书读少了

最近报读得少了，因为去读书了，因为发现，不读书，连报也读不懂了。

“The progress of the Chinese people,” LuXun declared, fifteen years before his own first satirical stories werepublished, “begins withscience fiction.”

The New York Review of Books June 7，2018 The Fantastic Truth About China

读罢这篇评论，才知道鲁迅还说过这话，汗颜。

And while much of the genre remains escapist entertainment for the nation’s surplus of engineering students, its more literary practitioners have reclaimed its place at thevanguardof China’s national introspection.They are using it as aTrojan horseto sneak in truth so bliquely, offering notfeel-good bromidesbut twisted visions of what modern China has become.

...

Han Song himself—winner of the 2017 Chinese Nebula Award—is no less grim. His story “Security Check” in Touchable Unreality parodies China’s ubiquitous subway security scans, a symbol of the nanny state,which he imagines intensifying ad absurdum; while in “Finished,” an unfeelingboss traps a worker in aKafkaesqueargument about whyhe cannot get paid for his labor.

Webster：

Kafkaesque

adjective/ˌkäf-kə-ˈesk, ˌkaf-/

Franz Kafka(1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fictionvividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individualin the 20th century. Kafka's work is characterized by nightmarish settings inwhich characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority. Thus, thewordKafkaesqueis often applied to bizarre andimpersonal administrative situations where the individual feels powerless to understandor control what is happening. The first recorded appearance of"Kafkaesque" in English was in 1946.

DEFINITION

1.: of, relating to, or suggestive of FranzKafkaor his writings;especially: having a nightmarishly complex,bizarre, or illogical quality

特洛伊木马是奥德修斯的杰作，结果是特洛伊的倾覆，然而胜利并没有让奥德修斯成为英雄，而是给了他十年海上的漂泊，从这层意义上，奥德修斯才是英雄。

卡夫卡的《变形记》要比《城堡》出名得多，但更出名的，还是《海边的卡夫卡》吧，嘿嘿。

好吧，另一篇The Economist上的文章，劈头就来了一句:THEY’RE watching you.把奥威尔的小说融入了现实。

...

I spy with my many eyes

When East Germany collapsed in 1989, peoplemarvelled at the store of information the Stasi security service had garneredon them, and the vast network of informants it took to compile it. …AI helpsthem find needles in the digital haystacks thus assembled. Technologies thatonce seemed a friend of freedom, allowing dissidents in dictatorships tocommunicate and organise more easily, now look moreOrwellian, letting autocrats watch people even more closely thanthe Stasi did.

……

The not-quite-Gulag archipelago

As a result, more and more camps are beingbuilt: the re-educationarchipelagois adding islands even faster than the South China Sea.

I spy with my many eyes其实来自一句童谣，I spy with my little eyes. 所以童谣的确可以很可怕，是不是？比如阿婆的Ten little Indians，又或是最近的一首Lockdown，lockdown所反映的现实：

Lockdown, lockdown, lock the door

Shut the lights off, say no more

Go behind the desk and hide

Wait until it’s safe inside

Lockdown, lockdown, it’s all done

Now it’s time to have some fun!

...

Lockdown drills are common in schoolsacross the US.

TheGuardian 20180610 app

Orwellian

Vocabulary.com:

George Orwell is best known for his 1949dystopian novel "1984," with its themes of social injustice and acontrolling, authoritarian government. The wordOrwellianis most often used to talk about real-lifesituations that are reminiscent of this kind of state control and surveillance,called "Big Brother" in the book. Any hint that our government iswatching or listening to us as we make phone calls or do Internet searchesfeels at least a little bitOrwellian.

Gulag archipelago

wikipedia:

The Gulag Archipelagois a three-volume book written between 1958 and 1968 by Russianwriter and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

积极的结论是：借助于文学的语言，我们加以描述的现实进入了一个早已为人熟知的公共领域，变得更容易理解，或者，正相反，对于像我一样，读书少的人，则变得更为费解。所以说，多读书，总是好的。

换句话来说，不读报，又怎么知道自己读书少呢？

然而消极的结论也可以是这样的：这些特定的文学词汇，指向的是一种特定的回忆，在这个政治性的记忆框架中，以及由之衍生出的隐喻中，我们看到的，只能是一个灰暗的未来。就像真理部的口号一样，谁掌握了过去，就掌握了未来。

那么，谁掌握过去呢？