A. 作者Janet Fitch簡介 英文版
內容簡介
Astrid Magnussen is a twelve year old girl living in Hollywood, California. She and her mother, poet Ingrid Magnussen, live a solitary life with little outside influence. Ingrid left her husband, Klaus Anders, before Astrid was old enough to remember him and forbade him to contact Astrid after they left. Astrid relies solely on Ingrid and has trouble fitting in at school. However, Ingrid is self-centered, cold-hearted and eccentric. She lives by a set of her own rules and shows little interest in Astrid, sometimes seeming to forget she has a daughter at all. As a result, Astrid fears abandonment above all else.
Ingrid begins dating a man named Barry Kolker. At first Ingrid is disgusted by his vulgarity and finds him repulsive. Barry continues to woo her and Astrid watches her mother break every self-imposed rule as she becomes more involved with him. Eventually he's revealed as a womanizer, leaving Ingrid shattered and enraged. Numerous attempts at reconciliation leave Ingrid more and more humiliated and culminate with her breaking into Barry's house and spreading a mixture of DMSO, an arthritis drug, and oleander sap all over the surfaces of Barry's home. The DMSO allows the oleander poison to be absorbed into skin, ostensibly killing Barry. She is eventually charged with his murder and sentenced to life in prison. She promises her daughter that she will come back, but Astrid is sent to a series of foster homes.
The first foster family is that of Starr, a former stripper, drug addict, and alcoholic. She has two children of her own, as well as two other foster children. Starr takes in foster children because her own children were in foster care at one time e to her addictions. Despite the fact that he is nearly fifty years old, Astrid has an affair with Starr's boyfriend, Ray. As Ray becomes more and more disinterested in Starr, she relapses. One night, after a loud, drunken argument with Ray over his relationship with Astrid, Starr shoots Astrid with a .38. Astrid suffers some broken bones and stitches from the gunshots and is hospitalized for a few weeks.
Her next home is with the Turlocks. Ed and Marvel are the parents of a toddler. In their home, Astrid becomes an unpaid babysitter. Astrid befriends the Turlocks' next-door neighbor, a beautiful African-American woman named Olivia Johnstone. Astrid admires Olivia's beauty, wealth and hedonistic lifestyle. Olivia is a prostitute by profession and is hated by the Turlock family. After befriending Olivia, Astrid begins using drugs and performing oral sex on a boy in a park in exchange for some pot. Olivia teaches Astrid about all of the finer things in life. On her fifteenth birthday, Astrid goes for a walk, and is bitten by a pack of dogs, leaving scars on her arms and face. During the winter break, Astrid is expelled from the Turlock household after accidentally falling asleep at Olivia's house one night.
Next, Astrid is sent to the home of a Hispanic woman named Amelia Ramos. Amelia is an interior designer, originally from Argentina, and lives in Hollywood, with a huge, elegant house. Amelia has a son, but he has AIDS and the girls do not see him much. The other foster girls in the house are all Latino. All the girls in Amelia's household, however, are treated the same in that they are fed dinner, but Amelia keeps a lock on her fridge so the girls starve in the mornings. Astrid starves to the point that she stops menstruating. She resorts to eating unfinished lunches from the garbage at school. Astrid eventually gets a new caseworker who finds her a new placement.
Astrid is taken in by a former actress named Claire Richards, and her husband, Ron. Claire does everything she can to ensure Astrid's comfort. For once, Astrid is doing well in school and pursuing art. Astrid continues corresponding with her mother in prison, but Astrid becomes increasingly bitter towards Ingrid. Claire suspects that Ron is having an affair, and Astrid watches their fights worsen as Ron makes constant trips away from home. After New Years, Claire commits suicide by overdosing.
Astrid is then placed in MacLaren Children's Center (known as Mac), which is known as a final resort for foster kids without a placement. Astrid meets a boy named Paul Trout, and they bond through the shared experience of living in foster care.
Astrid's final home is with Russian immigrant Rena Grushenka. She intentionally chooses Rena over better prospective foster parents because she is devastated by Claire's death, and does not want to become part of a nuclear family. Astrid is afraid it would be too easy to forget the pain she has gone through. At Rena's, she lives with two other teenage girls named Niki and a pregnant girl named Yvonne. Astrid becomes very close friends with Niki and Yvonne and has sex with Rena's boyfriend Sergei, one night after getting high on acid with Niki, Astrid begins to have memories of a woman named Annie.
