THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOThe William Vaughn Moody Lecture CommitteepresentsA READINGFollowed by an informal discussionof his poemsbyROBERT PACK4:30 p.m.FRIDAY DECEMBER 6th, 1985HARPER MEMORIAL 10311(X) East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637Admission is five and Without Ticket Rockefeller Chapel5850 S. Woodlawn962-7000Sunday, December 1st9:00 a.m. Ecumenical Serviceof Holy Communion,with Sermon.11:00 a.m. University Religious ServiceBernard 0. Brown,Dean of the Chapel, preacher12:15 p.m. Carillon recitaland tower tour4:00 p.m. Choral Vespers for AdventThe Chapel Choir,Conducted by Victor Weber.* v***«* i g \ • t•we university of Chicago DepARTMeNr of music pReseN-rs:UniVcrsitV sVmpHonVOR£fi€ST0^Barbara Schubert, conductorRpssini: Overture to Semiramide * Brabtns: Variations ona'theme of HaydnSibelius : Symphony No.3 in C MajorSAXURPAy, DeceMBeR, 7&-30 PM • MAMD6L ElAlt' -57th So UtMlVCR^lTVITJTiV Donations Requested *. £3 Adults ; $ 1 StudentsliiiiiiVn ■*?*?*fcKplTY i • I • 1 •2—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985CH.C'GqLITERARY REVIEWQUARTERLYFriday, December 6, 1985 Nonfiction Giacometti7 Style on Style 16 EconMade Popular 16 TimesCorrespondent Speaks 18Editor—Gideon D’ArcangeloAssociate Editors—Krishna Ramanujan,Johanna StoyvaStaff Writers—Stephanie Bacon, TheresaBrown, Chris Browning, Lu Ann Jacobs,Laura Jasper, Stefan Kertesz, Rich Rinaolo,Gary Roberts, Erika Rubel, Mari Schindele,Michael Sohn, Ellen Streed, Kathy Szydagis,Martha Vertreace.Contributors— Janet Afary, Steve Best,Carole Byrd, Jordan Orlando, Sahotra Sarkar,David SullivanProduction—Stephanie Bacon, Gideon D’ \r-cangelo, David Miller, Erika Rubel, LauraSaltzAdvertising Manager—Ruth MauriOffice Manager—Jaimie WeihrichThe CLR would like to thank the ChicagoMaroon, the Grey City Journal, and the Semi¬nary Coop Bookstore for their help with thisissue.Cover and table of contents graphics by Steph¬anie Bacon and Gideon D’Arcangelo The Mind of the WhiteTribe 18 ReconsideringSimone de Beauvoir 21Ansel Adams 33 TechnicalPrecision Meets LiteraryAesthetic 34Fiction and PoetryDecadence and Depravity in LA 5 Dynamics at theBorder 10 The New Naipaul 10 Humankind inNature 11 Growing Up in the Age of Paranoia 11Submission Guidelines— Deadline for winterissue is Feb. 28, 1986. Submissions of fictionor poetry should be anonymous and accom¬panied with an envelope containing the en¬trant’s name and address. No more than fourpieces will be considered for one issue, and ifyou wish a group of poems to be treated assuch, this should be specified. Enclose SASE ifyou want your work returned. The CLR willnot be responsible for lost manuscript, so sendcopies. We encourage all entrants to get in¬volved with the paper. Our address is 1212 E.59th, Chicago, 60637. Our office is in IdaNoyes 303 (962-9555). Office hours are Tues¬days at 7-9 p.m. Birth of a Writer 14 Memoirs of an IrresponsibleExpatriate 18 Human Being as Enormous Brain 25Ticket Stubs and Snapshots 25 Raw America 28Breadloaf 28 Not Logic, but Faith 28 Airboume/Earthbound 30 Michael Ondaatje’s Personal MythThe Editorial Board—Chris BrowningGideon D’Arcangelo, ed.Stefan KerteszKrishna RamanujanGary RobertsErika RubelMichael SohnJohanna StoyvaEllen StreedCopyright 1985 TCMgcj/CLRCLR Editorial policy— A great deal of effortthis last quarter went into the establishment ofan editorial policy that would be sound andconsistent enough to be made public. We feelthat the more coherent our method of selectingoriginal fiction and poetry, the more comfort¬able writers will feel in entrusting us with theirwork. If writers believe that their work is beingfairly and thoroughly considered, then the ac¬ceptance or rejection of it will carry some sig¬nificance. Furthermore, readers will feel thatsomething more than whimsy or nepotismwent into the choice of the work published.Decisions are made by the Editorial Board,which is currently made up of eight members.The Board is comprised of staff members whohave expressed a commitment to establishing astrong voice for the paper.All work is considered anonymously. Eachpoem is presented both orally and on paper,followed by discussion among the group. Vot¬ing is by secret ballot, with the choice to ab¬stain always open. In the event of a tie, the edi¬tor’s vote is counted twice.A difficulty arises when somebody on theBoard is submitting their work. It’s no surprisethat of the people on campus interested in cri¬tiquing fiction/or poetry and putting out a lit¬erary magazine, some are writing it and maywant to publish. To allow members of theBoard to submit, and still preserve their ano¬nymity as entrants, they were required to ab¬stain from the voting and challenged to treattheir work as objectively as possible in discus¬sion.The plan above is the most viable we havecome up with, faced with the problei u tic taskof judging original work. It is difficult t avoidthe accusation of having an editorial policybased on favoritism, or having no ecitorialpolicy at all. This is what we want to avoid atall costs. We are open to all suggestions. ology 30 Rising Light or Descending Dark? 31On Publishing Monopoly & Literature 4Photography by Phil Pollard 9 by David Miller 36Poems by Ellen Streed 16 by Martha Vertreace 21by Jane Hoogestraat 22 by Michael Sohn 25 by Andrew Rudalevige34The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—3Monopoly & Literatureby Steve Best and Gideon D’Arcangelo“We were publishing with one eye andwatching our stock with the other.”Bennett CerfFormer President of Random HouseIn Capital, Marx warns us of treatingcommodities as neutral facts, as if theirproduction is not controlled. As long as amystifying veil lays over the production ofcommodities, they take on a life of theirown; this is the fetishization of commodities.When we lift this veil, we see the social andeconomic basis for the production and cir¬culation of commodities, the context inwhich they are produced, and the system ofclass relations behind their production.In capitalism, culture is treated the sameas textiles, paper, or automobiles. Culturehas become an industry. As an industry, it isin the business of producing commoditiesand turning a profit. Whenever we sit downto read a novel, watch a movie, or listen to arecord, we are consuming a commodity.These are all objects with an exchange valueproduced for the market.If cultural products are commodities,what then is their social basis, what roles dothey fulfill, whose interest do they serve?Under what conditions are they producedand who owns these conditions of product¬ion? Let us, following Godard, trace the“images” back to their sources, their originin the centralization and mass accumulationof capital.Economic and Cultural MonopolyIf Adam Smith were alive today, he wouldsurely see the fallacy of the “invisiblehand”. It is clear that “free competition”has engendered only its opposite. Capital al¬lowed to develop unfettered has producedmonopoly capital; corporations have be¬come financial leviathans. There are approx¬imately 360,000 industrial corporations inthe US today, but most of these have little orno power. The 500 largest, less than 1 % ofall corporations, have 87% of all sales. Thisis where "free competition” has broughtus.Cultural institutions have followed thepath of hypertrophied growth and centra¬lized power established by other industries.The media are concentrated, and their influ¬ence is pointed. 25,000 media outlets (pub¬lishers, radio and TV stations, movie studi¬os) are owned and controlled by only 50corporations. This concentration only showssigns of increasing. In 1900, there was anaverage of one newspaper owner for every38,000 citizens. In 1980, the average papersupplies news for 300,000. Giant newspaperscontinue to assimilate smaller ones. Of the500 largest corporations in America, 21 arefrom the media, while 20 years ago only 9were in this group. Localized media is fastbecoming a thing of the past. From 1900 to1950 the American population doubled andthe number of urban places tripled, but thenumber of daily newspapers dropped. Morethan 7,000 American cities have no dailypapers of their own. Instead, we get homo¬ genized news nationwide in USA Today orThe New York Times. Book and magazinepublishing, tv and radio broadcasting, andother media have all followed suit, formingmonopolies and centralizing the source ofpublic information.The key point of this is that the dominantmedia corporations are integrated with othercorporate giants. Ben Bagdikian, in TheMedia Monopoly (to which this article owesits structure and the majority of its data) saysthat “Today there is hardly an American in¬dustry that does not own a major media out¬let.” The fifty corporations that dominateall media are interlocked with other massiveindustries and a few multinational banks.Large media corporations exchange direc¬tors, and therefore have common policyviews with non-media corporations. A dozenof the nation’s largest multinational bankshold significant shares in many of the majormedia corporations. Bagdikian reveals that“the most influential paper in America, theNew York Times, interlocks with MorganGuaranty Trust, Bristol Meyers, Charter Oil,Johns Manville, American Express, Bethle¬hem Steel, IBM, Scott Paper, Sun Oil, andthe First Boston Company.” It is frighteningenough to imagine the implications of thecontrol of public information falling into afew hands, but much worse still to realizethat this information monopoly naturally be¬comes interlocked with the entire corporateweb. “The media are no longer neutralagents but essential gears in the machinery ofcorporate giantism, and increasingly they arenot only needed but they are owned by thecorporate giants,” Bagdikian surmises. Eco¬nomic power itself is concentrated, mediapower is concentrated; the two work integ¬rally together to control the production anddistribution of information.Book-Publishing Monopoly in the Cor¬porate Web — Simon and SchusterThe difference between information andculture is negligible when it is considered as amanipulative force in the hands of corporategiants. They are concerned with the publicbelief, and this is controlled by news, novels,magazines, movies, etc. The origin of thesemultibillion dollar conglomerates lies in cap¬italist thought, which is more than economicbut social and political as well. The fetishiza¬tion of commodities, the lust for objects, is away of life, and this way of life can be rein¬forced through control of the culture; con¬trol over the movies and television we watch,the music we listen to, and the books weread. These media are as much a tool for thelarge corporation as the more-often-targetednews media.We focus on Simon and Schuster becausethey are controlled by publicly-owned Gulfand Western, and thus their financial data ismore available. Random House is owned bythe private newspaper conglomerate,Newhouse Publications, who bought it fromRCA in 1980, and therefore their yearly re¬ports are not made public. Random House,it should be noted, is very similar to Simonand Schuster. It is a large company thatowns and controls several other publishing houses, such as Alfred A. Knopf, VintageBooks, Villard Books and Pantheon. As awhole, they are responsible for a large per¬centage of the titles we find on the bookstoreshelves. Simon and Schuster controls, in ad¬dition to its own publishing, the LindenPress, Summit Books, Poseidon Press,Washington Square Press, Pocket Books,Fireside, Touchstone, and CornerstoneBooks. In addition, they handle the distribu¬tion for many smaller publishers, as well asbeing the exclusive distributor of HarlequinRomances. This massive publishing monop¬oly averages annual sales of up to $400 mil¬lion, and is but a small subsidary of itsparent company, Gulf and Western.Gulf and Western is all over American so¬ciety. To quote Bagdikian, “there is hardly amajor issue in the news that does not affectG&W.” Its largest subsidary is AssociatesFirst Capital, a $1.2 billion operation in¬volved with large scale corporate financing(a business that undoubtedly links them in¬timately with a great many other industries).G&W started out in auto parts, and this isstill one of their major industries, along withthe manufacture of industrial equipment.They own Paramount, and so have a hand inboth television and motion picture prod¬uction. Gulf and Western Foods Division isconcerned with the buying and selling of rawsugar products. Sega Enterprises, a G&Wsubsidary, is in video-games and vendingmachines. G&W owns the PennsylvaniaMalleable Irons Division, the Taylor ForgeDivision, and the Simmons Corporation (inclothing manufacture). The list goes on.They are further enmeshed in the corporateweb through their investments, holdingshares in the Atlantic Richfield Company aswell as many others.Obviously, G&W has a stake in the fetishi¬zation of commodities that so characterizesAmerican life. They depend on a society thatsees the desire for new cars, new clothes, newmovies, new TVs, etc. as a natural desire.That is why it is in their interest to promotethat way of thinking, and they can do thismost effectively through control of the cul¬ture. Martin Davis, chairman of G&W, inhis 1984 letter to stockholders, says “ourmovies, our television shows, our books, ourfashions, our home furnishing designs, re¬spond to the enduring desire for somethingnew...Creativity and alertness to consumertrends are especially crucial to our success”(italics ours). Davis should have added“cleverness in devising consumer trends” tohis list. He claims to be responding to cultur¬al needs, but this claim seems ludicrous inlight of the supply-side economic policy ourcountry is currently following, which isbased on the assumption that what is pro¬duced will determine what is demanded.G&W has a part in shaping our culture, butto their own ends.How does the influence of its parent com¬pany (and, eventually, the whole corporateweb) affect Simon and Schuster? First of all,it’s important to note that a high rankingvice-president at G&W, Barry Diller, sits onthe board at Simon and Schuster, so there isDifferent flavors of the same product? Simon and Schuster in the Corporate Web:“In America we have freedom of the press,but if most of the presses are owned bymulti-billion dollar corporations, it is theywho can speak most effectively.”an envoy from the parent company directlyinvolved with the publisher’s decision-mak¬ing. There is an incident, reported in TheMedia Monopoly, where Richard Snyder,President of Simon and Schuster, refused topublish, at the last minute, an expose of thedefective gas tanks in Ford Pintos. The in¬vestigation revealed a decision by Ford toforego the expense of a major recall becauselaw suits brought against them would be lesscostly to deal with. This example of cor¬porate irresponsibility was not one that S&S(G&W) wanted to emphasize, and onewonders if G&W’s ties in the automobile in¬dustry had anything to do with Snyder’s de¬cision.The corporate influence is evident in muchsubtler ways than this, however. Let us ex¬amine the line of books that S&S will be of¬fering us this coming winter. A great numberof their new titles are geared towards suc¬ceeding in the business world. For example,the subtitle of Howard Ruff’s MakingMoney is “Winning the Battle for Middle-Class Financial Success.” Another bookoffers to help you to “get ahead in businessand life through effective communicating.”Fast Track to Fortune will give you real es¬tate strategies, state-by-state, and there arethree books on interviewing, “for that 4minutes that can make or break you.”Another group of books is designed to putthe reader in the buying mood, so that they’llknow how to spend all that money they’reearning. These are guides to Gourmet Cof¬fee, Favorite New York Restaurants, the bestbottled waters, cosmetic facial surgery, coin¬collecting, gems, and the “Glorious Nood¬le.” We can learn from Charlie’s Angel Ja-clyn Smith how the “American Look” canbe ours. In this same general grouping arethe books on diet and exercise. NautilusWoman and Super Bodies in 12 Weeks createfor us a yuppie image which we want (areconvinced) to pursue.Turning to Simon and Schuster’s politicaltitles, Vietnam is the featured issue thiswinter. We can read The Vietnamese Gulag,“a shocking first-person chronicle of aformer supporter of the Socialist Rupublicof Vietnam who survived his country’s de¬scent into totalitarianism” or ‘Wouldn’t theVietnamese be so much better off if theAmericans had won.’ In The 25-Year War,by General Bruce Palmer, Jr., the emphasisis on strategic and not moral problems in theVietnam War. The model of the good soldieris upheld by Palmer, who is called “a truehero in combat and in print.” Our outmodedmilitary, which has “failed in Vietnam, Iran,and Lebanon,” is criticized in Edward Lut-twak’s The Pentagon and the Art of War.While a strong criticism, it remains verymuch an affirmation of US military power,offering plans for rebuilding it. Along withthe Vietnam literature, we can also find a“devastating analysis” of Soviet expansion¬ism and militarism abroad, linking this to thepolitical and economic oppression within thecountry. A consistent anti-Soviet, pro-mili¬tary tone rings through these books, andwhile this is what the people want, it is alsowhat G&W wants the people to want.This is the manipulation of ideas. None ofthe work here contains a pointed attack onAmerican politics, economics, or the Ameri¬can society. Works of this nature simply willnot be published by the major presses, be¬cause it is against their interests and those oftheir parent firm. For this type of book, youhave to look to the small presses, which have4—The Chicago Literal* Review, Fiiuay December 6, iv»5Decadence and Depravity in LALess Than Zeroby Brett Easton EllisSimon and Schuster, 1985208 pp, $15.95“Experience leaves usundecided, but a writer mustpresent ambiguity in theclearest of terms... ”by Johanna StoyvaLess Than Zero has a basic, sympatheticlayer which needs to be dug out from underthe heap of publicity on tv, in Rolling Stone,and in advertisements, stressing the violentimagery of the book, if it is to be anythingmore than a multi-media confabulation. Thetheme of this layer is separation; leavinghome, relationships ending, distance be¬tween old friends, death. While Ellis’ treat¬ment of this theme is capable, it is made poi¬gnant by the fact that it takes place in thedemented Los Angeles Ellis describes. Thebook’s structure alternates between lyrical,italicized passages of pure memory, and thedepraved present tense of Clay, who returnsto Los Angeles on Christmas vacation fromcollege in New England. Unfortunately, thisorganizational scheme allows the author topresent both aspects of the book without ex¬ploring their interrelationship. We wonder ifEllis believes LA decadence and alienation tobe causes of the problematic personal liveshe writes about, or effects of the problems,or something in between.Clay’s Christmas vacation looks prettybleak. His parents have been divorced forabout one year, and he has two younger sis¬ters whose interests consist of Galaga, GQ,and the VCR. His girlfriend Blair, broken¬hearted at his leaving LA, hopes to convincehim to return. Though she has two trees ather Christmas party and makes jokes about“Jew SC,” (USC, where she is a student), weknow she’s ok when she is the only girl at thebeach in a one piece swimming suit. Clay, atleast, seems to take this as evidence of hersuperior integrity, and although her charac¬ter isn’t drawn deeply enough for us to un¬derstand precisely w'hy he still cares for her,we trust Clay, so the death throes of theirrelationship do have some pathos for us.Clay’s friend Julian, who was in his jr. highschool soccer club, is now paying off a drugdebt by prostituting himself under the direc¬tion of a certain Finn, who is not about to lethis “best boy” go, even though the debt hasbeen paid. Daniel, Clay’s classmate fromcollege, is also home on break. He starts thevacation with an ironic, critical view of thegoings-on in his hometown, but unlike Clay,is sucked back into the vortex, and does notreturn to New England.Driving home from the airport, Blair saysto Clay, “People are afraid to merge onhighways in Los Angeles.” Again and again,throughout the book, we are shown why thisis so: something in the LA mentality makes anead-on collision the most likely result of aroutine driving maneuver. They just natural¬ly carry things to extremes. Clay’s teenagedsisters watch not only Jane Fonda on theVCR, but pornograhic movies. “Yuk” saysone, “I hate it when they show the guy com¬ing.” On Christmas eve, the family is reunit¬ed at a restaurant. The meal is filled withawkward silences, partly because the parentsare not on speaking terms, and partly be¬cause the things they really know how to talkabout are sportscars and real estate. Theysense the impropriety of this on the night be¬fore Christmas. Clay is withdrawn and readyto become more so should his father ask theobvious “What do you want for Christ¬mas?” Mercifully, he doesn’t, but he doesdecide to prolong the evening and go on to abar, where he has a telephone brought to thetable. Clay’s nasal passages are disintegrat¬ing, and he is usually either working his way into, or recovering from, some strange sex¬ual encounter.But Clay’s excesses are tame comparedwith those of his friends. In search of coke,Clay goes to the apartment of his friendTrent, a model who will soon be posing forInternational Male. Trent has an eleven year-old girl tied to his bed. His friends, exceptingClay, rape her in between making phonecalls for drugs and plans for the beach. Thisdisturbing scene is critical to Ellis’ themethat under the gleaming rock of LA lies amass of writhing worms and...what? Thisscene affected me strongly. I was angry andsickened, as I was throughout much of thebook, but these emotions were not woveninto a larger whole, nor were they completelysevered from one. Experience leaves us unde¬cided, but a writer must present ambiguity inthe clearest of terms, and that means goingdeep enough to find causes, however diffi¬cult they may be to express.Ellis is only about twenty-one, so an un¬derstanding of the dynamic between his per¬sonal development and the violence he expe¬rienced is perhaps too much to expect. He isa very good writer. His voice is intelligentand ironic, unspoiled by reliance on the vo¬cabulary of older writers.Early in the book, Clay is at a party talk¬ing with Trent. Trent tells him he looks paleand gives him the card of a suntanning stu¬dio. “It works,” Trent says. “What works?” “An UVA bath. UVA bath. Lookat the card dude.” They discuss Trent’s newjob for International Male, then the conver¬sation falters. “What else have you" beendoing?” asks Clay. “Oh, like the usual.Going to Nautilus, getting smashed, going tothis UVA place...But hey, don’t tell anyoneI’ve been there, okay?” Another typical Ellisscene takes place in a Fatburger, where Clayand Trent have gone after an unrewardingsearch for coke. Trent chastises Clay for notordering any chili on his Fatburger. Claygives up on the food idea, lights a cigarette,looks around at the yellow walls and thefluorescent lights, and listens to Joan Jettand the Blackhearts singing Crimson andClover on the jukebox. “Trent is still staringat my Fatburger with this amazed look on hisface and there’s this guy in a red shirt withlong stringy hair, pretending to be playingthe guitar and mouthing the words to thesong...he starts to shake his head and hismouth opens. ‘Crimson and clover, over andover and over’.”Concern for the appearance of the body,and an absolute neglect, unawareness, ordeath-wish for its inner health — much lessthat of the mind and soul — are shown mostpointedly in the situation of Julian. ThoughJulian has been looking haggard and drop¬ping cryptic hints about his prostitution,Clay doesn’t know exactly what is going on.He wants to borrow some money from Clay, but won’t tell him why. Clay insists onknowing, so Julian brings him to Finn’s Wil-shire Boulevard apartment. Finn, assumingthat Clay is there to make some money, givesthem both a rendezvous with a ‘client’ in ahotel room that afternoon. Julian says“Fine,” then starts to cry. “What is itbabe?” says Finn. “Hey, you can tell me.”Finn politely excuses himself and Julian, andthey go into another room. Clay hears Juliansays, “I don’t want that. I’m through withthat,” then “a couple of matches being litand this slapping sound, and after a while,Finn finally speaks up. “Now you know thatyou’re my best boy and you know that I carefor you. Just like my own kid.” As Julianand Clay are leaving, Finn tells Julian he’slooking skinny, “Keep up the Nautilus. Keepup the bod.” “Sure,” says Julian.Clay’s memories have mostly to do withthe slide of stable relationships into some¬thing less certain. In high school, he andBlair spent a blissful week at MontereyBeach, drinking champagne and frolickingin the surf. “But,” says Clay, “I soon be¬came disoriented and I knew I’d drunk toomuch, and whenever Blair would say some¬thing, I found myself closing my eyes andsighing...Blair would sit by herself on thedock overlooking the sea and spot boats inthe afternoon fog. I’d watch her play Soli¬taire through the glass window in the livingroom, and I’d hear the boats moan andcreak, and Blair would pour herself anotherglass of champagne and it would all unsettleme.”While I find Ellis’ handling of the separa¬tion theme touching, I do not think that thisis why the book was published. My suspicionis that had these scenes been emphasizedmore, and the graphic, LA violence scenesless, the book might not have been pub¬lished. The commercial potential of lyricismis less certain than that of violence, andSimon and Schuster wanted to make surethis book would pay.In the first chapter, Clay is wearing dirtyLevi’s and a rumpled shirt. In the photo¬graph on the dust cover, Ellis is wearing aconservative dark blue suit. Are we to thinkthat this is his habitual attire now that thoseLA images are out of his system? It’s morelikely that a PR person at Simon and Schus¬ter asked him to wear a suit to the photo ses¬sion; the suit’s anticipated effect being to-make the book identifiable to people whowear suits to work, but have a history ofdirty jeans behind them. “This is aboutyou,” says the suit to the young investmentbanker.I am glad that Simon and Schuster pub¬lished this young writer’s book, but I distrusttheir motives in doing so. I hope Ellis writesa second novel, in which he either under¬stands the violence he writes about, or getsrid of it, and that Simon and Schuster havethe integrity to publish it.'