主题：【整理】梅岗城故事发表五十周年 -- 元亨利
To Kill a Mockingbird will turn 50 this coming summer. Below is an shortened version of the article in The New York Times.
As an aside, this writer likes the Chinese translation of the book's title-- 梅岗城故事 better than another, too direct and unpleasant,杀死一只知更鸟。
------------------------------
A Classic Turns 50, and Parties Are Planned
By JULIE BOSMAN
In Santa Cruz, Calif., volunteers will re-enact every word and movement in the famous courtroom scene. In Monroeville, Ala., residents dressed in 1930s garb will read aloud from memorable passages. In Rhinebeck, N.Y., Oblong Books will host a party with Mocktails and recorded music by the indie band the Boo Radleys.
All summer “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be relived through at least 50 events around the country, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that became a cultural touchstone and an enduring staple of high-school reading programs.
Perhaps the largest concentration of celebrations for the book are in Monroeville, which calls itself the “literary capital of Alabama” after its most famous resident, the “Mockingbird” author Harper Lee. The city is planning four days of events, including silent auctions, a walking tour of downtown, a marathon reading of the book in the county courthouse and a birthday party on the courthouse lawn.
The festivities are not expected to attract an appearance by the mysterious Ms. Lee, who is 84 and still living quietly in Alabama after never publishing another book. “Harper Lee has always been a very private person,” said Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins. “The legacy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ speaks for itself.”
Few novels have achieved both the mass popularity and the literary cachet of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book was originally published in 1960 by J. B. Lippincott and Company (now part of HarperCollins), won a Pulitzer Prize and has not been out of print since. It has sold nearly one million copies a year and in the past five years has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the country, beaten out only by the novel “The Kite Runner.”
Interest in the book intensified after the 2005 film “Capote,” in which Catherine Keener played Ms. Lee, and grew even stronger the next year, when Sandra Bullock played her in “Infamous.”
Mary McDonagh Murphy, a writer and documentary director whose book, “Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of 50 Years of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’,” will be published in June, called “Mockingbird” “our national novel.”
“I can’t name another book that is this popular, that tells such a good story, has such indelible characters and makes a social statement without being preachy,” Ms. Murphy said. “It is plain in the very best sense of the word.”
Less plain is Ms. Lee’s response to the unceasing popularity of her one and only book. Executives at HarperCollins said they began planning the summer-long celebration of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the assumption that Ms. Lee would not take part. “She’s almost never given interviews,” said Kathy Schneider, a senior vice president and associate publisher at HarperCollins. “That’s why we didn’t expect her to participate in a big way.”
Ms. Murphy, who has interviewed Ms. Lee’s sister Alice Lee, said that Harper Lee was unhappy that in interviews decades ago, reporters did not quote her precisely. And she also had a philosophical issue — “that writers should not be familiar and recognizable,” Ms. Murphy said. “That was for entertainers.”
Wally Lamb, a novelist who will be part of a panel discussion about the book in Wilton, Conn., in September, said he believes Ms. Lee’s quiet stance evokes Boo Radley, a character to whom Ms. Lee has compared herself.
“One of the things that I find really cool about her is what I consider her caginess,” Mr. Lamb said. “And I think maybe the mystery surrounding her, and that sort of silence that she decided to maintain with the media, that becomes part of the legend of the book.”
The New Yorker Times Book Review. Just a placeholder for future reference. If the reader happens to be also interested, here is the linkThe Meteoric Rise, and Decline, of a Talented Young Writer
Audrey Hepburn，Breakfast at Tiffany’s, don't these names evoke some emotional stir in your heart? If this is the case, here is a book review in The New York Times that looks back at Holly Golightly, the role in the movie Audrey Hepburn played. Would this role go against the image Ms Audrey Hepburn always portrayed? Now a book is trying to set record straight in that aspect.
We have never watched the legendary Charlie Chan movies. Now there is a chance we might be able to, on DVDs.
