51吃瓜

Frida was confined to her bed for nine months鈥攁n eternity for an active six-year-old. Her father tended to her with care, and when she was finally given the go-ahead to return to school, Guillermo prescribed sports. Frida excelled in soccer, swimming, roller-skating, and boxing. She grew stronger, but her right leg remained puny and withered. She was ostracized at school for her 鈥減eg leg.鈥� To help compensate for her loneliness, her father, who believed her to be the most like him of all his daughters 鈥� gave her books from his library and taught her how to take and develop photographs.

The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they live they will be an ostracised [sic] class, and invidious distinctions will be made against them in the world of work. Thrown on their own resources they have all the hardships that men have to encounter in earning their daily bread, with the added disabilities which grow out of disfranchisement.

The pampero, dreaded on shore as well as at sea, blows with tremendous force across this region. There is not a cloud in the sky. The night may be perfectly calm. Mosquitoes in vast numbers are busy with their sharp stings. Suddenly a rustling in the woods may be heard afar off. The noise increases into a dull roar. Clouds appear above the horizon. Still all is calm. The mosquitoes vanish. The dogs are howling in anticipation of danger. As if by magic, dark masses of clouds cover the heavens like a curtain. They are rent asunder, thunder roars, lightning flashes, and the wind, like an army of wild beasts, rushes on.

When the heat is at the greatest, a pampero suddenly comes, with its accompaniment of rain, thunder and lightning, and cools the air. Pampero winds from the W. and W.S.W. with nothing to impede their progress across the extended Pampas, blow with great violence, raising clouds of dust, and obliging every one to close windows and doors. Being off the land, they are not dangerous to shipping; though vessels at the mouth of the river have been blown in sea hundreds of miles, by a Pampero.

Hot, harsh, arid wastelands, nothing but sand, sky, and rocks. Majestic, sweeping landscapes, teeming with a life that seems it shouldn鈥檛 be, and more things to see, experience, and explore than one could imagine to fit in a lifetime. These are two ways to describe the desert, neither wrong, and neither giving the whole picture. A land of contrasts, with razor thin lines between polar opposites: pleasure and pain, life and death, success and failure, bleakness and beauty. The desert is a truly desolate and wondrous place.

Each of [J. G.] Ballard鈥檚 98 short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own. His personal vocabulary of scenarios imprints itself from the very first, each image with the quality of a newly minted archetype. Ballard was the poet of desolate landscapes marked by signs of a withdrawn human presence: drained swimming pools, abandoned lots littered with consumer goods, empty space stations, sites of military or vehicular tragedies.