Play With Words

今天《卫报》邀请了几位美国作家以”大选之后的早晨”为主题写一篇短篇小说。这里是最短的一篇，也是想像最狂野的一篇，作者是 Harry Shearer, 小说 Not Enough Indians 的作者，还是电视剧Simpsons 中 Mr Burns 等角色的配音。有兴趣的可以阅读和翻译所有五篇小说。

Harry Shearer

November 5, 2008, was the best of times and the worst of times for Senator John McCain. Eking out a surprise electoral-college victory in the presidential election he was favoured to lose, McCain was taking a victory lap around his Sedona, Arizona, compound when, complaining of chest pains, he texted his wife Cindy. What turned out to be his final message was: “Sell Budweiser stock.”

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《卫报》邀请了一批美国作家、艺术家谈谈布什的8年对他们创作生活的影响。以下这段是美国小说家 Paul Auster 的文章。

Paul Auster

I’m hard-pressed to think of a single thing the Bush administration has done to promote the arts. Things have gone on as before: novelists are writing books, people read them or don’t read them, movies are being made and people go or don’t go, artists are painting pictures, people are making music. I don’t see that the Bush people have affected the cultural landscape that much.

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Keith Stuart 在这里谈的是电脑游戏中人工智能(AI)控制的角色之间的对话。

Turning dumb dialogue into intelligent conversation
o Keith Stuart
o The Guardian,
o Thursday October 30 2008

In 1950, when the mathematician Alan Turing set out to tackle the question “Can machines think?” the intellectual litmus paper he settled on was conversation. The Turing test – in which an AI program attempts to fool judges into believing they are conversing with a human – has never been passed, though two weeks ago, a program named Elbot came close.

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Wendy Roby 介绍了一种新现象：针对女性的恐怖电影、网站和艺术节。

It’s a scream!
As Halloween draws near, Wendy Roby explores a new wave of films, websites and festivals feeding women’s growing hunger for horror

Wendy Roby
The Guardian,
Wednesday October 29 2008

For horror film fanatic Leah Holmes, a tolerance of fear began at an early age. Her anaesthetist father “had half a human skeleton which he used to get out to entertain me and my brother,” she says, “so I was very blasé about scary things. Years later, he was trying to put me off becoming a pathologist, and gave me a book with graphic photos of dead bodies in it. I think he was trying to frighten me, but I just flicked through and thought, ‘Oooh, interesting.'”

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Marc Abrahams 是双月刊《不可思议的研究》(Annals of Improbable Research)主编和 “搞笑诺贝尔奖”Ig Nobel Prize组织者。他为《卫报》写的专栏就叫”不可思议的研究”(Improbable Research)。今天的专栏介绍了两位巴西研究者如何研究不同坐姿对椅子产生的压力变化。

Why can’t you just sit still?
Marc Abrahams
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 28 2008

Contrary to what you might think, sitting is not a static activity, unless you are dead. In the study Chair Load Analysis During Daily Sitting Activities, Carla Paoliello and Edgar Vladimiro Mantilla Carrasco adopt the perspective of a chair. They quantify the shifting risks your furniture faces when someone sits on it.

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David Thompson 为《卫报》写的专栏叫做”电影生平字典” (Biographical Dictionary of Film)，每次介绍一位电影人，不是介绍生平那么简单，而是分析其电影事业上的起伏，并加上分析见解。”字典”第50期说的是007新片男主角 Daniel Craig。

Daniel Craig
The pieces are in place for the unthinkable: a slump in the Bond market. Daniel Craig’s Bond is thinking too much and doing too little

David Thomson
The Guardian,
Friday October 17 2008

Everyone in the Bond franchise business seems happy with Daniel Craig – yet the thought lingers that he may be a mole. Is he secretly an actor instead of a brand image? The surest sign of confidence in him is that the upcoming Bond picture has been allowed to cost about $225m. What’s more, that picture is called Quantum of Solace, the kind of title that Andrei Tarkovsky’s best friends might have talked him out of. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, you say, it’s a Bond picture, and they work according to different rules. That’s true, but the old rules used to work like this: Dr No (made in 1962, when Daniel Craig was two years old), cost $1.1m and it had a worldwide gross of $59.6m. Thunderball (1965) cost $9m and it had a gross of $141m. You can do those numbers yourself and they don’t mesh with the figures on the remake of Casino Royale (2006), Craig’s debut as 007 – that cost $150m, and grossed $167m at the American box office.
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英国剧作家、《卫报》专栏作者 Mark Ravenhill 发起一项竞赛，要求参赛者根据他提供的一则故事拍摄一段不超过5分钟的短片，上传到YouTube频道上，然后把姓名地址联系方式发到 youtube.competition@guardian.co.uk，截止日期2008年12月19日。Mark Ravenhill 的故事全文是今天的英语推荐阅读。

Mark Ravenhill’s Old School People
This is the text for your Guardian YouTube challenge. What you choose to do with it in your five-minute film is completely up to you
Mark Ravenhill
guardian.co.uk,
Friday October 24 2008 00.15 BST

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Harriet Swain 的 How to be a student 系列介绍了几个克服”没有东西可写”困境的招数。阅读这篇文章，不仅可以学习英语，还可以学到些有用的学习方法。

How to be a student: The art of avoiding writer’s block
Harriet Swain
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 21 2008

Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between writer’s block and feeling you can’t be bothered. If it happens every time you face a blank page or screen, and involves screwed up pieces of paper or frenzied use of the delete key, not to mention hours of pacing and chewed fingernails, it’s writer’s block. If it happens only when there’s a good gig on at the students’ union, it’s not. If there always seems to be a good gig on at the union whenever you face a blank page, it’s probably somewhere between the two.

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正在伦敦泰特现代艺术馆举办的“轮机房展览”以“2058年世界末日”为题材。科幻小说作家 M John Harrison 作了一番专业作者的评述。

Another view: Sci-fi writer M John Harrison on Tate Modern’s new Turbine Hall show
M John Harrison
The Guardian,
Monday October 20 2008

It felt as if I had walked into a dull replay of a JG Ballard short story. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is lined with bunk beds, the beds are scattered with science-fiction novels, and a screen at the far end of the hall plays excerpts from sci-fi and experimental films.

I thought the work – TH.2058, by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster – was rather feeble, to be honest. It includes a “mission statement” on the wall that creates the atmosphere of a futuristic refuge shelter much more effectively than the exhibition itself. I like to feel threatened by installation art. In the past, I’ve come out of Tate Modern shaking my fingers as if they’ve been burnt, but that wasn’t happening here.

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在F1上海站即将举行之际，让我们来读一下《卫报》体育记者 Richard Williams 在F1日本站后写的这篇文章。他对 Lewis Hamilton 与其他F1车手之间关系加入了一点历史视角。

Reckless Hamilton should now take a history lesson in respect
There are signs that Lewis Hamilton has inherited from his predecessors the view that any tactic justifies victory

Richard Williams

They grew up racing go-karts as though they were dodgems. Now they race 750-horsepower cars with survival cells so strong that you could probably drive one off the rim of the Grand Canyon and live to tell the tale. No wonder today’s formula one drivers don’t play by the old rules, as those of us who rose before dawn on Sunday saw during the course of an absorbing but, in the end, dismaying telecast from the foothills of Mount Fuji.

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