®an astronomically lower circulation and areoften just struggling to break even. Ofcourse, one can say they are small becausethey don’t address popular interests, but (hiswould be ignoring the effect that massive in¬stitutions can have on shaping the popularinterests.Monopoly and FictionIs fiction itself just another medium likethe news, that big money can manipulate toits own ends? If we say this is so, we do notneed to go so far as to implicate the authors.Even if one has sat alone in their room, grap¬pling with the art of writing, weaving thetruth, etc., the end-product can be drastical¬ly altered once it gets into the publisher’shands. How the book is marketed canchange the effect of most books, even thosewith the best or, at least, innocent intentions. In choosing a book to publish, a majorhouse like S&S has to think even beyond itsmarketability, to is appropriateness andcompatibility with the values that sustain thecorporate system.The novels coming out this winter fromS&S fall into two general categories: shal¬low, mildly anti-Soviet suspense novels andsimple works affirming American life as itwas or still is. Family Madness, a novel byThomas Keneally, tells the story of a youngman “traumatized by his boyhood experi¬ences as a pawn of the Nazis and the Rus¬sians.” Clive Cussler’s Cyclops tells the storyof a fictional pact between the President andFidel Castro, and a Soviet attempt to dispelthe Castros from Cuba. Sincere writing byRussian novelist Yuri Trifonov is marketedas the voice of the artist speaking up against Soviet oppression. In America, we have free¬dom of the press, but since the presses areowned by multibillion dollar corporations, itis they who have the freedom to speak mosteffectively and convincing. Love and Gloryis a romance novel about the WAC’s at theoutset of WWII. Come Spring, “a stunningnovel of Americana” is a nostalgic rompthrough the settling days of the Great US,capped off by The Passionate War, a look atthe ‘romantic’ Spanish Civil War.Looking to other publishers, Vintage(under Random House), has come up withone of the most blatant examples of a pub¬lisher trying to create an image of America.Their “Vintage Contemporaries” series,which they dub “The Best of a New Genera¬tion,” mass-markets many different flavorsof the same product. This is one of the most striking examples of a publisher using au¬thors’ works to their own end, practicallysquelching identities in an effort to create atrend.The intent of the publisher has to be sepa¬rated from the intent of the author. Where abook is being published will give you a goodidea of why it is being published. Booksfrom the small presses are an entirely dif¬ferent phenomena than those from the pub¬lishing monopolies, and should be treated assuch. The corporate giants have a vested in¬terest in the American culture, and so havesought to gain control over it. The prod¬uction of culture is controlled; it only ap¬pears to have a life of its own. It is designedto underpin and reinforce a system of beliefswithin which giantism will continue tothrive. %The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, iv»5—5thf■ * ***“■’EUROPEAN ROLENATOLieutenant General TONNE HUlTFELDT, NorwaySee fascinating exhibits:• Communications display of cables, connections, etc. .Bring all vour friends!:^ :GREAT GIFT BOOKS■ GREAT SAVINGS •OUR PRE-CHRISTMAS SALEFeaturing:• THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN’S BOOKSAS LOW AS8!98• SAVINGS UP TO 80% OFF LISTPRICE ON AN EXTENSIVE SELECTIONOF PUBLISHERS’ REMAINDERSf )5uS ", -VJ*-*^ ijptr iZtpH 'sk //( . JMHpW RL.„ «A Presentation By Eurogroup Representatives: :*t'■ • ■, ' ''. . . .‘ ^. ,- Brigadier General JORG SCHONBOHM,Federal Republic of Germany - -, ‘J*" 11 - ' jj J£V||— Mr. Teoman Surenkok, Turkey? n'4>— Major General FRANCO AMALDI, ItalyWith Faculty Participation By JOHN MEARSHEIMER,Associate Professor, Department of Political Schiene, andLLOYD RUDOLPH, Professor, Department of PoliticalScience With Questions Posed By Student PanelistsMONDAYDECEMBER 9,19857:30 P.M.INTERNATIONAL HOUSE1414 E. 59TH St.753-2274‘*,Cordially Invites You ToA Presentation On*S&ifc* "Vl!" A t£' ' « 5The Corporate Finance■- ... ■Financial Analyst Program,. ■ -i-’ ■ ■ ■■.... ■ . ■ ■ .To Be Held On. .. wFriday January 10,1986 Yat 4:00 PM.to be held atThe North Loungeof The Reynolds Clubat the University of ChicagoMerrill Lynch COMPUTATION CENTER OPEN HOUSEDECEMBER 6, 3 - 5 P.M.1155 EAST 60TH STREET(DIRECTLY OPPOSITE ROCKEFELLER)Come and see our new home across the Midway!- Machine room tours: see the Amdahl 5860, the DECs, the Pyramid,the 9700s, the Gandalf, and much, much more! £Electronic printing and publishingEthernet and Bitnet maps > tiEPIC prerelease examples ' ^Mainframe graphics v;4,Mainframe databasesHistorical exhibit of modems, computer cards, etc.- See the inside of a MAC and an IBM PC! * ■BMPC!,:. :-.V v« J5 -S' t k« ■rV',“l| • ;Visit the Microcomputer Demonstration and Development Laboratoryand see a number of micros running different programs! Jf.. S»;’■ - ■■I ___ ■■- Enjoy sumptuous refreshments!; ••• :.;/fRegister to win a door prize: *First Prize: One used Teleray terminal!Second Prize: Two used Teleray terminals' ■ '‘... ■ ■. ' •" : • " - '• FREE! A COPY OF DREAMS INSTONE (reg. $35.00) WITH ANYPURCHASE OF $50.00 ORMORE UNTIL DEC 24thft « »■entHOURS: Monday through Saturday- p,: . /t -• r , ■>. . * '! :/ /■ ;giWe accept Visa, Mastecard, andThe University of Chicag970 East 58th Street • Chicago, Illinois 60637 • (312) 962-87206—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985Giacometti: A Biographyby James LordFarrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1985575 pp, $30by Gary RobertsAlmost two decades have passed since the death ofsculptor Alberto Giacometti, and for fifteen of thesetwenty years, James Lord has devoted himself to writ¬ing a definitive biography. The result is a sensitive ac¬count of a life worth reading about. Giacometti was acomplex and unflinching personality, respected for hisdiscerning intelligence and strength of character bycontemporaries in all fields of art. In a way, he standsalone in the modern era as the last great champion offigurative art, a tradition that for the most part hasbeen eschewed for the freedoms of abstraction.It is interesting though, that Giacometti’s geniuswas first recognized during his years as a member ofthe Surrealists, in the early 1930’s. Spearheaded byAndre Breton, the group sought to rebel against avapid and complacent bourgeois society, and to assertthe autonomy of the inner-self. After moving to Parisfrom his native Switzerland in 1922, Giacometti even¬tually gravitated into the iconoclastic movement, at¬tracted by its ideals and intellectual vigor; from thestart both parties were mutually impressed.Although Giacometti’s works from this period donot point to the naturalism he would later espouse andbe acclaimed for, they reveal nonetheless tremendouscreative and visonary potential. For example, Lord de¬scribes the well-known Palace At 4 AM. as,“one of the most eerie and enigmatic of allsculptures. Made of wood, wire and string,with a small rectangle of glass dangling in mi¬dair, it looks like the masquette for a stage set¬ting in which some dramatic action may haveoccured, may be occuring, or may be about tooccur. At the rear rises a tower, unfinished, itwould seem, or in ruins, brooding above thescene below. To the right, framed in a window,hangs the skeleton of a flying creature, andbelow it, inside a cage, a spinal column. Mount¬ed on a slab in the center is an erect phallicshape, while to the left a stylized female figurestands before three upright panels...the conceptis a dream.”Shortly before the end of the Surrealist revolution,Giacommetti left the group because of a disagreementover the sculptor’s livelihood: making vases, lampsand other utilitarisn objects was hardly, Breton felt, inthe spirit of Surrealism. Giacometti’s tendency towork from nature also became an issue; in short, hesimply was not bohemian enough. As a result, Gia¬cometti lost his reputation as an artist and originalthinker, and slipped into relative obscurity for the nextten years.During this part of his life, the artist lived intimatelywith failure. He set himself to rediscover viable meansfor expression in the human form, a process which forhim meant trying to forget the whole history of art.The more Giacometti endeavored to instill a primalpower in his works, the smaller his figures became,and the more distressing was his failure to transfer liv¬ing experience into a sculptural object. Giacomettipersevered however, resolutely working on figurinesbarely four inches tall.We can regard Giacometti’s mature style as an aes¬thetic and philosophical consummation to what fail¬ure and those miniature statues taught him. Althoughhe never considered his work completed (and he knewthat it never would be, but that he must continue any¬way), the artist realized that he could preserve the evo¬cative force of the tiny sculptures, and at the sametime create more imposing and less ephemeral works,by making them very thin and tall, with a rugged,“unfinished,” texture. Man Pointing exemplifies thismature style. It stands (in uncharacteristic animation)with a stoic air, alone and tolerating its own existence.This attitude became so intrinsic to Giacometti’sworks that it became popular to describe them as em¬bodying existential principles, though Giacometti didnot consciously seek this association.In addition to sculpture, painting also has a place inGiacometti’s oeuvre. The loss of a dimension in whichto work did not impair his ability to create compellingpieces. They consist mostly of portraits and still lifes,sketchily painted, austere, but intense. It could be saidthat Giacometti painted like he sculpted. Man Pointing, 1947 GiacomettiA deeper understanding of his art can be had byknowing something about his life. His relationshipwith his mother and Diego, his brother, the womanwhom he came closest to loving, and his affinity forprostitutes; his friends, Picasso, Balthus, Beckett,Sarte, and a number of homosexuals, Jean Genetamong them. His influences. And significant experi¬ences, two of which Giacometti considered most im¬portant - a car accident and the death of a travellingcompanion. All of this was essential to his art, and inthis respect, Lord’s biography is invaluable. Giaco¬metti is not a hypertrophied encyclopedia entry, not acritical analysis meant to place the artist in some his¬torical context in modern art. Lord does amass facts,and analyzes Giacometti’s important works, but hedoes it in such a way that he avoids the potential dry¬ness of such aspects of a biography. The book is wellwritten, and the several dozen accompanying photo¬graphs are a welcome addition to the text. The authorwas acquainted with Giacometti (the artist painted hisportrait), and has been so inspired by the genius thatthis is his third book on the subject. With his com¬prehensive tribute, Lord definitely does justice to therecord of a great man. $ Biographer James Lord, conversing with thesculptor (right) in 1965.The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—7Die University of Chicago VepartmentofMusic presents anDVENTTeam ring the University Chorus, MotetChoir and Womens Chorus singingHORALmusic by Brahms, Mendelssohn, Brucknei;Gretchaninov, and StanfordON CERTtSunday, December S, 1985,nt Span.SamrThomas the Apostle Church5472 South Kunbarh AvenuesFree & open to the public (ampleparking in thechurch's lotfFOREMOST 'MrAMFRICAS DISCOUNT LIQUOR SUPERMARKETSMISSIONVALLEY WINES999M 4 LILITERRIUNITE37$ LITERHYDE PARK’S LARGEST BEER DEPARTMENT!GROLSCH6-12 oz N.R. Bottles349 BLUE NUN339750 MLFRANCIA ASTI750 MLST. PAULI6-12 oz N.R. Bottles OKEEFS6-12 oz N.R. Bottles089429 LABATTSBEER or ALE6-12 oz N.R. BottlesSALE DATES -12/5/85 THRU 12/11 /85Join the FOKKMUST Wine & Imported Beer Sociot>SAVE ON FINE WINES & IMPORTED BEERSHOH SALE ITEMS OKLV OUR FAMOUS STUFFED PIZZA IN THE PANIS NOW AVAILABLE IN HYDE PARKcocktails • Pleasant Dining • Pick-up"Chicago's best pizza!” - Chicago Magazine, March 1977"The ultimate in pizza!” - New York Times, January 19805311 $. Blackstone Ave.947-0200Open 11 a.m.-midnight Monday-Thursday11 a.m.-1 a.m. Friday and SdturdayNoon-Midnight Sunday(Kitchen closes half hour earlier)Over 45 years of professional servicewill assure your satisfaction'Beautiful Eyes are yours from only$88°°Bausch & Lomb Soft Lenses•Extended Wear ‘Tinted Lenses•Astigmatic Lenses ‘Bifocals•All Brands Of Gas Permeable LensesSOLUTIONS, STERILIZING KITSFULL YEAR FOLLOW-UP SERVICEOptometrists: Dr. Joseph Ogulnick • Dr. Kurt RosenbaumEafafav &ye SouUyueEye Examinations, Fashion Eyewear, Contact Lenses493-83721200 E. 53RD STALWAYS CONVENIENT PARKING 752-1253KIMBARK PLAZADaily: 9-0Sat: 9-3:30By appointment8—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985Sheep Meadow Press, 198572 pp, $13.95 Though he brags of his success with whores and celebrates his first taste of cunnilin-gus over and over again, it would be unfair to say that Rios* images of women areentirely objectified* or chauvanistic. His strongest characters are women:“Nani...the absolute Mama...never serves/herself, she only watches me/with herskin, her hair. I ask for more/ ...Even before I speak she serves.” (Nani) Womenhave more practical sense than men: “Missy comes because he is the owner./ Hiswife died/ who knew how to say no,/ how to get money from those who had none,/and now he will have to close this place.” (El Monino Rojo) And from women,comes all the wisdom of the world:Tonio told me at catechismthe big part of the eyeadmits good, and the littleblack part is for seeingevil—his mother told himwho was a widow and soan authority on such things.by Carole ByrdWhispering to fool the wind, and fucking to pass the time. Drinking to fill theinsatiable thirst, and singing to fool yourself. Alberto Rios has captured the dream¬like essence of the Southwest, the Mexican-American blues, the fogginess that comesin the recognition of a civilization lost in a cultural time-warp. His characters walkon the land of their ancestors who wrestle them down to the earth, reaching outfrom the grave through the cracks in the solid ground, reminding them that theirpast tells a story of agony and their future and unconscious walk through someoneelse’s history. “We had come to the New World/ and become a part of it./” hewrites, “Having lost our previous names/ somewhere in the rocks as we ran,/ wecould not yet describe outselves.” (Lost on September Trail, 1968)Whispering to Fool the Wind is a collage of photographically visual, verbalimages that shroud the vision of the American Dream in the reality of the modernAztec’s daily life, from the adobe ridge to the picante sopa that masquerades asnourishment on the unending Arizona plains. The author, Alberto Rios, was born inNogales, Arizona on the Mexican-American border. Stylistically, this book is a pro¬saic mix of Spanish grammar written in English but smattered with Spanglish namesand places that, like rugged ancient landmarks, guide in the journey from one cul¬tural existence to the next.Rios work is practically void of revolution. His struggle is not against the culturein which he has been placed, but rather a struggle to maintain the dignity that hasbeen gradually stripped from his family and his people. It is a collective struggle, butalso an isolating one that reawakens the Spanish theme of soledad in a new linquistictradition: “He is a stranger, but like the old men in dreams/ ... I have seen himbefore,/ I wait until he tells me something, about relatives,/ about death, explainingabout his being so/ terminally sad; sadness like his is a disease,...” (The Men inDreams) He is preoccupied with loneliness—each woman and each man’s privatereckoning with death. Death is by far the most pervasive image in the book, linkingus to our past, uniting us with our future, and freeing us from the feeling of inexora¬ble existence. In the Spanish literary tradition, there is a particular understanding ofdeath and the passage from life to death as an eternal dance, an everlasting fiesta inwhich the boundaries of heaven and hell are melted into one. The theme of death asdance, comes to the tradition, in part, directly from Aztec ritual. Rios clearly juxta¬poses this infernal fiesta with a more Western preocupation with the aging and de¬caying process. The Aztec’s final wrestling with solitude, with death, “comes likedances, out of/nowhere and leaves into, the night/like sophisticated daugh¬ters/painted and in plumes...” (Lost on September Trail, 1968), and yet the with¬ered Belita living in a now Westernized Southwest has grown “to recognize clearlywhy not one of her grandchildren would touch her...” (Belita).Rios’ tangles with sexuality are at times unbelievably self-indulgent, but his bla¬tant, honest confusion seems to promote the idea that all poetry must somehow beescapist:He had whispered instead that her eyesopened like huge and wet, ugly clamswhich tried to draw his spiritinto her muscly insidessmooth and soft and disgustingthe way he said her feminine envelopetried to swallow him up on cold nights.But he would rather be cold than die.(Sleeping on Fists) (The Purpose of Altar Boys)The images of grandmother, “The intricacies of/ the lace veil become/ imprintedon their/ faces, on my grandmother’s/ face, everything/ is black lace, patterned,/an expensive skin.” (Deciding on a Face) and of grandfather, “Mi abuelo is the manwho speaks through all the mouths in my house” (Mi Abuelo) fixate the reader onthe strong bonds of the extended family system that is far from being lost in Rios’-world. The explanation for man’s existence, if there can be any, is found in hislineage, the living connection to his past. In La Sequia (The One That Follows), ason seeks his history through his father, in his grandfather, and finally in the earth,where he was born and will one day return:Peaches ar* drying up all aroundElfrida, Arizona. I must belike my grandfather, without a soundto show he’s worried at all; his brownhand rubs the elbow that feels like thepeaches are drying up all aroundthe pores and ridges of his skin and downhis back. My father used to do that; he,like my grandfather, without a soundof complaint, wore a fire that was blondon his head. He too would say, (I can seepeaches drying up all around)through the blue-eyes bruises he gave melike my grandfather, without a soundgave him one summer, one night on the groundripping apart the only thing he could. Thepeaches are drying up all aroundlike my grandfather, without a sound.Although there is a sense of celebration of the Mexican culture, there is also thatpervading sense of nostalgia for something lost in each of Rios’ poems. The loss ispartly a linquistic loss, “To speak/ now-foreign words I u ed to speak,” (Nani) butmore than that, a loss of self-respect. Rios is dreadfully aware of the prejudices thatthe Mexican-American must face daily: “My father said once/ during the war/ hesaw the sign no/ dogs or mexicans/ allowed but this/ must not be/ that place.”(Deciding on a Face) From the chanting power of carnal desire, to the aging senorasmasquerading as saints on their way to church, to Rios’ grandfather, like thepeaches drying up without a sound, Whispering to Fool the Wind is a treasure foranyone with the slightest understanding of the Mexican Southwest. Rios has anoverwhelming power to transform natural images into an illuminating poetic wis¬dom. His poems are “whispering to the wind/ ...which always carries a secret far¬ther...” (Sundays Visiting) They bring a warm sense of life to the ridigity of Englishverse, and tell a new story that has been waiting, for generations, to be told.You see there are in our countries rivers which have no names, trees whichnobody knows, and birds which nobody has described...Our duty, then, aswe understand it, is to express what is unheard of.—Pablo Neruda (Introductoryquote to Whispering to Foolthe Wind)Whispering to Fool the Wind won the Walt Whitman Award in 1981, an open com¬petition sponsored by the Academy of American Poets that is given only to Ameri¬can poets who have not yet published a first book of poems.The New NaipaulFinding the Centerby V.S. NaipaulVintage, 1985192 pp, $4.95 (paper)by Krishna RamanujanV.S. Naipaul is renowned as one of thebest contemporary writers in the English lan¬guage. In the words of Irving Howe, “Forsheer abundance of talent there can hardlybe a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Nai¬paul.” He was born in Trinidad in 1932 inthe little market town of Chaguanas. Hisgrandfather had migrated to the West Indiesfrom India. Since his eighteenth year he livedin England, and was a student at Oxford. Byhis twenty-third year, he was working for theBBC when he typed the first sentence of hisfirst novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957). Sincethen he has written 18 books, of which tenare novels. Naipaul writes the truth as he seesit, looks at reality and then finds thewords.In his latest book, Finding the Center,Two Narratives, V.S. Naipaul seeks his owncenter. In the first narrative, Prologue to an Autobiography , he recalls writing his firstline as a writer. In thinking about that mo¬ment, he starts going back to the variousforces that made him a writer. It is his firstautobiographical work, and the word pro!