Word: pens
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...Nalpaul: Put this gay In the Marquez category. He'll get it. He's from Trinldad, he's upholding the standard of Western Culture, and he has a pen like vipet's tongue. Trouble with Mr. Vidladhar Surajprasad Naipaul, as Bud Collins would cali him, is that he is way too young as well as way too popular. The average age of the last six winners when they got the TNT laurels is over 71, and Bellow '76 was the kid on the block at 61. A fot at 50, Vidiadhar will have to wait...
...more), to be bound in pigskin into a special limited edition of his novella Brother Pig. The assignment carries with it an all-expenses-paid two-week working holiday in the Caribbean with the companion of Bech's choice, who will pull each sheet from under his busy pen. Bech brings along Norma, the reliable mistress whom he will never marry; the two of them have settled into "a limbo of heterosexual palship haunted by silently howling abandoned hopes." As the tense sojourn drags toward its close, Bech finds his signature harder and harder to complete. Finally he lifts...
...Bauhaus school of design, which his former assistant Walter Gropius founded in 1919 at Weimar. In graphics as in industrial design and architecture, the Bauhaus stripped away historic associations and ornaments in a search for essences. Letter forms no longer followed the paths of the scribe's pen or engraver's burin, but were constructed with ruler and compasses. The new type faces, posters and symbols were not always easily legible. But they were blunt and provocative, the ideal style for mass communication, advertising and propaganda...
Obviously the author wonders whether writing a book on the whole subject is absurd. What can the scratch of a pen accomplish when all the big bangs turn banal in the end? Sometimes he presses too hard. The ball of fire that appeared over Siberia in 1908 never quite finds its symbolic connection to his account of the Russian Revolution. A narrative on the ill-used Anabaptists begins so remotely that a reader gets lost in the preliminary spirals. At Friedrich's high level of risk, a measure of failure is unavoidable. But what would we do without this...
...Jordan's King Hussein. Hussein is personally courageous but an extremely timid man in political matters. That timidity derives almost inevitably from the inherent weakness of Jordan. As a nation, it is a contrivance, arbitrarily devised by a few strokes of the pen. Hussein is caught in a nutcracker, between Israel on one hand and Iraq and Syria on the other. He has little inherent national wealth, so he is dependent on the largesse of Saudi Arabia and others for weapons and economic security. He has a difficult situation governing a weak nation. But he is frustrating because...