'As far as I can understand, my play has not been found suitable, and I ask you to return it to me.'
For some reason, these words caused agitation. Armchairs shifted, someone leaned down towards me from behind and said:
"No, why put it like that? Come now!"
Ivan Vasilievich looked at the jam and then, in consternation, at the people around him.
'Hmm
After a pause, I said:
'In that case I ask you to return it to me.'
And in that moment I quite distinctly glimpsed malice in Ivan Vasilievich's eyes.
'We have a little contract,' another voice suddenly spoke up, and Gavriil Stepanovich's face appeared from behind the doctor's back.
'But your theater does not wish to perform it, what do you want it for?'
Then a face with very lively eyes behind a pince-nez moved closer to me and in a high, thin tenor voice said:
'Surely you won't take it to Schlieppe's theater? What will they make of it there? Why, they'll have brisk little officers strutting around on stage! What good is that to anyone?'
'Under the terms of the current statutes and interpretations it cannot be given to Schlieppe's theater - we have a little contract!' said Gavriil Stepanovich emerging completely from behind the doctor's back.
'What is going on here? What do they want?' I thought and suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had a terrible, suffocating feeling.
So used and manipulated leaves Maksudov a mental wreck and wretchedly jaded. Bulgakov opens chapter 14 talking about Moscow and a stain he has on his clothing, perhaps drawing parallels to the people he deals with daily there:
How, can you tell me, can grease stains be removed from clothing? I tried this way and that, one thing and another. And it's quite remarkable: for instance, you soak it in petrol and the result is wonderful - the stain dissolves, dissolves and disappears. You feel happy, because there is no torment worse than a stain on your clothes. It's sloppy, it's bad, it gets on your nerves. You hang the jacket on a nail, and when you get up in the morning - the stain is back again, only now it has a slight smell of petrol.
The same thing after boiling water, dilute tea, eau de Cologne. Its' a real curse! You start getting angry and twitchy, but there's nothing you can do. No, it's clear that anyone who has once put a stain on his clothes is going to walk around with it until the suit itself wears out and is thrown out for ever. It's all the same to me now, but I wish others fewer of these stains.
So true of the tricks and contracts that artists find themselves in. Ever wonder why The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is once again Prince? Contract dispute! And I'm sure he had some of the best lawyers working for him and reading over that document before he signed it! How much longer before that stain is back?!
Fortunately, his play is eventually produced as the theater is under criticism for not being contemporary or independent (which is in its name). From that point on, every horror story ever told of a book or play being produced into a movie or stage is realized by our hero. Aside from massive ego complexes, critics mad with jealousy & bad acting instructions, he has to deal with his contemporary play being directed by an older, more esteemed man who wants to censor and edit the play. Bulgakov's real life hardships were no different as directors and theater managers tried desperately to cleanse his plays of any political satire or criticisms--especially of the current government!
This drives him to nearly complete sanity. At night he practices lying to Vasilievich and dealing with him so that his play will be produced without censorship. He comes to this harsh realization:
One night I decided to check things - I pronounced my monologue without looking in the mirror, and then cast a furtive, squinting glance into it - and was horrified.
Gazing out at me from the mirror was a face with a wrinkled forehead, bared teeth and eyes that betrayed not only anxiety but also ulterior motive. I clutched my head in my hands realizing that the mirror had misled and deceived me, and I flung it to the floor. A triangular piece sprang out of it. They say it's a very bad sign if a mirror breaks. Then what can be said of the madman who deliberately breaks his own mirror!
A harsh realization that you are dealing with these kind of people, an even harsher realization when you realize that you've become one of them. Now a nearly a raving lunatic who has taken to talking to himself, he depends entirely on living at the theater where his play is being produced. It is the only thing that keeps him going--to know that his story might be told to people to provide them enjoyment and to hear it and recognize with the characters.
However, the production goes very slowly and the director (Vasilievich) is taking entire days to force the actors and actresses to perform strange acting rituals that are supposed to make them better actors. While the play does not progress at all! By this time, Maksudov & Bulgakov have become cut down and unsure of themselves, the lunatic says to himself near the end of the book:
'Yes, this is all astonishing. But it is only astonishing because I am an ignoramus in these matters. Every art has its own laws, mysteries and methods. For instance, a savage would think it funny and strange that anyone should scrub his teeth with a brush, filling his mouth with chalk. To the uninitiated it appears strange that instead of proceeding directly to operate on his patient, a doctor first does all sorts of strange things to him, for instance, he takes blood for analysis and so on
How many times do you think that a musician, actor, writer, painter or graphics artist has been instructed not to do something? How many albums do you think come out these days with the intensity of the sound on the CD mastered so that it is all the way up all the time? How many artists are allowed to keep the sound that made them famous in their small towns? How many movies are made that lack a formulaic sure fire success model for today's theaters? Are we not living in a society where what is 'art' is defined by those with the funds to publish it?
If you don't read A Dead Man's Memoir, at least recognize that to be an artist of any kind today doesn't mean starvation necessarily but instead torment, manipulation and in the worse cases being stripped of your dignity & sanity.
there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.
the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.
A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!
And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.
What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).
You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.