小城记 (5)高留与巴留
我虽常忘事忘人,可对有些地方的容貌却有些过目不忘,甚至想用螺丝钉将其固定在脑子里,好让它们象黑白胶片,趁琐事俗事的间歇,在脑子里时而翻卷,不经意落下一二幅旧景,对旧地重新惊鸿一瞥,再而莞尔。曾经蛰居过的法国西南的两个加泰罗尼亚小镇,高留尔(Colliure)和海滨巴留斯(Banyuls-sur-Mer)便是如此,为亲切起见,干脆把它们的名字汉语化,爱称高留与巴留。
盛夏凌晨。午夜从巴黎出发的火车拂晓抵西南名城佩尔皮酿(Perpignan), 然后沿地中海一路西行。海岸线在临近法西边境二十来公里处开始柔软缓慢地向内陆弯曲,形成一道优美圆润的曲线。此时,海面更趋平静,似刚出染坊的一幅巨大深蓝色绸缎,在夏日的晨光下尽情舒展着厚重又细腻的质感,细密微微波动的水纹把阳光分解成无数晶莹的碎片,轻柔的海风又将这迷人景致化为千万飘摇的星星碎点洒至海岸山峦的葡萄园。前方的高留渐渐显现于一小港湾山峦中,红顶白墙徐徐淡出,零星小船飘在水面,和所有的小站一样,火车在此只停三分钟,三两乘客上下。继续往西车出高留,穿过一丛矮小密集的深绿色,著名的高留白葡萄酒产区,绕过一凸进海水的尖角地,便是巴留,再停三分钟。列车继续往西,驶往几十公里外的终点巴塞罗那。
落脚地在巴留半山上。开车的人不断换档,一路崎岖爬至半山一石头房子说道:到了。这幢被南方人称为”le mas” 的中世纪石头农舍位于一片葡萄园中,院里好些果树,以杏仁为最大,正在结果。在平台上手搭凉篷瞭望山下的镇子与大海,顺便问道,此地有啥可看可玩的?主人答:“吃?海鲜呀。喝?高留白葡萄酒啊。玩?海滩也。对了,马蒂斯的野兽派,毕加索的立体派都在高留发源呢,到处都是他们画过的景致,不好玩吗?还有,雕塑家马约尔就是巴留这村里的人,他的故居还在呢,不好玩吗?” 这区区弹丸之地竟如此藏龙卧虎,真是庙小神仙多。
从佩尔皮酿开始至西班牙边境的整个东比利牛斯省(Pyrénées orientales) 在语言和地理上都属加泰罗尼亚。一七八九年的大革命后次年便归属法国建省,两百多年来这片法属加泰罗尼亚地区几乎从未高调要求自治独立,也未曾表示要与西班牙的加泰罗尼亚合并。山那边的加泰罗尼亚人总是为自己在弗朗哥执政期间反独裁维护共和而自豪,当时的许多艺术家知识分子流亡法国的必经之路就是经巴塞罗那至佩尔皮酿,再北上巴黎,巴留与高留自然成了他们歇脚的驿站。两国交界的比利牛斯山区在二战期间还是法国抵抗组织的后方基地,坐镇伦敦的戴高乐手下的人员情报武器曾源源通过山间河溪的牧羊小道进入法国被占区。直到今天,两镇的人口也多为来自边境两国,相距十公里,加起来总人口最多过万,夏季稍多些外来人口,且多为拖家带口探亲访友,与蓝色海岸尼斯嘎纳摩纳哥的游人如鲫,纸醉金迷,竟相争富斗艳几乎两重天。
周六早晨赶集时路过邮局,被正在分信的人从窗口看见呵住说:“嗨,有你们石头房子的邮件,一块带去吧!” 行至鱼摊时被叫住:“看见今早刚上岸的鱼了吗?正好在山上院子里烧烤,保证你不会失望。”卖肉卖菜卖水果的自然也不甘落后:“我的茄子西红柿洋葱是地道加泰罗尼亚本地出产,你要是用它们都做不出地道地中海大锅杂菜 (la ratatouille)的话,下周六来找我退钱……”,如此反复不断被各类摊主夹攻狙击一上午,等回到半山上时,菜筐早已不堪重负七歪八扭。我不由得对主人感叹说:“幸好大多数法国人只会说一种语言,设想他们要是会说别的语言,这天下的话还不被他们都说完了。”。结果他回答说,“嗨,你有所不知,当地人大多双语呢,不是西语法语就是加语法语”。我恍然大悟,“难怪我耳朵都听疼了,下周还赶不赶集?这是个问题。”日前观摩了一友人的厨艺,我兴致勃勃准备将赶集所得变佳肴也。
