Even so, the displacement of sail by
steam, with its smaller crews, made work increasingly difficult to find. Conrad
slowly rose through the ranks, but he was often forced to settle for jobs below
his level of certification. In nineteen years at sea, eight of them as a
qualified "master," he captained only one ship.
The young szlachcic also bucked
against the conditions of service. Time and again he would quit a berth after
quarreling with his captain. His education and background would also have cut
him off from the scrum of ruffians, drunks, and drifters who made up the
typical crew. He is likely to have been no less lonely as a young adult than he
had been as a child. On shore, he lived a life of culture and expense. Uncle
Tadeusz, delivering a long series of final warnings, ceaselessly admonished his
extravagance and just as unfailingly funded it. Conrad's long periods
ashore--he was afloat less than eight years altogether--were not always
involuntary. Throughout his career, he plotted schemes of trade or investment
as an alternative to further service; he gave up his only captaincy after
little more than a year. His nearly two decades in the service were a series of
false starts, and he seems never to have settled to life at sea. Only in
retrospect did it assume shape, meaning, and value, and come to stand in his
mind for fellowship and fidelity, duty and craft, labor and courage, honor and
nation. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
This last would prove especially
important. A Personal Record, Conrad's memoir of his youth, ends with his first
glimpse of the Red Ensign, the flag of the British merchant service, "the
symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined
for so many years to be the only roof over my head." His fiction
consistently underplays the proportion of foreigners he encountered in the
service, which on some voyages ranged as high as 60 percent. In The Nigger of
the "Narcissus," his most personal novel, only four of the sailors
are foreign; in the real Narcissus, ten were--half the ship.
Conrad's retroactive reconstruction of
an English service served his active construction of an English identity. But
during his years at sea, as he wandered from Poland toward an unforeseeable
destination, his identity was protean, and in many ways it always would be.
The spaces that Conrad knew--ships and
waters alike--were as multinational as they were British. His crewmates were
Russian, Scandinavian, and West Indian as well as Scottish and Cornish; his
realms of service were the Dutch East Indies, French Antilles, and Belgian
Congo, as well as India and Australia. While his French was impeccable, he
spoke English, as he always would, with a thick Polish accent. His letters make
use of all three languages and a variety of signatures. In fact, his name seems
to have been the least stable thing about him, especially during his years at
sea. A company of ghost selves floats across the life--nicknames, pseudonyms,
garblings, alter egos: Konrad, Korzeniowski, Konkorzentowski, Korgemourki,
Kamudi, Monsieur Georges, T. Conrad, H. Conrad, Johann Conrad, and in one
instance, touchingly, Comrad. The list suggests a ship of many hands and many
nations. Like Kurtz, all Europe contributed to his making.
Only when he steps ashore does the
identity we recognize appear: "J. Conrad, " used for the first time
to sign off after what would prove to be his final voyage. By then he had
undergone his most marvelous transformation of all. Conrad's emergence as a
writer has no parallel in English literature, perhaps not in any literature.
George Eliot was also thirty-seven years old when she published her first work
of fiction, but she was already an accomplished essayist, and she moved in the
highest intellectual circles. Nabokov, too, was a foreigner, but he had known
English from early childhood, and he had already mastered the art of fiction
before taking up the language as a literary instrument. Conrad had both their
disadvantages and many others. When he began drafting Almayer's Folly one idle
autumn, five years and four voyages before it was ultimately finished, he was
an unknown seaman who had written almost nothing more ambitious than a letter,
and he was venturing into a language that he had not started to learn until he
was twenty.
Then as now, there was no shortage of
obscurities nursing dreams of literary greatness, dragging their manuscript
along from year to year. Conrad just happened to turn out to be a genius.
"There is more--and different things too--in me yet," he could still
declare at fifty. If he was skeptical about the possibility of self-knowledge,
that must have been in part because he had experienced the mysterious depths of
his own powers.
Conrad would eventually make art out
of large areas of his life at sea, but one experience in particular incited him
to fiction. In 1887, during his longest stint in the East, he spent four months
sailing in Borneo and Celebes, the remotest parts of the Malay Archipelago. It
was his first close look at the East, beyond the bubble of large Europeanized
ports such as Bombay, Singapore, and Sydney. His voyages took him sometimes as
much as thirty miles upriver, to far-flung trading posts set down amid a
bewildering complexity of local cultures and dwarfed by their backdrop of
jungle and fog. There Conrad stumbled upon the sea wrack of colonial
civilization: idlers and adventurers, scoundrels and cranks, lost, lonely men
who dreamed of Europe and wealth and consoled themselves with native women and
the bottle. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
In them he recognized what was to
become his most enduring theme: moral isolation.
