Word: janitor
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...Originally published in Germany in 1971 (and still banned in the Soviet Union), the book is a loose recounting of 20th century Russian history seen through the eyes of three aging brothers. Pyotr and Andrei Lashkov have become provincial Communist Party functionaries, while Vasilii acts as a morose janitor for a Moscow apartment house. All are profoundly disillusioned by the course their lives and land have taken. For them, the glorious future promised by the Revolution is not working, and Pyotr wonders...
Raisins are more complicated: if you ate them in your dream, tough luck, because "you can expect a season of cash going out faster than it comes in." If you stuck them in your ear, for instance, or fed them to a janitor, you can count on "pleasant social times ahead." The entry under "Pickle" is more or less what the amateur would expect: "overall satisfaction with the general state of your life, love, and pursuit of happiness is forecast." "Petunia" shows a need for professional guidance. Growing outdoors, "these flowers signify pleasant friendly social affairs." A petunia indoors foretells...
...Berkeley in 1970. She changed her name to Mizmoon in honor of a poem written to her by Camilla Hall. After a year studying French and English at Berkeley, Mizmoon dropped out to work and threw herself into radical feminist activities. She supported herself as a part-time janitor at the Berkeley public library, where a co-worker remembers her as "a very gentle person...
...presidents have ordered similar burglaries. The old "they all do it" gambit was fine as long as the victims were members of minority groups and others who don't deserve civil liberties in the first place, but as soon as Edmund Muskie cried in New Hampshire and a night janitor at the Watergate Complex happened on a taped door-lock, the cry was, "Hold on, boys! These are the major politicians you're messing with...
...edges into dreaminess by the force of a whimsical tone, the sense of a playful personal force behind it. But perhaps the strongest story in the new book adopts a tenor which is totally different; it is set in a smoothed and poeticized version of a black janitor's voice, telling a story about a friend...