詹姆斯·艾吉 — 作者 (7)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [图书] 豆瓣
Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.
Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.
Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery.
Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.
Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery.
失親記 [图书] 豆瓣
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
by James Agee
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《垮掉的一代》
序
要讨论这个剧本你须将它放在某一个文化背景之中——那是1957年，艾森豪威尔当时任总统，尼克松任副总统。戏剧的普利策奖颁给了奥尼尔的《进入夜晚的漫长一天》，小说则没有奖。《西区故事》在百老汇开演，《留给比弗》在荧屏亮相。假如你进电影院，看的影片很可能就是《桂河大桥》，《十二怒汉》，或者《佩顿小城》。国内方面，为取消学校里的种族隔离而作的斗争仍在继续，而国际方面，俄国人发射了人造卫星一号，太空时代已经开始。那是1957年，杰克·凯鲁亚克的《在路上》已经出版——那一年出版的别的书还包括伯纳德·马拉默德的《店员》，詹姆斯·艾吉的《亲人之死》，以及诺姆·乔姆斯基的《句法结构》。
……
by James Agee
------------------------
《垮掉的一代》
序
要讨论这个剧本你须将它放在某一个文化背景之中——那是1957年，艾森豪威尔当时任总统，尼克松任副总统。戏剧的普利策奖颁给了奥尼尔的《进入夜晚的漫长一天》，小说则没有奖。《西区故事》在百老汇开演，《留给比弗》在荧屏亮相。假如你进电影院，看的影片很可能就是《桂河大桥》，《十二怒汉》，或者《佩顿小城》。国内方面，为取消学校里的种族隔离而作的斗争仍在继续，而国际方面，俄国人发射了人造卫星一号，太空时代已经开始。那是1957年，杰克·凯鲁亚克的《在路上》已经出版——那一年出版的别的书还包括伯纳德·马拉默德的《店员》，詹姆斯·艾吉的《亲人之死》，以及诺姆·乔姆斯基的《句法结构》。
……
A Death in the Family [图书] 豆瓣
Agee on Film [图书] 豆瓣
James Agee [图书] 豆瓣
Better known for writing in a variety of other genres, James Agee always thought of himself as essentially a poet. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1934 for Permit Me Voyage , Agee was, in the words of editor Andrew Hudgins, “as restless in his poetry as he was later in his prose, exhibiting a variety . . . that we expect from the protean mind that excelled in so many different kinds of writing.” Ranging from intense religious sonnets to lyrics for musical comedy, Agee’s verse takes us into the heart of his unique genius, what Robert Fitzgerald called his “sense of being . . . a raging awareness of the sensory field in depth and in detail.”