Even more than imperial rapacity or
spiritual extremism, more than fidelity or toil or unrest, this is the red
thread that runs through Conrad's greatest work and makes it a supreme
expression of his time, which is still our time. Moral isolation--the sense of
being without companionship, without even comprehension, in the perilous
business of choice--marks his characters' existence for the same reason that it
marked his own. The worlds of Conrad's fiction are shaped by imperialism, but
they are not, by and large, imperial spaces. Forster, by contrast, gives us in
A Passage to India the more typical colonial situation: two communities,
European and native, living in precisely defined relations of subjugation and
power, the lines of allegiance and conduct carefully laid down. Conrad's
attention was drawn instead to the spaces between empires, between nations, the
kinds of spaces in which he had passed his nautical career--intercultural
spaces, permeated by the force fields of empire but not bound within a single
imperial orbit: the Malay world of his early fiction, the Inner Station of
Kurtz's domain, the republic of Costaguana in Nostromo, the anarchist cell in
The Secret Agent, the circle of Russian exiles in Under Western Eyes. Each is
made up of individuals who have lost the orientation of a familiar community
and the restraining context of a stable moral framework. (His sea fiction,
stories of fellowship and fidelity within a known horizon of expectation, gives
the complementary perspective, a picture of the world that has been lost.) Louis
J. Sheehan, Esquire
This is not Dickens's London, an
earlier and more bounded kind of modern space, domestic rather than imperial,
where isolation and incomprehension finally give way to recognition and
communion. In Conrad's world of expatriates and isolatoes, mutual estrangement
is intractable, cultural fragmentation is irreparable, and neither authorial
prestidigitation nor English good fellowship can relieve them. His characters
cling instead to shards of broken meaning--a name, an idea, a dream. Each is
left alone with his impulses and terrors and illusions, armed only with a
fragile sense of right and wrong.
By the time he got to Borneo, Conrad
was already several times an exile and many years a wanderer, and what he
discovered must have resonated powerfully with his own experience, for he began
composing Almayer's Folly, set in an upriver trading post and concerned with
the type of man he had found there, upon his next return to England. Flaubert
and Maupassant, long his reading, were now his models. Timely encouragement
came from a Cambridge graduate to whom he showed the growing manuscript while
serving aboard a passenger ship. Conrad was a man of culture and a writer's
son, and he hungered for contact with the world of letters. His turn to fiction
must have felt like a kind of homecoming--perhaps the only one he ever had.
Conrad's first works, shepherded by
his editor Edward Garnett, a well- connected member of the literary world, were
well received but modestly remunerated. Conrad would vacillate for years about
returning to sea, but for the time being he pressed on. Meanwhile, through
Garnett and a few other acquaintances, he groped his way into English life,
constructing that masquerade of personality that he called "Joseph
Conrad." His sense of alienation can be gleaned from "Amy
Foster," the brilliant story he would soon write, in which a European
castaway on English shores is met with uncomprehending hostility, viewed as a
kind of gibbering monster. In person, Conrad could neither hide his accent nor
conjure away his foreign looks, but print made for a better place to bury
secrets. With a single, slight exception, his fiction would never give the
faintest hint of his Polish background. In his first two novels--the name of
the second, An Outcast of the Islands, suggests its continuity of setting and
theme with the first--nothing directly reveals even his nautical one.
"When speaking, writing or
thinking in English," Conrad had written as early as 1885, "the word
Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain." The
initial qualification is telling, given that Conrad often spoke, wrote, and
thought in other languages. Equally telling is the generic nature of his
imagined home: Great Britain in general, but not any particular place in it.
Conrad had long yearned to find himself a specific English home, and in 1896,
immediately after the publication of An Outcast--whose title can be read in
more than one way--he made a precipitous jump into English domesticity,
marrying an undereducated working-class woman he seems scarcely to have known.
He was thirty-eight, Jesse George was twenty-three.
The record of Conrad's erotic life,
both before and after his marriage, is exceedingly thin. S Louis J. Sheehan,
Esquire
Sexuality seems to have been a less
potent force for him than his desire for friendship--this is perhaps another
reason we find him so difficult to understand. The Conrads settled in the
countryside, near Ford, Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, and other members of his
growing circle. His fiction, too, moves toward comradeship and, haltingly,
toward self-revelation. The Nigger of the "Narcissus" finally takes
up his nautical experiences directly, but the novel is troubled by Conrad's
difficulty in locating himself in relation to the shipboard community whose
unself-conscious fellowship it depicts. He seems to have been unable to figure
out how he wanted to appear before his English audience. His struggles with
identity had become an impediment to his art. The answer that he discovered was
not to place himself-- not even his "Joseph Conrad" self--as a
narrating presence within his fiction. The answer was to invent yet another
persona, comfortably nautical and solidly English, with his own circle of friends
and listeners. The answer was Marlow.
Marlow unlocked the door to Conrad's
major work, helping him produce, in the space of two years, "Youth,"
the first of his great short stories; Heart of Darkness; and Lord Jim. The
second of these is not his most ambitious work, and arguably not even his
greatest, but it will surely be the one by which he is longest remembered. A
long string of imitations and counter-versions--by Wells, V.S. Naipaul, António
Lobos Antunes, James Dickey, Caryl Phillips, Francis Ford Coppola, and many
others--has ratified its canonical, or we might say (adopting a term coined for
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that other river journey) its
hyper-canonical status. Like Robinson Crusoe or Kafka's
"Metamorphosis," Heart of Darkness achieves its transcendent stature
by approaching the condition of myth. Indeed, like Ulysses or The Waste Land,
though far less laboriously than those other modernist masterworks, it
compresses a whole set of myths into a single narrative substance. The voyage
of exploration, the heroic quest, the epic descent, the journey into the self:
all are implicit in Marlow's odyssey.
