Night Review

Hey,

So I'm departing from my usual reading to run through a few items that interested me from my recent issues of Lapham's Quarterly. These aren't quite my usual fare, but it's good to be peek in on other stuff from time to time.

So that's why I picked up Night by Elie Wiesel. This is a slim volume that recounts the authors experiences in the concentration camps of WWII. So...some light reading here.

Interestingly, Mr. Wiesel first wrote this book in Yiddish. This is a new translation to English that was done by his wife. Translations are always interesting because you wonder how well the translator "grokked" the author. One hopes that this would be a very good translation. Although in the forward, Mr. Wiesel discusses the difficulty of writing down any of it. Not that he was unable to write about his experiences, but that those experiences were so profound that words seem a poor means of conveying them. In a sense, he's translating his trauma.

But if it's a translation of a translation, it's a very good one. The text is compact, efficient, and drives relentlessly from his last days in Transylvania to his last days in the camps. Throughout most of it, he remains with his father and it seems like that familial tie is one of the things that keep him alive when people around him succumb. The other thing that surprisingly seems to be a key element is his anger at god -- more specifically his rejection of god. At the start of the book, he's very devout, but the camps strip that faith away and leave someone determined to outlast a god who hates him.

Then the war is over, the camp is liberated and that's it. A short, sparse, powerful account of life in the camps. It's a well-told account, but any honest account of a survivor is worthy of being read and considered.

later
Tom

Weekend Diversions

Hey,

So this weekend, I went down to MIT's Festival of Independent Games. I wasn't too interested in the video game section, but they did have an area set aside for boardgames. I got to try a game of 49. This is a simple "connect four" kind of game played on a numbered grid. The hitch is that you turn over a card and auction it off. Win the auction and you can place your token on the grid. There are some special wild cards that provide more leeway over where to place your token and every wild card offers a payout ($7 per space you occupy up to a maximum of $49).

I was doing pretty well, but one of the other players got three in a row first and then he just sat and waited, collecting paydays, until a winning number for him game up and then just bought the game. I feel the game might be just a tad too luck-driven, but it was fun and I hope that the creator gets it published.

In the afternoon, the Interactive Fiction Society held a live action Zork-style game called Lost Pig. That was what brought me to the FIG because they asked PMRP for some people to read off the screen and provide voice talent for the game. I got to be Grunk the Orc, searching for the lost pig. Another PMRP member got to read for the gnome I encountered. It was a lot of fun. I had a good time and people seemed entertained, we got a lot of compliments on the session and it'd be fun to do again sometime.

Finally, in the evening we walked across the quad to go see MIT's Musical Theatre Guild's Avenue Q. Our seats weren't great, but we did enjoy the show. I was surprised to discover that the soundtrack really was most of the show. I assumed there was a fair amount of non-musical dialogue between the songs, but it seemed like it just rolled from one song to the other without a lot of pre-amble. Which is too bad because those bridge scenes were a lot more interesting in my head. Still it was a fun show and I ran into a bunch of people I know.

So yeah...busy Saturday
Tom