Word: sebastians
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Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that...
...dissemble: spying should be just your meat." Wren goes off to more of a welcome than he bargains for from Olga, the Amazonian ringleader of the Liberation Front, and less help than he needs from Clyde McCoy, American drunk and pornographer, the Firm's resident operative in Saint Sebastian...
...those who would rather not think about World War II, or the cold war either, one of the main events of the year is the 300th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach.* Anyone who missed the St. Matthew Passion in Bach's hometown of Leipzig on his actual birthday, March 21, can sample Bach festivals in Hamburg, Berlin, Heidelberg and Stuttgart, as well as the nine-day Bachanalia on the island of Madeira in June. And if this seems a surfeit of baroque music, remember that June 16 is Bloomsday in Dublin, when admirers of James Joyce spend 18 hours retracing...
Today, there are daily traffic jams in Harvard Square, Derek C. Bok is Harvard's President, and Harvard is celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach's 300th birthday...
...read music like most children read books, if your family played music together the way others play baseball, if you wanted to grow up to be a musician instead of an astronaut, you could be Johann Sebastian in Bach...or you could be Christoph Wolff, Chairman of the Music Department...