Oriana Fallaci Speaks Looking at SontagmmWilliam O. DouglasUnpackaging SternHarrison Risingfl P VPYY i' jH* m4J Y* & i' V vj. vl..The Chicago Literary UNIVERSITY ARCHIVESJRL 130A T TN. : ^ • RYANElkin, Calvino Reviewed The Writing ProgramGive the Gift that Keeps on GivingRecords from SPIN-ITGive the giftof music.Give the giftof music.Here are a few of this week’s sale itemso(( fooMvAySpin it Now,Spin it LaterINCLUDEBAD INDICATION/HANG ON FOR LOVE(Totn^DattsHeartattack And VineJOHN LENNON&YOKO ONOIncludes (Just UKe) Starting OverKiss Kiss Kiss WomanWatching The WheelsSPIN-IT1444 E. 57th684-1505Sole good thru Dec. 15 Double Fantasy NKILVCX NO.INCUDESFOR YOU, FOR MEHEART OF THE MATTERSOME ARE BORN £ Hawks & DovesJONI MITCHELLIncludes Uptown Party UpWhen You Were MineSHADOWSAND LIGHTWITH mistletoe and holly „Let C hristmas time be jollyWilli just a little lolly:But don’t get oil your trolley !Occasional VersesBv IDA E. S. NOYESStudent Activities’ Annual Wassail PartyToday, beginning at 4 p.m.Ida NoyesWith Carols, Santa Claus and Seasonal Goodies 000f.02 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980The Textbook DepartmentThe University of ChicagoBookstore970 E. 58th StreetWISHESALLAHAPPY HOLIDAYBooks for many winter quarterclasses will be available for salethe weekofDecember 8Shop early and avoid therush in January TheChicago JJterary ReviewCopywright 1980 The Chicago MaroonVolume 90 Number 62"For if it is rash to walk into a lion'sden unarmed, rash to navigate theAtlantic in a rowing boat, rash tostand on one foot at the top of St.Paul's, it is still more rash to go homewith a poet." —Virginia Woolf"Give me the still, white seethingand the incandescence of the mo¬ment: the moment, the quick of allchange and haste and opposition —the moment, the immediate present,the Now."—D.H. LawrenceEditors: Candlin Dobbs, Richard KayeProduction: Joan SommersArt Editor: Lee SorensenOur ContributersPaul Ausick, an Assistant Dean of the College, is into New Wave.Joel Baird, a student at Grinnel College, is fondly remembered by certaineditors.Paul Bodine is an English Major in the college.Marc Diamond is Assistant Dean in the Social Service Administration. Hecan be seen walking his wild pet dogs on and off campus.Steve Eaton would rather be enjoyed than understood. He wants the world toknow that he is not corrasable.Tim Erwin is a PhD. candidate in English and a resident head in PierceTower.Keith Fleming is a student in the College and a constant habitue of the Commuter Lounge.Kate Fultz is a third year student in the college. She would rather work for"The Quarter Horse Journal" in Amirillo, Texas.Jack Helbig is presently learning about the facts of life in Hyde Park. Hislatest film, "To Sentimental Jean" will be ready for Easter, and he ispresently endangering his eyesight by editing it eight hours at a time. Hisnext film will be based in art on Eliot's Four Quartets. Mr. Helbig would liketo be a Poet-Warrior.Maggie Hivnor is the fomrer editor of Chicago Review . She is a freelanceEditor and is studying the Italian Women's Liberation movement of the pastfifty years.Bibi Levine is a fish-out-of-water from Lake Forest. She commutes to U of C.Frank Lewis is a graduate Student in Art History.Eleanor Leyden is a chronically incomplete and withdrawn student, more orless..."What do college girls like? to feel pretty and smart and clean.../ Whatdo I's and W's mean?”Jay McKenzie is a fourth year student in the College, majoring in English.He plans a future of near-continuous unemployment, enlivened by debt andthe abuse of alcohol. "I'm not unwilling to sell my soul to prospectiveemployers," he says, "but so far no one's asked." Inquiries may be madecare of the CLR.Molly McQuade is a red hared student in the College, former Co-editor of theCLR and dangerously distracted.Marian Henrique;Neudel is an anarchist attorney, draft counselor, and hashad a long time crush on William Douglas, whom she thinks looks likeSpencer Tracy.David Oates was paroled from the college, A.B. '79, and is still exploring thequestion "is there life after college?" He worked last year for a smallSouthern daily paper as a reporter, photographer, editorialist, paper stuffer,and hog stopper. Asked why he returned to Hyde Park, the Tennesseanreplied "I missed the Chicago winters."Adam O'Connor is a long time member of the Quality Club, an illegalUniversity based organization. He has a bedroom door like nobody else's.Jeff Smith is a PhD. candidate in English and does not belong to the ChicagoReview staff.K.G. Wilkins has an aunt who brings her zebras.Special thanks to Kate Fultz, Molly McQuade, Becky Woloshin, Leslie Wick,and Wanda Jones.The Chicago Literary Review Dec 5, 1980 — 3Stanley Elkin's Greatest HitsStanley ElkinE. P. Dutton$10.95By Jack Helbig"I can't go on; I'll ao on." Beckett'smotto is epitome ofElkin's philosophy.Like Beckett, Elkin wraps his saddest! statements in vaudevillian humor. Hisdark humor, and its accompanyingpessimism has made Stanley Elkin lessthan a best selling author. His books, ifnot stillborn, come into the world veryvery quietly. Only his last novel, TheLiving End, caught the public's attention,a feat which prompted WarnerPublications to release six Elkin's booksin paperback. E. P. Dutton, hoping toprofit from this mild Elkin- mania haspublished Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits,a collection of seven stories, each Elkin‘.Hitsa*. andMissesexcerpted from one of Elkin's Sevenpublished works. (Isn't that finemarketing?) That makes this book a finepoint from which to survey Elkin'swriting career. Unfortunately the view isfar from breathtaking. (No loss if you leftyour camera.)Stanley Elkin, at his best is intelligentand witty; in peak form he can commenton life's petty pace with a wistful humor:Ellerbee had been having a badtime of it. He'd had financialreversals. Cahnge would slip out ofhis pockets and slide into thecrevice of other peoples furniture.He droped deposit bottles and lostmoney in pay phones and vendingmachines. He overtipped in darktaxis. He had many such financialreversals.But at his worst Elkin in gross, sexistand vaguely pornographic, finding humorin little stiffies, women's genitals andsub-human sexual encounters. In "TheDick Gibson Show" Bernie Perks fallsmadly in lust with a woman who buyssupersized tampons at his pharmacy:"My life centered on her center, on theprodigious size of her female parts."Elkin balances the good and the badfairly well; so every story has a niceportion of insight and humor, and anequal helping of ridiculous mastabatorycomedy. In "The Making of Ashedan" wemeet a man (a fine satire of thewandering rich boy, who is raped by ahuge, female virginal Kamchatka bear.(He liked it even though he struggled atfirst.) Elkin is like Lenny Bruce—whenhe is good, he is great, but whenhe's bad, don't waste your time.I've made him sound like an inconsistent comedian, but he is also aword weaver, a poet, or, to please mypoetic friends who tell me prose cannotbe poetry, Elkin is a "proset". Elkin isgreat at starting an avalanche of wordsand clauses; beginning with only a fewwords, the tumbling phrases hit otherphrases, momentum increases assentence after sentence maintains therhythm until the rockslide tumbles thelength of the paragraph.Slowly, very slowly, the Chinamanbegan to open his mouth. Bertiewatched the slow parting of theChinaman's thin lips, the gleamingteeth, white and bright as fencepickets. Gradually the rest of theroom darkened and the thinlypadded chair on which Bertie satgrew incredibly soft. He knew thathe had been transported somehow,that they were now in a sort of atheatre. The Chinaman was seatedon a kind of raised platform.Meanwhile the mouth continued toopen, slowly as an ancientdrawbridge. Tiny as the Chinamanwas, the mouth seemed enormous.Bertie gazed into it, seeing nothing.At last, deep back in the mouth, hesaw a brief flashing, as of a smallcrystal on a dark rock suddenlyilluminated by the sun. In amoment he saw it again, brighternow, no longer sustained. Soon itwas so bright that he had to forcehimself to look at it. Then themouth went black. Before he couldprotest, the brightness wasoverwhelming again and he saw acascade of what seemed likediamonds tumble out of theChinaman's mouth. It was theChinaman's tongue.This technique is, of course, used by bothgreat writers and pornographers; andElkin does not seem to know whichcategory he wishes to belong. Witness thesame style used when Bernie Parksdescribes his love:I saw the vastness, the tropical rain forest that was her pubes, theswollem mons like freshly madeIndian tumulus, labia majora like agreat inverted gorge, the lushpudendum.Now I'm not accusing Elkin ofperverting a generation, or of destroyingpublic morals, only of being a poor judgeof the comic. Barry Hannah can be assexual as Elkin, but he is so with arealization of why the sexual appears inhis stories. Hannah's characters becomeobssessed with sex because of moral andspiritual sickness. Elkin's people turn tosex as a means of filling up pages, orfinishing a story that has lostmomentum.Stanley Elkin is a shy pornographer,shy because he never describes morethan the mildly objectionable ortitilating, a pornographer because hedoes not write to be erotic or To attackthe worldliness of eroticism but becauseit is fashionable to write this way aboutsexuality. His writing betrays acontemporary love of the vaguelypornographic, that modern interest in theslightly bestial or the mildly sinful. It isquite fashionable for Jordache children toride each other bareback; It is quitefashionable to talk about the Marquis deSade and to take his sadism from theback rooms and dungeons and, wateringit down, put it into the condominiums andsuburban ranch houses, If not in deed,then in word, sado-masochism isacceptable to mainstream metropolitanlife. (How many normal, even dullpeople, have you heard joking about Sand M? Doesn't everyone seem to knowabout chains and leather?) Elkin is alltoo timely in his writings, and timelywithout comment — without acceptance,or rejection of his sexual subject. "Hereis a man schtuping a bear." he simplystates, adding casually, "And here is aman lusting after a woman's abnormallylarge genitalia."Perhaps I'm being unfair to Mr. Elkin.Some of his stories do not have the strongsexual bent of "The Making of Ashedon"and "Bernie Perks." "The Transient"Continued on 2 7Packages: Not All Wrapped UpPackagesRichard SternGeorghem, Coward, McGeen$8.95By Bibi LevineOver many of Richard Stern's storiesin Packages, a paternal figure hovers:the writer, a conscious crafter of talesthat are meant to honor life in itsold-fashioned incarnation. In thisincarnation, life may be difficult andeven bewildering, but it is always blessedin the end by the value and meaningwhich people — themselves endearinglyimperfect — contrive to give to it.If this creed isn't yours, the pressure ofStern's pen can be a little irritating. Youbegin to imagine his shadowy profilevisiting the pages as you read, nudgingyou toward home truths with an alacrity,ou don't quite welcome. Though thetrip through Packages is certainlyentertaining, you may eventually want toskip town for more devilish business onthe outskirts — to flee the too cheeryimplications of mainstream realism.The urge sets in strongly with "Mail,"the second story in the collection.Narrated by one Marcus Firetuck (evenhis name is dismayingly cute), it is acloyingly calculated reverie about theman's lately received letters and faithfulcorrespondents. As a cartographer,Firetuck gives Stern the opportunity toinsert clever technicalities of the trade inbetween orchestrated gushes ofsentiment. And his eloquence, too, has itsjustification: Firetuck is a weekend poet.His coterie of pen pals is chosen torepresent the most eccentric, exotic andheart-warningly human of the species:Sandra Lukisch, the cashmere-clad andvirginally volumptuous chief of theLukisch Cartographic Service, inAustralia; Joachim Fopper, hailing fromEcuador, a tireless devotee of Firetuck'slittle known poetry; Vernon Bowersock, pedant and adventurer, an "eyeglassedimmensity", and Lester Doyle, anobscure musicologist. Tracing the historyof these friendships, Firetuck waxes intomawkish celebration of what remainliterary contrivances. He pats himself onthe back for it.Similar problems crop up in"Packages," a rumination by thenarrator on his recently deceasedmother. Perhaps because the subject ismore elemental than that of "Mail," thenarrator is disarmed of outrightgrandiloquence, but still manages todeliver a salute too precious to be real.The details of dotage and physicaldecline are also milked for whateverweary pathos they can by this timeconvey, as the son makes his inevitableattempt to reconcile his mother's ashesto her life.However, the same topic — death — issplendidly tackled in "Dr. Cahn's Visit,"a third-person account of the finalmeeting between a middle aged man'selderly parents. "'How far is it now,George?"' it begins, as the formelydistinguished Dr. Cahn makes hismuddled way to the hospital where hiswife lies dying after a long illness.Dialogue largely replaces and improveson the tearful descriptions of"Packages", and what omniscientnarration there is proceeds in a spirit ofrestraint. The meeting itself, in a fewspare lines, is startlingly powerful, as thelong-standing distance between the oldpeople is suddenly bridged.Still, it is with relief that one passes onto more frivolous stories and beyond thetoo easy emotional targets of"Packages" and "Dr. Cahn." —prticularly to "Troubles" and "A RecitalFor The Pope," among the mostdiverting in the book. With these Sternshifts gears to write about young people,dropping, for the most part, his fondnessfor the grand summary statement, thefatherly annotation."Troubles"is the story of an ill-matched student couple at the U of C.Stranded in the bogs of their respectivedissertations, Hanna and Jay subsist onthe leavings from their Peace Corpsincomes while tinkering with their ownand their friends' neuroses. Though Jayactually doesn't have friends (hesecludes himself in their apartment nightby night, devouring apples and books ashe drains Sanka from a grisly greenvase), Hanna has four, each in their ownway crippled by inadequacies. In Stern'shands, these inadequacies turn them intogrotesques: "Clover would have beenbeautiful except for a dermal scurf thatwas the facade of a wintry interior...";"Wanda's trouble lay under more layersthan Troy; enormous energy piled fat,wit, manual genius, and a sense otspectacle over it." Jay tries to persuadeher out of friendship with these "freaks",but Hanna persists, until she concludestnat he is the worst of them. She thenloses faith in herself. It seems that acommon germ afflicts everyone in HydePark.Moving afield, young Nina Callahan in"Recital" is an impoverishedworld-traveller and poet offered a free Richard Sternyear in Rome if she spends it there at aresidential school run by Dominicannuns. Having lived hand-to-mouth foryears while conducting her epicresearches and literary labors, she findsthat she must pay dearly for institutionalsecurity — must put up with thephilistine nuns, who let the glories oftheir 16th-century palazzo go to seed,with stupid American students whoignore their lessons for the pleasures of"playing footsie in the scum" withswains, and with lesser humiliations.She endures these for the sake ofobtaining an audience with the Pope,enjoyed by each student annually. ThePope "smiled at Nina's curtsey, held outhis peasant's hand for her kiss, asked ifshe understood Italian, where she wasfrom, how she liked Rome." Missionaccomplished, Nina — everstrong-minded and smart, with nopatience for anyone who is not — returnsto her scavenger's life. With only a fewadvisory sentences, and a resilient comicsense, here Stern almost makes up forthe sententiousness of other stories in thisi>no\,pn hook\4 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980PostscriptWhen you vanished, the beeches trembled all over with freezing rain:a November miracle. Gangling, blonde,bare-lidded, aurorallyfreckled, you roseearly alwaysfor the squawling animals.Muscular phantasm.Hands ruggedfrom lambs’ births, you’d presidedalso over burst pipes,at aching hours yarned the stubborn calvesout of their mothers, succoredthe rabbits kneading their tiny souls,toted bales. Kept the kittens astir.Flushed the fowlsout of the shady woodswhere they would spoil and fussunder the rubbery clouds.Karen, nobody knew you here: notthe Polack farmers’ childrensullenly riding beside your chalicedsilence on the schoolbuspast the acrestufting heavy with vines in Octoberand feeling the loss weeks into the pallorand barren windshifts ofthe New Year. Not them.Not, either, the coy and nosylibrarians mouthing their tinny librettosof cousins and merchants and budgets,year after year.Brought to life in a brood of Anglicans,willy-nilly left to yourself at three, at ten you climbed the wandering beeches with your brothers,bruised and bony, playing “Set Free.”The tumor rounded into your foreigner’s quietwhen you were thirteen. You got over it.Finished school a naive survivor, certainthe chickens and hogs two miles overfrom home would be enough.Your older sister ran away,your brother left for the Coast,your middle brother converted,sunny with homilies, to“Jews for Jesus.”Leaving you only. Molly McQuade ■oL.aCD*5>o—>>»Oo*-o£Q. FreeTranslationof ChineseTz’u Poem(2|At first Magpie Bridgethereafter the silver throatof the riverswallowing the spirit ofthis night altogetheras the reconciliationof the bridegroomto a good nameIt is wiser not to keepthe ancient yearPull down the cassia tree!Break the cord within a month!How else to findone of the immortal women?Eleanor LeydenSquid SoupMichael Mooneywith illustrations byPeter BalestrieriStory Press, Chicago.S10.50 Hardcover, $3.95 PaperDavid OatesMichael Mooney is an old-time taleiteller dealing in the stuff of modern life,ana with a glimpse into things outside therealm of the old tales. His style could fiteasily with any number of works fromjtne middle ages, particularly the folk[tales which were shared by villagers.This is both a strength and weakness of[the volume — brief fairly tale endingsjean be very irritating. “The Masculine[Principle", a story in which a large andoverwhelmingly friendly black dog takesover an old couple's home, much to thecouple's delight and the disgust of theirfriends and family, ends with “It was themasculine principle, all right. Rigel[looked at Joey and they both knew."“Thief", which is overall an engagingIstory, closes with “So Rita Murphy toldhim never to think himself a better thiefthan his father but to go into the worldand seek the spirit of manly delight. Andwith a broken heart he did."In “Thief", one of the special scenescomes when Joey does an apprenticeshipliving with an old man in Sicily to learnhis wisdom and become a great thief —msieaa ot aiscovering great wisdom afterthree years with the simple old man, herealizes the old man is a fool and hiserrand a waste — a nice twist on thetraditional story of the mystic mentorgiving enlightenment to a pupil.Mooney's ideas are always interesting,but in a few cases as in the story“Laughter", they are not as well realizedas they could be. The remain good ideaswithout having been convincingly broughtto life. The premise of “Laughter" is thatthe protagonist is a comedian such as wehave never heard before — one who holdsup a vision of a better world, “a comediannot in the modern sense but the ancient, inthat he made a man's soul to wax light, nothis mouth to laugh." But the comedian'sactual speech does not rise to the level ofeloquence or insight which would fullyrealize the idea.In other stories, Mooney's whimsiescome alive and dance for the reader.“Women" has a wonderful scene with aGreek man, who is a wheeler dealer, talking to a man asking for a loan to keepfrom getting his legs broken by sometoughs who he owes money. Through thescene, the wheeler, Zak, has to deal withmother nagging him and insulting thesupplicant in Greek, which the other mandoes not understand.“The man is a beast" his mothersaid in Greek.“Ma," said Zak.“If the man is a snake, you must carry astick.... The snake would be a bird," hismother said, “if he weren't a snake."“Ma," said Zak.“What did she say?" Steve said.“never mind what she said—"“If the snake were a bird, he wouldstill eat eggs."“Ma, for christsake!"“I like your mother," Steve said,“We understand each other."He looked at her and she smiledsweetly.The collection as a whole is united by the repetition of certain symbols, such asthe squid, wooly mammoths, big blackdogs, gangsters who get their ideas fromcomic books and can't enjoy sex becausethey are afraid; by the repetition ofthemes, among them the way immigrantsdeal with our New World, the war betweenthe sexes and the fundamental alienationwhich can remain even in the best of mar¬riages; and by the simple but effectivevoice of Mooney, telling you about thediverse snips of life he has found to show.Story Press, which published SquidSoup, is a small press run by RichardMeade, a University of Chicago GraduateStudent in English, and Carol Evans, afomrer Chicagoan who now lives in NewYork where she is an advertising ex¬ecutive for McCall's magazine.The company has produced one bookeach year since 1978. Meade said hewould like to do more, but at presentthere is only enough capital in theventure for one book. After each goesout they have to wait for the return ontnat investment before they can publishanother. “I'm pleased," said Meade, “that while we do have to wait, the bookshave been well enough received that thefunds do regenerate." “Currently he istrying to find more people interested ininvesting in the press so the operationcan be expanded. He is also consideringapplying for grants from privatefoundations. 'The first two-story Press books, TheHour of the Sunshine Now by NorbertBiei and The Monkey Puzzle Tree byFlorence Cohen of Wilmette were wellreceived both critically and in terms ofsales, with the Blei book receiving threeliterary awards.“We favor stories with larger concerns— emotional issues are more importantto us than abstract ones. We are tryingto create a larger audience for the shortstory and that works against theexperimental as well, since experimentalfiction is interesting to only a fewesoteric circles." He stresses that he andEvans are not avoiding publishingexperimental fiction just because of aconcern for what the public will think —he sees it as a fortunate coincidence thattheir taste coincides with what is moresaleable. One advantage to being a smallpress, Meade said, is that he and Evansare able to read all the unsolicitedmanuscripts they receive and don't haveto rely on agents to screen submissionsfor them — they see few enough thingsthat they are able to make their owndecisions in this respect.Mooney, according to Meade, is in hisearly 40s, received his doctorate inmedieval literature from Edinburghuniversity, and was a college professor at jMoorhead State in Minnesota until hequit because h felt the work was "not for jhim" and not good for his writing. Aftermoving back to his hometown ofMilwaukee, he started working for a realestate firm as a manager of properties.The tales in Squid Soup grew from hisexperiences in that job, and hisstory telling style and concerns weremolded by his work with medieval tales.The book itself justifies the risk of theStory Press editors in staking this year'sincome for the organization on its merits, jSo compliments on Squid Soup to chefMooney and restaurateurs Meade andEvans and best of luck to Story Press — ithey deserve it.The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 5Henry Adams as an undergraduateAnEducationAn EssayBy Maggie HivnorHenry Adams first made me nervousback in 1972, when I was a sophomore incollege. One of the matters in my dormhad a habbit of peddling literature tocertain of the smaller undergraduates:sometimes he would even have a Penguinpaperback of the work — The LongestJourney, for example— in his coat pocket, and whip it out and lend it to youright then and there, on the spot, in theelevator, or over a breakfast bowl ofyogurt and granola (this was 1972,remember). It was over granola andyogurt, I remember, that someonebrought up Henry Adams. I alsoremember saying something like “Ohyeah. I tried to read that once. Mont S.Michel was OK, but The Education...