【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障25系列】【25-15】文史哲_Mark Twain

jay871750293

official weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

hello, pals~ Sunday again~
Today is the literature's day and I will introduce you guys another famous American novelist and journalist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more famous for his pen name---Mark Twain.
Speaker part, from BBC 6 min English, is about "Retirement"(A nice fresh start for the old in my opinion)
Speed part contains four articles; first two are about Sam's life, and the third one is full of the judgements from others; the last is about a household name in one of his popular novels.
Obstacle part is an essay of advice to juvenile written by Mark Twain.


Have fun~

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Part 1 Speaker

[Rephrase1]
Retirement

[dialog: 6:05]
[Transcript]

[Mp3]
[Source] http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/2013/09/130926_6min_retirement.shtml

Part 2 Speed

Article 1(Check the title later)
Introduction of Mark Twain

[TIME2]
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp California where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, even being translated to classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no responsibility to do this under the law.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it," too. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."
[Words: 333]
Source: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain#Marriage_and_children

Article 2(Check the title later)
Twain’s Darkest Times and Late Life

[TIME3]
In these later years‚ Sam’s writings turned dark. They began to focus on human greed‚ cruelty and questioned the humanity of the human race. His public appearances followed suit and included a harshly sarcastic public introduction of Winston Churchill in 1900. Even though Sam’s lecture tour had managed to get him out of debt‚ his anti-government writings and speeches threatened his livelihood once again. Labeled by some as a traitor‚ several of Sam’s works were never published during his lifetime either because magazines would not accept them or because of a personal fear that his marketable reputation would be ruined.

In 1903‚ after living in New York City for three years‚ Livy became ill and Sam and his wife returned to Italy where she died a year later. After her death‚ Sam lived in New York until 1908 when he moved into his last house‚ “Stormfield”‚ in Redding‚ Connecticut. In 1909‚ his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean‚ the youngest daughter‚ died from an epileptic seizure. Four months later on April 21‚ 1910‚ Sam Clemens died at the age of 74.

Like any good journalist‚ Sam Clemens‚ a.k.a. Mark Twain‚ spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the strengths and weaknesses of a rapidly changing world. By examining his life and his works‚ we can read into the past - piecing together various events of the era and the responses to them. We can delve into the American mindset of the late nineteenth century and make our own observations of history‚ discover new connections‚ create new inferences and gain better insights into the time period and the people who lived in it. As Sam once wrote‚ “Supposing is good‚ but finding out is better.”
[Words: 301]
http://www.marktwainhouse.org/man/biography_main.php

Article 3(Check the title later)
Mark Twain - What Have Famous Writers Said About Mark Twain?

By Esther Lombardi

[TIME4]
What have famous writers said about Mark Twain? Why have writers been so fascinated by the life and works of Mark Twain? And, what did writers think about Mark Twain when they met him in person?
Mark Twain -- When Maxim Gorky met Mark Twain, he said:

"Mark Twain's fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine. He is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. He has done much to beat away the dross and bring out the true steel of character in his writings."

Mark Twain -- Regarding the Mark Twain film, Dayton Duncan said:

"I think he would make an interesting film even if he weren't one of our greatest writers. He saw everything that the 19th century in America had to offer. Riverboat pilot, the hey day of riverboats, crossed the West on a stagecoach, was there at the big booms of the mining in Nevada."

Mark Twain -- Hal Holbrook said:

"He refused to lie down.... He was a life force, a forward moving life force, a powerful life force.... He wasn't a quitter."

Mark Twain -- Regarding Mark Twain's funeral, William Dean Howells said:

"I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens(note: Mark Twain’s real name) was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
[Words: 328]
Source: About.com
http://classiclit.about.com/od/marktwainfaqs/f/fa1_mtwain_writ.htm

Article 4(Check the title later)
Mark Twain 'based Tom Sawyer on drinking buddy from steam baths'

Alison Flood/ Tuesday 2 October 2012 15.29 BST

[TIME5]
The "real" Tom Sawyer was a heavy-drinking firefighter and local hero whom Mark Twain befriended in the 1860s, according to new analysis by the Smithsonian magazine.