Meanwhile, Ingrid has begun to build up a following of fans and admirers from prison, who all believe she is innocent. Ingrid and her lawyer begin to build up a case to get Ingrid released from prison. However, their case depends on Astrid — if she testifies that Ingrid did not murder Barry, Ingrid could probably get out, but if she testifies the truth, Ingrid could not win her case. Astrid realizes that she is in a position of power over her mother, and tells her that unless she answers some of her questions, she will testify against her. Astrid asks Ingrid about her father and Barry and then Annie, Ingrid is shattered to learn that Astrid remembers Annie at all, and tells Astrid that Annie was a babysitter who Ingrid left Astrid with for over a year, making Astrid realise why she fears abandonment from her mother. Astrid lets Ingrid know how damaged she is because of what Ingrid did to her, even going as far as becoming completely gothic, Astrid gives Ingrid a choice, to have her testify or to have her return to the person her mother knew her as. Astrid ends up not testifying in the case.
Two years later, Astrid is 20 years old and living with Paul in a run down flat in Berlin, Germany. Astrid has spent a lot of her time and effort into buying suitcases and making them into artwork detailing the journey Astrid has taken from her mothers imprisonment to her life with Rena. One afternoon Paul brings home a newspaper article reporting Ingrid's release from prison after winning her appeals trial. Astrid acknowledges the power that her mother still has over her and even reveals her secret dream of going back to California. She never fulfills this dream, knowing that too much has happened and she would never fit into the daughter mold her mother wants from her. She also realizes that if she returns to California, she must abandon Paul, leaving him much like she has been abandoned so many times before. She embraces the life she has lived, the past that has made her who she is and accepts her mother's love, but continues to live the life she leads.
作者簡介：
Janet Fitch (born 1955) is most famously known as the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon.
Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become an historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction.
Janet Fitch is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction.
Some of her favorite authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.
Her third novel, Paint It Black, named after the Rolling Stones song of the same name, was published in September 2006.
Extra:In addition to the overwhelming success of White Oleander, she has published short stories in literary journals such as A Room of One's Own, briefly attended film school in the director's program at the University of Southern California, worked at various times as a typesetter, a proofreader, a graphic artist, a freelance journalist, the managing editor of American Film magazine, and the editor of The Mancos Times Tribune, a weekly newspaper in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Currently, she teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California』s Masters of Professional Writing program. She lives in Los Angeles.
White Oleander, the story published in Black Warrior Review which grew into her novel, was named as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 1994.
Interestingly enough, the story was rejected from The Ontario Review with a note from Joyce Carol Oates, long a literary hero of Fitch』s, saying that while she enjoyed it, it seemed more like the first chapter of a novel than a short story. It had never occurred to Fitch to extend the story, but, armed with this advice, she decided to take a chance and write the novel.
Her writing process is simple. "I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not," she says. "I never get inspired unless I'm already writing. I write every day, including weekends. For writers there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them."
Her journalistic experience proved a vaccination against writer's block. "When I had the newspaper, I had to come up with 12 or 15 stories a week regardless of whether there was anything to write about. Someone would call me up and say, "My kid just caught a big fish, come over and take a picture of it." So you'd go take a picture of the fish and then interview the kid. What do you ask a kid who caught a big fish? "What kind of t were you using? Where'd you catch it? What time of day was it?" I learned you could always write. You just couldn't be too perfectionistic about it."
But the artistry of her work, the lines that take the reader's breath away, were hard-won. "I could always tell a story," she said, "but I needed to learn the poetics of the literary craft." She found her mentor in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman, under whom she learned to work until she found the right word, the right sound.
Poetry plays a great part in her writing of prose fiction. "I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language. Their startling originality is a challenge. I like Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Sexton. There are parts of White Oleander which use cadences of Pound--whatever you think of Pound, there's a specific music to him. I like Joseph Brodsky and the late Donald Rawley. A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words."
B. 誰能介紹下HIPHOP的品牌以及他們的特色的產品
PHAT FARM 由著名HIPHOP DEF JAM RECORDS<唱片公司>創立於1992年，Rocawear的形象代言人已經是貝克漢姆的老婆，辣妹維多利亞。
ROCA WEAR 創立於1999,著名RAPPER JAY-Z做形象代言人.