— atwhich point I received a look from thisliterary dorm master which allprofessors should take special lessons todevelop, if they don't already have itdown, and completed my sentence, . .but I didn't really give it time then. I'llhave to try it again soon."Eight years later I was as happilyunacquainted with Henry Adam'seducation as ever. Then one spring dayhis name came up in a literature class,and a look of acute, guilty recognitionmust have come over my face, which theprofessor mistook for wise, knowingrecognition. It was Monday morning, Isuppose, and the class room was notexactly rife with looks of recognition. Iwas encouraged: 'Ah. Have you read it?"I stared vacantly back at the professor,managing not to answer, so that I did notexactly, technically, lie; but as anyonewho has read A Man for All Seasonsmight understand, I was not sure that mysilence would hold up in a court of law. Ihad to get that book read. Soon.A month or so later I bought a copy,first hand, and started reading theintroduction. Then someone (who will gounnamed here) told the Maroon that Iwas going to read The Education ofHenry Adams this summer, and itappeared in a year-end round-up ofsummer readng plans. Well, it was true:I had been saying I was going to read it;I had even started it ... I was even a bitfascinated by Adams's worriedreferences to natural selection.There was something comforting aboutthis Bostonian jabs at eighteenth-centurynotions of character and virtue. It waspleasant to hear him. protest that his social and politicalsuccesses were not really the directresult of good habits and/or a stout heart,and that his failures were caused byneither sin nor sloth. But what madethese confidences most interesting wasAdams's style. However much heclaimed to be a mere bug in the wind ofhistory, he did so with such flair thatanyone reading him would have to feel itwouldn't be so bad to be an insect,provided one had some degree ofconscious grace. (But that grace requireda sense of history, and that required alittle background reading, which requireda trip to the library, . . . which I did nottake.)Then I went on an overnight sail withtwo friends who were late sleepers. Thatalone wouldn't have done it, necessarily,but by chance the only other readingmaterial I had with me that morning wasa stale little collection of French shortstories. I was awakened at dawn by aflock of off-shore Long Island mosquitoes,and there was no swimming ladder ondeck (not to mention man-eating swansin the harbour), so I could not goswimming.I read The Education —most of it.On a crowded coachout of Penn. Stationsix weeks later, I was reading chaptercalled "Silence." Henry Adams (as is hiswant) was rather exultantly down in thedumps:One's mind was already litteredand stuffed beyond hope with themillions of chance images storedaway without order in the memory.One might as well try to educate agravel-pit.Adams's extended identity crises — orperhaps it was his ability to absorb mostof the confusion of a whole society intoone mind, and the syntactical virtuositywith which he catalogued confusion —had me fairly bewildered. In a feebleattempt to catalogue some of Adams'sconfusion, I was listing page numbers onthe inside back cover under variousrubrics: "value and money," "science & religion," and (by far the longest list)"contradiction & paradox." Reading TheEducation of Henry Adams was makingme just about as nervous as not readingit had made me. Maybe it was true thatknowledge could not be accumulated inpackets, stored up, or invested, and thencounted upon, as they say money can be.Typically, though, Adams's point wasmore complicated than that.. . . one know no better in 1894 thanin 1854 what an Americaneducation ought to be in order tocount as success. Even grantingthat it counted as money, its valuecould not be called general.America contained scores of menworth five millions or upwards,to whom the task of making moneyequivalent to education offeredmore difficulties than to Adamstask of making educationequivalent to money.The fellow sitting next to me lookedover his copy of Sterio Investments andremarked, "The Education of HenryAdams. I tried to read that once. Mostboring book I ever read."I was hardly about to start /proselytizing on a train, so we discussedour own educations instead. It turned outthat we had B.A.s from the samedepartment of the same university: wehad both enjoyed fancy educations at theAlma Mater of Henry Adams. He said hehadn't read a piece of literature since,that he was living now in the Village,writing for trade magazines, doingfree-lance design work, and more or lessgetting by in a comfortable way.I said that sounded nice.He asked what I was doing with myeducation, and I told him that I wasworking on a doctorate in comparativeliterature out in Chicago, and doing alittle free lance (free) editing.He looked at me and asked, "What areyou going to do with your doctorate?"I said I would like to make people readContinued on 7(Reynolds Club Basement)is having an end term \SPECIALALL QUALITON LABELS%AT $5.90 per Disc. Now Till the End of the QuarterOpen. Daily 9.30 - 6.00Sat. Noon - 5.30Closed Sunday 1) Czech Wind Quintet - RosslerRosetti, Rejcha,Stamic2) Czech Music Mass - Jan Jakub Byba3) Concertos tor Harpsichord and Strings -Jim Antonin Benda4) Janacek- Katya Kabanova5) Dvorak - String Quintet in E Fiat Major6) Martinu, Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 tor Violin -JosefSuk7) Glagolitic Mass -Leos Janacek8) Martinu, Concerto No. 1 for Cello & OrchestraConcerto for Violin, Piano & OrchestraThe Syphilitic MuseThe Horror of LifeRodger L. WilliamsUniversity of Chicago Pres$22,50"At night, his dissoMng brainhad been flowing fnefm his noseand mouth in a gummy paste.'IT MEANS IMMINENTDEATH AND \ AM MAD. Youwill never see rhe again.' "By Paul BodineThe words are Guy de Maupassant's,the nineteenth century French writer,and they are quoted by Roger Williams inhis latest book, Tfie Horror of Life, amedical and psychological study ofMaupassant, Charles Baudelaire, Julesde Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert, andAlphonse Oaudet. Armed with quotationslike the one above, Williams attempts toestablish that disease (mental andphysical), rather thah^social factors, wasthe cause of their bleak world-views. Asecondary aim of his book is to show thatsince the gloomy outlook of whatWilliams calls "Flaubert and Co." wasrooted in sickness, their view of life isinvalid. Therefore, the Weltanschauungenof many writers of the twentieth centurywho subscribe to such pessimism arelikewise suspect, in that they wereinfluenced by these "sick" men.Williams ts successful in conveying thesevere effects that the agonies of diseasehad on these men. Baudelaire, whose LesFleurs du mat brought him charges ofobscenity and blasphemy, died at arelatively early age, paralyzed andYhute,from the effects of gonorrhea. Jul^s deGoncourt, with his brother, Edmond, theauthor of the Journals (a sourcebook forliterary historians researching the worldof French art, in the last half of thenineteenth century) died insane at agethirty-nine from syphilis. Riaubert died ofan epileptic seizure and tvjAteria broughton primarily by tertiary syphilis.Maupassant, again because of syphilis,died at forty-three, "in ar| advanced stateof the dementia of general paralysis."And, finally, Alphonse Dafudet, thelittle-remembered author of Naturalistnovels, died in 1897 from fkbes dorsalis, aform of syphilis that cause! unrelievedpain and forced him to try 4 variety oftherapies. One such therapy\the Seyresuspension, required that Dapdet be"suspended in air for several flainutes,and in the final minute held up by hisjaws alone." Not surprisingly, it%asIneffective.Now there is no doubt that diseapainful as these influenced theworld-views of "Flaubert and Co." But,Williams claims that disease was theprimary factor behind these views. Here,he runs into difficulties. He must account le fact th^Tthesewriters developedtheir bleak outlooks earty^^efore theyexperienced any significanTdi^eases. Toexplain this, Williams falls baclSpnmental disease: not only were theytortured by physical diseases thatcemented their "horror of life," but tht"horror" actually started in theirchildhood.Williams' psychological interpretationsare not unsound. But he seems to thinkthat a few dreams and conjecturedOedipus complexes have the samevalidity as "proof" of mental "sickness"as syphilis and gonorrhea have as proofof physical sickness. And because theburden of proving these men diseasedlies in explaining how they arrived attheir gloomy world-views before theycontracted venereal disease, Williams isforced to put the full weight of hisargument on psychological explanations. AThus, he finds "represented hostility"toward family in Maupassant'smigraines, "evidence" for Baudelaire'smental disease in an isolated dream, andis selective in his treatment of Goncourt'sdreams: he discusses several of hisdreams and then remark* "six yearspassed before.. Jules recorded moredreams in the same vein" (myemphasj^L-Gid WTIttariTS-reject six yearsofjdrgams because he was unable to findsingle dream that supported his thesis?The problem is exacerbated by Williaclaim in the Preface that he is onlysearching for the "medical wellsprings"of these artists' disenchantment with life.Williams seems to believe thatnormative terms like "maturity,""normality" and "neurosis" are reallydescriptive terms: that one canscientifically and objectively diagnose"abnormality" with the same certaintyas one can diagnose syphilis. By thinkingof them as descriptive terms, Williamsignores their moral overtones, wnen w6call a man "abnormal," we are, to someextent, making a moral judgment abouthim, because there is a pejorativecoloring to the word, which simply isn'tpresent when we describe a man ashaving, say, bronchitis. While there iscertainly room for more than oneterpretation in determining whether €3someone has a particular disease, thereis far more subjective judgment involvedin pinpointing "abnormality."Williams' intention is to show that theaccepted historical explanations for the 'If you could ask one question about life,what would the answer be?' EugeneIonesco responded, 'No.' " There areproblems with this, if Ionesco, or any ofthe other writers Williams has in mind,can be said to be "purveyors of the bleakoutlook," is it really true that theirworld-view is dependent on, or wasModernist preoccupations of thj^"1" ‘ “““ shaped^by, Flaubert? There is no doubtwriters are not the proper explanation,rejects, for example, such factors asfailure of the French Revolution, theline of legitimes^ and the "birth ofliitarianism asprinciples of authority."though heroes posit an argument inpport of Disease as the principlenfluence, he never adequately refutes/the historical explanations. We are leftwondering how invalid those explanationsreally are. Williams also admits to beingbaffled by how these writers could havebeen so obsessed with despondency, whenarobnd them the Industrial Revolutionwas flourishing. How, he asks, could theybe ^alienated from "an age of astonishingvigor at home and broad?" Because thevigor of the Industrial age was material— an explosion not of culture but ofeconomic gain. Many artists doubtlessrejected this material vigor, becausetheiy recognized the disadvantages of thegrqyvth of technology and the imminentpredominance of the mechanisticmentality it spawned.Williams' secondary aim is to suggestthat because 'Nflaubert and Co." 'sworld-view was'“a product of theirsickness rather than their artisticinsights, any writer who subscribes tothis worlcf-view should be viewed withsuspicion. This aim is implicit inWilliami* Preface in which, In a highlypolemi/al tone, he decries the intellectualpopularity of the interpretation of lifeembraced by, most notably, Baudelaire,Flawroert and de Maupassant. Forexsimple, of Flaubert he writes: "Hishoror of life, which drove him to rank artabove all else, meant a foreclosure ofparentage. Yet, he left heirs, theoffspring of his mind, the mostimmediate of whom was Maupassant.Others are with us today, purveyors ofthe bleak outlook whose origin they haveno reason to know. To the recent query, that he mahNiave influenced them, butWilliams clearty. is implying that withoutFlaubert and hisH^iseased" mind,Ionesco's " 'No' " vwSldd not have beenuttered. Ionesco's outlobk, then, is notreally his own; he, and art^ writer likehim philosophically, cannorhave reachedthis perspective on their own, withoutFlaubert. With this, Williams has gone abit too far.Finally, it should be noted thatWilliams views Alphonse Oaudet ahaving succeeded where the other f$urmen failed. He was able to writeuplifting, positive novels even though hispain had led him to accept a pessimisticview of life. This Baudelaire, Goncourt,Flaubert and Maupassant could not db:their disenchantment with life isreflected clearly in their oeuvres.Williams is, of course, quite right toapplaud Daudet for his attempt to behopeful for the benefit of his readers,even though he himself despaired. It wasindeed his strength as a man. But not asa writer. And here Williams makes asignificant error: he claims that it wasDaudet's "literary duty" to write hopefulworks, despite his own convictions. Hebelieves Baudelaire, Goncourt, Flaubert,and Maupassant failed as artists, in thisregard, because they did not fulfill their"duty" by creating works which ,tbey didnot believe in. To an extent, then,Williams argues that the artist's duty isto society, rather than to himself or art.This is always a dangerous position inthat it imagines that an artist can creategood art while being dishonest withhimself. Or worse, it conceives of goodart as of secondary importance tosocially constructive art. Given this, it isperhaps not coincidental that whileDaudet vyas-perhaps the most "nobleman of the five, he is generallyconsidered to be the lesser artist.There is no doubt that The Horror ofLife is rigorously researched, cleanly .written, and that Williams successfullyweaves his medical and psychologicalemphasis into the general biographies.But because Williams' basic approachand assumptions are problematic, allthat rests on them is tainted.Henry AdamsThe Education of Henry Adams at someinstitution remotely connected witheducation, but that I also wouldn't mindbeing fiction or poetry editor of theAtlantic Monthly, if they asked me.(Henry Adams was recruited to teachMedieval History at Harvard in 1870;protesting all the way that he knewnothing about Medieval History and thathe would much prefer to be awell-educated nobody in Washington, heallowed his family and President Eliot topersuade him to accept the position. Hecalls the chapter in which he describeshis assistant professorship at theinstitution where many of my friends solonged some day to find employement,"Failure.""The Education of Henry Adams! Bestbook I ever read."I looked over at a young-but baldinggentleman in a tweed jacket. "The lastperson I sat next to said it was the mostboring.""Boring? Oh no! It's an incredible book, really wonderful. I loved it." Thiscame from Mr. Wise, who, it turned out,had had quite an education himself. Hehad been lectured to by Hutchens at theUniversity of Chicago, received a Ph.D.in anthropology as well as medicine, hadtaught college, and had worked as aphotographer in twenty countries.I asked him what he was doing now,with all that education.He said he was remodling a loft in theVillage, working as a businessconsultant, going through Jungiananalysis, and starting a company tomake perfume for gay men. "We'regoing to call ie Wilde, with an E, afterOscar, you know. It's going to be veryclassy!"I said that sounded nice. (No, I didn't;I said, "You're kidding.")I then received a brief education on themanufacture of perfumes, percentages ofessence to alcohol, tobacco, and what Mr.Wise called European tastes. I also heardabout how Mr. Wise had always wantedto be a professor at the University ofChicago and yet, when they had finally hired him, had felt let down. Now, atthirty-eight, he had great hopes for thefuture. He was learning so much. He hadtime to run eight miles a day, and paint,and write poetry . . .It was ready to go back to HenryAdams, who at sixty-six had just "satdown as though he were again a boy atschool" to write a Dynamic Theory ofHistory. He had been mulling over thenotion (not really Darwin's) that man, as"fittest," every aeon and in every way,was getting better and better. Lookingagain at the cathedral at Chartres, thehistorian questioned progress. "In whatdirection?" he asked. "Complexity,Multiplicity, even a step towardsAnarchy, . . . but what step towardsperfection?"Adams had learned so much by thattime, or thought so much, that he seemedto be wandering about the world in a kindof educated blurr. His blurr was not,however, the result of poor focussing; ithad more to do with motion. It lay infront of me in its thirty fourth chapter,still emitting delicate structures of intelligence: mazes that shifted andregrouped, shifted and regrouped, untilthey set up a kind of rhythm:During a million or two of years,every generation in turn had toiledwith endless agony to attain andapply poer,allthewhile betrayingthe deepest alarm and horror at thepower they created. The teacher of1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate;if foolish, might resist; ifintelligent, might balance, as wiseand foolish have often tried to dofrom the beginning; but the forceswould continue to educate, and themind would continue to react.Yet somehow, as long as the mindreacts — even if it is reacting tocontradictions, reacting at crosspurposes, or reacting in three differentdirections at once — it is gettingsomewhere. During his education Henry !Adams reacts to language, history, art, [sex, politics, and the Chicago World'sFair in 1893. His reaction is literary, but iit is, after all, a reaction.The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 7The money in The money inWhich would you rather have?Money in your checking account, while waiting to be used, does littlemore than collect dust.It could be collecting 5V* % interest!With a Hyde Park Bank NOW Account, every dollar you deposit earns51/4%, compounded continuously, paid monthly,until the second it's used.A NOW Account works exactly like regularchecking. Same checks. Same checkbook.The only difference is interest. But, what adifference!There is no charge for a NOW Account, solong as you maintain a minimum balance ofat least $1,000. Should the balance fallbelow this minimum, a $7 fee will becharged for the month. Consider switching to a NOW Account if:• Your monthly checking balance is $1,000 or more.• You have a combined checking/savings balance of$1,000 or more.NOW Accounts begin January 1st. But, youcan sign-up today at Hyde Park Bank. We'llarrange to transfer your present accountswithout charge.Complete details are available at the NOWAccount Center in the mam bank lobbyor, by phoning 752-4600.HYDE PARK BANKnmiACCOUNTThe checking account that pays 5lA% interest!Federal regulations require that N O W. Accounts beoffered solely to individuals, sole proprietorships andqualifying not-for-profit organizations Corporationsdo not qualify at this time HYDE PARK BANKAND TRUST COMPANY♦• — The Chicego Literary Review Dec. 5,19®0 1525 EAST 53rd STREET CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60615 (312) 752-4600 Memlxrr FDICHigh Street front of University College, OxfordOxfQrd and CambridgeRichard GloucesterHermione Hob HouseThames and Hudson$15.95By Adam O'ConnorIn time for Christmas yet another pic¬ture book of Oxbridge architecture has ap¬peared. The first since 1910 to include both|universities, Oxford & Cambridge withphotographs by Richard Gloucester and atext by Hermione Hobhouse is a pleasantfailure. Pleasant, for no book with so hand¬some a subject could not be, and a failurebecause this volume is less well executedthan any previous one. Urban and urbane Oxford and airy Cambridge are among thedearest places to our architectural,historical, and academical hearts, but thisparticular record is lacking in learning,design and purpose. The book is perfect forthe smaller coffee table, is largely com¬posed of photographs, with a brief historyof each school. In a minor editorial perversion, the captions are numbered (not thephotographs) and there is no list to whichthey are intended to refer.Mr. Gloucester's photographs have thevices of both the poetic and prosaic urge.They betray a definite, and clumsy, ar¬tifice, for instance, Mr. Gloucester, nevertires of framing his subjects in the dark ofthe archways which face them. Onewonders if he can even see a building if it isnot boxed in by some lancet window or Caroline under Cup and Oxford:UnjustTreatmentf h*- North Quad at the Queen * ( o8egt-abacus. The artifice which favors weirdangles and charming juxtapositionsprevents the photographs from being asystematic architectural survey, but doesnot help to evoke the romance of the place.In this, Mr. Gloucester utterly fails. "Hisphotographs were always taken when thesun was shining," is enough, perhaps todescribe the callowness of the work. On theother hand, the photographer manages theimpossible when he makes the Queen'sCupola at Oxford appear dank, and allowsus to see the robust Caroline only insilhouette.Hobhouse only occasionally gives usdates in her captions and rarely managesto credit an architect or builder. We arenot offered any anecdotes or peculiaritiesof the buildings or their long histories. On¬ly buildings are featured; the great men donot appear. Where is Newman, Newton,Beerbohm, Pitt? Where is Rupert Brooke?Interiors are apparently unworthy of in¬clusion, even the requisite shot of theQueen's Library at Oxford is missing.We're permitted to view only the outside ofWren's Trinity College Library, and theChapel of King's College, the most famousinterior in Britain, is nowhere to be found.The berobed collegians who lend such anair of mystery, energy, and anachronismto early photographic records are absent.The photoqraohs, like the text, eschewhumanity, but if the levi-clad students whomanaged to sneak into some frames arenow typical, so much the better. The Universities of Oxford and Cam-! bridge have already been well!documented. Dozens of beautifully produc- ■ed and painfully detailed histories of in¬dividual colleges are matched by the !j costless memories of University life which j; have been issued by graduates for cen-i turies. There are, too, several big picturej books, and short histories. One by an jearlier Hobhouse (Oxford published in1939) combines handsome photographswith an informative and sanctimoniousj text. The twin volume:, published by |i Weidenfend and Nicolson Cambridge(Grant and Marmaras 1966) and Oxford!(Markham and Tweedie, 1967) combineguide-book photos with agreeable texts, jand are notable for presenting the ji treasures: stained glass, sarcophogi, a jpompous Jowett memorial and a luscious!