The renowned American monthly attempts in its latest issue to settle once and for all a question that has long perplexed scholars: did Twain really name his child hero Tom after his drinking partner Sawyer, a "stocky, round-faced … customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman and bona fide local hero?"

The pair met in the steam rooms in San Francisco in 1863, writes Robert Graysmith in the Smithsonian, where Sawyer recounted the incredible story of how he had saved dozens of people from a shipwrecked steamer off Baja California – a story close to Twain's heart as his brother had been killed by a steamboat explosion. Sawyer swam back and forth between the ship and the shore, "a feat of amazing strength and stamina", and is credited with saving 90 lives at sea, 26 singlehandedly.

"Twain, floating in clouds of steam at Stahle's baths, was riveted by Sawyer's story," writes Graysmith, and the pair went on to become friends. "Sam was a dandy, he was," Graysmith quotes Sawyer as saying about Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens. "He could drink more and talk more than any feller I ever seen," said Sawyer. "He'd set down and take a drink and then he'd begin to tell us some joke or another. And then when somebody'd buy him another drink, he'd keep up all day. Once he got started, he'd set there till morning telling yarns."

In between drinks, Twain was working as a journalist and writing stories anonymously; Sawyer had plans, later fulfilled, to open a saloon. One morning, according to Graysmith, after a "momentous bender", Twain told his friend: "Tom, I'm going to write a book about a boy and the kind I have in mind was just about the toughest boy in the world. Tom, he was just such a boy as you must have been … How many copies will you take, Tom, half cash?"
[Words:343]

[TIME6]
In 1866, Twain left San Francisco, aged 31, and the pair never met again. The author published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, saying the character was based on three boys. He later said that he himself was the inspiration behind the character, and that Tom Sawyer "was not the real name … of any person I ever knew, so far as I can remember".

"The great appropriator liked to pretend his characters sprang fully grown from his fertile mind. Yet the fireman had no doubt that he was the inspiration for the name of Tom Sawyer," writes Graysmith. The belief that Twain named his character after his friend was never disputed while they were both alive.

Graysmith also quotes a 1898 newspaper article in which Sawyer told a reporter about the influence he had had on Twain's most famous novel.

"You want to know how I came to figure in his books, do you?" Sawyer asked in the interview, cited by Graysmith. "Well, as I said, we both was fond of telling stories and spinning yarns. Sam, he was mighty fond of children's doings and whenever he'd see any little fellers a-fighting on the street, he'd always stop and watch 'em and then he'd come up to the Blue Wing [saloon] and describe the whole doings and then I'd try and beat his yarn by telling him of the antics I used to play when I was a kid and say, 'I don't believe there ever was such another little devil ever lived as I was.'

"Sam, he would listen to these pranks of mine with great interest and he'd occasionally take 'em down in his notebook. One day he says to me: 'I am going to put you between the covers of a book some of these days, Tom.' 'Go ahead, Sam,' I said, 'but don't disgrace my name'."

The affection in which his namesake is held today suggests that his friend took him at his word.
[Words: 330]
Source: The guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/02/mark-twain-tom-sawyer-drinking-buddy

Part 3 Obstacle

Article 5(Check the title later)
Advice to Youth

by Mark Twain (1882)

[Paraphase7]
Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of talk I ought to make. They said it should be something suitable to youth--something didactic, instructive, or something in the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in my mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable. First, then. I will say to you my young friends--and I say it beseechingly, urgingly--

Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

Go to bed early, get up early--this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time--it’s no trick at all.

Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail--these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail”--the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal. There is in Boston a monument of the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah no, my hearers, the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a million years. An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years--except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours. A final word: begin your practice of this gracious and beautiful art early--begin now. If I had begun earlier, I could have learned how.

Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right--it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of. Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it make one shudder.