SEAN JOHN 創立於1991年,形象代言人是PUFFY DIDDY,本人最喜歡HIPHOP品牌ENYCE 創立於1996年
VOKAL 創立於1997年,形象代言人人是當前很紅的RAPPER NELLY
LRG(Lifted Research Group) 創立於1999,URBAN style接近於HIPHOP SYTLE.AVIREX 創立於1975PELLE PELLE 創立於1978,起初做皮草生意起家,然後漸漸地轉形於HIPHIP OUTWEAR
ECKO 創立於1993,以做T- SHIRT的形式起家..發展到今天已經是人人皆知的是HIPHOP 和STREET style的品牌!
FUBU 創立於1992年美國NEW YORK CITY,由 RAPPER LL COOL J做形象代言人,曾經大紫大紅的品牌開始走下坡路.
（轉一個）
TRIBAL
NY
ROCA WEAR
G-UNIT
FUBU
BAPE
LRG
THE SOURCE
PLAYERZ69
KARL KANI
SEAN JOHN
KANGOL
MECCA
PHAT FARM
PNB NATION
TRIP 5 SOUL
SNOOP DOGG
Pelle Pelle
ENYCE
ECKO
Akademiks
VOKAL
SHADY
附一些品牌歷史:
hiphop作為一門文化越來越得到大家的認可，服飾作為他最直接表現出來的元素更是得
到了極大的發展，不要光以為大t恤大褲子就是hiphop style，他的內涵很多，品牌也很
多，許多走在了時尚的最前沿，和gucci lv等都有cross－over，引領著時尚的方向，再
者，象我們這么大歲數正是拗街頭風格的時候，以後上班整天工作裝，出門正裝，沒樂
趣啊，不講廢話，下面都是我搜集整理的，大家有興趣可以去官方網站看看，一般都是
KARL KANI
不能不提它,HIPHOP WEAR中最傳奇的人物KARL KANI,(本名是CARL WILLIAMS)創造的同名
品牌.早在77年的時候就已經成為全美最大的黑人自創HIPHOP服裝品牌.想說的是,他的衣
服特點每件都有他的****商標,KARL KANI本身就是創始人兼設計師,曾經還受到前美國總
統柯林頓的召見,是黑人設計師成功的象徵性人物!!!!
SEAN JOHN
SEAN JOH由大名鼎鼎的吹牛老爹P DIDDY創立的品牌，最近還得了VH1的時尚大獎，他
的東西更多的加入了白人休閑服飾的元素，是第一個走進白人的時尚品牌
KANGOL
熱愛KANGOL的人可以說遍布了全世界.38年創立的英國品牌.BEATLES,RUN
DMC,LLCOOLJ,JANET JACKSON,到已經去世的值得尊敬的黛安娜王妃都是它的忠實支持
者. 據我所知,KANGOL的名字是由三個詞中的字母拼成的,分別是"KNITTING"(編織)的
K,"ANGORA"(安哥拉羊毛)的A,以及"WOOL"中的OL.這個品牌對商品的堅持是不言而喻的.
MECCA
這個牌子其實剛成立的時候並不是那麼受人矚目,84年創立的.最有特色的就是它的復古
鞋和OLD SHOOL 風格的棒秋外套,夾克和美式足球JERZY!!!為什麼我要提它呢?我最先知
道的時候是因為看到NOTORIOUS B.I.G在VEDIO JUICY中穿著MECCA CHURSKY美式足球球衣
和BILL COSBY在COSBY SHOW經常穿著MECCA新款毛衣!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!太太太吸引我
PHAT FARM
RUSSEL SIMMONS在92年成立的品牌..沒有它..估計SIMMON也寫不了LIFE AND DEF那書..
