Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another Math Department bystander darted into his office and returned a few seconds later with a large, awkward wooden object which says was a Renaissance-period ancestor of the flute. After demonstrating how to play the instrument, he passed it around among his friends, some of whom acknowledged that they were already familiar with a modern-day woodwind...
...telephone console resting on a gargantuan round table boasts 90 buttons, and the man seated before it seems bent on using all of them at once. His plump fingers, the nails freshly manicured with clear polish, poke impatiently at the instrument. Visitors flow into the office in a steady stream, yet all the while the man continues a separate dialogue with the console. "He wouldn't be a bureaucrat unless he was in a meeting," he booms into the speaker in a British-accented baritone that is powerful yet velvety. "I want the man, not the message." Poke. A button...
Sontag's earlier novels have met a mixed reception, and not just in Bull Durham. Though she builds an absorbing puzzle in The Benefactor (1963), in parts of Death Kit (1967) the scientific instrument of her prose is never quite equal to a musical instrument of the imagination. But in her more recent short stories, many of them collected in I, etcetera (1978), she triumphs, neatly drawing thought into the shapes of feeling. At the end of the story Debriefing, about the psychic perils of city life, she even makes what could be a gently funny summation...
...favored, Whitmanesque sobriquet makes even more sense as an evocation of a McFerrin performance. He appears onstage alone, his only instrument a mike, his only prop a bottle of Perrier, and the song will take him over, take him away. He sings lyrics, he sings rhythms, he sings sounds. "Singing without words is easier," he says. "Consonants get in the way. It's hard to sing as fluidly with lyrics." He will slap his thumb against his chest to make a bass tone as his hand becomes the snare drum. The mike, rubbed against his close- cut beard...
...waiting room, a block away from the headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, few would question that the Soviet security service has undergone a dramatic transformation since Stalin's era, when numbed citizens queued for news of arrested relatives. Once a crude weapon of repression, it now functions as a sophisticated instrument of state control, both at home and abroad. But despite the change of image, the KGB still inspires fear and loathing. As a letter in the magazine Ogonyok put it last August, "The time has come to lift the curtain of secrecy from the KGB's activities -- otherwise...