w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 1 收了欢欢喜喜的双黄包，寝食难安，只好赶紧写出来还债。
《小学常识》是民国年间一套国学常识书中的第一本，全套共十本，有小学、音韵、经
学、理学、史学、子学、文学、诗学、词学和说部（小说传奇等）十种。这套丛书的作
者徐敬修，生平难考。给这套书题词写序的人却史上有名：民盟黄炎培，和太祖有过著
名的“周期率”对话；政要张一麐，同盟会早期会员，当过云南讲武堂总办，任过教育
总长；文人金天翮，和曾朴一起写作《孽海花》，还写过《女界钟》。金天翮是徐敬修
的授业师，从他的序来看，徐敬修很年轻，说他“学成而志益高，学益专，慨然叹国学
之将沦替，暇辄从事于四部之搜讨，寒暑昕夕不倦，今年(1924)乃成国学常识十种”。
此时金天翮五十一岁，由此推测书成时徐敬修最多不到三十岁。
以上满足一下我的八卦心，下面说书。《小学常识》主要介绍文字常识，讲文字的源流
，介绍六书，最后还有一点字形正伪，并且讲了训诂学的发展。其中最有趣味的是文字
源流，讲了很多那时或是常识而今日很少学到的东西。比如说文字的写法起源于结绳记
事，所以上古文字很多结构都是单线条或者双线条，而组合字就是线条的组合。古文的
上字为“二”，即“一”在“一”上；古文的曲字为“』”，即“」”加“」”；古文
的之字为“|”，表示前后语相联。这些例子都很直观，特别是很好地解释了之、及、
乃、也、夫这些古文虚词的字形来历。
而文字的读音稍微有点复杂。书里说文字的读音来自于人的自然发音，如我字，出自于
喉咙，所以为自称。此说似乎勉强。或者说来自于形状，月字发音近缺，因为月形缺多
圆少；这也有点问题：难道月字不该早于缺字吗？书里还说字音也可以来自模拟自然，
“水音澌澌，其音近水（南人读水如矢），故水字之音，即像水流之声。（河字之音，
亦犹河流之音活活，转而为河）。”“羊字之音，近于羊鸣；牛字之音，近于牛鸣；雀
字之音，近于雀鸣。”这倒很说得通。
书里讲到六书，比较了一下班固和许慎的说法，沿用许慎的说法，但按照班固的版本调
整了次序，分别是字形——象形；字义——指事、会意；字声——形声、转注、假借。
其中象形、指事、会意是本书最好玩的部分，二十三页到四十七页，如果纯娱乐的话只
看这部分也够了。举几个象形的例子：雨水的雨字，一横像天，一竖表示地气上腾，罩
子是天气下降，阴阳合而后雨，点是象征雨形。这个解释比我小时候看的详细得多。再
比如说目字的古字为囧（里面有一口，口中一点），说它的外面是眼眶，儿像睫毛，O
像眼睛，点像眸子。兒字的上半部分囟门未合，用来表示小孩子。这些形象都很好辨认。
按照书上的说法，象形这个说法来自于大象：“象为南方之兽，为中土所罕见，而仅出
于拟象者，故凡无实可指而以虚形拟之者，皆曰象。”这倒是指事的手法。比如行，左
右对称，三个笔画分别代表大腿、小腿和脚，而指事为行走。再比如出字就像草木茂盛
生长的情形，指事为出外。刀字已经很完整了，为了特指刀刃的部分，就在刃上用一个
点来表示。
会意的会是会合的意思，会意就是把两三个意思合在一起表达更复杂的意思，比如王字
，一竖参通天地人；分字写为“八”，中间加一竖，分而再分，就是小字。会意字例子
很多，再举一个特别好玩的：今昔的昔字，是古文中的腊字， “从残肉，日以晞之”
，也就是剩下的肉越来越干，这不就是腊肉么？此说来自于许慎。
六书的另外三种，形声、转注和假借，如果没看过《说文解字》之类的书，看了这本书
也可以长些知识，趣味性就差多了。字形正伪的部分，因为都是繁体，对今日的借鉴有
限；训诂学博大浩繁，本书提供了一个简单启蒙，对现代人可能也没什么意义。
欢喜说对《小学常识》有兴趣，我揣度她是不是为了教书，想了解些文字演变的常识；
如果是这样，我觉得还有两本古文字专家写的通俗读物也许更合适。一本是《古文字演
变趣谈》，作者夏渌是武大中文系的教授，给《书法报》撰稿十三年，每一篇都很短小
精炼，配图把同一个字的甲、金、篆放在一起讲解，练习书法的朋友可能会喜欢。他也
有很多新见解，颇有见地，比如前面说到的昔字，金文中不是水在日上就是水在日下，
夏渌认为这反映了先民对昔日的记忆是洪水滔天。他还嘲笑许慎解昔为腊肉是牛头不对
马嘴，许慎是老知青门下的高材生，焚书坑儒造成了知识断层；这笑话也很耐寻味。
另外一本书是我搜索《古文字演变趣谈》时在豆瓣看到的，中山大学中文系陈炜湛教授
的《古文字趣谈》。我稍微翻了几页，觉得这本书文字的故事性更强，所以同样四百多
页的书，讲解的字就少一些，但读起来相对轻松。豆瓣上有他学生写他的故事，很有意
思，不妨一看：http://book.douban.com/review/1898911/。 | w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 2 这里提到的三本书，除了夏渌的《古文字演变趣谈》外，另外两本在新浪爱问都可以搜
索到，这儿就不提供链接了。 | m**e
发帖数: 27062 | 3 有趣得很
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 收了欢欢喜喜的双黄包，寝食难安，只好赶紧写出来还债。
: 《小学常识》是民国年间一套国学常识书中的第一本，全套共十本，有小学、音韵、经
: 学、理学、史学、子学、文学、诗学、词学和说部（小说传奇等）十种。这套丛书的作
: 者徐敬修，生平难考。给这套书题词写序的人却史上有名：民盟黄炎培，和太祖有过著
: 名的“周期率”对话；政要张一麐，同盟会早期会员，当过云南讲武堂总办，任过教育
: 总长；文人金天翮，和曾朴一起写作《孽海花》，还写过《女界钟》。金天翮是徐敬修
: 的授业师，从他的序来看，徐敬修很年轻，说他“学成而志益高，学益专，慨然叹国学
: 之将沦替，暇辄从事于四部之搜讨，寒暑昕夕不倦，今年(1924)乃成国学常识十种”。
: 此时金天翮五十一岁，由此推测书成时徐敬修最多不到三十岁。
: 以上满足一下我的八卦心，下面说书。《小学常识》主要介绍文字常识，讲文字的源流
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 4 偶最爱看你的八卦咯～～
看第一段，觉得古人读书真是真心诚意，能三十岁有所成，又能三十岁起步未晚，两样
都是现代人难以做到的～～
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 收了欢欢喜喜的双黄包，寝食难安，只好赶紧写出来还债。
: 《小学常识》是民国年间一套国学常识书中的第一本，全套共十本，有小学、音韵、经
: 学、理学、史学、子学、文学、诗学、词学和说部（小说传奇等）十种。这套丛书的作
: 者徐敬修，生平难考。给这套书题词写序的人却史上有名：民盟黄炎培，和太祖有过著
: 名的“周期率”对话；政要张一麐，同盟会早期会员，当过云南讲武堂总办，任过教育
: 总长；文人金天翮，和曾朴一起写作《孽海花》，还写过《女界钟》。金天翮是徐敬修
: 的授业师，从他的序来看，徐敬修很年轻，说他“学成而志益高，学益专，慨然叹国学
: 之将沦替，暇辄从事于四部之搜讨，寒暑昕夕不倦，今年(1924)乃成国学常识十种”。
: 此时金天翮五十一岁，由此推测书成时徐敬修最多不到三十岁。
: 以上满足一下我的八卦心，下面说书。《小学常识》主要介绍文字常识，讲文字的源流
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 5 Check Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Examples of both situations are plenty.
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 偶最爱看你的八卦咯～～
: 看第一段，觉得古人读书真是真心诚意，能三十岁有所成，又能三十岁起步未晚，两样
: 都是现代人难以做到的～～
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 6 我俩显然对有所成这个概念的理解相差甚远～～我看了一下wiki和其他地方的采访书评，貌似他写的是the brightest, the
most famous. 而且很明显倾向于天份和时代性，你看他举例犹太律师和球类运动员。 不过用词好像很英式外交化，地动
山摇，却落不到实处。
而且，不好意思地说，偶觉得就是因为人太倚重天分，所以才无成。
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: Check Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Examples of both situations are plenty.
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 7 刚才在路上，说不明白。除了那本书以外，原来在纽约客上Galdwell的文章可以给出详
细一些的例子吧：
http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html
Articles from the New Yorker
Late Bloomers
October 20, 2008Annals of Culture
Why do we equate genius with precocity?
1.
Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas
offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law
school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain
had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted
of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write
when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do
much. He decided to quit his job.
"I was tremendously apprehensive," Fountain recalls. "I felt like I'd
stepped off a cliff and I didn't know if the parachute was going to open.
Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of
law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—
my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy."
He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his
kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until
lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest
his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer
. He had discipline. "I figured out very early on that if I didn't get my
writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it
like a job. I did not procrastinate." His first story was about a
stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was
sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that
story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.
In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote
a novel. He decided it wasn't very good, and he ended up putting it in a
drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his
expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper's.
A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a
collection of short stories titled "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara," and
Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational.
The Times Book Review called it "heartbreaking." It won the Hemingway
Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major
regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by
the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and
drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le
Carré.
Ben Fountain's rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the
provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain's
success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For
every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty
rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The
dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His
breakthrough with "Brief " came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat
down to write at his kitchen table. The "young" writer from the provinces
took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
2.
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—
doing something truly creative, we're inclined to think, requires the
freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his
masterpiece, "Citizen Kane," at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a
year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with "Moby-
Dick." Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at
the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the
importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S.
Eliot when he wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ("I grow old . . .
I grow old")? Twenty-three. "Poets peak young," the creativity researcher
James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of "Flow,"
agrees: "The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the
young." According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading
authority on creativity, "Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is
discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age."
A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David
Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was
true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since
1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of
course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified.
But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary
scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American
canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock," Robert
Lowell's "Skunk Hour," Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,
" William Carlos Williams's "Red Wheelbarrow," Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish,
" Ezra Pound's "The River Merchant's Wife," Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Pound's
"In a Station of the Metro," Frost's "Mending Wall," Wallace Stevens's "The
Snow Man," and Williams's "The Dance." Those eleven were composed at the
ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty,
thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively.
There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry
is a young person's game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of
their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent
of Frost's anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For
Williams, it's forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it's forty-nine per cent.
