glamorousky's Time----提升作文修炼

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

前言
我们在写作时总是会感到词汇的匮乏 即使我们已经把红包包背了几十遍 实际上 这并不是我们没有记住这些词 而是在我们的脑中 没有将这些词赋予到相关语境中 所以我们只是会在读到这个词时 才会把它的也许并不准确的中文意思从脑中挖出来 而常此以往 这些我们曾经记住过的单词会逐渐在我们的脑中退色 为了解决这些问题 读地道的英文读物是首选 推荐（Economist, National Geographic, The newyorker,Time） 而在读的过程中 假如能选择自己喜欢的段落记忆 写作水平会有大的提升 所以 我会每天选取一篇读物上的文章进行学习 督促自己也是服务大家:loveliness:
红：给出解释的词语
蓝：值得学习的短语或是句型 常见 但是我们不常用

欢迎有兴趣的朋友一起在下面跟帖 做一篇Time 或是写下自己的见解都可以:loveliness:

NO.4  Barack Obama, and the Rush For Election Souvenirs

Prosperity has its favorite hobbies, its gold-trimmed roadsters（金边跑车）and superyachts（超豪华游艇） and the million-dollar platinum（白金） fishing lure studded with（镶嵌有...） 100 carats of diamonds. But in an age of austerity, when we seek satisfaction on the cheap, some pursuits are all about value, but not necessarily about money. This is the beauty of the collector's world. When you don't like the look of the economy, you get to make your own.

At the moment, people have decided that anything related to Barack Obama--not just posters and T shirts but magnets and mouse pads and coasters and clocks（这里是指一系列的印有奥巴马形象的杯垫 鼠标垫等的畅销）--has special value. For most people, I don't think it has much to do with investment; it's about placing inspiration under glass. You can capture historic moments in memory, but those fade and fracture. The buttons allow instant replay: the speeches, the spectacle, the grand finale. And who knows: maybe someday they'll have public as well as private value.

The test of a collector is to acquire the most treasure for the least money. It was during the Depression that my grandfather became a great collector. He was not born rich, but he had a genius for money, especially for primitive and "odd and curious" currencies（各种各样的钱币 比如在某些国家被称为硬币的圆板）. In 1934, the New York Times described his coin collection as one of the largest in the world. "A lot of people call us crazy," he told the paper, "but I think it's a worthwhile hobby. It keeps me broke most of the time." Like any master hunter, he had a scavenger's（清道夫） instincts. He would write to missionaries（传教士） serving in the most remote corners of the world, offering a modest contribution in return for two samples of the local currency. He would sell one and keep the other, a self-financing collection that eventually grew to more than 200,000 pieces--from ancient Etruscan rings and Incan gold to Kenyan elephant tails and Babylonian clay tablets, all of which he kept in a vault in the basement of his house.

I understand the numismatist's（钱币收集者） desire to possess the objects by which we capture value. (This, of course, is also known as banking.) But the collective unconscious goes further and deeper, and starts long before we know the meaning of a nickel. Children are natural curators, classifying their Barbies or Bakugan, holding on to Happy Meal toys until they have a full set（一整套 注意表达）. Freud had a theory about this: not surprisingly, it had to do with toilet training and the trauma of relinquishing a part of oneself. But it's not a need we outgrow（由于逐渐成长而变得不需要）. Over the course of his life and travels, Freud acquired more than 2,000 statues, vases and terra-cottas（赤陶 如兵马俑即可表达为 Terra-cotta Warriors）, plus some phalluses, of which his favorites stood in a row on his desk. "I must always have an object to love," he confessed to Carl Jung.

We find ourselves now in a golden age of obsessive acquisition. We watch Antiques Roadshow and mentally inventory the attic, troll the tag sales, join the National Toothpick Holder Collectors Society. Once treasures were prized for(被看做是...)their scarcity, but now mass production creates mass disposal and the chance to find worth in the weird and worthless: bottle caps and matchbook covers, swizzle sticks and toilet seats. (There's a toilet-seat-art museum in San Antonio, Texas.) Since objects of desire tend to hold some special meaning, they let people connect with the instant intimacy of shared fixation. If you doubt this, stop by modernmoisttowelette.com to compare notes about the world's best hand wipes and their unexpected uses.

eBay may be the ultimate collector's resource, but it kills some of the fun. Sitting in your pj's doing keyword searches for Pez（沥青） dispensers（药剂师） is not the same as pulling off（远离） the road to explore a junk store and finding a prize. Collecting involves more than just buying a full set of something. It is the quest for a family reunion: the posters for all 15 Houdini movies（电影特效制作魔术师制作的电影） from 1919, all 177 pieces of a Minton dinner set（餐具）. There's the possibility of failure and the hope for immortality. That helps explain why we have 17,500 museums in America alone, ranging from the Getty and the Whitney to Boston's Museum of Dirt.

