Count on being watched while strolling along George Orwell Place.
Tag Archive: literature
LOVE the bartender, and the targets.
“Move your whiskey, before you start shooting.” Sage advise.
Night of January 16th is a play written by Ayn Rand. It takes place entirely in a court room and is centered on a murder trial. It was a hit of the 1935-36 Broadway season. The play deals with issues of a man’s ability to regard oneself as important and exist in a society where moral decay is ever prevalent. It also deals with issues of love, loyalty and betrayal.
One particularly interesting feature of the play is that members of the audience are picked to take on the role of jury members each night. Depending on whether the “Jury” finds the defendant of the case, as in the play, “guilty” or “not guilty” – the play would have different endings. Another unique feature of the play is that it does not state what the true events were on the night of January 16th, forcing the actors performing the show to decide how much of their character’s testimony is actually true. Since several witnesses contradict each other, it is almost certain that some of them are lying.
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I performed in this play in high school. On the morning of January 17th, students arrived on campus to find this in the quad, plus new posters for the upcoming play posted around the campus:
Dune humor.
My friend Timmy sent us a Yule card this year. I couldn’t help but notice the stamp, an Ayn Rand stamp!
Who knew there was one? I don’t know where he got it, but he had to add extra stamps to make the right amount.
Can’t WAIT to see this: a thriller based on Poe’s stories, starring John Cusack, directed by James McTeigue (V For Vendetta):
“When a mother and daughter are found brutally murdered in 19th century Baltimore, Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) makes a startling discovery: the crime resembles a fictional murder described in gory detail in the local newspaper–part of a collection of stories penned by struggling writer and social pariah Edgar Allan Poe. But even as Poe is questioned by police, another grisly murder occurs, also inspired by a popular Poe story.
“Realizing a serial killer is on the loose using Poe’s writings as the backdrop for his bloody rampage, Fields enlists the author’s help in stopping the attacks. But when it appears someone close to Poe may become the murderer’s next victim, the stakes become even higher and the inventor of the detective story calls on his own powers of deduction to try to solve the case before it’s too late.”
Inspired by “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson, and the movie of the same name:
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“Curious officers could now inspect the secrets of the service yard – see where the electric power had come from, and what ‘secret weapons’ there were.
“The victorious generals descended from the towers and went off to breakfast. Without knowing any of them, I feel confident that their appetite that June morning left nothing to be desired and that they drank deeply. An alcoholic hum would not in the least disturb the ideological harmony in their heads. And what they had for hearts was something installed with a screwdriver.
“The number of those killed or wounded was about six hundred, according to the stories, but according to figures given by the Kengir Division’s Production Planning Section, which became known some months later, it was more than seven hundred. When they had crammed the camp hospital with wounded, they began taking them into town. (The free workers were informed that the troops had fired only blanks, and that prisoners had been killing each other.)
“It was tempting to make the survivors dig the graves, but to prevent the story from spreading too far, this was done by troops. They buried three hundred in a corner of the camp, and the rest somewhere out on the steppe.
“All day on June 25, the prisoners lay face down on the steppe in the sun (for days on end the heat had been unmerciful), while in the camp there was endless searching and breaking open and shaking out. Later bread and water were brought out onto the steppe. The officers had lists ready. They called the roll, put a tick by those who were still alive, gave them their bread ration, and consulting their lists, at once divided the prisoners into groups.
“The members of the Commission and other suspects were locked up in the camp jail, which no longer needed for sightseers. More than a thousand people were selected for dispatch either to closed prisons or to Kolyma (as always, these lists were drawn up partly by guesswork, so that many who had not been involved at all found their way into them).
“May this picture of the pacification bring peace to the souls of those on whom the last chapters have grated. Hands off, keep away! No one will have to take refuge in the ‘safe deposit,’ and the punitive squads will never face retribution!
“On June 26, the prisoners were made to spend the whole day taking down the barricades and bricking in the gaps.
“On June 27, they were marched out to work. Those trains in the sidings would wait no longer for working hands!
“The tanks which had crushed Kengir traveled under their own power to Rudnik and crawled around for the zeks to see. And draw their conclusions…
“The trial of the rebel leaders took place in autumn, 1955, in camera, of course, and indeed we know nothing much about it. …Kuznetsov, they say, was very sure of himself, and tried to prove that he had behaved impeccably and could have done no better. We do not know what sentences were passed. Sluchenkov, Mikhail Keller, and Knopkus were probably shot. I say probably because they certainly would have been shot earlier – but perhaps 1955 softened their fate?
“Back in Kengir all was made ready for a life of honest toil. The bosses did not fail to create teams of shock workers from among yesterday’s rebels. The ‘self-financing’ system flourished. Food stalls were busy, rubbishy films were shown. Warders and officers again sneaked into the service yard to have things made privately – a fishing reel, a money box – or to get the clasp mended on a lady’s handbag. The rebel shoemakers and tailors (Lithuanians and Western Ukrainians) made light, elegant boots for the bosses, and dresses for their wives. As of old, the zeks at the separating plant were ordered to strip lead from the cables and bring it back to the camp to be melted down for shot, so that the comrade officers could go hunting antelopes.