The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study "Old Masters and
Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity." Yes, there was
Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was
Alfred Hitchcock, who made "Dial M for Murder," "Rear Window," "To Catch a
Thief," "The Trouble with Harry," "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," and "
Psycho"—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his
fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published "Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn" at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote "Robinson Crusoe" at
fifty-eight.
The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were
Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well.
Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began
with a masterpiece, "Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas," produced at age
twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career
—including "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," at the age of twenty-six. Picasso
fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.
Cézanne didn't. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d'Orsay, in
Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of
masterpieces you'll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of
his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices
paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which
they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties
was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in
his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created
in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he
created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did
little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our
accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the C
ézannes of the world.
3.
The first day that Ben Fountain sat down to write at his kitchen table went
well. He knew how the story about the stockbroker was supposed to start. But
the second day, he says, he "completely freaked out." He didn't know how to
describe things. He felt as if he were back in first grade. He didn't have
a fully formed vision, waiting to be emptied onto the page. "I had to create
a mental image of a building, a room, a faade, haircut, clothes—just
really basic things," he says. "I realized I didn't have the facility to put
those into words. I started going out and buying visual dictionaries,
architectural dictionaries, and going to school on those."
He began to collect articles about things he was interested in, and before
long he realized that he had developed a fascination with Haiti. "The Haiti
file just kept getting bigger and bigger," Fountain says. "And I thought, O.
K., here's my novel. For a month or two I said I really don't need to go
there, I can imagine everything. But after a couple of months I thought,
Yeah, you've got to go there, and so I went, in April or May of '91."
He spoke little French, let alone Haitian Creole. He had never been abroad.
Nor did he know anyone in Haiti. "I got to the hotel, walked up the stairs,
and there was this guy standing at the top of the stairs," Fountain recalls.
"He said, 'My name is Pierre. You need a guide.' I said, 'You're sure as
hell right, I do.' He was a very genuine person, and he realized pretty
quickly I didn't want to go see the girls, I didn't want drugs, I didn't
want any of that other stuff," Fountain went on. "And then it was, boom, 'I
can take you there. I can take you to this person.' "
Fountain was riveted by Haiti. "It's like a laboratory, almost," he says. "
Everything that's gone on in the last five hundred years—colonialism, race,
power, politics, ecological disasters—it's all there in very concentrated
form. And also I just felt, viscerally, pretty comfortable there." He made
more trips to Haiti, sometimes for a week, sometimes for two weeks. He made
friends. He invited them to visit him in Dallas. ("You haven't lived until
you've had Haitians stay in your house," Fountain says.) "I mean, I was
involved. I couldn't just walk away. There's this very nonrational,
nonlinear part of the whole process. I had a pretty specific time era that I
was writing about, and certain things that I needed to know. But there were
other things I didn't really need to know. I met a fellow who was with Save
the Children, and he was on the Central Plateau, which takes about twelve
hours to get to on a bus, and I had no reason to go there. But I went up
there. Suffered on that bus, and ate dust. It was a hard trip, but it was a
glorious trip. It had nothing to do with the book, but it wasn't wasted
knowledge."
In "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara," four of the stories are about Haiti,
and they are the strongest in the collection. They feel like Haiti; they
feel as if they've been written from the inside looking out, not the outside
looking in. "After the novel was done, I don't know, I just felt like there
was more for me, and I could keep going, keep going deeper there," Fountain
recalls. "Always there's something—always something—here for me. How many
times have I been? At least thirty times."
Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-
ended exploration. They tend to be "conceptual," Galenson says, in the sense
that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they
execute it. "I can hardly understand the importance given to the word '
research,' " Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de
Zayas. "In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the
thing." He continued, "The several manners I have used in my art must not be
considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting.
. . . I have never made trials or experiments."
But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their
approach is experimental. "Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is
tentative and incremental," Galenson writes in "Old Masters and Young
Geniuses," and he goes on:
The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they
have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the
pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the
same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an
experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and
none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely
make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider
the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to
discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that
learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings.
Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their
careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are
perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability
to achieve their goal.
Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: "I
seek in painting."
An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That's how
that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was
painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty
sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The
result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée ''Orsay.) When C
ézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight
in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a
break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He
would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious
for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin
Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method: "His routine procedure seems to
have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon
proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would
overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push
on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again." Twain
fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on "Huckleberry Finn" so many
times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of
the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or
distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that
proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to
fruition.
One of the best stories in "Brief Encounters" is called "Near-Extinct Birds
of the Central Cordillera." It's about an ornithologist taken hostage by the
FARC guerrillas of Colombia. Like so much of Fountain's work, it reads with
an easy grace. But there was nothing easy or graceful about its creation. "
I struggled with that story," Fountain says. "I always try to do too much. I
mean, I probably wrote five hundred pages of it in various incarnations."
Fountain is at work right now on a novel. It was supposed to come out this
year. It's late.
4.
Galenson's idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual
and experimental—has a number of important implications. For example, we
sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don't realize they'
re good at something until they're fifty, so of course they achieve late in
life. But that's not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as
Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered
late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the
assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the
same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market
failure. What Galenson's argument suggests is something else—that late
bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their
careers.
