ChaseDream
搜索
返回列表 发新帖
查看: 12226|回复: 61

[阅读小分队] 【Native Speaker每日综合训练—36系列】【36-09】文史哲 Mother's Day

[精华]   [复制链接]
发表于 2014-5-10 22:33:10 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
Stay tuned for our latest post, follow us here! 【http://weibo.com/u/3476904471


明天母亲节,于是就做了个专题。读完也正好给家里打个电话~

May they live in forever happiness.



Part I: Speaker

Chris Abani: On Humanity

[Rephrase 1]

[Dialog: 16'08]

Source: TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity#t-253019

本帖子中包含更多资源

您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看,没有帐号?立即注册

x
 楼主| 发表于 2014-5-10 22:33:11 | 显示全部楼层
Part III: Obstacle


Courtesy of Julia Glass -  The novelist with her sons Alec (right) and Oliver (left).

On Mother’s Day weekend, things I wish I taught my son
Julia Glass  |  May 9

[Paraphrase 7]
Because every woman has, or has had, a mother — and knows, if only through stories, her grandmaternal forebears as well — to become a mother is to step into a hall of mirrors. In its most essential state, however, motherhood involves a single, mutual reflection. You could even see the word “mother” as the contraction “m’other”: me attached, permanently yet not inseparably, to a resoundingly significant other; from the child’s perspective, the collision of my with other.

Just after my first son was born, a friend called because her preschool daughter was in that phase of longing to hold infants as fervently as preschool boys long to ride on tractors. Mid-conversation, my friend turned to her daughter and said, “I’m talking to Baby Alexander’s mommy!” An electrical charge passed through me, as if those words, once applied to me in the third person, cast a spell invoking countless promises, fears, fantasies and, inescapably, illusions to be shattered.
I was two months shy of turning 40. Like so many nick-of-time mothers, I hadn’t meant to wait so long. That I came late to this ordinary human condition led me to feel both irrationally proud and profoundly fearful. I’d had a solid decade in which to observe all the friends who became parents in a more timely fashion; like an anthropologist, I’d taken note of things that could go wrong, habits I admired and missteps I was certain I would never make. I also believed that because I held within me a war chest of life experience — lessons learned, losses endured, battles won — I would be able to share it with my child early on, as if I could spare him from learning, on his own, what it’s like to fall, fail, lose badly, win gracelessly, seek the wrong friends, hurt feelings, make stupid choices under pressure, wallow in grief, live through heartbreak, gather a lasting regret or two; and then to face the consequences.

I now stand at a threshold from which I look back on that benighted time with such volatile emotion that at moments I am overcome. Next fall, Baby Alexander’s Mommy will send 18-year-old Alec — a young man with wide shoulders, a trim beard, a deep baritone, a love of the piano and a fine knack for mimicry — to college. Thinking of all the mothers whose sons have gone off to war or to sea or to hop a freight, I know how privileged I am to face this gentle parting. Those 18 years have not passed in a flash; I’ve had more than my share of joy and fun. Yet I feel as if I’ve arrived at a private reckoning, an unavoidable summing up of all the things I hoped to teach this boy, share with him, imprint on his soul — alongside his father, I remind my grandiose self — and all the things I thought I would but didn’t. I linger on those I didn’t.

I did not teach him to keep a shipshape room, to write thank-you notes by reflex. I did not foster craft projects at the kitchen table or teach him to grow tomatoes. He did not learn to ice-skate. I had fantasies, when he was barely walking, that I would raise him to dress in a confidently nonconformist way, to converse easily with his elders, to love dancing. One day I would show him Paris, where I’d spent a year after college. Our family would memorize poems together, read aloud to one another from the classics. Alec would know Billie Holiday from Sarah Vaughan; cherish “The Sword in the Stone.” He would learn how to cook something other than a frozen pizza. Above all, we would accrue countless idiosyncratic traditions, unique to our tight-knit, ice-skating, bed-making, jazz-loving, Dickens-reading family.

