Went to the grave with him?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Went to the grave with him?

Houdini artifacts of all types are larger than life in the magic world. The Queens graveyard where he is buried, Machpelah Cemetery, has been closed to the public for years because of thefts and vandalism to the Houdini plot. Busts of the Master Mystifier, as Houdini was known, are said to carry a particularly peculiar significance. In 1975 the original graveyard bust, carved from marble, was crushed into pieces with a sledgehammer.

“The thinking is that he went to the grave with secrets in his head, so if I bust open the head, I will find the secrets,” said John Bohannon, who is chairman of the Houdini Committee, the group at the Society of American Magicians that looks after the grave site. The society twice replaced the original bust with cheaper copies, he said, but both replacements disappeared.

- With Police Help, a Bust of Houdini Reappears, The New York Times, March 10, 2002.

3. Like many Poles who survived the war, Ms Szymborska readily accepted communism in early life, seeing it as a salvation for a ruined world. Early poems praised Lenin and young communists building a steel works. Later she blamed her own “foolishness, naivety and perhaps intellectual laziness”, but some found it hard to forgive her for signing a petition in 1953 backing a show trial of four priests.

Her ironic and individualistic spirit was ill fitted to the grey conformity of “people’s Poland”: the Nobel citation said she wrote with the ease of Mozart and the fury of Beethoven. Playful, subtle and haunting, her poetry could never be in harmony with the socialist realist style dictated by the country’s cultural commissars. She mocked their intolerance of dissent in a poem on pornography: