题目内容
Policeman as a Writer
I decided to begin the term's work with the short story since that form. would be the easiest for the police officers, not only because most of their reading up to then had probably been in that genre, but also because a study of the reaction of people to various situations was something they relied on in their daily work. For instance, they had to be able to predict how others would react to their directives and interventions be- fore deciding on their own form. of action;they had to be able to take in the details of a situation quickly and correctly before intervening. No matter how factual and sparse police reports may seem to us, they must make use of a selection of vital detail, similar to which a writer of a short story has to make.
This was taught to me by one of my students, a captain, at the end of the term. I had begun the study of the short story by stressing the differences between a factual report, such as a scientist's or a policeman's report, and the presentation of a creative writer. While a selection of necessary details is involved in both, the officer must remain neutral and clearly try to present a picture of the facts, while the artist usually begins with a preconceived message or attitude which is then transmitted through the use of carefully selected de- tails of action described in words intended to provoke associations and emotional reactions in the reader. Only at the end of the term did the captain point out to me that he and his men also try to evaluate the events they describe and that their description of a sequence of events must of necessity be structured and colored by their understanding of what has taken place.
The policemen's reactions to events and characters in the stories were surprisingly unprejudiced...They did not object to writers whose stories had to do with their protagonist' s rebellion against society' s accepted values. Nor did stories in which the strong father becomes the villain and in which our usual ideals of manhood are turned around offend them. The many hunters among my students readily granted the message in those hunting tales in which sensitivity triumphs over male aggressiveness, stories that show the boy becoming a man because he fails to shoot the deer, goose, or catbird. The only characters they did object to were those they thought unrealistic. As the previous class had done, this one also excelled in interpreting the ways in which characters reveal themselves, subtly manipulate and influence each other; they, too, understood how the story usually saves its insight, its revelation, for the end.
This almost instinctive, grasp of the writing of fiction was revealed when the policemen volunteered to write their own short stories. They not only took great pains with plot and character, but with style. and language. The stories were surprisingly well written, revealing an understanding of what a solid short story must contain; the revelation of character, the use of background description and language to create atmosphere and mood, the need to sustain suspense and get make each event as it occurs seem natural, the insight achieved either by the characters in the story or the reader or both. They tended to favor surprise endings. Some stories were sheer fantasies, or derived from previous reading, films, or television shows. Most wrote stories, obviously based on their own experiences, which revealed the amazing distance they must put between their personal lives and their work, which is part of the training for being a good cop. These stories, as well as their discussions of them, showed how coolly they judged their own weaknesses as well as the humor with which they accepted some of the difficulties or injustices of existence. Despite their authors' unmistakable sense of irony and awareness of corruption, these stories demonstrated how clearly, almost naively, these police men wanted to continue to believe
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The earth is witnessing an urban revolution, as people worldwide crowd into towns and cities. In 1800 only five per cent of the world's population were urban dwellers; now the proportion has risen to more than forty-five percent, and by the year 2010 more people will live in towns and cities than in the countryside. Humanity will, for the first time, have become a predominantly urban species.
Though the world is getting more crowded by the day, absolute numbers of population are less important than where people concentrate and whether these areas can cope with them. Even densities, however, tell us nothing about the quality of the infrastructure—roads, housing and job creation, for example—or the availability of crucial services.
The main question, then, is not how many people there are in a given area, but how well their needs can be met. Density figures have to be set beside measurements of wealth and employment, the quality of housing and the availability of education, medical care, clean water, sanitation and other vital services. The urban revolution is taking place mainly in the Third World, where it is hardest to accommodate.
Between 1950 and 1985 the number of city dwellers grew more than twice as fast in the Third World as in industrialized countries. During this period, the urban population of the developed world increased from 477 million to 838 million, less than double; but it quadrupled in developing countries, from 286 million to 1.14 billion. Africa's urban population is racing along at five percent a year on average, doubling city numbers every fourteen years. By the turn of the century, three in every four Latin Americans will live in urban areas, as will two in every five Asians and one in every three Africans. Developing countries will have to increase their urban facilities by two thirds by then, if they are to maintain even their present inadequate levels of services and housing.
In 1940 only one out of every hundred of the world's people lived in a really big city, one with a population of over a million. By 1980 this proportion had already risen to one in ten. Two of the world's biggest cities, Mexico and Sao Paulo, are already bursting at the seams—and their populations are doubling in less than twenty years.
About a third of the people of the Third World's cities now live in desperately overcrowded slums and squatter settlements. Many are unemployed, uneducated, undernourished and chronically sick. Tens of millions of new people arrive every year, flocking in from the countryside in what is the greatest mass migration in history.
Pushed out of the countryside by rural poverty and drawn to the cities in the hope of a better life, they find no houses waiting for them, no water supplies, no sewerage, no schools. They throw up makeshift hovels, built of whatever they can find. sticks, fronds, cardboard, tar-paper, straw, petrol tins and, if they are lucky, corrugated iron. They have to take the land none else wants; land that is too wet, too dry, too steep or too polluted for normal habitation.
Yet all over the world the inhabitants of these apparently hopeless slums show extraordinary enterprise in improving their lives. While many settlements remain stuck in apathy, many others are gradually improved through the vigour and co-operation of their people, who turn flimsy shacks into solid buildings, build school, lay out streets and put in electricity and water supplies.
Governments can help by giving the squatters the right to the land that they have usually occupied illegally, giving them the incentive to improve their homes and neighborhoods. The most important way to ameliorate the effects of the Third World's exploding cities, however, is to slow down the migration. This involves correcting the bias most governments show towards cities and towns and against the countryside. With few
A third of the people in Third World cities ______ .
Bilateral asymmetry of the claws comes about gradually. In the juvenile fourth and fifth stages of development, the paired claws are symmetrical and cutter like. Asymmetry begins to appear in the juvenile sixth stage of development, and the paired claws further diverge toward well-defined cutter and crusher claws during succeeding stages. An intriguing aspect of this development was discovered by Victor Emmer. He found that if one of the paired claws is removed during the fourth or fifth stage, the intact claw invariably becomes a crusher, while the regenerated claw becomes a cutter. Removal of a claw during a later juvenile stage or during adulthood, when asymmetry is present, does not alter the asymmetry; the intact and regenerate claws retain their original structures.
These observations indicate that the conditions that trigger differentiation must operate in a random manner when the paired claws are intact, but in a nonrandom manner when one of the claws is lost. One possible explanation is that differential use of the claws determines their asymmetry. Perhaps the claw that is used more becomes the crusher. This would explain why, when one of the claws is missing during the fourth or fifth stage, the intact claw always becomes a crusher. With two intact claws, initial use of one claw might prompt the animal to use it more than the other throughout the juvenile fourth and fifth stages, causing it to become a crusher.
To test this hypothesis, researchers raised lobsters in the juvenile fourth and fifth stages of development in a laboratory environment in which the lobsters could manipulate oyster chips. (Not coincidentally, at this stage of development lobsters typically change from a habitat where they drift passively, to the ocean floor where they have the opportunity to be more active by borrowing in the substrate.) Under these conditions, the lobsters developed asymmetric claws, half with crusher claws on the left, and half with crusher claws on the right. In contrast, when juvenile lobsters were reared in a smooth tank without the oyster chips, the majority developed two cutter claws. This unusual configuration of symmetrical cutter claws did not change when the lobsters were subsequently placed in a ma nipulable environment or when they lost and regenerated one or both claws.
The passage is primarily concerned with ______ .
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