Suffice it to say that I haven’t read Dickens since I was in high school. And honestly, what a peculiar list, right? What about teaching him compassion, generosity, introspection, circumspection, responsibility, rolling with the punches, laughing at the whims of fate? How about a firm handshake? (Does my son have a good handshake? I don’t even know!)

On Alec’s 18th birthday, I did something I’d thought about doing for years. I wrote him one of those in-case-I-get-hit-by-a-bus letters. Hoping to strike a tone midway between Ben Franklin and Dr. Seuss, I offered up a bunch of unsolicited life advice, acknowledging that he might not even want to look at all this embarrassing balderdash until 10 years from now. My allegedly sage counsel ranged from crucial forms of respect (being on time; being a good listener) to a virtual checklist for the choice of a mate (as if it’s a shopping expedition). Be a volunteer, I told him. Learn to express gratitude, sorrow, fear, affection. Apologize. Forgive. Hang on to old friends. Treasure your brother. And yes, learn how to cook.

I elaborated on some items, let others stand for themselves. I left the letter on his desk. I have no idea if he even opened it; a combination of bashfulness and cowardice prevents me from asking. (He could probably sense that it did not contain a check. I gave him a card along with his gifts and his favorite dessert: icebox cake, a relic from my 1960s childhood that I remembered, and resurrected, only recently.)

Eighteen years and I still haven’t learned: The one thing a mother cannot do for her children is live the hard stuff or even carve out a shortcut. What that letter to my son contains, more than anything, are clues about his mother’s dreams and fears, vanities and insecurities, strivings and humblings: a map of the terrain she’s crossed, especially the steep and the rugged. If he saves it, what he will always have is a slantwise portrait of the mother I imagined and hoped I could be.

This Mother’s Day, I’ll be on the opposite coast from my sons and their dad — and from my mother, too. I’ll be reading from my new book in Danville, Calif., while back in Massachusetts the assorted members of my two families will probably be just as glad not to go through the motions of a holiday in which none of us fully believe. Through my childhood, in fact, the second Sunday in May passed like any other. “Mother’s Day,” my father was fond of declaring to me and my sister, “is just a cunning invention of Fanny Farmer candies, Hallmark cards and the florist industry. You should appreciate your mother every day.” Not until my 20s did I begin to observe, and feel guilty about, all the brunches and bouquets and missives of adoration my peers lavished on their moms. Imagine my mother’s bemusement when suddenly I began to mark the day with calls and cards, even the random potted plant.
[1205 words]

[The rest]
Once, when I phoned and Dad answered, I said (amnesiac me), “Did you do something special for Mom today?” He said: “Why? She’s not my mother.” Which reminded me, piercingly, that my father lost his mother in his early teens — and led me to wonder if the true reason we’d shunned the niceties of Mother’s Day had little to do with unbridled commerce.

Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don’t. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers. (Maybe, when I look in that direction, the light is just too bright.) But the mothers will have their say. Mothers always do. It occurs to me that in the web of what-ifs I spin in each story, I am sometimes trying out or even trying on different ways of fulfilling this role, whether my characters are exemplars to whom I could never live up or cautionary tales above which I hope to rise.

A few years ago, Alec and his younger brother, Oliver, became inexplicably smitten with the 1996 movie “Mother.” Albert Brooks plays a middle-aged, twice-divorced, blocked sci-fi writer who goes home to live with his self-sufficient, emotionally aloof mother (an exquisitely cast Debbie Reynolds) who has adamantly repurposed his room and has no desire to give it back. Over dozens of viewings, both boys howled at the friction caused by the generation gap between the Depression-era mom and the Spago-era son. On car trips, at friends’ homes, they would rehash scenes and quote lines from the movie with glee. (“Look under the protective ice, dear.”)