"All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and
obstructed by Cézanne's incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the
personae of his drama," the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the
early Cézanne. "With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the
comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for
the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to
realize such visions as Cézanne's required this gift in high degree." In
other words, the young Cézanne couldn't draw. Of "The Banquet," which Cé
zanne painted at thirty-one, Fry writes, "It is no use to deny that Cézanne
has made a very poor job of it." Fry goes on, "More happily endowed and
more integral personalities have been able to express themselves
harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting
natures as Cézanne's require a long period of fermentation." Cézanne was
trying something so elusive that he couldn't master it until he'd spent
decades practicing.
This is the vexing lesson of Fountain's long attempt to get noticed by the
literary world. On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will
resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and
changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what
he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist
who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius
from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind
faith. (Let's just be thankful that Cézanne didn't have a guidance
counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him
to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can't but wonder how
many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged
their talents. But we also have to acccept that there's nothing we can do
about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?
Not long after meeting Ben Fountain, I went to see the novelist Jonathan
Safran Foer, the author of the 2002 best-seller "Everything Is Illuminated."
Fountain is a graying man, slight and modest, who looks, in the words of a
friend of his, like a "golf pro from Augusta, Georgia." Foer is in his early
thirties and looks barely old enough to drink. Fountain has a softness to
him, as if years of struggle have worn away whatever sharp edges he once had
. Foer gives the impression that if you touched him while he was in full
conversational flight you would get an electric shock.
"I came to writing really by the back door," Foer said. "My wife is a writer
, and she grew up keeping journals—you know, parents said, 'Lights out,
time for bed,' and she had a little flashlight under the covers, reading
books. I don't think I read a book until much later than other people. I
just wasn't interested in it."
Foer went to Princeton and took a creative-writing class in his freshman
year with Joyce Carol Oates. It was, he explains, "sort of on a whim, maybe
out of a sense that I should have a diverse course load." He'd never written
a story before. "I didn't really think anything of it, to be honest, but
halfway through the semester I arrived to class early one day, and she said,
'Oh, I'm glad I have this chance to talk to you. I'm a fan of your writing.
' And it was a real revelation for me."
Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which
was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an
entire story for each seminar. "Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so
much?" he said, with a laugh. "There was just something in me, there was
like a pressure."
As a sophomore, he took another creative-writing class. During the following
summer, he went to Europe. He wanted to find the village in Ukraine where
his grandfather had come from. After the trip, he went to Prague. There he
read Kafka, as any literary undergraduate would, and sat down at his
computer.
"I was just writing," he said. "I didn't know that I was writing until it
was happening. I didn't go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote
three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I'd never done it like
that."
It was a novel about a boy named Jonathan Safran Foer who visits the village
in Ukraine where his grandfather had come from. Those three hundred pages
were the first draft of "Everything Is Illuminated"—the exquisite and
extraordinary novel that established Foer as one of the most distinctive
literary voices of his generation. He was nineteen years old.
Foer began to talk about the other way of writing books, where you
painstakingly honed your craft, over years and years. "I couldn't do that,"
he said. He seemed puzzled by it. It was clear that he had no understanding
of how being an experimental innovator would work. "I mean, imagine if the
craft you're trying to learn is to be an original. How could you learn the
craft of being an original?"
He began to describe his visit to Ukraine. "I went to the shtetl where my
family came from. It's called Trachimbrod, the name I use in the book. It's
a real place. But you know what's funny? It's the single piece of research
that made its way into the book." He wrote the first sentence, and he was
proud of it, and then he went back and forth in his mind about where to go
next. "I spent the first week just having this debate with myself about what
to do with this first sentence. And once I made the decision, I felt
liberated to just create—and it was very explosive after that."
If you read "Everything Is Illuminated," you end up with the same feeling
you get when you read "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara"—the sense of
transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own
world. Both are works of art. It's just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer
could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to
Trachimbrod just once. "I mean, it was nothing," Foer said. "I had
absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book
. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up." Total time
spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.
5.
Ben Fountain did not make the decision to quit the law and become a writer
all by himself. He is married and has a family. He met his wife, Sharon,
when they were both in law school at Duke. When he was doing real-estate
work at Akin, Gump, she was on the partner track in the tax practice at
Thompson & Knight. The two actually worked in the same building in downtown
Dallas. They got married in 1985, and had a son in April of 1987. Sharie, as
Fountain calls her, took four months of maternity leave before returning to
work. She made partner by the end of that year.
"We had our son in a day care downtown," she recalls. "We would drive in
together, one of us would take him to day care, the other one would go to
work. One of us would pick him up, and then, somewhere around eight o'clock
at night, we would have him bathed, in bed, and then we hadn't even eaten
yet, and we'd be looking at each other, going, 'This is just the beginning.'
" She made a face. "That went on for maybe a month or two, and Ben's like,
'I don't know how people do this.' We both agreed that continuing at that
pace was probably going to make us all miserable. Ben said to me, 'Do you
want to stay home?' Well, I was pretty happy in my job, and he wasn't, so as
far as I was concerned it didn't make any sense for me to stay home. And I
didn't have anything besides practicing law that I really wanted to do, and
he did. So I said, 'Look, can we do this in a way that we can still have
some day care and so you can write?' And so we did that."
Ben could start writing at seven-thirty in the morning because Sharie took
their son to day care. He stopped working in the afternoon because that was
when he had to pick him up, and then he did the shopping and the household
chores. In 1989, they had a second child, a daughter. Fountain was a full-
fledged North Dallas stay-at-home dad.