| Shelly memorial. In Markham's book, one I! can even find the Brasen nose ofBrasenose College. With all these booksand the fairly recent issue of a great labor |of love, Jan Morris' Tl\e Oxford Book of'.. Oxford (Oxford University Press, 1978),j the unimportance of Hobhouse and jj Gloucester's book is fairly an insult.The biography of the schools is ratherj like the schools themselves: extensive,! varied, jumbled, repetitive and always in-! teresting. Despite its flaws, Oxford and\ Cambridge does have 36 color and 200I black and white photographs of what areI the world's most ueautiful universities.1There is probably room on somebody's:| shelf for this latest. Crescat/Historia. jPianist, Guitarist, Friendfor Jim Hartby Jay McKenzieHow we can’t let things be!The stuff and tools of our arts,your mad dream in notes, in cycles,mine in words, in stanza’s cleft.We both explore the feel of things;we both reach out in song-touch litmus to what is, pushvision into form. This is commonality,is striving, is our hands’ observanceof what is, our pass of time, our worship.You don’t, you say, understandmy art. Is this comfort?: nor do I.Your composer’s ear hears musicbehind (' poem—as well it ought.But it is the music of words,the song, the thing itself, beyondthe amplitude of notes. Our artsare independent in their union. The sculptor cuts to free theshape existent within stone, thepainter clears his mind with pigments.Only the writer’s stuff is unsupportive:grows brittle, resistant. There are noexercises, no paints to fiddle,no notes to collate—only the endlessflux of words in varied combination,the unspecific drone of beat.Jim, I see your hands at yourinstrument's moment, the wrist archedprecisely in desire, the supple rushof fingertips above the strings, blindlycertain, they are, swollen withlight and grace, dropping on the heldnote only present in the finger’sthought. The rub is gentle, sum ofevery moment prior to this, discreetas the soft-legged fly sudden on thewater’s skin: not the presence wedelight in, but the ripple’s endless outing The before the lakethe pink and tembling air presentstwo half lit wafers,one to fadeone to become a sphereand burn geometry into gauzey light.cyc a darkened limb, an asphalt arm,sleeved in mist it reaches northbalancing a cyclist.he’s heading outward to the fingersto liquid nails at restwhere he may rest, discernhis center.now, pushing helmet firstpostured by the wind,chin to chesteyes grazing asphalt, his thick armsrooted in the metal barsthat glint his goal.competing with the dayhis knees drum out an unfelt distancewheels describing veins on asphalthe’s searing toward the palm.Sally L. SatelThe Chicago Literary Review oec 5 9by Candlin Dobbs withKate FultzWhen I toured the U of C campus as ahigh school senior, Regenstien Librarywas pointed out to me as the place where"They" hook you up to a machine thatsucks out your imagination. That this isnot so, that the University actually fostersimagination (for imagination read cre¬ative writing), that there is a writing op¬tion offered in the English department, is afact known only to those who read their redbooks assiduously. There it says that athird year English major may, after tak¬ing two writing courses, submit a portfolioof his work to the writing committee, and ifhe is accepted, the student may find an ad¬visor, register for English 191, and writefor his B.A.In 1974, the present English curriculumwas adopted. At that time the student poli¬cy committee complained that there werenot enough writing courses offered; in re¬sponse, the English faculty voted to in¬clude a writing option, ft is the only En¬glish option that is selective. RobertFerguson, associate chairman of English, explains, "The program is kept small be¬cause it takes a special kind of student todedicate his or her self to working well on afairly well defined project." The programis indeed small; few students apply, and onthe average only four writers have gra¬duated from the program each year.A program that graduates four studentsa year seems peripheral at best, but thesefour students are only the tip of the ice¬berg. Richard Strier regularly teacheswriting poetry classes. He says that thewriting program is a lot bigger than thosefour students. The two to three writingcourses offered each year are usuallypacked, and almost all the professors onthe writing committee have students withwhom they are working independently. Al¬though Fergusen says that "teaching writ¬ing is the last priority for most scholars,"there are a number of professors who doteach independent studies, despite the factthat such courses require a great deal oftime, and are not counted as courses or en¬tered into the professors records. As LisaDickler, a senior in the writing program,points out "if the administration is seriousabout the writing program they should give credit to professors for doing it itshould be recognized the same way acourse is." Because professors are not of¬fered recompense for their one-on-onework with students, those who will take in¬dependent study students are greatly indemand; so much so that two fourth yearstudents accepted into the program inJune of 1979 tried more than five profes¬sors because they found one who had notmade other commitments in May.All of the professors agree that the mostimportant part of the writing program isthe opportunity for students to make per¬sonal contact with professors and writers.To this end, the Visiting Writers programwas inaugurated in 1976. The committeeattempts to bring in each spring a differentwriter to teach. In the past, Triquarter-ley's Anderson, Michael Aninia, Play¬wright David Mamet, and poet JohnMatthias have given courses. This springChicago poet Allen Shapiro will teach.Some of these courses have been suc¬cessful, some not. Fergusen says "it's dif¬ficult to find a visiting poet who is also agood teacher." David Mamet is a case inpoint. A graduate of the writing program last year, Jack Helbig said that "Mametturned the course into a class on Stanis-lofsky's method, seventh week, when Idropped out, they were still doing actingexercises, and no writing had yet been as¬signed." Strier suggests that it is not mere¬ly a problem to find writers who are goodteachers, but to find writers who are goodteachers who are also willing to work forthe modest sum the writing program hasavailable. "It must be a Chicago writer:we can't afford any one who can't com¬mute. It's the same with getting writers tocome to read; sometimes we're lucky andsomeone good is in the neighborhood,sometimes not."Even with these problems, the visitingwriters program has been successful. Infact, the group that began as Matthias'class last spring still meets regularly, de¬spite the graduation of a number of itsmembers and Matthias's return to SouthBend, Indiana. Matthias even returned toChicago for a meeting a few weeks ago.This kind of mutually fructifieing rapportthat extends beyond the classroom iswhat is hoped for in the visiting writers'program as well as in the whole of the writ-The Moth 1by David OatesThe court magician sat looking at the cand¬le on the table in his study and regretting thepassing of the old regime in the kingdom ofMedalia.When the king was alive, the magician hadonly to do his usual work of poisoning ene¬mies from afar, throwing fear into others’armies, building arcane instruments of war,reading the thoughts of influential courtiersand providing nice weather twice a year forthe royal birthday and wedding anniversary.And that had been just enough for the oldmage, just the sort of things he had beentrained to do. Nothing gave him more satisfaction than sinking a hostile fleet twentymiles from the Medallian coast.But now things had changed. The queen,the old king’s daughter, had sense enough toallow the prime minister to keep deal¬ing with political affairs in the same way.But the young queen was an unfortunatelyyoung and attractive woman, and the fashionat the court this year was chivalric love. All ofthe young courtiers made a point of being inlove with her Royal Highness.Instead of hunting together, they competedin writing poetry for her; instead of jousting,they made up clever speaking games aboutlove. They lavished exotic and romantic giftson her, sighed after her in the passagewaysand met each other privately in the garden toduel. The ranks of the young men were beingdepleted remarkably by this last entertain¬ment — much more dangerous than a nice bat¬tle where you had a good suit of armour andno one was really mad at anyone, thought themagician.It seemed he was always being called on toconjure some entertainment about love, andwhenever he read a mind now all he found wasa rather distorted picture of the queen —"Can’t even one of them see her freckles?” he from the program: prose, prose-poem, and poemthought — in the minds of the men, and astore of lingering resentment in the women.He hated being involved in this conjuringon love.He hadn’t had anything to do with the stuffsince his apprenticeship when he had fallen inlove with the sorcerer’s daughter and beenturned briefly into a newt by her once when hetried to steal a kiss. He had watched morethan enough of it at court, and was quitehappy to have gotten the knowledge from adistance instead of going through romantic in¬sanity in his own person. Better to serve theterm as a newt than wander around like thesefellows now, blindly walking into things. Onelittle margrave had begged his pardon of apost the other day, then drawn his sword andrun the poor wood through before it had partof a chance to apologize.Perhaps a minute remained before the ma¬gician would be expected in the main hall todevise some romantic amusement to keep thecompany entertained and reinforce theirpreoccupation with love. Last week he’d letthem talk with Cleopatra, the week beforeshowed them some of the best poets of thepast millenium reciting poems on love. To¬night he wanted something he could producequickly and then leave them, for it had been aweary day. As he stared at the flickering can¬dle flame, he had an idea, and was so pleasedwith the thought that he hummed the jauntyschool fight song from his magicians’ aca¬demy as he passed through the long passageinto the great dining hall.When he came into the hall the group wasalready assembled; two gallants playing theirlutes already, most of the rest staring at thequeen like so many bull calves maddened bythe spring, and one showing her a water colorhe had painted in her honor. Needless to say,the queen looked lovelier than ever soakingup all this attention, though even the carefulwork of her ladies-in-waiting with the paintshad not succeeded in hiding her freckles.The magician reflected briefly on how cuteshe had been as a freckled little girl, and de¬cided to suggest to her that she make frecklesthe fashion. At least that would give somefine tuning to the picture he found of her inthese moon struck minds.The group turned to him as he entered, andthe queen clapped her hands with pleasure.The three young men who had been interrupt¬ed looked daggers at him, then settled grudg¬ingly into cushions around her feet."Well, what diversion have you brought forus this evening, dear omnimancer?” askedthe queen, "What will you show us for our in¬struction this time?”The magician just smiled and gesturedthem over to the long table in the middle ofthe hall. They settled themselves along bothsides about halfway down the long table. Theboard had been cleared after supper, and allthat remained on it was the candles. A dog under the table gnawed on the thigh bone of acow. As they watched, a moth descended fromthe rafters and began circling the candle inthe middle of the table before the group. Themagician gestured towards the table, mut¬tered a few choice words of power, then strodefrom the hall.The company looked about, and saw noth¬ing. One of them, an interrupted lutist, stoodand began to draw his sword, “Your Ma¬jesty,” he said, “allow me to skewer that trou¬blesome old fool and repay him for this in¬sult.”"Wait a moment, sweet friend,” said thequeen, "I think the magician has not cheatedus, for listen ...”They all strained their ears, and in the si¬lence they could hear a soft discourse. Whentheir eyes tracked it down, they focused onthe moth at the candle. The moth and the can¬dle were conversing.The queen smiled to herself and leaned for¬ward, and the rest of the company were quietand leaned forward too.“Dear Flame,” the moth said in a tone oftiny gallantry, "excuse me for intruding onyou, but give me leave to pass a little timewith you.”"Well, Moth, you are welcome, for I washoping for some company,” the candle said,"indeed, it gets rather lonesome here burningthrough the evening with no one to talk to.”' The moth circled deferentially, only occa¬sionally looping close by the candle. "Youmust forgive my intrusion, dear lady, but Iam drawn to your bright and beautiful lightby a power I cannot control.” ..."Oh, Sir Moth, I suspect you are just flat¬tering me. I’m sure that you have said asmuch to several lady moths and perhaps acoat or two. There seems a note of practice inthis speech — is it perhaps one you’ve usedbefore?”“No, fair flame, for the converse I havewith moths and garments is very calm. Eachof us speaks only amiably, for there is noother object in the world which has raisedsuch feeling in my breast as the ballet youperform, dancing with the wind.”"Ah, moth, I am not dancing with the wind,I am dancing with you, and only dancing onthe wind as people dance upon a floor.”“I am honored, mademoiselle, and cravethe pleasure of the next dance as well.”"Well, since you are the only partner here, Isuspect I shall be able to grant your wish. Youspeak beautifully, you know. I have neverheard such lovely thoughts. Of course, I amyoung, only set out three nights ago. Perhapsthe other candles have heard all this a thou¬sand times. Yet it is so wonderful after listen¬ing to nothing but the moaning of old Windwith his belly ache, people mumbling to eachother in a tongue I don’t understand, and theold castle sighing to herself.”"If I speak well, it is because you provide me with a wealth of feelings that strains mythoughts to find ample expression. The fear Ihave is that I cannot speak well enough, foryour beauty is the sort about which the grea¬test sonnets are written, the most glowingportraits made and from which the most in¬spiring tragedies find their matter.”"Perhaps I am lovely now. I know that I amstraight and young, and that my flame burnsbright as any other. It’s not as clear as that ofsome of my sisters, but I like the bit of orangein it, don’t you?”The moth dipped a bow at her in what ap¬peared agreement to the courtiers. The candleseemed to take it as such for she continuedwith more assurance in her argument."You rhapsodize about my light, but bothmy flame and my long thin body will be gonebefore too much longer, and I will be anotherof the drip-crusted stubs sitting in the old waxbin waiting in darkness for the next candle¬making. But I enjoy your company now, evenif you are here only for my flame."There’s one thing you must know, goodmoth. The other candles tell me that some¬times moths are badly burned as they dancearound our flames in that drunken way you donow. You must be careful, and not fly soclose, or our converse will be regrettably cutshort.”"I have never heard that, though I can feelthe great heat you give off and expect I wouldindeed be burned if I were not careful. Themoths who dance with candles have not comeback to tell us of any danger, which makes methink the danger is great indeed."But I am master of myself. Though I amdrunk, as you say, with the feeling I have as Ibask in your wonderful radiance, yet I stillhave my wits about me; I can still formulatethe idea of leaving, see the need for care, re¬cognize the dangers here. Fear not for me,sweet candle, but enjoy our time together. Iwill stay with you as long as I can and evenfollow them down to the kitchen to keep youcompany in this bin, if I am able — for even ifthe light of you were to stop shining, still Iwould know that you were the one I wor¬shipped, and the memory of that burningwould still burn within me and bind me toyou.”"Well, you must be careful. I don’t wantyou to be burned and leave me alone. I hatethe empty silence I lived in before youcame.”The moth grew more active at that state¬ment, and made faster, smaller circles, one ofthem taking him quickly through a point aquarter of an inch from the bright fire."Look out!" she cried, "what are youthinking to do that? You’ll kill yourself!""Do not fear, mademoiselle,” soothed themoth, taking wider loops now, "I know how10 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 KBifruU writing c/c-c^jjC22 -r 'd£22 1 t ^ A' /Cing program.As Strier says, “no one can teach youhow to begin." But having begun, what dothe writing courses offer? Time out fromterm papers one would have to write in¬stead of poems, a community in which tolearn how to read and criticize one's ownwork, and the two most important things— contact with an editor and with theworld of contemporary writing. Strier says“Sometimes people are writing things thatjust don't make sense, like Shakespeariansonnets. I try to show them what's happen¬ing now, what techniques are alive." Poet¬ry classes are good places to learn tech¬nique, the craft of writing. As Matthiassaid “a good poet must know how to makeevery move, even if he never uses themall."After taking writing courses, the seniorproject is done with a faculty advisorwhom the student finds. Both students andfaculty noted that the success of the proj¬ect was dependent on the student and theadvisor getting along. Students com¬plained of the isolation of the fourth year.There is structure and community in thefirst three years provided by literaturecourses and the writing workshops “thenthey let you off on this island with notrees," says Helbig. He suggests that therebe a senior seminar for students in the writing option. Fergusen also notes thisproblem, "I would like more cohesionamong writers in the college."For those in the writing option, the aimis that they improve as writers, not thatthey get published. "At its best," says Fer¬gusen "the writing option provides a youngwriter with a good editor, and helps him orher to develop a sense of shape and con¬text." Steve Levine, whose book A BlueTongue was published in 1976, is perhapsthe most successful writing program grad¬uate. There are others who have slippedinto anonymity, and still others who areworking as freelance writers. Most counttheir writing experience a good one.What of those who do not register for En¬glish 191? Joe Williams, professor in En¬glish believes that "all English majorsshould try to write poetry or fiction; not tois as absurd as being a music historianwho doesn't know how to play an instru¬ment." And further, this winter boasts anew addition to the writing program's cur¬riculum: the little Red Schoolhouse. Thisis a two component course, lectures in thewriting of expository prose and tutorialsthat work with students' own expositions,the tutorials will be run by graduate stu¬dents from all fields; writing skills will betaught with direct reference to the fieldconcentrations of the students. "This is not a remedial course," says Williams "Wewill not be working on split infinitives,basic grammar, or punctuation, butstyle."As Williams said "we don't claim tohave a program like the University ofIowa." There are problems with our writ¬ing program — the isolation of some stu¬dents, the paucity of funds and recogni¬tion. These are things that could beremedied by simple measures — a seniorseminar, more money (that is always thesimple, if impossible solution). It is notnecessary that the program here be likethe one at Iowa. It is the supposition of thewriting committee that those who are tobe writers will write in class or not. Thatthey are right is borne out by the large at¬tendance in writing classes and tne "un¬derground" independent studies that goon. It is also the writing committee's sup¬position that the education provided hereprovides the chance to learn much of whatis necessary to write — where wouldJames Joyce have been if he had not readHomer? In sum, although underground,the writing program is alive. It offers aB.A. option to some students in the college,but it is more than that. The program isopen to all students in the college, offeringa chance to learn the craft of writing andthe framework within which to create. ALeaf Likea WarMy attempt to behave normallyWas disrupted this A.M.By a leaf like a war(Perhaps it’s still there —A bunch of them still loitered on the side:walk)Oh that tree was like a holocaustAnd the leaf was like a warVeins spreading like flood plainsTo solitary cellsExploding like dying skiesIn violent reds and yellows and brownsAnd if you don’t believeRun outside and see yourself!Like a cat is like a steamboatAnd a man is like a cactusAnd a thing is something elseThe tree was like a holocaustThe leaf was like a war!Steve EatonDay Six: Numbers Day Seven: CandleYou don’t give your love a number. Yes, they said it in a movie. I lay back and lita cigarette, my twelfth for the day. The two hundredth-and-twenty-sixth day forthe hostages. I counted the foil balls I made of the Hersey kiss wrappers, twelve.I grew angry at Peter. I remembered the night he said I’ve been with ninewomen: you’ve been with more men. I lit a cigarette with two matches. I said I’vemade some mistakes. It doesn’t matter. I can’t change it. I thought You Bastard,You’re One of The Men! I quit counting. They were lovers, not underwear.When Peter went to sleep I lay awake, drinking white wine. I rememberedcounting. I counted zero for years, being a virgin and all. I was one of the last sixvirgins in high school.I remember counting one. I was ready for more. I was eager for more passion,even more ecstasy like frenzy. I remember counting two, feeling so sophisticated. Idid keep count. I’ve kept record of evenings, mornings, afternoons, hasty omelets.I made graphs of orgasms, inches, impotences, perversions. I kept count ofeverything.I sometimes grew sad over the numbers. Five and six were especially painful.When I was alone, I waited and grew tired of waiting. Experienced, I didn't have aresume.Some men ask how many? I asked how many? My friends never asked. They didnot keep count. One said you hardly avoid it, men being what they are. I said,Women Too.The wine glass was empty. I went into the kitchen, wanting to write. I filled upthe glass. Then I counted the eggs in the carton, four.Peter was lying in the middle of the bed, snoring. I said, Peter, I’ve been withtwo hundred and twenty-six men. Peter rolled over to say, gabba, gabba in hissleep.I finished the wine in two gulps.close I can dare and how long I can staythere,” And to demonstrate he danced closeand fast again. He Knew his wings would burnlike an oil paper kite if he were not judi¬cious.The courtiers were troubled by his daringflying, for they were caught by the littledrama as surely as if the magician had put aspell on them as well. A few malcontents mut¬tered about the magician’s impudence andothers argued whether the moth and candlewere speaking what they would truly feel withhuman souls or merely reeling off a play thespellcrafter had maliciously planted to teasethe lovesick nobles.The consensus was that the magician didn'tspeak that well, so he must have just giventhem a human spark and left them to theirmortal play.The moth danced in and out, faster andslower, spinning loops in all directions aboutthe flame so that if they had been chartedthere would have been a nearly solid globedrawn around the flame, though it would havebeen a lumpy sphere, with great protuber¬ances from the more elliptical loops.One moment the moth danced exquisitelyclose. Just then a servant opened the door tothe hall to bring the lords and queen their eve¬ ning mulled wine, and the draft from the doormade the flame dance and flare."Oh no!” screamed the candle, "Sir Moth,beware!”But she called too late, for the moth had al¬ready been caught by a tongue of the upreach-ing flame, and, stunned by the scorching, fall¬en into the pool of liquid wax around thecandle wick.In that unfortunate bath he died quickly,and resting as he did half in and half out ofthe wax not far from the wick his body caughtfire and began buring as a second wick withthe wax flowing through him to the flame.The candle sent up a taller, darker, orangeflame, of one piece but with two centers andtwo points at the top of it.She wept softly, quietly berating the moth,the servant and the wind, and sometimes cry¬ing out louder with grief and disgust that thesad corpse was stuck in its wax.One of the courtiers delicately lifted themoth from the candle with the point of hisslim, bejewelled dagger and put him on thetable. Another man emptied his small goldsnuffbox, intricately worked with a relief ofthe late king's victory over the barbariansand each carved soldier no bigger than a mus¬tard seed. Today, when I closed my eyes I could see your face for a thousandth of a second.And I was aroused every time I saw your strange Midwestern face inside my head.My fellow office-workers were curious, but afraid to ask. I kep thinking, this islove, again love and desire. I almost choked when you got up to leave last night. Ihad been counting on your missing the train.I have a feeling that when you saw three toothbrushes in the bathroom, youknew the truth. I must seem so bland in the bathroom. A dirty toilet, a blackshower curtain, an oriental rug, a jar of Noxema, toothpaste, baby powder, and adiaphragm in the medicine chest.Yes, what do college girls like? They like color. They like feeling good and cleanand fresh and sleeping with strange attractive cynical older men. But if you werenot interested. I wouldn’t say a word. We talked about jobs and college and money.Your money and my money. We talked about our dirty little tricks. I was such aclear elitist, using my power for cruel and unusual pleasures. I’m certain that ifyou had stayed, we would have discussed perversions. Mine and yours. His andhers, whosever. And the biology would have been educational. You see, I have notslept with a tall-dark clean-shaven man in years. I need a review. You have beenyour own man, I know. And I also know that my desire for you is turning intosomething Overwhelming, Potent, and Unhealthy. This will do no good for anyone,least of all, you or I. But we will be alone in knowing where this ecstasy of myimagination will end, or could have ended. Let me tell you, no matter what, Iwould not have cried. No, I would have closed my eyes and held my breath, andcontained the mystery.K.G. WilkinsThe queen delicately laid the moth in thebox."Will you bury this noble fellow in the gar¬den by that lovely flowering apple tree, SirWilliam?”"Of course. Your Majesty,” he said, andwalked out with all the erect respect in hiscarriage he would have found for a similarceremony for a brother knight.The company quietly left the hall, where thecandle stayed quietly grieving. Before thequeen went to bed, she called her chamber-lain, and gave him several surprising instruc¬tions.First she asked that the wine steward bemade a stable boy and that he not show hisface when she was about.Then she asked that the wizard and theprime minister be sent to her in the morningso they could speak of policy.Finally, she asked that the center candle onthe table in the great hall be saved after it wassnuffed this night, placed in a velvet-linedgolden box and brought to her on the mor¬row.And that was the end of the cult of love atthe court of the beautiful warrior princesswho ruled so many years ago in the land ofMedalia.The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 11PAT TUNNEY'SSouthwest AMC/JEEP/RENAULTi! FREE! 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Milwaukee W!q/&u£-6Joi{'d0t0h. witfcA- e&KkUC-12 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980Italian Folktales“"Selected and Retold byItalo CalvinoTranslated by George MartinHarcourt, Brace, Jovanich, Inc.