大锅杂菜属典型的南方夏季日常菜。做起来并不复杂,以用料新鲜取胜,需要的只是时间。夏季通常八九点才开晚饭, 黄昏时分,一杯开胃酒在手之际开工刚好在月上柳梢头时上菜。因为太过普通平常,各家的杂菜往往大同小异,细微之处见功夫。西红柿茄子红绿甜椒洋葱一通乱切,先用橄榄油将一堆蒜瓣煸一气,然后把杂菜们掀下锅炒拌至香,打开去皮的意大利椭圆形西红柿罐头两个,毫不客气灌下,略来点白葡萄酒,扔一二枝院子墙角的百里香,把火降至中档,让菜们独自咕嘟一二时辰,其间不停翻滚几下不让其粘锅就行了。
需要认真对待的是烤那一大块羊肩膀。院子里烧烤处一堆去年的葡萄枝已被点着,正劈里啪啦爆响,赶快将羊肉均匀戳些小洞,把蒜瓣一一嵌入,等树枝烟过雾散时放上架,翻动不能太勤,也不能放盐,否则会出水影响肉质。因不用烤炉,只能自己掌握时间,差不多时用一小快刀插入,抽出时刀上若无血水,说明肉也差不多了。吃时自己放盐胡椒什么的,至于配菜当然是无处不在的杂锅菜。杂锅菜乃居家日常菜,冷热均可,一般不用它请客,皆因模样不佳。想来一阵乱炖后除了营养,何谈美观?那象滇西尤其丽江的杂锅菜,青的青,绿的绿,红的红,白的白,兼容并蓄,想不垂涎都难。第一次领教法国南方的杂锅菜时,实在不敢恭维,看上去与剩菜无异,菜们早已在文火温炖之后花容失色,幸好味美,但仍难弥补这道名菜的固有缺憾。好在明媚皓月,对酒当歌,柔风中飘来些杏仁的香味,凭添些无谓的情趣,灯光下的杂锅菜也有些无辜的模糊,味道似乎也比刚出锅时好些。席间友人说到其工作的海洋生物实验室明晨有船出海,可以捎我去玩。
夏天的地中海犹如神话里风情万千的美女,天阴时几许愁容,凄凄切切般楚楚可人;艳阳灿烂时,其浓烈执着如梵高的向日葵直逼人心。从巴留弯到高留,觉着风景有所变化。感觉是近在咫尺高留的艳阳与蓝天,巴留的田园风光,半山上散落的红顶白墙,刹时间随立体变化中的山峦横七竖八,在阳光下如此浓烈甚至几分狂野,强烈的色彩就着正午的阳光轰然袭来,似千军万马驰骋,如声声响鼓直捣脑门,大可将人带船囫囵吞尽。我仿佛瞬间理解为什么马蒂斯,杜尚早期在高留创作的作品会被称之为野兽派的开端。而毕加索,布拉克,马松,格里的立体派也许受自然的零乱的和不规则的启发也未可知。至于达利,能把普普通通的佩尔皮酿火车站称为世界上最美的火车站的人,他的作品,能不荒诞,能不让人会意吗?那个来自北方的马蒂斯到了高留,更是乐不思蜀。某晚进镇玩耍,见村里一群人在广场上围圈跳舞,旁人介绍说这是典型的加泰罗尼亚集体舞,可谓热情奔放,据称传统上走乡串户的人可以凭其舞在加泰罗尼亚串亲访友不愁吃喝。可惜我早已忘其名,越看越觉得马蒂斯笔下的蓝色舞蹈是以此舞为灵感的。
在当地人心中,富有个性的雕塑家阿里斯蒂德•马约尔(Aristide Mailllol, 1861-1944)才是故乡真正的骄傲。 马约尔出生在巴留,他最初学绘画,在库尔贝的艺术精神影响下,作过一些油画,但其功底更多来自他早年在巴黎著名的高步蓝壁毯工场的织毯手艺。他的风格与同时代的罗丹全然不同,如果说罗丹致力表现人的精神,马约尔推崇的却是接近希腊罗马时代对人体与自然为一体的赞美。在我看来,他的作品比希腊罗马更为简化,明快,柔美。每次信步巴黎的杜勒里公园(Jardin des Tuileries),注目马约尔的雕塑《地中海》,令我想到的必是巴留与高留。
三伏某日,我从巴留登上往南的火车,脑海里荡漾着齐豫的《橄榄树》,随着来自五湖四海的背包旅行者们,沿地中海蜿行,开始我的第一次西班牙之旅。回想起来,似隔世般遥远,还真是青春做伴,正好流浪呵。
2008.1.