There are many sorts of books; but good ones are the sort for the young to read. Remember that. They are a great, an inestimable, and unspeakable means of improvement. Therefore be careful in your selection, my young friends; be very careful; confine yourselves exclusively to Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The Innocents Abroad, and works of that kind.

But I have said enough. I hope you will treasure up the instructions which I have given you, and make them a guide to your feet and a light to your understanding. Build your character thoughtfully and painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you have got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how nicely and sharply it resembles everybody else’s.
[Words: 1235]
Source: About.com
http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/adviceyouth.htm

疏离无罪

板凳，感谢JAY

01:38
Introduce the life of Mark Twain

01:26
The writing and life of Mark Twain in his later years.The influece of his literature.

01:23
Ohter writers' comments on Mark Twain.

02:11
What Mark Twain experienced when he created the Tom Sawyer.

02:01
Mark Twain use his friend's name to name after his character but he refuse to admit that there is a real person.
But other writers and Tom argued against him.

06:34
The instructions made by Mark Twain to youth.
1 Obey parents when they are present
2 Be respectful to superior and stangers
3 Sleep early and get up early
4 Care about lying
5 Never handle firearms carelessly
6 Always read good books.

小鱼上树

首页二姐又来啦，谢谢jay

25-15

1 6min

Hang up one’s boots, touch wood, hereditary, jobsatisfaction

2 333 1min42

Twain’s background- became famous for a short story- badinvestor and struggled in finance- influence

3 301 1min41

Political reason for the unpublished-life changes- he spenthis life observing and reporting his surroundings and gave us an insight lookof the 19th century

4 328 1min40

5 343 1min51

Know better about twain through one of his drinking buddies

6 330 1min47

Twain named one of his most famous characters after hisfriend and refused to admit that.

7 1235 6min54

I can’t believe this lecture was given in 1882. These advicesare still true after 150 years. That’s amazing! Obey parents, respect your bossand everyone, how to treat others when you get offended, the opinion aboutlying, handle weapon carefully, wake up early and go to bed early.

irvan

看到微博于是兴致勃勃的来了～

______________
Obstacle
07:08
Instructions Mark Twain gave to youth

ttlovej

终于有首页了呜呜呜

TIME 2  2'30

TIME 3  1'34

The passage introduces the whole life of the famous writer Mark Twain.

TIME 4  2'08

Some comments wrote for Mark Twain which came from other famous writers.

TIME 5  2'23

TIME 6  2'21

Tom Sawyer ,which is the character prototype of the hero of The Adventure of Tom Sawyer,was a heavy-drinking firefighter and local hero.But after the book was published,Mark Twain told people that he did't know anybody which has the same name Tom Sawyer.

TIME  7 4'52

more酱

谢谢Jay，我最喜欢bbc 6min English和English at work啦提到了小贝hiahia~

补-----------------------
2'44[Words: 333]
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2'03[Words: 328]
2'54[Words:343]
2'01[Words: 330]
7'36[Words: 1235]
Obey your parents and respect to your superiors.
Go to bed early and get up early.
Do not lie,always tell the truth.
Never handle firearms carelessly.
Read good books.

olivekola

2:38
2:20
1：49
1:37
1:29
6：42

晓野的野

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Mark Twain gave young children some advice.
Obey your parents.Be respect to people.Advice about how to deal with offense. Go to bed early and sleep early. Pay attention to lie because it may cause bad consequence.Never handle firearms carelessly. Choose good books to read.

kimwang53

谢谢jay~扫盲啦~~

2.07
1.33
2.06
2.08
1.44

8.00

billylau

2,3 1"46 1"55
the passage summarizes Sam's life.

4 2"12
the comment of Sam from other people.

5 2"46
the passage shows that Sam is a person that could drink more and talk more than any feller,what is more,he'd set down and take a drink and then he'd begin to tell us some joke or another.between drinks, he will create some novels in sudden.

6 2"27
the author shows some detail about how Sam collected the material in normal life.

7 9"34