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对于在大学任教的王晓渔而言，图书馆对他的帮助并不大。出于“书非买不能读也”的习惯，除了偶尔几册他需要从学校图书馆借出的“古书”外，一年他自己要买大概500册左右的书。

“如果我接受赠书，书评写作在情感上势必有所偏向，而且也会为出版社左右。在今年7月第1期‘独立阅读’出炉前，我算了算，上半年我收到的赠书大概有六七十本，就是全买下来，也就两千多元，为这些放弃自己的立场似乎得不偿失。”

书评的主体既不是书评作者，也不是书评媒体，而是出版机构的营销部门。新书出版之后，营销部门便邮寄样书给书评作者，收回文章之后再分发到各个媒体，甚至稿费也是由出版机构负责发放。书评作者以收到赠书为荣，认为这是自己得到承认的标志，也不用担心书评没有去处；书评媒体省却了组稿的麻烦，甚至还可以获得出版机构的广告作为回报；出版机构更是受益者，用最小的代价获得最大的回报。整个书评生产链的各方各取所需，牺牲的是‘上帝’们的权益，这种‘软寻租’连消协也无能为力，具有超强的可持续性。”

If there’s an idea behind Jamesianism, it
might just be this: that the landscape of our slightest and most private
intentions is susceptible of the same kind of treatment, both precise and
metaphorical, as the landscapes of the natural world.

Her style so often suggests that of her friend Henry James – and mostly its
virtues

If these stories have a defining subject (other than New York) it is divorce,
which begins to replace art as Wharton’s excuse for discussing the
fashionable and the real. In fact, one of the pleasures of a collection like
this is that you can trace her tendencies in it – and the way they develop.
She is better at divorce than art; she is better at divorce than marriage.

Robinson is right to praise its “powerful, precise and startlingly modern”
qualities, even though a true modernist might have figured out a way of
ending it somewhere in the middle, which Wharton can’t quite manage. Short
stories are notoriously difficult to finish. To her credit, she never
develops a formula for solving the problem, which isn’t to say that she ever
does solve it.

The madness of her actions has a great internal
appearance of reasonableness, and that appearance itself suggests, as
nothing else could, the madness of grieving. This is perhaps the simplest of her dramatic conceits, and the most effective: it relies only on the natural
drama of a natural event, not on a frame of improbable coincidences.

Her stories tend to be more
eventful than her novels. They turn on more terrible or more whimsical, and
consequently less moving, twists of fate.

Short stories are strange things. They demand an
interest in form, in the invention of form, that poets and artists share;
novelists can usually get away with being a little more conservative. In the
hands of a novelist, short stories can suggest a subject their author found
insufficiently interesting to expand on; yet they also offer a chance to
experiment.

I would have liked to see
the dates (either of composition or publication) given after each story, in
part because the evolution of New York society is one of Wharton’s themes,
and in part because her own evolution as a writer makes up so much of the
interest of the collection

Much of Wharton’s work reveals the stifling artificiality of the
society she grew up in; but it is the attractive aspects of that society,
the glitter of its artifice, the grandeur of its real estate, that draw so
many readers to it. Wharton’s fictional New York and Hassam’s stately and
somehow heartbreaking view of Washington Square make the same appeal: O,
what a world to be unhappy in!

The cover shows a scene from a painting by the prettily
impressionistic, and appropriately American, artist Childe Hassam.

The star system was a cage, but it was a gold-plated, ermine-lined cage, and it provided material comforts and existential relief that most mortals can only dream of (those dreams are one reason movies even exist). This isn’t to deny it can be hard to clock 14 hours a day, six days a week, as stars were sometimes obliged to do. (Davis sought to make a maximum of four movies a year.) Then as now, stardom is a job. The movies invariably try to hide the work that goes into turning a star and the film itself into seamless illusions, which is why Bette Davis was a real Hollywood rebel. She tore out the seams.

Studio contract stars like Power had it tough, to a degree. When you signed with a studio, you threw away your autonomy and more. As Clark Gable said, “I am paid not to think.”

why does a Chinese veteran want to write a memoir in a language most of his compatriats cannot understand?