$25.00By Paul AusickSamuel Johnson, recalling those bookswhich gave him the most pleasure in hisown childhood, puts it thus: "Babies donot want to hear about babies; they liketo be told of giants and castles, and ofsomewhat which can stretch andstimulate their little minds."Italo Calvino's Italian Folktalescontains giants and castles aplenty,enough to stretch and stimulate minds ofevery size. This collection defies praise.Until you hold it in your hands, savoringits richness and losing your heart to itskings and queens and peasants, such arecommendation may seem to behyperbole. It is, instead, understatement.Fiabe Italians was first published inItaly in 1956. Calvino, who spent over twoyears researching and collating stories inmany different dialects from all parts ofItaly, depended entirely on existingcollections and does no new "field work"himself. Calvino not only translates thestories from dialect, however; in somecases, where only an Italian versionexists, he also recasts the stories intotheir original dialects before settling onhis own Italian version. In his notes tothe stories, Calvino gives his sources, thenumber of variants he has used to makethe finished story, and the touches he hasadded to enrich each story.The two hundred stories in thecollection have added to them thebrilliance and imagination of one of themost original and compellingcontemporary storytellers. Cosmicomicsand t zero, which came out in 1965 and1967, respectively, are masterfulfantastic tales narrated, for the mostpart, by an infinitely malleable bit of theprimordial soup named Qwfwq. Otherbooks available in English include TheBaron in the Trees, The Cloven Viscountand The Non-Existent Knight and TheCastle of Crossed Destinies. Calvino's most beautiful novel, andarguably his masterpiece, is InvisibleCities, published in 1972. The novelconsists of a series of conversationsbetween Marco Polo and Kublai Khan inwhich the Venetian merchant describesfor the Khan all the cities he has seen inhis travels. The descriptions, woven moreout of Marco's recollections of Venicethan of gathered intelligence from histravels and filtered through the Khan'sown experience and imagination, paint aportrait of infernal Xanadu. One mayescape this city only by recognizing "whoand what, in tne midst of the inferno, arenot inferno, then make them endure, givethem space." Folktales are decidedly "not inferno."Calvino, in his introduction, puts it thisway:Taken all together, (folktales)offer, in their oft-repeated andconstantly varying examinations of human vicissitudes, ageneral explanation of lifepreserved in the slow ripeningof rustic consciences; thesefolk stories are the catalog ofthe potential destinies of menand women, especially forthat stage in life when destinyis formed, i.e., youth, begin¬ning with birth, which itselfoften foreshadows the future; then the departure fromhome, and, finally, throughthe trials of growing up, the at¬tainment of maturity and theproof of one's humanity. . . .There must be fidelity to agoal and purity of heart, val¬ues fundamental to salvationand triumph. There must alsobe beauty, a sign of grace thatcan be masked by the humble,ugly guise of a frog; and aboveall, there must be present theinfinite possibilities of muta¬tion, the unifying element ineverything: men, beasts,plants, things.Calvino nas captured at least oneexample of all the 50-odd types offolktales, as well as one that no less anauthority than the late Sith Thompsonhas described as distinctly Italian. Thatis not to say that these stories duplicatein all details the German or the Frenchor the English tales. For instance, theItalian stories are considerably gentlerand have practically none of the almostgratuitous violence of the others."Silver Nose," a variation of theBluebeard story, provides a goodexample. In the traditional story,Bluebeard, having already married and"lost" several wives, takes yet another.He gives his new wife keys to all therooms in his house and bids her becomemistress of all but one. Of course sheagrees and, again of course, the instanthe leaves the house she opens theforbidden door. Inside are the bodies ofall Bluebeard's former wives. Bluebeardreturns, discovers her disobedience, andproclaims that she must die. She gets(inexplicably) a quarter-hour's reprieve,during which time her brothers, whohave been in the army, return and killBluebeard just as he is about to cut offhis wife's head."Silver nose" differs substantially. Inthis version, from Piedmont, SilverNose/Bluebeard is the Devil himself, theforbidden room is Hell, and the victimsare not wives but servant girls SilverContinued on 2 7A Memorial Service for Dr. James Roy Blayney,Profession Emeritus of the University of ChicagoMedical Center’s Zoller Dental Clinic, will be held onThursday, December 11 at 4 P.M. in Bond Chapel. Areception will precede the service and will take place inthe Medical Center’s Surgery-Brain Research Pavilion inroom J-137 at 2:30 P.M.Dr. Blayney, 91, founded the Zoller Dental Clinic in 1936. and wasDirector of Zoller until he retired in 1954. He also directed one of thefirst major studies of the effect of fluoridated water on tooth decay.The study, begun in 1946 and lasting 16 years, involved thefluoridation of Evanston’s water supply and subsequentexaminations revealed a substantial reduction in tooth decay.Dr. Blayney was also a Past-President of the InternationalAssociation for Dental Research as well as the Illinois State DentalSociety.A Memorial Fund has been established in his name. Contributionscan be sent to the Zoller Dental Clinic, c/o Betsy Hunt. Box 418. 950E. 59th Street. Chicago, IL 60637. Erikson Institute The Universityof Loyola University and of Chicago Pressinvite you to aCELEBRATION IN HONOR OFJEAN PIAGETSpeakersE. JAMES ANTHONY, M.D , Blanche F Ittleson Professor of ChildPsychiatry. Washington University, St. LouisCONSTANCE KAMII, Associate Professor of Education, University ofIllinois at Chicago Circle, and Chargee de Cours, School ofPsychology and Sciences of Education, University of GenevaMARIA W. PIERS. Distinguished Service Professor, Erikson InstituteFilm Presentation:"PATRON PIAGET IN NEW PERSPECTIVE"Friday, December 5, 1980, 7:30 p.m.Law School AuditoriumThe University of Chicago1111 East 60th StreetChicago, IllinoisAdmission without ticket and without chargeThe Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 13Nabokov: Class LecturesLectures on LiteratureViadmir NabokovHarcourt, Brace, JovanovichBy Keith FlemingAt last we have some amplification onthe literary views of the man who carednothing for "Lady Chatterly'scopulations" or "the pretentiousnonsense of Mr. Pound, that total flake."It has been three years now sinceNabokov's death, so that it is somethingof an event when his previouslyunpublished work appears in print —even if the work happens to be a set oflectures more than twenty years old.Because he believed there to be onlytwo or three writers of enduring worthper generation, Nabokov was alwaysruthless in weeding out those who failed to meet his high standards. At one timeor another he has dismissed Freud as acharlatan, Marx as a bourgeois (in theFlaubertian sense), Faulkner as aregional writer of limited interest, andDostoyevski and Mann as second-rateartists. Audacity, of course, has alwaysbeen one of Nabokov's hallmarks (whoelse would have dreamed up a romanticnovel featuring a middle-aged lunatic anda 12-year-old girl?), and if his opinionssometimes seem as extravagent as hisnovels, it is perhapsthe privilege of theman John Updike often cited asAmerica's greatest writer.Happily, the novels discussed in theLectures represent the few booksNabokov found worthy of praise. AsUpdike says in his introduction:"Nabokov's reputation as a literarycritic...benefits from the evidence ofthese generous and patientappreciations." The authors discussedare all established giants -- Austen,Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, andProust — but one: Robert LouisStevenson (readers of Nabokov's TheReal Life of Sebastian Knight mightrecall that Stevenson was one the authorsrepresented on Sebastian's night table).The lectures date back toNabokov's teaching days at Wellesleyand Cornell in the 50's. Though he oftenplanned to, Nabokov never got around topreparing the lectures for publication,the result being that what we have hereis little more than a folder full of roughnotes which have been arranged by aneditor who has seen fit to interspersefreely into the text long passages from the novels under discussion. In a way,this last seems Nabokovian (he alwayshated people who never seemed to readbooks but skimmed throught theminstead for bits of history or philosophy).Still, he probably would have winced atthe editors, arrangements. After all,Nabokov is the master craftsman whowas satisfied with the inspiration of twogood lines a day amid the steam of hislong morning baths, a man who wroteeverything down on index cards whichwould be shuffled and ordered into hisnovels. For the rest of us, the damagedoes not seem to be too great. Thelectures read smoothly and are full of thefamiliar Nabokov wit, and there is aningenous something coming frominspiration unchecked by second thoughtswhich has been allowed to remain amid"the classroom odors an authorialrevision might have scoured away," asJohn Updike puts it.One lecture which could benefit from arevision is the piece of Stevenson's Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One wonders whyNabokov would include at all a novel headmits does not achieve the great heightsreached by Kafka or Gogol; and if so,why the piece is so much skimpier inrange and detail than the others. The restof "Professor" Nabokov's lectures thisstudent found instructive andentertaining, particularly tne one on"Madame Bovary, as Flaubert intendedit to be discussed," and chances areFlaubert would have been plased byNabokov's minute scrutiny of histechniques and felicities of style.It is refreshing to see a novel approached with both readerly gusto andpractical literary know-how. The"layer-cake" technique Flaubert used tounfold an image; the counterpoint heused to such ingenious and humorousends; the horse theme runningthroughout the novel; the mistranslationof Emma's hair-do which misleadsreaders into thinking her hair extends tothe tips of her ears, when in fact it fallsdown to her earlobes — Nabokov'slectures abound with sharp little pieces ofinformation like these which pique thereader's interest. We learn elsewhere, forinstance, that: the first homosexuals toappear in Modern European literatureoccured in Anna Karenima; contrary topopular belief, Gregor Sausa is not acockroach — he is much too round andhis legs are too short; flies in MadameBovary do not "crawl", they walk; areader who does not imagine thatarrangement of rooms in the Samsahousehold cannot fully enjoy TheMetamorphosis. Details such as thesemight seem to be unimportant, but it isprecisely this lavish attention spent onminutiae which distinguishes Nabokov asa great novelist. As Nabokov himselfwrites:This capacity to wonder attrifles...these asides of the spirit,these footnotes in the volume of lifeare the highest form ofconsciousness, and it is in thischildishly speculative state ofmind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we knowthe world to be good.NEW MUSIC ■FOR A ROMANTICS AGEProduced by Pete Solley Spider Management Distributed by CBS Records t 1980 CBS IncAvailable AtSPIN-ITL.P.*4.99 Give theKiftof muftir ,1 Songs You Know By Heart./§ You demanded it! Here are the originalfr studio recordings of all the greatHeart singles, including "Magic Man,""Crazy On You" and "Barracuda"You demanded it! The first live Heartalbum includes spectacular concertperformances, never before availableon record. Plus, as a bonus, the newHeart single, "Tell It Like It Is."A double album in every way from Heart.Available at your favorite music store.14 The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980In The Cheer the deaths he survivesare often those of friends and fellowpoets, including Robert Lowell, SylviaPlath and, especially, John Berryman.Meredith suffers what in an earlier bookhe called the curse “of responsible sleep"where “we trace disaster to our ownacts." In the extraordinary and terriblesection on Berryman in “Dreams ofSuicide" he cannot prevent the death ofhis friend:If I hold you tight by the ankles,still you fly upward from the ironrailing. Your father made thesewings, after he made his own, andnow from beyond he tells you flydown, in thevoice my own fathermight say, walk, bov.He elsewhere recognizes that survivors,among whom he counts himself,look around with new eyes at anewly praiseworthy world, blinkingeyes like these.("Accidents of Birth")The world is there to praise, the poet'stask in The Cheer to find the courageachieve “some normal excellence, of longaccomplishment" which is “all that canjustify our sly survivals" (“Freezing").The poems range over historical figures,the places and people of politics, scene ofthis and other countries, children andparents, friends, relatives and lovers.These poems, of course, engage thevery losses and tenuous conditions thatmake it seem “quite impossible" to havecheer or courage. In the lovely closinglines of “Recollection of Bellagio," thespeaker expresses passage of time:And who is saying these words,now that the man is a shade, hasbecome his own shade? I see theshade rise slow and ghostly fromits seat on the soft, grainy stone, Iwatch it descend by the gravelledpaths of the promontory, under anet of steady stars, in April, fromthe boughs' rite and the bells' —quiet, my shade, and long ago, andstill going on.Much of Meredith's "praise" is saved for“those we love." In “Parents," “InThe CheerWilliam MeredithAlfred A. Knopf$13.95By Marc DiamondIn Alone With America RichardHoward noted the characteristic“persistent modesty" of WilliamMeredith, not a modesty of skill orachievement but an attitude in the face ofchange and death, in the face of a worldthat is often incomprehensible. Meredithcan write, in “Poem About Morning,"that “there is a great deal about it youdon't understand." “Random" is one ofMeredith's favorite words; while theremay be order behind the apparentrandomness of things, it is elusive.“Where is something solid?" the poetasks.Meredith's characteristic modesty setsthe tone for The Cheer, his latest volumeof poems. In the “Envoi" prefacing thebook he writes of the “Cheer of courage"that is the source of his poems, as well asthe function (loosely so) of these poems:It's native to the words, and whatthey want us always to know, evenwhen it seems quite impossible.This assertion, however, must be putmodestly. In “The Cheer,"-reader my friend, is in the wordshere, somewhere. Frankly, I'd liketo make you smile. Wordsaddressing evil won't turn evil backbut they can give heart. The cheeris hidden in right words.The assertion modified by “somewhere,"the plain-spoken, honest (“frankly" voiceof apparently small ambition theadmission of limits (they can't do this,but): these stances mask theoverwhelming task the poems undertake— to turn evil back, to deal with the factthat “A great deal isn't right." Meredith,in fact, engages a world in which "itseems quite impossible" to have courage,and in which a smile is no modestachievement.In The Cheer the threats to survival saved is the question Meredith asks.The situation of the survivor is oneMeredith has explored repeatedly inearlier books. In "The Open Sea" (1958)his prayers for “each creature lost sincethe start at sea" gives rise to "thanks itwas not l, nor yet one close to me." In“The Wreck of the Thresher," (1964), thedead speak to the meditating poet,forgiving the dream in which only hesurvives (where he cannot, in fact,imagine his own death, a failure whichMeredith elsewhere calls “our slysurvivals"):Now they are saying, Do not beashamed to stay alive, You havedreamt nothing that we do notforgive. And gentlier, Studysomething deeper than yurselvesAs, how the heart, when it turnsdiver, delves and saves.are part of the mundane details of dailylife. He writes of “this random/life"where we are "spared by a caf - orairplane-crash or/cured of malignancy"or "pardoned miraculously for years/bythe lava of chance" (Accidents ofBirth"). In his characteristic situation,the poet considers death through themediation of dreams. Dreaming himselfas one of those spared, he discovers thatsurvival is often less than heroic:In the dream I lie still. Bootedand brutal, their pieces slung atwaist height spraying random leadthey wade through the dead for oneof whom I hope to be mistaken.When I wake up, what am I to dowith this mortifying life I've savedagain?Survival is thus a problematicachievement: what to do with the lifeDo You Know ThatUniversity Extension's celebratedBASIC PROGRAM OF LIBERAL EDUCATIONFOR ADULTSis being offered in HYDE PARK next term?Read and discuss, with experienced teachers, the great classicsfrom Shakespeare and Plato to the Bible and Freud.Weekly classes.Small groups of adults.No prerequisites.No examinations.Non-credit. Tuition:$125. per quarterDiscount for faculty spouses.University of Chicago staff,and Alumni.Place:Graduate Library School, Regenstein Library: East Entrance1100 East 57th Street(Free parking lot immediatelyadjacent to the east entrance)Time:Thursday evenings 6:30-9:45 p.m.First meeting, January 8thOther Locations:Classes also offered Downtown, Near North,North Shore, and River ForestFor more information:Telephone: 753-3137 (Weekdays 9 am - 5 pm) PRE-CHRISTMAS5225 South Harpermarimelcko,no-ironoercale b> Dan Riveri.. . * 1 •••, ^Rainbow Stripe 4* Ve**Watch For Linen Sa/eBeginning Dec. 26 Choose from• Seven Flowers• Morning Lato• Boo-Booor Fitted *9SFull Flat $4 099or Fitted I CS°^la' *15"*18"*9"*11"King Fiator FittedPaur StandardPillowcasesPair KingPillowcasesComfortersTwin $39.99Full $49.99Queen/King $59.99Stylish combination ofblack, camel brownand white in contempo¬rary stripeTwin Flator tiltedFull Flator FittedQueen Flator FittedKing Flator Fitted *5"$8"*11"*13"Pair Standard $C99Pillowcases ®Pair KingPillowcasesComfortersTwin $29.00Full $44.95Queen/King $59.95The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 15 Continuedon29Angela Jackson teachingthrough the Illinois Arts CcAn Interview WithAngelaJacksoncorner/d menpicking their teeth onhungertheirskin strung tight on the linebonebetween the el rumbleandgut/spotato chip & pepsimusic.disaster.newspapers warnapproaching faminewaikingdownthese strangledcrowdedstreetsi hear a thousandgrowlsbrotherswhen we pass.Angela JacksonWillie MaeWillie Mae, she say he say:Willie, you too nice a lookinwoman to cuss the way you do.Goddammit, she say, fierce blue tongued,who are you? Nobodyin forty years part me from my mouth.Not mama, daddy, minister.This a package deal. Youdon’t take nothin out.Everything she lay her mouth on turnblue and beautiful and true.(Do you remake the sun toanswer its warm darkening? Ortamper with moon, or turnits tide?Angela JacksonLeave me alone and love me.Leave me alone and love me)By Richard KayeOn the telephone, Angela Jackson hadan almost shy, cautious voice when Irang her up asking for an interview. “Isthis Angela Jackson, the poet?" I asked,because there were six or so AngelaJacksons in the telephone directory.“Yes," she answered, very slowly, andthen became downright combative whenI said that I thought she might have mov¬ed to the Northside. “Who told you I'dmoved to the Northside? I'd never moveto the Northside." When I tried by luckby telling her that several fans of herpoetry had suggested her as a fine personto interview, she broke into a school-girlish giggle: "Poetry?" she said,pretending not to know what it was,“Does anybody read it anymore?"If you've been at all paying attention toChicago poetry, and particularly to thepoetry of Chicago's black poets, thenAngela Jackson's name, her poems, and,lately, her stories, have been difficult tomiss. Considered to be one of Chicago'smore important younger talents, Jacksonhas published her work in a wide numberof magazines, anthologies, andperiodicals. Her two books of poetry in¬clude VooDoo/Love Magic (Third WorldPress) and The Greenville Club (a chapbook length collection in Four BlackPoets, BookMark Press, Kansas City,Missouri). Next year a volume of herpoems entitled, A House of ExtendedFamilies will be put out by OBAhouse.Jackson has appeared in Story Quarterly,Black Scholar, Chicago Review, BlackReview, South and West, Black Creation,and Spoon River Quarterly. Most recent¬ly, Jackson has had a play produced.Shango Diapora: An African AmericanMyth of Womanhod and Love, an adaption of a series of Jackson's prose poems,was produced at the Midwest BlackTheatre Alliance Conference last Octoberand is scheduled for another productionelsewhere. Winner of the Conrad KentRivers Memorial Award from BlackWorld Magazine, the Academy ofAmerican Poets Award, and the EdwinSchu*man Fiction Prize, among otherawards. Jackson is also one of the firsttwo winners of the Illinois Arts CouncilvCreative Writing Fellowships, for whichshe received a $5,000 prize for her fiction.The twenty-nine year-old Jackson is the16 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 Chairperson of the OBAC WritersWorkshop (a workshop for black writersand poets on the Southside), of which shehas been a member for some ten years.In 1977, Jackson was selected as a UnitedStates representative in literature to theSecond World Festival of Black andAfrican Arts and Culture in Lagos,Nigeria, and in 1979 she participated inthe arts festival, Diaspora II in Port-au-Price, Haiti, where she read from ShangoDiaspora: The God of Fire. When sheisn't scooping up prizes, teaching schoolchildren through the Illinois Arts Council,or sending her writing off for publication,Jackson works on her Master's Degree inLatin American and Carribean Studieshere at the University. But Jackson isfiesty and adament in insisting that she isreally not a part of the University arena.Her real home encircles the University —the Southside, where she was raised aftermoving from Greenville, Mississippi, thefifth of nine children.The interview with Jackson was con¬ducted in a Hyde Park restaurant, whereJackson ordered a tall glass of gingeralewhile she talked of her recent work — analmost-complete semi-autobiographicalnovel called Treemont Stone — and spokeof her life in Chicago, black artists, andsome of her more recent projects. A veryfunny woman when something tickles herinterest (she nearly spirited away aminiature tape-recorder used in the inter¬view: she found it “adorable"), she canalso be fierce when angry about apolitical subject (the rise of Reagansim).Jackson said she thought she was comingdown with a cold the day of our talk, buton the Friday after Thanksgiving, onwhat seemed a deader-than-usual after¬noon in Hyde Park, it was hard to believethere was a more healthy, moreenergetic Southsider around for miles.Kaye: Can you maybe say somethingabout where you grew up, what that waslike? What was it like growing up on theSouthside?Jackson: I was born in Greenville,Mississippi, the fifth of nine children andthe last of us who were born in Mississip¬pi. I just recently learned that the placewhere I was born, that section of town,was called Brown's Addition, and I likethat alot. In my mother's and father'schildren you can see two different per¬ sonalities, and it comes from the sense ofplace. There's a difference between thoseof us who were born in Mississippi, andthose of us who were born in Chicago, soI think that just being there, did seem tomake a big difference in that I wasn't anabsolute product of the city. Which is not tosay that the city that I knew as a child wasthat much different than Greenville, inBrown's Addition. \I grew on on the Southside of Chicago,not that far from the U. of C„ though Inever would've dreamed of even goingpassed the U. of C. when I was growingup. Strange people lived in Hyde Park(laughs.) Rich people lived in Hyde Park,(laughs).Kaye: Strange like eccentric?Jackson: Strange people and rich, whitepeople.Kaye: And that's why you never went in¬to Hyde Park?Jackson: Oh, no, good gracious no. Ofcourse not. That's why I hardly everwent to Lake Michigan. You know, theonly thing that would ever bring us inthis direction was the Museum of Scienceand Industry. We took the bus — wedidn't walk — and we looked, and therewas this strange, mysterious grayness.You have to understand when I grew up— the fifties and the sixties. I rememberthat if you walked passed Halsted, whichis only 800 West, you would get run backover. It was circumscribed. But whatwent on in that place where we lived wasreally a black Southern community.Blues grew up here. The block that I liv¬ed on, 53rd and Wentworth, where myparents still live and which faces the DanRyan now, was part of a sel.-containedcity, a town. It was really like growingup in a small town, that's the way Iremember it. Mailbox on the corner, mybrother was a soda fountain junkie whoworked in the drug store on the corner.There was a Certified, a bakery, and abig house that was like a haunted housethat was almost directly facing us. Twodoors down was a Missionary BaptistChurch that we went to sometimes,because our friends went there and webelonged to a club there. Two doors downfrom that was a Sanctified Church. So there were a lot of churches, andeverybody knew each other and you kneweverybody. Even people who might beconsidered tough — who were tough —belonged to that place, so there was noreal danger, which is a little differentfrom what it is now.Kaye: The other day when I told you thatsomeone said you moved to the Nor¬thside, you nearly hit the ceiling. Yousaid you would never think of movingthere. Why is that, aside from the factthat you grew up here?Jackson: There's not enough life for meon the Northside. It has a different feel¬ing to it. This friend of mine and I wereriding on the El through the Northsideand she said, “You know, over here has adifferent feeling to it. You know, thereare a lot of witches over here."