Word: grails
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...Wampeters," by the way, are objects (like the Holy Grail) around which the lives of otherwise unrelated people revolve. "Foma" are "harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls,"-such as "prosperity is just around the corner." A "granfalloon" is a "proud and meaningless association of human beings." As members of the Vonnegut granfalloon know, the words first appeared in one of Uncle Kurt's early novels, Cat's Cradle. · John Skow
...same members are now rushing forward in pursuit of the Grail of European unity. "Europe has been treated like a nonentity," complained French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert in a remarkable turnabout. "Europe has been humiliated by the superpowers..." Willy Brandt, preaching to the converted, promised the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "We can and will create Europe." Ted Heath and Georges Pompidou, meeting at Chequers, exchanged vows of the same sort...
...Mailer is back at the top, a master of a new form--nonfiction infused with all the technique and daring of the novelist. His recovery from the strain of the novel has taken the route of retreat, with the MacArthurian pledge that he will one day return to the grail to overshadow his The Naked and The Dead. Since Armies of the Night in 1967, Mailer's reputation has been restored to prominence; the decade of inattention was revealed to have wounded Mailer but not to have changed his direction. In Armies of the Night, Mailer mentions that no matter...
...monster as its prime agent. The small scale of that work, and its ingenius conception made it much more approachable. The came the Sunlight Dialogues, a very lengthy piece of prose with over 100 characters. Here, a great conglomeration of metaphysics is structured along the lines of a modern Grail Quest. Its one redeeming quality seems to be the real world Gardner so cautiously avoids...
...novels are built out of too much plot and too many characters; they provide quantities of information far beyond anyone's desire to be informed. They are full of technical disquisitions of differential calculus, organic chemistry, the history of film, jazz and rock, dope and Freud, the Holy Grail, rockets, the Wizard of Oz -- all Pynchon metaphors for the twentieth century. It is not that he is groping for the one correct metaphor to one consistent reality. He is compiling as many metaphors as he can for as many realities as he sees...