My own collection is personal, the table of contents of my life. I have baby teeth and ticket stubs, my first license, my last loan payment, the rehearsal bouquet made from the ribbons from my bridal shower, and a shoebox full of key chains and charms and snow globes. Souvenir means "to remember"; I wonder why we tend to associate the word with the tacky and tasteless, rather than with the most precious collectible（可收集的）of all: the memory of the moments that make us who we are.

hyacinthUID: 2184492

合并了下。。。在一楼做个index好了。。。呵呵 加油 :cool:

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

Dec.6
The Pits

Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts(店面) without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default（在破产边缘）, unable to lure replacements. It’s a feasible scenario, if you consider the consumer-confidence and consumer-price indices, the wealth destruction, all the layoffs（停工） and trickle-down effects（渗透效应 即是指指一个项目的效益和经济政策的改变,首先使最低收入者受益,然后逐渐向上发生影响）, and the allegedly（据传说的） unrelated possibility, as the Times reported last week, that “something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe.” (“A better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space”—and here we were blaming Alan Greenspan.) A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures（废弃的上层建筑） occupied by tent shanties（简陋的住所） and with squatters（住违章建筑的人） gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged（有草率之意） cardboard（是指破烂不堪的那些纸板） in Washington Mutual’s cashless vestibules（门廊） or the bare aisles of Circuit City.

“What will it look like?” is a question of the hour, as people try to visualize（可以不用imagin了） the ways in which life will change in New York as a result of the financial and economic crisis. In the mind’s eye, we tend to populate our recessionary streets with squad（小队） cars painted green, cat’s-eyed ambulances, and other anachronisms—“Fort Apache, the Bronx: The Remake.” But, really, the city will probably just look the way it does now. After an extraordinary era of construction and renovation, demolition and replacement, there will almost certainly come a long period in which little to nothing gets built. Putting aside the long-discussed public projects that are endangered or doomed (the Second Avenue Subway, the West Side Railyards, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozens of private undertakings（私营企业） have stalled（这个词很不错） or died. The calls go out to the architects: pencils down. We have inherited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind—condos galore—and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease（好搭配） in the need for it. Throw in the high cost, or total unavailability, of capital, owing to the credit freeze, and you have a New York that may be frozen in time. The skyline, which has been very dynamic recently, like a stereo’s equalizer display, should sit still for a while. The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.

Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new buildings. The town is pocked with them. The real-estate boom fostered grand schemes, which, though they are in many cases now stillborn, began with holes in the ground. The expiration, earlier this year, of a tax-abatement减税 law, 421-a, encouraged residential builders to dig quickly, to achieve grandfather status and thus better financing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits, some that builders may have had no intention of filling soon anyway. In some cases, if a developer hasn’t already paid for the steel, he will be inclined, or forced, to walk away. Buildings that are halfway built tend to get finished, although they may wind up（最终） being what are called “see-throughs.”

What will become of the pits? Can we turn them into half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England? Ring them with barbed wire and convert them into debtors’ prisons or internment camps for the culprits（罪犯） who structured synthetic C.D.O.s? They’d make excellent ha-has, for livery（有肝病症状的） horses or livestock. Corn mazes. Extreme-cockfighting arenas. Or perhaps they could serve, over time, as urban tar pits, entrapping（陷入） and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby for the scientific edification of future generations, if there turn out to be any. Or they could become parking lots.

Vacant space tends to remain vacant, in anticipation of an upswing（期望中上涨）. Tax policy, inertia, and the eternal belief that things will get better (profitable) again usually trump（用来代替win） civic dreams of pocket parks or stickball （美国人玩的一种棍子球）fields. Whoever ends up owning it all, after the foreclosures（回赎权的取消） and the workouts（练习） are done, holds out for the big payday. The greatest pit of them all is at Ground Zero（世贸废墟）, where the squabbling among constituents and stakeholders, as well as the usual big-city incompetence, even before the financial meltdown, has kept the hole a hole for years. Now it’s hard to imagine a way out of it. ♦

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

sigh~~搞成新闻贴了 呵呵Pakistan's Mumbai Arrest: Will It Satisfy India?