(Laughs). “Covens and evil-doings," shesaid.Kaye: She was joking...Jackson: No, she wasn't (laughs). Butfor me, it's not as interesting. The Nor¬thside doesn't have the same lev§l.s offeeling that set me off, it doesn't have thesame world-view that I have. There arenot enough smells there. One day, I wason the Northside and I was at a bus stop,and I was looking around and it waswierd, because there was somethingwrong. And I realized there were twothings that I decided were missing —music and smells, Mambo sauce. You'llnever smell Mambo sauce on the Nor¬thside.Kaye: Do you consider yourself as partof a community of artists and writers onthe Southside?Jackson: I am a part of a community,and that's very important for me. Ibelong to the Organization of BlackAmerican Writers Workshop here on theSouthside. And I have been a member ofthat for as long as I've been a writer. Istarted going in 1969, and I've been goingever since. I went from being theyoungest person there to the Chairperson,which doesn't mean that I'm the oldestperson there, though I once was. Sincethe beginning of this year, when we mov-Italian interviewer Oriana Fallaci wasat the University on November 22nd in aprogram sponsored by The ChicagoLiterary Review and The Chicago Review.Fallaci came to discuss her recent book, AMan: A Novel, (Simon and Schuster), andgave specific instructions that she did notwant to talk about any other aspect of herwork. Before a question and-answer ses¬sion which Fallaci requested, she gave ashort talk on the subject of her latest"novel”, Alexandros Panangoulis, thepoet and radical who made an unsuc¬cessful assasination attempt on the life ofGreek dictator, George Papadopoulis.Fallaci asked for no tape recorders duringany part of her public visit. The followingis a fully accurate copy of Ms. Fallaci'sshort speech which we put together fromseveral short hand notes at her talk. Wehave retained the exact wording of Fallci'sspeech, though her less-than-perfectEnglish may make some of her sentencesappear ackward. Nevertheless, aside fromone very moving part of her talk when noone appears to have been taking notes, thefollowing is a word by-word replay (ac¬complished without recorder) of Ms.Fallaci's introduction.I don't see myself as a journalist only,and even less as an interviewer only. Thathas been put on me in this country — why Idon't know why — and it hurts me a lot.Because those interviews which youalways go back to in this country are a tinypart of my work. And it is not my fortunethat the American press publishes themmore happily than other things. I havewritten more than six books. I prefer tolook at myself as a writer who does alsomuch journalism. I am very proud of beinga journalist, but I am not only that, andthis book, A Man is not a book of a jour¬nalist, it is the book of a writer. I am nothere to speak about Kissinger, for Christ'ssake, and even less about Khomeni andother people. I am here today to speakabout this book, which I regard as the big¬gest effort that I've done in my life. It hastaken up three full years of my life — noSunday, no Christmas, no Easter, no NewYear's Eve. For three years, I have beenprisoner of myself, in a kind of self-jail inmy country house in Tuscany, never leav¬ing the desk, never answering the phone,never seeing anybody. And I did it not outof masochism, but because I had to do it.What pushed me to write this book initiallywas the tremendous grief from the deathof this man, whom I had loved, whom Ilove, and who had loved me.It was the attempt at keeping this manalive, or, if you want, a little less dead. Itwas not because he was and is so dear tome, but for what this man had representedand still represents. If it were not so, thisbook would have been a personal story, ona personal case, and God knows it is notthat. It is much more than that.During the course of writing this bookthe subject began to grow in my hands,like when you make bread, when the yeastgrows and levitates. Because in the storyed to the Southside Community ArtsCenter, we've seen a lot of activity.We're putting out a newsletter. This isn'tnecessarily a time where things are go¬ing in our interests, but it is still a mar¬shalling of a new consciousness, and Ican feel it. This is a very important time.The Ku Klux Klan is out in full forceagain. Ronald Reagan will be the Presi¬dent. Who voted for him? People will notadmit that they voted for him. One out ofsix black people voted for Regan. AlexHailay campaigned for Ronald Reagan,and he convinced Ralph Abernathy tovote for Reagan!Kaye: Is this going to be a bad period forblacks?Jackson: It's not necessarily a badperiod for us. I didn't say it was going tobe a good period either. It depends on ourresponse. When external resources arenot there for you, you pull together thetwo cents that you have, whether it'smonetarily or culturally. You find outwhat you have to do and you do it.Though I'm not saying that it's all thateasy. It's also a very dangerous time. of Alekos are all the elements — thedramatic elements — of our time and ofour life. Problems of freedom, of justice, ofpolitics, of political parties, of right, left,and center, of revolution. It was scaring. Iwrote the book four times, at least. I threwaway much. It was a much bigger book. Itwas scaring because I wanted to dosomething accessible to everybody. Notthe work of scholar on the subject. And it isbecause of this that I chose the form that ldid. Before speaking of this book, I shouldspeak to you more of Alekos. I would neverdo this in Europe where everybody hasknown for years who was AlekosPanagoulis. He was for us the symbol itselfof freedom and resistance. But inAmerica, he has never been known. Fewpeople really know who was Alekos, inspite of the fact that when he died paperslike the New York Times reported abouthis death with much evidence.In April of 1967, a military coup tookplace in Greece, the one led byPapadopoulis, and a military dictatorshipwas established in Greece. The whole ofEurope participated in this tragedy andKaye: Moving on to your own poetrynow, are you satisfied with the idea of be¬ing a "black" poet versus being someother kind of poet, or not being any kindat all? What do you think of the criticismthat writers with certain, more specificidentifications are missing out onsomething. That they're missing out on —oh, universal truths or something.Jackson: Everybody comes from someplace. George Kent, who is an Englishprofessor at the University, said, amongother things in a chapter from his bookon Gwendolynn Brooks which waspublished in Black World, is that youdon't get at a universal by aspiring andbeing lofty and making grandstatements. You get a universal by goingdeeply into an experience, by specificallyexploring the terrain that you have. Youdon't get at it by trying to be colorless,smell-less, by trying to bland yourselfout. You get at it by trying to be as ex¬clusively and perfectly yourself as youcan. So, I don't feel that to claim thespecificty of my blackness is to denymyself as a human being.Kaye: Do you think there's still an ex¬clusivity in American publishing that reacted in disdain. And nothing happened,tragically, in spite of the fact that manywere arrested and there was resistance.Until August 1968 when a man, calledAlekos Panagoulis, but in the very firstdays we did not know his name — tried tokill the tyrant, the dictator, Papadopoulis.Two mines that should have killedPapadopoulis in the morning when he wentto the office when he left his villa were puton the road, under a bridge. One mine didnot burst, the other one burst a fewseconds later. A few seconds that permit¬ted the car of Papadopoulis to go a fewmeters, and in fact no one was hurt. Alekoswas immediately arrested and had tostand tremendous interrogation by tor¬turers and unimaginable torture for manymonths. Then in the fall he was tried by theCourt Marshall, not so much for the at¬tempt for which he was condemned for afew years of jail, but because he was theleader of the movement called the GreekResistance. And also as a deserter, sincehe was a sbldier when the military couphad taken place. He was condemned todeath twice. He was to be executedir, ^genakeeps the black writer out?Jackson: Oh, goodness, yes! It goes backto what we we're saying about univer-sals. What's universal is universally dic¬tated by people in power. The people whorun things decide what's important. If itfits them, it's universal.Kaye: You mentioned GwendolynBrooks. What poets have had powerful ef¬fects on you?Jackson: A lot of people have had astrong effect on me. Certain ones had avery specific effect on me. GwendolynnBrooks had a very specific effect on mein terms of her use of language, hertransformation of language. Mary Evans'use of understatement and the directlypolitical statements that you find in herwork were influential. Robert Hayden inthe spiritual largeness of his work, in hisgrasp of the historical. Langston Hughesin an interestingly rythmic and vitalsense of portraying ordinary people. DonL. Lee is someone, for the political quali¬ty of his work, and the irony. CarolineRodgers. In fiction, Toni Morrison is v>- three days later. He was not executedbecause of the intervention of all the headsof state of the whole world, at least of theWestern world. Even Breznev asked thathe not be executed. Even Johnson, whichhelped a lot, because Papadopoulis wouldnever do something that the Americanswould not like.He was thus closed into the militaryprison of Bolartey, in a cell which had beenbuilt for him personally, as large as a dou¬ble bed, no window, electric wireseverywhere, twenty-four guards to watchhim day and night. There he remained insolitary confinement. He was not evengiven newspapers, books, papers to write.He was a poet, and one of his main strug¬gles during those years was to have papersand pencils to write his poems. They woulddeny him even that. There are somepoems, in my opinion the most beautiful,which he literally wrote with his blood.And in fact, when I met him he had hiswrists all full of little scars. He had hiddena little razor, they never found it, and hecut his wrists and with his blood andanything he could find to write a poem.There he remained five years until August,1973, when Papadopoulis gave a generalamnesty. He didn't want to leave the jail.He thought that leaving jail would helpPapadopoulis. He left jail on August 23,and a few hours later we met. A kind of in¬evitable encounter, I would say. Sooner orlater we should meet each other, and themoment we met each other we had to loveeach other. We worked together, we livedtogether, the last three years of his life,which were not easier than his five yearsin prison. First, because as soon as he wasreleased from prison, they needed toeliminate him. I succeeded in getting himto Italy, in what was called exile, though itwas far from being a simple exile, becausein those eleven months Alekos went onwith his struggle in the Resistance.(Here are notes are unclear, but Fallaciwent on to tell how Panagoulis wasmurdered on April 30, 1976 in an "auto ac¬cident." That automobile accident happen¬ed a few days after Alekos was to havedelivered (to the one newspaper that final¬ly willing to publish them) document in¬criminating political leftists and rightistsin Greece.)This is the story of Alekos, the story thateveryone knows, that has been told manytimes in the newspapers in Europe, andthis is the story that I mil in mv hook. Ihave not told this story as memoire,or as a journalistic account or as anhistorical one. It would not have beenenough, because it would have confinedthe story, the case, to the personal andhistorical and political case of Alekos.What l wanted to do instead, was to univer¬salize the personal and political andhistorical case of Alekos. To give it as asymbol, as an example. I wanted to tell astory in which, in other countries, in anypossible regime, people would recognizethemselves in that story, in that man.meone I like, for her creation of placeand time and character, specifically inSuma, which I prefer to Song of Solomon.Toni Bambara, for her short stores, andfor her novel which came out last yearcalled The Salt Eaters.Kaye: What's going on with your play, *Shango Diaspora: An African-AmericanMyth of Womanhood and Love? How didyou come to write for the theater?Jackson: Shango Diaspora was producedat the Midwest Black Theatre Alliancefor one time only, and the theme of theConference was Asian African myths inAfrican-American art forms. They hadmade that theme without even hearing ofthe play, which was written earlier. Itpreviewed there, but it will premiere atthe Lamont Zeno Theatre on the westsideon April 16 and at Karamoo House inCleveland, which is the oldest blacktheatre in the country. Also, it may ap¬pear at a few places that I'm not sureabout yet.The play had its origins when I showeda series of my poems to a producer, whowas excited about the writing but he saidContinued on 27The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 17Tri Quarterly 47Winter 1980$5.95Hair Trigger III$6.95 arrangement.Weightman's remark comes toy way ofthe observation that the "literaryjournals" with the highest profiles atChicago ReviewVolume 31, Numbers 3 & 4$3.00By Jeff SmithThere's something uncomfortablyweighty about the three journals underreview — TriQuarterly, an art andliterature magazine out of NorthwesternUniversity; Columbia College's latestStory Workshop anthology, Hair TriggerIII; and, to a lesser extent, our ownChicago Review. The former two tomesare books, really. TriQuarterly 47(Winter 1980) contains 344 pages, all ofthem fiction; Hair Trigger, with an evenlarger format, runs 248, though some ofthat is poetry and drama. Making someallowances for big type — both areprinted nicely on good paper and areeasv enough on the eyes — the effect stillis most confrontational. We are askedsimply to accept each mass of materialas uniformly worthwhile, so deemed byan editor who, at least within themagazine itself, insists on anonymity.I admit to a certain fondness for theeditorial task, the special contribution toliterature and art that editors make. Atthe least, editors are agents of theaesthetics of presentation, if what theypresent purports to be literature ratherthan literary journalism, if they aim torun an "interesting market-garden"rather than a "green grocer's shop" ofliterature (in John Weightman's phrase),one might expect them to show agardener's pleasure in cultivation and amarket-keeper's pride in distinctive present really engage themselves withjournalism and academic cataloguing ofliterature. He means publications like theNew York Review of Books and, inEngland, the Times Literary Supplement,in which his remarks appeared last Juneamong contributions to an internationalforum on "The role of the literarymagazine." Similar observations, withvarying degrees of wistfulness, unitenearly all the English-speaking criticswho contributed to the forum: IrvingHowe, David Bromwich, George Steiner,Robert Pinsky. Though a couple of thesewriters emphasize the "healthydiversity" one might account theproliferation of little magazines, mostagree that few such magazines today, inEngland or America, strive for adistinctive identity, a special relationshipto the present moment or condition. Anda couple writers, notably Howe, put downthe "loss of influence and decline ofattention" literary magazines haveexperienced toa feeling that they are no longer"central," no longer embroiled insignificant cultural issues. Simplyto accumulate a quantity of goodwriting is rarely enough to give amagazine its tone of distinctiveness. . . What a vital literary magazineneeds is a point of vew, achampioning of some cultural oreven social cause, not yet won oralready lost. It needs somesharply accented view of "thesituation" — and of course there always is a "situation."It would not be apparent from currentissues that any particular criticalperspective, purpose, or ideology informsselection and arrangement in eitherTriQuarterly, Hair Trigger or theReview. Certainly none is editoriallyenunciated. Without proposing that any ofthe publications turn specificallypartisan, it's fair at least to ask, if onlyfor the sake of the readers' comfort, thatthe editor step forward a little — if onlyin an introductory note or an occasionalbreak in the line of bumper-to-bumpershort stories. A little more unity in amagazine makes it more pleasant, evenaside from the question of identity.To be sure, Hair Trigger has theclassroom connection as an identityprinciple: All the works issue fromColumbia College's storywriting, poetry,songwriting, scriptwriting, andFreshman Writing and English Usagecourses. But this principle does notinhere to the works themselves and hencedoes not contribute to unity. TriQuarterlydoes do "theme" issues, which may aidunity from time to time, but it does notsolve the identify problem. Issue #47(Winter 1980) hangs loosely beneath thesubtitle "Love/Hate," which maybe helpsexplain wrenchingly gothic pieces likeVirgil Burnett's "Djaa: A sexual fable"and Angela Carter's "The bloodychamber," respectively a historicalfantasy and a Bluebeard yarn both ofwhich link sexuality to violence andtogether depict women as the source andsubmissive victims of this violence. Inplace of literary identity, what comes todefine them is current fashion.The Review's stories unfortunatelycohere along similar lines. Numbers 3and 4 of the current volume (Winter andSpring 1980) rely far too much on a *narrative voice whose snide disgust with"humanity" has evidently become a fad.On the positive side, Stephen Dixon's "InTime (Winter), Ben Brooks' "A PostalCreed" (Spring) and the shorter, lessrepelling ruminations in Welch D.Everman's "Neighbors" do develop acommon interest in close communities,and the irrational rationality of themundane, that engenders both theirbinding strength and their humanity.Although I have not begun to doindividual justice to mese, it would beinteresting to know what cultural forcesinspire the current interest in insipidcharacters, narrative scorn and fantasticconvolutions of incident — just the kindsof questions a self conscious literaryjournal might really attack.More than any other, Chicago Reviewdoes try. The Spring issue especiallylooks after "postmodernist"commonalities in its criticism andstories. It does give us an introductionand a lead essay — novelist Eric Basso'sthoughts on "Annihilation" as a centralmodern experience. There is bolderfiction in this issue, too; RaymondFederman's "Parsifal in Hamburg,"though it shares some traits discussedabove, probes a complex search foridentity among intellectual charactersscreened through a two-tiered narrative voice.Of the three magazines, the Reviewmost consciously positions itself within aliterary culture. Rather than present"literature" existentially conjured out ofink and paper, it gives us the sense ofaccess to a society of creativeindividuals. It emphasizes literature assomething that happens in a culture, adiscourse that is itself a social programand can be so presented aside fromallegiance to specific social doctrines.One really only needs an allegiance toliterature and a desire to place it incontext. The Chicago Review's relianceon, say, interviews with authors (JorgesLuis Borges, Richard Stern, IsaacBashevis Singer in recent issues) showsmuch more of this than an occasionalgraphic, Or the fold-out photo illustrationsDianne Bleu and Stephen Sanders slipinto a few of TriQuarterty's stories.It may be no accident that ChicagoReview comes out of Hyde Park, and thatit relies less than TriQuarterly seems toon the work of major authors like JoyceCarol Oates. The presence of suchauthors in a magazine tends to beseif-defining, turning the magazine'spurpose into something like, "Here'swhat the literati have written up thisquarter." A magazine's basis in aconsciously creative community can giveit that needed insight into art as acommunal function. (The ChicagoReview, for better or worse, does notlimit its scope to Hyde Park, however.)As Howe and others point out,decentralization nf literary culture in linewith the spre • * universities may inpart account fc -s of identity. So, theysay, do the absence of guiding literarylights behind magazines, people likePhilip Rahv of Partisan Review, JohnCrowe Ransom of Kenyon Review, andseveral in Europe. Bromwich also notes*the proliferation of amateur writers uverintelligent readers, making magazinesprivate addresses to no one. It may alsobe a function of the times. In any case,no ready solutions appear.But what these conditions ominouslyimply is a lack of identity, and hencenurturance, in the literary world itself.Here the student writers and editors ofHair Trigger III stand to be mostaffected. It any continue to write beyondschool (and some, like Rod McKinneyand freshman Dino Malcolm, bothauthors of fine stories about Chicagostreet life, probably should), they willneed supportive contact with literarycultures and heritages. Writing as"existential experience" is valuable tolearn; it seems to be the focus ofColumbia's Story Workshops, andcertainly informs Hair Trigger. But theworkshops should also be exploited asmodels of the social engagement writingrepresents. Inclusion of reviews,interviews and criticism in the nextanthology would help not only the bookbut the students. If they then achieve thekind of self-consciousness George Steinerattributes to good editors, always askingthemselves "Is my next issuenecessary?" the answer will be obvious.Pre-Christmas SaleonArt Books, Crafts,Sports, Cookbooks S'•1—*Powell's Bookstore1501E. 57th St. • 955-7780 *9 am-! 