Of course, like all the best comedies, it’s serious, too: Suppose a grown man could revisit his childhood, unearth the secrets to his mother’s past and change the way they see each other? What I find so moving is that it shows how, in fact, a mother’s job never is done. If I’m lucky enough to see the day when my sons are living independently, maybe with families of their own, I’ll still be wondering how I can be a better mother and worrying about the things I overlooked back when they lived under my roof. Not that I’ll ever repurpose their rooms. No way.
[443 words]

Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/julia-glass-on-mothers-day-things-i-wish-i-taught-my-son/2014/05/09/19be8c9e-d21d-11e3-9e25-188ebe1fa93b_story.html

本帖子中包含更多资源

您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看,没有帐号?立即注册

x
 楼主| 发表于 2014-5-10 22:33:12 | 显示全部楼层
Part II: Speed



(Left) 1966. She made my dress and cat pinafore, and she probably made her dress, too
(Right) May 1983, Harding University, Searcy, Arkansas. She insisted on this photo.
(Courtesy of the author)

Fifty Things About My Mother
——She liked to stay and watch the credits.
Laura Lynn Brown

This essay was originally printed in the Iowa Review.


[Time 2]
She liked to walk in the neighborhood on summer evenings, and would get me to join her by saying, “Let’s go look in people’s windows.”

Linda Lee Gosney Brown was born on Oct. 6, 1938; she died on April 8, 1989, when she was 50 and I was 28 and my brother was 23, between the time she called for my father and the time he made it from his recliner to the bedroom, her mitral valve blown out like a flat tire at high speed, gone in a heartbeat.

Nine months and five days after her wedding, she gave birth to me.

One time when I was sunbathing on the deck and felt something poking me in the hip, I opened my eyes and there she was with a spatula, deadpanning, “It’s time to turn you over.”

Once when I was a teen sleeping a Saturday away, she lured me with a cheerful call from the kitchen: “The Red Cross was here, and they brought doughnuts.”

One morning I took two pretzel sticks from a bowl of them on the kitchen counter, looked in the bathroom mirror to arrange them like vampire fangs, headed back toward the kitchen with my hands in a scary vampire pose, and met her coming around the corner, her hands in a scary vampire pose, pretzel fangs stuck under her lip.  

One Halloween when I was sick, she trick-or-treated for me; another Halloween she dressed up to answer the door and silently handed out candy enshrouded in my red Sears ribcord bedspread and a cheap devil mask; and throughout the year, she would use my brother’s astronaut mask, which had a pane of transparent plastic over the eyes, when she was cutting onions.

She had cut from a magazine a particularly startling photo of Richard Avedon—cropped so only half his face, only one raptor eye, was showing—and for a while we took turns hiding it for each other to find, until she found an unbeatable place that made me yelp when I found it: under the toilet lid.

She let me read at the dinner table.

She was only slightly exasperated with me the time I got gum stuck in my hair because I had tried storing a chewed piece behind my ear like Violet Beauregarde did in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[407 words]

[Time 3]
She dealt gently with me when I called my fifth-grade classmate Midge a bitch.

She dealt gently with me when I yelled variations on the F-word in the basement with all the fury and frustration I had ever hurled into a single word, not realizing the sound would travel through the ductwork; rather than punishing me—the mortification of having been heard by my grandmother was enough—she wanted to learn what had me so angry.

That time in kindergarten when I was trying to play British with Craig Robson and meant to say, “Pip, pip, old chap,” but said, “Tit, tit,” instead, and Craig was worldly enough to know those words and turned me in, she was fascinated to know how I knew British people said that.

For a while she and Craig Robson’s mom, Barbara, (neither of whom was fat) and some of the other neighborhood moms rode together to weekly Weight Watchers meetings, and then to lunch.

There was a time when my strongest yearning toward heaven was the hope of seeing my mother again.

At the visitation the night before her funeral, I felt helpless dismay and betrayal when I saw a gaggle of church women in the corner, listening to the one who five minutes earlier had asked me what happened, and whose seeming concern for me now looked like gossip-gathering; and I wanted to choke the insurance salesman church member who had done several unethical things to try to get my parents’ business and who kept standing there in his plaid sport coat talking, holding up the line of people who wanted to speak to us, unable to see how uncomfortable he was making my father; and I wanted to smite the stranger (who I recently learned was no stranger but my father’s Uncle Frank) who thought he was paying a compliment when he called my mother’s body a beautiful corpse; and I was already weary of church people fishing for more when they said they’d heard I was in D.C. when she died—was I there on business?—and telling them I was visiting a friend, which was true, although I had also gone for a pro-choice march that weekend, a march that took place while I made the stunned, disbelieving, desperate drive home; so it was a balm and a benediction and a heart-healing kindness when Barbara Robson (who had also gone with Mom and some other moms to NOW meetings for a brief season in the 1970s) simply said, “So, you were in Washington,” and I simply said yes, and she smiled and said, “I’m glad you were there.”

