ナオミクラインさんのこの動画には共感を覚えたので、訳をつけてメモがわりにおいておきます。これは英語学習においても無縁ではありません。「今までのやり方は全然駄目で、わたしの方法こそが一番だ」と吹聴する輩はうじゃうじゃいますからね。Start from scratchではなくStart from scrapこそが必要と訴えるナオミクラインさんのコピーライター能力は素晴らしいですね。
Naomi Klein: Well I think one of the most famous . . . one of the most dangerous human impulses is the idea that you can start from scratch. This is an idea that has come up again and again in history. I almost called my book (Blank) is Beautiful, because it seemed to be this recurring idea that was at the root of this dream of transformation through disaster; transformation through shock, through violence. 一番よく知られた、一番危険な人間の衝動の一つに、ゼロから始めることができるという考えがあると思います。この考えは何度も歴史上に現れて来ました。私の本では、空白は美しいと呼んだところです。 この何度も現れる考えには災害を通じて変革を生み出す夢、ショックや暴力で変革を生み出す夢が根本のところにあるように思えるのです。
And I don't think by any means that the right . . . the market fundamentalists are the only ones who think this way. I think it's the indicator species for a dangerous ideology. It's the year zero mentality of a _..., or the desire for blankness, cleaning slate of Mao. But you hear it from the Donald Rumsefelds and the Cheneys as well -- this idea that you can create a country . . . a model country in somebody else's land. It's the same dream of total power, total creation. It's the colonial dream as well. 私は、市場原理主義者だけがこのように考えているとみなしているのではありません。危険なイデオロギーの指標であると考えています。これは、ゼロ年という考え、真っさらな状態への欲望、毛思想の白紙の状態などです。しかし、ラムズフェルドやチェイニーからも耳にするのです。国家を、誰かの土地に模範となる国を建設できるという考え。完全に支配し、全体を創設するという考えはおなじです。植民地化の夢でもあるのです。
It's . . . And I think we are in denial that this is a deep part of our history here in North America -- this dream of starting over, of rebooting the world that's imbedded in some of our most powerful Judeo-Christian biblical myths of great floods, and great fires, and just a gang of us and our friends being saved and getting to start over. You know Noah's ark and the rapture. 我々はここ北米での我々の歴史とも深く関わっていることを否定しているように思えます。もう一度やり直すという夢、世界を再起動するという夢は最も影響力があるユダヤキリスト教の聖書の神話に根付いています。大洪水、大火で、我々と友人の一群だけが救われ、再出発するのです。ノアの方舟、ラプチャー（空中携挙）などです。
I mean we are . . . We . . . It's an amazingly seductive idea -- this idea that you can reboot the world, start from zero. It's an amazingly anti-human idea, and I think we need to understand that because it can be framed as a really idealistic concept, right? We just . . . We want utopia. That sounds good. And we know how to build it. これは驚くほど魅力的な考えということです。世界をやり直せる、ゼロから始めることができるという考え、これは驚くほど非人間的考えでもあります。理想主義の考えとして構築されたものだと理解する必要があるのです。我々はユートピアを欲しています。素晴らしいことのように感じ、構築する方法も分かっているのです。
But the problem with this dream is, you know, that people get in the way, right? So then you have to clean the slate. You have to wipe the slate clean because there are no empty lands. And that was the violence of colonialism. I think it's been the most . . . It is the most powerful, most dangerous idea. It crosses political lines. It crosses religious lines, and it . . . it is the ideology that has rationalized the great cleansings, the great genocides. ただ、この夢には問題があり、民衆が邪魔をしているのです。だからこそ、粛清が必要になるのです。過去を帳消しないといけないのです。誰もいない土地などないのですから。これこそが植民地主義の暴力だったのです。最も影響力のある、最も危険な考えだと思います。これは政党の違いを乗り越えます。宗派の違いも乗り越えます。大粛清を、大虐殺を正当化するイデオロギーであったのです。
And we need to identify it is a dangerous ideology. We need to understand it in our history so that we don't repeat it. And you know, and we need to counter it with something else. And in terms of my philosophy I tried sort of developing a philosophy that is the opposite of starting from scratch, which is starting from scrap. これが危険なイデオロギーであることを自覚しないといけないのです。我々の歴史の中で理解し、繰り返さないようにする必要があるのです。別の何かで対抗しないといけないのです。私の考えに関していえば、ゼロから始めるとは反対にある考えを生み出そうとしていました。がれきから始めるというものです。
Because I think this idea that we do . . . that there will be some moment when we get to start from scratch, we need to excise it. There are no empty lands. There are no blank slates. There are no clean sheets. There are always gonna be people who disagree with you. You're always gonna have to start from compromise. この考えは、ゼロから始める時には、何かを追い出す必要があります。誰もいない土地などないのです。白紙の状態ではないのです。まっさらな状態などないのです。反対する人々が必ずいます。かならず妥協から始めないといけないのです。
And one time I interviewed William Gibson who is a wonderful science fiction writer. Or he doesn't only write science fiction. But I was talking to him about science fiction writing and he was saying there are two different kinds of science fiction writers -- the people who believe that the future is shiny, and the people who know that the future is rusty, right? And it's the shiny science fiction writers that you have to worry about. あるとき、ウィリアム・ギブソンにインタビューする機会がありました。素晴らしいSF作家です。SFだけを書いているのではありませんが、SFを書くことについて話をしました。彼によれば、２種類のSF作家がいるようです。未来を輝かしいと思う作家と未来はさびれているとみなす作家です。輝かしいと考えるSF作家こそが心配なのです。
And you know I think the future is gonna be rusty. I think it's gonna be built by, you know, whoever is around and whatever is left behind. And it'll be this sort of patchwork. And we just need to resign ourselves to that. You know we leave . . . We leave big messes behind, and we need to start from scrap and stop dreaming of starting from scratch because it's a very violent idea. And it sounds wonderful, but the flip side of it . . . of that clean slate idea is the scorched earth . . . is the scorched earth we're seeing it in Iraq right now. 私は未来はさびれたものになると思っています。周りにいる人たちと、残されたもので、構築していくからです。つぎはぎのようなものになるでしょう。そのような状況を甘受しないといけないのです。散らかった状態を後に残すのです。がれきから始めるべきで、ゼロから始める夢をあきらめるしかないのです。とても危険な思想なのですから。素晴らしい考えに思えますが、白紙の状態を求める考えの裏には焦土があるのです。現在のイラクで目の当たりにしているような焦土があるのです。
オバマ大統領が、ISISへの戦略についてWe don’t have a strategy yet.と答えたことが衝撃を与えていますが、直前に"I don't want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet."とおなじみのイディオムを使っていましたね。
（ロングマン） put the cart before the horse to do two things in the wrong order
IN a polarized region and a complicated world, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria presents a unifying threat to a broad array of countries, including the United States. What’s needed to confront its nihilistic vision and genocidal agenda is a global coalition using political, humanitarian, economic, law enforcement and intelligence tools to support military force.
In addition to its beheadings, crucifixions and other acts of sheer evil, which have killed thousands of innocents in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, including Sunni Muslims whose faith it purports to represent, ISIS (which the United States government calls ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) poses a threat well beyond the region.
ISISに対してits nihilistic vision and genocidal agendaとか、crucifixions and other acts of sheer evilとか、完全に悪とみなした書き方をしています。
Airstrikes alone won’t defeat this enemy. A much fuller response is demanded from the world. We need to support Iraqi forces and the moderate Syrian opposition, who are facing ISIS on the front lines. We need to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ capabilities and counter its extremist message in the media. And we need to strengthen our own defenses and cooperation in protecting our people.
Next week, on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Wales, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and I will meet with our counterparts from our European allies. The goal is to enlist the broadest possible assistance. Following the meeting, Mr. Hagel and I plan to travel to the Middle East to develop more support for the coalition among the countries that are most directly threatened.
一方のマケイン議員は、オバマ大統領が議会承認を求めてから軍事行動をすると言ったこともあり、ISISへの軍事関与を両党派政策として進めるべきと米国内の視点から述べています。911の時もそうでしたが、“a matter of homeland security”として米国の安全保障として捉えているようです。
Such a strategy would require our commander in chief to explain to war-weary Americans why we cannot ignore this threat. ISIS is now one of the largest, richest terrorist organizations in history. It occupies a growing safe haven the size of Indiana spanning two countries in the heart of the Middle East, and its ranks are filled with thousands of radicals holding Western passports, including some Americans. They require nothing more than a plane ticket to travel to United States cities.
This is why the secretary of homeland security has called Syria “a matter of homeland security.” His warnings about ISIS have been echoed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and, now, the secretary of defense. Americans need to know that ISIS is not just a problem for Iraq and Syria. It is a threat to the United States. Doing too little to combat ISIS has been a problem. Doing less is certainly not the answer now.
最後にもオバマ大統領に積極的に軍事関与する方向に政策転換するように呼びかけています。
One of the hardest things a president must do is change, and history’s judgment is often kind to those who summon the courage to do so. Jimmy Carter changed his policy on the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Bill Clinton changed his policy in the Balkans and stopped ethnic cleansing. And George W. Bush changed course in Iraq and saved America from defeat.