"When Ben first did this, we talked about the fact that it might not work,
and we talked about, generally, 'When will we know that it really isn't
working?' and I'd say, 'Well, give it ten years,' " Sharie recalled. To her,
ten years didn't seem unreasonable. "It takes a while to decide whether you
like something or not," she says. And when ten years became twelve and then
fourteen and then sixteen, and the kids were off in high school, she stood
by him, because, even during that long stretch when Ben had nothing
published at all, she was confident that he was getting better. She was fine
with the trips to Haiti, too. "I can't imagine writing a novel about a
place you haven't at least tried to visit," she says. She even went with him
once, and on the way into town from the airport there were people burning
tires in the middle of the road.
"I was making pretty decent money, and we didn't need two incomes," Sharie
went on. She has a calm, unflappable quality about her. "I mean, it would
have been nice, but we could live on one."
Sharie was Ben's wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his
patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it
far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be
supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like
Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning
of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an
art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute
he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that
starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need
someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art
to reach its true level.
This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of
his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the
story of Cézanne's circle. First and foremost is always his best friend
from childhood, the writer mile Zola, who convinces the awkward misfit from
the provinces to come to Paris, and who serves as his guardian and protector
and coach through the long, lean years.
Here is Zola, already in Paris, in a letter to the young Cézanne back in
Provence. Note the tone, more paternal than fraternal:
You ask me an odd question. Of course one can work here, as anywhere else,
if one has the will. Paris offers, further, an advantage you can't find
elsewhere: the museums in which you can study the old masters from 11 to 4.
This is how you must divide your time. From 6 to 11 you go to a studio to
paint from a live model; you have lunch, then from 12 to 4 you copy, in the
Louvre or the Luxembourg, whatever masterpiece you like. That will make up
nine hours of work. I think that ought to be enough.
Zola goes on, detailing exactly how Cézanne could manage financially on a
monthly stipend of a hundred and twenty-five francs:
I'll reckon out for you what you should spend. A room at 20 francs a month;
lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22, which makes two francs a day, or 60
francs a month. . . . Then you have the studio to pay for: the Atelier
Suisse, one of the least expensive, charges, I think, 10 francs. Add 10
francs for canvas, brushes, colors; that makes 100. So you'll have 25 francs
left for laundry, light, the thousand little needs that turn up.
Camille Pissarro was the next critical figure in Cézanne's life. It was
Pissarro who took Cézanne under his wing and taught him how to be a painter
. For years, there would be periods in which they went off into the country
and worked side by side.
Then there was Ambrose Vollard, the sponsor of Cézanne's first one-man show
, at the age of fifty-six. At the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and
Monet, Vollard hunted down Cézanne in Aix. He spotted a still-life in a
tree, where it had been flung by Cézanne in disgust. He poked around the
town, putting the word out that he was in the market for Cézanne's canvases
. In "Lost Earth: A Life of Cézanne," the biographer Philip Callow writes
about what happened next:
Before long someone appeared at his hotel with an object wrapped in a cloth.
He sold the picture for 150 francs, which inspired him to trot back to his
house with the dealer to inspect several more magnificent Cézannes. Vollard
paid a thousand francs for the job lot, then on the way out was nearly hit
on the head by a canvas that had been overlooked, dropped out the window by
the man's wife. All the pictures had been gathering dust, half buried in a
pile of junk in the attic.
All this came before Vollard agreed to sit a hundred and fifty times, from
eight in the morning to eleven-thirty, without a break, for a picture that C
ézanne disgustedly abandoned. Once, Vollard recounted in his memoir, he
fell asleep, and toppled off the makeshift platform. Cézanne berated him,
incensed: "Does an apple move?" This is called friendship.
Finally, there was Cézanne's father, the banker Louis-Auguste. From the
time Cézanne first left Aix, at the age of twenty-two, Louis-Auguste paid
his bills, even when Cézanne gave every indication of being nothing more
than a failed dilettante. But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an
unhappy banker's son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have
learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir,
Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and,
but for his father, Cézanne's long apprenticeship would have been a
financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first
three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne
never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left
Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn't just
have help. He had a dream team in his corner.
This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly
contingent on the efforts of others. In biographies of Cézanne, Louis-
Auguste invariably comes across as a kind of grumpy philistine, who didn't
appreciate his son's genius. But Louis-Auguste didn't have to support Cé
zanne all those years. He would have been within his rights to make his son
get a real job, just as Sharie might well have said no to her husband's
repeated trips to the chaos of Haiti. She could have argued that she had
some right to the life style of her profession and status—that she deserved
to drive a BMW, which is what power couples in North Dallas drive, instead
of a Honda Accord, which is what she settled for.
But she believed in her husband's art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed
in her husband, the same way Zola and Pissarro and Vollard and—in his own,
querulous way—Louis-Auguste must have believed in Cézanne. Late bloomers'
stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such
difficulty with them. We'd like to think that mundane matters like loyalty,
steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what
looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius.
But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing
that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
"Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never," Fountain said. She
was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain
that he understood how much of the credit for "Brief Encounters" belonged to
his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. "I never felt any pressure from
her," he said. "Not even covert, not even implied."
评，貌似他写的是the brightest, the
。 不过用词好像很英式外交化，地动
plenty.