1 pm EverydayESPOfib*- The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980, ... ■.. r P.S. We Buy Books Too *n■i*>45 LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICSA chance to study and live in LondonA wide range of subjects and courses is available in Central London forstudents of the social sciencesJunior year Postgraduate DiplomasOne-year Master s degrees ResearchSubjects include Accounting and Finance, Actuarial Science. Anthropology.Business Studies, Econometrics. Economics. Economic History. Geography,Government, Industrial Relations. International History. International Relations,Law. Management Science. Operational Research, Philosophy. Politics. SocialAdministration, Social Work. Sociology, Social Psychology and Statistical andMathematical SciencesApplication blanks from:Admissions Secretary, L.S.E., Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, EnglandPlease state whether junior year or postgraduateDays of DecisionThe Court YearsWilliam O. DouglasRandom House$16.95By Marian Henriquez NeudelI am probably not the most objectivepossible reviewer for this book. I had acrush on Douglas' opinions long before Ieven considered going to law school,simply for their style, organization, andclarity of thought (back when I was anEnglish teacher.) I met him in the fleshonce, about seven years ago, at abanquet, where he spoke so softly duringhis after dinner speech that l hao tostrain to hear him, and my tape recorderdidn't pick him up at all. I had expectedringing, clarion tones, and was a littledisappointed at a quiet discourse thatcould be drowned out by a ventilatingfan. But he may have felt no need forvolume; he was saying things that wereto him as obvious as "2 + 24". "Congressshall make no law infringing freedom ofspeech" means "no law", period. What'sto shout about?The Court Years has something of thesame effect on me. In large sections ofthe book, the clarion notes aren't there.Part of the problem is the organization.This is not a chronologicalautobiography, like the earlier Go East,Young Man (which brought the reader upto Douglas' ascent to the SupremeCourt.) The chapters in the latest volumecover one topic at a time, from beginningto end, which can be a bit confusing tothe reader who hopes to get a historicalsense of the years in question. The firstchapter in particular ("Early Years onthe Court") is a rousing disappointment— rambling, anecdotal, and hard toconnect to the history of the era. Itsposition at the beginning of the bookdetracts even more from ourappreciation of the book as a whole —buried in the middle, it might have beenless underwhelming.With a few significant exceptions,Douglas is not at his best tellingancedotes. He does give us a few usefulbits of little known historical gossip: thatFranklin D. Roosevelt seriouslyconsidered Douglas as his running-matein 1944, before finally settling on Truman(Douglas toyed with the idea mainlybecause he hoped to have some influenceon foreign policy — he remarks wrylythat he obviously hadn't known muchabout the vice presidency at the time!);that the Democratic party consideredhim as a presidential candidate in 1948;that he was "morally certain" that theSupreme Court phones, chambers, andconference room were bugged in the '60sand '70s. He gives us an unexpected viewof his interests in foreign policy; the onlycabinet position he would ever haveseriously considered was Secretary ofState, and he did a good deal of globaltraveling to acquaint himself with worldrealities (including a trip through the Soviet Union with the young Robert F.Kennedy, at Kennedy Sr.'s request).He has some worthwhile thinqs to sayabout the Court: he and Burger were atloggerheads from the beginning over theCourt's workload, which Burger felt wasimpossibly neavy and Douglas consideredperfectly manageable on a four dayweek; likewise, Douglas opposed fromthe beginning the increasingbureaucratization of the Court and Themultiplication of its personnel, as well asthe various mechanisms, proposed andsometimes implemented, for deipn^tinnthe work of the Justices, especially whereprisoner petitions for review wereconcerned. But his insider stories aboutthe dramatis personae of the Court lacksavor, perhaps because Douglasgenerally lacks the malice necessary toput real spice in his gossip. Hispresidential ancedotes about Lyndon B.Johnson and Richard Nixon are morepeppery (for instance, he relates hisdisappointment at not being on Nixon's"enemies list", especially because "somany less deserving characters madeit"). But in general, Douglas (or perhapshis editor) was too much of a gentlemanto be a good raconteur. I was especiallydisappointed that he did not include, inhis chapter about the two attempts of theSenate to impeach him, the argument onthe Senate floor in which apro-impeachment Senator alleged thatDouglas' four marriages and threedivorces indicated a lack of judicialtemperament, and a Douglas supporterpointed out in response that KingSolomon is traditionally upheld as themodel of judicial wisdom, even thoughthe Bible tells us that he had 1000 wivesand 3000 concubines!We get some surprising views o*Douglas' ideas on foreign policy. There isnothing startling in his objections to war:"Modern wars are too costly to be fought.They rob domestic programs ofnecessary support". But it is ratherextraordinary that he was acutely awareof the corruption and heavy-handednessof the Shah's government in Iran, 20years ago (and tells us that John F.Kennedy was seriously consideringwithdrawing U.S. support from him). Heis quite convinced that the CIA wasbehind the military coup which led to theoverthrow and death of Ngo Dinh Diemin South Viet Nam in 1963, a viewconsistent with those of most SoutheastAsian historians today. But he also seesthe CIA's hand in the Buddhist uprisingsagainst Diem and even in some of theimmolations of Buddhist monks, whichlaid the ground work for that coup — aviewpoint shared by neither FrancesFitzgerald nor the Committee ofConcerned Asian Scholars. And, unlikethem, Douglas sees Diem as having beentargeted by the CIA primarily because ofhis firm opposition to an American"expeditionary force", rather than forany failings in his domestic policies.Douglas' personal acquaintance with William O. DouglasDiem may have colored his views in thisarea, but this whole question maywarrant further research.There is nothing low-key about thesections of the book that deal with thegreat issues the Court has had toadjudicate in Douglas's term: theloyalty-security program under Trumanand Eisenhower, judicial treatment ofnonconformists, race discrimination,executive privileges, big business, thepress, privacy and surveillance, andprisoners' rights. One wishes there weremore, but what there is is utterlyfascinating, despite the brevity and hastewith which it is covered. These chaptersprobably deserve reprinting separatelyas a brief constitutional history of theperiod for legally literate non lawyers.Douglas deals, quite honestly and openly,not only with the ways in which the Courthas expanded upon the legal rightsenumerated in the first ten amendmentsto the Constitution, but also with theinconsistencies and backtrackings whichoften occurred under pressure from war(hot or cold) or presidential power. It isin these chapters, and the chapter on the"The President and the Court", thatDouglas undertakes to restore to theword "liberal" the luster long sincedulled by the operation of the left, theright, and the passing years alike. In anera when Maoists define liberals as the enemy, and rightists are incapable ofusing the word at all without "ultra" or j"phony" prefixed to it as inseparably as"damn" to "yankee", it is refreshing tohear the stories of the important liberalbattles and victories — for the right ofworkers to organize, for the financialprotection of the individual fromunemployment and old age, for equaljustice for people of color, for legalassistance to the poor, for conservation ofnatural resources — from someone whowas there at the beginnings of manydecisions and the conclusions of others.And, given the conservative-chic tenor ofthe times, it is important, too, to bereminded that most of those victories are |partial and precarious, and not to beabandoned merely because they are"ancient history" or the fruit of a "tiredideology".Read chapters 11 - V11 and XI-XIV at! one sitting; they are the heart of thebook; skip the first chapter until afterthat, if you bother with it at all, but read i-the others as you have time. Perhaps thefaults in The Court Years result fromposthumous editing, but they need not *destroy its basic readability, nor itsimportance to law buffs, lay andprofessional, and to anyone who caresabout the history of the times that madej our time what it is, for better and for; worse.Court Studio Theatre PresentsFrom the Archives of the Theatre of the AbsurdBORIS....../#« BUILDERVI ftN SEMPIRE 'HE <ii\ SIh Ui/mi'uj*'VNovember 28-30, December 5-78:30 Friday & Saturday, 7:30 Sunday57th and University753-3581$3 ($2 students and senior citizens) Directed by Steve SchroerThe Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 19~”yV."Columbia" f* a trademark of CBS Inc. © W80 CBS Inc.AEROSM1THS GREATEST HITS mMThis ad is your chance to get a great car andsave $100. it’s a special offer for you fromAvis Used Car Sales. 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Fifteenyears after the publication of his firstbook, a slender volume of poems entitled; Plain Song, Harrison is writing fictionillumined by many of the concerns whichfirst launched him as a poet. At its best,Plain Song (Norton, 1965) consists ofsubtle, pure lyrics—songs, really—whichowe a considerable debt to the greatChinese poets. (L> Po is especiallyevoked.) The influence of William CarlosWilliams is apparent as well: the thing isseen, up close, without mediation, until itshines in pure being.The first lines of the first poem of PlainSong define a region and a sensibility:"Form is the woods: the beast,/ a bobcatpadding through red sumac...." Fifteenyears have passed since the poem waswritten, and Harrison's world and themesare larger now. Nonetheless, thisrootedness in nature—though often anironic one—is still the place to start.Harrison was born in rural Michigan,where he still lives, the son of Swedishimmigrants. His father was anaaricultural aaent. and the area was oneof poor farmers and unproductive soil. In"Northern Michigan," an early poem,Harrison says of it:On this back road the landhas the juice taken out of it:stump fences surround nothingworth their tearing downIn his first novel, Wolf (Simon andSchuster, 1971), Harrison gives a fullerdescription of the region:...small farm settlements often ofless than thirty people, or merely agrocery store and gas stationadjoined by a shabby aluminumtrailer or a basement house withthe first and perhaps second storiesawaiting more prosperous times,the stores themselves with littleand aged stock—lunch meat,bologna pickled in a jar, Polishsausage, tinned foods covered withdust, plaquettes of fish lures,mosquito repellent in aerosol cans,live bait ano a pop cooler outsidethe door—but not many of these....Harrison is 43, the author of threej novels, a collection of novellas, and five! books of poetry. He received both a| bachelor's and master's degree from| Michigan State, and lived in SanFrancisco, Boston, and New York beforejoining the faculty at SUNY-Stony Brook.Various grants enabled him to return toMichigan in the late 60s, where he edited,for a time, a literary quarterly entitledSumac.The relation between the poet andj Michigan has not always been a smoothj one. With the exception of his 1980 trilogyi of novellas, most of Harrison's bestj writing was tocused on the Swedes of his: region, poor farmers, who drink perhaps too much, eat salt herring, wait outwinter in bars and sitting rooms, arereligious or not so, and who, more thanmost of us, live close to the land.Harrison's strengths might be those ofhis region, but his novel Wolf makesclear that it is a case of attractionsporadically resisted. The book'sprotagonist, Swanson, has left Michiganat eighteen—with a few books, clothes, atypewriter—to go to New York city. Whathappens there (and in Boston, and in theWest) is interspersed with scenes of anolder Swanson, who is camping inMichigan—drying out, fishing for hisfood, hanging on, and hoping to see awolf.For Swanson the wolf is asymbol—though an enigmatic one—of alost way of life. (It may no longer exist;it may never have existed.) So Swansonburies his cigarettes, dances naked in hisboots around the fire, and longs forbourbon and Lauren Hutton. (He hasfallen in love with her photos in Vogue.)The city may be too much for him, but irhis refuge in the outdoors neither is hethe sterotypicai sportsman: deposits ofiron ore disorient his compass and hegets lost. He is consumed by insects. Hecan't afford a new and lightweight nylonI tent. Instead, his canvas home weighstwenty pounds.For Swanson it is not solely natureI which restores, but the solitude and| especially the fishing one finds in thej country. Like Thoreau, the natural world| sets Swanson thinking: of meanings, of| past loves, of ways to live. TheseI musings are what ultimately prove thebook more than a black-comic lament.! Although Wolf is obviouslyj autobiographical, the voice of despairbecomes generalized: It stands for morethan a single writer's complaint that, "Iwas wronged."As a whole the book has some of theflavor of Rilke’s Journal of Matte LauridBriggs. Both books are works in prose bypoets, and both concern young artists,self exiles, sensitive loners. Harrison alsoshares Rilke'soddly-egoless first person(despite their profusion, the "I's" never clot) and both works own a half-morbid,half-apologetic interest in disease anddisplacement.In his first book of poems and his firstnovel, Harrison claimed a region. Thegeography may be circumscribed, butthe emotional range is large, and whatHarrison reports, he reports well.Ultimately, he finds that everything isgermane. His work, in its essence, is theproduct of an interesting mind.Harrison is a great reader, especiallyinformed of Spanish fiction and Chinesepoetry. (Like most poets, he reads mostpoets.) And eventually the distillate of hisreading becomes part of his work. Unlikeanother eater-of-texts, Saul Bellow,Harrison's thefts are necessary, henceunforced. His books don't containundigested essays, spooned forth byautodidacts, but rather the reflections ofa thoughtful man. In Wolf, theeighteen-year old Swanson "reads forstrength;" one suspects this might betrue to Harrison at any age.In 1976, Harrison wrote Farmer, anovel of great beauty and insight. (It wasreissued last month by Delta Books, in ahandsome trade-paperback edition.)Farmer is the story of ai schoolteacher—and sometimesj farmer—in rural Michigan. For somej years, Joseph's life has been one of| postponements, until at last, at age 43, hej must choose a life He has begun anI affair with a student, the beautiful and| sophisticated Catherine. Meanwhile, thej town assumes he will marry Rosaiee—alongtime sweetheart—whome he has' never quite proposed to.Decisions about work must be made! simultaneously with the choice ofi Catherine or Rosaiee. Will Joseph■ continue to teach, or will he, like hisI father, farm? Interwoven with thesestories are a number of others, allsuperbly handled—the death of Joseph'smother, the discovery of his affair withCatherine by first Rosaiee and thenCatherine's father, the scenes with thefamily doctor, and Joseph's trip, aschaperon, with his high school students toChicago. Farmer is a wise ano compassionatenovel, quiet and deft in the telling. Itspublication marked a new phase inHarrison's career—his arrival. The novelis well crafted, with mature, sensitivestorytelling, and a great degree ofself confidence: certainly one of his finestworks.In 1979, Center Publications reissuedHarrison's two most recent collections ofpoetry, Letters to Yesenin and Returningto Earth, as a single volume.Letters to Yesenin consists of thirtypoems written to the Russian poetYesenin—husband of Isadora Duncan,and a suicide, in 1925, at the age of thirty.The poems are bitter, funny,sarcastic—"an homage," as Harrisonsays in #29, "that often resembles asuicide note to a suicide."The threat may be more than ironic; attimes, Harrison seems to be debatingsuicide with the ghost of Yesenin, as JohnBerryman so often debated with hischaracters Henry and Mr. Bones. UnlikeBerryman, however, Harrison has so fardecided in favor of life. The tone is atonce tragic and comic:No tranquil pills this year wantingto live peeled as they descrribedthe nine throats of Cerebrus. Thoseold Greek names keep popping up.You can tell we went to college andour sleep is troubled....(11)Naturally we would prefer sevenepiphanies a day and an earth notso apparently devoid o*angels...What a beautifultoothbrush...How fun to have nomoney at all...It's good for my soulthat she prefers to screwanother...(19)These last few notes to you havebeen a bit somber like biographiesof artists written by joylesspeople...You know the sound—Keeeaaatttswuzzzz verrrry unhappppppyabouttt dyinnnng....(22)The poems in Letters to Yesenin arewritten in long lines, and control isachieved equally through rythm andj punctuation. Whether prosepoems orpoems, the collection is one of Harrison'sbest, and with sucn novels as Farmer,prove him tnat rarity; both a good poetand a good noveiist. His latest trilogy of jnoveHas, Legends of the Fall, prove just jhow good Harrison is: they are the finest :novellas, at least in Englisn, since thosej of Salinger.Ail three novellas turn on the question 1of revenge, and all are beautifully andsparely written. The author neveri intrudes; the narrator is circumspect; jHarrison is obviously harkening back to :an earlier kma of storyteding, one thatmany thought was lost amongpostmodernist confusion. In so doing, he( has reasserted the simple dignity ofnarrative, and turned his poetic gifts toi novelistic advantage. And at the age of43, Harrison has only just realized his fullpowers.Article On DepressionFacing circles of green,Surrounded by trees,Stone pillars rest on the lawn.Is this a city park?Or is this a dream I once hadthat fields were scraped offSomebody’s land, and thenSpread across this grey expanse.The old black man sweeps the lintand candywrappers off the marble floor.He told me the stones look colder atday than night.‘‘Not much to see at night ‘cept theshadows of spirits on those stones."Old spirits are drinkingAt the water fountainOutside these buildings.They see someone coming.They quickly drift away.I looked into the windowFramed by sculptured serpents,and I saw my reflection.I was laid out as if I had melted into theglass.Kate Fultz Poetry Readings in ChicagoDecember5 Michael Benidikt at the MCA Poetry Center9 Liz LaBlanc and Alfred Woodsat the Skokie Public LibraryKen Smith at the Paul Waggoner Gallery10 Virgil Burnett at the West Hubbard GalleryJanuary15 Open Reading at Northeastern21 Michael Sells at the West Hubbard GalleryFebruary11 Mark Costello and Marcia Southwickat the West Hubbard Gallery13 Linda Pastan at the MCA Poetry Center24 Charles Wright at the Paul Waggoner Gallery26 Charles Wright at NortheasternMarch Paul Waggoner Gallery2269 N. Lincoln525-7477West Hubbard Gallery61 W. Hubbard321-9365MCA Poetry Centerin the Museum ofContemporary Art237 E. Ontario19 Harold Hind and Sarah Roller at NortheasternThe Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5. 1980 — 21Michael White and Lou Adler presentTHE FIRST NORTH AMERICAN TOURDON’T DREAM IT, SEE IT! New andRebuiltTypewriters,Calculators,Dictators,AddersU of ChicagoBookstore5750 S. Ellis Ave.753-3303 REPAIRSPECIALISTSon IBM, SCM,Olympia, etc.FREE repairestimates; repairsby factory-trainedtechnician.RENTALSavailable withU.ofC. 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(Tickets on sale til we sell out) IdaNoyes Rm 210 753-3592.» e»mn«d||Shapiros are due!, / 'V' ■Your "Art-To-Live-With" painting must be turned in to Student Activities Rm 210, Ida Noyes Hall by Tuesday, Dec. 9.Late charges begin Wednesday, Dec. 10: 25* per day — including weekends.If it is raining or snowing, please wrap your painting in plastic.22 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980The University of ChicagoDEPARTMENT OF MUSICFriday, December 5, 8:00 p.m."Music at Rockefeller Chapel"Rodney Wynkoop, directorROCKEFELLER CHAPEL CHOIRUNIVERSITY CHORUS • COLLEGIUM MUSICUMChristmas Lessons and CarolsRockefeller ChapelSaturday, December 6, 8:00 p.m.COLLEGIUM MUSICUMCHAMBER CHOIRDavid L. Brown, director cuntThe classic RADLEYShetland has the authenticAlan Paine saddle shoulder.Made in England inexclusive colors,about $39.50752-8100 1502 EAST 55th STREETCHICAGO. ILLINOIS 60615In The Hyde ParkShopping CenterWe accept our own. Master Charge, Visa andAmerican Express Credit Cardsworks by de Victoria and ScarlattiAugustana Lutheran Church5500 S. Woodlawn Ave.CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES 1981Gabrieli String Quartet • Peter Serkin, pianoMusic from Marlboro • New York String QuartetPaula Robison, flute, and Ruth Laredo, pianoMandel Hall 8:30 p.m.Tickets and information at Concert Office, Coodspeed Hall5845 Ellis Ave. • 753-2612• LUNCH TIME CONCERTS:• Thursdays, L2:15 -12:45 p.m Reynolds Chib North Lounge,_ Bring your lunch._ Enjoy the music,_All ffHiccrts free unless otherwise specified. Information at 253,-2612._ ATTENTIONARTISTSAND OTHERSFota is now soliciting creative sketchesfor the 1981 FOTA calendar and T-shirtdesigns.Please submit PRELIMINARY SKETCHESor IDEAS by JANUARY 21, 1981 to theStudent Activities Office, Room 210. IdaNoyes Hall. A cash prize will be awar¬ded.For further information,contact Brian David, 947-8161The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 23Susan Sontag:An OverviewBy Tim ErwinA sixteen-year-old Californian, SusanSontag entered the University in 1949,toward the end of the chancellorship ofRobert Maynard Hutchins. It was an era ofpostwar euphoria, of other earlier 'libera¬tions,' before our Korean involvement hadbecome a conflict. It was also an anti-intel¬lectual era, generally speaking, when theUniversity, and particularly the College,was still characterized in the minds ofmany by academic innovation and almostmissionary intellectuality. Writing in theNew Yorker, A. J. Liebling gave his per¬spective sharp expression. Chicago, hesaid, was the "only large university thatawards a liberal-arts degree for an under¬graduate course that starts after the sec¬ond year of high school and ends afterwhat would anywhere else be the secondyear of college. As a result of this generousstand, Chicago's undergraduate collegeacts as the greatest magnet for neuroticjuveniles since the Children's Crusade,with Robert Maynard Hutchins, the insti¬tution's renovator, playing the role of Ste¬phen the Shepherd Boy in the revival."Liebling was not a man to use the metaphor at hand when a more striking onecould be found futher afield. "Walking in¬advertently (I can't imagine anyone'sdoing it on purpose) into any of the campustaverns along Fifty-fifth Street," he con¬tinued, "the University's equivalent of theBoulevard St. Michel, the adult strangerfinds himself in a kind of juvenile Alsatia,where the male voices haven't changedyet."With its early admissions, unusual degrees and, more important, its insistenceon a first-hand knowledge of the classics ofall ages, Chicago changed educational de¬corum. The much more common way oflooking at American higher education wasto see it simply as another form of socialcurrency. The view was articulated in 1949in the pages of Harper's by Russell Lynes,an editor at the magazine. In an articlecalled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middle¬brow" Lynes saw the coming meritocracyof education taxonomically, and withalarm. "What we are headed for is a sortof social structure in which the highbrowsare the elite, the middlebrows are thebourgeoisie, and the lowbrows are the hoipolloi," he wrote. It was this pervasive so¬cial parallel, which in Lvnes's essay wentso far as to fix elaborately an upper andlower middlebrow, that in large part laybehind the misplaced superciliousness ofsome commentators toward the Universi¬ty. Where the serious business of educationwas concerned Chicago had long refused tosanction any binding social or utilitarianconnections, and was known for its refusal.A seriousness of purpose is perhapsmore than any other the quality that hasmarked the clearsighted essays and booksof Susan Sontag since her stay here of twoshort years. One of what LIFE magazinecalled Chicago's 'speedy students' in a 1948photo-essay by that title ("Chicago, whichadmits many students after two or threeyears of high school, believes that all stu¬dents should advance as rapidly as theircapabilities permit"), she had come to theUniversity from North Hollywood HighSchool after a couple of terms at Berxeiey.Prof. Edward Rosenheim was her teacherin what was then called Humanities Three,and he recalls her affectionately from thewinter of 1951: "The first time we talkedwas after class one day. I remember be¬cause she was wearing her father's armyjacket, and I was wearing my officer'spinks. What we talked about l forget, butwe talked again after that. She was alwaysamiable, clever but not in a smart-aleckway, and more gentle than otherwise, avery good student." Already married,Susan Sontag left Chicago to do graduatework at Harvard, eventually to take a doc¬torate in philosophy there. "When I was a child," she once wrote,"until the age of thirteen, I wanted pas¬sionately to be a chemist. I had been writ¬ing essays, stories, poems and plays sinceI was about eight, but I had never takenmy writing very seriously. I began writingin earnest, after years of involvement witha number of academic and scholarly sub¬jects, when I was twenty-eight. One night Isat down to write something that turnedinto my first novel, The Benefactor." Atonce didactic and oneiric, this first novel(1963) is narrated by the aging Hippolyte,a dilletante who longs for a truly free wayof being himself. Like Arthur Schnitzler's,The Benefactor is a kind of dream novel.Critics have been most insistent about theEuropean influences in it, finding thejthemes of Simone Weil and Jean Genet,the styles of Alain Robbe-Grillet and UweJohnson, at the same time seeing it as veryAmerican.That rich variety of interests most evi¬dent in her first collection of essays,Against Interpretation (1966), is anotherhallmark of Sontag's sensibility. In its top¬ical pieces on the cinematic aesthetics ofRobert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard andAlain Resnais, in its striking explicationsof texts by Norman O. Brown, AlbertCamus and Michel Leiris, the collectionshows a wide discursiveness and on occa¬sion an almost preternatural farsightedness. "The best service to the vitality andscope inherent in the Marxist position onart," she wrote in an essay on the criticismof Georg Lukacs fully fifteen years aheadof its time, "would be to translate aboveall, Benjamin." "Benjamin," she wrotewith wholly pardonable hyperbole in 1964,"shows us what Lukacs as a literary criticmight have been."The title essay arguing against the reac¬tionary project of interpretation — "the revenge of the intellect upon the world," shecalled it — and for the sensory experienceof the work of art through a formal analy¬sis is one of the central documents of thedecade. "Notes on 'Camp'," remains anintelligent and witty exploration of a stylethat until then hadn't dared speak itsname. Yet the best essay in the book mustbe "On Style." She isn't speaking of aperiod style, of a mannerism or an art nou¬veau, which she would sensibly rather calla stylization, but of an individual style.Sontag wold have us notice the practicalpersistence of an old antithesis that hadbeen theoretically jettisoned: the Horatianbifurcation of verba and rebus, styleversus content. The word style, Gombrichreminds us, comes from stilus, pen; Son-tag reminds us of the intentional pressurethat must be brought to bear in writing. Soin place of an authorial style, the dress ofthought in the old metaphor, she wouldhave us understand an individual style ofwill. Style is thus "the principle decision ina work of art, the signature of the author'swill." The style of will, created as part of apersonal mnemonic system to embody anindividually significant rhythm or redun¬dancy, also "embodies an epistemologicaldecision, an interpretation of how andwhat we perceive." Not that every writerexplicitly