补:Ruozhi 要烤羊肉菜谱,没现成的,顺便想起这段历史。日前在飞机上看见放电影Ratatouille,一看是只硕鼠!赶快关上,回忆我的 ratatouille 吧。
高留
夜
地中海
- Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/12/2008
这篇是真的有“味道”。:-) - Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/12/2008
咖啡馆里我最羡慕的就是鹿希了,怎么整天在外面晃悠?我什么时候也能过上这种在路上的生活呢。 - Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/12/2008
真丰富的文字~~~多么幸福的旅行生活啊~~~
看完ratatouille,我对这道菜很感兴趣。但上次去吃一个法国餐馆,居然告诉我他们的ratatouille和电影里的一点也不一样,解释了一通,我没有敢尝试。原来是这样子的啊。:) - posted on 01/12/2008
是一个养懒人的好地方,但为什么好事总被鹿希摊上了?
时代周刊有一篇酸葡萄文章,The Death of French Culture,就等鹿希来批驳一下哈。
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686532,00.html
In Search of Lost Time
By DON MORRISON/PARIS
The days grow short. A cold wind stirs the fallen leaves, and some mornings the vineyards are daubed with frost. Yet all across France, life has begun anew: the 2007 harvest is in. And what a harvest it has been. At least 727 new novels, up from 683 for last autumn's literary rentrée. Hundreds of new music albums and dozens of new films. Blockbuster art exhibitions at all the big museums. Fresh programs of concerts, operas and plays in the elegant halls and salles that grace French cities. Autumn means many things in many countries, but in France it signals the dawn of a new cultural year.
And nobody takes culture more seriously than the French. They subsidize it generously; they cosset it with quotas and tax breaks. French media give it vast amounts of airtime and column inches. Even fashion magazines carry serious book reviews, and the Nov. 5 announcement of the Prix Goncourt — one of more than 900 French literary prizes — was front-page news across the country. (It went to Gilles Leroy's novel Alabama Song.) Every French town of any size has its annual opera or theater festival, nearly every church its weekend organ or chamber-music recital.
There is one problem. All of these mighty oaks being felled in France's cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world. Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace. That is an especially sensitive issue right now, as a forceful new President, Nicolas Sarkozy, sets out to restore French standing in the world. When it comes to culture, he will have his work cut out for him.
Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English. That's about the same percentage as in Germany, but there the total number of English translations has nearly halved in the past decade, while it's still growing in France. Earlier generations of French writers — from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre, Camus and Malraux — did not lack for an audience abroad. Indeed, France claims a dozen Nobel literature laureates — more than any other country — though the last one, Gao Xingjian in 2000, writes in Chinese.
France's movie industry, the world's largest a century ago, has yet to recapture its New Wave eminence of the 1960s, when directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were rewriting cinematic rules. France still churns out about 200 films a year, more than any other country in Europe. But most French films are amiable, low-budget trifles for the domestic market. American films account for nearly half the tickets sold in French cinemas. Though homegrown films have been catching up in recent years, the only vaguely French film to win U.S. box-office glory this year was the animated Ratatouille — oops, that was made in the U.S. by Pixar.