After a week of breathing fire on Pakistan for failing to crack down（镇压） on the militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which India blames for orchestrating（这里是精心安排之意） the lethal Mumbai attacks of last month, New Delhi reacted with caution to reports of a Pakistani raid that led to the arrest of an alleged Mumbai mastermind. Indian security analysts are concerned that the move may be a feint by Pakistan's all-powerful military to buy time（缓和时间）. "If the reports are true, the raids show some movement forward," says defense expert C. Uday Bhaskar. "But given how the civilian and military establishments are aligned in（部署） Pakistan, it is always a case of two steps forward, one step backward."

The raid in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani half of the disputed territory of Kashmir, targeted the main local office of the Jama'at-ud-Da'awa (JuD), a charitable organization that terrorism experts say became the legal front of the banned LeT. Soldiers entered the office after a 3 p.m. deadline for its occupants to surrender had passed. Some 30 people fled. Local residents report that they heard fighting and machine-gun fire but no heavy weapons. The army has refused to comment. Latif Akbar, a leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party in Muzaffarabad, told TIME that he's "very worried about the law-and-order situation（治安状况）. There will be retaliatory attacks（报复性攻击） [by militants] for sure."

Among those reportedly taken into custody was Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who India believes was in charge of training LeT operatives for suicide attacks. Indian authorities refused to comment on the reports, saying they were awaiting official confirmation from the Pakistani government that they had acted on a diplomatic protest served on the Pakistan High Commissioner to New Delhi on Dec. 2, seeking "strong action" against those responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

Indian security analysts, meanwhile, were not only reticent but also skeptical of both the Pakistani authorities' ability and their willingness to crack the whip on（采取严厉手段） the many terrorist groups operating on Pakistani soil. Mistrust of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) runs deep among Indian intelligence and security circles — far more than in the U.S. — particularly since the late 1980s, when the ISI was accused of aiding a fierce insurgency in India's border state of Punjab. Many believe that the ISI-Pakistani-army nexus holds the country in a vise, severely curtailing any civilian government's power to take any meaningful action against the many terrorist movements operating in Pakistan, whether on the border with Afghanistan or in Kashmir.

Vikram Sood, former head of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), is even more skeptical and thinks the raid may only be a means to buy time. "It would be quite surprising for the Pakistani army to do this," he says. "The LeT has been their favorite." He points out that no raid has taken place at the JuD headquarters in the city of Muridke near Lahore. The LeT allegedly morphed into（融入） the JuD after 2001, when the LeT was banned by Pakistan after it was accused of masterminding a botched yet deadly attack on the Indian Parliament. The JuD denies it is the same organization. However, it continues to be headed by Hafiz Saeed, the LeT founder who figures on India's most-wanted（可代替important使用） list.

A day before the raid, TIME spoke with Muhammad Yahya Muhahid, the JuD's secretary of information, who defended Hafiz Saeed, saying he is merely a religious scholar and cleric, denying his role in any of the terrorist acts. "Our organization has again and again made it public that it has no relations with the Lashkar-e-Toiba," Muhahid said. "Hafiz Saeed does not head the Lashkar-e-Toiba. The Jama't-ud-Da'awa does not consider any activity, carried out by any person, group or state, in any place, anywhere in the world, in which unarmed civilians and public places are targeted, to be right. We have already condemned the Mumbai attacks." Muhahid said that "India wants to implicate him just to protect its own Hindu extremists."

Responding to speculation that India might stage military strikes against institutions and camps it believes may be LeT-militant strongholds in Pakistan, Muhahid said, "If our educational facilities are attacked, we will put pressure on our government to respond to India in the same coin."

In India, there is pressure for continued pressure on Pakistan. Even so, says former Indian intelligence chief Sood, things will get a lot worse before they get any better. "Just today there's been an attack on 160 NATO vehicles in northwestern Pakistan," he says. "I expect more bombings, even in Pakistan. There's going to be no let-up（停止放松）. There may be more suicide bombings." He says the task of ridding Pakistan of terrorists cannot be left to the Pakistani authorities. "It should be taken up by an international force," he says.