But Heart of Darkness has itself
become a foundational modern myth by registering some of the chief anxieties of
its historical moment. The menace that Marlow senses emanating from the jungle
is a projection of his own guilt. He knows that he is going somewhere he does
not belong, and he senses that the universe will intervene to restore the
violated balance. The history of literary travel, whether of wandering,
discovery, or conquest, holds no precedent for this intimation; in Conrad's
consciousness, imperial expansion reached the limit of its own self-revulsion.
That is what has made his tale so adaptable to Dickey's Appalachia, Coppola's
Vietnam, and every other scene of neo-colonial intrusion.
Marlow returns to England a
post-traumatic husk, and his confessions parallel Freud's development of the
psychoanalytic monologue as a path into the darkness of the human heart. But
the imperial system that he had discovered in the Congo resembles nothing so
much as a parody of Weberian bureaucracy, another key theoretical articulation
of the time. What Marlow finds among the accountants and the managers, with
their "methods" and their bookkeeping and their reports, is
procedural rationality run mad. The "cannibals" who man his steamboat
are paid not in anything they can eat or trade, but in lengths of utterly
useless copper wire--but they are paid, Marlow acknowledges, "with a
regularity worthy of a large and honorable trading company."
The double reach, toward Freud and
Weber, psyche and society, is characteristic of all Conrad's major work, and
places him at the pivot point between the great social chronicles of the
nineteenth century and the great psychological explorations of high modernism.
He achieves the depth of the one without sacrificing the breadth of the other.
And the place where the two orientations meet, where Weberian corruption
becomes Freudian revelation, is language. Marlow asks the chief accountant how
he manages to sport such clean linen in the midst of the jungle. "I've
been teaching one of the native women," the accountant explains. "It
was difficult. She had a distaste for the work." The last phrase points
straight toward Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," toward
"collateral damage" and "extraordinary rendition" and
"enhanced interrogation techniques
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de As always, its real
purpose is not deception but self-deception, the disabling of the ethical
gag-reflex.
Notes of Louis Sheehan
Moral isolation is only the first step
in the Conradian descent. His characters are strangers to one another,
especially to those with whom they are most intimate, but above all they are
strangers to themselves. Because they have been stripped of an encircling
community, the only ideas that matter to them are the ones they have about
themselves, and they can have any ones they want. Apocalypse Now is a profound
gloss on the novel, but it simplifies Conrad's scheme by making Kurtz too
glibly cynical, too comfortable with his own damnation. The original Kurtz,
self-divided and self-deluded, hugs his fantasies to the last. That is finally
what makes him such a supreme symbol of the modern soul, holed up in his Inner
Station, ensconced in the throne room of his imperial self. Moral isolation is
exactly what he wants, because it leaves him free to dream the dream of himself
undisturbed.
To the decay of language and the
gravitational force of self-delusion Conrad opposed the powers of literary art.
"The conquest of the earth," Marlow famously says, "is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much." But Conrad's mission--as
quixotic a venture as running away to sea, and equally true to his father's
spirit--was precisely to "look into it too much." "My task,
" he wrote in the Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," his
declaration of artistic purpose, "is, by the power of the written word, to
make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
Conrad may be the most visual of novelists, staging his lighting effects with
the precision of a master cinematographer: candlelight, lamplight, blinding
sunlight; shadow, gloom, and a dozen varieties of haze. An exquisite precision
both of visual perception and verbal expression marks his narrative style, a
disillusioned irony casting everywhere its cold illumination. "The reaches
opened before us and closed behind," Marlow says, "as if the forest
had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return."
Writing like that does not come
without sweat and tears; for someone composing in a foreign language, it does
not come without blood. Conrad's agonies rival Flaubert's, and his letters are
some of the most colorful in the annals of writerly suffering. He is
"lonely as a mole, burrowing, burrowing without break or rest"; he is
"like a cornered rat, facing fate with a big stick that is sure to descend
and crack my skull"; he is alone with a monster "in a chasm with
perpendicular sides of black basalt"; he is about to be "ingloriously
devoured" by "an irresistible march of black beetles"; he is
trapped in "a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write,
write." He was writing against time--serialization deadlines, promises to
agents and editors--and in the face of illness and money trouble. He suffered
constantly from gout and depression. Jesse was no healthier, undergoing an
endless series of operations to repair an injured knee whose condition was not
improved by her steadily increasing obesity. The couple also had two sons.
." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Flaubert could afford to spend six or
eight years on a novel, but Conrad turned out nearly a book a year, including
short stories and prose sketches, and still grew deeper in debt. He was no
better at handling money than he had been as a bachelor.
Jesse was scorned by more sophisticated
women--Virginia Woolf called her a "lump," Lady Ottoline Morrell a
"mattress"--but she was plucky and gregarious, and she kept the
household together. Yet she couldn't do anything about Conrad's writing
schedule, which was always hopelessly disorganized. He was the kind of person
who used one project to procrastinate on another. Heart of Darkness interrupted
the writing of Lord Jim, which had itself interrupted the writing of The
Rescue, a book that finally took Conrad twenty-four years to wrestle to the
ground. Almost every one of his novels began life as a short story before
expanding beyond all prediction. Of course, another way to see this is that
Conrad was willing to let himself be taken by surprise, and was smart enough to
trust his intuition and let the deadlines be damned.