The Paris art scene, birthplace of Impressionism, Surrealism and other major -isms, has been supplanted, at least in commercial terms, by New York City and London. Auction houses in France today account for only about 8% of all public sales of contemporary art, calculates Alain Quemin, a researcher at France's University of Marne-La-Vallée, compared with 50% in the U.S. and 30% in Britain. In an annual calculation by the German magazine Capital, the U.S. and Germany each have four of the world's 10 most widely exposed artists; France has none. An ArtPrice study of the 2006 contemporary-art market found that works by the leading European figure — Britain's Damien Hirst — sold for an average of $180,000. The top French artist on the list, Robert Combas, commanded $7,500 per work.
France does have composers and conductors of international repute, but no equivalents of such 20th century giants as Debussy, Satie, Ravel and Milhaud. In popular music, French chanteurs and chanteuses such as Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf were once heard the world over. Today, Americans and Brits dominate the pop scene. Though the French music industry sold $1.7 billion worth of recordings and downloads last year, few performers are famous outside the country. Quick: name a French pop star who isn't Johnny Hallyday.
France's diminished cultural profile would be just another interesting national crotchet — like Italy's low birthrate, or Russia's fondness for vodka — if France weren't France. This is a country where promoting cultural influence has been national policy for centuries, where controversial philosophers and showy new museums are symbols of pride and patriotism. Moreover, France has led the charge for a "cultural exception" that would allow governments to keep out foreign entertainment products while subsidizing their own. French officials, who believe such protectionism is essential for saving cultural diversity from the Hollywood juggernaut, once condemned Steven Spielberg's 1993 Jurassic Park as a "threat to French identity." They succeeded in enshrining the "cultural exception" concept in a 2005 UNESCO agreement, and regularly fight for it in international trade negotiations.
Accentuate the positive
In addition, France has long assigned itself a "civilizing mission" to improve allies and colonies alike. In 2005, the government even ordered high schools in France to teach "the positive role" of French colonialism, i.e. uplifting the natives. (The decree was later rescinded.) Like a certain other nation whose founding principles sprang from the 18th century Enlightenment, France is not shy about its values. As Sarkozy recently observed: "In the United States and France, we think our ideas are destined to illuminate the world."
Sarkozy is eager to pursue that destiny. The new President has pledged to bolster not just France's economy, work ethic and diplomatic standing — he has also promised to "modernize and deepen the cultural activity of France." Details are sketchy, but the government has already proposed an end to admission charges at museums and, while cutting budgets elsewhere, hiked the Culture Ministry's by 3.2%, to $11 billion.
Whether such efforts will have much impact on foreign perception is another matter. In a September poll of 1,310 Americans for Le Figaro magazine, only 20% considered culture to be a domain in which France excels, far behind cuisine. Domestic expectations are low as well. Many French believe the country and its culture have been in decline since — pick a date: 1940 and the humiliating German occupation; 1954, the start of the divisive Algerian conflict; or 1968, the revolutionary year which conservatives like Sarkozy say brought France under the sway of a new, more casual generation that has undermined standards of education and deportment.
For French of all political colors, déclinisme has been a hot topic in recent years. Bookstores are full of jeremiads like France is Falling, The Great Waste, The War of the Two Frances and The Middle Class Adrift. Talk-show guests and opinion columnists decry France's fading fortunes, and even the French rugby team's failure at the World Cup — held in France this year — was chewed over as an index of national decay. But most of those laments involve the economy, and Sarkozy's ascension was due largely to his promise to attend to them.
Cultural decline is a more difficult failing to assess — and address. Traditionally a province of the right, it speaks to the nostalgia of some French for the more rigorous, hierarchical society of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Paradoxically, that starchy era inspired much of France's subsequent cultural vitality. "A lot of French artists were created in opposition to the education system," says Christophe Boïcos, a Paris art lecturer and gallery owner. "Romantics, Impressionists, Modernists — they were rebels against the academic standards of their day. But those standards were quite high and contributed to the impressive quality of the artists who rebelled against them."
The taint of talkiness
Quality, of course, is in the eye of the beholder — as is the very meaning of culture. The term originally referred to the growing of things, as in agriculture. Eventually it came to embrace the cultivation of art, music, poetry and other "high-culture" pursuits of a high-minded élite. In modern times, anthropologists and sociologists have broadened the term to embrace the "low-culture" enthusiasms of the masses, as well as caste systems, burial customs and other behavior.
