在书店里买到Jong的新书 Seducing the demon, 一口气两个晚上就翻完了。马上跟她的agent联系,想知道什么时候再能有机会见到她,希望能得到这本书的翻译权。
10年前认识Jong,这些年来我一直把她当作我的的Mentor,我的文学老师,我的文友。读她的小说仿佛在读我自己的传记。我对她的喜爱与崇拜超过了任何一位女作家。
现在把她书里的一些段落打出来与大家分享,这本书是本年度的best seller,是为她自己也是为所有爱好写作的人写的指导书:
Isaac Baqshevis Singer wrote a wonderful story called "Taibele and her demon." in it, a man pretending to be a demon visits by night a pretty young woman whose children have died and whose husband has walked out in utter despair.
at first the demon terrifies her with his ugliness, but then she falls in love with him-as much for his vivid stories of hell and heaven as for his demonic lovemaking. she completely forgets that he's ugly and becomes more and more attached to him-even though after a while she can see his human failings. yes, this demon "perspired, sneedzed, hisccupped, yawned." yes, "sometimes his breath smelled of onion, sometimes of garlic...his body felt like the body of her husband, bony and hairy, with an adam's apple and a navel...his feet were not goose feet, but human with nails and frost blisters.
once taibele asked him the meaning of these things, and hurmizah(the demon's assumed name) explained;"when one of us consorts with a human female, he assumes the shape of a man. Otherwise she would die of fright."
"yes, taibele got used to him and loved him. she was on longer terrified of him and his impish antics."
perhaps she suspected he was really a man, but not wanting to know it, she refused to. Singer's story is a kind of reverse scheherazade:the woman falls in love with the teller of tales and welcomes his lovemaking no matter what his looks. but it is more than that. it's a fable of disguise to give each other permission to love each other. she needs to believe he is a demon so that she thinks she has no choice but to submit to him. he needs to be convinced that she believes him in order to keep up the elaborate fantasy that turns her on. Many marriages are based on less.
the story of Taibele has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for my life as a writer.
the job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories. often you go to bed with a man who claims to be a demon and later you find out he's just an everday slob. by then he may have inspired a novel. the novel remains though the demon has departed.
........
So who is my demon?
He is wild, uncivilized and lives entirely in the moment. He makes up stories and acts them out. He is never polite. He didn’t go to college and certainly did not get an MFA at Iowa. He doesn’t know which fork to use. He never heard about the ten commandments-and certainly not the one about adultery. He has hairy feet and ver likely a tail.
Let’s see if you can tell when the demon appears. It shouldn’t be hard. He casts a jagged shadow. And he leaves a wet spot on the sheet.
Of course, for male writers he is a she. She becomes whatever physical type the writer favors, since men care so much more about appearance than women do. Does he like big rits with rosy nipples? .....
For a gay write, he’s the perfect boy. He has idealized muscles like Michelangelo’s david. He may even be a lovely Bacchus or a Hermes with winged sandals.
He’s Greek, of course. The Greeks had the most beautiful boys. And they competed naked with their adorable cocks bound up in leather thongs so as not to swing. Oh what repture to watch them run! Nobody was gay or straight then-only human.
^^^^^^^
Nobody wants to read-or write-about perfect people. Perfection is boring. And unbeliebable. It was my curse or blessing to have interesting relatives. They were all smart and talented. But I was the one with guts to rish disapproval and defeat. Talent is nver enought. Talent without guts gets you exactly nowhere. Which is why I am most proud of Molly. She has guts. She has never been afraid to take me on. Or the world.
.....
When you are the writer in the house, it is your version that gets told. Naturally, other people resent that. The problem is that you must live with them and at the same time live with your own demon. The demon says: the hell with them. Tell the story!” the family says: be mice, don’t embarrass us. And above all be good to isreal!
There is no way to make peace between these two conflicting demands.
^^^^
when we are young, our parents case these huge shadows. Then they shrink and shrink until it’s time to put them in a box. How would I have survived thse metaphorphoses without wirting?
My demon thinks I want to nurder my mother. Can he possibly be rigtht? I have often wundered why wirters a re so obsessed with murder. Is it because we all need to murder out parents in order to go on?
- Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/16/2006
I read this book few months ago, and like it too. The most funny part is she had a dream to fuck Clinton :)) She is a Jewish and poet --- the two kinds people I like the most :)) (but I don't really like her poems) Here is her link:
http://www.ericajong.com/ - Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/16/2006
July,I just wonder why you like Jewish.I know nothing about them.you may help me to get some information about Jewish.thanks - posted on 09/16/2006
这里是我三年前写与她交往的一段:
虻叔提到Erica的新书,我这里就侃一段我与她的结缘。大约八、九年前,我的台湾女友作家成寒毛羽翻译了Erica Jong的代表作《怕飞》。那时我还是一个怕飞的小女子。成寒写信来与我们讨论“ziplesss fuck”的中文翻译,根据Erica为zipless fuck 所下的定义,成寒觉得“意淫”最为恰当。根据《红楼梦》里警幻仙姑的定义:“ ‘意淫’二字,惟心会而不可口传,可神通而不可语达。汝今独得此二字,在闺阁中,固可为良友,然于世道中未免迂阔怪诡,百口嘲谤,万目睚眦。” 我们都觉得恰当。 所以有这样的等式:
ziplesss fuck=意淫=柏拉图精神恋爱=mind game/sex=……………
红楼里” 贾宝玉神游太虚境 警幻仙曲演红楼梦” 这一回是我最爱读的章节之一。
Erica Jong 在美国当代女性文学历史上是一个重要的人物。从70年代初,她带领一群先锋女人一路飞过来。 我也是受到了她的鼓励,逃离婚姻、逃离新英格兰的庄园和令人窒息的骨董,飞到纽约去见她。我还记得给她送了一张我的照片,为她写的诗歌,还有热烈激情的信。她曾经发请贴让我去参加她和其他纽约女作家的一次讨论会。会后还见到她的第四任丈夫―――Ken,他是律师。她有好看的有皱纹的微笑,手上有特大号翡翠绿松玉的戒指,目光柔和,举止典雅。我们谈到了成寒的翻译和中国的女性,还有我当时的困惑。谈话非常投缘,因为我也是个书虫,在很多地方,我们的一些经历和兴趣爱好竟然惊人地相似。 我当时问她为什么那样喜欢Henry Miller,因为我不喜欢Miller. 她只是说他是一个诚实坦白的作家。我觉得这个理由非常不充分。但我现在才知道光是诚实坦白就是多么不容易做到!忘记问她我喜欢的爱伦坡。遗憾。
她的书对我曾经起到了惊天动地的启蒙作用。 我记得当年是一口气通宵在一个星期内读完她的三本自传小说fear of flying, How to Save Your Own Life 和 Parachutes & Kisses.
Erica近年来专注历史及犹太民俗研究,看过她写的绘有精美插图的有关女巫历史的书,哈,又是与我兴趣相同!
下面是她说过的有趣的话:
Internet dating is providing the 2003 version of the ziplesss fuck, unapologetically no-strings-attached, purely sexual experience. Women, in other words, get to act like men.
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything its cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Beware of the man who denounces women writers; his penis in tiny and he cannot spell.
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks. It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first 10 minutes I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged . . . I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
When I was a ten-year-old book worm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
还要虻叔的一段:
http://www.mayacafe.com/forum/topic1.php3?tkey=1052148880 - posted on 09/16/2006
这是一个大问题,我在写一篇故事关于这个问题。大概说吧:
1) 犹太人和中国人很多地方像似,聪明,勤劳,重视教育,以家庭为中心。
2) 犹太人太聪明了,据一些数据统计,他们的智商是最高的。科学家,艺术家里犹太人特别多。
3) 犹太人特别坚持自己的传统。我家附近有一座犹太教堂,一百五十年的历史了,还和新的一样。
4) 如果你读过圣经,就会知道,他们是神的选民,它们不停地背弃神,所以吃了很多苦,受了很多难。可还是‘选民’,人类的历史,特别是战争和杀戮,都和这个民族有关。
当然,这只是非常肤浅和简单的说法。
Paul wrote:
July,I just wonder why you like Jewish.I know nothing about them.you may help me to get some information about Jewish.thanks - Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/16/2006
在Seducing the demon里,我最喜欢她对威尼斯的描述,还没有见过任何人把威尼斯写得那麽美。 - posted on 09/16/2006
July wrote:
这是一个大问题,我在写一篇故事关于这个问题。大概说吧:
1) 犹太人和中国人很多地方像似,聪明,勤劳,重视教育,以家庭为中心。
2) 犹太人太聪明了,据一些数据统计,他们的智商是最高的。科学家,艺术家里犹太人特别多。
3) 犹太人特别坚持自己的传统。我家附近有一座犹太教堂,一百五十年的历史了,还和新的一样。
4) 如果你读过圣经,就会知道,他们是神的选民,它们不停地背弃神,所以吃了很多苦,受了很多难。可还是‘选民’,人类的历史,特别是战争和杀戮,都和这个民族有关。
当然,这只是非常肤浅和简单的说法。
Just wondering, how many jewish you've known, friends with and how big is the Jewish community you live(d) in ? - posted on 09/16/2006
I have quiet Jewish friends. My next door is a Jewish doctor and we are very good friend. My boss is a Jewish too. He loves music, poerty and is very smart. I live in a Jewish community but I don't know how big :)) It was the biggest Jewish community long before, not anymore, but still quiet big.
But don't misunderstand I like every Jewish...like everywhere, some good, some bad...I am just saying an overall picture.
rzp wrote:
Just wondering, how many jewish you've known, friends with and how big is the Jewish community you live(d) in ? - Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/16/2006
50%+ of my colleagues in the past 10 years are Jewish. 50%+ of the neigbors and my kid's classmates are Jewish people. They are indeed quite outstanding from other people. There are many types of Jewish. Just like Chinese, perhaps any other heritage groups. It is good that we can share views for each others here.
- Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/16/2006
"Internet dating is providing the 2003 version of the ziplesss fuck, unapologetically no-strings-attached, purely sexual experience. Women, in other words, get to act like men."
Ha anyone here fucked on internet? Just curious - posted on 09/17/2006
我现在住的地方,在上个世纪20年代,是芝加哥犹太富人的居住区,有几条街住的全是当时的‘CEO’们。他们在这里盖犹太会堂,办学校。
rzp wrote:
50%+ of my colleagues in the past 10 years are Jewish. 50%+ of the neigbors and my kid's classmates are Jewish people. They are indeed quite outstanding from other people. There are many types of Jewish. Just like Chinese, perhaps any other heritage groups. It is good that we can share views for each others here.
- Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/17/2006
This fanghuzhai must be fake.
fanghuzhai wrote:
"Internet dating is providing the 2003 version of the ziplesss fuck, unapologetically no-strings-attached, purely sexual experience. Women, in other words, get to act like men."
Ha anyone here fucked on internet? Just curious - posted on 09/17/2006
I do know many Jewish families moved from or related to Chicago.
New York is the second largest Jewish population centre in the world, after Tel Aviv in Israel. The United States is competing with Israel for the title of home to the world's largest Jewish population, and has by far the largest community of Ashkenazi Jews, Jews who came from central and northern Europe.
The American Jews includes a range of Jewish religious communities ranging from the most theologically conservative Haredi communities to a large segment of Jews who are entirely secular. (I've meet people from both ends.)
Jews in the U.S. settled largely in and near the major cities. The metropolitan areas with the highest Jewish populations are New York City (1,750,000), Miami (535,000), Los Angeles (490,000), Philadelphia (254,000), Chicago (248,000), San Francisco (210,000), Boston (208,000), and Washington DC (165,000).
The Israeli community in the America is less widespread. The three significant Israeli immigrant communities in the United States are in Chicago (50,000), Miami (105,000), and New York City (162,000).
- posted on 09/17/2006
I am reading a book titled "Revisting the shadows", the author Irena Shapiro who is my best Jewish friend's mother. After she surviving her last concentration camp at Auschwiz, worked in Germany for the American and British armed forces. In 1946 she was among the first few hundred displaced persons granted a collective visa to the United States. She tought biology at the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized high school for gifted students in New York, from 1964 to 1987.
I also wrote a poem for her father, my friend's grandfather:
http://www.mayacafe.com/forum/topic1.php3?tkey=1150076127
rzp wrote:
I do know many Jewish families moved from or related to Chicago.
New York is the second largest Jewish population centre in the world, after Tel Aviv in Israel. The United States is competing with Israel for the title of home to the world's largest Jewish population, and has by far the largest community of Ashkenazi Jews, Jews who came from central and northern Europe.
- posted on 09/17/2006
Seducing the demon 节选:
I am going to write because i cannnot help it.
charlotte bronte
wrting is the first anti-depressant. it came before prozac or effecxor. and it was cheaper. all you needed was a blank piece of paper and a pencil, as my father used to say. if you were lucky, you might even make some dough. but even if you didn't, you were doing something godlike-emblazoning words of fire on a tablet of stone and handing them to Moses, any Moses. So what if there were a lot of shalt nots"? Interesting enought, just writing "shault not" cheered you up.
i think writing elevates my mood because it's a way of imposing order on chaos. ....memory is always impure. we tend tomake up narratives for ourselves that grow stronger with each retelling. of course they depart from what really happened because what really happened was not fixed in language. what efer is not fixed in language drifts away. once we create a narrive, the underlying events diffuse like fog. a great deal of ink has been wasted on autobiography versus fiction, when the truch is that all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography.
there is in writing- or any creative work- a kind of fuck-you impulse. Part of the energy comes from sheer rebelliousness. I will show you! a ertier says. I am not who you think i am. Sometimes you have to get mad just to begin. YOu think you are all alone in this-but battalions of dead wrtier who faced the same challenge are shouting in your ears. (Margaret Atwood calls writing "negotiating with the dead.") You have to drown them out when they keep you from hearing yourself. They are alternately encourageing and stifling. You have to invent a voice that will make all their voices obsolete. You can't do this without grit, aggression, a kind of madness. No one really asks for a new book, but you need to write it. And your need will eventually infect your reader.
if you want to be a nice person, don't write. there is no way to do it without grinding up your loved ones and making them into raw hamburger. it's hard to do it and keep a social schedule. the essential chapter will sometimes arrive on the night of a dinner party. your job is to be always ready. writing is not a life.
- Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/18/2006
她在这本书里说:当生活使你失望的时候,写作就成了必需的。 - posted on 09/18/2006
This is an interesting article about Erica Jong written in 1999.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3847972,00.html
What this woman wants
When Fear Of Flying was published 25 years ago, it was an immense success - millions found liberation in its message that what women should want is sex and - above all - adultery. But was that truly a radical stance? Suzie Mackenzie asks its author, Erica Jong, where this manifesto has taken her. Portrait by Melanie Dunea
It was Jean-Paul Sartre who once remarked that if Freud had come from a background in which he was starving, he would have singled out hunger rather than sexuality as the basis for human activity. It's a simple point.
And then, free floating around these, situated we know not where, some would say in the heart, some the groin - there is desire, wanting. It's a tricky one desire, because it can't be sated and it doesn't go away. All your basic needs can be met, you can be living in the world's biggest democracy, and you will still feel desire. There is even an argument that you would feel desire more intensely, when all your needs are met.
So it is not intended ironically when I say that I can see life must have been tough for Erica Jong. She was born in New York, on the Upper West Side, into a close, Jewish family in which she lacked nothing. Not stability. 'My parents had and have a great marriage.' Not money, not love, not respect, not education, not culture, all was in situ. The middle child of three daughters, her father was 'a wealthy songwriter' turned businessman. 'So tenacious he would have been a success at anything. That's where I get my tenacity.' Her mother was an artist who felt under-appreciated. 'She was always saying that had she been a man she would have been much more renowned. That's where I get my feminism, the sense of wanting to conquer.'
She doesn't add that this may also be where she gets her frustration, the sense of nothing ever being enough. She was given everything, including a view of the world. Holidays were in Europe - staying in luxury hotels - the Gritti in Venice, the Grosvenor House in London. A slightly lopsided view. Lopsided, too, in her parents' politics. 'They were bohemians, the hippies of their time. Not communists, but receptive to communist views. A lot of their friends were blacklisted during the McCarthy witch-hunts.'
She was brought up to believe she would be successful. As she explains, like so many Jews of his generation, her father was unable to finish his education, he didn't want the same to happen to the daughter he adores. 'I adore my father and he adores me.' So proud. She went to Barnard College, reading English and Italian literature, then to Columbia to do a Masters degree. She wanted to write, she wanted to be a poet. These were ascertainable wants. Her first book was a collection of poems, Fruit And Vegetables - the poems are execrable. But she never knew this. Like the child, dressing up in front of a mirror, she saw the image her parents gave her. Lovely.
Sex. Lots of it for Erica Jong. Always, as far as I can tell, with men. Lots of them, too. Sex, she notes somewhere, started in 1969. Jong didn't invent sex, but she reinvented it for a generation. The baby boomers, the American 'me' generation who reaped the benefits of post-war prosperity. It was mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies, the liberation decade, for blacks, for gays, for women - the opening up of the culture from repression. But women like Jong - white, upper-middle-class, educated - were, she says, used to freedom: 'My parents were not disciplinarians. They gave me a tremendous gift - freedom to say and do anything I liked without being disowned.' Women like her didn't have anything to be liberated from. She didn't need anything. Her rights were observed.
She wanted, of course she did - it was like some hunger inside her. She must have wanted at the very least, some kind of liberation from the oppressive normality of her parents. She must have wanted something else to do - she was now on to a PhD - and the life of an academic. 'What people don't realise about me is that I was on my way to becoming Harold Bloom. People who miss that don't get who I am.' She wanted a form of self-expression - but not too distant from her parents' expectations of her. She didn't want to be an outsider. Far too tame for that. And when she hit on it, it was like a reflex in her, an instinct. She started having sex and couldn't stop. Sex and creativity combined and she wrote her first book about the freedom that comes from sex. And, in particular, the freedom that comes from having sex with other men when you are married.
When Fear Of Flying came out it wasn't recognised at first for what it was - as Jong sees it, a book, a time-bomb, that would revolutionise the female pre-conscious, unconscious and conscious mind, that is women's needs, their desires, their rights. Her first real sex, in 1969, was with a psychoanalyst, a friend of her second husband, while on a psychoanalysis conference, in Vienna no less. So it's no surprise that, from this milieu, she took Freud's fundamental idea - that sexuality is the basis of all repression, that sexual desire is not simply sexual desire, but something that will encroach upon the whole personality. And she borrowed something else from the institution of psychoanalysis - the sense of a closed environment, of someone locked into a world. It's a discrepancy that goes to the heart of analysis - that here is this person, supposedly opening up, and they do it in the confines of a room, privately, with no recognition of the public, political realm.
Jong's writing, her fiction and her essays, reflects this. It's all about openness, yet you can't get in. Reading Fear Of Flying, you can't help wondering how someone can write a book about how exciting sex is and make it sound so boring.
When at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, Newsnight brought Jong on for a comment, there was a moment of thinking: Hello, what's she doing here? But, of course, it is adultery, and not sex, that is her subject. She's been writing about it for 25 years. Adultery, which she dressed up all that time ago as sexual liberation, without ever seeming to recognise that adultery depends for its existence on the ultimate bourgeois convention, marriage.
She always had marriage on her mind. If sex within marriage is de facto dull as she claims ('Sex by definition is something you have with someone other than a spouse...'), adulterous sex is premised on precisely that same structure. But, according to Jong, it is the transgression that defines us. 'Forbidden sex gives us ourselves because selfhood is still forbidden to women.' Like the little girl ticked off by daddy, she needs the disapprobation to feel complete. This is fine when you are five or 15. It is an absurdity when you are over 50.
......
- posted on 09/18/2006
Erica's 20 Rules for Writers
1. Have faith--not cynicism
2. Dare to dream
3. Take your mind off publication
4. Write for joy
5. Get the reader to turn the page
6. Forget politics (let your real politics shine through)
7. Forget intellect
8. Forget ego
9. Be a beginner
10. Accept change
11. Don't think your mind needs altering
12. Don't expect approval for telling the truth -
(Parents, politicians, colleagues, friends, etc.)
13. Use everything
14. Remember that writing is Heroism
15. Let Sex (The Body, the physical world) in!
16. Forget critics
17. Tell your truth not the world's
18. Remember to be earth-bound
19. Remember to be wild!
20. Write for the child (in yourself and others)
There are no rules
Erica Jong
.
- posted on 09/18/2006
玛雅, is she a Chinese or Korean offsprings?
玛雅 wrote:
Erica's 20 Rules for Writers
1. Have faith--not cynicism
2. Dare to dream
3. Take your mind off publication
4. Write for joy
5. Get the reader to turn the page
6. Forget politics (let your real politics shine through)
7. Forget intellect
8. Forget ego
9. Be a beginner
10. Accept change
11. Don't think your mind needs altering
12. Don't expect approval for telling the truth -
(Parents, politicians, colleagues, friends, etc.)
13. Use everything
14. Remember that writing is Heroism
15. Let Sex (The Body, the physical world) in!
16. Forget critics
17. Tell your truth not the world's
18. Remember to be earth-bound
19. Remember to be wild!
20. Write for the child (in yourself and others)
There are no rules
Erica Jong
.
- Re: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 09/24/2006
No, She is a Jewish. Jong is her first husband's last time. I guess she became famous by this name so she never changes her last name. Now, she is with her forth husband.
Hata wrote:
玛雅, is she a Chinese or Korean offsprings?
- RE: Seducing the demon , 我与Erica Jongposted on 07/16/2016
Reply 玛雅不再喜欢她了。
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