-goue in the title suggests that there will bemore to come. Naipaul is known for beingtaciturn about himself as a person, but inthis book, he lays bare the complex circum¬stances that made him the kind of writer heis. His first reading was his father’s writingin the local paper in Trinidad where the elderNaipaul worked as a journalist. The othernarrative, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,is also a first in its way.In his earlier novels, Naipaul sounded likethe brown Englishman. He portrayed nega¬tive aspects of third world countries, where,according to him, progress was possible onlyunder the white man’s influence. In this newbook, he seems to be writing from a new per¬spective. He says that the magic and spiritu¬ality of Africa will always remain, no matterwhat the white man attempts. When he first arrives, he looks at the African worldthrough his usual lens of skepticism, but asthe narrative continues, he begins to see the“moral” and “spiritual” and “magic”power of Africa.Naipaul says of Africa that what the whiteman accomplishes during the day, Africamakes up for in the night. The symbol of thecrocodiles of Yamoussoukro is really a sym¬bol of Africa. The President of the villageYamoussoukro has built a palace and a man¬made lake with a fence surrounding it. Hehas placed crocodiles, the most powerful ofwater animals, in that lake. Every day at fivethey are ritually fed a hen. Naipaul goes toYamoussoukro and observes this ritual. Theguards have to throw the hen three times tothe crocodiles and finally cut off its head be¬fore one crocodile snaps its powerful jawsaround it leaving only feathers behind. Thelake and the motions of the feeding are allfalse but the magic that strikes Naipaulcomes through in the power of the crocdiles.In the last line of the narrative, he quotes Ar- lette, a French-Indian woman living in Afri¬ca. At first, he sees her as a woman with anaffected French attitude, praising the ca-membert that Naipaul finds no good. Butwhen he realizes what her view of Africa is,he begins to respect her. In the last line hequotes her sympathetically: “We get somany people like them from the UnitedStates. Black people who come here to con¬vert the Africans. They are like everyone elsewho come to do that. They bring their ownpsychic sickness to Africa. They should in¬stead come to be converted by Africa. Theyare mad.” “Us sont fous.”In the Prologue to an Autobiography,Naipaul says that he learned how to write outof his father’s journalism, his father’sknowledge of writing which he had gottenfrom an Englishman named MacGowan whohad said, “Write sympathetically.” Naipaulalso says that his own writing changed him.In this book, we, as well as Naipaul, realizehow Naipaul has grown to take Macgowan’sadvice. He no longer slanders the ThirdWorld (as in An Area of Darness, India aWounded Civilization, Among the Unbeliev¬ers), a world where he himself has hisroots. ^10—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985Growing Up in the AgeThe Nucelar Ageby Tim O’BrienKnopf, 1985320 pp, $16.95by Chris BrowningIf one were to survey the American publicconcerning the effects of nuclear war, the re¬sults would presumably show a basic under¬standing of the dangers of atomic bombs.Your average Joe on the street could proba¬bly tell you with confidence that if thefingers hit the buttons, a sizeable portion ofthe human population would perish. Thanksto various nuclear awareness campaigns, onerarely encounters diehard support for the no¬tion that society could be successfully rebuiltpost-nuclear war. So the American public isnot ignorant of the “ifs” involved in nuclearwar. But what of the sociological and psy¬chological affects of the existence and thethreat of nuclear bombs? How has Joe as aperson been changed growing up with thelooming fear of vaporization? Tim O’Brien(author of Going After Cacciato) treats this“child of anxiety” phenomenon in the per¬son of William Cowling—seemingly averageAmerican brought up in an average Ameri¬can environment.The novel begins in 1995 with William, age49, beginning the process of digging a bombshelter in his backyard. Despite the vehementopposition of his wife and daughter, Williamis convinced that this is the proper responseto the anxieties that have been tormentinghim for decades. As his project progresses,he is reminded of events from his past. Atthe tender age of thirteen, William decides itis time for action. Sheltered by the basementping-pong table and with makeshift falloutmask donned, William undergoes his finalbout with the fear of war and death that hewill not escape. His loving but sometimesconfused parents see that a problem existsand put young William into therapy. Wethen follow William through high school tohis confusing but formative experience at Pe-verson State. There he suffers further de¬pression and anxiety, leading him eventuallyto form a radical group called “The Com¬mittee” (with a little cajoling from his newly-formed friend—Ollie). The group eventuallyadds three new members to its ranks. Tina,overweight companion to Ollie, Ned, silentsensitive linebacker, and Sarah, aggressiveand domineering but in many ways just asscared as William. A relationship developsbetween Sarah and William which continuesafter college through their experience with photo by Gideon D’Arcangelothe radical underground (Viet Nam). Theirfriendship fades, however, as William drawsback from the radical arena. When the war ends, William retreats to his home town andremains there for most of the 70s. Althoughhe sees his cohorts again (some ten years of Paranoialater), William has separated himself fromhis college friends emotionally. He is nowsolely concerned with finding the airlinestewardess he had fallen in love with. Even¬tually he finds and marries her. Though heappears settled, the underlying fear of warand death still nag at him, leading him to hispresent and most decisive step—the diggingof the hole in his backyard.William’s reaction to war, killing, nuclearthreat is one of disgust and shock. Yet he ismotivated by fear. William is the victim ofsanity. He cannot understand why the irra¬tionality of nuclear war doesn’t influenceother people as it does him. He is not a trueradical, his social conscience is rarelytouched upon. His problem is personal, andit is reflected in his beliefs. “I valued the loveof my father and mother, I valued peace, Ivalued safety.” Again his “peace” is person¬al and is rooted in the desire to survive.“Safety first, that was the moral.” In lightof this it is difficult to understand why Wil¬liam takes the stand against nuclear war incollege that he does. Toting a sign with “TheBombs are Real” written on it, William at-tenpts to heighten the awareness of the cafe¬teria regulars at Peverson State. This gestureseems more directed toward repairing theends of the world and saving humanity thanthe “safety first” motto we have grown ac¬customed to by this time.It is difficult to determine O’Brien’s intenthere. Up until this stage William is portrayedas a character inevitably concerned with him¬self and his existence. He is mad at the worldonly because his fear overwhelms him. Thesudden appearance of the socially concernedWilliam detracts from the effect created byWilliam’s isolation and fear.Throughout his life, W’illiam is constantlystruggling with his sanity. Though he feelsrelatively clear-headed, the irrationality hesees and feels around him creates such a re¬action in William that he is forced to ques¬tion his state of mind. O’Brien’s treatmentof this topic in the novel raises key questionsabout our own willingness to face the truereality of the nuclear threat. Is WilliamCowling “buggo” (in the words of hisdaughter) for digging a hole in his backyard?Is he out of his mind for taking such precau¬tions? O’Brien makes the choice fairly clear.It’s very difficult not to side with the ratio¬nality of William against the insanity of theworld. &HumankindNew & Selected Poemsby Peggy Pond ChurchAhsahta Press, 198461 pp, $5.95 (paper)By Stefan KerteszReading the poetry of Peggy Pond Churchis something akin to sitting by a tiny pondfor a day, observing the ripples. Like ripplesher poems are smooth and deliberate in tone;they stir the reader without jarring. They aredelicate, uniform, and yet at times totally ab¬sorbing. The ripples travel in several direc¬tions, but only in the context of a singlepond, one consisting of a lifetime of reflec¬tions on the relationship between humanityand nature.Church’s book, New & Selected Poems,represents works from four of her previousbooks along with some later unpublishedpoems, all written over the period 1933-1975.While the dynamic of humanity and natureappears to have inspired Church for most ofher life, how she responded to this relation¬ship changed over the course of her years asa poet.Her early poetry reveals an elemental senseof wonder which she has carefully workedinto smooth rhythmic sentences. Poems ex¬pressing a sense of her unity with naturedominate this period. Church’s willingnessto explore a diversity of ways in which onecan arrive at this sense, however, makes herearly poetry stand out from the more ordi¬nary stew of “Nature-I-see-how-admirable-thou-art” poems. As one could expect,Church sometimes describes this sense ofunity as the end result of a conscious move¬ment away from the time-bound concerns ofeveryday life. She writes:Would it be so dreadful to drop, inan interval of ecstasy,in a fear-escaping second, out of thishuman existance,to go back to earth and be one in theconstellations, in Natureto give birth to mountains, to beintimatewith the tide and the rain and theseasons?(1 Have Looked at the Earth)Her own sensitivity sparkles most genuine¬ly, however, when everyday human experi¬ence functions not as an antithesis to nature,but as an integral part of nature. Humanity’sphysical constructions remind Church of na¬ture, and in turn become nature, in theselines from Winter Sketch: in the snowy val¬ley she finds “a house with a blue door and ablue-framed window / Like a reminder ofthe sky, and a lamp lit in it.” Which lamp?one might be tempted to ask, the one in thesky, or in the house? By avoiding the me¬chanical question, Church encourages herreader to enjoy a deeper sense of the wayboth lamps are the same.It is often the careful blending of humanworks with nature that makes her sense ofunity seem all the more realistic. In FamiliarJourney Church describes her daily voyage.Back and forth on the same road andthe same hills....A new house is built and an old onecrumbles...Who watches in silencewhile an old man dies or a child isbeing born?I and the stars go pastagain and again on the same road.She presents the connection with nature assomething available to the average humanbeing in daily life; it no longer requires aplane ticket away from human works, to theHimalayas or the Lake country.Despite its accessibility in Church’s poet¬ry, however, the full realization of thisstrange dynamic of humanity and natureoccurs only with a certain sense of wonder.She writes, in Alchemy,Strange when the essence of flowersis indistinguishable from music.Strange when music blossoms like a flowerthat can be seen as the blind see, onlywith the fingers.Strange when the body turns intobread and wine.If Church’s earliest period describes a ten¬uous unity with nature, then the secondphase of her work — presented in the formof selections from her 1946 book. Ultimatumfor Man — constitutes in large part a reac¬tion to humankind’s newly-unfolded abilityto destroy that relationship with unprece¬dented violence. The poems in this sectionpresent themselves far more boldly. Theirtitles portend the tone: Ultimatum for Man,Comment on a Troubled Era, Epitaph forMan. Whether one is moved by these poems,however, depends on the context in whichone reads them. Reflections on nuclear an¬nihilation are so ubiquitous today that one’sfirst instinct is to think that Church is over¬working a tired theme. Even if she did writein 1946, her current readers have no way oferasing from their minds The Day After andall the other allusions to nuclear holocaustthey confront daily in the media. Her mes¬sage, however, does succeed in moving thereader, in part because a belief in the humanpotential for an ideal relationship with na¬ture remains. It remains in the form ofChurch’s emphatic horror at the prospect oflosing that relationship. In Omens shewrites,I have seen omens in the sky,and in the entrials of wild beastsslaughtered;have felt the ground pulse withoutfootfall;watched dead leaves driven by nowind.Horror resolves itself into sad acceptanceby the end of the Ultimatum. Allusions toGreek tragedy in the last two poems of thesection reveal that Church has come to ac¬cept our self-destruction as something inevi¬table, something natural:Now we must learn again what theGreeks knewand what all poets know...We live as a man must live, who isboth wise and blind, who warned, yet neverhearsthe voice of his own wisdom, nor hertears.(Prelude to Act IV)In the final section, Church appears tohave come to accept both the wonder and theterror of the relationship with nature. Nolonger dominating her thought, nature takesa place among other elements in the contextof a much more direct exploration of hu¬manity itself. The final stanza of Elementsfor an Autobiography typifies the new rolenature plays in Church’s poetry:Horses:the sweet smell of leather, thecold bitstained green,the long reins draggingbehind heras she slyly creeps upto the wild hoofed one in thepasture.Often in this late period Church concen¬trates simply on the beauty of relationshipsbetween human and human, as in WhomGod Hath Joined:Oh stranger far than book and ringthe woven oneness two may know...Who see with wonder on their lipswith eyes tear-cleansed and openedwide,that struggle each for his own soulwas struggle side by side.The final poems on love and the loss oflove through death help make Church a farmore human poet. In the earlier parts of thebook Church’s reflections on humanityamidst nature cast her in the role of “thehuman” simply. One relishes and identifieswith her words, but remains unsure of justwho she is. In these last poems it seems as ifan awareness of death has inspired Churchto look more closely at that which she mightmiss most, relationships with other people.Suddenly she is reflecting on her life, herlove, her feelings. One gets several stepscloser to this poet all at once. Nature nolonger dominates her thought. It can, how¬ever, provide the tools for an analysis of her¬self. #The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—11A symposium presented bythe Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsModerated byJohn CallawayPanelists:Ruth Adams, director,International Security Program,The MacArthur FoundationDavid Broder, columnist,The New York TimesFr. Theodore Hesburgh,president, Notre DameUniversityKevin Klose, journalist,The Washington PostW.K.H. Panofsky, director,Stanford Linear AcceleratorLaboratoryJohn Simpson, professor of phys¬ics, University of ChicagoJerome Wiesner, past president,MITMeet with these outstanding paneliststo discuss the problems of nuclear warand opportunities for peace.Thursday, December 12,2-5:30 p.m.Mandel Hall, University of Chicago57th Street and University Avenue 55HYDE PARK BY THE LAKE5500 So. Shore Drive643-3600 Extensive Wine ListCongenial LoungeAttentive ServiceGracious DiningThisChristmasGive Yourselfa GIFT!Take Time Out From YourHoliday Schedule toRelax & Enjoy A Fine DinnerEvening at TJ'sSpend Time in OurNewly Expanded & BeautifulLounge AreaOr Perhaps You'd EnjoyAn Evening at TJ's with Friends.We Would Be Happy to Reservea Table for Your Holiday PartyWe at TJ's Look Forward to Serving YouThis Holiday SeasonCall for info about our complimentary courtesy van service.Tom WardProprietors Jerry Zoidanlft OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK FOR LUNCH ti DINNER WThe latest news in hair comes from the HAIR PERFORMERS News inPerms - innovative conditioning waves that improve the look textureand feel of your hair. News in cuts — uncomplicated shapes thatmove easily from casual to professional to nighttime dramatic Takeadvantage of our great introductory offer and make your own news'Family Styling CenterNOW FEATURING"THE INDOOR TANNING SYSTEM1621 E 55th StrlptChicago !L 60615 (312) 241-777817—The Chicago I iferary Review Friday December 6 1Q8Sti—i ,0 ttiuii I (.hijU-i aii 1Viet Nam Memorial—August 24, 1985I thumb through the directorythat’s thick as a phone bookto find an acquaintancean Army corporalwho stepped on a mineoak leaves settlebeside the black mirrorthat’s chiselled with letterswhere I see my reflectionVisitor’s cameras flashas they inadvertentlytake their own photos,trying to capture a nameKim FranceLEBANON„ TGRENADAEL S A L VADQigood POETRYJJ10 WETRV1 walked one day,for my legs being stiff they had little else to do thanmoveme forward in a forward, forward direction,and 1 saw a tree—a long, sturdy tree,and 1 said to myself,for mine was the only self who would listen,“This tree is truth,this tree represents everything in the universe,”. ■-and then I noticed that it was petrified.The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—13& Tr<0xr<D tHJBirth of a WritertHJ tt<3 tt4ISlow Learnerby Thomas PynchonBantam Books, 1985199 pages; $13.95 (paper)by Jordan OrlandoThomas Pynchon is unique among writersof his literary standing for his tremendousreclusivity, which is one of the reasons thathis latest book, Slow Learner, a collection ofpreviously published short stories coupledwith a disarmingly modest and colloquialismautobiographical introduction, meritsgreater scrutiny than its unpresuming formand tone seem to demand. Pynchon is pub¬licly almost invisible, shunning the inter¬views and appearances that many writers ofits standing indulge in, to the extent that at¬tempts to interpret his fiction are confined tothe texts of his novels alone, independent ofany knowledge of the writer behind them.Pynchon’s emergence as a renowned au¬thor is based entirely on his three novels,which appeared within a twenty-year periodbefore the author’s fortieth birthday. V.(1963), a novel about, most simply, connec¬tive threads between certain human concernsand obsessions in ninteenth century pre-warEurope, during World War II, and in NewYork in the mid-fifties, won the coveted Wil¬liam Faulkner First Novel Award. The Cry¬ing of Lot 49 (1967), a less ambitious shortnovel attempting to explicate certain Ameri¬can mores in California during the sixties,was awarded the Rosenthal Foundationaward. Pynchon’s most ambitious and sig¬nificant work was the subsequent epic-lengthnovel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an over¬whelming meditation on death and the pre¬dicament of the mid-twentieth-century de¬scribed in the context of Americans in thewar-torn London of the mid-forties, wasawarded the National Book Award, andcompared by many reviewers to Ulysses andMoby Dick. “More than any other livingwriter...he has caught the inward movementof our time,” wrote a reviewer in SaturdayReview. Before the appearance of SlowLearner this year, these three novels consti¬tuted Pynchon’s entire published works,with the exception of the five stories collect¬ed in the present volume.Thomas Pynchon is matched for reclusive¬ness and silence perhaps only by J.D. Sa¬linger. This addition to his canon is remark¬able not only in the glimpse that it providesinto the college writer that Pynchon evolvedSo bad, It’s Good— If it’s not obvious, Viet¬nam Memorial by Kim France, wins in theBest Poem Category and Tree for True, byKen Scudder, in the Worst. In the GreatestDisparity Contest, Shortness was specifiedby its poet J.D Smith as the higher end of thepair. Poets were required to clearly marktheir entries as ‘good’ or bad.Although easily mistaken for gratuitous orirreverent, the intent of the contest was, atbottom, serious. It was based on the ideathat having criteria for judging a poem ‘bad’is fundamentally different than having nosuch criteria at all (i.e. being bewildered inthe face of a poem, not able to form anyopinion at all.) Further, it is much more dif¬ficult to then turn these criteria back on one¬self and judge one’s own work. The ability to from, and the resulting insight into the con¬struction of his three subsequent novels; it isalso remarkable because of the inclusion of a34-page introduction in which the author,for the first time, speaks in his own behalf,presenting his first published works as wellas apologising for their inadequacy. The fivestories, not to be overlooked despite Pyn¬chon’s clever and modest dismissal of themas being worthwhile only as educational orachival documents, are uniformly good andat least one is notable and even breaktakingon the scale of V. or Gravity’s Rainbow.Pynchon’s fiction has always workedthrough a technique of saturation favoredover selection; his prose is disarmingly collo¬quial and even clumsy. The illusion is createdthat the stream of words is unfiltered or care¬less. The achievement of Pynchon’s novelslies, in effect, behind the words; as much asindividual sentences may display what hecalls a “Bad Ear” or an annoying conversa¬tional smugness reminiscent of Vonnegut orHeller, the implications and allusions, con¬nective threads and associations accumulate,and, as if by magic, the grand themes ap¬pear. For these reasons, Pynchon is perhapsless suited to the mechanics of short fiction;there is less room for his particular techniqueto function properly.The available facts about Pynchon’s lifeare few and far between, but what little isknown provides insights into the backgroundif not the themes of Pynchon’s work. He at¬tended Cornell University in the early 1950’s,studied engineering, and “interrupted his ed¬ucation to spend two years in the Navy.” Inaddition, he was “excited by Kerouac andthe Beat sensibility” after encountering anissue of the Evergreen Review. Pynchon’snovels, perhaps as a result of this series ofinfluences, make frequent use of militaryand World War II references and back¬grounds. Pynchon also has a unique propen¬sity for connecting his philosophical andspiritual themes to concepts of physics,chemistry, and thermodynamics. Entropy(1960), the third story in Slow Learner, useda thermodynamic principle as its central met¬aphor, a difficult task that Pynchon per¬forms adeptly, to surprising result.Slow Learner, it is quickly made clear, isnot intended to be considered independent ofPynchon’s entire collection of works. Char¬acters and themes from V. and Gravity’sRaimbow make their first appearance inLow-Lands (1960) and Under the Rose(1961), allowing further literal as well as the-On the Contestassess one’s own work is the first steptowards revision, and therefore, towardsggod writing. The idea was that a poet wouldlook at the whole body of her/his work, andpull out the poems that both worked welland didn’t work at all. The expectation wasthat most poets who had worked a lot wouldhave poems to enter in both the Best and theWorst Categories, as well as a pair of theseto enter into the “Greatest Disparity Be¬tween Two Poems” Contest.A survey of the entries shows that thingsturned out quite differently than was expect¬ed. Any one poet tended to enter in only oneof the categories. Of the 72 entrants in the matic understanding of certain aspects ofthese books.Pynchon is occassionally described as a“Beat” or “Post-Beat” writer, and perhapsmost interesting in Pynchon’s commentary ishis discussion of the Beat movement inAmerican culture and the mark that it left onhis writing. “We were at a transition point,”he writes, -A strange post-beat passage of cul¬tural time, with our loyalties divided.As bop and rock’n’roll were to swingmusic and postwar pop, so was thisnew writing to the more establishedmodernist tradition we were bring ex¬posed to then in college. Unfortun¬ately there were no more primarychoices for us to make. We were on¬lookers; the parade had gone by andwe were already getting everythingsecondhand, consumers of what themedia at the time were supplying us.That didn’t prevent us from adoptingBeat postures and props, and eventu¬ally as post-Beats coming to seedeeper into what was, after all, a saneand decent affirmation of what we allwanted to believe about Americanvalues, (p.xviii)Pynchon mentions, among such influencesas Kerouac and Henry Miller, the Universityof Chicago;The conflict in those days was, likemost everything else, muted. In it’sliterary version it shaped us as tradi¬tional vs. Beat fiction. Although faraway, one of the theatres of actionwe kept hearing about was at theUniversity of Chicago. There was a“Chicago School” of literary criti¬cism, for example, which had a lot ofpeople’s attention and respect. At thesame time, there had been a shakeupat the Chicago Review which resultedin the Beat-oriented Big Table maga¬zine. “What happened at Chicago”became shorthand for some unima¬ginable subversive threat.The Small Rain (1959) is the earliest-writ¬ten and least substantial story in the volume.It describes the actions of a few enlisted menat an Army training camp in Louisiana whoare recruited to assist an emergency NationalGuard detail in aiding a flooded town. Ahurricane and subsequent flood have allwiped out the town, and the main charactersmake forays into the wasted area to removevast numbers of corpses. The base of opera-contest, only 4 entered in both categories(thus the winner of the Disparity contest wasa l-to-4, not-very-long shot.) Of the badpoems entered, and perhaps this should havebeen foreseen, most were written with the in¬tention of being bad (or funny). This made itdifficult to decide on a winner; if it is writtento be bad, and succeeds, isn’t that good? Ofthe type of bad poem that we expected—afailed attempt at a good poem—we receivedonly a few. This forced us to alter our cri¬teria for the judging of bad poems, for wehad to decide who had best succeeded intheir prescribed task of writing poorly.We thank all who entered, and congratu¬late the winners, with a reminder; if youknow what’s bad, you practically knowwhat’s good. —Ed. tions, absurdl , is a small nearby college,where the proi gonist, slothful transplantedNew Yorker N ithan Levine, has a brief af¬fair with a stuo^nt named Little Buttercup.The Small Rain is limited in its scope; writ¬ten during Pynchon’s days at