The French like to have it all ways. Their government spends 1.5% of GDP supporting a wide array of cultural and recreational activities (vs. only 0.7% for Germany, 0.5% for the U.K. and 0.3% for the U.S.). The Culture Ministry, with its 11,200 employees, lavishes money on such "high-culture" mainstays as museums, opera houses and theater festivals. But the ministry also appointed a Minister for Rock 'n' Roll in the 1980s to help France compete against the Anglo-Saxons (unsuccessfully). Likewise, parliament in 2005 voted to designate foie gras as a protection-worthy part of the nation's cultural heritage.
Cultural subsidies in France are ubiquitous. Producers of just about any nonpornographic movie can get an advance from the government against box-office receipts (most loans are never fully repaid). Proceeds from an 11% tax on cinema tickets are plowed back into subsidies. Canal Plus, the country's leading pay-TV channel, must spend 20% of its revenues buying rights to French movies. By law, 40% of shows on TV and music on radio must be French. Separate quotas govern prime-time hours to ensure that French programming is not relegated to the middle of the night. The government provides special tax breaks for freelance workers in the performing arts. Painters and sculptors can get subsidized studio space. The state also runs a shadow program out of the Foreign Ministry that goes far beyond the cultural efforts of other major countries. France sends planeloads of artists, performers and their works abroad, and it subsidizes 148 cultural groups, 26 research centers and 176 archaeological digs overseas.
With all those advantages, why don't French cultural offerings fare better abroad? One problem is that many of them are in French, now merely the world's 12th most widely spoken language (Chinese is first, English second). Worse still, the major organs of cultural criticism and publicity — the global buzz machine — are increasingly based in the U.S. and Britain. "In the '40s and '50s, everybody knew France was the center of the art scene, and you had to come here to get noticed," says Quemin. "Now you have to go to New York."
Another problem may be the subsidies, which critics say ensure mediocrity. In his widely discussed 2006 book On Culture in America, former French cultural attaché Frédéric Martel marvels at how the U.S. can produce so much "high" culture of lofty quality with hardly any government support. He concludes that subsidy policies like France's discourage private participants — and money — from entering the cultural space. Martel observes: "If the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found, cultural life is everywhere."
Other critics warn that protecting cultural industries narrows their appeal. With a domestic market sheltered by quotas and a language barrier, French producers can thrive without selling overseas. Only about 1 in 5 French films gets exported to the U.S., 1 in 3 to Germany. "If France were the only nation that could decide what is art and what is not, then French artists would do very well," says Quemin. "But we're not the only player, so our artists have to learn to look outside."
Certain aspects of national character may also play a role. Abstraction and theory have long been prized in France's intellectual life and emphasized in its schools. Nowhere is that tendency more apparent than in French fiction, which still suffers from the introspective 1950s nouveau roman (new novel) movement. Many of today's most critically revered French novelists write spare, elegant fiction that doesn't travel well. Others practice what the French call autofiction — thinly veiled memoirs that make no bones about being conceived in deep self-absorption. Christine Angot received the 2006 Prix de Flore for her latest work, Rendez-vous, an exhaustively introspective dissection of her love affairs. One of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex. "In America, a writer wants to work hard and be successful," says François Busnel, editorial director of Lire, a popular magazine about books (only in France!). "French writers think they have to be intellectuals."
Conversely, foreign fiction — especially topical, realistic novels — sells well in France. Such story-driven Anglo-Saxon authors as William Boyd, John le Carré and Ian McEwan are over-represented on French best-seller lists, while Americans such as Paul Auster and Douglas Kennedy are considered adopted sons. "This is a place where literature is still taken seriously," says Kennedy, whose The Woman in the Fifth was a recent best seller in French translation. "But if you look at American fiction, it deals with the American condition, one way or another. French novelists produce interesting stuff, but what they are not doing is looking at France."
French cinema has also suffered from a nouveau roman complex. "The typical French film of the '80s and '90s had a bunch of people sitting at lunch and disagreeing with each other," quips Marc Levy, one of France's best-selling novelists. (His Et si c'Etait Vrai... , published in English as If Only It Were True, became the 2005 Hollywood film Just Like Heaven starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo.) "An hour and a half later, they are sitting at dinner, and some are agreeing while others are disagreeing." France today can make slick, highly commercial movies — Amélie, Brotherhood of the Wolf — but for many foreigners the taint of talkiness lingers.