addresses the relationship of f ic-tionality to reality at every point along theway, of course, but that he or she makeschoices which imply some selective contin¬uity, often a continuity of content, by ad¬mitting certain elements to discourse andexcluding others, is her basic point, onewith obvious affinities to the structuralistproject then developing.Discourse can tend radically in two di¬rections, either toward inclusiveness, as inRabelais, Sterne or Mailer, or toward theexclusions of Mallarme, Thomas Mertonor Julien Green — whose work reads, Gidesaid, as if he never lifted pen from paper.Some writers hear an inner voice, a sermointerior, and keep their heads down.Others, with their heads up, take in thequotidian. So styles may be quiet, incliningto silence, or noisy, encompassing the dir of events. Sontag's second collection,Styles of Radical Will (1969), tests thoseextremes, moves purposefully along thespectrum of discourse from one to theother.The opening essay, "The Aesthetics ofSilence," brackets the dilemma of the con¬temporary artist: how to work within thenewer myth of selfconsciousness wherethe artwork demands its own abolition.Traditionally, silence had been thought ofas a zone of meditation, in Sontag'sphrase, a preparatory calm, a Keatsian ri¬pening. Silence must now answer in theguise of a termination either literal, as inRimbaud, or metaphorical, as in those ar¬tists whose work becomes arcane, impen¬etrable. The most literal notion of silenceis death; the most literal understanding oftermination is suicide. As for metaphori¬cal termination, Sontag follows Wittgen¬stein's dictum that meaning is use, as shesays, and the uses of silence are many. Si¬lence may certify the absence of thought,or thought's completion; it may allow timefor thought, when speech would close itoff; and in the way it punctuates discourse,it may lend speech authenticity. Silencenever exists as the property of an artwork,however, since that would posit an unre¬sponsiveness on the part of an audiencethat is never actually felt in the face ofart's silence. Authentic silence will an¬nounce itself in the spaces around authen¬tic speech, which in modern literature isusually modelled after oral and often per¬sonal kinds of discourse.Sontag is eloquent in these speculations,and equally so in her anger at the Johnsonadministration, at an America writ aslarge as it may ever again be written. Al¬though there is never totality of discourse,it is hard to imagine essays more full of theAmerican present, anyway, than the twopolemical acts of witness that close thisbook, "What's Happening in America(1966)" and "Trip to Hanoi." If one canreasonably fault her characterization ofAmerica in the mid-sixties as a Yahooland— and Swift was kinder to his people — it istoo easy to take issue with her today, in theglobal village of global shortage, when shecalls the nation an omnipotent destroyer,just as it is too tempting, still, to offer oneself facile congratulations on having emigrated earlyto the country of the young that Sontag cel¬ebrates, where everyone was either a mu¬sician or a cultural politician. It is too easyto note now what few of us noted then, thatwhat happened in Russia in 1966, amongother things, was the trial and sentencingof Sinyavsky and Daniel in part for havingwritten literature whose pessimism mightdemoralize young people. There were toomany injustices at home, and they wouldescalate.The unusual range of Styles of RadicalWill suggests an act of will, then, an inten¬tion to fulfill the ambitions of "On Style"and perhaps also to remake the role of theengaged intellectual in this country on theFrench model. Other essays here eitherchart new territories in the academic ("'Thinking Against Oneself': Reflections onCioran") or popular cultures ("The Por-noraphic Imagination") or circle thought¬fully back to earlier concerns ("Berg¬man's Persona," "Godard"). Sontag'sfictional world from these years, the novelDeath Kit (1967) and a couple of stories inthe collection titles /, etcetera (1978) issomewhat surpisingly not at all made fromthe materials of these essays. Her fictiongenerally is not programmatic, unless it isa programme for fiction to ask as hersdoes to be experienced on its own terms.A good way to mark differences that sep¬arate decades is to take bits and pieces ofthe contemporary vocabulary and to rubthem together to see what comes off onwhat, and what lies underneath. A certainword may have beneath it a specializedhistory within a particular profession, roleor class. In the nineteen-fifties manyterms passed from psychological to common parlance, and one of them, a ratherfamous example, was the starkly abbre¬viated title of a 1960 Hitchcock film. An¬other new word may have nothing paticu-lar beneath it, like lifestyle, that coinagefrom popular psychology. If one were toask that mythical exemplar of the fifties inhis grey flannel suit about his lifestyle,how would he answer? If he were a high¬brow he might suppose the word a Germantranslation, or he might take a mental de¬tour through a learned language, arrivingthrough modus vivendi, say, at the generalnotion of a way of getting along. Becausehe wouldn't have a context to refer to orabstract from, however, or much pre¬science about the way leisure impinged onlabor in the sixties, he wouldn't exactly un¬derstand.Neologisms lacking clear contexts re¬flect cultural and conceptual discontinui¬ties. The currency of a portmanteau wordlike lifestyle tells us something about thegrowth and packaging of popular psycho¬logies, their distance from traditional psy¬chological theory, and so on. And yet clearcontinuities may be forged even betweenneologisms: finding rough equivalents forlowbrow, middlebrow, highbrow may beas easy as consciousness one, two, three.Although the contexts differ widely, theidea of a borrowed social taxonomy establishes continuity. The continuing tendencyof educated people to construct basicallyintellectual hierarchies on social modelstell us something about the ways theyvalue education, personal change, and soforth.In its highest form this rubbing game,which is best played in both directions,seeking continuity in change and change incontinuity, can become part of the historyof ideas. Take on the local scale thatbyword of the sixties which would beraised and lowered like a standard in theconsciousness. One can near its irte<?iiiitgshifting downward over the course of thesixties from that of an epochal change inawareness to that of a private mental domain. "From now to the end of conscious¬ness," wrote Sontag in "Against Interpretation," "we are stuck with the task ofdefending art." In "The Aesthetics of Si¬lence" she used to word to mean theshared awareness of an era: "Art, itself aform of mystification, endures a suc¬cession of crises of demystification; olderartistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly,replaced; outworn maps of consciousnessare redrawn." And in the personal contextof "Trip to Hanoi" she defines the word infine sixties fashion as that within the head."The problem was that Vietnam had become so much a fact of my consciousnessas an American that l was having enor24 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980mous difficulty getting it outisde my ]head.” We should hear a ringing of thechanges and a ringing change of tone atthe Same time.No one is more attuned to culturalchange than Sontag because no one haswatched consciousness in the mirror oroverheard it in solioquoy better than Son-tag, who has turned in the seventies awayfrom speculative and topical considera¬tions toward cultural history. In the muchdiscussed On Photography (1977) she con¬siders the history of photography as a un-j ified project in terms both of the overstat¬ed claims of its exponents and of itsseveral uses over the decades since its in¬vention. What, she asks, do people do withphotographs? In the first instance they collect them: "Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is theideal arm of consciousness in its acquis-tive mood.” Photographs are evidentialstandards of 'truth,' objects used in socialrites, aiders and abettors of desire, fragilesthical statements, her procedure is argu-nentative; her prose picturesque. She es-ablishes a dialectic, slowly elaborates its ;:ontrary theses, and moves to tentative Iresolution. Thus, photographs are domes¬tic objects of private record, but also, in sofar as professionals produced them in thelate sixties to show startling novelty, pub¬lic objects of surprise and shock.Is its late blooming surrealism truer to theontoloy of photography than the acquisi¬tiveness of the bourgeois collector? Sontagthinks not. Collecting is the continuing im¬pulse, while the timespirit has mischie- !jvously drawn the magic out of the surrea- illist aesthetic. The freak studies of Diane Ii Arbus are a case in point. In the context of ;the seventies Arbus's photographs haveHost aesthetic value becuase "what is safeno longer monopolizes public imagery.”The freakish is no longer a privatezone, difficult of access. People whoare bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emo¬tionally vacant are seen daily on thenewsstands, on TV, in the subways.Hobbesian man roams the streets,quite visible, with glitter in hishair.Like Lessing's, Sontag's concern is to seean artform in the available light ratherj than in the reflected glory of the other arts, !land her controversial argument ceiebrates photographs only as richly informaStive deposits, not as art.Illness as Metaphor (1978) is another de-mythologizing essay and offers like textualpleasures while maintaining the same high! level of discourse. The subject of analysishere is discourse itself, the historical com-I plex of metaphors that surrounds tubercu¬losis, the nineteenth-century disease, andcancer, the plague of the twentieth. Invok¬ing a full catalogue of literary texts of tu- !berculosis — Gautier, the brothers Gon- !court and Goldsmith just among the G's — Iand a quarter's reading a political philoso¬phers on cancer — Hobbes, Burke, Trotskyand Gramsci, among others — she con¬trasts contemporary ways of talking aboutthe diseases. Until late in the last century,she notes, TB and cancer, (CA in the medi¬cal jargon) were often diagnosed as thesame illness, 'consumption.' Tuberculosisemerges as a highly colored and patheticemblem of refinement in the late capitalistmyth of expansion, while cancer is seen asa deadly scourge in an era of conserva-| tion.Sontag's quarrel is not with metaphori¬cal language, because all language is met¬aphorical, nor with the cancer metaphoras such, which she has used herself morethan once, but with the unblinking accep¬tance of metaphor as truth. The ultimateend of the book is to purify the language ofdisease, to rid it of moralistic undertones,and thus to restore innocence to sufferersfrom disease.Listening to Sontag's discourse disclosesa kind of overarching intention, in one metaphor, or figure in the carpet, in another.Superimposing her various works one onthe other leaves a composite statement ofpurpose, as Galton's family photographsleave us certain invariant factors. Per¬haps photography is too easily textualized,too easily made utterable, for a mind likeSontag's, and metaphor too quickly madetransparent. At any rate, one would like tohear from her about the languages of discourse; one would like to have more suchwriting whose clear aim is so passionatelyto certifv the ineffable. Susan SontagUnder the Sign of SaturnUnder the Sign of SaturnSusan SontagFarrar, Straus, and Giroux$10.95By Jeff SmithThe "project," as she herself might putit, for this new collection of essays is onethat Susan Sontag implicitly mapped outyears ago. Several essays in AgainstInterpretation discuss the mattertheoretically. As a critic, Sontag seeks anengagement with art that goes beyond’interpretation to "experiencing theluminousness of the thing in itself." Shebelieves the critic's object to be not"meaning" in art, but the sensibility (or"taste") that underlies the creation anduse of art objects. Understandingsensibility means, for her, recognizingthe pre-eminence of art as form or style,though within a totalistic grasp of artthat disdains the old dualism of form andcontent. (Content is meaning, whereasstyle is that prized "luminousness.") Inparticular, it means foregoing moralmeanings in art of judgments about itsvalue in favor of a deeper ethicalconcept, one that views art as itself amoral enterprise, a style of behavior."Sensibility" embraces the whole rangeof activities of which art is oneexpression.With this understanding, Sontagresearches a modern sensibility that,explicitly or not, recognizes and uses artin its context as an enterprise of thesensibility itself. Her 1964 "Notes on'Camp' " comprise one effort in "AgainstInterpretation" to define such asensibility — a cultural style that shesees being itself beyond old artisticmodes and pieties like meaning,judgment, beauty, and seriousness. Campsensibility is a way of seeing the worldthat "offers for art (and life) a different— a supplementary — set of standards."The method of "Notes on 'Camp',"however, has Sontag striking straight outat sensibility, attempting to distill it froma list of cultural particulars. Informal asshe makes this approach, it remainsbasically theoretical. But if modernsensibility's essence is to grab hold of artas style — as behavior, as sensibilityitself — then it would make sense also toapproach that sensibility via particular"Iife"-styles, particular persons, whoembody it. The seven essays in Under theSign of Saturn, presumablyrepresentative of Sontag's work since1972, all adopt this approach.In turn the essays discuss PaulGoodman, on the occasion of his death;Antonin Artaud; Leni Riefenstahl, on thepublication of "The Last of the Nuba"and the ongoing effort to rehabilitate herbrilliant Nazi film propaganda; WalterBenjamin; Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, onthe release of his "Hitler, A Film fromGermany"; Roland Barthes, again on hisdeath; and Elias Canetti. Benjamin ("thewriter to whom Sontag can be mostrelevantly compared," according to thepublishers occupies the title essay, adiscourse not only on him but on the melancholic, "Saturnine" temperamenthe claimed for himself and that Sontagevidently views as a component of themodern sensibility.The other essays likewise document theaesthetic components that tfie individualsensibilities under study have bothdiscovered and created. Besidesmelancholia, themes linking the essaysinclude the influence of surrealism,whose "great gift to sensibility was tomake melancholy cheerful"; the natureof "things" as constituents of life and art(not only a surrealist preoccupation,according to Sontag, but the apparentinspiration of her interest in suchsubjects as photography); the role ofmoral energies in modern art and itsartists' lives; and fascism, as both asource and a problem for modernaesthetics.The latter subtopic provides-occasionfor both the highest critical praise andthe sharpest critical attack in Sontag'sbook. The praise accords to Syberberg,whose "truly great work. . . both excitesand paralyzes the imagination." The filmserves as link between style and subject(grandiosity), and of moral and aesthetictasks. It becomes a self-conscious artistic! effort to undertake the "work of themovie's mourning" that the melancholicGermans have proven incapable of. Thisaccounts for great power. Sontag,however, attacks Riefenstahl, whosetripartite career — pre-Nazi film actress,official film, director and advisor toi Hitler, and, lately, photographicexpostulator of primitive, vanishingcultures — Sontag analyzes as anongoing, un-self-conscious preoccupationwith fascism's essential themes and therise and decline of its social forms.Sontag's criticism hits at Riefenstahl's| continuing refusal to own up to thepreoccupation, and at her apologists': failure to acknowledge the "fascist! longings in our midst." With thisargument Sontag sounds virtually hersole note of pessimism about modern sensibilities, briefly worrying over a! "romantic ideal" and a campyformalism, grown prevalent in the 1970s,that dishonestly abuse the emphasis onstyle over content to the neglect theimplications of Riefenstahl's work:Art that seemed eminently worthdefending ten years ago, as aminority or adversary taste, nolonger seems defensible today,because the ethical and culturalissues it raises have become moreserious. . What may be acceptablein elite culture may not beacceptable in mass culture. . . .The Syberberg piece and the analysisDf Riefenstahl, with an addendum on thegrowing interest in fascist symbols ascomponents of pornographicsadomasochism, may be the book's mostbrilliant essays. The thinnest, on theother hand, is the brief homage to PaulGoodman, the only American to figureprominently here. Nonetheless, "On PaulGoodman" is Sontag's most directlypersonal statement; her feelings for himallow Goodman the most explicit creditamong "that small company of writers. ..who established for me the value ofbeing a writer." As that kind ofexemplary figure, a direct influence onthe sensibility of the critical personabehind the book, he plays a leading rolein Sontag's own "theater" of taste, and itworks thematically as well aschronologically to lead the book with hiseulogy.The dramaturgical image is Sontag's.Most important of all in her study of eachsubject is the passionate commitment ofeach mind to its ethical aesthetic — acommitment that mirrors that veryaesthetic's insistence on art as themedium of a moral "voice." Modernsensibility is a drama of mind and lifewith passionate artists and critics as itscharacters. The driving tension of thedrama is their need to find and affirm"the very possibility of making art."Continued on 29W-. -. Z®; cy-.*0^ A*• o■■<o_or_,e>cP -A^ X) ^A 4y fO aTV* X/SJ? y <b- q>'A /y&o* • O H-rtThe Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 19S0 — 25IMPORTANTNOTICEWINTER QUARTER,1981 LOAN CHECKSWILL BE AVAILABLEBEGINNING JANUARY 5,1981You will need your permanent I.D. card,and a record of course enrollment com¬pleted by your Dean of Students, to pickup your loan check(s). Consult your Win¬ter Quarter time schedule for additionalinformation.NOTE: Due to a clarification of FederalRegulations, loan checks cannot bereleased prior to registration.STUDENT LOAN CENTERBOOKSTORE 4TH FLOOR The correct suit foryour interview datesAs you plan your first interviews in the businessworld, remember that the accepted outfitter foryoung executives is Brooks Brothers; this is thelook, and the label. Our “Brooksgate” suits arethe ideal introduction to this famous company,for these are suits quite moderate in price, andcut on slimmer lines. Brooksgate suits (coat,vest and trousers) begin at $170. You are assuredof a suit with the unique correctness that isBrooks Brothers. Visit us in the Loop, or atNorthbrook.ESTABLISHED 1B1BSsScna tr l§ ogs furnishings. §3als ^flboes74 E. MADISON ST., CHICAGO, ILL.NORTHBROOK COURT, NORTHBROOK, ILL. JnDOC FILfTlSWoody A lien'sSLEEPERCobb Hall7:15/9:00 Dec. 6(ISO26 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5. 1980Since she emerges naked, the youngman has her climb into a tree and hidewhile he goes back to the palace forclothes and a carriage. While he is gonean ugly Saracen woman comes to thewell for water and, looking into the well,sees the reflection of the beautifulmaiden and thinks it is her own. Whenthe ugly Saracen discovers that it is not,she tricks the girl into leaving the treeand stabs her with a comb while dressingher hair. A drop of the maiden's bloodfalls on the ground, changes into apigeon, and flies away.About this time the king's son returns,sees the ugly Saracen, and is tricked intothinking she is the beautiful maiden hehad left behind. He takes the uglySaracen home and marries her. Thepigeon appears that very day at thepalace and is soon killed by the uglySaracen. A drop of the pigeon's bloodfalls in the garden and a pomegranatetree immediately springs up in the veryspot. The pomegranates from this treeprove to have a magical healing powersand people come from all around to begthe ugly Saracen for one.The ugly Saracen, planning to keep thelast pomegranate for herself, is forced bythe young man to give it to an old womanwhose husband is dying. When the oldwoman returns home, she finds that herhusband has already died. Rather thanreturn the pomegranate, she decides tokeep it as a decoration.As it happens, each day when the oldwoman goes to Mass the beautifulmaiden comes out of the pomegranate,cleans the house, and then goes backinside the fruit before the old womanreturns. One day the old woman onlypretends to leave and hides outside thehouse so that she may find out how herhouse gets so clean. She discovers thegirl, still naked, who recounts the sadtale. The old woman gives her somepeasant clothes and leads her to thepalace. The ugly Saracen is forced toreveal the truth and then to sentenceherself to death. "So was it done, and theking's son married the maiden."The central metaphor of this story, themetamorphoses of the maiden, dazzlesboth in its simplicity and itssophistication. A child will grasp andaccept instantly the logic of the maiden'stransformations. Older readers recallsome forgotten center of meaning, aplace where life in its fullness is "notinferno." That recollection, like "anecessary angel," clears away the worstof everyday life and liberates its beauty.Elkin’s StoriesContinued from agrippingly describes a professionalwrestler's death in the ring, and "TheGuest" sardonically portrays a half madfallen Beat who has talked his squarefriend into letting him apartment sitwhile the friend goes on vacation. In bothstories Elkin's descriptions are beautiful,and characters strong. We quiver withmortal fear as death infects all thewrestler's narration:I sat on the wide, matted strawseat along the side of the (street)car, my shoes damp, their thinsoles in shallow, steamy, dirtypuddles on the floor. Useless pinkstreetcar transfers, their crypticholes curiously clotted with syrupymuck, floated face downward likesuicides. Colored round bits fromthe conductor's punch made adirty, cheerless confetti on the floorof the car. I read the car ads,depressed by the products of thepoor, their salves for pimples, theirchewing gum, their sad, lacklusterwedding rings. A pale, fleshlessnurse, a thid red cross exactly thecolor of dried blood on her cap,held up a finger in warning. V.D.CAN KILL! spoke the balleonabove her.But Elkin's best story in Greatest Hits is"The Conventional Wisdom" from TheLiving End. This panel of Elkin'striptych concerns Ellerbee, an innocous,concerned but amoral liquor store ownerCalvino Continued from 13washerwoman to give up one of her threedaughters to be his servant. He takes herto his house, gives her the keys and thesingle admonition, pins a flower in herhair, and departs. When she opens theforbidden door, the flower is singed.Silver Nose returns, notices the singedflower, and punishes the girl by tossingher into Hell. The same thing happens tothe washerwoman's second daughter.The third, Lucia, being cleverer than hersisters, removes the flower from her hairbefore she opens the door. Finding hersisters in the fires of Hell, Lucia resolvesto rescue them and to escape herself.With some ingenious use of a laundry bagshe tricks the Devil into delivering hersisters and her back to their mother —without spilling a drop of blood.The lack of bloodshed in one of thebloodiest of all fairy tale "types"bespeaks the relative gentleness of theItalian stories. However, what stands outmost is the cleverness of Lucia'sresolution. She is not one to sit on abalcony, wailing at the top of her lungsand awaiting a princely (or brotherly)deliverance. Lucia is courageous, earthy,wise, and, ultimately, touching. Sheshares this "unwomanly" daring. So rarein the tales from other countries, with theheroines in many of the Italian stories,most notably "Serpent King," "TheCount's Siter," "The Little Girl Sold withthe Pears," and "The Canary Prince."The story of Cupid and Psyche, firstrecorded in The Golden Ass of Apuleiusin the second century A.D., is well represented in Calvino's collection. Thestory's most famous variant is Madamede Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast"and the Italian "Belinda and theMonster" closely parallels that Frenchclassic. Another interesting variant,"King Crin," tells of a king's son who is apig. When the pig marries a baker'sdaughter (after two unsuccessfulmarriages in which the brides arerepulsed by his filthiness and he respondsby killing them), she discovers that atnight he takes on human form. However,when she lights a candle to have a look athim she drops it on his arm and heawakens, furious: "You broke the spelland will never see me again, or onlywhen you have wept seven bottles oftears and worn out seven pairs of ironshoes, seven iron mantles, and seven ironhats looking for me." Through courageand determination, she finds him and thestory ends happily. Other stories of thistype include "The Man Who Came OutOnly at Night" and "The King's Son inthe Henhouse."Perhaps the most beautiful tale is "TheLove of the Three Pomegranates," one ofthe type of distinctly Italian storiesmentioned earlier. A king's son sets off insearch of a wife who is both milk-whiteand blood-red. He meets an old man whogives him three pomegranates,cautioning him to open them only besidea fountain. The young man does so withtwo of the pomegranates and both timesa beautiful maiden jumps out, asksimmediately for water, and then dieswhen he is too slow getting it for her.When he opens the third he has the waterready, throws it in the beautiful girl'sface when she asks for it, and she lives.GILDA RADNERBOB NEWHART-MADELINE KAHN 'FIRST FAMILY'TT»Fw Doughtu The hrvtiem F« LodyAN INOlfWVOO COMPANY PftOOUC'ONRICHARD DENJAMINj- DOB DISHY-HARVEY KORMAN AUSTIN PENDLETONfc*uJ*o«ory The Vice P*w»*o* The Ambouodo, K> the U N The Pievdeonol Tion»ta*orTORN FRED WILLARD john philip sousa • Ralph burns ROwerw of the PiendeonolJon Oveh o> VaH DANIEL MELNICK • BUCK HENRYOpening Christmas DayAt A Theatre Near You. Jackson Con,inue‘,rom 17he didn't know how to do it without mak¬ing it, in form, too similar to For ColoredGirls, the Broadway hit. There's not a bigaudience interest in choreo-poemsbecause it has been done so many timesafter For Colored Girls was a success.What helped me write it as a play was,first of all, other people's excellence. Isaw Home by Sam Mark Williams, and Ireally loved what he did with just threepeople. He created a whole world withjust three people. I saw a play calledAmong All This Stand Like A Fine BrownStone, a collection of GwendolynnBrooks' poems that were adapted for thestage. That taught me how poetry couldbe handled in creating scenes. Then lsaw Death and the King's Horsemen atthe Goodman. Those three plays had atremendous influence on me. I thinkShango is really a combination of theelements of ritual theatre, too, where youuse dance music, all the elements. I sawhow "Africanness" could be retained in aEuropean form of a traditional play.Without an intermission, the play is twohours long. People in the audience saidthat watching it was like being at a heal¬ing session.Kaye: What is your next major project?Jackson: I want to finish a fiction thatI've been working on for a very longtime, part of which appeared in ChicagoReview as "Witch Doctor" and anotherpart of which was in StoryQuarterly. It'sa novel about a girl named MaggieGrace.Kaye: Is it at all autobiographical?Jackson: When it was starting off it wasmore autobiographical, but I've beenworking on it for so long that it's lessautobiographical, because I've grownaway from the character, from myself.And I know more abut who she is, so lcan separate me from she.Kaye: What else is in the novel?Jackson: I can't tell you. You'll just haveto wait to read it.who is killed in a hold-up and sent toHell, where he finds for all its fire andlonliness, Satan's realm resembles aninner city not an inferno. Fine satire. Foronce Elkin's fiction describescontemporary spiritual shallownesswithout joining in the amorality. Whetheror not Elkin writes moral fiction, andwhether or not his writings aresometimes pornographic, his GreatestHitscollection is worth listening to...uh,reading as a means of getting to knowthis pessimistic comic, and laughing tra-oedian.The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5. 