Cornell, it isinteresting only in its atmospheric effectsand its character studies. Ultimately thestory, oddly and in a roundabout fashion,manages to speculate about reactions todeath. “In The Small Rain, characters arefound dealing with death in pre-adult ways,”writes Pynchon. “They evade, they sleeplate, they seek euphemisms. When they domention death they try to make with thejokes. Worst of all, they hook it up withsex.” (p.xiv) The synthesis of themes duringLevine and Little Buttercup’s sexual en¬counter, Levine’s stunned reaction to thelandscape of corpses, and the connectivethread of the rain that surrounds their bed¬room and brought on the flood, is Pyn¬chon’s achievement in the story; the first sur¬facing of his attempts the themes that wouldlater permeate his novels.Low-Lands (1960) is about an unhappilymarried ex-sailor, Dennis Flange, obsessedwith the sea and sea tales, who escapes theresponsibility of his doomed marriage byrunning with several to a sort of surrealodyssey across the low-lands, the fields ofthe garbage dump at the edge of his LongIsland town. The dump is rumored to be in¬fested with gypsies living underground intunnels built decades earlier by a cult of wor¬shippers fearing the imminent apocalypse.Flange is abducted by a young gypsy girl,with whom he decides to stay. The story ismore of a character sketch than a story, asPynchon apologizes: Dennis Flange“doesn’t ‘grow’ much in the course of it; heremains static, his fantasies become embar-rasingly vivid, that’s about all that hap¬pens...a brightening of focus maybe, but noproblem resolution and so not much move¬ment or life.” (p.xix)Entropy (1960) is an extremely successfulstory. Here Pynchon does for the first timethat thing which he is almost breathtakinglyadept at doing: unifying a spiritual or hu¬manistic theme with a chemical or physicalphenomena. Reacting to this much-anthologised story, Donald Barthelme hassuggested that Pynchon has a sort of pro¬prietary handle on the concept of entropy it¬self, an assertion that Pynchon firmly andmodestly denies (p.xxii). Not just thermo¬dynamic entropy is the subject of the story,but almost effortlessly, a spiritual malaisethat is a perfect analog for the human dilem¬mas and concerns of the present day.The next story, Under The Rose, (1960) issimply brilliant. It functions as a sort of pro¬logue to V., Pynchon’s first novel, describ¬ing certain events in Egypt at the end of the19th century, and a battle of wills betweenGerman and British spies intent on bringingabout or averting the predicted apocalypsethat is the Great War. Aside from the un¬matched vibrance of the characters andevents, the themes that emerge from thisshort (48 page) story are quite large; thestruggle ceases to be specific to the espionageand detente the characters are obsessed withand becomes a grander tale of flawed hu¬manism encountering ideals of perfectionwhich turnout to be, in the final confronta¬tion at the Sphynx, not entirely, perhaps, ofearthly origin. In addition, Pynchon uses thepre-World War I apocalyptic fervor as aneliptical device for describing the currentconfrontation with the threat of nuclear an¬nihilation.The final story. The Secret Integration(1964), was written after the pubication ofV., when Pynchon’s literary reputation wasfirmly established. This is a simpler, less am¬bitious narrative about children in New Eng¬land confronting certain realities of adulth¬ood including racism and poverty. TheSecret Integration is intriguing and someh-wat engrossing, but falls beyond the scope ofthe important, observable development ofthe earlier stories.Ultimately Slow Learner, like Pynchon’snovels, consists of deceptively simple or dis¬armingly colloquial surface, under which canbe found several complex themes not imme¬diately apparent. The book is aptly titled, forit is about something independent of the contained stories; it is about Pynchon’s genesisas a writer. The introduction and the choiceand ordering of stories bring about or invokea statement of purpose which functions as anarrative, commentary, or explanation of hislater works. Viewed in the context of the en¬tire Pynchon ouevre, Slow Learner is a cru¬cial device in the process of understandingthe fiction of a reclusive and private writerwho perhaps has a unique hold on the sen¬sibilities of the time. And independent ofthis, the stories are good, and a couple ofthem are really quite breathtaking. #14—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985FASTSPEEDYRAPIDSWIFTPRONTO FASTQUIK While you waitCROSS instant printing...IF YOU NEED IT FAST...OUR SERVICES INCLUDE• TYPESETTING• PHOTO DUPLICATING• BULK PRINTING• ENVELOPES• LETTER HEADS• BUSINESS CARDSQUIK CROSS INSTANTPRINTING INC. CALL 684-7070• CHURCH BULLETINS• THESIS - TERM PAPERS• FOLDING• COLLATING• BINDING• WEDDING INVITATIONSPRINTINGWE’RE AS NEAR AS YOUR PHONE Hyde Park Bank Bldg.1525 E. 53rd St.Suite 626684-7070fOUl b. plnon for hairSALON FOR WOMEN & MEN100 e. walton, lower level, 642-863420% OFF For U of C StudentsJvffPueldoFIXE MEXICAX CLISIXE2908 W. 59th 737-2700ODf“'i 1' a ir to 11 p riRECOMMENDED BY...Chicago Tnbune 84 Tempo 84Chicago Magazine - June 85 & Chicago Sun-Times - July 85Our Specialties .. and Yours Too• r.NCHiLADAb MOLE • OUR SOMBRERO• Av AG ADO TACOSD Outside->! Om Ratios Giu.tdrist Win fc'itertam OnWKJnesildvs Tm.isiiavs 8 F-.davsOurMargaritasAreMagic!Mi Pueblo is a Special FindJEFIIET IIIIISIII liltSdatil hr IIISEISM COOP BOOKSTORE5757S.0WVIIISITY 752-4381 AirwayHONDAPRICE PROTECTED SALE!BEAT THE FACTORY INCREASE! I 3 Days Only!SAVE $400 TO $500 I Sale endsON SELECTED MODELS IN STOCK! I Saturday, Dec. 71986 HONDA CRX2-DOOR AUTOMATICfrom only—-- ■ i 1986 ACCORD2-DR. HATCHBACKAUTOMATICfrom only*73991985 CIVIC4-DOOR WAGON *14-WHEEL DRIVE 6-SPEEDDemo with air AM-FM cassette RH mirrormats and more Save $2000 trom orig listnow only*8653 MST K40 LATE-MODEL HONDA TRADE-INS.IN STOCK! CHOOSE YEAR. MODEL. COLOR!’7® CHEVY SUBURBANSCOTTSDALE C209-pass eitra deanwith air. tutl powerAM-FMcasette $CCQC' automatic only 91115137 000 miles WWWW *84 CHEVROLET CAVALIER4-DOORWhi'e beauty with ^air automatic 4M C M M MFM Stereo much *81 AUDI 4000 4-DOORSilver air all the B _ AMpower-Steering KKTbrakes windows — —' ■locks Plus crinse A[MRcassette only UPPPIC24 000 miles m1 *84 HONDA ACCORD 4-DR.Charcoal gray 5-speed air tunpower AM-FMcassette 33 000 ■ M W Wmiles *84 MERCURY TOPAZGS 4-door with airAM-FM cassette (JAAPcru.secontro' a-rconditioning TlWWW *80 FORD MUST AMOBlue 2-doo' hetch-autometre air. h»M AApower am-Fm 4N4Ncassette ” ” “ ”*84 HONDA PRELUDENavy blue 2-door 5- AAAAspeed priced to go W w w Wlast' ■ ■ ■ ■ *82 MAZDA RX-7 OSSilver 5-speed II Wt 8?Sureroot air Ml MAMpower one owner madman28 ooo mii«s pi Emm ’80 FORD FAIRMONT 4-OR.WHitt beautyautomatic oo« af|4AEORoa ,ust3i 000cart miias*84 PONTIAC FIERO SEWhite only 2t 000 BESToriginal miles Mustsee to appreciate Uaa BH *82 HONDA PRELUDESliver 2-door 5- $PAAAspeed only 33 000cer\ miles 8P MB ^P 4P *76 MERCURY MONARCHGold 2-door eicep- * m |k a p•lonaliy ciea- w-m } 1 P D EM2 V-8 automatic | 0 %F 9air condtr*Lt47* STThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985- 15Style on StyleVoicelustedited by Allen Wier and Don Hendrie, Jr.U. of Nebraska, 1985125 pp. $12.95by Theresa BrownWith a title like Voicelust this book should be about thelife and times of desperate people who, unable to face love,use Ma Bell to convey the passion of their unrequited obses¬sions. But it’s not, it’s not even about sleazy people dialingnumbers late at night. Voicelust, so titled because it talksabout the passion driving writers, is a collection of essays onstyle by contemporary fiction writers: Doris Betts, WrightMorris, Donald Barthelme, Max Apple, George Garnett,John Irving, Lee Smith, and William Gass.The essays range from being datadumps covering every¬thing from the metaphor/metonymy distinction to the factthat “and” appears 7170 times in Ulysses, to being cogentarticles on the rudiments of good fiction writing. Few of thearticles are helpful, but most of them are interesting. DorisBetts begins the book by winding her way through the im¬portance of metaphor and the relevance of religion to litera¬ture to end up discussing whether there are five writing styles(semiliterate, flat, ornate, experimental, and plain) or justtwo: plain and fancy. What Betts believes is the connectionbetween Christianity or religion and writing is unclear, butthe point of the essay is that style, similar to fingerprints(thus the title “The Fingerprint of Style”) is unique, natural,and permanent. Ms. Betts’ belief in the distinctiveness ofstyle establishes the tone of the book in two important ways:(1) it provides the reader with a paradigm for analyzing thefollowing comments on style, and (2) it prepares the readerfor the different styles which appear in the book.The styles vary incredibly and there is a correlation be¬tween the straightforwardness of the style and how helpfulthe article would be to someone interested in writing fiction.For example, George Garnett turns out twenty pages of whatis essentially stream of consciousness writing on what makesa good author. Equally unhelpful is William Gass’s “And”:thirty pages on the different functions of “and” in literature— this is interesting from a linguistic point of view, but isapplicable to the question of style in a manner too limited tobe helpful, and is also very silly. Donald Barthelme and Wright Morris do not say much onthe subject of how to write well, but their ideas about art areprovocative. Barthelme agrees with Doris Betts that, “Styleis not much a matter of choice,” then extends the argumentto a discussion of how style relates to art, “Art is a trueaccount of the activity of the mind...(it) cannot remain inone place...Style enables us to speak, to imagine again.”Barthelme believes that style is the means to art. WrightMorris is more pragmatic than Barthelme; he believes thatpeople write in order to resolve a crisis of conscience, “Fewof them knew it, but the first half of the twentieth centuryhad found many remarkable talents turning to writing as anact of faith, with the novel the revelation of the true gos¬pel.” According to Wright, writing helps to resolve psycho¬logical crises because it brings the author to a “new' and un¬familiar” level of consciousness.The essays of John Irving and Lee Smith will be the mosthelpful for asoiring fiction writers because they talk in con¬crete terms about what good fiction writing is. In five pagesIrving points out with examples that, “The narrative voicehas a tone of legend...every chapter ending somehow shouldforeshadow the end of the novel...At the end of every goodstory, there is the suggestion of the idea about how to live anew life,” Irving is concise and interested in providing gui¬delines for potential authors. Lee Smith writes about what itmeans to be a good author, “My teachers kept telling me,‘Write what you know.’ ” Smith charts his experimentationwith different narrative forms and sudden break into “...anintrusive, down-home narrative voice.” Smith’s message isthat authors must wait to write and discover what the best,“Voice Behind the Story” is for them.Max Apple writes about the importance of creatingimages as illustrations. Apple is funny talking about theniche he chose, “Since I had so little seniority, they assignedme teeth and foreskins,” The point is that anything is worthwriting about and also, that nothing is new — similar toteeth and foreskins — all subjects for fiction have beenaround for a long time. The valuable thing about this bookis that each author has taken the old subject of style andcome up with something new to say about it. The book isintriguing because readers got to see how Donald Barthelme,Max Apple, et. al. approach the question of style. It is im¬portant because, as Max Apple says, “The telling of storiesis the central business of all our lives.” $$ Battered WomanWhen you hit meI don’t fight backI just lay silentlike a martyr.I know you have no rightto hurt meexcept the rightof my passivity.I let yourun your handsover my hips and thighswhile we kissAnd I let youthrust your fistinto my jawwhile we fightIt’s quietwhen you stopand I tremble,bruised and swollen.My heartlimp and scaredstill beats outthat same, sad love.—Ellen S treedle Journey’<1 Farmers FindHardship as They. to City for Workof JojvSeeking Skills,Credit Hurt: What’s News' inanee\NS todayalternative•ould retainbut reducetax credit' and al-jomes- World-WideTHE l’.S. FAULTED a Philippine court ’sverdict over the Aquino assassination.A State Department spokesman said itwas “very difficult to reconcile’ the court’sacquittal of Gen. Fabian Ver and 25 otherswith the finding of an independent commis¬sion. That panel concluded a year ago thatthe military conspired to murder Aquino,who was slam in 1983. Following the verdict, j Help-Wanted AdvertisingIn percpnt, seasonaily adjusted (1967 = 1001.HELP-WANTED advertising rose in Oc¬tober to 140*7 of the 1967 average from136' • a month earlier, the ConferenceBoard refxirts.\smen Chargeor 77mp -Ty , LaboA Special NevAnd TheirFields tCHRISTMAS B»employees’ ch< er.Crowai Publishtthe best selleigives bonuses rantthousands." WalV85,000 hourly.eniP;to $150. American Ipaper, offers a choing turkey and abill. National Lamployees a week’sA survey of 465of National Affairsfirm, showmEconomics Made PopularThe Nature and Logic of Capitalismby Robert L. HeilbronerW.W. Norton, 1985225 pp, $15.95by Rich RinaoloA funny thing happened to me in the basement of theCo-op earlier this quarter. I was persuing through the newbook stacks when my eyes found themselves fixed on asmall, rather unassuming volume. “The Nature and Logicof Capitalism!” I thought, abusively fondling it, “spareme!” The title immediately conjured up images of tedious,analytic diatribe so prevelant in economic discourse, and as 1roamed across some random text these first impressionsseemed not far off: “...From this hidden source of valueMarx can now expand his M-C-M’ formula—from a moneysum to a larger money sum—into the form M-C-C-M’ ...”No wonder I canned econ as a major! And yet, it was soinviting. 1 badly needed a book to review. Zippy’s new ad¬ventures lacked the necessary sobriety, and Sex in the MiddleAges wasn’t quite as riveting or enlightening as I had an¬ticipated. Besides, I was tired, hungry, mildly annoyed - inshort, my senses were numbed, and 1 bought the hook!After the intitial shame and regret had receded, I sat downand began to ploy through Mr. Heilbroner’s little book. 1am happy to report that things didn’t turn out so badly. In¬deed, much of the book was rather dry and necessarily ana¬lytical, but I definitely walked away with my opinions toward capitalism considerably adjusted, feeling the timespent to be worthwhile. And from one who harbors littleaffinity for positivist science in general, and modern eco¬nomics in particular, this judgement amounts to almost totalsuccess on Mr. Heilbroner’s part. He has presented a well-balanced, fresh view of modern capitalism, complete withthe review and careful explanation necessary for the laymanto adequately navigate the book’s depth of analysis.The Nature and Logic of Capitalism is especially appro¬priate for students with a little Smith and Marx under theirbelts, for the work frequently alludes to both, and while theprincipal ideas of these two theorists are explained to a suffi¬cient degree, some familiarity with the source material elicitsa tinge of excitement along with such scholarly sentiments as“perhaps my education was worth it” or perhaps just a com¬fortable “1 am familiar with what he’s talking about.” Inany case at least here is an opportunity to profit from anyjoyless hours spent in introductory social science classes, andto those students with interest I recommend: read this book,and examine how a modern economist treats the classic so¬cial problem of explaining the dynamics of a social sys¬tem.Mr. Heilbroners begins his work with a discussion of someelementary social and economic ideas necessary to grasp hisown interpretations laid out later in the book. This is thesection 1 mentioned as ‘rather dry.’ Nevertheless, the style isfresh, the material presented clearly and interspersed withenticing comment or two. It occured to me that more ad¬vanced readers may find these introductory remarks too ex¬ tensive, but of course, Mr. Heilbroner has aimed for a bal¬ance, a balance which fortunately favors less sophisticatedeconomists such as musicians, philosophers, and zoolo¬gists.After sections subtitled On the Nature and Logic of SocialSystems, The Drive to Amass Capital (containing an inter¬esting, albeit cursory treatment of the relationship betweenhuman nature and capitalism), both of which contain mostlyintroductory material, Mr. Heilbroner begins to lay out hisown view of capitalism. Perhaps not much is new here—theauthor suggests that his architecture of capitalism is what’sreally fresh—but I nevertheless found it exciting and a con¬stant challenge to my own ignorant and confused concep¬tions. Of interest were the treatment of capitalist ideologyand a short economic history of the West, within which weresome elucidating comments on why socialism never gainedpopularity in America as it did in post-war Europe. As forthe architecture of capitalism, special emphasis is placed onthe relationship between the political or ‘public’ sector andthe business or ‘private’ sector; Heilbroner sees a greatercongruence between the interests of these two entities than isusually perceived. The book ends appropriately with a piececalled ‘The Limits of Social Analysis.’ Here Mr. Heilbronerqualifies his interpretation of capitalism, takes a swipe atpositivist economics (bravo!), and forsees work containingsome daring predictions for the future of capitalism. Aftermy first experience with Mr. Heilbroner, I’d have no reser¬vations about buying that.To conclude: whether you’re a collegiate revolutionarybent on annihilating the ‘system’, or a young Republican outto preserve it, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism will adddepth to your dogma, if not radically alter your view¬point. Qib—the Chicago Literary Review, Friday uecemoer b, 1983VT MAM LIQUORS 8 WINE SHOPPEIVui4 East OH Street • In Kiabark Plau 495-3355Mil DATS 12/4 THBU 12/4/Mstock-up specials$35*RHOMBERG t ...6-12 oz a/149No R.t BritSTROH’SSTROH’SLITE24-12 ol Com $779 ST. PAUU,6-12 ozNo Ret. Btls.AUGSBURGER6-12 ozNo Rot Bris $22» OU> STYLE24-12 ozNo Ret Brii $6"BUD *BUD UTE $39912-12 oz. Comi PAUl'MASSON $4991.5 liter 9 ACHATEAU LA SALLE750 ml.LANCB’SROSE750 ml. $2*9$2$’ GALLO PREMIUM1.5 LITERLOUIS MARTINCABERNET SAUVIGNON■*n 750 mltA1. ALMADENW$T 1.5 LITERHARVEY’S BRISTOL CREAM **99 PT750 ml 3WENTE BROS.750 ml. l/$5$6”DO MAINECHANDONBRUT750 ml $999 SPARKLING WINEMONISTROlSPANISH SPARKLING750 ml. ^$299 JACQUART750 ml$1199i\ SMIRNOFF; VOOKAp $10" naiSCOTCH750 $g99 JOHNNY WALKER j&LRED LABEL M750 ml. a jk AA$8" Hi MARTEL VSi COGNAC[ 750 m $H99 CANADIAN MISTLITER $1()49WITH $1 SO M4JL-M MAX CANADIAN CLUBs $15”P|! KAHLUA750 ml. ^ A$399| WITH IUO MMUM MMX SEAGRAMS7 CROWNSI $10"WITH 1200 MM-M MMX SEAGRAM’S V.O.- *15” ?IHAA6EN DAZS1 99f WTTH 1X00 MAJUM MAH REMY MARTIN V.S.COGNAC750" $H99 JIM BEAM jX175LITER $099WTTH $1 JO MAA4N MAT! -M J\ Mafcerri- Mark| k MAKER’S MARKJ 750 m $995J nr SOUTHERNCOMFORT75° m, WOIBCHMIOT jB3^VODKAUTER $099WTTH $7 00 O |^4XMMUN MMXocrcon Q0<ocmy 2 itTH . TT ! Sar^Te-me. m $H9^/ 1I TONIC CLUB SODA GINGER ALE SELTZER 1 l'ip/ JWe reierre (tie nght *o limit quantitiei andcorrect printing errors Sole item* not icedAN prices subject to Federal Excne Tax Mon Thors 8 om 1 orrWe occep lFri Sot 8 am 2 o»r Son Noon Midnightit Viso Masterco'd & checksCall For Friday Show TimesTOTALLY REMODELED!NEW SEATS, PROJECTION & SOUND.THREE NEW THEATRESSchedule times startingSaturday December 7,1985MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV GREGORY HINES INWHITE NIGHTS pg-u5:10 7:45 10:20SAT & SUN 12:00 2:356:15SAT & SUNSYLVESTER STALLONEROCKY IV PC8:152:15(NO PASSES) 10:154:151 SYLVESTER STALLONEROCKY IV PC5:15 7:15 9:15SAT & SUN 3:15(NOPASSES)BACK TO SCHOOL - STUDENT SPECIAL*★ SPECIAL PRICE - $2.50 Mon.-Thur. Last Show★ The drinks are on us —FREE DRINK with medium popcorn purchase*with U. of C. student I.D..ilw ^CHILDREN UNDER 6 NOT ADMITTED AFTER 6 P.M.S2.50 UNTIL FIRST SHOW STARTS BRADLEY ORIENTAL CARPETSSPECIAL CHRISTMAS OPEN HOUSE - SALESATURDAY-SUNDAY DECEMBER 7-8 11 A9M.-8 P.M.FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THREEYEARS, MY PRIVATE SALE WILLFEATURE RARELY SEEN AFGHAN-BELOUCH PRAYER RUGS ANDDONKEY BAGS, AND VEGETABLE-DYE TURKISH KILIMS, ALL ATSPECIAL CHRISTMAS PRICES!!(BETWEEN $150-$250).I ALSO HA VE MANY NEW ROOM-SIZE CARPETS!ONE-OF-A-KIND, HAND-PICKED CARPETS FOR LESS!SEE CLASSIFIED AD FOR MORE INFO. OR CALL288-0524•nnPTm.g•nOPTTfl.qCOPIESOur copies are greatOur machines are the latest...and very fastOur people are anxious to please yotrOur service is swiftAnd all this for 5*. What a deal!isitsThe Copy Center in Harper Court52TCTS: *Harper 288-COPYin 1(MANGIA!!!)COME CELEBRATETHE FIRST NIGHT OFCHANUKAH.