Same Window"
When Kyokyo was in elementary school, he wrote the story of Snow White and the prince, saying that the two ended in divorce. I said to her, "Fine, think like that, just write like this." ”
"Same Window" is a book written by mother and daughter, recording the reading exchange between Gui Zhi and Jingjing. Their discussions ranged from "Grimm's Fairy Tales" to beauty, anxiety and fear, from "Journey to the West" to the country of daughters to gender relations, from "Meditations" to life and death, power and wealth, from "Madame Bovary" to erotica and art... In the end, they forget who is a daughter and who is a mother.
The exchange between mother and daughter may have created new possibilities for relationships – no preaching, no talking, mutual inspiration, and independence. The communication between daughters and mothers is not only short-lived in parents, the topics covered in the book range from life and death, people's self-awareness, relationship with the world and others, to spiritual freedom, power and wealth, gender topics, sex and love...
Overcoming Europe
"If my thoughts are good and true, why not those that originated in Rome or Paris? Was it because my mind was born in this little ravine called Travnik? Shouldn't my thoughts be noticed, recorded? Ivo Andrić, a former Yugoslav writer and Nobel laureate in literature, once questioned.
Serbia, located at the crossroads of central and southern Europe, was once divided between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire, and later between the Byzantine and Hungarian kingdoms, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire. These overlapping influences have led to cultural diversity throughout Serbia: the north tends to the contours of Central Europe, while the south is characteristic of the wider Balkans and even the Mediterranean. In Overcoming Europe, author Milutinović combs through the images of Europe by fourteen Serbian writers. How is the image of Europe in Serbian culture constructed, and how does it reflexively affect the native culture? How did the subjective consciousness of Serbian intellectuals change from "not Western, rather dead" to "overcoming Europe"? From this book, we can read how Serbian culture broke through the limitations of Eurocentrism and completed its self-shaping in the blind worship, misunderstanding and reflection of European culture.
"Phantom"
First published in 1962, Historian Daniel Bulstine explores the transformation of social concepts from the perspective of media development and analyzes the phenomena that emerged after the transformation of mass culture. Two years later, media theorist McLuhan referred to "Illusions" in Understanding Media, and media critic Neil Postman later built on this idea, warning in Entertaining to Death that image-based media is turning our discourse into nonsense.
"Illusion" recalls the process of public consciousness shifting from focusing on the real to loving the fake: journalism is no longer faithful reporting, but instead hype hot spots; The media caters to the public and mass-produces entertainment stars who die in the twilight; Sightseeing spots are customized for tourists, but they appear to be the same; Marketing advertisements are also real and false, overwhelming; Literary adaptations emerge endlessly, and the tricks are renewed... For the first time, Burstine introduced the concept of "pseudo-events," which refer to events that are carefully planned just to be reported. Media organizations tend to pursue high ratings and clicks, so they tend to report on high-profile pseudo-events and ignore news stories that are really important but may not be as eye-catching. When people are too immersed in pseudo-events and false image construction, they lose accurate perception of reality. Burstine believed that distinguishing between what is real and what is false, and understanding what really matters, is essential for the development of individuals and societies.
Interview with David Bowie
David Bowie is a legend of 20th-century pop music and culture. His work, especially his musical explorations in the 1970s, was groundbreaking for the music scene as a whole. In 1972, he appeared as the flashy and androgynous Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the pop single "Starman" and the album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars", heralding the era of glam rock. Bowie's image at the time, in the view of biographer David Berkeley, "challenged the core values of rock and roll at the time" and "created perhaps the most prominent iconolatry in popular culture."
The book includes 32 interviews with Bowie from 1969 to 2003, and Bowie, who was constantly reborn artistically, also used the interviews themselves as an artistic expression. Interviews cover mysticism and the myth of the Holy Grail, from Kerouac and William Burroughs to Andy Warhol, postmodernism and the Internet. In interviews, Bowie constantly switches roles and identities, shares the idea and production of music, anecdotes from the tour, reviews his experience in film and theater, and shares his insights on painting, fashion design and literature.
"Energy, Sex, Suicide"
Mitochondria are energy-making structures in cells and are the main places where cells engage in aerobic respiration, known as "power houses." In addition to supplying energy to cells, mitochondria are involved in processes such as cell differentiation, cellular information transmission, and apoptosis, and have the ability to regulate cell growth and the cell cycle. It's a tiny "power plant" of our cells, providing all the energy and many molecular building blocks we need to survive.
Much of evolutionary biology research focuses on the interpretation of biodiversity, i.e. how individual species adapt to their specific environments, while there is still a vague idea of how the "ultimate causes" behind diversity, such as the most critical phenotypic changes in the evolutionary history of life—eukaryotic cells, sexual reproduction, multicellular development, and so on—occur and what environmental factors drive them. In this book, British evolutionary chemist Nick Lane attempts to propose a driving factor explanation for phenotypic adaptive evolutionary events, namely energy, and its spokesman, mitochondria. Ryan uses several facts related to mitochondrial energy conversion to show us some of the most important questions in the evolution of complex life: How do molecules generate life on our planet? Why did bacteria dominate the planet for so long? Why do we have sex, two genders? Why do we have to end up getting old and dying?