Many analysts are doubtful about the significance of the Muzaffarabad raid because they believe Pakistan's past attempts to crack down on terrorists have been merely cosmetic. "They have banned organizations, taken their leaders in custody, then put them under house arrest（软禁）, only to release them and let them get back to their activities," says B. Raman, former head of the counterterrorism wing of the R&AW. "They need to show us that this time it will not be a farce. They should either deport those accused of the Mumbai attacks or allow an Indian police team to visit Pakistan and interrogate them." Raman believes greater pressure from the U.S. and from Israel, which lost nine citizens in the Mumbai carnage, may make a crucial difference this time. "As of now, there is tremendous anger（这个形容词很好用） among the Americans and the Israelis," he says. "But we need to see how things will be two, three months later." —

泡面UID: 2513568

感谢Glamorousky，如此辛劳~~~~
统统收起来哈哈

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

Hot Seat（这个短语有电椅之意 但这里是另一个意思 即尴尬境地）

Otto Kerner, Jr., is usually remembered, if he is at all, as the leader of the Kerner Commission, in 1968, which evaluated the riots and other unrest that was then rocking（相当于shocking） American cities. He was governor of Illinois at the time, and went on to serve as a federal appeals court judge, but his later claim to fame may be of greater historical note. In 1969, he was charged in a corruption case where he and a subordinate received bribes from a racetrack(赛车场) owner in return for an expanded racing schedule. That particular scandal came to light（暴露 很好的词组） because the owner tried to deduct the value（注意搭配） of the bribes on her taxes. Paying bribes to the governor was, in her view, an ordinary business expense in Illinois in the late nineteen-sixties.

So, it appears, even today. In a breathtaking seventy-six-page complaint filed this morning, the current Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, and his chief of staff are charged with engaging in a pattern of corruption that suggests that the culture of Illinois has only got worse in recent decades. David Mamet is a dewy-eyed（天真的） idealist compared with the government lawyers and investigators who chronicled（载入）the cynicism and depravity（堕落） of Blagojevich and his staff. (George Ryan, the governor who was elected before Blagojevich, is currently serving a prison sentence for his role in a more prosaic corruption scandal during his tenure. And Dan Walker, the governor from 1973 to 1977, waited until he left office to engage in the criminal conduct that led to his imprisonment.)

The case against the Governor comes in（组成的替换词） three parts, each more astonishing than the last. The first, the result of a long-running investigation in the state, charges a fairly routine pay-to-play operation. The Governor is said to have demanded campaign contributions in return for highway contracts and the like. (In a bravura touch, Blagojevich appears to have delayed an addition to a children’s hospital because the sponsors had not paid up.)

The surreal aspects（超现实的角度） of the case begin with the fallout（余波） from the bankruptcy of the Tribune company. The company, which owns the Chicago Cubs, was looking to raise money by selling the team’s home, Wrigley Field, and seeking the assistance of state government in the process. Blagojevich had a condition for giving the help: the newspaper had to fire a group of editorial writers and editors who had been critical of him. In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s cheering, in a way, that the Governor thought that a mere editorial page mattered so much, but his manner of showing his respect seems to owe too much to local custom.

Most attention, of course, will focus on（以此来做主语） the third aspect of Blagojevich’s scheme: his apparent effort to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat, which the Governor had the sole right to fill. It is Obama’s good fortune that the Governor seems to be pretty irritated with Obama’s lack of attention to Blagojevich’s needs. In a soon-to-be famous observation on the tapes, the Governor on Obama’s team: “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”



[ 本帖最后由 glamorousky 于 2008-12-20 17:49 编辑 ]

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

Person of the Year 2008
Why History Can't Wait

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced（筹集资金） or heard a pitch about life insurance. There's a table, some off-brand（杂牌的 这里应该是没什么名气的） mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.  To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can't quite put your finger on it ...
"It's like the set of The Office," someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems（琐碎的问题） — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones（简陋的） room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws（这个词很好 表示召集） 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt's — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza（厨具柜）? A hutch?