• Italian — Kosher Dinner*Saturday, December 7th, 7:30 P.M.5715 S. Woodlawn • 752-1127$4°° each All invited & Welcome jjThe Chicago 1 iterarv Review Friday December <S, IQ85—J7The MilThe Political Mythology of jby Leonard ThompsonYale, 1985293 pp, $22.50by Sahotra SNot so very many years frowill be celebrated throughoutca, black and white, as an anniof UmKhonto We Sizwe (MK)as the military wing of the Afr(ANC). Today December 16thof the 1838 slaughter of thou:hundred and sixty-eight Afrikand African servants, and abcIn Afrikaner ideology the masthe Covenant: a public vowsixty-eight Afrikaners are sup]to build a monument to their jday as one of thanksgiving. Thsible the Afrikaner victory; aft<ancy in the sizes of the two forery was nothing short of a mirresearch has shown, as Leontstrates in the book under consvow was taken. Yet this vow cby Afrikaner ideology since itcial elements of that ideology:the Afrikaner nation, its contaon. In this sense the vow servelogy of the Afrikaners and theSouth African schoolchildren wait in line to drink rationed water.Memoirs of an Irresponsible Expatriate trivial event from his past andTime and Time Again: Autobiographiesby Dan JacobsonAtlantic Monthly Press, 1985213 pp, S15.95by Gideon D’ArcangeloYou feel cheated on realizing that the passage quot¬ed on the dust jacket, with sentences like “to sit to¬gether...with anyone of a darker skin than their ownwas a moral impossibility for almost all whites,” is theonly mention of apartheid or racism in the wholebook. As you figure out what this book is actuallyabout—the life-story of a white middle-class college-boy who flees to London in pursuit of literature—youbegrudge the $15.95 dropped on this “memoir by oneof South Africa’s leading expatriate writers.” Jacob¬son is no expatriate in the sense of the word connotedhere. If he was driven to leave South Africa, it was dueto personal reasons only indirectly related to the polit¬ical and social conditions there. In fact, what is soamazing about the book is that someone could beborn and raised in South Africa and be so superficiallyaffected by the situation there. Most of Jacobson’s ex¬periences could just as well be set in Dayton, Ohio—with his stories of the school bully and bookbags—only periodically punctured by an awareness ofapartheid, which he sees “not only as a misfortune ona vast scale, but also as a grotesque joke.” In SouthAfrica there was too much misery and not enough cul¬ture; that’s why he left. To top off the promised andundelivered insight into South African race-relations,only a quarter of the book is actually set there. Mostof the book is about this lonely character walkingaround London in search of an experience worth writ¬ing about. The hype is blatantly misleading, but youcan’t really blame Atlantic Monthly, for who wouldwant to buy it for what it is? It only stands up as theautobiography of an author you’ve followed for along time, which is unlikely here because only a few ofhis most recent books have been released in America(since the South African issue became marketable).Furthermore, I doubt many Americans would even beinterested in Jacobson’s interpretation of the South African scene, if they actually wanted to know whatwas happening there. In The Zulu and the Zeide(1957), a collection of short stories dealing directlywith South African social conditions, Jacobson treatsriots and poverty only as fodder for good literature,with little sense of social purpose.In the forward, Jacobson reveals his intention ofnot merely writing his autobiography (or, as it turnedout, a series of discontinuous “autobiographies”),but also “to produce tales, real stories, narrativeswhich would provoke the readers curiosity and satisfyit.” If good fiction is invisible autobiography, Jacob¬son’s polarization of experience and narrative is un¬fortunate. When he writes “Life does not writestories. Events have no regard for narrative shapeli¬ness,” he places too much burden on the author, aburden that he, and perhaps nobody, can carry. Henever relaxes his grip long enough to let the story in¬trinsic to his experience unfold, for he is so afraid thatthere will be none unless he puts one there. As a result,you see evidence of the craftsman all over his work;Jacobson is caught over and over again forcing a nar¬rative line on an experience that rejects it. Alwaysarmed with a quote, Jacobson would never allow him¬self to have an experience that wouldn’t be alluding togreat literature. Lhot remains for him “pre-eminentlythe poet of London; as much London’s poet as Dick¬ens is still its novelist.” As he rides around on Lon¬don’s subway, he wonders “why there haven’t beenany illusions to the underground.” In The Calling hemelodramatically recounts the moment when he knewhe must be a writer. The book is full of instanceswhere you get the sense that the story-line and whatreally happened don’t fit together. It’s like he said, asa young man reading a lot of literature, “Boy, I’d liketo experience life like this,” but found that the onlyway he could was by writing the whole thing himself.He is reluctant to tell things as he saw them and in¬stead tells us what he thought about them. He is afraidthat if he lets up on his analysis he’ll miss the crucialelement of the scene. Therefore, we read on the dust-jacket of his “painful, passionate detail.” It’s painfulto read. It’s painful to see someone so afraid of miss¬ing the meaning of their life that they hold onto every¬ thing they can get their hands on. I question his discre¬tion in choosing what experiences to describe. Iquestion his ability to choose the pertinent elements ofan experience....it was Hyde Park itself which was imposingand the lumps of statuary just inside and out¬side the park, and the glimpses of street andbuilding beyond. It was mid-afternoon, in lateMarch, and bitterly cold,etc, and other gratuitous detail.How could he get so waylaid, as to confound thepertinent and unimportant moments of his life? Hecomes into experiences with a set of preconceptions ofhow they should turn out, which he learned fromreading books. He writes, in “Time of Arrival”, astory about his first days in London: “In the novels Iread, young men in the position I was in were contin¬ually picking up attractive girls in streets and parksand bookshops; I had no such luck...l hadn’t theknack.” Even with the self-awareness present in thisquote, we never get the sense from Jacobson that heever gave up hope for a life “with narrative shapeli¬ness” and wonders if, perhaps, he just doesn’t “havethe knack.” You can’t just write a narrative life. Lifedoes write stories, or at least deserves more of a voicethan Jacobson allows it. His mistake comes up mostembarassingly in an autobiography called “Fate, Art,Love, and George.” Jacobson takes an absolutely turning point. You know, ho\takes on meaning in the great <Jacobson chooses a meaninglesmeant to bear any meaning. Ofwith a stranger, that leads him isix years later will introduce hinwrites with almost laughable ea(for me) he existed solely to ormy life, and then vanish.” Herson writing things into an expeltake any experience and makiJacobson’s unwillingness tocial conditions in South Afric“expatriation” to literary Londerstood through what he wrCambridge critic by the nameideal community, Leavis holds,reader. One can bring this prinexistence without even stirringmakes perfect sense that Jacob:a notion. Ideal community doesis “experienced only inside my iertheless feels more like the realcould imagine myself joining,brutality (or maybe just the in<South African experience thatinto literature. After reading L<as if the ‘Republic of Letters’,and transformed into a homelasee Jacobson escaping to the saized literature, and it is only in“expatriate”, not just from S<the entire real world.iiLJacobsons experiences cjust have well been set in LOhio...only periodically purby an awareness of apart!Joseph Lelyveld Times Correspondent SpeaksMove Your ShadowBy Joseph LelyveldTimes Books, 1985389 pp, $18.95by Laura JasperJoseph Lelyveld returned to South Africa fourteenyears after his expulsion to report the changes that oc¬curred during his absence. Sent under the auspice ofthe New York Times on both occasions, his secondtrip began in 1980, endured three years, and enabledhim to witness modern South Africa.Lelyveld attempts to investigate apartheid: how theblacks and non-blacks view their lives, how they livetheir lives and their hopes of change — furtherchange. Within hours of returning, Lelyveld witnessesa pass-law arrest (or harassment, as it turns out).Upon investigation, Lelyveld discovers that the men involved and their friends have no great interest in theincident or Lelyveld’s eagerness to disclose or under¬stand the injustice. The harassment seems to be anorm which is impossible to change. Living with it ismuch easier.Although the blacks overtly seem to passively toler¬ate such activity, many are dilligently working to de¬stroy the rule of apartheid covertly. For many yearsthe anti-apartheid cause has not been supported by asingle voice in Parliament, but by thousands of voicesin hidden corners trying to construct a method ofchange. As often happens when covert activity isplanned, police interrogation follows, and the human¬ity of these tactics should certainly be questioned andacted upon. Despite the weak voice of the majoritybeing barely heard, it continues to pause for breath inpreparation for uttering more, hoping to motivateapartheid supporters to reconsider their form of gov¬ernment. As Lelyveld pursues his invea member of a circus audience cand his cage of lions, hor so:mance appears to be under thtrainer, but he is out numberidoes a whip restrain the tigers'vestigate this thoroughly enouanalysis for future change, bucage, the tigers and the whip ’has a developed description oftion of the cage in the circusIf Lelyveld does clarify any aation, it is illusion that the tigerin order to pass another day. Lperience of the oppressed undesion and their desire fer a saLelyveld’s investigation in Miformative for the person intere:one of the greatest injustices ofing a more comprehensive sociaof conditions in South Atrica,as a supplement.18—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985?s couldn Dayton,mncturedirtheid.” well as historians have been guilty of manipulating ev¬idence to produce conclusions that confirm their pre¬judices.” Presumably, then, this criterion for assess¬ment requires a probe into a myth’s scientific truth.The ‘‘third criterion for assessing political myths isutilitarian. In applying this criterion, one asks notwhether the myth is technically an accurate account ofevents, nor whether it is compatible with scientificknowledge, but whether its effects are good or bad.The answer to this question will vary with the valuesof the respondent (pp. 17-18).”What is most troubling about this discussion is thatthe motivation behind such an assessment of politicalmyths is never made clear. In the concluding chapterof the book Thompson focuses on the relative easeand comparative difficulty of removing the Slagters-nek and Covenant myths from the Afrikaner politicalmythology respectively. It might appear from this thatthe ultimate purpose of the analysis of Afrikanermythology is to understand better how to combat it.At this point in the history of the liberation of SouthAfrica such a purpose is both understandable andlaudable. The sooner the Afrikaner mythology standsdiscredited — especially in the Afrikaner conscious¬ness — the easier the overcoming of Afrikaner resis¬tance becomes, and ultimately, the easier the re-inte-gration of the Afrikaner into humanity. But such anattribution of purpose to Thompson might be pure distinction from other races (p. 69).” Strictly speakingthe core assumption is not a myth: it is not a tale toldabout the past. According to Thompson, however, itis buttressed by a myth: that Africans came to SouthAfrica about the same time as the whites and, there¬fore, have no greater historical claim to the land thanthe whites.As far as the core assumption is concerned, Thomp¬son notes quite correctly, that until World War II itwas certainly not peculiar to South Africa: it was justas prevalent in Europe and North America. Racism,and often a very blatant undiluted racism, was partand parcel of the imperial creed which the white mancarried into Asia, Africa or the New Worlds, no mat¬ter whether it took the form of Manifest Destiny orthe White Man’s Burden. After World War II, howev¬er, the rest of the world witnessed a change. The em¬pires crumbled and new nations of people of coloremerged with growing .self-confidence. The old‘‘science” of phrenology — and its successor, eugen¬ics (and finally, today, IQ) — that had served to legi¬timize racism also withered away. By the 1960’s rac¬ism and discrimination was even being successfullychallenged in the white-dominated United States.Meanwhile, in South Africa, racism was being institu¬tionalized: starting with the (almost all white) victoryof the Nationalist Party in 1948, a system based onunassimilable races/separatenations assumptions persist... ”speculation on my part: I doubt that Thompson hadas overt a political project in writing this book as Iwould like him to have. In any case some problemsremain: no matter whether my attribution of politicalpurpose to Thompson is entirely correct, the tripartitedivision of criteria for assessment of political mytho¬logy is still unclear. In my scheme of things the assess¬ment of “utility” would take precedence over theothers. After all, there might be “incorrect” mythsthat are “good” from Thompson’s utilitarian point ofview: myths which, though based on faulty history orscience, perform some useful function from somepoint of view. A further problem with the analysis isthat the separation of the criterion of historical veraci¬ty from that of scientific probability does not makethat much sense: both are conditions of probable '•truth. The real distinction is the one between a criteri¬on of correctness and a criterion of utility.Much more important than these shortcomings isthe insight that Thompson provides into the process ofthe establishment and the possibility of the dissolutionof the Afrikaner political mythology. The first mythhe analyzes is the myth of “unassimilable races.”“The core assumption,” of Afrikaner political ideo¬logy “is that races are the fundamental divisions ofhumanity and that different races possess inherentlydifferent cultural as well as physical qualities. In themodern South African context, white people, as explicitly on racial separation and domination, name¬ly, apartheid, was introduced and gradually becameentrenched.The “arrival myth,” as I will dub the tale that theAfricans arrived in South Africa at the same time asthe whites, has also been shown to be false. Thompsontraces how this myth gradually became part of theAfrikaner mythology based on nothing but some fan¬ciful speculation by seventeenth and eighteenth-centu¬ry European travelers. According to them these indig¬enous Africans must have been of Arabic originsimply because they practised circumcision and occa¬sionally had similar features! A myth based on “evi¬dence” as flimsy as this became an integral part of themythology because it justified white dispossession ofAfrican land. Twentieth-century research, especiallyin archaeology, has conclusively demonstrated thatAfrican settlement in South Africa dates back at leastto 300 A.D. Unfortunately, Thompson does not elab¬orate on what he perceives to be the connection be¬tween the arrival myth and the core assumption of un¬assimilable races. While they are certainly consistentwith each other, on the face of it, they seem to bemaking independent points: the core assumption at¬tempts to justify racial separation while the arrivalmyth attempts to legitimize white presence in SouthAfrica.to page 20lind of the White Tribeogy of Apartheid)nahotra Sarkar/ears from now December 16th>ughout a liberated South Afri-> an anniversary of the foundingwe(MK) on December 16, 1961,F the African National Congressiber 16th is also an anniversaryof thousands of Zulus by four;ht Afrikaners, their “colored”and about sixty African allies,the massacre is associated withlie vow the four hundred andare supposed to have made —to their god and to observe thatving. That vow alone made pos-tory; after all, given the discrep-two forces, the Afrikaner victo-of a miracle. Careful historicalas Leonard Thompson demon-der consideration, that no suchiis vow continues to be invoked/ since it explicates several cru-leology: the religious mission ofits contact with its god, and soow serves to legitimize the ideo-> and the crime they perpetrate,>ast and tries to describe it as atow, how a meaningless eventle great chain of things? Well,eaningless event that was neverning. Of a negligible encounterads him to meet the friend who)duce him to his future wife, he;hable earnestness, “It was as ifely to open his mouth, change>h.” Here, again we see Jacob-an experience, thinking he canind make it literary,gness to frankly respond to so-th Africa, and his subsequentary London can be better un¬it he writes of his mentor, ahe name of F.R. Leavis. The'is holds, is between author andthis primary community “intoi stirring from the room.” Itat Jacobson is attracted to suchnity does not require action butiside my own head...which nev-e the real thing than any other Ijoining.” Perhaps it was thest the inappropriateness) of hisnee that caused him to retreat:ading Leavis, he writes “it wasLetters’...had been opened upa homeland.” Consistently, weto the sanitary world of canon-s only in this sense that he is anfrom South Africa, but from namely, apartheid. As far as I know, for the SouthAfrican liberation movement, though December 16this a day of historic importance, there is as yet noapochryphal tale associated with it. Perhaps in the fu¬ture, after South Africa has been liberated some suchstory will be invented, and the story then used to legi¬timize a new ideology. I hope not. For, as we shall seelater, one of the easiest ways to discredit an ideology isto destroy its credibility and the last thing that a liber¬ated South Africa would need is an ideology thatcould be discredited quite so easily.The book being reviewed is primarily about threecrucial “myths” that have, at various points, beenused to legitimize the ideology of Afrikaner national¬ism in South Africa. A “myth,” for Thompson, issimply “a tale told about the past to legitimize or dis¬credit a regime.” A political mythology is “a clusterof. such myths that reinforce one another and jointlyconsitute the historical element in the ideology of theregime or its rival.” The three myths analyzed in thebook form the core of the mythology of Afrikaner na¬tionalism which legitimizes the ideology of the aparth¬eid state. The first is the myth of unassimilable raceswhich has routinely been used to justify racial segrega¬tion and the associated discrimination. The second isSlagtersnek, an insurrection by a few Boers at the east¬ern frontier of Cape Colony seeking personal revengethat was later reinterpreted as a nationalist Boer revoltagainst British imperialism. The third is the myth ofthe Covenant which has already been mentioned.However, behind the description and analysis of thesemyths lies a much more general enterprise. Accordingto the author, Leonard Thompson, political myths are“ubiquitous in the modern world” and serve to legi¬timize political ideology. It is crucial that historiansand scholars not only reexamine these myths but alsobring the result of this reexamination to the generalpublic. “Everywhere,” declares Thompson, “power¬ful people make decisions that affect human lives andprosperity in the light of historical images that theyhave acquired in their youth, even though scholarsknow them to be false. This book is an attempt toexamine this problem, using South Africa as a testcase .”All the same, in thinking about Thompson’s book Ihave been compelled to distinguish sharply between itscase study of apartheid mythology and the theoreticalproject that this case study is supposed to exemplify.The case study is incisive and often brilliantly insight¬ful. Thompson’s scholarship (as Charles J. Stille Pro¬fessor of History at Yale he is one of the West’s lead¬ing Afrikanists) is always apparent. The theoreticalanalysis of political mythology, however, leaves muchto be desired. Thompson has three criteria for assess¬ing political myths. The first is “the special provinceof the historian, who is a technician in the handling ofhistorical evidence. If a myth is compatible with theevidence, it passes a crucial test. If it distorts the evi¬dence, it fails the test and is bad history — and to thatextent an implausible myth.” The second criterion forassessing these myths is their “scientific probability.Scientific knowledge, like historical knowledge, issubject to a process of accumulation...But scientists as: his investigation, he resemblesudience observing a tiger trainer. For some reason the perfor-under the control of the singlenumbered by the tigers. Howhe tigers? Lelyveld does not in-hly enough to develop a goodange, but he does describe theie whip well. The reader neverption of the trainer or the loca-he circus as a whole,ifv any aspect of the whole situ-the tigers create for themselveser day. Lelyveld reveals the ex-sed under the strain of oppres-fer a satisfying life,ion in Move Your Shadow is in-jn interested in a description ofstices of the day. To those seek-sive social and political analysisAfrica, this book will only act South African women waiting on line to apply for jobs.Apartheid: In and Out of FocusThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—19continued from page 19All this is familiar history and, for themost part, Thompson gives an admirablyclear account of it. What is not clear,though, is exactly what Thompson believesto be the causal factors that enabled the es¬tablishment of the apartheid state. If theideological assumptions of South Africa andthe United States were so similar in 1945,and here I concur entirely with Thompson,what permitted the entrenchment of aparth¬eid in South Africa while it was usually beingsuccessfully challenged in the United States?Surely, mere consistency and correctness ofan ideology is not enough. Thompson notesthat the exposure of the falsity of the coreassumption, and associated myths, has creat¬ed a crisis for Afrikaner ideology. 1 am notsure what to make of this. If apartheid iscrumbling, and I believe it is, it seems as ifthe reasons for it are the growth of the liber¬ation movement, the emergence of militantand powerful Black labor unions, and to alesser extent, economic pressures fromabroad. I am afraid that the collapse of ideo¬logy is a result of these factors rather than acause: it is always possible to invent newmyths to bolster up any ideology or struc¬ture. The South African regime has beenparticularly adroit at this. Since themid-1970’s, after the doctrine of “unassail¬able races” became unacceptable, especiallyto the international community, apartheid’spropagandists carefully modified their jar¬gon to couch apartheid in terms of differentnations rather than different races. Aparth¬eid is now the separate development of dif¬ferent nations, no longer the separate destinyof separate races.The two other myths analyzed are S/ag-tersnek and the Covenant. The incorpora¬tion of both of these myths into the Afri¬kaner mythology follows a similar pattern.In each case the initial episode, though im¬portant, was nothing momentous and wasrapidly forgotten. The episode was then laterconsciously revived and embellished, dis¬crepancy with known facts ignored, and usedfor some overt political purpose. Slagtersnekwas used to arouse Boer nationalist feelingagainst British imperialism and to lay thefoundations of the ideology of Afrikaner na¬tionalism. The Covenant was used to justifythe white domination of South Africa: by thevow that constituted the Covenant the white race — now expanded gradually to includeAfrikaner as well as British — was bound toits god to fulfill its destiny in South Africa.Subsequent historical work showed both epi¬sodes to have been greatly modified in theircorresponding myths. Independent of its fal¬sity, the Slagtersnek myth was eventuallydropped from Afrikaner mythology in theinterest of white — Afrikaner and British —unity against black. The Covenant continuesto dominate the Afrikaner mind to this day:when in March 1979 well-known Afrikanerhistorian Floris van Jaarsveld attempted toquestion some of its elements during an aca¬demic conference, a gang of forty membersof Afrikaanse Weerstandbeweging (Afri¬kaans Resistance Movement) burst into theroom and literally tarred and feathered. . *4.., • -ft • i could have been removed from the mytho¬logy quite so easily while the Covenant seemsto be so much more deeply entrenched. Heargues that Slagtersnek, being a secular anti¬imperialist myth, was peripheral to the ideo¬logy. Because of its secular nature it could bedropped without the legitimacy of the entireideology being brought into question. TheCovenant, being an explicitly religious mythis central to the ideology: it could not bedropped without jeopardizing the entireideology in question.Here, once again, I find myself disagree¬ing, at least in part with Thompson. 1 haveno doubt that there are some myths that areperipheral and others that are central in therole that they play in legitimizing an ideo¬logy. I also do not doubt that the Covenantmom native reservelit NilTIMIKl PfISMlEiMt TIE PltCUIMH<1111II lllllf IIMttfCIMHUNTINGSTRIET1V PROHIBITEDSOROMASINBOORLING RESERVAATtlltf HttMKM PEIJOM HIHE tEPIHUMEEIIE N> IEHU1IS OHMIfWS Ul lEKNHtJAG STRENG VERBODEhim.Thompson recounts the careers of thesemyths in elaborate detail and the chaptersdevoted to them make fascinating reading.Here at last is the origin of the Afrikanerideology put in a proper historical setting,the often-repeated “seige mentality” of theAfrikaners — the Laager — put in perspec¬tive and the Afrikaner recalcitrance to racialreform at least partly “explained.” 1 havenot seen a more complete treatment of theevolution of Afrikaner ideology before:though the book focuses on the three mythsalready mentioned it ends up providing amuch more general introduction to Afri¬kaner ideology as a whole. Thompson alsospeculates as to why the Slagtersnek myth is more central than Slagtersnek in Afrikanermythology. It seems, however, there is amuch simpler explanation than Thompson’sas to why Slagtersnek disappeared from themythology so rapidly. As Thompson notes,political myths are created and perpetuatedby historians or authors of text books withovert or covert political agendas. Similarlymyths can also be removed from public con¬sciousness by being excluded by the sameagents. When Afrikaner nationalism had tobe fostered, and Afrikaner resistance to Brit¬ish imperialism inspired, as Thompsonnotes, Slagtersnek was introduced, oftenconsciously, into the relevant literature. Andwhen white, that is, Afrikaner-British unitybecame the task to accomplish, I suspect it was quite consciously dropped. (Or perhapsunconsciously: the overt reason for its exclu¬sion might have been an attempt to patch uppast differences between the white allies.)And after it disappeared from the writtenworks, it was only a matter of time before itdisappeared entirely from the Afrikaner con¬sciousness. That the factual basis for themyth was erroneous might have been impor¬tant, might have provided some rationale, orrather, rationalization for those responsiblefor its exclusion but 1 am not sure how im¬portant a role it played in the course ofevents.There is as yet no reason for those thatdominate South Africa today, apartheid’smasters, to dispense of the Covenant —hence its persistence. Historians have de¬monstrated the factual errors at the basis ofthe myth, but in a society where education isas tightly controlled as South Africa, thetransition from scholarly journal to textbookis anything but certain. Perhaps its religiosityexplains why the Covenant is so central toAfrikaner ideology: it does not explain itspersistence. The unassimilable races/sepa¬rate nations assumptions persist, too, andthey have nothing to do with religion.For those of us who work for the libera¬tion of South Africa the problem is notmerely to discredit the ideology behindapartheid by exposing the falsity of its myth¬ology: the task at hand is to formulate anideology of liberation. Moreover, this ideo¬logy has to be more than an ideology of resis¬tance and it has to go beyond the liberaldemocratic agenda of the Freedom Charterof the South African people. This ideologyhas to be one that carries over into the nextphase — when the apparatus of the liberatedSouth African state is being created. PerhapsThompson’s book contains one very impor¬tant lesson for those who undertake thisprocess: when the ideology of the liberatedSouth Africa is being formulated, and per¬haps a mythology constructed for its legiti¬mization, we have to be careful in our recapi¬tulation of past historical events. I am notarguing that we can write “true history” inany strict sense of the term but, certainly, wecan write histories that are more accuratethan others. It is here that we have to becareful so that the historical veracity of ournew mythology cannot be very easily ques¬tioned. ®OUR REGULAR PRICE• COMPLETEsingle visiondesigner glasses$3375Offer expires 12/13/85Contacts & SmsUnlimitedGLASSES AT OURGOLD COAST LOCATION ONLY!1051 N. Rush SI. • 642-EYES(At State/Cedar/Rush, above Solomon Cooper Drugs) CONTACTLENSESOUR REGULAR PRICE30 day extendedwear lenses$2495SOFIA! YTE AM) BAl SC H AM)OMBOMA . PROFESSION YE FEEADDITION YE REQl IKEI).Offer expires 12/13/85Contact LensesUnlimitedEVANSTON11724 Sherman Ave.864-4441 NEWTOWN2566 N. Clark St.880-5400 GOLD COAST1051 N. Rush St.