There was a time when my strongest yearning toward heaven was the hope of seeing my mother again.
[479 words]

[Time 4]
Hers is the most worn modern Bible I have ever seen, but outside of church I seldom witnessed her reading it.

I never heard her pray.

When I was 11, after the family had stopped going to church, she started sending me to church camp each summer, and it’s been within the last five years that it finally dawned on me that the flicker of something on her face the year I greeted her and Dad at the end of the week with the news “I got baptized!” might have been disappointment that she didn’t get to witness a watershed she probably had prayed for.

She sang soprano.

She sang to me when I couldn’t sleep: “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and something by Peter, Paul and Mary, and “My Grandfather’s Clock,” which I would request even though, or perhaps because, it made me cry.

She sang “Hey, babe, wanna boogie?” because she liked John Hartford, whom we had seen in concert at Wheeling College, and because, I think, she knew the gravity-defying magical realism of the line “We could boogie on the ceiling if you think you might be able” (a line she might have made up) thrilled me.

She kept a radio in the kitchen and listened to the top 40 while she washed dishes, and whenever Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire” came on, she would pretend she didn’t notice, until the chorus’s melisma of “Wi-i-i-i-i-ild-fi-ire,” which she sang loud and off-key just to annoy me.

She didn’t cuss.

She didn’t interfere the time Dad beat the breath out of me for something I didn’t do.

She didn’t spank me ever again after the day she broke a wooden spoon across my backside, the handle still in her hand, the jagged bowl skittering across the linoleum with a cold sound that frightened us both.

The way she expressed anger was not to express it.

When she decided it was time for me to know about sex, she gave me a book for Christmas, The Wonderful Story of How You Were Born.

When she drank—at social events, maybe once a year—she asked for a gin and tonic; at home her drink of indulgence was Pepsi in her tall mug with a peacock on it, tilted, two ice cubes, the pop poured slowly down the inside.

When she was a bank teller, she was moved up to the second window, the one that got the most traffic.
[449 words]

[Time 5]
She built a library of quilting fabric and organized it by hue and tint; she had made several quilts as gifts and was finally working on one for herself.

She loved the ocean, and I think the most joyous I ever saw her was the morning the two of us rented bicycles and explored Rehoboth Beach on what would turn out to be her last summer vacation; and if there is one thing in my life I could go back and do over again, it would be—how to say it? how to lay down this beachstone of regret I’ve carried for 22 years?—to not have preferred biking alone the next morning.

My brother’s grail quest is to bake an apple pie like Mom’s.

She loved going to weekend matinees with the two of us, and she so prized theater naps that after the first time, we were always instructed not to wake her if she fell asleep, which is why she sat through The Empire Strikes Back without ever seeing Yoda.

She liked to stay and watch the credits.

She loved well-made, handcrafted things and warmed her home with pottery, hand-loomed rugs, a Shaker box, all bought at one or another of the arts-and-crafts festivals we went to each year, purchases she often followed by saying, “This will be yours when I kick off.”

She won the Bausch & Lomb science award in high school, as did my brother, who didn’t know Mom had won it until we found hers while cleaning out her dresser after she died.

For a few years, after heavy rain or seasonal winds would leave their debris around our corner lot, she wouldn’t just tidy the sidewalk; she would sweep our edge of the street.

When I was in graduate school and someone at a social event asked my parents about their children, Dad, the parent who thought compliments went to our heads, said I was a professional student; Mom, the encourager, countered, “Frank thinks everyone who went past the eighth grade is a professional student.”

