Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...journalism. A voluminous genre of literature and drama has grown up around a singular theme of prison rebellions. Prison evils have been documented in thousands of articles, hundreds of books and scores of legislative reports, not to mention innumerable recapitulations by local, state, national and international investigative groups. The tale of Attica's prisoner mutiny and massacre nine years ago, though tragic because of its cost of 43 lives, was only a spit in the dark ocean of the prison chronicle...
...quite a saga, a tale of horrors seeping forth from a real-life phantasmagoria. Thomas Murton writes of Arkansas' Tucker State Prison Farm as it was before he was brought in for a year as a reform superintendent in 1967: "Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the 'Tucker telephone,' an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals." In Jail: The Ultimate Ghetto, Ronald Goldfarb records so many atrocities of prison life that the reader...
...never shows the corpses, but traces the phenomenon back to its birth as fantasy, a dream in the Nazi mind, with tortured mannequins hanging from the gallows, dismembered dolls, as the film proceeds from its first parts, "The Grail" and "A German Dream" to "The End of Winter's Tale" and "We Children of Hell...
Eliot presents the oft-dramatized story of Becket as a morality play, a lesson in the nature of martyrdom, and eschews all the possible theatrics in the tale. He manipulates a sparse collection of performers--Becket, three priests, four tempters, four knights, and a chorus of women--through a ritual that both plumbs the deep seas of Christian theology and plunders pagan mythology for parallels and a natural background. The mutable verse form, with irregular rhymes and cyclical repetition, can hypnotically enthrall you even if you don't quite catch Eliot's meaning...
...sketches, magazine-formula pieces, experimental cul-de-sacs. Fortunately, among them were also shards of genius. Her best stories-At the Bay, Je ne parle pas français, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, The Garden Party, perhaps half a dozen others-leaped beyond the traditional 19th century tale in a few quick, bright strokes. Although they were short on narrative, the pieces proved startlingly fresh, almost hallucinatory in their vividness, yet anchored in wit and ruthless reportage...