Although Ha Jin writes in English, it is apparent from page one that he is a Chinese writer. His writing is similar in form to other popular Chinese writers like Yu Hua. Short, dynamic sentences using mostly active voice. There are also awkward phrases where it is apparent Ha Jin is translating Chinese sayings into English, often an ill fit.

　　

　　Yet this is exactly how the language works. This memoir -- this novel -- is written for Western readers. The narrator even takes the trouble of explaning Chinese lifestyle here and there in bits and pieces of inserted sentences. By using such translations, the author aims at evoking an alienated atmosphere where everyone is driven half-mad by what finally turns out to be fatally destructive. Thus when the story ends, an overwhelming sense of pain is only doubled because we have known from the alianated atmosphere that all these people are doomed.

They were always running away from their lovers and writing brilliantly to explain why. It was mostly not the failure of love but the desire to work that made them run — the longing for what their contemporary Virginia Woolf immortalized as “A Room of One’s Own.”

What brought the people out onto the streets was not only the wish to express sympathy with the students, but also the denial of their rights as citizens.

Among today’s intellectuals in China, one sometimes hears a distinction being made between a republic and a democracy. Adapting it, I would use the term ‘republic’ for the united will that establishes a political collectivity in the first place, and ‘democracy’ for the procedures that govern it once unity is established. Ideally, the two should be complementary, for without republican unity there is no framework for democracy, and without democracy the original spirit of a republic is never guaranteed. At one level, the students knew this. They demanded democracy, but always assumed it would be realised in the context of the People’s Republic, and this was how they justified their confidence in marching through the streets. But at another level, the connections were not always well understood. The group of hunger-strikers, for example, paid little regard to the larger student body represented by the Beijing Autonomous Association of College Students. In effect, it functioned as a little ‘republic’ of its own. The hunger strike had an electrifying effect in the city, but when the strikers attempted to speak on behalf of the students as a whole, sidestepping the BAACS, something I argued against, there was inevitably confusion and a crisis of legitimacy.

The movement was, of course, led by students, although by the end they made up only a modest proportion of those who took part, and they have consistently been singled out for criticism, not only by the government, but by a number of intellectuals in China and abroad, who claim that had they taken power, they would have exercised a more extreme dictatorship than the Party itself. In reality, most of the students were troubled by the question of the democratic legitimacy of their actions. They did go beyond inviting public sympathy for their protests, but they never meant to overthrow the government or to usurp its authority. Although they lacked practical experience, owing to the vigilant ban on non-governmental organisations, they benefited from the more open and reflective intellectual atmosphere of the 1980s. Ideas of democratic reform had been widely spread by the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi and others. The political principles of autonomy and transparency were hot topics at the time.

With Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crush the demonstrations the Party recovered its monopoly of power, but not its legitimacy or its authority. To fill the ideological void Deng set China on an accelerated path of economic change, announced to the nation by a speech in the southern city of Shenzhen in the spring of 1992, and expressed in the message ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Plastered on billboards across the country, the Party’s new slogan dismissed any possibility of discussion of ideas or principles, proclaiming simply: ‘Development is the Irrefutable Argument.’ Fifteen years later, China is the industrial wonder of the world. The average standard of living has improved, poverty has been reduced, urbanisation has exploded, exports and financial reserves are sky-high. Abroad, admiration for the People’s Republic has never been higher. National prosperity and pride typically go together. With such achievements to boast of, why should the Communist Party still be so fearful of something that happened an epoch ago? Why does it go to such lengths to distort and repress the past, and where it is unable to erase people’s memories entirely, why does it try to portray the demonstrations of 1989 as senseless turmoil and the movement’s activists as conspiring tricksters? But the real question is this: what was the conviction that led the protesters to stand up to the military machine?

Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public holidays like any other, or gatherings of tiny bands of militants or mourners, whose numbers dwindle to nothing as the years pass.

To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few professed scholars can read it, probably not one in the whole United States.’ Perhaps the real experts were more interested in Housman’s Latinity than in Manilius’ Latin. But Manilius was his chosen life-work, and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’.

He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal and Ovid, and had produced some learned articles much admired by the few who were qualified to comment.