“By now disarray had spread throughout the Archipelago and reached Kengir. Bars were not put back at the windows, huts were no longer locked. The two-thirds’ parole system was introduced, and there was even a quite unprecedented re-registration of 58’s – the half-dead were released.
“The grass on graves is usually very thick and green.
“In 1956 the camp area itself was liquidated. Local residents, exiles who had stayed on in Kengir, discovered where they were buried – and brought steppe tulips to put on their graves.
“Whenever you pass the Dolgoruky monument, remember that it was unveiled during the Kengir revolt – and so has come to be in some sense a memorial to Kengir.”
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This will be the last installment of this series. I want to thank everyone who stuck with it: as you know, the rewards were great. I’m simply burned out on this project. I’ve hand-typed 149 pages in 11-point font with narrow margins. I did want to bring the entire story of the Kengir revolt to you.
The final, seventh book is relatively short, and deals with exile. Seems it sucked even harder than hard labor camp. At least there, they were guaranteed a food ration. In exile, no one will hire you, no money is given from the State, and one cannot leave the area. It was not unusual for exiles to commit a crime in order to get themselves back into camp.
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 An Experiment In Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, copyright 1976
For an introduction to this series, click here:
http://kimkiminy.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-gulag-archipelago/
Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
“In the early dawn of Friday, June 25, parachutes carrying flares opened out in the sky, more flares soared from the watchtowers, and the observers on the rooftops were picked off by snipers’ bullets before they could let out a squeak! Then cannon fire was heard! Airplanes skimmed over the camp, spreading panic. Tanks, the famous T-34’s had taken up position under cover of the tractor noise and now moved on the gaps from all sides. (One of them, however, fell into a ditch.) Some of the thanks dragged concatenations of barbed wire on trestles so that they could divide up the camp grounds immediately. Behind others ran helmeted assault troops with Tommy guns. (Both Tommy-gunners and tank crews had been given vodka first. However special troops may be, it is easier to destroy unarmed and sleeping people with drink inside you.) Operator with walkie-talkies came in with the advancing troops. The generals went up into the towers with the snipers, and from there, in the daylight shed by the flares (and the light from a tower set on fire by the zeks with their incendiary bombs), gave their orders: ‘Take hut number so-and-so!… That’s where Kuznetsov is!’ They did not hide in observation posts, as they usually do, because no bullets threatened them.
“From a distance, from their building sites, free workers watched the operation.
“The camp woke up – frightened out its wits. Some stayed where they were in their huts, lying on the floor as their one chance of survival, and because resistance seemed senseless. Others tried to make them get up and join the resistance. Yet others ran straight into the line of fire, either to fight or to seek a quicker death.
“The Third Camp Division fought – the division which had started it all. (It consisted mainly of 58’s with a large majority of Banderists.) They hurled stones at the Tommy-gunners and warders, and probably sulfur bombs at the tanks… Nobody thought of the powdered glass. One hut counterattacked twice, with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’
“The tanks crushed everyone in their way. (Alla Presman, from Kiev, was run over – the tracks passed over her abdomen.) Tanks rode up onto the porches of huts and crushed people there (including two Estonian women). In one of the tanks sat Nagibina, the camp doctor, drunk. She was there not to help but to watch – it was interesting. The tanks grazed the sides of huts and crushed those who were clinging to them to escape the caterpillar tracks. Semyon Rak and his girl threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms and ended it that way. Tanks nosed into the thin board walls of the huts and even fired blank shells into them. Faina Epstein remembers the corner of a hut collapsing, as if in a nightmare, and a tank passing obliquely over the wreckage and over living bodies; women tried to jump and fling themselves out of the way: behind the tank came a lorry, and the half-naked women were tossed onto it.
“The cannon shots were blank, but the Tommy guns were shooting live rounds, and the bayonets were cold steel. Women tried to shield men with their own bodies – and they, too, were bayoneted! Security Officer Belyaev shot two dozen people with his own hand that morning; when the battle was over he was seen putting knives into the hands of corpses for the photographer to take pictures of dead gangsters. Suprun, a member of the Commission, and a grandmother, died from a wound in her lung. Some prisoners hid in the latrines, and were riddled with bullets there.
“Kuznetsov was arrested in the bathhouse, his command post, and made to kneel. Sluchenkov was lifted high in the air with his hands tied behind his back and dashed to the ground (a favorite trick with the thieves).
“Then the sound of shooting died away. There were shouts of ‘Come out of your huts; we won’t shoot.’ Nor did they – they merely beat prisoners with their gun butts.
“As a group of prisoners were taken, they were marched through the gaps onto the steppe and between files of Kengir convoy troops outside. They were searched and made to lie flat on their faces with their arms stretched straight out. As they lay there thus crucified, MVD fliers and warders walked among them to identify and pull out those whom they had spotted earlier from the air or from the watchtowers. (So busy were they wit all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme – a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.)”