The next act
How to make France a cultural giant again? One place to start is the education system, where a series of reforms over the years has crowded the arts out of the curriculum. "One learns to read at school, one doesn't learn to see," complains Pierre Rosenberg, a former director of the Louvre museum. To that end, Sarkozy has proposed an expansion of art-history courses for high schoolers. He has also promised measures to entice more of them to pursue the literature baccalaureate program. Once the most popular course of study, it is now far outstripped by the science and economics-sociology options. "We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason," says Education Minister Xavier Darcos. "They are always in demand."
Sarkozy sent a chill through the French intelligentsia last summer by calling for the "democratization" of culture. Many took this to mean that cultural policy should be based on market forces, not on professional judgments about quality. With more important adversaries to confront — notably the pampered civil-service unions — Sarkozy is unlikely to pick a fight over cultural subsidies, which remain vastly popular.
But the government may well try to foster private participation by tinkering with the tax system. "In the U.S. you can donate a painting to a museum and take a full deduction," says art expert Boïcos. "Here it's limited. Here the government makes the important decisions. But if the private sector got more involved and cultural institutions got more autonomy, France could undergo a major artistic revival." Sarkozy's appointment of Christine Albanel as Culture Minister looks like a vote for individual initiative: as director of Versailles, she has cultivated private donations and partnerships with businesses. The Louvre has gone one step further by effectively licensing its name to offshoots in Atlanta and Abu Dhabi.
A more difficult task will be to change French thinking. Though it is perilous to generalize about 60 million people, there is a strain in the national mind-set that distrusts commercial success. Opinion polls show that more young French aspire to government jobs than to careers in business. "Americans think that if artists are successful, they must be good," says Quemin. "We think that if they're successful, they're too commercial. Success is considered bad taste."
At the same time, other countries' thinking could use an update. Britain, Germany and the U.S. in particular are so focused on their own enormous cultural output that they tend to ignore France. Says Guy Walter, director of the Villa Gillet cultural center in Lyon: "When I point out a great new French novel to a New York publisher, I am told it's 'too Frenchy.' But Americans don't read French, so they don't really know."
What those foreigners are missing is that French culture is surprisingly lively. Its movies are getting more imaginative and accessible. Just look at the Taxi films of Luc Besson and Gérard Krawczyk, a rollicking series of Hong Kong-style action comedies; or at such intelligent yet crowd-pleasing works as Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both hits on the foreign art-house circuit. French novelists are focusing increasingly on the here and now: one of the big books of this year's literary rentrée, Yasmina Reza's L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night) is about Sarkozy's recent electoral campaign. Another standout, Olivier Adam's A l'Abri de Rien (In the Shelter of Nothing), concerns immigrants at the notorious Sangatte refugee camp. France's Japan-influenced bandes dessinées (comic-strip) artists have made their country a leader in one of literature's hottest genres: the graphic novel. Singers like Camille, Benjamin Biolay and Vincent Delerm have revived the chanson. Hip-hop artists like Senegal-born MC Solaar, Cyprus-born Diam's and Abd al Malik, a son of Congolese immigrants, have taken the verlan of the streets and turned it into a sharper, more poetic version of American rap.
Therein may lie France's return to global glory. The country's angry, ambitious minorities are committing culture all over the place. France has become a multiethnic bazaar of art, music and writing from the banlieues and disparate corners of the nonwhite world. African, Asian and Latin American music get more retail space in France than perhaps any other country. Movies from Afghanistan, Argentina, Hungary and other distant lands fill the cinemas. Authors of all nations are translated into French and, inevitably, will influence the next generation of French writers. Despite all its quotas and subsidies, France is a paradise for connoisseurs of foreign cultures. "France has always been a country where people could come from any country and immediately start painting or writing in French — or even not in French," says Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian whose movie based on her graphic novel Persepolis is France's 2008 Oscar entry in the Best Foreign Film category. "The richness of French culture is based on that quality."