ISIS presents Mr. Obama with a similar challenge, and it has already forced him to begin changing course, albeit grudgingly. He should accept the necessity of further change and adopt a strategy to defeat this threat. If he does, he deserves bipartisan support. If he does not, ISIS will continue to grow into an even graver danger to our allies and to us.
100 novels everyone should read The best novels of all time from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch 1:00PM BST 20 Jun 2014 24 Ulysses by James Joyce Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
ちょっと脱線しますが日本文学で100冊に選ばれているのは何と、源氏物語でした。
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
Jonathan Coe's new novel - The Rotters' Club - contains a sentence of 13,955 words.
We believe that this is the longest single sentence in the English language, easily outstripping Molly's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.
According to Dr Lucia Boldrini, Lecturer in English Literature at Goldsmiths College, London, the longest of the eight sentences in Molly's monologue is 4,391 words.
Coe had no knowledge of this - he thought Joyce still held the record - and was, er, delighted to find out.
The most famous mega-sentence in literature comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Molly Bloom’s monologue from “Ulysses” (1922) —36 pages in the thinly margined, micro-fonted 1986 single-volume corrected text (and actually two long sentences, thanks to an often-overlooked period 17 pages in) — sets an impossibly high standard for the art of the run-on. It breathlessly binds together all that comes before while nearly obliterating it, permanently coloring the reader’s memory in one final rush. It feels unstoppable, and then it stops.
Molly’s soliloquy is a touchstone for writers aiming to go long. A copy of “Ulysses” pops up in “Green Coaster,” the 33-page, single-sentence section that closes Jonathan Coe’s brilliant novel “The Rotters’ Club” (2001). (The BBC has reported that at 13,955 words, it is the longest sentence ever written in English.)
The Very Long Sentence could be seen as a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself. “I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period,” William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1944. “I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead.” (Faulkner, no stranger to the mind-expanding possibilities of the very long sentence, was once credited with a 1,400-worder by the Guinness Book of World Records.) In this age of 140-character Twitter posts — not to mention a persistent undercurrent of minimalism in our literature — there’s something profoundly rejuvenating about the very long sentence. For the sake of the novel, and ourselves, let’s hope that Hrabal wasn’t being prophetic when he wrote, four decades ago, “People twitter away like magpies and don’t really care.”
The Rotters’ Clubに関しては長い一文というだけでなく、小説としても評判はよかったようで、映像化されたようです。
１ヵ月以上遅れての話題ですが、「ろくでなし子」さんの逮捕はロイターも三面記事的に取り上げていました。「ろくでなし子」は英語で説明するとIgarashi, who worked under the alias Rokudenashiko, which means "good-for-nothing girl" in Japaneseのようになるのですね。
(Reuters) - A Japanese artist who made figures of Lady Gaga and a kayak modeled on her vagina said on Wednesday from jail she was "outraged" by her arrest and vowed a court fight against obscenity charges.
Megumi Igarashi, 42, says she was challenging a culture of "discrimination" against discussion of the vagina in Japanese society.
Igarashi, who worked under the alias Rokudenashiko, which means "good-for-nothing girl" in Japanese, built a yellow kayak with a top shaped like her vagina after raising about $10,000 through crowdfunding.
who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not
現在では名作であることの評価は揺るぎないですが、当時は、作品をわいせつとみなされ、発禁処分となったり、裁判があったりといろいろあったようです。その経緯を丁寧にたどっていったのがThe Most Dangerous Bookです。最近借りて読み終わったので記事にしました。当時の状況がわかって面白かったです。
by KEVIN BIRMINGHAM An account of the dramatic writing of and fight to publish James Joyce's Ulysses reveals how the now-classic book was the subject of a landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933 that overturned key censorship laws.
Ulysses sparked a revolution because it left out nothing: for the single day it chronicles Leopold Bloom's wanderings around Dublin, we hear (among a thousand other things) about his daydreams, his erections, his newspaper reading, and the quality of his bowel movements. Ulysses also bombards us with different narrative styles and voices — most famously that of Bloom's wife, Molly, whose words about intercourse from a woman's point of view are now celebrated as one of literature's great soliloquies.
この書評はBirmingham helps his own readers see how an enlightened society came to the realization that the only fitting response to a work of art like Ulysses is (to quote Molly Bloom): "Yes."とうまくまとめています。
In a landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933, Ulysses was deemed to be "literature" by a patrician federal judge named John Woolsey, who was repelled by the gross excesses of Joyce's novel, but also unexpectedly moved by passages like Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Since then, generations of readers have been amazed, inspired, turned off and turned on by Ulysses. Birmingham helps his own readers see how an enlightened society came to the realization that the only fitting response to a work of art like Ulysses is (to quote Molly Bloom): "Yes."
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world
********
yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921
Organic Food Premium Prices and Uncertain Benefits By Leslie Patton | Updated Aug. 20, 2014
The Situation、The Background、The Argumentの最初の部分を引用します。Organic foodはまだ食品市場の４パーセントしか占めていないそうですが、確実に増加しているそうです。振り返ってみると化学肥料って20世紀の出来事なんですね。
The Situation About three-quarters of grocers in the U.S. sell organic food, including specialty markets, like Sprouts, and mass-market retailers, like Wal-Mart and Target. While that’s only 4 percent of total food sales, demand in the U.S. and Europe is growing.
The Background Until the invention of pesticides, all agriculture was organic. Poison gas research in World War I led to bug-killing nerve gases, including sarin and DDT, which was so effective at killing malaria-carrying mosquitoes it won its inventor a Nobel Prize. After Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” documented the dangers of DDT, the chemical was banned for use as a pesticide in the U.S. in 1972. In the 1970s, the first industrial-scale animal farms in the U.S. began popping up, first for egg production, later for pigs and cattle. Yields increased, but so did worries: These animals are often treated with antibiotics and consumption of the meat has led to more drug-resistant infections in humans.
The Argument Proponents say that organic produce has more nutrients, including antioxidants and vitamins that may prevent or delay cell damage, than conventionally grown fruits and vegetables.
Naomi Klein on This Changes Everything, Her New Book About Climate Change JOHN POWERS AUGUST 26, 2014 7:30 AM by JOHN POWERS “I was never really a marcher,” says Naomi Klein, an author so politically committed that she discovered she was pregnant with her son, Toma, while among Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park. “Even though I believe in mass social movements, I’m uncomfortable in crowds.”
Because such words put Klein far to the left by American (if not global) standards, one might easily imagine her as some sort of cliché radical—earnest, smugly righteous, out of touch with ordinary people and their pleasures. Yet in person, she’s the opposite—warm, funny, down-to-earth, unobtrusively stylish. Although she may be the world’s most famous critic of consumerism, she understands the joys of shopping. At an appearance in London, somebody asked her to name one thing she liked about capitalism. She instantly replied, “The shoes.”
また、子供を持つかどうかという決断についても共感を得やすいポイントでしょう。
It was during these years that Klein underwent a profound personal transformation regarding motherhood. Although she always knew that Lewis wanted children and would be a great father, it annoyed her when people asked whether she planned to start a family. It was as if they were telling her to stop doing what she was doing. “Before I had Toma,” she says with a grin, “I was one of those people who had no interest in other people’s kids. I was ‘Don’t hand me that baby!’ ” But when she was 38 years old and deep into promoting The Shock Doctrine, a Polish journalist asked if she planned to have kids. To her surprise she heard herself answer, “Yes, if it’s not too late.”
気候変動問題についてもあまりにも問題が大きすぎて当初は及び腰だったようです。 Still, for all her renown, Klein is now writing about climate change, a topic that most people, even those on the Left, would just as soon avoid. Klein confesses that she long shared the same desire for denial. “When you think about something this big,” she tells me, “it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or depressed.” That said, This Changes Everything is far from an apocalyptic downer. Perhaps because she wrote most of it during her son’s infancy—the dedication reads for toma—it is the most personal of her works and the most desperately optimistic. “This book isn’t about what everybody already knows,” says 350.org’s cofounder Bill McKibben, the dean of climate-change writers. “It’s about how all the pieces fit together.” Klein moves from an analysis of how huge corporations and free-market ideology block the attempt to fight climate change, to a critique of many of our supposed saviors (big green organizations that are actually bound up with oil companies; billionaires like Richard Branson who promise more than they deliver), and then winds up giving examples of where people are doing things right. In the end, Klein argues that the climate crisis can become a catalyst of great and positive social transformation. But to get there means retooling a capitalism that runs on fossil fuels, demands endless growth, and concentrates power in the hands of the 1 percent. “Dealing with the climate crisis,” she says simply, “will require a completely different economic system.”
ただ、記事の最初ではshe understands the joys of shoppingとショッピングに理解を示していましたが、新刊の内容は大量生産大量消費のライフスタイルの見直しに踏み込んでいるようです（苦笑）
Confronting climate change, Klein argues, requires far more than putting a tax on carbon without rolling back total emissions and believing that scientists will find some magic bullet. It means humanity weaning itself off fossil fuels (Klein adamantly opposes opening the Keystone XL pipeline), governments spending trillions on renewable energy, corporations giving up the idea of endless economic growth, and consumers everywhere learning restraint. We all must learn to stop buying so much, which means learning to stop defining ourselves by what we buy.