(At State/Cedar/Rusb,above Solomon Cooper Drugs)642-EYES20—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985■Reconsidering Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarinby Mary EvansTavistock, 1985985 pp. $8.95 (paper)by Janet AfaryFor more than two decades the life andwritings of Simone de Beauvoir and in par¬ticular The Second Sex have continued to bea major source of influence and discussionamong modern feminist writers. What hascurisouly been missing from his literature,however, has been a critical re-examinationof de Beauvoir’s writings in light of the con¬tributions of the women’s movement sincethe 1960s. This surprising reluctance on thepart of modern feminists to critique de Beau¬voir becomes even more curious when we re¬alize that de Beauvoir’s feminism, upon heradmission, took many years after The Sec¬ond Sex to emerge.First published in 1949, The Second Sexincluded a pioneering study of women’s sex¬uality and defined her social role in thevarious stages of life, where de Beauvoir’spoint of reference became images of womenin culture (i.e. novels, plays, diaries andmyths). What was left out, or under-estimat¬ed in her work, however, was the century ofstruggle for women’s rights which was to betaken up by the women’s movement in the1960s.In Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Man¬darin, Mary Evans tries to rectify some ofthis history of silence and analyzes de Beau¬voir’s life and writings in light of the con¬tributions by modern women writers. Evansargues that the feminism of de Beauvoir wasshaped by the very patriarchal values andhabits that the women’s movement today hascome to question and condemn. For deBeauvoir, Evans writes, it was never a matterof accepting traditional femininity. Yet the‘modern woman’ which de Beauvoir present¬ed seemed to be demanding little more than areorganization of education and socializa¬tion of young girls, thus, in many ways this‘emancipated woman’ completely adhered tothe male values and ways of life.The emancipated woman...wants tobe active, a taker, and refuse the pas¬sivity men mean to impose on her.The modern woman accepts mascu¬line values, she prides herself onthinking, taking action, working,creation on the same term as man.Instead of seeking to disparage them,she declares herself his equal...(The Second Sex p. 798)Because de Beauvoir saw women’s biologyas a root cause of her historic dependency in society, she counselled women against moth¬erhood, advocated economic independenceand praised emotional autonomy. ThusEvans in her critique, places de Beauvoirwithin that longstanding tradition of liberalfeminism which has historically fought foraccess to the professions, higher education,control over property and in general theamelioration of Western society, rather thanthe essential presentation of any fundamen¬tal challenge to that society.de Beauvoir represents all that is bestin feminism (and indeed it must besaid in western liberalism) in her con¬stant equivocal support for women’srights to education, employment andthe means of controlling their fertili¬ty. At the same time, she representsmuch that is limited about westernfeminism and again western liberal¬ism, in that she asks few questionsabout differences, particularly ine¬qualities of class and race betweenwomen.Evans begins her critique with a close ex¬amination of de Beauvoir’s personal life.Born in Paris in a middle class family anddetermined from an early age to become awriter, de Beauvoir graduated in Philosophyfrom Sorbonne in 1929. While still a studentshe met Jean-Paul Sartre with whom she wasto remain ‘firm friends’ until his death in1980s.As a young woman, disgusted with thefabric of convenient lies and half truths ofbourgeois culture, de Beauvoir decided tobecome ‘other than’ her mother and womanlike her. The question remained for her:Why do women refuse to recognize the reali¬ty of their situation, why do they passivelysuffer, suppress their rage and accommodateto the patriarchal oppression? In her person¬al life with Sartre, de Beauvoir tried, there¬fore, to overcome this traditional role ofwomen. They agreed neither to marry nor tohave children and de Beauvoir made a pactto complete honesty with Sartre. But Sartrehad also made it perfectly clear, Evanswrites, that “he was not inclined to be mo¬nogamous by nature.” The combination ofthese two ‘givens’ made the relationshipmost difficult and caused de Beauvoir muchtrauma. This was no mere ‘personal’ prob¬lem to her, rather she began to view the con¬tradiction between men and women throughthe Existentialist frame of mind. The majorcause of her anguish was that within thatcontext de Beauvoir could not admit her ownfeelings and her need for exclusivity in therelationship without apparently abandoningher so-called rationality and her belief in thefundamental existentialist principle of freeChild’s PlayIn Lafayette Square, children dance their rhymesaround status, which quicken in midmorningsun eclipsed by hordes of monarchs,a familiar simile. I tried to stem theirsouthward surge, whose mottled wings repaintthe park like withering maple leaves. My fatherread me Treasure Island lighted by a mason jarafire with lightning bugs, a false glow colderthan moonlight floating on the Potomacwhere breakers fractured in my cupped hand.My mother’s engagement ring tightensin the heat around my middle finger;its diamond chip burns through the thingold shank as chestnuts wear latesummer’s sodden green. I wear her ring,but dream my father’s moonstruck dreamsof whirling her Blue Willow into the backyardtree; saucers, plates slip through purpleplums. Their shards return to China claybeneath arthritic roots, awash with rainas cup handles break.In Tore City, I saw fresh stands of pinewhere they carted the very land away,carved it dark as silver slabs, flamestumbling from the toothless mouthsof hearths. We moved when I was ten,the house too small for my stamp bookor my brother’s drawings.—Martha Vertreace choice. It was a contradiction which was tobecome a constant theme of her semi-auto¬biographical novels, and reflected the dilem¬ma she faced in her own life.World War II was to bring a radical trans¬formation of values and aspirations in thelives of de Beauvoir and Sartre. It endedtheir isolation from the political domain andinspired the political activism which becameso characteristic of their lives.De Beauvoir writes of her attitude at thebeginning of the Second World War:‘Hitherto my sole concern had beento enrich my personal life and learnthe art of converting it intowords...It was very still my individu¬al relationships with separate peoplethat mattered most to me, and I stillyearned fiercely for happiness. Thensuddenly, History burst over me, andI dissolved into fragments. I woke tofind myself scattered over the fourquarters of the globe, linked by everynerve in me to each and every indi¬vidual. all my ideas and values wereturned upside down; even the pursuitof happiness lost its impor¬tance., when I ceased to regard mylife as an autonomous and self-suffi¬cient project, I was obligated to re¬discover my links with a universe thevery face of which I had forgot¬ten.”Thus she joined Sartre in supporting theAlgerian revolution at a time when such asupport meant great physical risk for all in¬tellectuals, and in the seventies she spoke outin favor of the legalization of abortion inFrance by signing the ‘Manifesto of the 343’.The theoretic premise for this political acti¬vism, nevertheless remained to be defined bythe philosophy of Existentialism.In 1943 Sartre’s Being and Nothingnesswas published. A central category developedin this work was the fundamental distinctionbetween a consciousness which Sartre de¬scribed as being ‘for-itself’ and the phenom¬enal world which he described as being ‘in-it-self.’ Consciousness that is for-itself is onewhich is radically free. It has the ability todemonstrate one’s perception of the worldand to defy habits and conventions that seemto limit the possibilities of human action.But action, as Evans writes, was not con¬ceived of in terms of transforming society,nor was it even a question of personal adven¬ture into the world of the unknown and un¬orthodox rather it was an action which em¬phasized the human possibilities forrejection of traditional ways of life, as wellas traditional expections. The greatest for anindividual therefore was denying themselvesthis capacity for choice. To follow a courseof action because of guilt, remorse, social re¬straints, or responsiblity to others was to re¬ject what Sartre saw as the most precious ofhuman capacities and the possibility of free¬dom.It was the sentiment called love, Evans be-lives, that caused the greatest difficulty forSartre and de Beauvoir. If we love anotherperson, then the question arises of how toprevent emotions from becoming a con¬straint on the liberty of ourselves and others.The ‘threat’ that loved posed, the possibilitythat relations between men and women be¬cause of love become circumscribed and fallinto the real tradition, was indeed a constanttheme of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s literarywritings.But in the case of Sartre, one may add, asColins and Piere in the essay Holes andSlimes: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysishave suggested we see, that his sentiments onthis question found the form of misogynyand utter sexism. In his central work Beingand Nothingness, on the one hand the Sar-trean concept of ‘in-itself’ had all the’ nega¬tive characteristics of femininity “sweet,clinging, dependent and a threat to malefreedom.” On the other hand the femalecharacters of Sartre’s novels were all virtual¬ly determined by their nature or role in soci¬ety and doomed to defeat in their endeavorsto transform their destiny.“All his women are conventional,natural, instinctively submissive;they seldom reflect or analyze, theyare emotionally swayed and they ex¬hibit the pettiness and malice of nar¬row-minded creatures. In shortSartre relies heavily on stereo-types,refusing to allow his women the indi¬vidual consciousness his male charac¬ters demonstrate. His women seemcomplacently, rightfully, and inevit¬ably imprisoned in their essences, aIhe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—21 De Beauvoir in 1948condition never accepted for malecharacters...”(Women and Philosophy by Gould andWai tofsky, p. 251)This indeed seems to suggest a contraditionas well in the Sartrean concept of human na¬ture, which is supposed to be able to deter¬mine itself, rather than be bound by its na¬ture or social role. Although Sartre revisedsome of his concepts in Being and Nothing¬ness when he moved towards critical Marx¬ism. Nor did it ever become an issue that deBeauvoir would attack as she addressed thequestion of images of women in modernWestern literature. In fact, de Beauvoir’slanguage alone, in The Second Sex, showsthe extent to which she ‘clung’ to Sartre’s un¬derlying theoretic assumption about women,even if she felt that a different socializationof women would ultimately change their po¬sition.women are ‘clinging’, they are deadweight, and they suffer for it; thepoint is that their situation is like thatof a parasite sucking out the livingstrength of another organism. Letthem be provided with living strengthof their own, let them have the meansto attack the world and wrest from ittheir own subsistence and their de¬pendence will be abolished—that ofman also...’(The Second Sex, p. 512)In rejecting de Beauvoir’s Sartrean exis¬tentialism as a possible theoretic premise forthe women’s movement today, Evans seemsto be suggesting an alternative based on anadmixture of feminism and Marxism. Evanswould like to support those aspects of mod¬em feminist writings which have tended tounderline women’s contributions as motherswives and nurturers in society aspects whichwere ignored in de Beauvoir’s writings. Butshe also tries to separate herself from the tra¬dition within feminism which supposeswomen to be inherently ‘peace loving’, sim¬ply because of their biology or maternalfunctions.Instead, she wants to present a ‘historicalmaterialist’ perspective of women’s historywhich would replace de Beauvoir’s or any¬one elses ‘biologically identified’ view point.The problem is that in speaking of socialismor Marxism, Evans confuses everything andeveryone at the same time. For a writer whoseems to be comparing existentialism andMarxism as philosophic concepts, it is sur¬prising that she draws no distinction betweenMarx’s philosophic contributions on the onehand and the existing Communist societies atpresent. Nor does she point to other signifi¬cant philosophic differences which existedbetween Marx and Marxists after him includ¬ing Fredrick Engels. In fact she actually givesus more Engels than Marx, and her point ofreference becomes The Origin of Family,which has been endlessly held up by femin¬ists and anti-feminists alike.As a result of this confusion Evans missesthe chance to theoretically critique de Beau¬voir’s political attitude vis a vis existing so¬cieties, a subject which she does take up inher study of de Beauvoir’s political acti¬vism.In Evans’ account we do see that de Beau¬voir waited until 1971 before she ‘officially’broke with Russia, even though her criticismof that society and its violation of humanfreedom, including women’s rights, longpredated that break. It was then that she cri¬tiqued Russia for ‘having fully disappointedall our hopes.” Evans, however, does notanalyze this aspect of de Beauvoir’s politicalattitude. There certainly had been manymore opportune such as the Stalin purges of1937-38, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939,which signalled the Second World War, aswell as the East European revolts of the1950s and 1960s against Russian Commu¬nism, every one of which was sufficient todestroy the myth of Russia as a ‘socialist so¬ciety’ and could have become a point of de¬parture for de Beauvoir. Unfortunately, itto page 221RevisionsFfcere the light that evaded me for yearshas stayed for an afternoon, distributedso finely over the water, between the wordswe have spoken against the edges of the wind,the land, images made from this common skyof how light catches a broken shell, fadesacross the hull of a wreck so far awaywe see only shadows of what must have beeniron slowly rusting toward the sea,and a sun that rests near dusk in this sandwe sift through an afternoon of abstractions.Wind starts now, from across the baythe white noise of a storm warning,some vague sense of unease, not filteredaway with the sand or dialed from static,not easily dismissable, although I wouldlike it to dissolve with the wavesthe way this light has merged slowlyinto the landscape of a single glance.How amazingly we were once able tobelieve a story could work like that,as though ocean light might deny the spaceit travels, or the light in its cycleforget the time it always marks,as though the finer filters we inventfor light could catch anything at allwithout the minor key irritationsof an ordinary afternoon, wind and sand,as though any of this could happen. VisitorsWhen you were very young a visitor arrivedfrom Russia and stayed the winterto tell your family storiesin a strange accent, of an aunt who livedto be a hundred and twelve. Tonight,two generations later, you take my armas we are about to cross, and say you do notlike to see this winter coming,and cannot tell me why. You’ve had dreams,these past seven years, always there isdanger, the one who could save you absentor not answering. An early wind, cold,rattles the branches around us. You wantto know what these dreams mean, why youcry sometimes at night. 1 tell yousome nights I’ve had the same dreams,that it’s all right, that’s on other nightsthe dreams will be good again. You wantto talk about Russia now, it was a landlike the past, like stories, people livedalmost forever there, died peacefully,someone travelled a long way to tell you.—Jane Hoogestraatcontinued from page 21did not.In the 1970s, a more serious critique of deBeauvoir presented by the marxist-humanistphilosopher Raya Dunayevskaya and a col¬league of hers, Olga Domanski. These essayswere recently re-published as part of a collec¬tion of Dunayevskaya’s writings Women’sLiberation and the Dialectics of the Revolu¬tion (1985).Domanski in her essay Women’s Libera¬tion in Search of Theory: The Summary of aDecade, criticizes de Beauvoir’s concept of“awkwardness of woman” Not once in the814 pages of The Second Sex do we ever seewoman, as active, thinking subjects, shewrites. Women are always the object thatterrible things are done to and primarily be¬cause they supposedly allow it to be thatway:De Beauvoir tells us that the slaveswere always conscious of their op¬pression, the proletariat has alwaysbeen in revolt, but women? No desire-evolution dwells within her.(Dunayevskaya, p. 103)All the great women of history whosenames were sprinkled on page after page,Domanski writes, were considered by deBeauvoir as isolated individuals. It was notonly the history of the Paris Commune of1871, and the remarkable participation ofthe women that de Beauvoir belittled, it wasalso the history oi her very own age. Shemissed completely the fact that the postWorld War II pcriodwwhen she was writingher book was the time when women werechallenging the attempts to shove them backinto kitchens. The late 1940s and 1950s be¬came a time when working women began tochallenge social relations and demanded newrelations with fellow workers as they partici¬pated alongside them in strike and sit-ins.They also demanded new relations at home,and when they did not succeed, left home.None of this, Domanski writes, ‘penetratedde Beauvoir’s thinking’.In her essay, Marx’s ‘New Humanism’and the Dialectics of Women’s Liberation inPrimitive and Modern Societies, Raya Dun¬ayevskaya points out the essential problem¬atic of de Beauvoir’s philosophy and its im¬ plications the movement today. A centralissue, she argues, is the assumption that be¬cause of the ‘passivity’ of women, the task ofher liberation becomes the responsiblity ofthe man.In the concluding paragraph of The Sec¬ond Sex, de Beauvoir quotes Marx’s com¬mentaries on the relationship between manand woman in his 1844 Economic Philosoph¬ic Manuscripts. The problem is, Dunayevs¬kaya writes, that she reads Ma x, ‘existen¬tially’! Thus after quoting, by now thisfamous passage, from Marx:The direct natural necessary relation¬ ship of man to man is the relation¬ship of man to woman...From thecharacter of this relation it follows towhat degree man as a species has be¬come human...de Beauvoir proceeds to include:The case could not be better stated. Itis for man to establish the reign ofliberty in the midst of the world ofthe given...It is necessary for onething that by and through their natu¬ral differentiation men and womenunequivocally affirm their brother¬hood.De Beauvoir in the late 70’s Such as interpretation of Marx, Dunayevs¬kaya writes, “runs counter to Marx’sthirst.” As she proceeds to document Marx’sawareness of the role and subjectivity ofwomen throughout history in his writings,Dunayevskaya writes:In a word, de Beauvoir’s high praiseof Marx notwithstanding the conclu¬sion she draws from the essay ofMarx as well as all her data over 800pages fails to grasp the reason Marxsingled out the Man/Woman rela¬tionship as integral to alienation, notonly under capitalism but also whathe called ‘vulgar communism’ His“new Humanism” stressed weshould especially avoid re-establish¬ing society as an abstraction, op¬posed to the individual. The individ¬ual is “the social entity” which iswhy he concluded with the sentence,communism as such is not the goal ofhuman development, the form ofhuman society.It is a critique which both catches the im¬plications of de Beauvoir’s commentary onMarx for the women’s movement and recog¬nizes its deep philosophic flaws, and thus ac¬counts for the problematic we posed earlierin the de Beauvoir’s attitude toward East Eu¬ropean societies. Evans forunately does nottake up these key issues. Instead she wants toforce us back into an Engelsian economic de¬terminism the very type of Marxism the Exis¬tentialists, in however flawed a fashion, hadsought to transcend.At a time when the sheer wealth of infor¬mation on the history of the women’s move¬ment has presented us with a very differentpicture than that portrayed by de Beauvoirand when the numerous attacks on women’sright in the last five years have put the ques¬tion of activism once more on the agenda,Evans work is certainly welcomed in its re¬jection of Existentialism as a theoretic foun¬dation for the woman’s movement and iscertainly a much belated one. Unfortunately,her critique does not go deep enough. It doesnot separate itself from a vulgarized theoryof Marxism, which has been as great adanger to the movement as was de Beau¬voir’s Existentialism. •22—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985EVEN BEFORE FINALS,YOU COULD FINALLY GET THEAMERICAN EXPRESS CARD.If you’ve been wanting the AmericanExpress* Card for some time, this is sometime to apply.Because if you’re a senior, all you needis to accept a $10,000 career-oriented job.That’s it. No strings. No gimmicks.