怎麼評價這個牌子...我得想想....男式精品?這個一個EAST COAST風格走向世界的設計,
有別於其他HIPHOP服飾,它結合了HIPHOP於時尚,SO有時尚的元素.."黑"化的程度沒有那
么深,也是它的成功所在吧. 美國許多喜歡OLD SCHOOL風格的HIPHOPA對它都情有獨衷,是
HIPHOP市場上最POPOLAR的BRAND了
PNB NATION
也許有人注意了,當時還沒有創立SHADY的EMINEM,是PNB的瘋狂FANS,不管是出席頒獎典禮
還是平時都喜歡一身PNB套裝.這個品牌誕生於87年,屬於OLD SCHOOL塗鴉風格的HIPHOP走
向的BRAND,由最受尊敬的塗鴉團體(FAME CITY)所成立的,而FC是由PHIL 167,AKS,THUD成
立於NYC的,這個團體擁有非常非常非常有價值的成員!!!!包括知名的DASH 和KAWS!!!!是
IRT最有名的一群人.尤其是1和3系列方面,今天這些人在NY創作了一些最精細的壁畫,因
此BRUE,WEST AND ZULU共同成立了PNB NATION公司,最早將其創造的塗鴉風格帶入了進
去.許多後起之秀也紛紛在近幾年效仿之~,被譽為近代塗鴉藝術最有貢獻的品牌~
TRIP 5 SOUL
憑著一股對衣服的熱情,CAMELLA EHLKE在89年NYC創立了TRIPLE 5,由於處於地下藝術的
發展重地和HIPHOP文化的黃金時代,使555-SOUL很快成為年輕人的焦點.值得一提的是,它
最初的設計靈感都來字街上流浪漢身上滑稽的雷鬼樂的服飾,很快的,他自創的服飾在
HIPHOP界廣受好評.97年是對555最重要的一年.因為它將NYC的總店從東邊搬到了中部,並
得到指明街頭設計師品牌STAPLE創辦人,設計師JEFF NG,SSUR 和STASH的幫忙.成功的開
創了男裝和女裝的兩條線..是即適合運動又時髦的服飾,比較有實用性和流行色彩.2000
年這個BRAND才正式進軍亞洲.它的棒球外套,軍帽,復古外套都很受好評.
SNOOP DOGG
看名字咯,SNOOPDOGG創立的同名品牌~不能不提~這位~他是先成立DOGG HOUSE唱片公司
的,然後為了把旗下的歌手一手包辦,,創立了自己的品牌...同時也打響了自己的品牌的
知名度.目前是美國WESTCOAST數一數二的品牌了.
Roca Wear
Roca Wear和Roc-A-Fella公司與Comet Group服裝製造商合資成立,是由Damon Dash和
Jay-z一起創立的.Damon Dash從小在Harlem長大,30歲時在黑人娛樂界擁有一股相當程度
的影響力,而Roca Wear是在99年才引進給美國的消費者.當時正好是Jay-z名垂青史的
HARD KNOCK LIFE TOUR巡迴演唱會,當時演唱會中的所有藝人,包括
REDMAN,METHODMAN,DMX,MEMPHOIS BLEEK,BEATIE SIGEL和DJ CLUE都穿ROCA WEAR的衣
服,DASH以他豐富經驗下的新穎行銷手段,掌握了這個機會並且利用巡迴這場演唱會的免
費宣傳把ROCA WEAR的名號帶到了民眾眼前,隨著演唱會巡迴到第40個城市,使得在創立的
第一年就變成HIPHOP WEAR的銷售冠軍,還曾看過一個VEDIO INTERVIEW,DASH說,這都歸功
於ROCA WEAR這個品牌確保衣服呈現真實生活風格,並注重每一細節包括設計,品牌和形
象.這兩年ROCA WEAR也把市場重點部分轉移到了女裝.他的設計雖然沒有PF,SJ的大方高
貴,但充滿了生活話和舒適感,我最喜歡它的空軍外套^^.
Pelle Pelle
Pelle Pelle是combined了European style和street soul然後再創新consistently
innovative and fashionable collections.
ENYCE
ENYCE的發音是取自NYC的,也就是"En-ee-chay".這個品牌比較重視衣服的款式和細節,應
該就是下一個Urban Clothing Leader .
ECKO
93年創立的品牌,目前似乎更受SKATER的關愛.感覺這從去年開始在倒退了.這個牌子見的
較多，可能出名早的緣故，不大喜歡
Akademiks
老黑喜歡的牌子
VOKAL
NELLY自己的FASHION CLOTHING LINE!!!!
G-UNIT
去年大紅大紫的說唱明星50cent所在的團體g-unit創立的品牌
SHADY
大家都知道的說唱明星eminem創立的品牌
其實這么多牌子認真看的肯定沒幾個人，不過要因為這個帖子有人喜歡上hiphop
cloth，喜歡上hiphop文化，那就沒白累了!