彼女が選んだ地球環境問題に関する10冊です。女性ばかりの選出になっています。Often they do so in name of future generationsとあるように、Naomi Kleinも出産を機に将来の世代のことを強く意識するようになったようです。
Naomi Klein’s Reading List One of the things that struck me most in my research into the climate crisis is that all around the world women are at the forefront of the fight to protect land, water, and air. Often they do so in name of future generations. These are some of the women whose love of the natural world, and rage at injustice, first inspired me to write about climate change. 1) Silent Spring by Rachel Carson 2) Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber 3) Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis by Vandana Shiva 4) The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood 5) Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver 6) Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy 7) All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke 8) Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert 9) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant 10) Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World by Wangari Maathai
As protesters line the streets of Ferguson, Mo., they raise their arms and chant "hands up, don't shoot." The sign for surrender has become a symbol of protest in the four days since police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Witnesses say the teen died Saturday after throwing his hands up and surrendering to police. Police have not confirmed that he put his hands up and have said there was a scuffle.
動画でも最後の方で"If you're angry, throw your arms up. If you want justice, throw your arms up."と呼びかけていますね。
The Rev. Al Sharpton referred to "hands up" when he spoke to crowds Tuesday. "When their hands are up, you don't shoot," Sharpton said. "If you're angry, throw your arms up. If you want justice, throw your arms up."
The members of the Washington Redskins' secondary made a gesture of support for protestors in Ferguson, Mo., before the team's preseason game against the Cleveland Browns on Monday night.
Businessweekの表紙は子供が手を挙げている写真だったのですが、ABCニュースでも同じ写真が使われていてこのキャプションによるとGabrielle Walker, 5, protests the killing of Michael Brown Aug. 17, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.と、この女の子も抗議の意思表示だったようです。
Meet Mr. Frankenfood Monsanto's COO Brett Begemann, the son of a farmer, explains why genetically modified food is safe—and essential to feed a hungry planet. By KATE BACHELDER CONNECT Aug. 22, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET
Before you can finish typing " Monsanto employees" into Google, the search engine suggests "Monsanto evil." The world's largest-grossing seed seller ranks between one and 15 on any list of the world's most-hated corporations. The annual "March Against Monsanto," world-wide protests against genetic modification, drew an estimated two million people in some 400 cities last year.
Opponents claim that genetic modification poses health risks, and groups such as the Non-GMO Project, Just Label It! and others want labels required on all foods containing GM ingredients. Vermont passed a GM-labeling bill in May, and Oregon and Colorado will hold referendums on labeling in November. Companies including Ben & Jerry's and Chipotle Mexican Grill say they are removing GM ingredients from their food, and General Mills recently made Cheerios cereal GMO-free.
Meet Mr. Frankenfoodというタイトルからして、反感があるのを充分分かって書いていますから、全体的に腰が低い記事になっています。Monsatanなんてことまで言われているのですね。そのような動画も簡単に見つけられました（苦笑）
The more extreme skeptics cast Monsanto as an evildoer peddling mutant Frankenfood. "Monsatan" is one nickname, and groups such as Occupy Monsanto exist solely to malign the company. Mr. Begemann takes personally the charge that Monsanto is poisoning food. "It just blows my mind," he says, "that anybody would ever imagine that I would ever be involved in producing any kind of food that would ever put me, my family or now a grandson at risk." He adds: "I go to the same grocery store that everybody else goes to."
He talks about "having a dialogue" and "coming to the table" with those concerned about genetic modification. It remains to be seen if that strategy will quell a backlash based mostly on fear and emotion. He doesn't discuss what else Monsanto will do, but the company is likely to spend big to fight the labeling movement. Monsanto poured in about $8 million to defeat a labeling initiative on the California ballot in 2012. He also notes that food companies pay the direct costs of labeling, and so consumers ultimately pay in higher prices. The state-based labeling initiatives on ballots and in legislatures would produce a patchwork system that is even more expensive. "Imagine a food delivery truck that has to stop when it gets to the Mississippi River, unload, cross the river and reload," he says. "I don't care how you cut it: It increases costs. It's just not practical." Besides, he adds, we already have a useful label at the federal level: the organic seal. "Anybody who wants to stay away from GM can buy organic. That choice is there," he says. The Department of Agriculture offers organic certification to farmers and food companies who meet a set of standards, one of which is proving that their food doesn't contain genetically modified ingredients.
While that's all the land we've got, demand for more and better food is skyrocketing as global population grows. By 2050 there will be nine billion people on earth, and they will want dinner. GM crops are not a panacea, Mr. Begemann reminds me many times, but "just one of many tools" that farmers should be allowed to choose.
Years ago Mr. Begemann traveled to a village in India where he met a farmer who increased his yield—and his profits—after he began growing Monsanto's insect-resistant Bollgard cotton. The men didn't speak the same language, but they had one word in common. "The farmer pointed to the second story on his little house, and said 'Bollgard,' " Mr. Begemann recalls. "Then he pointed to a scooter next to his house, and said 'Bollgard.' . . . Then he just lit up, and pointed to two children, standing in front of his house in school uniforms, and said 'Bollgard.' "
This is an invitation to change everything. In September, world leaders are coming to New York City for a UN summit on the climate crisis. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is urging governments to support an ambitious global agreement to dramatically reduce global warming pollution.
With our future on the line and the whole world watching, we’ll take a stand to bend the course of history. We’ll take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities.
To change everything, we need everyone on board. Sunday, September 21 in New York City. Join us.
SIGN UP NOW
or read:
Our Power Campaign’s powerful call to action Bill McKibben’s invitation in Rolling Stone or Eddie Bautista’s piece in Earth Island Journal.
No LogoやShock Doctrineなどキャッチーな本で毎回注目を集めているNaomi KleinさんがVogue９月号に登場しています。This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climateという新刊のプロモーションも兼ねているようです。タイトルからも分かるように気候変動と経済システムを問題にするようですね。iPadをお持ちの方はサンプルreviewで彼女の記事を読めてしまいます。
In December of 2012, a complex systems scientist walked up to the podium at the American Geophysics Union to present a paper It was titled, "Is the Earth Fucked?" His answer was: "Yeah. Pretty much." That's where the road we're on is taking us, but that has less to do with carbon than with capitalism. Our economic model is at war with life on Earth. We can't change the laws of nature, but we can change our broken economy. And that's why climate change isn't just a disaster. It's also our best chance to demand—and build—a better world. Change or be changed. But make no mistake... this changes everything.
Change or be changed（変わるのか、変えさせられるのか）という最後の問いもキャッチーですが、"Is the Earth Fucked?"というまさかのF-wordの話題から入るのもうまいですね。この件は2012年末に話題になっていたようです。
Many of us have wondered at some point in almost precisely these terms: “Is Earth F**ked?” But it’s not the sort of frank query you expect an expert in geomorphology to pose to his colleagues as the title of a formal presentation at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings.
Nestled among offerings such as “Bedrock Hillslopes to Deltas: New Insights Into Landscape Mechanics” and “Chemical Indicators of Pathways in the Water Cycle,” the question leapt off the pages of the schedule for the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. Brad Werner, a geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, is one of the more than 20,000 Earth and atmospheric scientists who descended on downtown San Francisco this week to share their research on everything from Antarctic ice-sheet behavior to hurricane path modeling to earthquake forecasting. But he’s the only one whose presentation required the use of censorious asterisks. When the chairman of Werner’s panel announced the talk’s title on Wednesday, a titter ran through the audience at the naughtiness of it all.
Why shout out the blunt question on everyone’s mind? Werner explained at the outset of the presentation that it was inspired by friends who are depressed about the future of the planet. “Not so much depressed about all the good science that’s being done all over the world—a lot of it being presented here—about what the future holds,” he clarified, “but by the seeming inability to respond appropriately to it.”
No Logoを書いた彼女らしく、Vogueで着させられた白いワイシャツについてサイトで弁明しています。Obviously I don’t endorse this particular brand, just as I don’t endorse any brands. It’s not my shirt. I don’t urge you to buy one. Lots of people make nice white shirts.なんて、Vogueに対しても言えちゃうなんてすごいですね。
However, I did place one condition on the interview, and it’s the same one I’ve placed on all my public appearances for almost 15 years: no logos. I pushed hard to wear my own clothes for the shoot but the idea was summarily nixed. (“It’s the SEPTEMBER Issue” the very cool stylist kept saying, with the kind of gravitas that the actors on Scandal reserve for “He’s the PRESIDENT.”)
I did win one concession: the editor agreed in writing that the magazine would not print “who” I was wearing. It seemed like a decent compromise: I wouldn’t bring down the property value of Vogue’s pages with my actual wardrobe, but I wouldn’t offer free advertiser-promo either.
They put me in a white shirt. It was nice. I’m vain enough to really like the photo.
The hitch is that for some reason, the editor’s promise was not kept and the name of the shirt’s designer does appear over the photo. The editor has been extremely apologetic. The reference will be removed in the online edition. I’m told there will be a printed correction. (Though nothing will ever be as awesome as this one.) And the fact that I briefly considered this screw up to be far more serious than my friends finding out from a public source that I have cancer tells you too much about where my brain is at.
