Word: greys
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...began on a chill, grey afternoon 20 years ago. The site was a laboratory in a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago's old Stagg Field Stadium. Gathered there was a team of scientists and engineers headed by Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Mussolini's Italy. They had finished building history's first nuclear reactor. Now they were using it to produce the first controlled nuclear reaction...
Madama Butterfly, you know, is about as Japanese as lasagne. The Boston Opera Group's production, which will be presented again at the Harvard Square Theatre tomorrow night, almost manages to convince us otherwise: Ming Cho Lee's set is delicately authentic in shades of grey; the second-act Flower Duet culminates in an inspired bit of flower-arranging rather than in the usual mess of pink petals strewn about the stage; best of all, the cast is almost entirely Japanese. We are, as I said, almost convinced that Madama Butterfly is really about Japan-but Puccini's music spoils...
...this solecism by thinking that Norman Mailer improves with age and by having, once, smoked a small quantity of marijuana.) The Burroughs gambit was, until recently, almost unanswerable, because it was almost impossible to track this author down, physically or in print. He was the greyest of grey eminences, a wraith who flickered into occasional visibility in Mexico, Paris or Tangier. The few shreds of information about him have been those of the YAD catechism: he was the legendary "Bull Lee" of On the Road; he spent 15 years on junk; he wrote an unprintable book called Naked Lunch, which...
...neighborhood bookstore, right there beside Youngblood Haivke and The New English Bible. The terrible Mary McCarthy has spoken of Burroughs with respect, and the Saturday Review's John Ciardi has praised his "profoundly meaningful" search for "values." British Writer Kenneth Allsop called him "Rimbaud in a raincoat." The grey eminence himself has even appeared at that squarest of social gatherings, a writers' conference...
...whose source is the Burroughs adding machine, which his grandfather invented (an irony important to beat hagiographers), the 48-year-old author lives in the "beat hotel," a fleabag shrine in a section of Paris where passers-by move out of the way for rats. There in a worn grey room the worn grey man has written three other novels. The Soft Machine, the immediate sequel to Naked Lunch, repeats the rant of its predecessor with far less coherence; the improvement may be explained by Burroughs' solemn assurance that much of his writing is dictation from Hasan-i-Sabbah...