And what keeps a nation great if not the infusion of new energy from the margins? Expand the definition of culture a bit, and you'll find three fields in which France excels by absorbing outside influences. First, France is arguably the world leader in fashion, thanks to the sharp antennae of its cosmopolitan designers. Second, French cuisine — built on the foundation of Italian and, increasingly, Asian traditions — remains the global standard. Third, French winemakers are using techniques developed abroad to retain their reputation for excellence in the face of competition from newer wine-growing regions. Tellingly, many French vines were long ago grafted onto disease-resistant rootstocks from, of all places, the U.S. "We have to take the risk of globalization," says Villa Gillet's Guy Walter. "We must welcome the outside world."
Jean-Paul Sartre, the giant of postwar French letters, wrote in 1946 to thank the U.S. for Hemingway, Faulkner and other writers who were then influencing French fiction — but whom Americans were starting to take for granted. "We shall give back to you these techniques which you have lent us," he promised. "We shall return them digested, intellectualized, less effective, and less brutal — consciously adapted to French taste. Because of this incessant exchange, which makes nations rediscover in other nations what they have invented first and then rejected, perhaps you will rediscover in these new [French] books the eternal youth of that 'old' Faulkner."
Thus will the world discover the eternal youth of France, a nation whose long quest for glory has honed a fine appreciation for the art of borrowing. And when the more conventional minds of the French cultural establishment — along with their self-occupied counterparts abroad — stop fretting about decline and start applauding the ferment on the fringes, France will reclaim its reputation as a cultural power, a land where every new season brings a harvest of genius.
With reporting by Grant Rosenberg/Paris
- posted on 01/13/2008
要想学鹿希这道烤羊排还真不容易。出去旅游能吃上当地风味,还是home made,真是一大幸事。羡慕鹿希有各式各样的朋友遍布世界各个犄角旮旯。
鹿希 wrote:
小城记 (5)高留与巴留
需要认真对待的是烤那一大块羊肩膀。院子里烧烤处一堆去年的葡萄枝已被点着,正劈里啪啦爆响,赶快将羊肉均匀戳些小洞,把蒜瓣一一嵌入,等树枝烟过雾散时放上架,翻动不能太勤,也不能放盐,否则会出水影响肉质。因不用烤炉,只能自己掌握时间,差不多时用一小快刀插入,抽出时刀上若无血水,说明肉也差不多了。吃时自己放盐胡椒什么的,> - Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/13/2008
真好看!
还记得鹿希写的一个意大利小镇,说那里的火车从来不会准点,强烈向往之~
- posted on 01/14/2008
老瓦,咱学法国人,周末只吃喝玩乐不工作,动脑筋的事得留给平时做。~~~~ 所以今天的答疑不管文化界的事,你不看俺都几乎改行从业狗仔专攻八卦了吗?你虽只是班副,但也不能在周末增加作业,俺早就不参加中国高考了!:-) 等上班时看了这篇长文再答。
绿茶同学:我不知道电影ratatouille 里的ratatouille 啥样,不是闭眼没看吗?但可以向你保证,真的la ratatouille 就是一锅煮得不能再煮的杂菜,是个人都会做。你不信去问个法国南方人证实一下哈,俺没骗你。这道菜的关键是不能放水,让菜自己的水炖自己味道才好。我认为早先发明这菜时,没有冰箱,所以得煮熟煮透才易存放,且天热时可以冷吃。
小曼小蒲:你没见我是身陷牢笼的困兽,看着蓝天追忆在自然里森林中的往事吗?七月说了嘛,流年似水啊!
村民同学说得对,那烤羊肉不好做,等先拥有一片葡萄园,才能有葡萄枝葡萄根,然后晒干来烤羊。不过住加州的同学可以实现这一愿望,先弄片葡萄园玩玩不迟。
谢各位鼓励。冬日愚快(古典发明的这词好,先用再谢)。 - Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/14/2008
八十一子 wrote:
这篇是真的有“味道”。:-)
正好中午看这篇,给肚子看得咕咕响。
我有好几年都没吃过烤羊了,作为后遗症,近期拟安排一次。 - Re: 小城记 (5)高留与巴留posted on 01/14/2008
好地方。
Please paste HTML code and press Enter.
(c) 2010 Maya Chilam Foundation