Obviously I don’t endorse this particular brand, just as I don’t endorse any brands. It’s not my shirt. I don’t urge you to buy one. Lots of people make nice white shirts.
かなり文脈は違いますが、金儲けの何が悪いと気持ちいいくらいに言い切った論評があるのを思い出しました。フランスの作家ゾラが1880年に発表した文学における金銭（L’Argent dans la Litterature）という論評です。金銭があることで表現の自由を確保できるというのです。比較的マイナーなものも英訳されて無料で読めるようになっているのは本当にありがたいです。THE INFLUENCE OF MONEY IN LITERATUREを日本語訳と合わせてご紹介します。日本語訳は以下を引用させていただきました。
1 OFTEN hear the following complaint uttered around me : " The literary instinct is dying out, letters are pushed to one side by commerce, money is destroying talent." And there are many other accusations uttered against the democracy which is invading our salons and our academies, which detracts from the beauty of our language, which makes the writer a merchant, disposing or not of his merchandise according to the trademark it bears, and as a result of the transaction amassing a fortune or dying in misery. 私の周りではしばしば「文学精神はなくなってゆく。文芸には金儲け主義が氾濫していて、金が精神を殺している」といった類の苦情が聞かれる。また、わが民主主義がサロンやアカデミーに侵入して、麗しい言語を狂わせているとか、民主主義のせいで作家は、銘柄次第でその商品を売りこんだり売りこめなかったり、財を蓄えたり貧困のうちに死んだりする商人のごとき存在に成り下がっている、といった涙ながらの非難の声もあがっている。
These complaints and accusations enrage me. It is certain, in the first place, that the literary spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is no longer that of our nineteenth century. An intellectual movement has little by little brought about a transformation which to-day is complete. First, let us see what this transformation really is. Then it will be easy for us to. determine the place which money holds in our literature. 冗談ではない、このような苦情や非難には腹が立つ。まず当然のことながら、十七、十八世紀に了解されていた意味での文学精神は、もはやまったくわが十九世紀の文学精神ではないのである。知性と社会の動きから徐々にある変化がもたらされ、それは今日完了している。まっ先にこの変化とはいかなるものであったかを検討しよう。その後でなら、わが国の現代文学における金銭の役割を見定めることは容易であろう。
"Work; it all lies in that. Count on no one but yourself. Say to yourself that if you have talent your talent will open the most tightly closed doors, and that it will put you as high as you merit to go. And, above all things, refuse benefits from the government ; never ask protection from the state ; you will leave your manhood behind you if you do. The great law of life is to struggle. Nobody owes you anything. You will triumph necessarily if you are a power, and if you succumb do not complain, for your defeat is just. Then respect money; do not fall into the childish fashion of crying out, with the poets, against it ; money is our courage and our liberty. We writers, who need to be free in order to say what we think, money makes us the intellectual leaders of the century — the only possible aristocracy. Accept your epoch as one of the greatest in the history of humanity ; firmly believe in the future, without stopping to look at the inevitable consequences, the invasion of journalism, the money-making spirit of the baser literature. Lastly, do not mourn for the old literary spirit, as it was the expression of a society now dead. Another spirit is springing out of the new society, a spirit which broadens daily in its search for and in its assertion of the truth. Let the naturalistic movement pursue its own ways; geniuses will rise up and complete the work. You who are starting on your career to-day, do not struggle against the social and literary evolution, for the geniuses of the twentieth century are among you."
I now come to the scientific breeze which is sweeping more and more over our literature. The question of money is simply one result in the transformation which the literary spirit has undergone in our days, for the primary cause of this transformation comes from the application of scientific methods to letters, from the use of those tools which the writer has borrowed from the savant in order to take up again with him the analysis of nature and of man. The actual battle is waged on this soil : on one side the rhetoricians, the grammarians,the pure men of letters, who intend to continue tradition ; on the other, the anatomist, the analysist, the experts in the sciences of observation and experiment, whose object is to depict anew the world and humanity, studying them in their natural mechanism, and extending their works so as to embrace the greatest amount of truth. These latter, by their triumph since the beginning of the century, have molded the new literary spirit. They are not a school, as I have said a hundred times; they are a social evolution, whose phases are easily stated. The abyss v^rhich separates Balzac from a writer of any kind in the seventeenth century immediately presents itself before our eyes. Let us admit that Racine formerly may have read " Phedre," which is his most audacious tragedy, in a salon; the fine ladies Hstened to it, the academicians approved of it, all those present were delighted with the pompousness of the verses, with the correctness of the tirades, with the propriety of the sentiments and language. The work is a fine rhetorical and logical composition, made about abstract and metaphysical beings, by an author imbued with the philosophical opinions of his day. Now let us take " Cousine Bette " and attempt to read that aloud in a salon or in an academy. The reading would appear improper; the fine ladies would be scandalized ; and this only happens because Balzac has written a book of experiment and observation on human beings, not as a logician or a maker of beautiful phrases, but as an analyzer, who is loboring at the scientific quest of his age. This com-parison shows how large is the abyss. When Sainte-Beuve sent forth his despairing cry, " Oh, physiologists, I find you everywhere ! " he sounded the knell of the old-time literary spirit, he felt that the reign of literary men of old times was over.
That is the situation. I sum it all up by saying that our epoch is a grand one, and that it is childish to lament before the century which is opening out to us. As it advances humanity leaves only ruins behind it ; why always turn back and weep over the ground which we have left behind us, wasted and strewn with debris ? Doubtless the past centuries had their literary greatness, but it is a poor aim to try to keep us immovable in this greatness, under the pretext that there could be no other. A literature is but the expression of a social condition. To-day our democratic society is beginning to have its literary expression, and it is magnificent and complete. We must accept it without regret or childish repinings ; we must recognize the power, the justice, and the dignity of money ; we must submit to the new spirit which broadens the domain of letters by means of science, which above all grammar and rhetoric, above all philosophy and religion, strives to attain to the beauty of truth.
"Colorless Tsukuru" is not without its irritations: the author's timeworn oddities of phrasing, airy philosophy and detours into the whimsy. Philip Gabriel's translation is typically slick, but there is not much he can do with similes such as "anxiety raised its head, like a jagged ominous rock" or "like tying a horse to a hitching post, he tied the dog's leash to a streetlight." The natural-world imagery is either eccentrically specific or terribly banal. An unpleasant possibility hangs in the air "like a small, thick, lenticular cloud"; a teenage girl "burst[s] into bloom, like a garden in spring"; an orgasm engulfs Tsukuru "like a huge wave crashing over him."
A reader without Japanese is completely at the mercy of Murakami's translators; when the prose lowers to cliche or commonplace – as it seems to do surprisingly often in this novel – there is no way of knowing if Philip Gabriel is accurately representing his client or letting him down. A further frustration for the British reader is that the publishers here have maintained the spelling and vocabulary of the US edition – "fit", "gotten", "sophomore" – which then leads to another culture clash during paragraphs about the significance of the Japanese pronouns and honorifics in use during conversations.
今回訳したPhilip Gabrielさんの記事がネットにありました。翻訳のプロセス、苦労なども話してくれています。Murakami and/or his staff read through the first draft of my translations and make suggestions and changesとありますので、村上春樹も英訳については多少関わっているようです。
Murakami, a writer 'found in translation' "Murakami understands and appreciates the challenges of working between English and Japanese. He is always generous with his time. When I have questions, I run these by Murakami via email and he responds quickly to any parts I have trouble with. Murakami and/or his staff read through the first draft of my translations and make suggestions and changes," says Philip.
Bridging the gap in translation How difficult is it to bridge the structural and grammatical gap between English and Japanese for a translator? "It's a real challenge. The order of information in Japanese is often nearly the reverse of English, I sometimes feel I'm giving away the punch line too soon when I translate a Japanese sentence into English. Cultural differences are the most difficult to get across in translation. Day to day lifestyle differences, differences in interpersonal interaction, etc. are aspects of life and writing that Japanese readers take for granted but which become a kind of stumbling block to understanding for English readers. As an academic I sometimes wish I could add footnotes, but commercial publishers usually don't allow these," laments Philip. Apart from novels, Philip Gabriel has also translated Murakami's short stories and works of non-fiction. Ask him about the most challenging work of all and Philip replies, "I did find Underground (2000) a challenge because I was dealing with the voices of eight different people—the cult members he (Murakami) interviewed—as well as Murakami's voice as narrator and interviewer. But probably the most challenging work of all was Kafka on the Shore because of the unique voices of the two main characters—Kafka and Nakata. These characters were unlike any in his previous works."
