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揽瓜阁俱乐部 Day11 2020.05.21
【人文科学-文化输出】 The Reclusive Food Celebrity Li Ziqi Is My Quarantine Queen （980字 精读 必做篇）
Like so many home cooks in quarantine, after I’ve used up the green tops of my scallions, I drop the white, hairy roots into a glass of water to regenerate, feeling pleased with my own sense of thrift and pragmatism.
But last week, after the Chinese internet star Li Ziqi posted a new cooking video to YouTube called “The Life of Garlic,” I wished I could graduate from scallions on the windowsill.
In the 12-minute video, which already has over seven million views, Ms. Li pushes garlic cloves into a patch of earth outside her home. A time lapse shows the sprouts growing, reaching up toward the sky.
Ms. Li sautées the young, fresh green garlic shoots with pork. When she harvests the bulbs, she plaits the stems, hanging them up to finish the drying process, pickling and preserving the rest, and using some to season chicken feet and dress salad.
Ms. Li, who lives in a village in Sichuan Province and rarely speaks to press, looks not unlike a Disney princess in her crown braids, wearing a silvery fur cape, trudging gracefully in the snow. At 29, she is famous for her mesmerizing videos of rural self-sufficiency, posted on Weibo and YouTube.
For a worldwide audience in isolation, her D.I.Y. pastoral fantasies have become a reliable source of escape and comfort.
I usually plan to watch one — just one — but then I let the algorithm guide me to another, and another, until, soothed by bird song and instrumentals, I’m convinced that I’m absorbing useful information from Ms. Li about how to live off the land. If I’m ever stuck with two dozen sweet potatoes, I now have some idea how to extract the starch and use it to make noodles. This is what I tell myself. Leave me alone in a lotus pond, and I know how to harvest and prepare the roots.
Ms. Li doesn’t explain anything as she goes. In fact, she tends to work in silence, without the use of any modern kitchen gadgets. Her sieve is a gourd. Her grater is a piece of metal that she punctures, at an angle, then attaches to two pieces of wood. Her basin is a stream, where she washes the dirt from vegetables.
Her kitchen is nothing like mine, in Los Angeles. But watching Ms. Li on my laptop, while eating a bowl of buttered popcorn for dinner, I think maybe I could be happy living like that, too, soaking in the sheer natural beauty of the countryside, devoting myself to extremely traditional ways of cooking.
Ms. Li makes peach blossom wine and cherry wine, preserves loquats and rose petals. She makes fresh tofu, and Lanzhou-style noodle soup with a perfectly clear broth, and ferments Sichuan broad bean paste from scratch. She butchers ducks and whole animals.
She is not known for taking shortcuts. A video about matsutake mushrooms begins with her building the grill to cook them, laying the bricks down one at a time, scraping the mortar smooth, then hunting for mushrooms in the woods.
In a video about cooking fish, she first goes fishing, in the snow, patiently throwing back any catches that are too small, as snowflakes freeze into her hair.
Like the main character in some kind of post-apocalyptic novel, Ms. Li is almost always alone, though she doesn’t seem lonely, riding her horse through fields of wildflowers, or carrying baskets of sweet potatoes under citrus trees. She seems tireless, focused, confident, independent.
The videos are deeply soothing. But it’s not just that — they reveal the intricacy and intensity of labor that goes into every single component of every single dish, while also making the long, solitary processes of producing food seem meaningful and worthwhile.
It’s the complete opposite of most cooking content, the kind that suggests that everything is so quick and easy that you can do it, too, and probably in less than 30 minutes.
But Ms. Li also romanticizes the struggles of farm life, and, as any savvy influencer would, monetizes that appeal. In her online shop, she sells a curved cleaver, similar to the ones she uses in her videos, as well as loose Hanfu-inspired linen clothing, Sichuan ginseng honey and chile sauces.
Skeptics are suspicious of her access to YouTube in China, where the platform is blocked. And though it seems unlikely, some people have wondered in the comment sections if her videos are propaganda.
Ms. Li’s story, as she tells it, is that she left home as a teenager to find work, but returned to the countryside to take care of her grandmother, then began documenting her life. Though she used to shoot her videos alone, on her phone, she now works with an assistant and a videographer.
“I simply want people in the city to know where their food comes from,” Ms. Li said, in a rare interview with Goldthread last fall. (She never responded to my requests.)
But most of the world’s food, whether in China or the United States, doesn’t come from anyone’s backyard, and isn’t made from scratch. Noodles are produced and packaged in factories. Chickens and pigs are gutted on fast, dangerous lines.
