Word: grassed
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Reading Gnter Grass's recent Nobel Lecture I was struck by two things: it's rather disjointed--like it was written in a hurry--and it's wrong in a predictable way. The triteness of it took me by surprise. I haven't read any of Grass's books, not even The Tin Drum (heck, I haven't even seen the movie), but it was my understanding that he was one of the best living writers and that his Nobel Prize for literature was long overdue. Maybe so, but his Nobel Lecture strikes me as the sort of thing that...
...lecture, Grass seems to be going through the usual motions: anecdotes from the history of literature, references to his youth, material from his own novels, an armchair liberal's criticism of the dehumanizing influence of modern science and the free market, insinuations that the Nobel Prize is really not such a big deal and a conclusion that portrays literature as a heroic struggle for the future of the human race. None of this is very original, and in this case it does not gel together very well. Past Nobel Lectures like Saramago's, Garcia Marquez's and Faulkner's have...
According to Grass, "literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect...How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism?...But when the light finally did brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically doable, to economic and social progress, a reason that claimed to be enlightened but that merely drummed a reason-based jargon (which amounted to instructions for progress...
Musharraf: I would like to move toward the substance of democracy and away from the sham democracy we have had. I want a true democracy at the grass-roots level in which people can govern themselves and run their own health programs and road construction. Members of the National Assembly were doling out uncontrolled funds and controlling people's destinies at their whims. I'll change that...
...this was about as good as it gets, at least so far: Bayonet drills. Fifty of us in an empty classroom, slashing, thrusting and smashing our way through imaginary commies, yelling "kill" with every move and tossing out the creeds in unison: "Blood, blood, blood makes the green grass grow, drill sergeant!" and "Kill, kill, kill with the cold blue steel...