こつこつ３、４ページずつ早朝に訳していると、毎日やる量を決めて進めていると語っています。
Do his translators too follow a strict fitness routine like him? "I certainly am not the athlete he is, but I do try to work at a set time, mostly early morning, and translate a set number of pages per day (a rough draft of 3-4 pages). It is daunting sometimes to consider translating books of 500-600 pages and I try to take it one day at a time. If you look up at the distant peak of the mountain you're climbing you can get dizzy and discouraged, so I train my gaze on the path before me and take a step at a time. I guess I'm more a hiker or walker than a runner," reveals Philip
If you look up at the distant peak of the mountain you're climbing you can get dizzy and discouraged, so I train my gaze on the path before me and take a step at a time.（かなたにある山の頂を登山中に見上げると、呆然としてやる気がそがれるかもしれません。ですから、目の前にある道だけを見て一歩ずつ進むようにしています）という部分は英語学習にも通じますね。
WSJに村上春樹の新作の書評が載っていました。積読状態なので、時間ができたら読んでみたいと思います。wildly popular but not a populist, accessible yet boundlessly inventive（広く人気があるが人気取りに走っているわけでもなく、読みやすいが無限の発想力がある）という表現はうまいですね。
Haruki Murakami is the closest thing we have to a global literary rock star who is also mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize. Mr. Murakami is as beloved in Europe or America as he is in Asia, wildly popular but not a populist, accessible yet boundlessly inventive. His writing, built on recurring motifs—dual realms, jazz records, questing males—and themes—solitude, guilt, the unbearable gulf between perception and reality—is both simple and entirely original.
WSJの書評ではカズオイシグロの村上春樹の作品の分類"the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" oneにならって、新作を後者に位置づけて好意的に評価していました。
Mr. Murakami's oeuvre can be broadly divided into two categories: What his friend Kazuo Ishiguro characterizes as "the bizarre, anarchic style" and the "controlled, melancholy" one.
His previous book, "IQ84," fell squarely in the former camp. More than 1,000 pages long, published in two separate volumes, it was chaotic and something of a headache. Some reviewers, including this one, felt that form and focus had been sacrificed to freedom, that freedom had given way to sloppiness, and that the narrative's very unpredictability made it humdrum. Invention requires restraint; the sense that anything could happen stopped it from mattering what did. In this context, Mr. Murakami's trademark flourishes felt tired too.
It is thus something of a relief that his latest novel, which successfully inhabits the second category, balances creativity with subtlety and narrative propulsion. "The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" may have a baggy title, but it is, for the most part, tidy, charming and ingenious.
Marathon man Haruki Murakami ran a jazz club in Tokyo before he was first inspired to write. A reluctant celebrity since the publication of a best-selling novel 16 years ago, his work explores themes of love and loss. His relationship with his country has been complex but, after years in exile, he has returned to live in Japan Richard Williams The Guardian, Saturday 17 May 2003
"He has two distinct styles," says his friend and admirer Kazuo Ishiguro, the Booker-winning author of The Remains of the Day. "There's the bizarre, anarchic style and there's the very controlled, melancholy approach. Of the latter, South of the Border is beautifully judged, so fragile. It's almost like a piece of cocktail jazz you hear playing in a bar, a perfectly measured piece from beginning to end. On the other side is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the berserkly inventive side where he keeps hitting you with things and you're not quite sure what to do with them."
Ishiguro feels Murakami stands alone in Japanese literature. "I see much more of an affinity with some of the film-makers of his generation, such as Juzo Itami and Yoshimitsu Morita. There's the deadpan, surreal-verging-on-absurdist comic tone, a willingness to bend the edges of reality in stories set in an otherwise mundane setting, and the underlying melancholy observed in everyday middle-class rituals. And in his early work Murakami was saying, as they did, 'This is the Japan that we know and it has very little to do with any of those ideas you may have.'
"Yet," Ishiguro adds, "there's also a thematic obsession going back very far into the past, which is that falling-cherry-blossom thing, about the ephemerality of life. And he identifies it while his characters are still relatively young: they're people only just entering middle age but recognising that a time of beautiful energy has passed them by without them being quite aware of how it happened."
King Learは悲劇なので、分かっていてもハッピーエンドにならないことにわだかまりが残ってしまいます。Wikipediaで調べてみたら、19世紀になるまではハッピーエンドに改作したものを公演していたようですね。よかった仲間がいて（笑）
（Wikipedia） King Lear After the Restoration, the play was often revised with a happy ending for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone, but since the 19th century Shakespeare's original version has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements. The tragedy is particularly noted for its probing observations on the nature of human suffering and kinship. George Bernard Shaw wrote, "No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear".
********* Tragic The harsh tragic climax of the play was indeed too bleak for some to take, even many years after it was written. King Lear was at first unsuccessful on the Restoration stage, apparently due to its bleak conclusion, and it was only with Nahum Tate's happy-ending version of 1681 that it became part of the repertory. Tate's Lear, in which Lear survives and triumphs, the fool is completely omitted, and Edgar and Cordelia get married, held the stage until 1838 when British actor and manager William Macready insisted on restoring both the Fool and the tragic ending.[29] Samuel Johnson endorsed the use of Tate's version in his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765): "Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor."
The Right Sort, David Mitchell's Twitter short story The Booker-shortlisted novelist has published his latest short story, The Right Sort, on Twitter this week. Here you can read the author's ongoing 280-tweet tale of a boy and his mother's valium pills in full, and in chronological order theguardian.com, Monday 14 July 2014 10.16 BST
Set in the same universe as his much-anticipated new novel The Bone Clocks, which opens in 1984, as a teenage runaway meets a strange woman who offers a small kindness in return for "asylum", The Right Sort will run to 280 tweets. Mitchell described writing fiction for Twitter as a "diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket".
First, said the writer who was shortlisted for the Booker for number9dream and Cloud Atlas, "obviously, you're limited to 140 characters". Secondly, the tweets are visually sequential, "and I think this alters how the text is read. Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye 'sees' the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and 'remembers' what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically 'flinch'. Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor."
And last, "narrative tweets have to be at least two things: one, a balanced entity with its own (may I say haiku-like?) rightness, and two, a 'propellent' or maybe a kind of plate-spinner of character development, or mood, or plot, or idea, or a combination. So it's just as well that I love the escapological challenges posed by diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjackets. I can't say it was easy, but then again Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without a single letter 'E'. Now that's a straitjacket."
最後の部分にAnd last, "narrative tweets have to be at least two things: one, a balanced entity with its own (may I say haiku-like?) rightnessとあります。短い詩イコール俳句というイメージは英国人にもあるのですね。まあ、彼は日本に住んでいたのでその辺は差し引かなくてはいけませんが。。。
（オックスフォード） Haiku (from Japanese) a poem with three lines and usually 17 syllables, written in a style that is traditional in Japan
The Man Booker, which is awarded to the best novel of the year in the opinion of the judges, is worth £50,000 to the winner. Previous winners include Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring up the Bodies, and two novels where sales have topped two million copies each, Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
The judges will meet again to reduce their longlist to a shortlist of six titles which will be announced on Tuesday 9th September. The winning novel will be revealed on the BBC television’s Ten O’Clock News direct from a black-tie dinner in London’s Guildhall on October 14.
（ロングマン） short list also short‧list [countable] British English a list of the most suitable people for a job or a prize, chosen from all the people who were first considered on the short list (for something) Davies was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. draw up/compile a shortlist The panel will draw up a shortlist of candidates.
（AHD） longlist A list of items or candidates that have been selected for consideration, as for an award, before being reduced to a shortlist.
（オックスフォード） longlist NOUN A list of selected names or things from which a shortlist is to be compiled: Smith was on nobody’s longlist for chairman
VERB Place on a longlist: a science centre in Glasgow is one of the projects longlisted for Millennium Commission funds
あと一つ今回のlonglistで気になったのが、９月発売予定のDavid MitchellのThe Bone Clocksがすでにリストに入っていたことです。ドラフトを提出したのでしょうか。
来月David Mitchellが新刊発売に合わせてイベントをするようです。Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for the big screen in 2013.とあるだけで、新刊がlonglistに入った事は触れられていません。Longlistぐらいでは経歴のアピールにならないことでしょうか。
Join David Mitchell for the UK launch event for his much-anticipated new novel The Bone Clocks.
From the author of the genre-busting Cloud Atlas, this kaleidoscopic thriller looks ahead to life without oil. It tells the story of Holly Sykes in six segments, from her teenage years in 1980s Gravesend to her old age on the west coast of Ireland, raising her granddaughter while the world's climate collapses. A dazzling mix of realism and fantasy exploring the nature of mortality and survival.
Mitchell's novels include number9dream, Ghostwritten and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for the big screen in 2013. In 2003 he was selected as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
Chair: Claire Armitstead, books editor, Guardian News & Media and presenter, the Guardian books podcast
* Readers who select the ticket plus book option can collect their pre-ordered copy of the novel at the event.
THE GUARDIAN BOOK CLUB EVENT HARUKI MURAKAMI Sat 23 Aug 3:00pm - 4:00pm Baillie Gifford Main Theatre £10.00, £8.00 SOLD OUTHaruki Murakami SPONSORED BY The Guardian THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE When it first appeared in English in 1997, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle instantly established Haruki Murakami as a major figure in world literature. Involving a trademark mix of Tokyo urban landscapes and dream imagery, the novel remains one of the Japanese writer’s most brilliant literary achievements. Murakami discusses his characters, plot and a wig factory with the Guardian's John Mullan.
Please note: there will not be a book signing after this event.
これに合わせて、ガーディアンが読者から質問を募集していました。一応締め切りは昨日の金曜日ですが、(The questions will be chosen by Friday – but do feel free to keep posting your thoughts afterwards) とありますので、興味がある方は是非投稿してみてください。
The conversation with Mullan will centre, of course, on that book. But there will also be a chance for you to participate remotely. We will reserve the last few minutes of the event for a few selected questions from you – and will bring you the answers on the Guardian Books site on Sunday morning (UK time). What would you like to ask Murakami? Post your questions below the line and we will select a few to ask him at the event. (The questions will be chosen by Friday – but do feel free to keep posting your thoughts afterwards).