But he doesn't seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot（抓拍 快照） taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. ("They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.") Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room's décor（法语词 装饰）, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It's a mind-boggling（难以置信的） journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt（此处salt 是他的风趣） in his salt-and-pepper（黑白相间的） hair. By now we are all accustomed to（很好的短语 适应） that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing（慰藉的） monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk（潜在危险带来的惴惴不安）.

"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out（跌倒低谷）," he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) "And so even if we take a whole host of（一大堆） the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered." That worries him. Also Afghanistan: "We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

"And then the third thing that keeps me up（此处为忧心）at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation（核扩散）," Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. "And then the final thing, just to round out（圆满  十分好用的短语 ） my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago."

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes（核武器） and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset（在最初）, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap（雷声）, upended（颠覆） our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity（无尽的可能  好短语） — has plenty of juice left in it.

[ 本帖最后由 glamorousky 于 2008-12-20 17:48 编辑 ]

glamorouskyUID: 2459211

Appointments

Lucky fellow, that Rod Blagojevich. The same history-making turn（载入史册的转折点） of events that had placed Barack Obama in line to become the forty-fourth President of the United States had handed Governor Blagojevich, Democrat of Illinois, a “golden” (his word) Christmas present: the power to name Obama’s replacement in the Senate. The Governor’s vote, unlike the average citizen’s, would really, truly, definitively count. In a one-man, one-vote electorate, he would be the man and his would be the vote. Rod Blagojevich and nobody but Rod Blagojevich would get to pick the next United States senator from Illinois.

What did Blagojevich choose to do with this gift? He chose to auction it off（拍卖掉）. He didn’t put it on eBay—no Sarah Palin he—but he did put it online. The line he put it on was a telephone line, and, unfortunately for him, the line was a party line, shared with Patrick Fitzgerald, the fearless United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. As the criminal complaint that Fitzgerald’s office filed last week shows, Blagojevich has been on a glide path to the penitentiary（感化的） for most of the six years he has been governor. An F.B.I. affidavit, seventy-six pages long, describes such activities as threatening to rescind eight million dollars in state funds for a children’s hospital because an executive neglected to give him a campaign contribution and trying to blackmail（很形象的词 敲诈） the Chicago Tribune into（注意搭配） firing editorial writers who had displeased him. (So much for the cruel canard that nobody reads editorials.) Donning his press-ombudsman（新闻监察员） fedora, the Governor summed up his verbal op-ed: “Our recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ’em the fuck out of there, and get us some editorial support.”

For the Senate seat, Blagojevich set a heftier reserve price（相当低的保留价格）. In discussions with an adviser about what he might extract from an unnamed hopeful, he suggested a floor of half a million dollars in campaign funds “up front.” He mused that if he let Obama make the pick the President-elect might come across with a Cabinet post or an ambassadorship（大使职位） in exchange. Or maybe Obama could get one of his rich buddies like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates to kick in “ten, fifteen, twenty million” to set up a foundation for Blagojevich to run (salary requirement: two hundred and fifty to three hundred grand per annum（年）). Or maybe the Governor could barter the seat to union officials for a high-paying, high-visibility leadership position. A lucrative corporate-board（公司董事会） seat for his wife—the Bonnie to his Clyde, judging from the transcripts—would be nice, too.

In all this, Blagojevich was just kicking up（provoke 挑起） the latest cloud of dust on a well-worn（平凡的） Illinois path. His immediate gubernatorial（州长的）predecessor, George Ryan, is currently doing six and a half years for racketeering（敲诈） and fraud. As of 2006, the last time the Chicago Sun-Times checked, at least seventy-nine current or former elected officials in Illinois had been convicted of a crime since 1972. As for Obama, though, the already ample evidence that he has taken a different route is buttressed by（支持） the Fitzgerald document. Blagojevich—who had remarked of the Senate seat, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing”—was not happy when told that no offers were forthcoming（即将到来的） from anyone around “this motherfucker,” as he referred to the President-elect: “Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.”