She had learned to drive as a teenager, in a boyfriend’s car, but she had let her license lapse and did not drive, though she did all the navigating on trips, because it made my father nervous to drive in unfamiliar places.
[403 words]

[Time 6]

Her two younger brothers had gone to college, and she was finally going to go that fall in a program at Wheeling College designed for life-seasoned students, and when Dad and I went to the mall to get him new shoes for the funeral, we stopped by the salon and canceled the hair appointment she had scheduled so she could have new hair when she picked out glasses at her eye appointment, so she could have a fresh prescription when she took the vision test to get her learner’s permit, so I could teach her how to drive the Dodge she had bought a week before she died, so she wouldn’t have to rely on anyone to get her to school and back, but in which she had never done more than sit in the driver’s seat and imagine where she would go.

In the journal I gave her for what turned out to be her last Christmas, the last entry, three days before she died, is The car’s here. That’s the first step. Got to save some money fast.

In the mid-1970s she was so impressed by a 60 Minutes piece on Bonnie Consolo, a woman damaged by thalidomide who drove, shopped, and cooked with her feet, that she taught herself to pick things up with her feet—in case she ever lost the use of her hands, she said, but her Mona Lisa smile when she practiced this feat hinted that it was more for the novelty and satisfaction of accomplishing something unnecessary and remarkable.

It’s not true that she didn’t like to have her picture taken, though one member of my family often says this, based on the fact that she appears in so few; the truth is she appears in so few because she was usually the one holding the camera.

In our next to last conversation, we quarreled.

She told me sometimes when she was reading—and I think when she said this she was reading Susan Sheehan’s Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, or I might have made that up—she would think, “Maybe this is the kind of book Laura will write someday.”

Among the accounts with her name on them at the bank, there was a recently opened savings account with a balance of $9.
[406 words]

[The rest]
She asked me several times to read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, not quite to the point of persistence, not nagging or begging, but with a quiet unspoken pleading—she loved it, and she wanted to talk about it with someone she knew would love it too; I had read The Last Picture Show, and I knew I would like the writing enough to ride along with the plot (I understood it was not a Louis L’Amour type of Western), but I didn’t, and I’m not sure why; maybe it was just the resistance that even an adult child feels when a parent asks her to do something optional—I could feel her yearning, and maybe that scared or dismayed me in ways I still can’t name, or maybe I thought I had too many other “important” things I wanted to read, this being the years I was in grad school and had developed a bookaholic habit of acquiring them faster than I could ever read them, a habit that is yet uncured, which is sometimes serendipitous, because on one of the four bookshelves in my bedroom, here is her swaybacked copy, which I still haven’t read, but which I’ve already possessed by writing my name in, and when I finally start reading the first page—such a simple, easy thing to do, no resistance at all—oh God, forgive me, I’m hooked by the first sentence and smitten by a half-sentence in the middle of the second paragraph, “Pigs on the porch just made things hotter,” and by the second chapter I understand she probably wanted to talk about the affection the writer bore for these characters, and his attention to their interior lives, which is probably the same reason she begged me to read some Barbara Pym, and now that I’ve passed 50 myself, maybe by reading this book I can put away the security blanket of regrets and wallow no more in the same pond that made child-me ask for a song I knew would make me cry.

At her funeral, when the preacher began his eulogy, he called her by my name.

The turquoise felt-tip pen I gave her with that journal still writes.
[392 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/05/mother_s_day_essay_about_a_mother_after_she_s_gone.2.html

本帖子中包含更多资源

您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看,没有帐号?立即注册

x
发表于 2014-5-10 22:46:55 | 显示全部楼层
以为前一阵子出差,一口气补了8篇之后,发现又出新的了~,沙发么?
1.56
3.33
2.10
3.04
2.11
6.45
我今天问我妈妈,母亲节想要什么?问了好几遍,老太太一个劲摇头说,花那没用的钱干啥。
母亲节快乐。
发表于 2014-5-10 22:48:37 | 显示全部楼层
happy mother's day

Time7: 14'21"
发表于 2014-5-10 22:57:33 | 显示全部楼层
占~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
散文实在总结无能

Speaker:The world can be saved in simple accumulation of gentle,soft,invisible acts of compassion.The only way for me to be a human is for yout to reflect my humanity back to me.The speaker used many experiece and examples to show humanity,her mother's experience,his child experience in Nigeria and in prision.The simplest act f kindness from a complete strangers will unstrich you.It't time to knock down god and come back to humanity.