Ms. Amanda Alison was recognized for a most impressive. achievement of landing five contracts in one week. アマンダ・アリソンさんは、週に5件の契約をとるという. とても印象的な業績のために表彰された。
コラムではa mostについて説明していますが、プログレッシブでは以下のように説明しています。
（プログレッシブ） ((強意語))((正式))非常に, たいへん, はなはだ(very) a most moving story 実に感動的な話
（ロングマン） recognize to officially and publicly thank someone for something they have done, by giving them a special honour: He was recognized for having saved many lives.
to officially and publicly thank someoneという説明があるように表彰する場合には誰もが納得できる基準でなされるでしょうから、共通認識があるものに対して表彰すると考えるのが普通だと思います。
Can we feed the world without destroying the planet? An environment activist with a global following is leading a fight against genetically modified crops. But are they a corporate scourge or a solution to hunger?
The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. By the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate ten billion inhabitants—roughly the equivalent of adding two new Indias. Sustaining that many people will require farmers to grow more food in the next seventy-five years than has been produced in all of human history. For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater.
The nutritional demands of the developing world’s rapidly growing middle class—more protein from pork, beef, chicken, and eggs—will add to the pressure; so will the ecological impact of climate change, particularly in India and other countries where farmers depend on monsoons. Many scientists are convinced that we can hope to meet those demands only with help from the advanced tools of plant genetics. Shiva disagrees; she looks upon any seed bred in a laboratory as an abomination.
Shiva, along with a growing army of supporters, argues that the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth’s resources. She promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day. Shiva has particular contempt for farmers who plant monocultures—vast fields of a single crop. “They are ruining the planet,” she told me. “They are destroying this beautiful world.”
“It is absolutely remarkable to me how Vandana Shiva is able to get away with saying whatever people want to hear,” Gordon Conway told me recently. Conway is the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a professor at London’s Imperial College. His book “One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?” has become an essential text for those who study poverty, agriculture, and development.
“Shiva is lionized, particularly in the West, because she presents the romantic view of the farm,” Conway said. “Truth be damned. People in the rich world love to dabble in a past they were lucky enough to avoid—you know, a couple of chickens running around with the children in the back yard. But farming is bloody tough, as anyone who does it knows. It is like those people who romanticize villages in the developing world. Nobody who ever lived in one would do that.”
Responsible newspapers and reputable writers, often echoing Shiva’s rhetoric, have written about the “suicide-seed” connection as if it were an established fact. In 2011, an American filmmaker, Micha Peled, released “Bitter Seeds,” which argues that Monsanto and its seeds have been responsible for the suicides of thousands of farmers. The film received warm recommendations from food activists in the U.S. “Films like this can change the world,” the celebrity chef Alice Waters said when she saw it. As the journalist Keith Kloor pointed out earlier this year, in the journal Issues in Science and Technology, the farmer-suicide story even found its way into the scientific community. Last October, at a public discussion devoted to food security, the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich stated that Monsanto had “killed most of those farmers in India.” Ehrlich also famously predicted, in the nineteen-sixties, that famine would strike India and that, within a decade, “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Not only was he wrong but, between 1965 and 1972, India’s wheat production doubled.
The World Health Organization has estimated that a hundred and seventy thousand Indians commit suicide each year—nearly five hundred a day. Although many Indian farmers kill themselves, their suicide rate has not risen in a decade, according to a study by Ian Plewis, of the University of Manchester. In fact, the suicide rate among Indian farmers is lower than for other Indians and is comparable to that among French farmers. Plewis found that “the pattern of changes in suicide rates over the last fifteen years is consistent with a beneficial effect of Bt cotton for India as a whole, albeit perhaps not in every cotton-growing state.”
この作者は遺伝子組み替えに肯定的立場のようで、すでに医療の現場では遺伝子組み換えの治療は受入れられていると語っています。 The most persistent objection to agricultural biotechnology, and the most common, is that, by cutting DNA from one species and splicing it into another, we have crossed an invisible line and created forms of life unlike anything found in “nature.” That fear is unquestionably sincere. Yet, as a walk through any supermarket would demonstrate, nearly every food we eat has been modified, if not by genetic engineering then by more traditional cross-breeding, or by nature itself. Corn in its present form wouldn’t exist if humans hadn’t cultivated the crop. The plant doesn’t grow in the wild and would not survive if we suddenly stopped eating it.
When it comes to medicine, most Americans couldn’t care less about nature’s boundaries. Surgeons routinely suture pig valves into the hearts of humans; the operation has kept tens of thousands of people alive. Synthetic insulin, the first genetically modified product, is consumed each day by millions of diabetics. To make the drug, scientists insert human proteins into a common bacteria, which is then grown in giant industrial vats. Protesters don’t march to oppose those advances. In fact, consumers demand them, and it doesn’t seem to matter where the replacement parts come from.
Don’t be alarmed by that robot delivering a toothbrush to your hotel room By Matt McFarland August 13 For now, only one robot will shuttle around the hotel’s hallways in a pilot program, but Brian McGuinness, global brand leader at Starwood’s Speciality Select Brands, expects multiple robots in the halls of all of Aloft’s locations by early 2016.
The robot, which Aloft is calling the Botlr, is capable of safely riding elevators and navigating winding hallways. Botlr uses a camera and sonar to map out the hotel so it isn’t smashing into walls or falling down unanticipated steps. An elevator was retrofitted to communicate wirelessly with Botlr. The elevator car alerts Botlr that it’s in the lobby and safe to board. Botlr then boards, and passes on what floor it wants to travel to. McGuinness says Botlr can be trusted to share an elevator with guests, and generally lets them exit first.
Because Botlr — made by Savioke — can’t knock on doors, it is programmed to call the room in question and play a recording that alerts guests that it’s standing outside.
最初The robot, which Aloft is calling the Botlr, is capable of safely riding elevators and navigating winding hallways.のBotlrという名称がピンとこなかったのですが、robot butlerを指していたのですね。。。ホテルのプレスリリースに書いてありました。
#MeetBotlr: Aloft Hotels Recruits Robot to Join Team in Cupertino Published: Aug 12, 2014 12:37 p.m. ET STAMFORD, Conn., Aug 12, 2014 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Aloft Hotels, the tech-forward, innovation hub for millennial-minded travelers, is thrilled to announce the appointment of A.L.O. as the hotel brand’s first Botlr (robotic butler). This charismatic cyber associate makes his debut at Aloft Cupertino today, making Aloft the first major hotel brand to hire a robot for both front and back of house duties.
In this role, A.L.O. the Botlr will be on call as a robotic operative where it will be assisting the Aloft talent in delivering amenities to guest rooms. Professionally “dressed” in a custom shrink-wrapped, vinyl collared uniform and nametag, A.L.O. will modestly accept tweets as tips as its wheels whizz from task to task. This newest Aloft associate will not only free up existing talent’s time, allowing them to create a more personalized experience for guests, but will enhance the hotel’s current tech-forward offerings.
まあbutlerと言えばこの映画ですね。
（オックスフォード） butler the main male servant in a large house
All of us at Savioke are pleased to announce the unveiling of our new robot – SaviOne.
As of August 20, anyone who wants to see our robot in person can do so at the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California. The only catch is that you'll have to be a guest there and forget to pack your toothbrush or cell phone charger - because SaviOne is a service robot designed for the hospitality industry. Guests that request items from the front desk can have that item delivered by a robot.
Next week marks the beginning of Savioke's pilot program, and we are very excited to be partnering with Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the parent company of Aloft Hotels. You can read Starwood's own announcement here.
Savioke will expand its pilot program to include additional hotels early next year. Anyone wishing to sign up for our early adopter program can do so here: http://www.savioke.com/contact/.