(And even if you don't have a job rightnow, don’t worry. This offer is still good for12 months after you graduate.) Why isAmerican Express making the Card alittle easier for seniors to get?Well, to put it simply, we be¬lieve in your future. And this isa good time to show it—for we can help in a lot of ways as you graduateThe Card can help you be ready for busi¬ness. It's a must for travel to meetings andentertaining. And to entertain yourself,you can use it to buy a new wardrobe forwork or a new stereo.The Card can also help you establishyour credit history, which can help inyour future.So call 1-800-THE-CARD and ask to havea Special Student Application sentto you. Or look for one on campus.The American Express" Card.Don’t leave school without it.5”O 1985 American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. APARTMENTSFOR RENTGRAFF &CHECK1617 E. 55th StSpacious, nswly-dtcoralw1 Vi, 2 Vi, 6 room, studios 41 bodroom opart monti ina quiot, woll-malntainodbuilding.Immadlata OccupancyBU8-5566A CLASSIC RESIDENCEIN ACLASSIC LOCATION! FIFTY-TWO HUNDREDI SOUTH BLACKSTONETHE BLACKWOODLuxury, high rise apartmentbuilding in the Hyde Park area nowoffering a limited selsction of oneand two bedroom apartments.Situated near the Illinois Central,University of Chicago, HarperCourt and only a short walk fromthe lake, our apartments feature cen¬tral air conditioning, individuallycontrolled heat, ceramic tile, securi¬ty intercom, new appliances andwall to wall carpeting. Onebedrooms from only $450, twobedrooms from $575. Ask about ourstudent and faculty discount.684-8666marian realty,inc.mrealtorStudio and 1 BedroomApartments Available— Students Welcome —On Campus Bus LineConcerned Service5480 S. Cornell684-5400YOU'RE RIGHT!!THE MBA DEGREEIS ATTAINABLELEARN MORE ABOUTTHE MBA ATA FREE SEMINAR FORBLACKSTUDENTSSPONSORED BY THEGRADUATE MANAGEMENTADMISSION COUNCILTuesday, December I0,19856:30 pm-7:30 p.m.LOOP COLLEGE,30 East Lake Streetat Wabash Avenue, Room 20I,in downtown ChicagoNo Registration Required life Stars Are' Out All Ctau AtBM5CH GARDENSAmerica’s European theme park inWilliamsburg, Va. is conducting auditions forover 200 singers, dancers musicians, variety ar¬tists, actors, technicians, stage managers, andsupervisors. You could be part of the cluster ofstars at Busch Gardens. So get your acttogether and come “shine” at our 1986Auditions!!!!Audition Date:CHICAGO, ILLINOISMONDAY, JANUARY 13,12-6 p.m.The Palmer House Hotel17 East Monroe St. at State St.The Wabash Parlor Room mThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—23CHOCOLATE SOUP IS COMINGIf Elizabeth Barrettand Robert Browning hadAT&T’s 60% and 40% discounts,it would have been a terribleloss for English literatureAnd of course, she wouldn’t have had torestrict her feelings to a mere sonnet’slength, either.After all, you can always think of onemore way to tell someone you love themwhen you’re on the phone.Let us count the ways you can save.Just call weekends till 5pm Sundays, orfrom 11pm to 8am, Sunday through Friday,and you’ll save 60% off AT&T’s Day Rate/ • on your state-to-state calls.Call between 5pm and 11pm, Sundaythrough Friday, and you’ll save 40% on yourstate-to-state calls.So when you’re asked to choose a longdistance company, choose AT&T. Becausewith AT&T’s 60% and 40% discounts, youcan satisfy your heart’s desire withoutexhausting your means.Reach out and touch someone;rnATsT==F The right choice.24—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985Ticket Stubsand SnapshotsManny and Roseby Joan K. PetersSt. Martin’s Press, 1985309 pp. $15.95by Lu Ann JacobsThirty-five years ago Faulkner accurately described Joan K. Peters’ first novel,Manny and Rose, when he wrote of the modern author: “He writes not of love butof lust, of defeats in which no one loses anything of value, of victories without hopeand, worst of all, without pity or compassion. He grieves on no universal bones,leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”It’s not the Peters didn’t try. Take her main themes: death (the novel begins andends symmetrically, with a death) and love (the love between a father and a daugh¬ter.) Surely, these qualify as “problem*; of the human heart in conflict with itself”which, Faulkner claimed, “alone can make good writing.” Unfortunetly, after rush¬ing in where angels fear to tread, Peters offers us only well-written emptiness. Shecaptures something of the truth by sheer technical accuracy, much like an InstamaticKodak records moments that did actually happen to someone somewhere, withoutoffering us anything more.Peters, steady and loving vision” shows us how repulsive we look when we eatmeat and the grease dribbles down our chin; how we respond when a garage me¬chanic fingers our nipples, tight, as if he were winding a watch; how angry and lostwe are when our parents go right on ahead and die, leaving us with words stillunspoken. In doing this, and nothing more, she insults us by implying that it takesan artist to call our attention to things which every person who rides with MannyHerman on the crowded subways from Manhattan to Queens has already observed,without having to put it on paper. All of us collect our snapshots and ticket stubs,very few create art. One closes the book with a “So what?”. ® MeditationNight is no longer a comfort.A reed bent by the expanse of waterSheds its green without a cry. YetWe colour it with the color of a pupil.A stone stands into the sky.How ludicrous; strict and stiff itMelts into the dust like a face.Pity it—it had no hands.And I between reed and stone?Hands I have without colour,Yet gazing at them is not a darknessThough its intimation. It is aPainful realization: the weight ofFlesh can never achieve a cloud, butSkin alone touches beyond air. ListenTo its sound and hear the silence I cannot.I am alone. A bird entangled in the skyHas a scream which cracks like theSun. My voice has dried becoming mud. WhereAre You? The ringing of circles close black.And I agree with the dark shuddering ofA tarp washed with light like a hand,Forming the night like damp lipsSlightly parted in a quiet breath ofClosed eyes. Where am I? The seaSputters overhead, diffracting theLight into a thousand wings of ice.I do not glitter lost in random pathsLooking for my cross without tears.—Michael Sohn?Galapagosby Kurt VonnegutDelacorte, Press, 1985293 pp, $15.95by Mari SchindeleIn Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonne¬gut tells of a letter he receives from a teenagefan accusing him of “putting bitter coats onsugar pills.” Vonnegut agrees that, while hisbooks are superficially cynical and pessimis¬tic, he has a deep underlying faith in humani¬ty’s strengths. Nowhere is this theme morereadily apparent than in his latest novel, Ga¬lapagos. In it, Vonnegut alludes to the de¬struction of the human race (which is facili¬tated by humankind’s “big brains”), butconcentrates on its rebirth and evolution.The story, told be Leon Trout (the son ofKilgore Trout, a favorite Vonnegut charac¬ter), involves several unusual personalities,including a middle-aged teacher, a German-Ecuadorean sea captain, a chronically de¬pressed lesbian wife of a genius, and sixyoung cannibals. These people meet in Ecua¬dor to embark on the “Nature Cruise of theCentury.” Their individual histories alter¬nate with the main story line: the destructionand rebirth of mankind. For your conven¬ience, the list below contains some of thebest subplots:—A ghost’s choice between staying withhumanity or going to the “great blue tunnelof the afterlife”—The untimely destruction of Mandarex,a super-intelligent but ultimately useless ma¬chine Human Being as—The lovely mating dance of the blue¬footed booby (a part of which is pictured onthe cover of the book)—A sociopathic executive’s plot to buyEcuador—A male prostitute’s clever method ofswindling little old ladies.Monitoring other subplots won’t spoil theplot of the story (Vonnegut leaves few sur¬prises for the end) but will wreck the fun.Galapagos is typical Vonnegut fare in that itis packed with ridiculous and/or thought-provoking situations. Veteran Vonnegutfans will also recognize some of his “regu¬lars”: Eliot Rosewater, a loving philanthro¬pist, is alluded to, although not by name;Dwayne Hoover, the richest man in MidlandCity (and his randy wife) employ the maleprostitute as a gardener; there is yet anotherdog named Kazakh; and Kilgore Trout, theincredibly obscure and creative science-fic¬tion writer, returns with things to say abouthuman mistakes, the “great blue tunnel ofthe afterlife,” and his own writing.Because he has so many subplots to dealwith, Vonnegut’s method of storytelling canbe a little unnerving. He uses the same frag¬mented, haphazard technique he perfected inSlaughterhouse 5. While non-chronologicalstorytelling is more than appropriate in thatnovel, which begins, “Listen: Billy Pilgrimhas come unstuck in time,” it can be frus¬trating in a more straightforward novel likeGalapagos. Knowing that, but not how,things will happen in the end (Vonnegut putsasterisks before the names of characters whowill die soon) works well, but the constantlyinterrupted and interrupting subplots aresometimes irritating. To give Vonnegut cred¬it, Leon, the narrator, looks back over onemillion years and tells things as he re¬members them. In fact, he devotes the lastchapter to the “tacking on of a few not veryimportant details...in no particular order.”Leon’s fragmented but realistic narrationmakes up for the inconvenience of tangledsubplots.Vonnegut’s characteristic use of sarcasmreinforces many of his points about humanfailings. Leon, from the perspective of onemillion A.D., tells us that most of human¬kind’s problems are due to oversized brains:“There was no other source (of evil). Thiswas a very innocent planet, except for those Enormous Braingreat big brains.” The teacher’s brain urgesher to kill herself at the beginning of thenovel, while her husband’s brain convinceshim that he killed his neighbor’s dog duringthe atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Evolu¬tion solves all these problems by producing ahuman race which resembles a colony ofcontented sea lions. It is here that Vonnegutbecomes ambiguous. Leon loves these gentlehumans because war is eliminated: “Even ifthey found a grenade...how could they evermake use of it with just their flippers andtheir mouths?” Yet this doesn’t seem to beVonnegut’s utopia. The instinctive, routinelife of the new humans bores Leon to no end(he is more than ready to join his father inthe “great blue tunnel of the afterlife” byjthe end of his story), and he readily admitsthat “Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” Vonnegut’sascerbic observations of man’s stupidity, de¬spite an excess of brain tissue, are clearly the“bitter coat.” But is the new race of humansthe “sugar pill”? He leaves this partially un¬clear, although there are frequent hints thatit is people’s potential for peace, and notplacidity, which he counts on.Galapagos is a wonderful, entertainingbook which makes for an interesting and op¬timistic contrast with the fatalism of Cat’sCradle. It is at least as funny as his othernovels, and thoroughly explores many of hispet topics. Galapagos is a good book forVonnegut “beginners” since it is well writtenand extremely representative of his themesfrom other works. However, it is not so re¬petitive that afficionados will not also enjoyit.*Th? Chicago Literary Review Friday Deremher 6 1985—?SThe Al&T Card eliminates fumbling with coinsand hassling over bills.The AT&T Card. The fast, easy wayto call long distance- from anywhereto anywhere, anytime. The AT&T Card makeskeeping in touch with friends and family a lot moreconvenient when you’re at school.Youll be able to get through on almost any publicphone—on campus or off—without bothering withcoins. And you’ll actually pay up to 50tf less than forAT&T collect, third-party or coin state-to-state calls.In fact, for most calls, it’s the lowest rate next todirect dialing. And there’s no charge to order theCard; no minimum usage fee.You can also use your card to make calls fromother people's rooms: the charge will show up on yourV .v * ■> bill, not theirs. No need to call collect or charge it to athird party.You’ll also eliminate a lot of hassle if you share aphone with roommates. With the AT&T Card, you’llget your own separate monthly bill itemizing onlyyour calls. You’ll pay more per call than if you dialeddirect—but you’ll save a lot of headaches trying tofigure out who owes what.As you can see, the AT&T Card eliminates allkinds of hassles. And you can get one whether or notyou have a phone in your own name. Put The Eliminatorto work for you. Sign up for your AT&T Card by com¬pleting and mailing the attached application. For moreinformation call toll free 1 800 CALL ATT, Ext. 4589.26—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6. 198*!Complete and mail to: The AT&T Card, College Program,P.O. Box 5362, Cincinnati, OH 45201 - 5362Please Print APPLICANT INFORMATIONApplicant’s Full Name (Last, First, Middle) Date of Birth Social Security NumberStreet Address (college) Apt# City State Zip CodeTelephone Number (college)( ) How long at addressvrs. mos. Number of DependentsIncluding SpouseyCollege Telephone is in□ own name □ roommate’s name □ spouse’s name □ do not have a phone in my room □ OtherName of Parent/Guardian Address City State Zip Code Parent/Guardian Telephone No.( )Are you aU.S. Citizen? □ Yes □ No CitizenshipCOLLEGE AND EMPLOYMENT INFORMATIONCollege Name Student Status□ Full Time □ Fr DJr □ Grad□ Part-Time □ Soph □ SrMajor Graduation Date Degree: □ Associate Degree□ Bachelor□ GraduateStudent Housing□ Dorm □ Rent-House/Apt □ Own□ Fraternity/Sorority □ Relatives □ ParentsOther Monthly HousingPavment$_Present Employer Present Position How long?VTS.Source of Other Income □ Grant, Scholarship(check any which apply) □ Summer Job□ Allowance□ Other (identify) mos. Monthly IncomeFrom Present Job$Annual Amountof Other Income$FINANCIAL INFORMATIONCredit references (include charge accounts, installment contracts, finance co., credit cards, rent, etc.).Give complete list of all amounts owing.Name of Creditor City/State Type of Account MonthlyPayments Balance Due$ $$ $$ $Student Loan Financed by $ $Auto/Motorcycle (Yr. & Model) Financed by $ $Other Obligations $ $□ Checking □ Both Checking□ Savings & Savings Bank Name City State□ Checking □ Both Checking□ Savings & Savings Bank Name City StateADDRESS WHERE YOU WANT Bl LL MAILED (card will be mailed to this addressAddress Box # City/State Zip Phone where you may be reached( )I agree to pay for charges to the account in accordance with the terms of the applicable tariffs as explained in the AT&T Card Account Agreement whichAT&T will send me when my application is approved. I understand that my AT&T Card Account is subject to a maximum monthly usage limit of $100. Iunderstand that once the monthly usage limit is reached, my AT&T Card will be deactivated until payment is received.I am aware that information gathered about me will be assessed to determine my eligibility for the AT&T Card Account. If I ask, I will be told whether ornot consumer reports on me were requested and the names and addresses of the credit bureau that provided the reports. I am aware that I must notifyAT&T of any address changes.SIGNATURE: X DateNote: In order to be considered for an AT&T Card, you must complete and sign this application.Omission of any of the information requested in this application may be grounds for denial.FOR RESEARCH ONLYDuring an average month how much do you spend on long distancetelephone calls to places outside your area code?C 1985 AT&T Communications AT&TThe right choice.The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—27Not Logic, but FaithThe Clear Blue Lobster-Water CountryA Trilogy by Leo ConnellanHarcourt-Brace-Jovanovich, 1985158 pp, $15.95by David SullivanThis long narrative poem on the semi-mythical life and hard times of Boppledock;second son of a second generation Irish im¬migrant, reformed alcoholic who is now ahusband and father, opens with a deceptivelydead-pan prayer:Father, we’llmeet again.You can tell me you love me then.Raw AmericaNew World Architectureby Matthew GrahamGalileo Press, 198551 pp. S4.95 (paper)by Kurt SteibMatthew Graham is a young poet fromupstate New York who now teaches creativewriting at Indiana State University. Hispoems have appeared in numerous smallpublications in recent years, but New WorldArchitecture is the first collection of hiswork to be published together as a book.The book is divided into two parts, eachfocusing on a particular theme. The first partcontains poems about his hometown, hisfamily, and memories from the early part ofhis life. The second is predominantly abouthis travels around raw America, concentrat¬ing on the significance of movement, as canbe seen in poems like Trains, California(about a dream lover on a dream train outwest), and Airport. Graham sees travel asopening up the possibility of freedom fromthe past, as of Starting Over: Fortuna, Ne¬braska, the opening poem in part 11. Con¬templating loneliness in a midwestern bar, hecloses by sayingIt’s the only thing I ever tookFrom this place — a kind of proofThat the world can change.Nearly all of the poems have strong sen¬sual imagery, which Graham often uses tocreate a lonely mood. In Christmas, TonjesFarm: Callicoon, New York, he arouses asense of quiet solitude: Boppledock’s impassioned voice with itsrhymes imbedded in thoroughly naturalspeech tie this three-part poem together. Hisvoice verges close to sentimentality but neversubmits. Every fabrication of Boppledock’sfervent imagination is self-consciouslypointed out as a construct by him. Weunderstand him, listen to all his self- con¬demnations, and as with a good friend whosefaults are past judgement, accept him.The poem’s three sections each employ adifferent style to a different end. In BookOne: Coming to Cummington to take Kelly,Boppledock struggles to create a ballad ofmanliness in which he will defeat at fisticuffsan imagined opponent and win his father’slove. The voice is direct, obsessive,repetitive, and in the end, lyrical. The com-Matthew GrahamThe sun moves down a cold roadleavingNothing but a hum in the powerlinesAnd the smell of ham in the bluewood smoke.Even on the road, however, the solitude per¬vades. In Airport, Graham describes it as aplace of passing through that leaves no markon the memory, a stop-gap between experi¬ences:Who will remember the airport or itspossibilities?The airport has no history.People lose their way but no onelives in its shadow'or spends long hours conversingon the concourse, or sleeping on thegrassy stripbetween runways.Graham is a poet who moves, but with astrong sense of place. New World Architec¬ture chronicles the paradoxical struggle ofleaving home in search of home; Grahamtransforms this struggle into a riveting pic¬ture of the American landscape. ^ petition with his older brother is eloquentlysummed up in one example:When they found you deadthe photograph of mein your wallet was aseven-year-old boy photograph.The photograph of my brotherwas of him as a grown man.Though Boppledock can understand whathas happened to him he can’t change it. Hisneed for his father’s affection, and his baldexpression in his clumsy ballad of that need,would be precisely what his father (a sternand self-hating man) would dislike. Yet Bop¬pledock struggles on, for himself as well ashis father, and we feel for him.In the second book Shatterhouse, we findBoppledock is in a detox center foralcoholism. His voice, and the poetry, iscrammed with details, exchanges, wildcharacters, and avoidances. His wife ex¬plodes at one of the nurses and Boppledockdouble, and then triple-thinks hospital logic.Bop waved his handto try to silence Mrs. Bop, showfunctioning—in-society not getting shook by LucyBubblegumsince he had to stay there in Little Hopeafter Mrs. left unless he signed himselfout against medical advice which wouldn’tbedemonstrating how much he reallywanted tobetome well, and now he was beginningnow tofear.All the strange logic of the outside world isfocused in the characters Bop finds in thehospital Little Hope: Bludgeon, George,Toothpick, Featherhat the Farter, and LucyBubblegum. They are attempting to unravelthe logic of the external world, though Bop¬pledock sees that it may not work on logic,but on small acts of faith, “Who knowswhat’s ‘good or ‘bad’...’’ Boppledock asks,“I cannot say to you, my Father...that I donot love you.’’ Perhaps that is what onehopes for, to understand that one will neverunderstand enough to reach any final con¬clusions.Book Three, The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country, shows the scope of personaland national history that contribute to Bop¬pledock’s understanding and acceptance ofphoto by Johanna Stoyva partial answers. He is shot in centralAmerica by confused American soldiers andthinks back on a conversation he had withhis older brother, his Grandfather’s greatdream house, and his own life. Thisfragmented narrative is held together by theregularity of the three line stanzas of roughlythe same length, and by Boppledock’s voice.His voice is as direct as in the first book, butwiser and more controlled. He asks a ques¬tion he must know his father struggled with:What is it that makes usthink we’ll find everythinganywhere else than whereit’s always been, in the arms of our loveand our children, but we do! We alwaysdo it, run to look where nothing is, whatis in us that breaks the heartsof the only people who love us?Later, when Boppledock says we “work sohard but inside ourselves, not/ever lettinganyone know we love them; it wouldbewilder us/that they would think wedidn’t” we are forced to think of his fatheragain. This is Bop’s reconciliation throughrecognition.Leo Connellan has fashioned an epic thatrefuses to adopt the looming, all-seeing voiceof most epics. Its answers are our answers.Personal hard-won nuggets that don’t giveus any greater income, but a somewhat bet¬ter understanding our our outcome.The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country isa poem whose effect depends on the buildingup of a distinct voice that does not alwaysspeak eloquently, or even truthfully, butsometimes does both. And that must beenough. •BreadloafThe Breadloaf Anthology of ContemporaryAmerican Poetryedited by Robert Pack et alU of New England, 1985368 pp, $ 14.95by Kathy SzydagisPretension. I remember mid-spring sittingin a small, cluttered room, bed pushed infront of a window of light. The words I readwere structured perfectly, too perfectly.Nothing simply was — poets afraid of bareemotions till metaphor upon metaphor suf¬focated simple realities. No one said love; 1read “ripened pear.” No one said sun; I read“Grandma’s gleaming silver,” till lack ofcliches became a cliche, and after all, whowants to read a poem like a secret codepassed between soldiers at war?The greatest of poems are those which areunafraid of sharing plain thoughts. Theworld cannot be summed up in an enrap¬tured line of philosophy by a poet wholaughs with nervous sophistication at thetouch of a rose petal. Fortunately, the poetsin this year’s Breadloaf Anthology representsomething different in contemporary writ¬ing. The Breadloaf Anthology is publishedfor the Breadloaf Writer’s Conferenceheld annually for the past 60 years at Middle-bury College in Vermont. The conferencehosts the most recognized poets in America.For the most part, the authors in The Bread¬loaf Anthology are not sitting in marblechairs, looking down upon life, placing aca¬demic complications upon little humantransactions and unadorned emotion. Theyare living with us, sharing, not preaching.His father handed him a sandwichhe had sneaked upstairsinside his baseball cap.(from Clayveld’s Glove, by Robert Pack)Is only one child awake,Breaking the crystal chime?—Knocking them down with a stick,Leaving the broken stems.(from Icicles, by Robert Pinsky)Hence I became eventually, gradual¬ly, unashamed of my mind’s incapac¬ity, just as I had once writtenPoems to be read many times, butwhat was the use of that? Now I writepoems to be read once and forgot¬ten,Or not to be read at all.(from A Post-Impressionist Susurration byHayden Carruth)If this is an accurate representation ofmodern American poetry, 1, for one, amgrateful. I’d like to sec the sun shine outsidemy window once again, even if it’s not agrand svmbol in some sophisticated literarytrend. •28—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985I Looking For ACOMPUTER?See us.CP/M & MS-DOSSystemsAccessoriesSuppliesAuthorized KA YPRO Dealer174314 E. 55th St. 667-2075Hours: 1-6 PM daily, 10-2 Saturdays orby appointmentTRAVELDOMESTIC ORINTERNATIONALNO SERVICE CHARGE • NO GIMMICKSCALL (312) 332-3070ftlPli INTERNATIONAL, INC.■(TV 36 S surf ST CHICAGO ILL 60603MAROONADVERTISERS!Thank you for yoursupport during FallQuarter.We resume publicationon January 10,1986.AD DEADLINE For BothJanuary 10 and January14 issues isJANUARY 5 AT 5:00 P.M.Anti-violence Volunteers: CenterFor Non-Violence Education seekingfull-time staff. Lodging, $150/month,health coverage. Public interestgroup developing courses on non¬violence and operating NationalCoalition on Television Violence na¬tional headquarters. In Champaignnext to University of Illinois.Research, writing, office work,monitoring entertainment. One yearcommitment. Call 217-384-1920.Studios, 1,2, & 3 BedroomApartments AvailableSome Nice Lake ViewsGood LocationHeat IncludedParking AvailableCALLHERBERT REALTY684-23335% Student Discounts9:00 A.M.-4:30 P.M.Monday thru Friday9:00 A.M.-2 P.M.Saturday The Chicago Maroonannounces its SpringAward recipients:Steven AmsterdamKaren AndersonStephanie BaconScott BernardRosemary BlinnMichele BonnarensElizabeth BrooksDennis ChanskyAlex Conroy Kathy EvansChris HillMike llaganKarla Karinen6ruce KingSteve LauFrank LubyCarolyn Mancuso Molly McClainCiaran OBroinJordan OrlandoSusan PawlowskiPaul ReubensPaul RohrMatt SchaeferWayne Scott Rick SengerGeoff SherryPaul SonaFranklin SoultsJoel StitzelDavid SullivanHilary TillRick WojcikCongratulations andThanks for your help lastspring!Pick up checks in Ida Noyesroom 210AAA aaaaaaaaa AAA a aa a aaVIOLIN LESSONSDavid My fordfO year* ftrofewuona/orc/i&itra/ <0Jbec/agoyica/eaj/berience.cPtuc/io- t/7 %/i/e i£arJt^YJforc/a/t/e ra/e*324 id/ifDR. MORTON R. MASLOVOPTOMETRIST•EYE EXAMINATIONS•FASHION EYEWEAR(one year warranty on eyeglassframes and glass lenses)SPECIALIZING IN• ALL TYPES OFCONTACT LENSES•CONTACT SUPPLIESTHt HYDCPARKSHOPPING CENTER15101.55th363-6100•w AN INVITATION TO THE lT of C FAMILY...CHAHUKAHAT SINAITEMPLESunday, December 811:00 A.M.CHANUKAH FESTIVALft nuiCDjVAL SERVICE ^jThe Sinai Choir will perform beautiful musicthe Menorah will be lit. andRabbi Howard Berman will present his Canta‘ A Light Through the Ages:A Chanukah OdysseyA holiday reception will follow the Service.This Service will also be broadcast onDecember 8 at 9:00 p.m. on WNIB-FM 97.Chicago Sinai CongregationLake Shore Drive at 53rd Streetin Hyde ParkTelephone 288-1600Free bus truisportationj^_CaUford£tails^___CHINESE-AMERICAN RESTAURANTSpecializing in Cantoneseand American dishesOpen Daily 11 A.