高级英语第二册第十四课学习辅导资料

高级英语（第二册） Lesson 14 Loving and Hating New York (Thomas Griffith)

1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart

design proclaiming “I love New York,” are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how

the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for bragging

was “bush” Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn’t have to assert

how special it was.

2 It isn’t the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the styles

and sets the trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with American taste as often

as it is out of step with American politics. Once it was the nation’s undisputed fashion

authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No

longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides itself on being a holdout from

prevailing American trends, a place to escape Common Denominator Land.

3 Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other cities

have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past

twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscanini’s NBC

Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms cloned and

canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, preempt the airways from

California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood. Vegas casinos

routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspot in Manhattan

can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the

most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.

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高级英语（第二册） Lesson 14 Loving and Hating New York (Thomas Griffith)

4 New York was never a good convention city – being regarded as unfriendly,

unsafe, overcrowded, and expensive – but it is making something of a comeback as

a tourist attraction. Even so, most Americans would probably rate New Orleans, San

Francisco, Washington, or Disneyland higher. A dozen other cities, including my

hometown of Seattle, are widely considered better cities to live in.

5 Why, then, do many Europeans call New York their favorite city? They take more

readily than do most Americans to its cosmopolitan complexities, its surviving, aloof,

European standards, its alien mixtures. Perhaps some of these Europeans are

reassured by the sight, on the twin fashion avenues of Madison and Fifth, of all those

familiar international names – the jewelers, shoe stores, and designer shops that exist

to flatter and bilk the frivolous rich. But no; what most excites Europeans is the city’s

charged, nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism .

6 New York is about energy, contention, and striving. And since it contains its

share of articulate losers, it is also about mockery, the put-down , the loser’s shrug

(“whaddya gonna do?”). It is about constant battles for subway seats, for a

cabdriver’s or a clerk’s or a waiter’s attention, for a foothold , a chance, a better

address, a larger billing. To win in New York is to be uneasy; to lose is to live in jostling

proximity to the frustrated majority.

7 New York was never Mecca to me. And though I have lived there more than half

my life, you won’t find me wearing an “I Love New York” T-shirt. But all in all, I

can’t think of many places in the world I’d rather live. It’s not easy to define why.

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高级英语（第二册） Lesson 14 Loving and Hating New York (Thomas Griffith)

8 Nature’s pleasures are much qualified in New York. You never see a star-filled

sky; the city’s bright glow arrogantly obscures the heavens. Sunsets can be

spectacular: oranges and reds tinting the sky over the Jersey meadows and gaudily

reflected in a thousand windows on Manhattan’s jagged skyline. Nature constantly

yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling

against encroaching cement and petrol fumes. Central Park, which Frederick Law

Olmsted designed as lungs for the city’s poor, is in places grassless and filled with

trash, no longer pristine yet lively with the noise and vivacity of people, largely youths,

blacks, and Puerto Ricans, enjoying themselves. On park benches sit older people,

mostly white, looking displaced. It has become less a tranquil park than an untidy carnival.

9 Not the glamour of the city, which never beckoned to me from a distance, but its

opportunity – to practice the kind of journalism I wanted – drew me to New York. I

wasn’t even sure how I’d measure up against others who had been more soundly

educated at Ivy League schools, or whether I could compete against that tough local

breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so highly motivated and single-minded,

such as Alfred Kazin, who for diversion (for heaven’t sake!) played Bach’s

Unaccompanied Partitas on the violin.

10 A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal and marketable of

one’s talents, still draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always, the

company of others fleeing something constricting where they came from. Together

these young share a freedom, a community of inexpensive amusements, a casual

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高级英语（第二册） Lesson 14 Loving and Hating New York (Thomas Griffith)

living, and some rough times. It can’t be the living conditions that appeal, for only fond

memory will forgive the inconvenience, risk, and squalor. Commercial Broadway may

be inaccessible to them, but there is off- Broadway, and then off-off-Broadway. If

painters disdain Madison Avenue’s plush art galleries, Madison Avenue dealers set up

shop in the grubby precincts of Soho. But the purity of a bohemian dedication can be

exaggerated. The artistic young inhabit the same Greenwich Village and its fringes in

which the experimentalists in the arts lived during the Depression, united by a world

against them. But the present generation is enough of a subculture to be a source of

profitable boutiques and coffeehouses. And it is not all that estranged.

11 Manhattan is an island cut off in most respects from mainland America, but in

two areas it remains dominant. It is the banking and the communications

headquarters for America. In both these roles it ratifies more than it creates. Wall

Street will advance the millions to make a Hollywood movie only if convinced that a

bestselling title or a star name will ensure its success. The networks’ news centers are

here, and the largest book publishers, and the biggest magazines – and therefore the

largest body of critics to appraise the films, the plays, the music, the books that others

have created. New York is a judging town, and often invokes standards that the rest of

the country deplores or ignores. A market for knowingness exists in New York that

doesn’t exist for knowledge.

12 The ad agencies are all here too, testing the markets and devising the catchy

jingles that will move millions from McDonald’s to Burger king, so that the ad

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高级英语（第二册） Lesson 14 Loving and Hating New York (Thomas Griffith)

agency’s “creative director” can lunch instead in Manhattan’s expense-account

French restaurants. The bankers and the admen. The marketing specialists and a

thousand well-paid ancillary service people, really set the city’s brittle tone— catering

to a wide American public whose numbers must be respected but whose tastes do not

have to shared. The condescending view from the fiftieth floor of the city’s crowds

below cuts these people off from humanity. So does an attitude which sees the public

only in terms of large, malleable numbers— as impersonally as does the clattering

subway turnstile beneath the office towers.

13 I am surprised by the lack of cynicism, particularly among the younger ones, of

those who work in such fields. The television generation grew up in the insistent

presence of hype, delights in much of it, and has no scruples about practicing it. Men

and woman do their jobs professionally, and, like the pilots who from great heights

bombed Hanoi, seem unmarked by it. They lead their real lives elsewhere, in the

Village bars they are indistinguishable in dress or behavior from would-be artists,

actors, and writers. The boundaries of “art for art’s sake” aren’t so rigid anymore; art

itself is less sharply defined, and those whose paintings don’t sell do illustrations;

those who can’ get acting jobs do commercials; those who are writing ambitious

novels sustain themselves on the magazines. Besides, serious art often feeds in the

popular these days, changing it with fond irony.

14 In time the newcomers find or from their won worlds; Manhatten is many such

words, huddled together but rarely interaction. I think this is what gives the city its

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