Word: drummings
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...spite of tensions, the agenda of costumed pageantry, fife-and-drum music, jet overflights and solemn oratory came off with scarcely a hitch, thanks in part to security arrangements so heavy that when the congressional special rolled into Philadelphia's 30th Street station, eight or so diners found themselves imprisoned for 15 minutes in a nearby McDonald's after police blocked all the restaurant's exits...
Ever since his first novel, The Tin Drum, exploded into international bestsellerdom in 1963, Gunter Grass has pursued two parallel careers. He continued to write fiction (Dog Years, Local Anaesthetic, The Flounder), as well as plays and poetry, that enhanced his worldwide reputation. He also plunged energetically into politics, working on behalf of West Germany's Social Democratic Party, speaking out against the superpower arms race, and hectoring with particular fervor the Western democracies. Planners of literary conferences learned that one sure way to garner attention was to snare Grass as a participant. He could, at the very least...
...narrator is explicitly Grass himself. He alludes to his birth and childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk), his service as a Hitler Cub during his early adolescence, and his later authorial relations to one Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked, stunted hero of The Tin Drum. Having asked for and received a pet rat as a Christmas present, the speaker begins suffering nightmares in which he must endure diatribes by "the She-rat of my dreams." She complains of, among many other things, the beastly treatment the rat has had to suffer at the hands of humans, dating all the way back...
This news spurs the narrator first into denial ("No, She-rat, no! . . . We're still alive and kicking") and then into a frenzy of storytelling ("an attempt to put off the end with words"). He resuscitates Oskar of The Tin Drum, now nearing 60 and the head of a film and videocassette production company, and sends him on a trip to Poland to attend his grandmother's 107th birthday party. He revives the plot and premise of The Flounder and sets five women in charge of a sailing barge on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly testing for the stultification of that...
...record that has sold 15 million copies and whose lyrics evoked comparisons with Tennyson and T.S. Eliot. EMI Records, for its part, celebrated the occasion by releasing the album on compact disc. As a group of well-wishers and Wife Linda watched, McCartney cut a cake shaped like the drum on the album cover and listened to the music that for many epitomizes the spirit of the psychedelic '60s. "It still sounds fresh," remarked McCartney, 44. "Was it really 20 years ago that we made that record?" Then the pop legend spoke about his continuing commitment to "peace on earth...