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 我俩显然对有所成这个概念的理解相差甚远～～我看了一下wiki和其他地方的采访书评，貌似他写的是the brightest, the
: most famous. 而且很明显倾向于天份和时代性，你看他举例犹太律师和球类运动员。 不过用词好像很英式外交化，地动
: 山摇，却落不到实处。
: 而且，不好意思地说，偶觉得就是因为人太倚重天分，所以才无成。
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 8 问一句题外话，这本书你看过没有？
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 刚才在路上，说不明白。除了那本书以外，原来在纽约客上Galdwell的文章可以给出详
: 细一些的例子吧：
: http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html
: Articles from the New Yorker
: Late Bloomers
: October 20, 2008Annals of Culture
: Why do we equate genius with precocity?
: 1.
: Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas
: offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 9 Gladwell的书我基本上都读过，我很喜欢的non-fiction writer之一，还有那个Peter
Hessler，John McPhee，James Fellows，William Langewiesche…
Outlier基本上是刚出来就买了一本，有好几年了……
出详
law
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 问一句题外话，这本书你看过没有？
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 10 嗯呐，等我把手头书单读完，把这几个人找来读读～～我刚查wiki，好像有一个得过普
利策～～一定要拜读的说～～
Peter
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: Gladwell的书我基本上都读过，我很喜欢的non-fiction writer之一，还有那个Peter
: Hessler，John McPhee，James Fellows，William Langewiesche…
: Outlier基本上是刚出来就买了一本，有好几年了……
:
: 出详
: law
| | | b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 11 手头书单读完是个tall order，呵呵……
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 嗯呐，等我把手头书单读完，把这几个人找来读读～～我刚查wiki，好像有一个得过普
: 利策～～一定要拜读的说～～
:
: Peter
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 12 哈哈，书单是样恐怖的东西～～
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 手头书单读完是个tall order，呵呵……
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 13 的确很好玩。有的字型很有说道的。我犹豫了一下，要不要写点雪白的大腿迎合二叔们
的口味，后来想想还是算了。平时没写惯，偶尔写一下把人吓着就不好了。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 有趣得很
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 14 其实写这个《国学十种》可能也不算很大成就吧，受旧式教育的话，这些应该都是常识
。八卦无处不在，呵呵
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 偶最爱看你的八卦咯～～
: 看第一段，觉得古人读书真是真心诚意，能三十岁有所成，又能三十岁起步未晚，两样
: 都是现代人难以做到的～～
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 15 嗯，列书单的目的是告诉自己，永远不要被书单束缚
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 哈哈，书单是样恐怖的东西～～
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 16 要相信"beginner's luck"
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 的确很好玩。有的字型很有说道的。我犹豫了一下，要不要写点雪白的大腿迎合二叔们
: 的口味，后来想想还是算了。平时没写惯，偶尔写一下把人吓着就不好了。。。
| C***3
发帖数: 2226 | 17 俺可不喜欢被人家叫“二”叔，谁知道他叫的时候心里是怎么想的啊，叫大叔的话又难
免回忆起那沧海桑田、斗转星移的岁月，各位脚的叫小叔怎么样～
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 的确很好玩。有的字型很有说道的。我犹豫了一下，要不要写点雪白的大腿迎合二叔们
: 的口味，后来想想还是算了。平时没写惯，偶尔写一下把人吓着就不好了。。。
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 18 就不写。
话说昨天傍晚刨了两个大坑，种了两棵香椿树，好高兴啊。今天中午吃的香醇炒蛋，哦
也。树是别人给的，本来还想着要不要给夏安和牛筋分两棵，后来一看那么大，快一米
了，就算了。。。希望种树的时候有点beginner's luck就好！
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 要相信"beginner's luck"
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 19 你是小朋友，不是二叔。。。
【在 C***3 的大作中提到】
: 俺可不喜欢被人家叫“二”叔，谁知道他叫的时候心里是怎么想的啊，叫大叔的话又难
: 免回忆起那沧海桑田、斗转星移的岁月，各位脚的叫小叔怎么样～
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 20 呵呵，鉴定完毕～～
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 你是小朋友，不是二叔。。。
| | | b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 21 这个“香醇”是乙醇吧……
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 就不写。
: 话说昨天傍晚刨了两个大坑，种了两棵香椿树，好高兴啊。今天中午吃的香醇炒蛋，哦
: 也。树是别人给的，本来还想着要不要给夏安和牛筋分两棵，后来一看那么大，快一米
: 了，就算了。。。希望种树的时候有点beginner's luck就好！
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 22 嗯，enjoy your arboreal and gastronomical bliss!
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 就不写。
: 话说昨天傍晚刨了两个大坑，种了两棵香椿树，好高兴啊。今天中午吃的香醇炒蛋，哦
: 也。树是别人给的，本来还想着要不要给夏安和牛筋分两棵，后来一看那么大，快一米
: 了，就算了。。。希望种树的时候有点beginner's luck就好！
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 23 偶当时觉得三十开始读书而有成，心里想的人是苏洵～～所以随口一说，看来不是很准
呐～～
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 其实写这个《国学十种》可能也不算很大成就吧，受旧式教育的话，这些应该都是常识
: 。八卦无处不在，呵呵
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 24 写错了，是香椿，送树的朋友还送了一大包新鲜的香椿叶，我仔细看了看，每一个都是
偶数叶子
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 这个“香醇”是乙醇吧……
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 25 我有点好奇，你学过化学？
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 这个“香醇”是乙醇吧……
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 26 这句话居然只有倒数第二个词不认识，很激动！
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，enjoy your arboreal and gastronomical bliss!
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 27 经鉴定，你是学化学的
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 我有点好奇，你学过化学？
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 28 曾经就学于Monsieur Lavoisier……
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 我有点好奇，你学过化学？
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 29 啊？等着瞧……
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 这句话居然只有倒数第二个词不认识，很激动！
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 30 Ну, погоди!
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 啊？等着瞧……
| | | b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 31 介什么意思？俄语？
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: Ну, погоди!
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 32 一个动画片。测试年龄用的……
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 介什么意思？俄语？
| l*r
发帖数: 79569 | | l******m
发帖数: 31446 | 34 嗯，都是高级八卦。
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: 偶最爱看你的八卦咯～～
: 看第一段，觉得古人读书真是真心诚意，能三十岁有所成，又能三十岁起步未晚，两样
: 都是现代人难以做到的～～
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 35 那个是六十四卦……
两样
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，都是高级八卦。
| l******m
发帖数: 31446 | 36 今天去同事家蹭饭，她闺女儿，当年我在美国开车带她遛弯的时候才几个月，现在已经
上了中关村二小。给我背「大学」，背「论语」，背「三字经」，一溜一溜的，我都惊
了。。
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 那个是六十四卦……
:
: 两样
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 37 你同事教女有方，佩服……
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 今天去同事家蹭饭，她闺女儿，当年我在美国开车带她遛弯的时候才几个月，现在已经
: 上了中关村二小。给我背「大学」，背「论语」，背「三字经」，一溜一溜的，我都惊
: 了。。
| l******m
发帖数: 31446 | 38 不是他，小学教的。我同事和我一样，就是个文盲。。。
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 你同事教女有方，佩服……
| p***r
发帖数: 20570 | 39 儒家从儿童教育开始抓起，搞和平演变呢
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 今天去同事家蹭饭，她闺女儿，当年我在美国开车带她遛弯的时候才几个月，现在已经
: 上了中关村二小。给我背「大学」，背「论语」，背「三字经」，一溜一溜的，我都惊
: 了。。
| l******m
发帖数: 31446 | 40 中关村二小果然是神校啊，还说了到小学数学题，也惊着我了。。。。也可能我数学太
差了。。。
【在 p***r 的大作中提到】
: 儒家从儿童教育开始抓起，搞和平演变呢
| | | p***r
发帖数: 20570 | 41 印象里是一小最好。我同学一大半都是一，二，三小的。
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 中关村二小果然是神校啊，还说了到小学数学题，也惊着我了。。。。也可能我数学太
: 差了。。。
| l*r
发帖数: 79569 | 42 不光是二小吧
小孩读经班到处都是现在
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 中关村二小果然是神校啊，还说了到小学数学题，也惊着我了。。。。也可能我数学太
: 差了。。。
| l******m
发帖数: 31446 | 43 国学大热。
【在 l*r 的大作中提到】
: 不光是二小吧
: 小孩读经班到处都是现在
| x***n
发帖数: 10764 | 44 现在国内就流行这个，都好几年了，所谓复兴国学。孩子们除了学钢琴奥数之类的，还
要上国学班。
要我说，整那些没用的，不如看看你小师妹这个帖子，我打算按贴去买几本有关说文解
字的书，因为我们家孩子很早以前就开始问我，为什么这个字要这样写，为什么这个字
要这么念？我一听这种问题就挠头，只好耍赖皮地说，这是很多年前的人“发明”的，
只有他们才知道为什么。
【在 l******m 的大作中提到】
: 国学大热。
| x***n
发帖数: 10764 | 45 赞效率，我光知道眼馋，还没开始在网上搜哪儿有得卖呢，你这都吃上了。我们这儿应
该有地方卖，中国人多，肯定不止我一个人惦记着香椿炒鸡蛋。
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 就不写。
: 话说昨天傍晚刨了两个大坑，种了两棵香椿树，好高兴啊。今天中午吃的香醇炒蛋，哦
: 也。树是别人给的，本来还想着要不要给夏安和牛筋分两棵，后来一看那么大，快一米
: 了，就算了。。。希望种树的时候有点beginner's luck就好！
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 46 小盆友们真可怜呐～～他们不知道什么叫放养么？？？ | p***r
发帖数: 20570 | 47 说问解字不少说法也不太对。
【在 x***n 的大作中提到】
: 现在国内就流行这个，都好几年了，所谓复兴国学。孩子们除了学钢琴奥数之类的，还
: 要上国学班。
: 要我说，整那些没用的，不如看看你小师妹这个帖子，我打算按贴去买几本有关说文解
: 字的书，因为我们家孩子很早以前就开始问我，为什么这个字要这样写，为什么这个字
: 要这么念？我一听这种问题就挠头，只好耍赖皮地说，这是很多年前的人“发明”的，
: 只有他们才知道为什么。
| l*r
发帖数: 79569 | 48 赞高效率啊
多谢惦记着同馋
俺也刚勾搭上local一家，他也刚从别人那儿分的。我估计要等明年了
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 就不写。
: 话说昨天傍晚刨了两个大坑，种了两棵香椿树，好高兴啊。今天中午吃的香醇炒蛋，哦
: 也。树是别人给的，本来还想着要不要给夏安和牛筋分两棵，后来一看那么大，快一米
: 了，就算了。。。希望种树的时候有点beginner's luck就好！
| l*r
发帖数: 79569 | 49 其实我觉得小时候多背背挺好的
说文也都是瞎蒙乱猜的
【在 x***n 的大作中提到】
: 现在国内就流行这个，都好几年了，所谓复兴国学。孩子们除了学钢琴奥数之类的，还
: 要上国学班。
: 要我说，整那些没用的，不如看看你小师妹这个帖子，我打算按贴去买几本有关说文解
: 字的书，因为我们家孩子很早以前就开始问我，为什么这个字要这样写，为什么这个字
: 要这么念？我一听这种问题就挠头，只好耍赖皮地说，这是很多年前的人“发明”的，
: 只有他们才知道为什么。
| p***r
发帖数: 20570 | 50 Peng!