WikipediaのYellow Perilをさらっと読んで、大真面目に考えるのが馬鹿らしい主張であることが分かりました。日露戦争の頃は「黄禍」を叫んでいたヴィルヘルム2世は、世界１次体制後はWe shall be the leaders of the Orient against the Occident!と真逆のことを語りだしたというのです。ベルサイユ条約で痛い目にあい英仏に恨みがあるとはいえHe declared Germany as "face of the East against the West" instead of being in the westとは何とも虫のいい話です。
（Wikipedia） Origins Many sources credit Kaiser Wilhelm II with coining the phrase "Yellow Peril" (German: gelbe Gefahr) in September 1895.[1] The Kaiser had an illustration of this title — depicting the Archangel Michael as an allegorical Germany leading the European powers against an Asiatic threat represented by a golden Buddha — hung in all ships of the Hamburg America Line. It was ostensibly designed by the Kaiser himself.[2] Wilhelm changed his mind after his abdication in World War I, saying that he should not have bothered to warn Europe of the Yellow Peril, writing that "We shall be the leaders of the Orient against the Occident! I shall now have to alter my picture 'Peoples of Europe'. We belong on the other side! Once we have proved to the Germans that the French and English are not Whites at all but Blacks".[3] He declared Germany as "face of the East against the West" instead of being in the west, and wished for the destruction of the western countries like England, France, and America, declaring the French to be "negroids", and stating his disgust at the racial equality Britain was allowing for blacks.[4]
Genius has no need of demographic tables. Shakespeare would not have seen that many examples of age-related dementia around him at a time when average life expectancy hardly reached 40. Fast-forward four centuries from 1606, and an incredibly rare condition in Jacobean London may afflict the parents of dozens of people in a large theatre audience today. Lear speaks out of an exotic past into a commonplace future. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, the one-in-100 incidence of dementia among 65- to 69-year-olds rises to one in six after the age of 80. (Lear himself is “four score and upward”.) By the mid-nineties, the ratio of sufferers climbs to one in three. More than 20 million people in Britain have a relative or close friend with dementia. At present, about 800,000 people in the UK have a dementia diagnosis. By 2021, that will rise to a million. The reported figures radically underestimate the scale of the challenge ahead as longevity extends. The society warns that the diagnosis rate still runs at about 45 per cent of the actual total. As for research funding, dementia receives less than one pound for every 10 that goes into the investigation of cancers. Compassion auctions among good causes always leave a nasty taste. No life-shortening condition is more “worthy” of support than any other. But Sally Magnusson has a point when she argues that dementia “does stand alone in disabling so many people for so long and at such inordinate public expense”. In the UK, that expense amounts to £23bn each year.
TOKYO — This newspaper’s recent obituary for Theodore Van Kirk, the last living crew member of the Enola Gay — the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — closed with a quote from a 1995 interview with Mr. Van Kirk. “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence,” he was cited as saying. “Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor?”
Mr. Van Kirk was right. Everyday morality falls mute before the horrors of war. And yet I can’t help feeling that, from the perspective of the victims, the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are different: Something distinguishes those attacks from the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Dresden or the Holocaust.
The difference lies not in the atrocities themselves, but in the attitude the world has taken toward them. The international community has reached a consensus regarding all those other horrors: They violated international law; they never should have occurred in the first place; they must never be permitted to happen again. The few individuals who defend the Holocaust, for instance, are not only condemned but reviled.
The situation is completely different with respect to the atomic bombings. Even if most people around the world privately believe the indiscriminate killing of civilians with nuclear weapons is wrong, there is no shared public consensus to this effect. The international community has not prohibited the use of nuclear weapons, as it has done with the use of poison gas and other chemical and biological weapons.
コラムは国際社会からも日本政府からも見放されている被爆者がまさにAtomic Bomb Victims Stand Aloneとなっている状況を描いていきます。なかなか難しい話題です。今、この時期に日本で核兵器という存在の有効性を訴えるのは非常識に思えますが、核の抑止力が第三次世界大戦を起こるのを防いでいるという見方もあるようです。Newshourで第一次世界大戦を回顧しているトピックでNuclear weapons are major league forces for peace.と主張している方がいました。
JEFFREY BROWN: John Mearsheimer, when you’re thinking about great power situations today or the kind of global struggles we see today, are there lessons that you most look at from 100 years ago? JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think there are two fundamental differences between Europe today and Europe in 1914. I think the first is that, in 1914, you had one country, Germany, that was especially powerful, yet fearful. And I think that that Germany, imperial Germany, was the principal cause of the war. Today, you have no power in Europe, whether it’s Russia or Germany, that has the power to dominate Europe. So there’s no one country that can cause a lot of trouble. The second big difference is the presence of nuclear weapons. I think it would be almost impossible today to have World War III that looked like either World War I or World War II in Europe or in Asia or any other place on the planet, simply because of the presence of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are major league forces for peace. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a limited war. But, anyway, all of this is to say that I think the situation in Europe is much more stable today than it was before World War I, before World War II, or even during the Cold War.
THE WHITE DISASTER TO MOST Eastern nations the advent of the West has been by no means an unmixed blessing. Thinking to welcome the benefits of increased commerce, they have become the victims of foreign imperialism; believing in the philanthropic aims of Christian missionaries, they have bowed before the messengers of military aggression. For them the earth is no longer filled with that peace which pillowed their contentment. If the guilty conscience of some European nations has conjured up the specter of a Yellow Peril, may not the suffering soul of Asia wail over the realities of the White Disaster.
JAPAN AND PEACEという最後の章でもYellow Perilと絡めて再度、西洋の帝国主義を非難しています。
Who speaks of the Yellow Peril? The idea that China might, with the aid of Japan, hurl her hosts against Europe would be too absurd even to notice were it not for those things from which attention is drawn by the utterance. It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the expression " Yellow Peril " was first coined in Germany when she was preparing to annex the coast of Shantung. Naturally, therefore, we become suspicious when Russia takes up the cry at the very moment when she is tightening the grasp of her mailed hand on Manchuria and Korea. （中略）This cry of a Yellow Peril must, indeed, sound ironical to the Chinese, who, through their traditional policy of non-resistance, are even now suffering in the throes of the White Disaster.
When will wars cease? In the West international morality remains far below the standard to which individual morality has attained. Aggressive nations have no conscience, and all chivalry is forgotten in the persecution of weaker races. He who has not the courage and the strength to defend himself is bound to be enslaved. It is sad for us to contemplate that our truest friend is still the sword. What mean these strange combinations which Europe displays, - the hospital and the torpedo, the Christian missionary and imperialism, the maintenance of vast armaments as a guarantee of peace? Such contradictions did not exist in the ancient civilization of the East. Such were not the ideals of the Japanese Restoration, such is not the goal of her reformation. The night of the Orient, which had hidden us in its folds, has been lifted, but we find the world still in the dusk of humanity. Europe has taught us war; when shall she learn the blessings of peace?
Our relations with China and Korea since the Restoration of 1868 are strikingly illustrative of our traditional policy of peace and non-aggression. When we emerged from our sleep of three centuries international conditions were changed indeed! Events were taking place in Asia which threatened our very existence. No Eastern nation could hope to maintain its independence unless it was able to defend itself from outside attack. （中略） Under these circumstances, we are compelled to regard our ancient domain of Korea as lying within our lines of legitimate national defense. It was when the independence of the peninsula was threatened by China in 1894 that we were compelled to go to war with the latter country. It was for this same independence that we fought Russia in 1904.
But Mr Studwell’s own manifesto for economic success does resemble the Washington consensus in one respect: it holds that poor economies can prosper by following a short recipe of tried and tested policies. This is now an unfashionable approach among economists, who have turned their attention from policies to “institutions”: the social and political constraints that weigh on ministers, whatever policies they avow. Most authors shy away from prescriptions for success, arguing that every development dish is different. Mr Studwell has no such inhibitions. Asia’s post-war miracle economies emerged, he argues, by following a recipe with just three ingredients: land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repression.
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Mr Studwell’s recipe is not original: the formula dates back at least 140 years, he shows, to Japan under the Meiji emperor. Only the first step, smallholder farming, would be backed by this newspaper. But “How Asia Works” is a striking and enlightening book, which reflects the author’s unusual career. Having worked as an analyst (for the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company) and a consultant, he wrote books on China’s seduction of foreign businessmen and Asia’s crony capitalists. Then he went back to school, embarking on a doctorate at Cambridge, home to a number of unorthodox economists. The result is a lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic. Its heart is a historical account of how smallholder farming, export-led manufacturing and financial repression took root in Asia’s miracle economies, such as Japan and Taiwan, but failed to bed down in the Philippines and Indonesia. This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis.
Entering the forest north-west of Tokyo, highway 299 winds up through the hills until it reaches Chichibu, a sleepy, nondescript town with no definable centre. Chichibu's name is synonymous in Japan with the largest farmer rebellion of the Meiji-era, put down by state police and troops in 1884.
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North of Chichibu and Minano,the KanEtsu expressway now tunnels its way under the peaks of central Honshu. Speeding along this highway, the pattern you will notice is that when ever a flattish area occurs among the hills and mountains and forest, it is filled to bursting with urban and industrial construction.
ここからは英語学習的な視点の話ですが、国道はhighway、高速道路はexpresswayを使っていますね。普通に使い分けているなと思ったら、すぐ後に、Speeding along this highwayと高速道路について語っているので、2つがオーバーラップしている部分もあるようですね（苦笑）
（Wikipedia） National Route 299 is a national highway of Japan connecting Chino, Nagano and Iruma, Saitama in Japan, with a total length of 189.3 km (117.63 mi).
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The Kan-Etsu Expressway (関越自動車道 Kan'etsu Jidōsha-dō?) is a national expressway in Japan. It is owned and managed by East Nippon Expressway Company.
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The Chichibu Incident (秩父事件 Chichibu jiken?) was a large scale peasant revolt that occurred in November 1884 in Chichibu, Saitama, a short distance from Japan's capital, and lasted approximately two weeks.
It was one of many similar uprisings in Japan around that time, occurring in reaction to the dramatic and drastic changes to society which came about in the wake of the 1868 Meiji Restoration.[1] What set Chichibu apart was the scope of the uprising, and the severity of the government’s response.
The point is: We dropped the bombs and saved a lot of lives. We… and the Japanese… would have had a bloodbath if we had invaded Japan. And they knew we were coming; they knew where we were gonna land; and they had their guns waiting for us.