Golly, Pop, You Always Get ’Em, Even on a Poverty Row Budget
Even for those who are tune-deaf(no pun intended), the mere mentioning of the name Beethoven will conjure up the image of an angry man fighting the fate. And of course, the symphonies--The Fifth and The Ninth, etc. And there is never a lack of books about Beethoven. Musical historian and critic Harvey Sachs has just put another one out on the shelf--
THE NINTH
Beethoven and the World in 1824
By Harvey Sachs
Illustrated. 225 pages. Random House. $26.
-----------------------------
For generations Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale espousing universal brotherhood, has been the work of choice to solemnize a peace treaty, open a new concert hall or foster communal bonding. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at an outdoor concert in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then again it was conducted profoundly by the great Wilhelm Furtwngler in Nazi Germany, leading orchestras and choruses purged of Jews.
Beethoven’s last symphony has been “used as a battle flag by liberals and conservatives, by democrats and autocrats, by Nazis, Communists and anarchists.”
Yet, as Mr. Sachs makes clear here, Beethoven’s Ninth, whatever ideas and ideals we charge or clutter it with, is also an ingenious composition by a towering master in his transcendent late period, a path-breaking work that defined its cultural era. Mr. Sachs, a historian and critic who is the author of valuable biographies of Toscanini and Rubinstein, convincingly relates the symphony to contemporaneous works by champions of Romanticism in other fields, including Byron, Pushkin, Delacroix, Stendhal and Heine.
Beethoven always said music was a higher calling than philosophy. Yet by this late stage of his life, he had long been cut off from natural social intercourse because of his deafness, isolation and orneriness. His pieces were not expressions of his life; they were his life, Mr. Sachs argues. Reading this book, you feel for the composer, trying to bond with others through an astonishing symphony.
added 6.22:heard on the World Cup TV broadcasting:The Portuguese Football team wore black arm band to moan the passing of Saramago. It shows that Saramago commanded great respect in his native country.
纽时报导：
José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies
By FERNANDA EBERSTADT
Published: June 18, 2010
José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.
A tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, Mr. Saramago gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was released in 2008.)
He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his longtime friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.
Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his stature as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.
Chinese Order Stops Printing of Memoirs by Ex-Premier
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: June 20, 2010， The New York Times
BEIJING — A Hong Kong publisher said Sunday that he was forced to halt the publication of memoirs ostensibly written by Li Peng, the former Chinese prime minister。。。
Bao Pu, the publisher, said the Chinese government warned him earlier this month that publication would violate copyright laws. He halted printing on Friday, as copies rolled off the presses.
Mr. Bao said he could not disclose who gave the order to stop the print run, describing them only as “the relevant authorities.” Previously published reports, however, indicated that China’s Politburo objected to publication of the diaries when Mr. Li submitted them for approval in 2004.
Mr. Bao said he was given a copy of the manuscript by a mysterious middleman and, after extensive due diligence, he determined the writings were those of Mr. Li, who is 81 and reportedly in failing health. He said he tried to obtain permission from Mr. Li but was unable to reach him.
You saw the picture.You know the story。 For many, it in a way picturistically marked the end of the world war II.Two photogs recorded the scene but neither managed to obtain the identities of the pair. The picture we saw was taken by Life’s renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Another photog was a Navy photographer, Lt. Victor Jorgensen.
Ms.Edith Shain claimed she was the lady in the picture. And now she's dead at 91. It is a very long kiss indeed.
China has definitely come, not only to the economic scene but also to the artistic one as well. The Met is holding an exhibit of Chinese painter Xie Zhiliu's paintings. What makes it interesting is that the show, which will run until July 25th, displays the painter in development:Mr.Xie's study of other paintings.
The NYT article, at the same time, provides Chinese readers a glimpse into how an American art critic would review a painter's works. Unlike the Chinese variety of critics we are used to, which usually either sings the praises lavishly without any reservation or negates the artist without mercy, this critic applies his scalpel in a detached manner, or at least tries to.