Word: contraband
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Tied to a balloon or bobbing down a canal in a bottle, the little magazine slips each month into Communist East Germany from the Western zone of Berlin. The cover of the contraband Tarantel (tarantula) proclaims that it is "priceless," but for East Germans caught chuckling over the magazine's sledgehammer humor, the price can be a term in a Red prison. Despite its problems of distribution and retribution, Tarantel is a big success among East Germans. Reason: the butt of humor for Tarantel is East Germany's Communist government...
...bread, crispy pie crust and glass upon glass of tepid milk. (It is of such starch that tomorrow's leaders are made.) It is the memory of a genial House superintendent humbly whistling an Irish air as he searched musty closets for machine-guns, hashish, Radcliffe girls and other contraband. It is the memory of leather magazine covers, tattered around the edges by the leisurely passing of time in the House common room. It is the memory of the indecisive rap on the oaken door and the diffident request to please modulate the sound on the record player. But perhaps...
...Pacific and Indian Oceans. They lived eight months among Papuan cannibals, were briefly jailed as suspected spies in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands. It was only days after they put to sea again that they discovered the Japanese had punctured all their cans of food in a search for contraband. Heaving the rotting" food overboard, they lived for a month on a few fish and a soup made of axle grease, curry powder and water. When they finally staggered ashore at Molokai, their delirium and ravaged appearance sent the lepers of Father Damien's colony fleeing in terror...
Nabokov's intellectual luggage included fragments of a book that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller's Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift-which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet...
Flying into London for a two-week concert tour, robust Singer Ella Fitzgerald ran afoul of tight-lipped British customs officials, who held up Ella and her eleven-man troupe for almost two hours on a luggage search (object of the hunt: unspecified contraband), cut open toothpaste tubes, analyzed a bottle of vitamin pills belonging to Bassist Ray Brown, tried to probe the large (225 Ibs.) person of Songstress Fitzgerald. Furious, Ella shouted: "I've been a million places but never saw anything like this!", later calmed down over the reaction of her first audience, which yowled for encores...