There was always more--and different
things, too--in him yet. After Heart of Darkness, which must have given him an
entirely new idea about what he could do, about what there was to do, he
returned to Lord Jim, put Marlow at its center, and amid the pressure of
serialization produced a novel that, in its fragmentation of linear sequence
and its orchestration of competing narrative modes, represents English
fiction's great leap forward into modernist complexity. After Lord Jim and a
third volume of short stories (there would be six altogether), he felt that he
had exhausted his experiences as a subject of fiction. "It seemed
somehow," he would later note, "that there was nothing more in the
world to write about." And then he remembered a little anecdote about a
man who had stolen a boatful of silver, and within two years he had built the
republic of Costaguana, and the pseudo-historical epic Nostromo, brick by
brick.
His imagination, proving even deeper
than he had imagined, had undergone a fundamental change. He had come to
understand that he no longer needed to rely on his own experience as a source
of material-- another reason that biography is so helpless before his art.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The Secret Agent, with its caustic
irony and bitter skepticism, and Under Western Eyes, with its Dostoevskian
tensions, would complete the trio of great political novels. But the three were
not just unforeseeably different from his earlier work. Each of them--indeed,
each of his five major novels--is radically different from all the others: in
subject, in structure, in tone, even in style. It was not enough for him to
reinvent himself as a writer after his career at sea. Fidelity to his sense of
artistic vocation required him to re-invent himself again every time he sat
down to write.
If his peers were in awe, the public
was less impressed. Even before Nostromo, figures such as Edward Garnett,
Edmund Gosse, and George Gissing had come to regard Conrad as the finest
novelist of his generation. Henry James was genuinely admiring. But Wells had
warned him early that "you don't make the slightest concessions to the
reading young woman who makes or mars the fortunes of authors." Conrad
proudly ignored the advice. Of "The Secret Sharer," another of his
great short works, he would boast that it contained "no damned tricks with
girls." ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
But tricks with girls-- romantic
interest, as scarce in his major work as it is in the record of his life--was
exactly what the reading young woman, and most other book buyers, wanted.
Conrad's darkness and difficulty repelled them, and he refused to play the game
of advertising and publicity.
He had fewer qualms about borrowing
money from his agent, James B. Pinker, who, like Garnett, became a kind of
father figure, even though both men were considerably younger than he. Finally,
after years of patience and mounting subsidies, and just as Conrad had finished
dragging himself through Under Western Eyes, Pinker put his foot down: no more
loans. The ultimatum precipitated a nervous collapse unlike anything even
Conrad had ever known. He raved in Polish, held imaginary conversation with his
characters, and didn't emerge from prostration for three months.
When he did, he was a broken man. With
scant exception, the work Conrad produced over the last fourteen years of his
life is frankly second-rate, and even worse. He simply no longer had the moral
energy left for the terrible daily struggle with words. For the first time in
his career, in fact, he was able to write with ease, and he started filling his
novels with tricks with girls. And so, in the wryest twist of all, he became a
success. He finally wrote badly enough to attract a mass audience. Meanwhile
the popular press had caught up with the judgments that more perceptive critics
had been advancing for years. By the time he gained fame, as is often the case,
his best years were behind him, and his late mediocrities fetched many times
the price of, and much louder a volume of praise than, his finest works.
Success made Conrad wealthy, but it
never made him easy. He spent money almost as fast as it came in, his failing
powers tormented him, his wretched health persisted to the end. His towering achievement
would make Joyce envious and Nabokov nervous, but for the aspiring writer, his
example braces and terrifies in equal measure. It is never too late to begin,
his story tells us, but there is no limit to what you will be asked to
surrender. You may reach the Inner Station, but do not expect to make it back.
New radiocarbon measurements of burned
human bones excavated earlier indicate that the famous Stonehenge site in
southern England served as a cemetery for at least half a century, from around
5,000 to 4,500 years ago
Stonehenge, a set of earth, timber,
and stone structures perched provocatively on England’s Salisbury Plain, has
long invited lively speculation about its origin and purpose.
There was nothing lively about
Stonehenge in its heyday, though. Medieval big-wigs used Stonehenge as a
cemetery from its inception nearly 5,000 years ago until well after its large
stones were put in place 500 years later, according to the directors of a 2007
investigation of the ancient site.
The new findings challenge a
longstanding assumption that the deceased were buried at Stonehenge for only a
100-year window, from 4,700 to 4,600 years ago, and before the large
stones—known as sarsens—were hauled in and assembled into a circle. ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
But the new findings indicate that
Stonehenge was a cemetery for at least 500 years, beginning around 5,000 years
ago.
“Stonehenge was the biggest graveyard
of the third millennium B.C.,” says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the
University of Sheffield in England. “From its beginning, it was used as a
cemetery for a large number of people.” Parker Pearson directs the Stonehenge
Riverside Archaeological Project, which began in 2003 and runs through 2010.
Parker Pearson and archaeologist
Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester in England described their latest
findings May 29 at a teleconference held by one of their funding organizations,
the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
He and his colleagues obtained the
first radiocarbon age estimates for cremated human remains excavated earlier at
Stonehenge. These burned bones were unearthed more than 50 years ago and have
been kept at a nearby museum.
The earliest cremation, a small pile
of burned bones and teeth, dates from 5,030 to 4,880 years ago, about the time
when a circular ditch and a series of pits were cut into the Salisbury Plain.
The human remains originally lay in one of those pits, at the edge of where the
circle of sarsen stones would later be placed.
An adult’s burned bones, originally
found in a ditch that encircles Stonehenge, date from 4,930 to 4,870 years ago.
Remnants of a third cremation date
from 4,570 to 4,340 years ago, around the time when sarsen stones first
appeared at Stonehenge.
Another 49 cremation burials were
unearthed at Stonehenge during the 1920s but later interred again because
archaeologists at that time saw no scientific value in the bones. An estimated
150 to 240 cremated bodies were buried at Stonehenge over a span of 500 to 600
years.
Andrew Chamberlain, a biological
anthropologist at the University of Sheffield who did not participate in last
year’s dig, suspects that Stonehenge functioned as a cemetery for 30 to 40
generations of a single family, perhaps a ruling dynasty. In support of that
hypothesis, the head of a stone mace had been buried with one set of cremated
remains, Parker Pearson says. Maces symbolized authority in British prehistory.
If Stonehenge operated as a domain of
the dead, the nearby village of Durrington Walls was built around the same time
to accommodate the living, Parker Pearson asserts. In 2006, his team discovered
remnants of this village, grouped around a timber version of Stonehenge.
Stonehenge’s builders apparently lived at the site for part of each year
beginning around 4,600 years ago.
Last year the researchers excavated
four houses at Durrington Walls that once sat on a hillside. An especially
well-preserved structure yielded a wall made of cobb, a mixture of broken chalk
and chunky plaster. It’s the oldest such wall known in England, Parker Pearson
says. The other houses consisted mostly of a more primitive, wattle-and-daub
material.
The well-preserved house contained a
few relics of everyday life, including flint tools and sharp flint chips swept
into two teacup-sized holes in the corners. ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Imprints of a bed and dresser were visible on the floor, as
well as two thick grooves where someone once knelt near an oval-shaped hearth.
The researchers also uncovered remains
of several three-sided structures along a broad avenue that linked Durrington
Walls to the River Avon.
Parker Pearson suspects that
Durrington Walls consisted of at least 300 houses, making it the largest
village of its time in northwestern Europe.
New radiocarbon dates of an antler
pick used for digging indicate that the Stonehenge cursus, a 3-kilometer-long
earthen enclosure framed by parallel ditches, was constructed about 5,500 years
ago. The cursus contains no bones or artifacts. It may have been either a
sanctified or a cursed spot that people avoided, Thomas suggests. Analyses
indicate that this monument was reworked several times from between 5,500 and
4,000 years ago.
“This landscape had symbolic
importance that was maintained over a long period of time,” Thomas says.
Louis Sheehan In 1989, when Sean Connery showed up in
the third Indiana Jones movie, as Indiana’s father, Henry Jones, he was no
longer a young man. But Connery, then fifty-nine, had relaxed beautifully into
middle age. Playing alongside Harrison Ford’s Indy, he was crotchety yet
formidable. The father was a medievalist, the son an archeologist, and both
were obsessed with lost treasures of unimaginable worth and extraordinary
powers, and Connery turned a rivalry with the younger actor into high-style
mischief. Nineteen years later, in the fourth movie in the series, “Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Ford, now sixty-five, is still
playing Indy, but he can’t be described as a man relaxing into middle age. He’s
in great shape physically, but he doesn’t seem happy. He’s tense and glaring,
and he speaks his lines with more emphasis than is necessary, like a drunk who
wants to appear sober. In the earlier movies, Indy was often surly, but his
scowl turned into a rakish smile—he dared you to think he was afraid to do
something, and then, before you had quite registered the dare, he raced away
and did it. Ford combined swagger with charm, and he was quick; he moved as if
he had steel springs in his legs. He rolls and jumps well enough in “Crystal
Skull,” but his hostile unease in some of the dialogue passages is a real
killjoy. And it doesn’t help that the screenwriter, David Koepp, who also
worked with Steven Spielberg—the director of all the Indiana Jones movies—on
the “Jurassic Park” series and “War of the Worlds,” isn’t good at the kind of arrogant
banter that was so large a part of the earlier films. In “Crystal Skull,” Indy
keeps his whip mostly furled, and his words don’t snap, either.
On balance, it was a mistake for
Spielberg and George Lucas (who dreamed up the characters, co-wrote the
stories, and produced the series) to revive “Indiana Jones” after so many
years. “Crystal Skull” isn’t bad—there are a few dazzling sequences, and a
couple of good performances—but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action
that made the movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly
gone. Stretches of this picture are flat, fussy, and dull. Trying to regain the
old rapture, you have to grasp at the few scenes that work—most of them at the
beginning. The first three films were set in the nineteen-thirties and drew on
Art Deco styling in clothes, cars, and aircraft. Spielberg has a taste for
sleek modernism, enhanced by a boy’s-illustrated-book notion of cool—everything
was a little more streamlined and snazzy than life. “Crystal Skull” is set in
the nineteen-fifties, and it begins, in Nevada, with the same quintessence of
period style. As kids hot-rod across military sites with Elvis on the radio,
Spielberg catches the era’s uneasy mixture of blandness, latent revolt, and
apocalypse, the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture side by side with nuclear
fears.
