loving and hating new york 课文和翻译之欧阳化创编.docx

1、loving and hating new york 课文和翻译之欧阳化创编Loving and Hating New York时间：2021.02.12创作人：欧阳化Thomas Griffith1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming “I love New York,” are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York City u

2、sed to leave the bragging to others, for bragging was “bush” Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didnt have to assert how special it was.2 It isnt the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the styles and sets the trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with Americ

3、an taste as often as it is out of step with American politics. Once it was the nations undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides itself on being a holdout from prevailing American

4、trends, a place to escape Common Denominator Land.3 Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other cities have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscaninis NBC Symp

5、hony once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, preempt the airways from California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood. Vegas casinos routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspo

6、t in Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.4 New York was never a good convention city being regarded as unfriendly, unsafe, overcrowded, and expensive but it is making something of a comeback as

7、 a tourist attraction. Even so, most Americans would probably rate New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington, or Disneyland higher. A dozen other cities, including my hometown of Seattle, are widely considered better cities to live in.5 Why, then, do many Europeans call New York their favorite city? Th

8、ey take more readily than do most Americans to its cosmopolitan complexities, its surviving, aloof, European standards, its alien mixtures. Perhaps some of these Europeans are reassured by the sight, on the twin fashion avenues of Madison and Fifth, of all those familiar international names the jewe

9、lers, shoe stores, and designer shops that exist to flatter and bilk the frivolous rich. But no; what most excites Europeans is the citys charged , nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism .6 New York is about energy, contention, and striving. And since it contains its share of articulate losers, it

10、is also about mockery, the put-down , the losers shrug (“whaddya gonna do?”). It is about constant battles for subway seats, for a cabdrivers or a clerks or a waiters attention, for a foothold , a chance, a better address, a larger billing. To win in New York is to be uneasy; to lose is to live in j

11、ostling proximity to the frustrated majority.7 New York was never Mecca to me. And though I have lived there more than half my life, you wont find me wearing an “I Love New York” T-shirt. But all in all, I can, t think of many places in the world Id rather li, ve. It, s not easy to define why.8 Natu

12、res pleasures are much qualified in N, ew York, . You never see a star-filled sky; the citys bright glow arrogantly obscures the heavens. Sunsets can be spectacular: oranges and reds tinting the sky over the Jersey meadows and gaudily reflected in a thousand windows on Manhattans jagged skyline. Nat

13、ure constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes. Central Park, which Frederick Law Olmsted designed as lungs for the citys poor, is in places grassless and filled with trash, no longer pristine yet lively wi

14、th the noise and vivacity of people, largely youths, blacks, and Puerto Ricans, enjoying themselves. On park benches sit older people, mostly white, looking displaced. It has become less a tranquil park than an untidy carnival.9 Not the glamour of the city, which never beckoned to me from a distance

15、, but its opportunity to practice the kind of journalism I wanted drew me to New York. I wasnt even sure how Id measure up against others who had been more soundly educated at Ivy League schools, or whether I could compete against that tough local breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so hig

16、hly motivated and single-minded, such as Alfred Kazin, who for diversion (for heavent sake!) played Bachs Unaccompanied Partitas on the violin.10 A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal and marketable of ones talents, still draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always

17、, the company of others fleeing something constricting where they came from. Together these young share a freedom, a community of inexpensive amusements, a casual living, and some rough times. It cant be the living conditions that appeal, for only fond memory will forgive the inconvenience, risk, an

18、d squalor. Commercial Broadway may be inaccessible to them, but there is off- Broadway, and then off-off-Broadway. If painters disdain Madison Avenues plush art galleries, Madison Avenue dealers set up shop in the grubby precincts of Soho. But the purity of a bohemian dedication can be exaggerated.

19、The artistic young inhabit the same Greenwich Village and its fringes in which the experimentalists in the arts lived during the Depression, united by a world against them. But the present generation is enough of a subculture to be a source of profitable boutiques and coffeehouses. And it is not all

20、 that estranged.11 Manhattan is an island cut off in most respects from mainland America, but in two areas it remains dominant. It is the banking and the communications headquarters for America. In both these roles it ratifies more than it creates. Wall Street will advance the millions to make a Hol

21、lywood movie only if convinced that a bestselling title or a star name will ensure its success. The networks news centers are here, and the largest book publishers, and the biggest magazines and therefore the largest body of critics to appraise the films, the plays, the music, the books that others

22、have created. New York is a judging town, and often invokes standards that the rest of the country deplores or ignores. A market for knowingness exists in New York that doesnt exist for knowledge.12 The ad agencies are all here too, testing the markets and devising the catchy jingles that will move

23、millions from McDonalds to Burger king, so that the ad agencys “creative director” can lunch instead in Manhattans expense-account French restaurants. The bankers and the admen. The marketing specialists and a thousand well-paid ancillary service people, really set the citys brittle tone catering to

24、 a wide American public whose numbers must be respected but whose tastes do not have to shared. The condescending view from the fiftieth floor of the citys crowds below cuts these people off from humanity. So does an attitude which sees the public only in terms of large, malleable numbers as imperso

25、nally as does the clattering subway turnstile beneath the office towers.13 I am surprised by the lack of cynicism, particularly among the younger ones, of those who work in such fields. The television generation grew up in the insistent presence of hype, delights in much of it, and has no scruples a

26、bout practicing it. Men and woman do their jobs professionally, and, like the pilots who from great heights bombed Hanoi, seem unmarked by it. They lead their real lives elsewhere, in the Village bars they are indistinguishable in dress or behavior from would-be artists, actors, and writers. The bou

27、ndaries of “art for arts sake” arent so rigid anymore; art itself is less sharply defined, and those whose paintings dont sell do illustrations; those who can get acting jobs do commercials; those who are writing ambitious novels sustain themselves on the magazines. Besides, serious art often feeds

28、in the popular these days, changing it with fond irony.14 In time the newcomers find or from their won worlds; Manhatten is many such words, huddled together but rarely interaction. I think this is what gives the city its sense of freedom. There are enough like you, whatever you are. And it isnt as

29、necessary to know anything about an apartment neighbor- or to worry about his judgment of you- as it is about someone with an adjoining yard. In New York, like seeks like, and by economy of effort excludes the rest as stranger. This distancing, this uncaring in ordinary encounters, has another side:

30、 in no other American city can the lonely be as lonely.15 So much more needs to be said. New Your is a wounded city, declining in its amenities . Overloaded by its tax burdens. But it is not dying city; the streets are safer than they were five years age; Broadway, which seemed to be succumbing to t

31、he tawdriness of its environment, is astir again.16 The trash-strewn streets, the unruly schools, the uneasy feeling or menace, the noise, the brusqueness- all confirm outsiders in their conviction that they wouldnt live here if you gave them the place. Yet show a New Yorker a splendid home in Dalla

32、s, or a swimming pool and cabana in Beverly Hills, and he will be admiring but not envious. So much of well-to-do America now lives antiseptically in enclaves, tranquil and luxurious, that shut out the world. Too static, the New Yorker would say. Tell him about the vigor of your outdoor pleasures; h

33、e prefers the unhealthy hassle and the vitality of urban life. He is hopelessly provincial. To him New York- despite its faults, which her will impatiently concede (“so what else is new?”) is the spoiler of all other American cities.17 It is possible in twenty other American cities to visit first-rat