1980 — 27AVOIDWINTERMADNESSEnroll in SAO's winter quarter mini-course program!CalligraphyJapanese FlowerArrangingJazz DanceLeaded GlassBaking HarmonicaRhythmic AerobicDancePopular DanceMimeAnd More!All Classes $15 - $25Brochures and enrollment availablenext quarter. Call 753-3592Brandeis UniversityJACOB HIATTINSTITUTE IN ISRAELWhat does it offer you?• a semester of study in Israel in the Fall term• coursework in English on the political, economic andsocial development of Israel and in its language,history and archaeology^ a strong program of Hebrew language study• important internship opportunities in social serviceagencies in Jerusalem• field trips, study trips, interviews with prominentIsraelis, a kibbutz visit• financial aid is availableApplication deadline: March 15For further information, see your StudyAbroad advisor or write:Office of International ProgramsBrandeis UniversityWaltham, Massachusetts 02254(617) 647-2422Brandeis University admits students of any race, color, nationalor ethnic origin, sex. age or hanckcap to all its programs andactivities HarperCourtSports5225 South Harper363 3748This Holiday SeasonGive a Gift Made atThe North PoleBy Eskimos!• Homemade Eskimo Art• Warm Eskimo Clothes• Many Unique Gift ItemsTO: JUDAH AND THE GANGMAZEL TOV4r WE WON! fSponsored by THE JEWS FOR JESUSHannukah Appreciation CommitteeP.O.Box 182 Skokie, II. 60076P.S. Don't worry about the oilshortage — God willprovide the light.(ISA: 60.1) FUTURE ORA’SJOIN OUR44,000 CPABECKER ALUMNIFREEINVITATIONTO OUR FIRST CLASSWEF.K OF DEC 15Call Collect:CHICAGO -Loop 312-299-5523Des Plaines 312-299-5523Blue Island 312-299-5523H7o%mPASSING RATEGALLERY OF ESKIMO ART104 East Oak Street, Chicago • 777 Bank Lane. Lake Forest HOUSE OF CHIN1607 E. 55thexcellent Chinese CuisineCantonese, Mandarinand SzechwanCarry-out andDining Room ServicePhone: 752-3786Hours: Tues.-Thurs. 11:30-9:00Fri. & Sot. 11:30-10:00Sunday 2:30-9:00Closed MondayBigJim’sPipe &Tobacco Shop1552 E. 53rd St.(Under the I.C. tracks)9 a.m.-7 p.m. weekdays12-4 p.m. SundaysVERSAILLES5254 S. DorchesterWELL MAINTAINEDBUILDINGAttractive 1 V* and2V> Room StudiosFurnished or Unfurnished$218 to $320Based on AvailabilityAt Campus Bus Stop324 0200 Mrs. Graak4Happy-Hohdfn 4tHapprHolidays *^H»ppy♦ ‘Holidays .Happy-* Holidays 4Happy-Holidays 4‘Happy‘Holidays \Happy -ry—♦ Holidays O;28 — The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980A PETITION TO THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTWe, the undersigned members of the Universityof Chicago community, are deeply alarmed at theaction taken by the Government of Israel in closingBir Zeit University on the West Bank.As members of a university community, we muststand against actions taken by any government torestrict The free expression and exchange of ideasand the transmission of cultural heritage, activitieswhich we believe universities exist to foster.We believe that the repeated closing of Bir ZeitUniversity by Israeli military authorities threatensthe cultural self-expression and development of thePalestinian people and thus is harmful to the pros¬pect for peace in the Middle East.We therefore ask forof Bir Zeit University. the immediate reopeningBOYD JOHNSON F. CHAPPERONFUSUN LEVENTOGLU F. DE CHATILLONPROF. JOHN E. WOODS AIMEE HORTONPROF. PETER NOVICK JULIA RATHTOM HOMERIN BIRGITTA WHALEYJAMES B. BRODERICK M. AHMADELIZABETH PHILLIPS GOTTSCHALK R. RODRIGUEZMARCIE PATTON P. McKEYESSANJAY TIWARI P. VAZTASPROF. H. HAROOTUNIAN T. M. SCRUGGSMARK PETRACCA M. RAMIREZSARAH SHIELDS B. RAMONEDWARD DANFORTH E. PINAROSALINDE VORNE K. STANTONJANE BESTOR A. HOWARDBEHROOZ HADAVI A. GUBENEZRACHEL LEHR JACQUELINE GLOMSKIPROF. JOHN R. PERRY V. WESTHELTEMARTHA LAMPLAND E. S. RUMARPROF. GAIL KLIGMAN D. P. MILLERPROF. TERENCE TURNER DANIEL P. WOLKDEBORAH MALAMAD C. DOLLAHCAROL PRINDLE PROF. M. T. JONESMARGO MILLER D.NAHENPROF. FAROUK MUSTAFA E. ANHILKJOEL FINGERMAN JEREMY PAULPROF ELTON L. DANIEL E. L. HIRSCHPROF. JAROSLAV STETKEVYCH A. WILLIAMSSUZANNE STETKEVYCH STEVE TIMEWELLBROOKE ENGLAND S. CSASZAREZUHAIR A.THALJI MARIE ELAINE DIAZJ. P. THIECK E. ANHILKKEITH WEISSMAN CARLOSCOPPOLACARRIE MASEK THOMAS WALKERPROF. BILL J. DARDEN RICHARD JANKOWSKIRUTH SURGAL M. H. HOFFEIMERJOHN EISELE PROF. JOHN H. COATSWORTHTERRY CULBURTH TOM PANELASCHARLES VAN LEUGAN PROF. CAROLYN G. KILLEANRUTH MANDEL BARNABA K. GIRGISELIZABETH GUENTHER PROF. FAZLUR RAHMANSUNIL KUMAR MAZIN SAFARMARY A. WRIGHT SABAH JASIMBOBBIE HENDRICK ABDALLAH ZAIDDAVID PELLMAN SHARAFUDDIN MALIKWING TEN IBRAHIM ALSINJALAWISOHAYL KABIRPAUL SPRACHMAN MO. MAHDAVI HEZAVEHAHMAD SAMIR JOHN KEYEST. M. SHIELD, M.D. FRANK WEBSTERR. JONES SARAH FORDH. NATAF ANDY L. SIEGELPROF. JOHN E. WOODS BOYD JOHNSONPROF. RALPH AUSTEN FUSUN LEVENTOGLUAnd Others Saturn Continued from 25Artaud's struggle with "his chronicalienation from his own consciousness"manifests the drama most poignantly. Itappears in more banal, yet morethreatening form in "affluent society'stendency to turn every part of people'slives into a taste, a choice" — thetendency toward interest in fascism andsadomasochism, or sex as theater.Sontag's focus makes sense. One mustview the possibility of making art interms of individuals who struggle to. Theessays draw interest from the inherentdrama of such characters, those whoembody the wholeness, luminousness,and moral strenuousness that embracemodern art. Inevitably, Sontag'senterprise implicates her ownpersonality. As her subjects apprehendthe world, so she apprehends them —often literally seeing them, either inmemory or in photographs. (Since Sontagso often returns to the visual, the bookwould be nicely enhanced by a fewphotographs.)Just as Sontag "reads" her subjects ascharacters in a drama of mind, so sheinvites us to read her as an exemplar ofmodern sensibility. To do so would wellaccord with her point, and she wouldprobably be pleased to learn that Underthe Sign of Saturn had taken its placebeside her earlier books in furthering theexploration and creation of this most“xoloratory creative cultural style.Meredith Continued from 15Loving Memory of the Late Author ofDream Songs," "My Mother's Life" andothers his "lovely words" are mosteloquent:iv. those we loveIncorrigibly (It is our nature) whenwe look at a map we look for thetowns and valleys and waterwayswhere loved people constellate, some of them from our blood, somefrom our loins. This fair scatteringof matter is all we will know ofcreation, at first hand. We flung itthere, in a gesture of sowing —random, lovely.("Examples of Created Systems")The narrowing focus in "Examples ofCreated Systems" from "i. the stars" to"iv. those we love" is mirrored in"Crossing Over." The only response to"Where is something solid?" is "Onlyyou and me." Love is the only ground,and it is tenous: we must learn how tosurvive the risks^and how to "walk":Here all we have is love, a greatundulating raft, melting steadily.We got out on itanyhow. I love you, I love thisfool's walk. The thing we have tolearn is how to walk light.Meredith's skills have never been moreapparent. The styles he adopts hererange widely, from the rhymingquatrains of "John and Anne" to thebroken, irregular lines of "Give andTake." In each case, Meredith'smarvelous control of his techniquedemonstrates forty years of craft, andprovide repeated, subtle lessons By"Long accomplishment" he has earned agrateful audience which should grow withThe Cheer. His "persistent modesty"must allow us to give praise as he does:not just me being here again, oldneeder, looking for someone toneed, but you, up from the clayyourself, as luck would have it, andinching over the same littlesegment of earthball, in the samelittle eon, to meet in a room, alivein our skins, and the whole galaxytaping there and the centurieswhining like gnats — you, to teachme to see it, to see it with you, andto offer somebodyuncomprehending, impudentthanks.Christmasat Cooley’smeans50% OffDECANTER SETS•• Now s2095s2095$22957-PC WINE SET reg. *41'7-PC COGNAC SETreg.Ml” Now7-PC WHISKEY SET reg. *45” Nowplus great savings onCUISINARTS .DLC-8 with expandedfeedertube SHOQOOreg. $17 5 00 Now I L3While quantities lastMARVELOUS LOW PRICEScoolcy’s cornerMon. thru Sat. 10 am to 6 pmSunday 12 noon to 5:30 pm In Harper Court5211 S. Harper Avenue363-4477The Chicago Literary Review Dec 5, 1980 — 29Handel'sMESSIAH'WWWWROCKEFELLER CHAPEL CHOIRdirected by Rodney WynkoopSunday, VcccmbeA 7 and 21, 4:00 p.m.Reserved $10, General $7Student/Senior Citizen $2.50, Chancel $15SOLOSCarol Loverde, SOPRANOPhyllis Unosawa, ALTODale Terbeek, COUNTERTENORGeorge DeLoriea, TENORGershon Silins, BASSTickets available, at REYNOLDS CLUB BOXOFFICE, 5706 S. LlniveJttitij, oh by mail.Atom ROCKEFELLER CHAPEL, 5850 S. Wood-lawn, Chicago, 111., 60637. 153-3381— - - A-hlXA— TJo ——iXi—" ~ 13f>- -==rlJHr-C'Rockefeller Memorial ChapelA Program of.Advent lessons and CarolsCffU^Friday, December 5th, 8 p.m.with the choirs ofAgustana Lutheran ChurchChurch of St. Paul and the RedeemerMormon Church-University of Chicago ChorusRockefeller Chapel Choir Rockefeller Memorial Chapel<•r 1 1Convocation Sunday, December 79:00 a.m. Ecumenical Service ot Holy Com¬munion10:00 a.m. Discussion Class - "Wholly Art - a-survey of the place of religion inModern Art," led by ScottStapleton, Assistant to the Dean11:00a.m. University Religious Service.Preacher - Franklin I. Gamwell,Dean of the Divinity School4:00 p.m. Handel's MESSIAH - theRockefeller Chapel Choir and Or¬chestra directed by RodneyWynkoop -¥'i *ROCKEFELLER MEMORIAL CHAPELCHRISTMAS EVE VESPERSPROCESSION AND PAGEANTOF THE NATIVITY4.00 p m, WednesdayDecember 24,1980CHRISTMAS CONCERTRockefeller Chapel ChoirRodney Wynkoop, DirectorChicago Children’s ChoirChristopher Moore, Founding DirectorSunday, December 14 at 4:00 p.m.Rockefeller Chapel5850 South Woodlawn AvenueTickets: $7.00 General Admission$3.50 Student and Senior CitizenA\ ailalde at the door and at the Reynolds ClubBov Office. Call 753-3381 for more information. OpenHouseSat. Dec. 6A •SingularGroup57th & Woodlawn(Unitarian Church)many newarts & crafts.Stop in!refreshmentsCHINESE-AMERICAtfRESTAURANTSpecializing inCANTONESE ANDAMERICAN DISHESOpen Daily11 AM to 8 30 PMClosed Monday1318 EAST 63rdMU 4-1062TEST PREPARATION FORL«« Schmi Amussiw TestGranite Maimemeit Aim TestGiAMATE RECMO ElAHmiTIMMedical Cduhe Adm Test i644-2185 Aim Test JoLtest IPSanta has come toTHE SCHOLARSHIP SHOPwe are here withHoliday BargainsTOYS, CLOTHES, BOOKS, NOTIONS1372 E. 53rd St.Mon. thru Sat10:00 AM-5:00 PM DR. M.R. MASLOVOPTOMETRIST•Eye ExaminationsContact Lenses (Soft & Hard)BAUSCH&LOMBSOFLENS(polymocon)Conloct Leases * Ask about our annual service agreement•Fashion lye WearHYDE PARK SHOPPING CENTER15101.55th363-6 TOO ATTENTIONGRADUATE STUDENTGERMAN EXAMHigh-pass the German Exam this spring withthe structural translation technique of KarinCramer, Ph.D., native German, years ofteaching experience.Course starting Jan. 12 (4 hrs./wk.)for 15 weeks Mon.-Thurs. 6-7 p.m.CALL 493-8127This is the last Maroon of the quarter. We will resume publishing on January 9, 1981.Have a happy holiday. ;30 — Th« Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980CLASSIFIED ADSCLASSIFIEDClassified advertising in the ChicagoMaroon is 75 cents per 30 characterline. Ads are not accepted over thephone, and they must be paid in ad¬vance. Submit all ads in person or bymail to The Chigago Maroon, 1212 E.59th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Our officeis in ida Noyes, room 304. Deadlines:Wed. noon for the Fri. paper, Fri. noonfor the Tues. papers.SPACEKenwood house for rent Jan.-June orJuly call 373-6618 or 753-8564.2 bdrm co-op Va blk from UC formaldining oak floor. Extras. $32,000 ownerwill finance 363-2529.Wntr. qtr. sublet 1 br in 4 br apt closeto campus. $144+util. 667-6057.Fern. Roommate wanted-1 br in 2 brapt. Very spacious. Large kitchen andliving room. Ready Dec. 13. $195.50per month. Call Amy at 643-5982 after 6p.m.1 room avail Jan. prob. thru next yr inIg super 3 bdr. apt. Cornell near 56th.$170/mo. 288-3626 eves.Hyde Park, 51st and Cornell, 3 bdrms,2 full baths, corner apt, balcony, nrtrans and shopping 364-1909 eves orwkneds.1 bdrm 4 rm fully turn apt avail Jan-April, 54th PI and Harper on C bus rte.Rent neg. 288-8643If you're tired of your surroundingsor just need a nice place to live in acreative atmosphere see this:Wanted clean pleasant male to shareexceptional apartment in classic S.Shore Dr. bldg. Private bedrm +Study + bath, use of very completekitchen, excellent security, Idry,garage space available lake Vj blk 1C2 blks, UC bus 1-blk CTA at door callMark 221-6606 am best.Third person needed to share Irg apt.Convenient to shopping and campus.$137/mo call Miriam at 241-6380 or753-0259.ROOM FOR RENT: Best campuslocation. 753-3257.Beautiful, large 2 bdrm apt for rentclose to campus available 1/4/81.$375/mo call Pete days-856-7455, evesand wkends 643-7515.1 very Ig rm in 4 rm apt now avail$150.00 4- heat, comes w/private frig5307 Cornell, apt 1,643-6581.SPACE WANTEDFemale grad student seeks roomw/kit priv in house or apt 752-5451eves or early morning.PEOPLE WANTEDPaid subjects needed for experimentson memory, perception and languageprocessing. Research conducted bystudents and faculty in The Commit¬tee on Cognition and Communication,Department of Behavioral Sciences.Phone 753-4718.OVERSEAS JOBS-summer/yearround. Europe, S. Amer., Australia,Asia. All fields. $500-51200 monthly.Sightseeing. Free info. Write: LJCBox 52-1LS Corona Del Mar, CA 92625.SITTER NEEDED for baby, in ourhome (East Hyde Park) MWF 8:30-1:30 from late Dec. thru June.References. 752-6247.Live-in babysitter wanted for 4 yr old15 hours a week in exchange for rent.Prior experience necessary. 667-8235evenings.MATH TUTOR WANTED-Knowledgein Calculus beginning in Jan 1981.Preferably Sat or Sun afternoons,once per week. For information callMrs. Williams 753-8204 office or eves955-2224. Dependable person w/car to performapprox 20 hrs/wk childcare for 2girls pay includes food and salarytogether worth $100/wk call John/-Joanne 643-5307 Joanne 399 2754 John493-9441.SERVICESTYPIST-Dissertation quality. Helpwith grammar, language as needed.Fee depending on manuscript. IBMSelectric. Judith 955-4417.FIREWOOD, We Deliver. 221-0918.Typing done on IBM by college grad;ica type. Term papers, theses, lawriefs, resumes, letters,manuscripts. Fast, accurate,reliable, resonable. New town area.Call 248-1478.Will do typing 821-0940.ARTWORK-Posters, illustration, let¬tering, etc. Noel Yovovich 493-2399.Pregnancy Tests Saturdays 10-1Augustana Church 5500 S. Woodlawn.Bring 1st morning urine sample. $1.50donation. Southside Women's HealthService. Call 667-5505.Typing-reasonable rates. 684-6284.TYPIST-Competitlvely priced, highquality work by freelance writer. Pro¬mpt; minoe editing without charge.Call after 6pm, 472-2415 or 472-0806.HEAVY EDITING/REWRITING,Dissertations, term papers, books.Give us any rough draft, we will giveyou smooth, logical finished copytyped error free on IBM Selectric II.Outline avail. Satisfaction guaranteed.$5.00/page. C.J. Ryan & Assoc.784-4563 or 889 0787.Dial 334-1617 to hear taped talks onZen. New tapes every Sunday & Thurs.Buddhist Educ. Center, 4645 N.Racine.Spanish lessons in Hyde Park In¬dividual or group instruction by nativespeaker with teaching experience.667-6762.TYPING Very Reasonable IBM Selec¬tric. Call 684-0690.The Writer's Adi. Editing and writing:flyers, pamphlets, reports, books,ghost-writing, resumes, creativepieces. Prompt professional service.288-1911.FOR SALE1972 Impala $425. Good condition, justtuned up 241-5968.Dining rm set tble 3 chrs all wood. 2yrs old exc. cond. 753-1596VOLVO-73 142 S 1 owner, 22 mpg city,$1450.233-3030.BOSTON 1-way flight Dec. 11, 5:30 pm$97.50 Iv. msg: 753-2220 box 510.Desks, chairs, tables, maple bed,bookcases, file cabinets, plants, rugs,VW snow tires, A/C, more. Come see.Make offers. 324 2986.Dodge Charger 1973, 440 mag eng. likenew. Good body, power steering, $850.Call 667 1373.PERSONALSWriter's Workshop (PLaza 2 8377)To everyone on the Maroon, Grey City,and Literary Review, and especiallyLAW and the other Personals- in¬mates: MELE KALIKIMAKA! LuvBarefoot Dreamer.It's true. If you are not a cowboy, youare not shit. After all, country is justdisco in bluejeans.-John the PainterDOC-Prediction. You will never be astand-up comic. It's fun, not funny. Dear Freedom: I'm so glad you'recoming out here, and I can't wait tosee you. All my love (and flowers too).Hey L Baby! We're so glad to have youback on campus—it's the best thingsince Fezzlk and Inigo were reunited!Did you know Welsh men have grayeyes?Quanah: Jirel carries a point mass inher locket and Jian wears the key. ThePiper's calling..on the WhisperingWind; the forests will echo withlaughter...(continued in today'sReader)...WANTEDGraduation Tickets wanted to buy-Jocelyn, 753-8666/363-4483RIDESDrive auto to Palm Beach Fla the lastweek in Dec. Ref. req. gas paid. Call642-0621 before 10 am or after 6 pm.LOSTAND FOUNDLOST: Light framed glasses in browncloth case. Call 753-3272.NEEDATYPIST?Excellent work done in my home.Reasonable rates. Tel: 536-7167 or548-0663.LOXANDBAGEL BRUNCHLast Brunch of the quarter SundayDec. 7, 11:00 am, $1.50 per sandwich.Hillel 5715 Woodlawn.JAZZ CONCERTThe U of C Jazz Band in concert!Saturday, Dec. 6, 8 pm Ida NoyesCloister Club.FICTION WORKSHOPShouri Daniel's (Molly Ramanujan) isoffering ten intensive fiction writingworkshops starting Dec. 13. Call667-0673 the Salt Doll by Shouri Danielsis available at Staver's Bookstore.CHANUKAH PARTYChanukah Party for families spon¬sored by the South Side School ofJewish Studies on Sun. Dec 14 at 11 amat 5715 S. Woodlawn Ave. For info, call752-5655.UC HOTLINE 753-1777The Hotline will be open for finalsweek! We will be closed for break star¬ting December 12 ans will re-open onJanuary 4.UKULeia raha joo viin maha sest see nainesind kunagi ei tahaSANTA SUITSSanta Claus suits are available for ren¬tal from the Student Activities Office.Call 753 3591 to reserve. $15. Mrs.Claus Suit also available.SUPPORT YOURLOCAL JAZZ BANDThe UC Jazz Band Autumn QuarterConcert. Saturday Dec. 6, 8 pm IdaNoyes Cloister Club,ROCKY HORRORFANSTickets for the original show on sale inRm 210, Ida Noyes. Great main floorseats! Start winter off weird.marian realty,inc.□WMIORStudio and 1 BedroomApartments Available- Students Welcome -On Campus Bus LineConcerned Service5480 S. Cornell684-5400 BORINGSATURDAYSCome down to the basement ofReynolds Club and browse around thePhoenix Book and Record Store We'reopen from 12:00-5:30 every Satur¬day...lots of used books, new records-gaming supplies and paper goods.UC HOTLINE753-1777PHOENIX ASSASSINS!University-wide coed assassin game isplanned for next quarter. All specialrules and targets will be assigned 1stweek—send recent photo, name, phoneI to Gary K. at B-J 242 before 12/13. In¬fo? Call!NATTY BUMPOSOCIETYReorganizational meeting. Time andplace TBA. ART INSTITUTEDISCOUNTIf you signed up for the membershipdiscount with SAO, you will be able topick up your cards during the first twoweeks of winter quarter. Rm 210 IdaNoyes. You can still sign up, too.WASSAIL!With carols, Santa and Mrs. Claus andseasonal goodies. Today at 4 pm.protus a call at 753-1777. We will listen.Also information and referrals. 7 pmto am everyday.BOOKKEEPER/SECRETARYAcademic library consortium re¬quires office management skills (noshorthand). Excellent fringebenefits. Salary $12,000 plus, depending on experience. Call Dr. JamesSkipper 753-2009 or 493-1193NEWRELEASESPHOENIXcarries all the new releases at thelowest prices around. Start your X-MAS shopping with the latest fromSpringsteen, Stevie Wonder, Supertramp, Metheny, Lennon, E. W & FSteely Dan and MANY MORE!! OpenSaturdays-in Reynolds Club.Paper Supplies Are Now AvailableWhere You Buy your Used Books—ThePhoenix Carries Typing Paper, LegalPds, Filler Paper, Index Cards -andmuch more! come In andBrowse—5706 S. Univ. We're OpenSaturdays 12-5.30.PHOENIX:A Cheap and Convenient Alternative 2 drawerfull suspensionfile cabinets26" deep file$50 Order 3 or more$47.50NEW AND USEDDesks • Chairs • File Cabinetssorters • Much MoreDelivery AvailableBRAND EQUIPMENT8560 S. south ChicagoPhone: Ri 4-2111WOODEN ANGELWOODEN ANGEL, a publication bysome U of C staff members, is on saleat the Bookstore $4.00.LITERARYMAGAZINEPrlmavera, a women's literarymagazine, needs more women to jointhe staff. Call 752-5655. On sale in mostbookstores.WOMEN'SRAP GROUPA Women's Rap Group meets everyTuesday at 8:00 pm at 5655 S. Universi¬ty Ave. For info 752-5655.Young Designs byLIZABETH GORDONHAIR DESIGNERS1620E. 53rd St.288-2900GRAFF & CHECKReal Estate1617 E. 55th St.1V2-2V2-4 RoomApartmentsBased onAvailabilityBU8-5566We Buy and SellUsed Records1701 E. 55th St.684-3375 Open Doily 8:30 AM-5:Q0 PM, Sot. 9:00 AM-3:00 PM^hcuc/oXtes<SxtcU&493-0666COU\TR Y ESTA TEIV THE CITY!Superb tpialitv brick residence on Mz am- near50th & Grccnw«*od. IT room-, all impeccable. 2 carItrick garage. side drive. $325,000. Call (Charlotte.Ken If esler (ere.) 047-0557. Sales(lereland Mel oivan (eve.) 700-1 11 O. Sales( harlolte I ikslrom #9.1-0666. BrokerBEST OF BOTHWORLDS. Spaciousnessa hou>e & condo conven¬ience. Handsome 8 rm. rondoear 57th & Dorchester.Cabinet kitchen. 2 baths &aundrv rm. & pantry. \ for¬mal dining room, of course,arking. $ 127.500. Call Ken.TRADITION &MODERMTY. The graceof a V ictorian home plusmodernity where you want it:in kitchen & hath*, Wood-hurning fireplace. 3 ear garage.$205,000. Ask about low-intere.'t private financing.Call Charlotte.The Chicago Literary Review Dec. 5, 1980 — 311\i/X ALMOST FINISHED!NO MORE FEAR OF FALLING PLASTER!ITS BEEN AN ORDEAL, BUT WE THINKYOU’LL AGREE THATTHE NEWFACILITIES MAKE IT ALL WORTHWHILE,ESPECIALLY SINCE THE GUIDINGSPIRITOFTHE UNIVERSITYOFCHICAGO BOOKSTORE REMAINS THESAME - DEDICATED TOINTELLECTUAL FELLOWSHIP, AND THEDESIRE TO LEARN.WHETHER YOUR IMMEDIATE NEED ISFOR A GOOD NOVEL OR THE LATEST INASTROPHYSICS, WE WANT TO SERVETHAT VITAL PART OF YOUR LIFE WHICHSTILL CENTERS ON THE PRINTEDPAGE.STUART BRENT, MANAGERGENERAL BOOK DEPARTMENTTHE UNIVERSITYOF CHICAGOBOOKSTOREf /"r