Word: arctic
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...tragic sense of life discarded by politics: in the high, empty gossip of the Muscovite prisoners; in the pathetic scramble for a few shreds of tobacco; in the epic wasteland of ice and snow. More illuminating than either the performances or the screenplay is Sven Nykvist's Arctic photography, shot in the glacial reaches of Norway. Long a cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman, Nykvist can achieve a tactile sense of dread; his expanses of snow are more than weather: they seem vast pages upon which no one dares to write...
Died. Ejnar Mikkelsen, 90, Danish explorer and author; in Copenhagen. Mikkelsen first indulged his zeal for polar exploration at the age of 16 by walking 320 miles from Stockholm to Göteborg in an unsuccessful attempt to join an Arctic balloon flight. Later he captured world attention by leading the 1906 Anglo-American polar expedition, a two-year journey that established the fact that there is no land directly north of Alaska. Between 1909 and 1912, Mikkelsen led a mission in search of the diaries of another brave Dane, Mylius-Erichsen, who had died while exploring the northeast corner...
...casting wistful second glances at "barbaric" societies that have lived harmoniously and respectfully with the earth. James Houston's particular over-the-shoulder look picks out an imagined Eskimo community at the moment of its intersection with Western life. A painter who spent twelve years in the Canadian Arctic, Houston was intrigued by an oldtimer's yarn of a lost whaleboat crew found wandering on the ice floes by Eskimos in 1896. The three men lived a year among their rescuers, only to be killed by them in the end. The White Dawn is Houston's crisp...
Final Tragedy. Over the whole story broods Houston's larger protagonist: nature in the Arctic, the violent rhythm of storms and seasons. There is an almost Homeric hunt for walrus, and a winter dance of exquisite magic and sexuality. Eventually a moment comes in the long winter when the whalers, ugly but not serious, threaten an Eskimo with knives. In his code, it is a disastrous challenge: he must either kill the kalunait or exile himself. "But killing men was not our custom," says Avinga, "and it had not been done in living memory." With no reasonable solution possible...
...along the route. As a quid pro quo, the U.S. would have to make some guarantee to divert Venezuelan or domestically produced oil to Eastern Canada if Arab nations shut off Mideast oil. Eastern Canada is not connected by pipeline to the oilfields in the Canadian West and the Arctic, but buys Mideast crude because it is cheaper...