01:49
01:37
01:24
01:38
01:28
This article is about a daughter missing her dead mother.All small things about her mother.May the victims rest in peace, May the survivors come up stronger.

06:50
Main Idea: Sth a mother wish to teach her son
In most states,motherhoold involves a single mutual feflection.And motherhood can make mothers proud as well as fearful.The author has always thought about what to teach to her son.And she also once wrote a in-case-I-get-hit-by-a-bus letter to her son,in which she had a lot of wished to her son.The letters contains clues about his mother’s dreams and fears, vanities and insecurities.The one thing a mother cannot do for her children is live the hard stuff or even carve out a shortcut. We need to show arpeciate to our mother every day not only on mother's day.

发表于 2014-5-10 23:08:14 | 显示全部楼层
昨天的作业还没写完,啧啧,滚去补了!

Speaker:
The man believe that we're never more beautiful than when we're most ugly. Ubuntu says the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. What Ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people. Then he tells some stories about remarkable people.

Time2: 2'40"
Time3: 3'06"
Time4: 2'38"
Time5: 2'40"
Time6: 2'24"
This article is about a daughter talks about fifty thing about her mother. Her mother died when she was 50 and she was 28 and her brother was 23. She was so sad and want to see her mother again, so she remembered many things about her mother, and it is very sensible.

Obstacle: 8'19"
Something that a mother wishes that she taught her son.


发表于 2014-5-10 23:09:56 | 显示全部楼层
------Speaker
There is no way for us to be human without other people. Then the speaker told the story of his mother to show the shinning humanity, and the tragety happened to his cell mate to show the loss of humanity in some people. Besides, the experience of killing goats taught him to see humanity. Lastly, he appealled to return to humanity.

------Speed
[Time 2] 3'11''
The author reflected how she was born.
[Time 3] 4'07''
The author missed her mum so much, and she reflected  the frustrating visitation the night before her mother's funeral.
[Time 4]4'24''
[Time 5]3'67''
[Time 6]2' 29''
[The rest] 2'55''
Overall, the author reflected some special things about her mum and the small things happened between her and her mum. She also expressed her regrets for not doing certain things related to her mum.

-----obstacles 15'02''
This artical written by a mother described her psychological journey of being a mother from the time when she was just having her baby son to the time when her son was 18 years old. Not until her son's 18th birthday did she write him a letter to teach him how to be a good man, and express her complex feelings of dreams and fears, vanities and insecurities, strivings and humblings. The author also realized that not until the time when she became a mother did she understand the mind of a mother.

发表于 2014-5-10 23:11:28 | 显示全部楼层
[Speaker1]
There is no way for us to be human without other people.
3 stories
[Time 2]-[Time 6]
50 things about a mother
recliner:活动躺椅
[Obstacle]
1- Memory about her son when he was just born.
2- On her son's 18th birthday, the author gave hime a letter.
3- The things that the author still haven't learned: live the hard stuff or even carve out a shortcut.
4- Summary: Everyday is mother's day.


今天的视频很震撼,内心还在触动中。做一个温暖的陌生人吧,回忆起了我自己很多陌生人的温暖故事。
后面的文章今儿都是文学作品,跟社科新闻一类还真不一样…… 抓脉络好宽泛。

祝天下所有的妈妈节日快乐!
发表于 2014-5-10 23:13:17 | 显示全部楼层
house887 发表于 2014-5-10 22:46
以为前一阵子出差,一口气补了8篇之后,发现又出新的了~,沙发么?

好毅力,致敬!
您需要登录后才可以回帖 登录 | 立即注册

Mark一下! 看一下! 顶楼主! 感谢分享! 快速回复:

手机版|ChaseDream|GMT+8, 2024-3-29 22:02
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号

ChaseDream 论坛

© 2003-2023 ChaseDream.com. All Rights Reserved.

返回顶部