Word: penned
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...Sarkozy fumed before an assembly of gendarmes at the Interior Ministry. The combative tone suggested to many that Sarkozy, who as head of the governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) is already eyeing the 2007 presidential elections, is gunning for the hard-right voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. If so, he'll have to contend with his own government first. Justice Minister Pascal Clément noted that "the law, all of the law, was respected" in the prisoner's early release, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin lectured that "nothing should put in question...
...prepared for an exciting surprise. In a brilliant end run that assured world attention, American PEN President Norman Mailer asked Secretary of State George Shultz to deliver the gathering's opening address. Unfortunately, the novelist did not notify the PEN board of directors, who were dismayed when they learned of the invitation. Many of them objected to a high-ranking representative of the U. S. Government speaking to American PEN, a group that loudly guards its independence from official censure or sanction. Said Susan Sontag, a prominent intellectual at the congress: "We have to as writers set ourselves in opposition...
...Mailer's action was not reversible; once invited, the Secretary could not be uninvited. That was hardly the end of the matter, though. The day before Shultz was scheduled to appear, Novelist and PEN Board Member E.L. Doctorow protested in the New York Times: "It is more than a shame--it verges on the scandalous--that those in stewardship of American PEN and the conference should have so violated the meaning of their organization as to identify it with and put itself at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen...
Among the many rewards of the congress was the chance for unknowns to meet such lions as Nobel Prizewinners Bellow, Czeslaw Milosz and Claude Simon as well as Playwright Arthur Miller and International PEN President Per Wästberg. They mingled in places as dissimilar as hotel coffee shops and the 34-room apartment of Saul Steinberg, the takeover artist. There was also a party at Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Edward Koch and Poet Allen Ginsberg hummed a mantra, and a wall-to-wall reception in the vast Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Milling around the reconstructed Temple...
...Morris saw a sudden movement beneath the President's table. Reagan's left foot was tapping off the seconds, a reflex planted more than 50 years ago in the soul of a fledgling broadcaster. Morris cradled a tiny black notebook in his left hand and with a thin-line pen jotted down his observation. Later, he transcribed his notes to a file card that went into a growing mass of research on Reagan the man and President, to be distilled into a biography after Reagan leaves office...