There is a brilliant, unnervingly
funny sequence in which Indy, after escaping some K.G.B. agents (they were
trying to steal some of his earlier finds, hoping to use their powers to
control America), wanders into a small town with neat wooden houses and square,
close-cropped lawns adorned with smiling mannequins of typical American
families. Indy enters a house, where “The Howdy Doody Show” blares from a TV.
Suddenly, he hears a loudspeaker announce a countdown and realizes that he’s
about to be nuked in a test blast. In a later sequence, young Shia LaBeouf
makes his entrance wearing a black leather jacket and riding a motorcycle—like
Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” He’s a snarling kid named Mutt, with a thick,
frequently combed wave of hair; he calls Indy “Teach,” and he needs a
father—like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The K.G.B. agent Irina
Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, takes off from Lotte Lenya’s slit-eyed Commie
menace in “From Russia with Love.” ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Blanchett wears a full-body flight suit in Soviet
gray—drabness turned into fashion by her trim figure—and a rapier hangs from
her waist. She enunciates like crazy in Russian-accented English and tilts her
cheekbones toward the camera. As is often the case with this actress, she’s the
best thing in the picture.
One tries hard not to be distracted
from any available pleasure by the plot—thickly woven gibberish about the lost
Amazonian city of Akator (formerly known as El Dorado), a crystal skull that
has been taken from a temple, and a brain-fried archeologist nicknamed Ox (a
quavering John Hurt, who is no ox). Sure enough, after a while the movie
settles happily into one of those long chases which Spielberg does better than
anyone else. The good guys hurtle down a jungle road in an open truck, while
Blanchett and her henchmen follow in another truck on a parallel road. The two
sides shoot at each other, various people jump, or are flung back and forth,
like volleyballs, between the vehicles, and LaBeouf, after a sword fight and a
karate match with Blanchett, winds up straddling the trucks and receiving many
blows to the crotch from passing branches, before grabbing onto a vine and
swinging his way through the jungle. The sequence ends with Indy and friends
going over a cliff in their truck. As they fall, they hit a tree sticking out
from the cliff wall, which bends slowly downward, like a giant sapling, and
deposits them gently in a river below, where the truck turns into a pontoon
boat. In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and
rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately
synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale. (The Spielberg chase has been
the subject of an hommage on TV’s “Family Guy,” in which Peter Griffin fights a
giant chicken on many moving vehicles.)
The first Indiana Jones movie,
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), had a romping confidence that was
electrifying. It was not just an action-adventure movie; it was a spoof of an
action-adventure movie, an exuberant parody of the kind of schlock shown at
weekend matinées in the fifties—movies about cursed tombs and strange rites and
“natives” chanting mumbo-jumbo in studio jungles, or waving swords amid the
bazaars of some back-lot Middle East. The stolid hero would gently approach the
“love interest,” a scientist’s daughter. In “Raiders,” Karen Allen was the love
interest, and, flirting and scrapping with Ford, she had a huge smile and a
directly sexual way about her that smashed old cautions. The pattern was set
with that film and it varied little in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”
(1984) and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). At the center of the
movies was a search for a buried sacred object (an ark, a stone, a grail) from
the ancient world. To prevent the villains from getting hold of it (Nazis in
crisp uniforms appeared in two of the pictures; a wild-eyed, blood-sacrificial
Thuggee cult in the third), Indy set off from his quiet classroom for some
exotic, sun-drenched place, where he would rout thirty excitable men in turbans
by using just his fists, a whip, and a revolver. A hard-fighting woman joined
his quest, only to prove more difficult to handle than the bad guys. To reach
the tomb of the sanctified object, he entered filthy pits and mucky tunnels
lined with snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and rats. He had to be spiritually
pure, as well as physically adroit, to get past the swords, spikes, and moving
walls that booby-trapped the entrance to the inner chamber. Yet Indy never
wanted the sacred object for himself (the relics the K.G.B. were after had been
laid away in a warehouse); he usually returned it to its rightful owner or just
left it in place. The search was everything; renunciation of the spoils was his
purity. ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
As he left the chamber, it collapsed
around him, but he escaped.
The movies managed to create a formula
and add new surprises at the same time. Working before digital technology
eliminated gravity, Spielberg kept his characters on the ground, where he was
forced to be inventive. In “Raiders,” there was an eccentrically staged,
infinitely dangerous fight between Indy and a bare-chested bruiser. As the
wings and moving propellers of a partly unmoored Nazi warplane passed in a
circle over their heads, the two men swung and ducked in alternating rhythm.
There’s nothing that wonderful in “Crystal Skull”—fistfights with the K.G.B.
henchmen go on forever, blow after blow. And, despite the greater flexibility
of digital, Spielberg isn’t able to create the awed anticipation and tensions
of the earlier films: the entrance-to-the-tomb scenes are pedestrian and
unscary. Karen Allen turns up again, but her reunion with Ford is a sexless
dud—a disappointment for older fans and probably a puzzler for people who have
never seen the earlier movies. Blanchett should be the sexual aggressor here.