He added: “The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt. I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.”
Mr. Van Kirk remembered “a sense of relief.”
“Even though you were still up there in the air and no one else in the world knew what had happened, you just sort of had a sense that the war was over, or would be soon,” he told Bob Greene in Mr. Greene’s 2000 book, “Duty.”
The crews that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seen by Americans as saviors for ending the war. But over the years, the morality of atomic warfare and the need for the bombings has been questioned.
Mr. Van Kirk joined his fellow crewmen in unwavering defense of the atomic raids.
“We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat,” he said. “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence.”
He continued: “Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you’re in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.”
From the beginning, however, there were critics. The first wave, motivated primarily by moral revulsion, is best represented by the popular writer John Hersey, whose "Hiroshima" (1946) put a human face on the bomb's victims and graphically depicted their suffering. Many of the early critics even declared that Japan was trying to surrender when blindsided by the nuclear weapon. A second wave, launched by the radical scholar Gar Alperovitz ("Atomic Diplomacy," 1965), asserted that the bomb was deployed against an already defeated Japan to deter Soviet expansionism.
Paul Ham, the Australian correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, at times seems close to endorsing the Alperovitz thesis, but in the end he finds it simplistic. It is one thing to say that American leaders did not welcome a planned Soviet grab of the northernmost Japanese home island of Hokkaido, another to declare that this threat was the primary reason for deploying atomic weapons. Moral anger drives Mr. Ham. It is directed in roughly equal parts at Japanese elites (dithering civilians, fanatical generals), American developers of the weapon (especially Gen. Leslie Groves, whom he regards as an especially callous militarist), and the architect of the incendiary-bombing campaign that razed many Japanese cities before Hiroshima (Gen. Curtis LeMay).
この記事でもバンカークさんの“It's really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence.”という言葉が取り上げられています。
The author's liberally distributed indignation is understandable. The Pacific war was vicious and homicidal. From the 1937 rape of Nanking on, Japan engaged in the indiscriminate killing of millions of Chinese. The U.S. incendiary bombing offensive against Japan was indiscriminate and consumed the lives of many innocents. Mr. Ham condemns Henry Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, for first objecting to the targeting of civilians and then "accepting the grotesque casuistry that 'workers' homes' represented a military target."
Yet in an age of industrialized total war, the assumption was not illogical. It was invoked by Nazis who bombed the East End of London, then by British and Americans who destroyed one German industrial center after another about as effectively as LeMay went at Japan. Dresden and many other German cities gave up their own quotas of maimed and burned children. The atomic bombs added only the special horror of radiation sickness. Timothy Snyder's important book "Bloodlands" (2010) aptly underscores the awful non-nuclear carnage in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Dutch Van Kirk, looking back on Hiroshima with few regrets, expressed the logic of 20th-century total war with terse eloquence: "It's really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence."
My Father Survived Hiroshima Duration: 55 minutes First broadcast: Monday 24 February 2014 Dr Akiko Mikamo's father Shinji survived the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Dr Mikamo says that despite suffering severe burns which have led to health problems throughout his life, her father has never held a grudge against the Americans and always taught his daughter about the importance of forgiveness.
The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011 caused catastrophic destruction throughout the country. People were hit especially hard in Otsuchi, a fishing town on the Sanriku Coast where a series of waves as high as 60 feet tall destroyed about 60 percent of the city. Alejandro Chaskielberg was in Tokyo for an exhibition of his work in 2012 when his curator, who had family in Otsuchi, told him about the devastation.
Chaskielberg made his first visit to Otsuchi 1½ years after the tsunami. When he arrived, he found a great plain of land where the city had been before. Red flags dotted the grasslands, marking where victims had been discovered. Large mountains of debris were scattered throughout the area.
“Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached forty meters above sea level, traveling up to ten km inland.
The fishing town of Otsuchi in the Iwate prefecture is probably the worst affected. Roughly ten percent of the population was killed or went missing and sixty percent of residential buildings sustained damaged. The mayor at the time and many municipal officials were killed in the ensuing tsunami, leaving Otsuchi’s administrative functions paralyzed.
I portrayed the Otsuchi inhabitants in the exact spot where their houses used to be, using long-exposure night shots for which they had to stay still for several minutes. These are b&w images tinted with colors retrieved from Otsuchi´s old family photographs that were swept away by the tsunami.
When I arrived to Otsuchi I was faced with the view of a great plain full of pasture lands covering where the city had been before. Here is where I found a family photo album with all its images completely blurred; however, the colors had survived the water corrosion and were not lost. I realized that the people of Otsuchi, besides having lost their loved ones, relatives, homes and old way of life, had also lost their family photographs, that in some way forms part of their memories from the past. I started thinking about this idea and wondered how our memories interacts with our family photographs, how we could retrieve a lost memory from a destroyed photograph.”
アレハンドロ・チャスキエルベルグ Alejandro Chaskielberg アルゼンチンのNational Film and Audiovisual Art Instituteでディレクターオブフォトグラフィーを務める。2011年にソニーワールドフォトグラファーオブザイヤーにおいてベストフォトグラファーオブザイヤーを受賞。また同年、POYIのポートレイト部門においてラテンアメリカピクチャーオブザイヤーを受賞。2009年のBurn Emerging Photographer Grantの受賞者であり、スペインのSCAN’09でTalent Latent Award、ボストン大学のLeopold Godowsky Jr. Award、アメリカの写真雑誌pdnが選ぶ最も注目すべき世界の新進作家30名の1人にも選ばれている。
Don’t you have an appointment?のようなものなら問題ないでしょうが、Hasn’t Wen ordered the office supplies yet?のようなものがくると主語が固有名詞であることも加わり前半部分でぐにゃぐにゃとなり意味がとれない受験者が出てくるように思えるのです。
一番登場する形はDon’t you have an appointment?のようなDon’t you…?でしたが、この当たりの聞き取りは問題ないのではないでしょうか。やはり気をつけたいのは、Wasn’tやWeren’tのようなbe動詞過去形やHaven’tやHasn’tのような現在完了形の否定疑問文ではないかと思います。
Hasn’t Wen ordered the office supplies yet? - I believe he has.
Weren't we supposed to receive the design plan by now? - Yes, I will check with Susan.
第一次世界大戦から100周年を迎えています。先ほどの辞書の話からつなげれば、当時の考え、価値観を無視して安易に現在との類似性を結びつけようとする乱暴なことは避けたいと思います。当時の考えを学ぶのに最適なのはその当時に書かれたものを読むことではないでしょうか。雑誌Atlanticがそのような雑誌を発売しています。日本のKindleでも買う事ができますし、新宿の紀伊国屋ではこの雑誌がMagazine of the Monthに選ばれ20％オフで売られていました。
この雑誌の前書きをAtlanticのサイトでも読むことができますが、ドイツ皇帝の1908年のインタビューでThe future belongs to the White Race, never fear … It does not belong, the future, to the Yellow, nor to the Black, nor to the Olive-colored.とあったのは驚きました。当時の感覚ではそういうものだったのですね。
The American Idea at War One can draw a line from September 11, 2001, straight back to the decisions made by colonial mapmakers as the fighting raged in Europe 100 years ago. JAMES BENNET JUL 29 2014, 10:03 AM ET
It’s not easy—in fact, it turned out not to be possible—to square Sedgwick’s very American optimism with other ideas put forward in this issue, like those of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the man who took Germany to war. (An American journalist interviewed the kaiser in 1908, but the German government suppressed his remarks, and The Atlantic published them for the first time in 1934.) He held to less encompassing truths: “The future belongs to the White Race, never fear … It does not belong, the future, to the Yellow, nor to the Black, nor to the Olive-colored. It belongs to the Fair-skinned Man, and it belongs to Christianity and to Protestantism.”
このヴィルヘルム2世ドイツ皇帝の1908年のインタビューは1934年まで日の目をみることはなかったようです。いろいろ過激なことを言っていますが、日本人として驚くのはThe Japanese are devilsのくだりでしょうか。日露戦争直後で日本を脅威と感じていたようで、これがyellow peril＝黄禍論なんですね。
Called Japanese Devils The conversation then turned to war. “In a world of practical facts,” the Kaiser said, "we have to fight, even for righteousness' sake. The Bible is full of fights — jolly good fights some of them were. It is 'a mistaken Idea that Christianity has no countenance for war."
He contended that the sword should clear the way for the missionary.
With the assertion that the world’s greatest warriors had been Christians, the Kaiser turned to the Japanese.
“The trouble with them," he said "is that they don't want any religion. They constitutionally are incapable of religion. They are utterly without sentiment-practical, cold unsympathetic."
Tne Asiatic situation was the emperor's chief theme.
"Everybody knows what must come to pass between Asia and the West, the yellow race and the white,” he said. "We are unworthy of our fathers if we are negligent of the sacred duty of preserving the civilization which they have achieved for us and the religion which God has given us."
He thought the Japanese had been over-estimated as fighters; they were too small in stature.
“We know tins much about him (the Japanese)", the Kaiser declared. "He hates the white man worse than the white man hates the devil; The Japanese are devils, that's a simple fact. They are devils!"
It was fifteen, years earlier that the Kaiser had painted his picture "the yellow peril.”