Meanwhile, back in the sleepy, often law-abiding state of New York, Governor David Paterson, who owes his office to the (strictly private) bad behavior of his predecessor, has been pondering（代替用的很烂的think consider ） whom to appoint to replace Senator Hillary Clinton, who plans to resign her seat once she is confirmed as Secretary of State. According to press reports, the list of possibilities under consideration is as strikingly unimaginative as if the choice were being made in the usual way—i.e., by the people, as mediated through and manipulated by party primaries, fundraising prowess（募集资金的能力）, non-stop polling, ethnic entitlement, and regional balancing. “Among the governor’s inner circle, there is a desire to pick someone from upstate New York, since the region has no representation in statewide office,” the Times reports. “A woman or a Latino would also be desirable.” The current roster (with accompanying parochial concerns) includes at least three members of Congress (one female and upstate, one female and Hispanic, one just upstate), two city executives (one upstate, one Hispanic), one labor leader (the teachers’ union), and two dynasts（元首） (one Cuomo, one Kennedy). The Cuomo is Andrew, the state’s elected attorney general. The Kennedy—and the only choice on the list that qualifies as even marginally adventurous—is Caroline, a reticent and intelligent woman who made a splashy political début（引人注目的首次政治亮相） this year as a campaigner for Obama.

What if Governor Paterson, prompted by the squalor of his Illinois colleague’s maneuverings, were to put aside mundane calculations（抛开世俗的眼光） and take full advantage of his theoretically unfettered freedom of choice? The Senate was originally conceived as a sort of chamber of notables, but most of its members, over the years, have been notable mainly for their mediocrity. New York is full of interesting people. Want some suggestions? Try these, collected from an informal canvass—a baker’s dozen, in alphabetical order:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, thoughtful and scholarly, would give the new President someone to shoot hoops with. Christiane Amanpour would be a slam dunk for the Foreign Relations Committee. The impossibly distinguished Vartan Gregorian is a one-man academy of arts, letters, and the humanities. Bill T. Jones, who doesn’t need words to make a speech, would make C-SPAN 2 worth watching. A non-dynastic Kennedy, the novelist William, would give upstate New York representation of the first order. Paul Krugman would provide ornery（低等的） economic smarts. Arthur Laurents, conveniently, is already in Washington, directing the National Theatre revival of his “West Side Story.” If you doubt that Lou Reed knows politics, listen to his album “New York.” Felix Rohatyn is as senatorial as you can get without wearing a toga. Ed Sanders—poet, Pentagon levitator, classics scholar, founding member of the Fugs—is a political force in Woodstock, New York. Toni Morrison’s majestic voice would warm the Senate chamber. No one who ever spent the equivalent of two Senate terms in a complex, ceaselessly scrutinized job in New York has ever done it better than Joe Torre did as manager of the Yankees. Harold Varmus, the head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and, like Morrison, a Nobel laureate, got lots of money from Congress for the National Institutes of Health when he ran them, during the nineteen-nineties. Perhaps he could do the same for New York—not that such petty considerations are worthy of this exercise.

All fantasy, of course. But not so fantastical as Rod Blagojevich’s notion that a seat in the United States Senate was his for the selling.

grekokomoUID: 2441677

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glamorouskyUID: 2459211

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haipai0727UID: 2257753

每篇都认真看了，真的谢谢

saavedroUID: 2423190

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草木也知愁UID: 2487572

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glamorouskyUID: 2459211

Unpretty Pictures
There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off（下降） the wall and break the floor. And yet they are thinly（薄薄的 勉强地） brushed, for the most part, on ordinary canvases（画布）. There’s a flypaper stickiness about them, too, though their usual surface is matte（不光滑的） and dry. The impressions are emotional. A Dumas（大仲马） retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cornelia Butler, affected me slowly at first, then in a rush, overcoming a resistance I’ve had to Dumas’s fast and loose, insouciantly ugly pictures, almost all of which are based on photographs of corpses, torture victims, terrorists (Osama bin Laden looking crafty and sensual), pornographically posed nudes（裸体画）, gawky children（笨拙的孩子 注意搭配）, and endless anonymous, discontented faces. Dumas, fifty-five years old, has been a star in Europe and on the art market since the mid-nineteen-eighties. She has been favored by a fashion for sensationalized moral seriousness which explains the recent prestige of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud and of younger masters of sardonic melancholy, including Luc Tuymans, of Antwerp, and Neo Rauch, of Leipzig. Is this taste a self-flagellating（自我惩罚） compunction of the spendthrift rich? It may be a calculated bet on meaningfulness. Surely, no one would paint pictures as aggressively uningratiating（不迎合） as those of Dumas unless she meant them. At any rate, the MOMA show proves her to be a far more formidably creative character than a glance at her style—to appearances, an expressionistic pastiche on modish themes—would indicate.