You expect her to make a pass at LaBeouf (a trial that would test any young
man), but it never happens. Reckless daring is what’s missing from “Crystal
Skull.” The movie leaves a faint aura of depression, because you don’t want to
think of daring as the exclusive property of youth. There must be a way for
middle-aged men to take chances and leap over chasms, but repeating themselves
with less conviction isn’t it.
The nonprofit Consumers Union is
launching a new hospital-ratings service, adding to the growing competition to
provide online consumer information about health care.
The effort by the publisher of the
popular Consumer Reports magazine is a gamble that the credibility of the
magazine's name and its no-advertising stance, identified with widely used
ratings for cars and other products, can translate into the tricky field of
health care, where doctors and other providers have objected to some
evaluations proposed by insurers. The field is increasingly crowded, with an
array of players trying to build definitive consumer-health information
sources.
Consumers Union already offers
assessments of health-insurance plans, drugs and some medical treatments. Other
areas the nonprofit is considering include physician groups and elder care. The
new hospital ratings, which are expected to be supplemented with further
information later, are the first step in a broader effort to expand the
nonprofit's health-care offerings.
The Consumer Reports online hospital
service will include around 3,000 facilities. Consumers will be able to see a
graph showing how intensely each hospital tends to treat patients, on a scale
from zero for the most conservative to 100 for the most aggressive. Intensity of
care is based on time spent in the hospital and the number of doctor visits.
The index reflects the hospital's handling of nine serious conditions,
including cancer and heart failure, when it treats patients in the last two
years of life.
The new Consumer Reports online
offering will also include a dollar figure that reflects an average
out-of-pocket cost for doctor visits during the last two years of life for the
nine conditions, though that doesn't match up to the charge for any particular
service.
"Consumers need to know there are
major differences in care," said John Santa, the director of the new
Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. ." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
He said the nonprofit is looking at
outcomes measures that could be added to the site.
The index is based on work from the
Dartmouth Atlas Project, a research effort developed by researchers at
Dartmouth College that uses data from the federal Medicare program. The
Dartmouth research has shown that more intense care doesn't necessarily
correlate with better results.
"On average, life expectancy with
the high-intensity hospitals is not better," said Elliott Fisher, a
Dartmouth professor who oversees the Atlas Project.
The question is whether consumers will
care about the intensity of care, without some sense of whether it leads to
better patient results at that particular hospital or not. "What would a
consumer do with that information?" said Hindy Shaman, a director at
PricewaterhouseCoopers in the health-industries practice. Consumers primarily
want to know what they will pay, as well as health outcomes, safety and
complication rates, she says.
Other online hospital-information
sites offer different approaches. The federal Hospital Compare site, for
instance, includes information about whether hospitals adhere to recommended
procedures, as well as some outcomes information and consumer-survey feedback.
The Leapfrog Group, a not-for-profit consortium of big health-care buyers such
as General Motors Corp., looks at practice measures, based on its own surveys.
The Battle of Stalingrad is a commonly
used name in English sources for several large operations by Germany and its
allies and Soviet forces conducted with the purpose of possession of the city
of Stalingrad, which took place between 17 July 1942 and February 2, 1943,
during the Second World War[12]. Stalingrad was known as Tsaritsyn until 1925
and has been known as Volgograd since 1961.
The results of these operations are
often cited as one of the turning points of the war in the European Theater.
Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in human history, with combined casualties
estimated to be above 1.5 million. The battle was marked by brutality and
disregard for military and civilian casualties by both sides. The German
offensive to take Stalingrad, the battle inside the city, and the Soviet
counter-offensive which eventually trapped and destroyed the 6th Army and other
Axis forces around the city was the second large-scale defeat of the Second
World War. In Soviet and Russian historiography the struggle included the
following campaigns, strategic and operational level operations:
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany
launched Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa). The armed forces of
Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, quickly advancing deep into
Soviet territory. During December, having suffered multiple defeats during the
summer and autumn, Soviet forces counter-attacked during the Battle of Moscow
and successfully drove the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) from the environs of
Moscow.
By spring 1942, the Germans had
stabilized their front and were confident they could master the Red Army when
winter weather no longer impeded their mobility. There was some substance to
this belief: while Army Group Centre (Heeresgruppe Mitte) had suffered heavy
punishment, 65 percent of its infantry had not been engaged during the winter
fighting, and had been rested and reequipped.[13] Part of the German military
philosophy was to attack where least expected so that rapid gains could be
made. An attack on Moscow was seen as too predictable by some, most notably
German dictator Adolf Hitler. Along with this, the German High Command
(Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH) knew that time was running out for them, as
the United States had entered the war following Germany's declaration of war in
support of its Japanese ally. Hitler wanted to end the fighting on the Eastern
Front, or at least minimize it, before the Americans had a chance to get deeply
involved in the war in Europe[14].