【在 l*r 的大作中提到】
: 其实我觉得小时候多背背挺好的
: 说文也都是瞎蒙乱猜的
| | | l*r
发帖数: 79569 | 51 咕咚
【在 p***r 的大作中提到】
: Peng!
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 52 对，多看点这个哄起小孩子来得心应手，呵呵。我有个同事的孩子在学中文，我每次见
到她就给她画点儿小画儿让她猜字，她玩得很高兴。学什么东西都要靠兴趣，小孩子记
忆力是很强，但还是关联式记忆，如果能联系实际学起来更快，不容易忘记。
国内现在流行国学，连带着民国老教材也很流行，我上回回国订了一套，还放在国内没
看呢。你要买书也可以考虑一下。
【在 x***n 的大作中提到】
: 现在国内就流行这个，都好几年了，所谓复兴国学。孩子们除了学钢琴奥数之类的，还
: 要上国学班。
: 要我说，整那些没用的，不如看看你小师妹这个帖子，我打算按贴去买几本有关说文解
: 字的书，因为我们家孩子很早以前就开始问我，为什么这个字要这样写，为什么这个字
: 要这么念？我一听这种问题就挠头，只好耍赖皮地说，这是很多年前的人“发明”的，
: 只有他们才知道为什么。
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 53 就是碰巧有个朋友问我们要不要，然后雷厉风行地就给送来了。我们俩晚上吃完饭回家
开始刨坑，最后天都黑了才种好，心里还有点犯嘀咕，不知道邻居看见有人晚上在后院
挖坑会不会报警。。。
香椿还可以盆栽，如果你或者牛筋就想种一小棵偶尔尝鲜，其实不需要很高的枝子，挑
个小枝子，截个二三十公分长就可以种在大盆里。露地栽种截四五十公分就可以，香椿
分枝能力不强，长高了就变树了，摘着不方便。呵呵，arboreal and gastronomical
bliss
【在 x***n 的大作中提到】
: 赞效率，我光知道眼馋，还没开始在网上搜哪儿有得卖呢，你这都吃上了。我们这儿应
: 该有地方卖，中国人多，肯定不止我一个人惦记着香椿炒鸡蛋。
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 54 许慎是老知青门下的高材生。。。
【在 l*r 的大作中提到】
: 其实我觉得小时候多背背挺好的
: 说文也都是瞎蒙乱猜的
| b********n
发帖数: 16354 | 55 嗯呐，enthusiastic gardener~~
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 就是碰巧有个朋友问我们要不要，然后雷厉风行地就给送来了。我们俩晚上吃完饭回家
: 开始刨坑，最后天都黑了才种好，心里还有点犯嘀咕，不知道邻居看见有人晚上在后院
: 挖坑会不会报警。。。
: 香椿还可以盆栽，如果你或者牛筋就想种一小棵偶尔尝鲜，其实不需要很高的枝子，挑
: 个小枝子，截个二三十公分长就可以种在大盆里。露地栽种截四五十公分就可以，香椿
: 分枝能力不强，长高了就变树了，摘着不方便。呵呵，arboreal and gastronomical
: bliss
| l******e
发帖数: 1550 | 56 再次感谢墨酥辛苦码字！ 看这本书为了充实自己接近于零的国学知识，也的确为了教
书。看完了，还得使劲儿想啊想，怎么能把这些只是转化成游戏，交给没有任何中文背
景的小朋友们呢。
【在 w***s 的大作中提到】
: 收了欢欢喜喜的双黄包，寝食难安，只好赶紧写出来还债。
: 《小学常识》是民国年间一套国学常识书中的第一本，全套共十本，有小学、音韵、经
: 学、理学、史学、子学、文学、诗学、词学和说部（小说传奇等）十种。这套丛书的作
: 者徐敬修，生平难考。给这套书题词写序的人却史上有名：民盟黄炎培，和太祖有过著
: 名的“周期率”对话；政要张一麐，同盟会早期会员，当过云南讲武堂总办，任过教育
: 总长；文人金天翮，和曾朴一起写作《孽海花》，还写过《女界钟》。金天翮是徐敬修
: 的授业师，从他的序来看，徐敬修很年轻，说他“学成而志益高，学益专，慨然叹国学
: 之将沦替，暇辄从事于四部之搜讨，寒暑昕夕不倦，今年(1924)乃成国学常识十种”。
: 此时金天翮五十一岁，由此推测书成时徐敬修最多不到三十岁。
: 以上满足一下我的八卦心，下面说书。《小学常识》主要介绍文字常识，讲文字的源流
| w***s
发帖数: 15642 | 57 不用客气，大家一起学习。教小孩子本身就很开心，边学边教更有意思，呵呵，希望你
能享受这个过程。有什么好故事记得发来分享一下吧：）
【在 l******e 的大作中提到】
: 再次感谢墨酥辛苦码字！ 看这本书为了充实自己接近于零的国学知识，也的确为了教
: 书。看完了，还得使劲儿想啊想，怎么能把这些只是转化成游戏，交给没有任何中文背
: 景的小朋友们呢。
|
|
