Post Mortem - 'Thatcher has died ...'

Post Mortem - 'Thatcher has died ...'

AS dies at age 89.......

Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies ~ 3rd August, 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies At 89MOSCOW (AP) ― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.His "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions."Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. "For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category."Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II, where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache." He served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred."A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956.In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign."Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?"The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the non-fiction "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris."During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension."Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire."Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence."Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup. Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before."He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat.Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character."Yeltsin's successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power.Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society."We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he saidFollowing the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.

Beryl Cook dies

Beryl Cook, who has died aged 81, was a one-time seaside landlady who became popularly known as "the woman who paints fat ladies"; with the possible exception of Jack Vettriano, there was no living British artist whose work was better known to the general public, yet the British art establishment fought for years to keep her paintings out of their galleries.

Beryl Cook painted what she described as "ordinary people enjoying themselves" and recorded the foibles of the British better than any documentary. Vulgar, raucous and straightforward, her paintings were as saucy as the seaside postcards of Donald McGill; she painted plump people in everyday and sometimes surreal situations, with special emphasis on bottoms and bosoms.

Among her cast of characters are fat, uninhibited matrons oozing out of corsets as they cavort on the dance floor; big-bottomed girls in leggings and stilettos wearing the self-satisfied smiles of the sexually alluring; and fat members of the working class lying on the beach, drinking in the pub or guzzling lobsters.
She claimed to paint people fat because "the bigger they are the less background there is to fill in", yet her technique was not as simple as it seemed: Beryl Cook’s figures were always instantly recognisable types, their expressions eloquent of human emotions from salacious glee to gormless preoccupation, their comic effect achieved with a detached ironical eye which noted the details of their absurdity.
Beryl Cook’s paintings graced everything from stamps to school books, greetings cards and advertisements and she sold her paintings across the world. Yet the critics hated her: Time Out refused to include her exhibitions in its listings and the Tate never bought one of her paintings. Brian Sewell said of her art: "It doesn’t have the intellectual honesty of the Pig and Whistle. It has a kind of vulgar streak which has nothing to do with art."
Yet infuriatingly for the artistic establishment, her paintings, (produced at a rate of about one a fortnight) commanded up to £20,000 apiece; even more infuriating was that Beryl Cook herself seemed to share their low opinion of her own work. “I know there are some artists who look down on my work,” she said, “and when you compare mine with some of the others, I can see what they’re getting at.”
People invariably wanted to know whether Beryl Cook was fat like her paintings. In fact she was neither fat nor jolly, but thin, almost pathologically shy and extremely neurotic, so much so that several interviewers concluded that her painting was an outlet for the repressed desires and emotions she never dared to express.
She had a disconcerting habit of laughing uncontrollably when uneasy; disabled people or dwarves would reduce her to wheezy hysterics and she could not sit in an audience at a theatre without bursting into fits of nervous giggles. Not surprisingly she rarely gave interviews and never attended private views or publicity events for her own work.
She had such a phobia of formal social situations that she never had people to dinner or went out to dinner: “I’d be completely tied and there’d be no escape whatsoever.” She did her socialising in pubs, but always sat next to the door “because I know I’ve got a means of escape”. When in 1996 she was appointed OBE, she “simply could not” go to London to meet the Queen, though she felt sorry for her family who would have enjoyed it. Instead, she agreed to accept the honour from the Lord Lieutenant in Plymouth, though she vetoed a civic reception.
Despite her fame and wealth, Beryl Cook continued to live a life of breathtaking ordinariness. Only her terraced house, off Plymouth Hoe, where she lived with her husband John, her dogs and two tortoises, reflected something of the cheerful tastelessness of her paintings, with garden gnomes, antimacassars on the velour three piece suite, ancient lamps advertising Guinness and collections of cruets and Art Deco dancing girls.
She was born Beryl Frances Lansley at Egham, Surrey, on September 10 1926, one of four sisters. Her father, an engineer, walked out on the family when she was very young and her mother, an office worker, moved to Reading where Beryl and her sisters were supported by their paternal grandfather.
Beryl went to Kendrick Girls’ School, Reading, but left school aged 14 to train as a typist. During the war, she became a showgirl, but out of shyness soon gave it up. She also worked briefly but unsuccessfully as a secretary before helping her mother run a tea garden near Hampton Court.
In 1948 she married John Cook, a merchant seaman whom she had first met at the age of 10 when his family moved next door to hers in Reading. She spent much of their first decade of marriage alone while her husband was at sea, but after he left the Merchant Navy in 1958 he took a job with a motor company in Rhodesia and the family (their only son, John, was born in 1950) moved with him and lived in Rhodesia for the next seven years.
Beryl disliked Rhodesia: “I didn’t like being so far from the sea and I couldn’t bear the social life which revolved around parties because there wasn’t anything else to do.” She loathed Zambia (her husband’s next posting) even more, and within nine months, the Cooks were back in England.
It was, however, in Zambia that Beryl Cook began to paint, after her husband had given her a child’s paint box for her fortieth birthday. Her early efforts disappointed: “I expected to paint like Stanley Spencer,” she confessed. “It was a great disappointment to me when I realised that I didn’t.”
Back in England, hard up and unable to find a job, she turned again to painting to occupy her time and to decorate the walls of their cottage at Looe, Cornwall.
After moving to Plymouth in the early 1970s, Beryl Cook took in lodgers to help pay the bills. In 1975 one lodger, a young actress appearing at the Plymouth Arts Centre, spotted her talent and suggested to the Centre’s director that he should go and look at her paintings. He persuaded Beryl to give an exhibition; her work was spotted by a national paper and so fame and fortune began.
Beryl Cook did not allow success to go to her head, nor was she ever interested in money, leaving the business side of things to her husband. She continued to buy her clothes from market stalls and remained a regular at the Dolphin pub on the Plymouth quayside. “When I was younger,” she said, “I steeled myself to do so many things I really didn’t want to do. Now I realise I do not have to do anything. Consequently I lead a very happy life.”
Nevertheless her income enabled her to give up taking lodgers and to afford the “luxury” of employing someone else to do the housework. It also enabled her to travel in search of subjects for her paintings and she produced books of paintings depicting low life in New York and London. In 1998 she and her husband, John, moved to Clifton in Bristol.
Despite her prodigious output there was always a waiting list of people wanting to buy her paintings; Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Collins were among her customers. But it was only in 1996, nearly 20 years after she had her first exhibition, that she had her first public hanging — at the new Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow — of a picture of the Scottish comic character Rab C Nesbitt on the steps of Number 10, Downing Street.
Beryl Cook produced several books of collected pictures and illustrated a number of works by other authors, including Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains; The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.
Her contribution to The Queen’s Golden Jubilee, The Royal Couple, featured in the Golden Jubilee Exhibition, May 2002, at Art London, Chelsea.
Two half-hour animated films of Beryl Cook’s women who meet at Plymouth’s Dolphin Pub were broadcast in 2004 and won several animation awards. In 2006 the Portal Gallery in London held a comprehensive exhibition of Cook’s work to celebrate her 80th birthday.
A retrospective exhibition of her work was curated by Peter Doroshenko at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in 2007.
Plymouth University will be mounting a major retrospective in November 2008.
Her husband survives her with their son.

David Reese dies

Poker star David 'Chip' Reese, Dec. 4

David "Chip" Reese, a card star who won one of the biggest cash games in the world and three World Series of Poker championships, died on Dec. 4.

He was 56. Reese died in his sleep and was found by his son at his Las Vegas home after suffering from symptoms of pneumonia. (AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Ronda Churchill)