The capture of Stalingrad was
important to Hitler for two primary reasons. Firstly, it was a major industrial
city on the Volga River — a vital transport route between the Caspian Sea and
Northern Russia. Secondly, its capture would secure the left flank of the
German armies as they advanced into the oil-rich Caucasus region — with a goal
of cutting off fuel to Stalin's war machine. The fact that the city bore the
name of Hitler’s nemesis, Joseph Stalin, would make its capture an ideological
and propaganda coup. Stalin realized this and ordered anyone that was strong
enough to hold a rifle be sent out to war.[15] Both Stalin and Hitler therefore
had an ideological and propagandic interest in respectively defending or taking
the city which bore Stalin's name, in honor of Stalin's defense of the city
during the Russian Civil War, but the fact remains that Stalin was under
tremendous constraints of time and resources. The Red Army, at this stage of
the war, was less capable of highly mobile operations than the German Army.
However, the prospect of combat inside a large urban area, which would be
dominated by short-range firearms rather than armored and mechanized tactics,
minimized the Red Army’s disadvantages against the Germans.
Army Group South was selected for a
sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to
capture the vital Soviet oil fields there. Instead of focusing his attention on
the Soviet Capital of Moscow as his general staff advised, Hitler continued to
send forces and supplies to the eastern Ukraine. The planned summer offensive
was code-named Fall Blau (trans.: “Case Blue”). It was to include the German
Sixth Army, Seventeenth Army, Fourth Panzer Army and First Panzer Army. Army
Group South had overrun the Ukrainian SSR in 1941. Poised in the Eastern
Ukraine, it was to spearhead the offensive. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Hitler intervened, however, ordering
the Army Group to be split in two. Army Group South (A), under the command of
Wilhelm List, was to continue advancing south towards the Caucasus as planned
with the Seventeenth Army and First Panzer Army. Army Group South (B),
including Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army and Hermann Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army,
was to move east towards the Volga and the city of Stalingrad. Army Group B was
commanded initially by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock and later by General
Maximilian von Weichs.
The start of Operation Blau had been
planned for late May 1942. However, a number of German and Romanian units that
were involved in Blau were then in the process of besieging Sevastopol on the
Crimean Peninsula. Delays in ending the siege pushed back the start date for
Blau several times, and the city did not fall until the end of June. A smaller
action was taken in the meantime, pinching off a Soviet salient in the Second
Battle of Kharkov, which resulted in the pocketing of a large Soviet force on
22 May.
Blau finally opened as Army Group
South began its attack into southern Russia on June 28, 1942. The German
offensive started well. Soviet forces offered little resistance in the vast
empty steppes and started streaming eastward in disarray. Several attempts to
re-establish a defensive line failed when German units outflanked them. Two
major pockets were formed and destroyed: the first northeast of Kharkov on July
2 and a second, around Millerovo, Rostov Oblast, a week later.
Meanwhile, the Hungarian Second Army
and the German 4th Panzer Army had launched an assault on Voronezh, capturing
the city on the 5th of July.
Operation Blau: German advances from 7
May 1942 to 18 November 1942 to 7 July 1942 to 22 July 1942 to 1 August
1942 to 18
November 1942
Operation Blau: German advances from 7
May 1942 to 18 November 1942 to 7 July 1942 to 22 July
1942 to 1
August 1942
to 18 November 1942
The initial advance of the Sixth Army
was so successful that Hitler intervened and ordered the Fourth Panzer Army to
join Army Group South (A) to the south. A massive traffic jam resulted when the
Fourth Panzer and the Sixth both required the few roads in the area. Both
armies were stopped dead while they attempted to clear the resulting mess of
thousands of vehicles. The delay was long, and it is thought that it cost the
advance at least one week. With the advance now slowed, Hitler changed his mind
and re-assigned the Fourth Panzer Army back to the attack on Stalingrad.
By the end of July, the Germans had
pushed the Soviets across the Don River. At this point, the Germans began using
the armies of their Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian allies to guard their left
(northern) flank. The German Sixth Army was only a few dozen kilometers from
Stalingrad, and Fourth Panzer Army, now to their south, turned northwards to
help take the city. To the south, Army Group A was pushing far into the
Caucasus, but their advance slowed as supply lines grew overextended. The two
German army groups were not positioned to support one another due to the great
distances involved.
After German intentions became clear
in July, Stalin appointed Marshall Andrei Yeremenko as commander of the
Southeastern Front on August 1, 1942. Yeremenko and Commissar Nikita Krushchev
were tasked with planning the defense of Stalingrad [16] . The eastern border
of Stalingrad was the wide Volga River, and over the river additional Soviet
units were deployed. This combination of units became the newly formed 62nd
Army, which Yeremenko placed under the command of Lt. Gen. Vasiliy Chuikov on
September 11, 1942. The 62nd Army's mission was to defend Stalingrad at all
costs.
Before the Wehrmacht reached the city
itself, the Luftwaffe had rendered the Volga River, vital for bringing supplies
into the city, virtually unusable to Soviet shipping. Between 25 July and 31
July, 32 Soviet ships were sunk with another nine crippled[17]. The battle
began with the heavy bombing of the city by the Generaloberst von Richthofen's
Luftflotte 4, which in the summer and autumn of 1942 was the mightiest single
air command in the world. Some 1,000 tons were dropped[18]. The city was
quickly turned to rubble, although some factories survived and continued
production whilst workers joined in the fighting. The Croatian 369th Reinforced
Infantry Regiment was the only non-German unit [19] selected by the Wehrmacht
to enter Stalingrad city during assault operations.
Soviet factory workers heading to the
front lines.
Soviet factory workers heading to the
front lines.
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