Dumas grew up speaking Afrikaans in Kuils River, a farming town near Cape Town. Her mother was a homemaker（主妇）, her father a hard-drinking（酗酒的） winemaker who died of liver disease when Dumas was twelve. Contact with the outside world was policed by the apartheid regime（种族隔离制度）. Kuils River had no television until 1976, the year that Dumas left for Holland, having graduated with a degree in fine art from the University of Cape Town. In Amsterdam, she studied at a conceptualism-fancying art institute, Ateliers ’63, and supported herself by cleaning houses. As a provincial from a disreputable culture, she had trouble adjusting. With ambiguous defiance（不明的挑衅）, she made a T-shirt for herself that read “Ik is een allochtoon,” adopting a term for “immigrant” that is sometimes applied pejoratively（贬低地） to Holland’s black and Muslim residents. Political sensitivity was rife in international art circles. Living in Europe’s last redoubt（多面堡） of colonialist tyranny, Dumas both suffered because of and learned to exploit her South African identity. (Her partner, the artist Jan Andriesse, was born in Indonesia to a family that, like all other Dutch former colonists, was expelled by President Sukarno in 1957. They have one child, Helena, born in 1989.) In common with the draftsman and animator William Kentridge, another white South African of political bent, Dumas channels（注意此词的动词用法） a direly exotic heritage of collective guilt and personally redemptive anger. She adds to it an element of truculent but breezy feminism, often expressed in her lively writing. She reasoned in 1993, “If painting is female and insanity is a female malady（弊病）, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.”

The earliest pieces in the show, in a section devoted to graphic work, feature doodlish drawings of pinup（美女照片） and fashion models. Rough collages, involving photographs and scribbled text, record Dumas’s efforts to get with conceptualist programs—an uncongenial ordeal（绝非善意的考验） from which she was rescued by the resurgence of painting in the neo-expressionist early eighties. Her initial mature paintings—portraying nerve-racked（折磨神经的） women or vaguely sinister children—somewhat recall the suavely（温文尔雅地） decadent symbolism of Francesco Clemente, only with considerably less polish. A self-conscious doubt attends her most dashing（活泼的） and spontaneous brushwork, which can seem determined to deny its own wonderful qualities. I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors (pinks, creams, turquoise). The art historian Richard Shiff’s surprising comparison, in the show’s catalogue, of Dumas’s method with that of Willem de Kooning adds up. Like that great Dutchman, she draws in a manner opposed to drawing’s descriptive function, keeping her line loose and a-crackle, in gladiatorial combat（决斗）with the subjects that occasion it. In “Fingers” (1999), the hand of a nude touching herself between her legs splays to（展开） become a detached, willful, de Kooningesque cipher. The effect is extravagantly obscene and sputteringly hilarious（充满的欢乐气氛）.

The show’s title, “Measuring Your Own Grave,” epitomizes Dumas’s punctilious inelegance（注意搭配）. (It sounds to me like a clumsy translation from an obscure Weimar cabaret lyric.) It’s also the name of a sketchy painting, from 2003, which displays a clothed female figure draped frontally over some kind of bar with her head down, legs dangling, and her arms stretched out to the sides of the canvas. The palette is black and white with slight, disproportionately dramatic tints of pinkish flesh tone in the hands—proof that the woman is alive. This is no easy assumption with Dumas, whose “The Kiss” (also 2003) riffs on（匆匆的过目） Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic shot of Janet Leigh dead in “Psycho,” closing the eye and turning the face downward, with lips weirdly puckered against the floor. (And then there’s the brand-new “Dead Marilyn,” from a photograph of Marilyn Monroe’s mottled, puffy face in death—a grotesque vision rendered with disconcertingly lovely touches of pink and blue.) The title and the image of the “Grave” painting grate rather than expand on each other, and neither brings anything else clearly to mind. The muddle（困惑） works to strand a viewer in the here and now of the painting, which becomes the practically abstract symbol of a powerful, ungraspable intention. That’s Dumas’s stickiness in action. Her art rarely conveys（这个词很好用） feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work’s authority. She doesn’t give; she takes. This turns out to be a fair deal, which alerts us to our own untapped emotions. The experience of sheerly（全然地） responding pleases.

奔跑蜗牛UID: 2579189

抱着学习态度 我看我看