The fragility of our industrial supply chains, and the immense risks for the people who work in commercial plants and slaughterhouses, have been laid bare in the last few weeks.
Ms. Li sidesteps the existence of that broken system entirely. This is the powerful fantasy of her videos right now — people growing and cooking all of their own food, not wasting anything, and not needing anything more than what they already have around them.
In isolation, watching Ms. Li gather rose petals and ripe tomatoes, I catch myself thinking, is this sequence set in the past, or the future? Are these videos a record of the collective food knowledge we’ve already lost, or an idealized vision of its recovery?
Source: The New York Times
【人文科学-艺术】 Choir Practice Could Lower Stress in Cancer Patients （317字 2分18秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
This isn't your typical choir practice. And it’s not held in a traditional practice space either. These singers are all dealing with cancer, theirs or a loved one’s. "There are people in our choirs who are undergoing treatment right now. There are some people who are waiting for treatment." Rosie Dow leads the choir groups at Tenovus Cancer Care, in the U.K. "We do have some terminally ill patients as well in our choirs, so people in palliative care. And then we also have people who've lost people to cancer. So carers and supporters."
Anecdotally, chorus members have said that belting out tunes makes them feel good. But Dow and her colleagues wanted to see if that psychological effect might translate to a biological effect. So they selected five choir groups in Wales—with a total of 193 singers—and they took saliva samples both before and after an hour of singing. They found that singers had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol after the session than they’d had prior to choir. Along with an increase in proteins called cytokines—which the researchers say might suggest a boost in immune activity. The results are in the journal eCancer Medical Science.
Of course it's still not clear whether those biochemical changes translate to any better outcome for patients. And choir practice is in addition to—not instead of—conventional treatments. "Of course we wouldn't recommend it as an alternative to chemotherapy or radiotherapy or surgery or any of the other conventional cancer treatments, but in terms of people's mental health, this might be a good complement to the treatment that they're having."
Next up, the researchers will conduct a follow-up study at the U.K.'s biggest cancer center to see if these biological changes hold up over the long term. After all, singing is certainly a cheap treatment. And it does no harm, either…as long as you don't wail too hard.
Source: Scientific American
【人文科学-文化输出】 K.pop is changing, too （451字 精读 选做篇）
In a small restaurant in a quiet backstreet in Seoul’s Gangnam district, the walls and part of the ceiling are covered in posters, postcards and key rings. On one shelf sits an enormous pyramid of coffee-cup sleeves. All the decorations show members of BTS, South Korea’s most successful K-pop act and the highest-grossing boy band in the world. They are gifts from fans around the world for whom the restaurant, where the band used to eat before they were famous, has become a site of pilgrimage.
So far, so unsurprising. Teenagers have projected their dreams onto K-pop idols for years. But BTS are not your average K-pop band. Although their output has all the trappings of the genre—slick production, perfectly choreographed dance routines, rap interludes and ever-unconfirmed rumours about band members’ relationships—they do not conform to the stereotype of the flawless, manufactured idols who are expected to serve as blank screens for fans’ projections. Their producer, a graduate in aesthetics who set up his production company after years of working as a songwriter, has given them plenty of leeway in writing their songs and developing their own image.
That has led them down lyrical paths previously unseen in K-pop. “Dionysus”, the final track of “Map of the soul: persona”, an album inspired by the theories of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, which topped charts all over the world in 2019, celebrates the creative potential of intoxication. The song, named for the Greek god of wine and other sensual pleasures, cuts to the heart of current changes in South Korea. Murray Stein, whose book about Jung inspired the album, likes to think of the Greek god as a “loosener”. Dionysus forces his followers to abandon rigid patterns of thought or behaviour that threaten to thwart their development.
Rather than put fans off, the public soul-searching and the references to Greek mythology and psychoanalysis have struck a chord in a way that no previous K-pop act has ever managed. In 2019 BTS were the highest-paid boy band in the world, selling out stadiums from Seoul to São Paulo. Their latest album topped the charts not just in South Korea but also in Britain and America. “The band’s story is very compelling,” says Hong Seok-kyeong of Seoul National University. “Just these seven ordinary boys who grow together.”
Contrary to common narratives in the West, the South Korean government’s efforts to promote Korean culture have had little to do with this success, says Ms Hong. “Western observers still find it hard to accept that a small east Asian country could generate this amount of cultural influence without a five-year plan from the government.” But that is precisely what BTS appear to have done.
Source: The Economist
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-5-20 22:20:36
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