-8 30 P M.Closed Monday1318 I. 63rd MU4-1062 travel HYDE PARK INC.FULL TRAVEL SERVICES -•AIR•AMTRAK• CRUISES • INDEPENDENT•GROUP•TOUR PACKAGESAIRLINE TICKETS AT AIRPORT PRICESCOMMERCIAL ACCOUNTS INVITED667-3900- MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED -The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—29Airboume/EarthboundKingfisherby Amy ClampittKnopf, 1983150 pp, $10.95What the Light Was Likeby Amy ClampittKnopf, 1985110 pp, $8.95by Martha VerteaceIn an interview published in Cream City Review (vol. 9,1984), Amy Clampitt discusses her personal poetic theories,stating that her poetry emanated from “experiences involv¬ing the deeper layers of the psyche.” A poet of details, shelikes “to find things, to notice things that are unintended.”She indicates: “I am interested in rendering sensations ofevery kind.”Clampitt’s two remarkable books illustrate these con¬cerns. In her first book, The Kingfisher, she shows herself tobe a poet of the earth, of physical existence and sensations.The first two sections, “I: Fire and Water” and “II: Air¬borne, Earthbound,” use Empedocles’ physical theory ofcreation as the schema of organization. He assumed that allcreated structures were formed by combinations of the prin¬cipal elements, or “roots,” which were fire, air, water, andearth.Clampitt’s use of these elements goes beyond physical de¬scription. In some of her poems, they even seem to havepsychic analogues. Empedocles asserted that nothing wascreated or destroyed; rather, change occurred because of a mixing of the elemental “roots.” Clampitt achieves this mix¬ing, and through it contrasts domestic life with primal crea¬tivity. In Cove, the opening poem, Clampitt begins by draw¬ing a picture of a cozy domestic scene:Inside the snug house, blue willow-ware plates goround the dado, cross-stitch domesticates the guestroom, whole nutmegs inhabit the spice rack.She watches a porcupine “withdraw from the (we presume)/alarming realm of the horizontal into/ the up-and-down un¬derbrush of normality,” and notices a turtle, “as it hoveeastward, a covered/ wagon intent on the wrong direc¬tion.”She contrasts the “wrong direction” of domestic securitywith the elemental, the unpredictable interplay of sunlighton the ocean:the coveembays a pavement of ocean, at times wrinkling liketinfoil, at other all isinglass flakes or sun-poundedgritty glitter of mica.The poem Meridian, in a similar vein, cautions the readerabout the mesmerizing effect of domesticity which she calls“that/apathy at the meridian, the noon/ of absolute bore¬dom,” rhetorically asking:what is there to lifebut chores and more chores, dishwater,fatigue, unwanted children: nothingto stir the longuer of afternoonexcept possibly thunderheads:climbing, livid, turreted alabasterlit up from within by splendor and terror—forked lightning’ssplit-second disaster.For Clampitt, fire and water produce a volatile mixture,which shakes the foundations of the boring predictability ofdomestic life.The section Airbourne, Earthbound examines human mo¬tivations and our place in the world, using the natural worldas a metaphor. The poem The Cormorant in Its Elementdescribes how the bird “discloses talents/ one would neverhave guessed at.” After describing the cormorant’s flightand diving, Clampitt concludes that the bird:goes into that inimitablevanishing-and-emerging-from-under-the-briny-deepact which, unlike the works of Homo Houdini, isperformed for reasons having nothing at all to do with ego, guilt, ambition, or even money.Clampitt seems to say that human aspirations are base,earthbound. Beethoven, Opus III, perhaps the best poem inthis section, weaves the onus of Beethoven’s deafness to hisown music with her father’s desire to bring beauty to theland he farmed — either by burning off the poison ivy,which resulted in a “mist of venom,” “a mesh of blistersspreading to a shirt/ worn like a curse,” or by digging up aflower he’d never encountered, hoping in vain to transplantit. Finally, she links to aspirations and deaths of these twomen in lines which seem to conclude Part II:Beethoven, shut up with the four walls of his deaf¬ness, rehearsing the unbearable semplice e cantabile,somehow reconstituting the blister shirt of the intol¬erable into these shakes and triplets, a hurrying intoflowering along the fencerows: dying, for my father,came to be like that finally — in its messages the levi¬tation of serenity, as though the spirit might aspire,in its last act,to walk on air.While the four elements, as “roots”, are the central meta¬phor which govern The Kingfisher, in her latest book, Whatthe Light Was Like, Clampitt becomes a poet with the strongsense of place, to which she alluded in Cream City, previous¬ly mentioned:A great deal about a person is the place that personcame from. A great deal of one’s experience, I think,is not just meeting other people and having physicalcontact with them, but the things that come to youfrom other sources besides people. You wouldn’t bemuch of a person if you only met other people...Ithink maybe part of the reason people don’t knoweach other is the sum total of a lot of incommunica¬ble things, things experienced in solitude, that haveto do with the part of the environment that is nothuman.This volume allows place to function as its central meta¬phor, each section exploring the effect of place on thehuman psyche.The title poem, What the Light Was Like, tells the story ofa lobsterman who died of a brain hemorrhage after sailingfrom town.'The poet wonders why such men are “naturallygracious,” suggesting that at their distance from “the Bap¬tist spire/ shrunk to a compass-/ point, the town an inter¬rupted circlet, feeble as apron-/string, for all the labor/ ittook to put it there,” the lobsterman comes under more nat¬ural influence.Since his boat was found near a restricted game preserve,Clampitt finds it:tempting to imagine what,when the blood roared, overflowing its cerebralsluiceway,and the irridcsccnceto page 31Secular Loveby Michael OndaatjeW. W. Norton, 1984126 pp, $6.95by Martha VerteaceMichael Ondaatje’s newest book of poems, Secular Love,combines a judicious selection of autobiograhical elementswith the concerns — even obsessions — which marked hisearlier collections. Written in four parts, the book chroniclesthe disintegration of the poet’s marriage, with a mentalbreakdown as a near consequence. Through the love of an¬other woman, the poet recovers his equilibrium and returnsto productive life.Through his development of a personal mythology whichsurfaced in his earlier works, the poet elevates a fairly com¬monplace story, saving it from plunging into banal senti¬mentality.Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje presently resides in Canada.This dual experience of domestic and rural jungle life per¬ceptions allows the poet to confront in his verse the psycho¬logical danger which the dissolution of his marriage repre¬sents, and to transcend that into new life and strength.Part 1, Claude Glass, describes a man who gets incrediblydrunk, hinting at the dissipation to follow, and the negativeeffects on his family:His wife half carrying him homerescuing him from departing cars,complains this morningof a sore shoulder.And even laterhis thirteen year old daughters struggleto lift him into the back kitchenafter he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.The destructive self of the poet surfaces as a driving forcein this section. Through his drinking, the poet has lost touchwith reality, the source of his inspiration, and must be “toldabout/ the previous evening’s behavior.” The preface de¬fines “claude glass” as a “somewhat convex dark or co¬loured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of thelandscape in subdued tones.” Dark colors predominate in this section, in which the moon brings to sharp focus muchof the movement. After drinking dark beer, he falls asleep inthe “brillaint darkness where/ grass has lost its colour andits all/ fucking Yeats and moonlight.”Part II, Tin Roof, documents the further degnerationwhich the poet experiences. The stanzaic pattern of theopening lines of the first poem illustrates the dissolutionYou stand still for three daysfor a piece of wisdomand everything falls to the right placeor wrong placeYou speakdon’t know whetherseraph or bitchflutters at your heart...The solutionThis last year I was sureI was going to die.As Part I is rooted in domestic references, Part II uses thejungle as a place fraught with its own peril. Whether speak¬ing of geckos or volcanic rock or green bamboo, the poet isalways cognizant of the idea that “He is joyous and break¬ing down./ The tug over the cliff:”We go to the stark places of the earth and find moralquestions everywhere.Nature itself takes on an ominous cast, as he describes“untidy banana trees” and “large orange flowers/ whichthrive on salt air” and “lean half drunk/ against the steps.”The poet, with roots in the jungles of Sri Lanka and urbanOntario, has lost both sources of inspiration and security.The third section, appropriately entitled Rock Bottom,begins with a poem in which he acknowledges his need forthe love of “the woman whose face/ I could not believe inthe moonlight/ her mouth forever as horizon.” From thatpoint, the poet who had compared himself to a screen door,which “in its suspicion/ allows nothing in, as I allow noth¬ing in,” becomes the poet deeply touched by small thingssuch as his son’s gift of raspberries which cause “the stain atmy heart.” The poet recognizes the impact of such things on himself and his work:I wished to write todayabout small thingsthat might persuade meout of my want.This section chronicles his relationships with friends, fam¬ily, and lovers, as he builds thematically to the fourth sec¬tion, Skin Boat, which contains some of the best poems inthe collection. Poems such as The Cinnamon Peeler and theexquisite To a Sad Daughter read like a rediscovery of boththe love and pain involved in relationship — the desire toselfishly keep the beloved, while knowing that only in free¬dom is true love possible.In this section, the poet very effectively uses the prosepoem:He loves too, as she knows, the body of rivers. Pro¬vide him with a river or a creek and he will walkalong it. Will step off and sink to his waist, the soundof water and rock encasing him in solitude. The noisearound him insists on silence if they are more thanfive feet apart. It is only later when they sit in a poollegs against each other that they can talk, their con¬versation roaming to include relatives, books, bestfriends, the history of Lewis and Clark, fragments ofthe past which they piece together. But otherwise thisriver’s noise encases them and now he walks alonewith its spirits, the clack and splash, the twig break,hearing only an individual noise if it occurs less thanan arm’s length away. He is looking, now, for aname.The experimental nature of much of the poetry is notalways as effective. The lack of punctuation, as well as arbi¬trary line breaks, is disconcerting in some places. The authortends to have summarizing lines where none are necessary.After describing the joy he experienced when working inwood with a friend, he then says: “We both know the plea¬sures art and making bring.” In another place, the poet de¬scribes an exceptional night of companionship and naturalbeauty, concluding with “but this is a magic night.” In theseinstances, the poet’s use of imagery and stanza has been ef¬fective — the reader understands. The use of a summary lineis simply one line too many. ®Michael Ondaatje’s Personal Mythology30—The Chicago Literary Review, I-riday December 6, 1985Rising Light or Descending Dark?Alternate Means of Transportby Cynthia MacdonaldKnopf, 198576 pp. $7.95by Michael SohnThe words “pessimism” and “optimism” have theirmeanings blurred by being spoken too often in modern soci¬ety. Their implications are almost banal; however, it is in thequality of the exhaustibility of these terms where one findsthe problem of the dialectic. There is a sense of decay, ofapproaching the finality of a slow death made terribly poet¬ic, that transfixes modern artists. This does not mean thatthey all turn to the dark view of a Beckett; in fact, they oftendeny the pessimistic (though with the realization of its occur¬rence) and attempt to transcend deconstruction through af¬firmation. This desire to whelm pessimism with optimism(or often to join the two) poses many problems. The greatestof these is the reconcilitation of the opposite views: a poetcannot just state that the world is dying, yet there is salva¬tion through some transcendental act. Even if.both expres¬sions are wrought with grace and beauty, the chasm betweenthem is too great for a vault of faith, That is not to say thatsome poets have not succeeded in making the connection.Roethke did this, but his success comes not from affirmationbut the desire of affirmation. There is an ambiguity as towhether or not he really believes it is possible to escape thedark, and it is this uncertainty which allows the reader toaccept the two viewpoints.Ms. Macdonald presents herself with the problem of dia¬lectic. However, her solution is not stable; it fluctuates be¬tween the unwanted discovery of decay and the believedbeauty of life. In the sequence of poems which gives its titleto the book as a whole, Ms. Macdonald creates a texture inwhich she suspends the two opposing ideals. The verse in¬vokes a wonderful translucent and surreal atmosphere, onewhere every object’s outline is vivid and sharp yet its form isslightly blurred. Throughout this world floats the image ofhats:Hats blow away, sailing, swirling overThe bright green lawn—mostly straws: boaters,panamas,The pale, large-brimmed ladies’ versions, sailors...A few cloches for those who like to wearTheir halos pulled down over their ears.(1. The Lawn: New Designs)Hats seem to be the object of transcendence, the objectthrough which one merges with the outside. The hats are*symbols of angels and salvation which are, as the child’squestion asks, “amazing in such a small space,/ That verdant lawn on the head of a pin.” (The Lawn: New Designs).This image swirls through the sequence and offers, when theclimate is right, to carry one away to some form of spiritualhappiness.This happiness is not austere; it is, in fact, quite jubuliantand even absurd: the search of the hat (transcendence) is thejoy of life:And the panoply of people chasing, twirling,Tripping, iumping. Ballet after Bournonville on thegreen.Painting after Brueghel, repainted Chagal, on thegreen.Everyone but the man with a butterfly net is laughingOr similing; such amiable pursuits.(The Lawn: New Designs)This childlike glee matches the beauty of the language. Ms.Macdonald writes sound as well as image, and her verse hasa fluidity and a lightness that make it erhereal. The searchfor the hat is found in grace and can only be achievedthrough graceful means; it is the inherent beauty in life, itsmystery and surreality. The chasing after hats is, in fact,simply the ability to wear a hat.The power of being achieves its ultimate expressionthrough art. It is not, however, the poet who creates thevoice but the art itself which speaks. The poet produces atimelessness which encloses the impression in a stillness:“The artist has at hand only the hues of his short span,/ thetransports of his time. But every century/ Critics createafresh the apprehending version.” (8: The Museum). Yet,art itself encloses eternity, which presents, when approachedfrom the correct angle, not a reflection of the viewer but afolding beyond, a music that knits existence into a gloriouswhole: The bystanders chasing their hatsBegin to laugh at the odd adornments;Even the currator permits himself a smile.And the wind runs through the fingers of statuesAnd slides along-the frames of paintings,Making music out of art. And the hats,Like mutes of trumpets or trombones,Damp the sound down just enoughSo there is no pain for those in the halls and galleries,Only a dancing exhilaration. And out throughThe mouth and eyes of the Museum music spillsdown the Avenue.(12: There Came a Wind)The salvation of the hat allows art to open beyond whileclosing one in a gentle wind of being made solid an light. Ms.Macdonald places the reader in this world full of mystery, aworld that seems somehow balanced between the joy of theabsurd and the affirmation of the beauty of life. It is a placewhere all seems to be still except words, and they creategraceful forms of motion which dance through the light.Rene Magritte, Le Pelerin, 1966However, Ms. Macdonald seems to suggest that underly¬ing the light is the sense of something wrong, a loss of bal¬ance, the possibility of death. The ninth poem is in the se¬quence, The C Major Mass with Flies, is a terrifying visionof the loss of hats:Flies invade the eyes of the people drowsing...The people on the dry, smooth-shaven lawn begin torun,Circling in steps like those of the generation ofHat-chasers but they wear no hat, onlyMasses of flies in their open buzzing circles;And the people run to escape reinvasion...What could the flies be? They are, by tradition’s definition,representative of demons and death, but those are, one mustremember, merely symbols themselves. Perhaps the flies area loss of certainty, an unhealthy doubt, a confusion thatderives from the loss of hats. Yet what is the most terrifyingis that this malaise takes the place of the spiritual: “(Flies)circle around heads; halos of flies,/ Crowns of flies, shim¬mering, musical, open to/ Interpretation.” This realizationof the power of decay, of the tenuousness of the connectionto what is outside a person, is accompanied by the acknowl¬edgement of the beauty of the decadent. Death is, after all,only a poetic expression, and its re-enactment has the seduc¬tiveness of rhythm.Ms. Macdonald’s analysis of the dark continues in TheDialectic of the Hatless (15), where she presents the essen¬tials of the pessimistic argument. Yet, notice that here thepessimists have lost their hats; despair comes from a lack ofcontact with the transcendent and not from a statement ofthe absence of the transcendent: “The trouble is, in a time without absolutes,God’s will, the King’s, the family’s, the tribe’s,No longer crowned with certainty, one understandsHow tedious absolute freedom is.”“No. How frightening. Yet, perhaps a form ofbliss.The liquefaction of our hats may force salvation onus,” she says...“Isn’t it only your own death and, possibly,The destruction of what you, yourself, havemade—Music, books, flower beds — that you can reallyfeel?”“Only your children,” says the hatmaker, givingsuck toThe rosy mouth of her youngest. “Also,” says theJewWho has no children, “your hats.”She presents, quite vividly, the modern argument for decon¬struction, the desire to negate the ideas which force onebeyond oneself, and, in this negation, find peace. Manwants the complexity of simplicity, as Wallace Stevens said,“A freedom at last from the mystical.” However, the painin this freedom comes from the intimation of the heavy ab¬sence that negation creates. The process is cyclical: the Jewprofesses the power to destroy creativity, the hatmaker thetranscendence of creativity in life, and the Jew closes withthe sad and absurd need to feel the possibility of the spiritu-.al. There seems to be the knowledge of the capability of un¬folding but the inability to achieve it: man’s self-interesteduneasiness will not allow him to escape himself and he re¬mains chained to his own misery.The problem with the poetry is an inability to completelyresolve the tension of the dialectic. Ms. Macdonald does nothave the uncertainty of Roethke or his affirmation withinacceptance and not outside of it. Her poems present bothsides of the dialectic separately with an occasional overlap ofthemes. There are some poems, such as Depending on theSalvation of Hats (14), which attempt to contain both lightand dark. However, the schism between visions is too greatfor a unity. Yet, if one looks at the poetry from the theme ofdisparate perspective — that man must regain the correctangle of the head to break free into the realm of hats — thenthe verse is quite effective and quite beautiful. Ms. Macdon¬ald opens, in a sense, the door to transcendence and asks thereader to enter; however, one hesitates through uncertaintyof purpose. Perhaps one can see both this uncertainty andthe importance of perspective when the ends of Benefit Ballfor Save the Children (7) and Discomfiting the AbsoluteSplendor (17) are juxtaposed into a smaller poem:Benefit Ball...These lovers see the universe asSelf-contained, a metaphor, they state, which hasthe ringOf truth. And they twist and turn on their scurfsFeeling that inside of them, in an agony of indiges¬tion,The maw of the universe is farting somethingwhichCould not possibly be hats.Absolute Splendor...I couldTake you back to the lawn, now studdedWith its spring brocade of flowers, to a skyStudded with hats, to a sky lavish with hats.Poems lavish with the language of light wing througha time whenWe are in the dark. Illuminated by static, by theelectricityOf the synthetic, love — a plain song, a plaint — isaskedto do more that it can. It is, perhaps, what we haveleft.One finds a vision of absence, of a decomposition where thetranscendent has been reduced to an absurdity. However,the poet expresses the ability to go beyond: faced with mod¬ern decay, one turns to the image of hats (in the absence of aform its illusion assumes reality) and finds the last remaininghuman emotion, love. This force becomes the salvation thatwas the hat, and one clings to it with a terrible fervor. Yet, islove enough? Can it support the weight of growing dimness?For, as Roethke said, “I see, in evening air,/ How slowly thedark comes down on what we do.” $continued from page 30of his last perception, charring, gave way tounreserved,irrevocable dark,the light out there was like, that’s always shifting.Clampitt elucidates this theme of place in a series ofpoems, Voyages: A Homage to John Keats, in which Keatstravels with his brother Tom. In Margate, on the EnglishChannel, he sees the sea for the first time, becoming a sourceof comfort for him:an ordinary field of barley turned to alien corn’s inland sea-surfaces, and onto every prairie rolling,sans the samphire trade’s frail craft, un¬basketed, undid the casement of the homesick,stared once more, and called an image home.In other poems of this section, Keats links the pull of the seawith the irrestible pull of death, as he watches his brothergrow more ill with coughing. Clampitt describes Keats aslistening to the Mediterranean at night “with a sense ofbeing drowned and rotted/ like a grain of wheat.”When Keats visits Scotland and Burns’ tomb, the “cold,pale, short-/lived, primeval summer” darkened his mood.Both his own health, and Tom’s, grew worse. In “Chiches¬ ter,” Tom is “dead at the beginning of December./ It wasJanuary now. Buried at St. Stephen’s/ Coleman Street.” Fi¬nally Keats himself dies:Hampstead: Feverand passion. A comedy. A sonnet. In letters,now and then a cry of protest. The restis posthumous.The Keats sequence includes some of the best poems inthis volume. Clampitt’s poetry has been criticized for beingtoo “learned” and abstract. While it is less immediately ac¬cessible than the Sears Catalogue, her poetry does yield itselfto careful reading. WThe Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—31Live inHyde Park's renovatediakefront aristocratfor as little as$290 per month.An intricate terra-cotta relief sculpture of the Indian chiefTecumseh—just one of Del Prado's architectural nuances.Stepping through Del Prado's entryway takes youback to the subtle elegance of yesteryear. Intricatemouldings and ornate cornice-work highlights thisrecently revitalized landmark.Our high-ceilinged one-bedroom apartments arefully carpeted with functional floor plans, individually-controlled heating and air conditioning and modernkitchens that feature all-new appliances and cabinetry.The Del Prado is perfectly situated to take advantageof the neighborhood's nearby parks (one right acrossthe street!) schools, beaches and shopping. And accessto the Loop is convenient with CTA and 1C commutingat the corner.Prices start at only $290 for students & $395 for 1bedrooms making the Del Prado Chicago's trulyaffordable grande dame. Call or stop and see ourmodels today.Del <=0=Prado Daily 11-5Baird & WarnerHyde Park Blvd. at 53rd Street285-1855Cfiazfotte nS.'ihtiomoReaf Estate Co.JS3S Esst 33th Street493-0666THE WISH LIST... you like a cozy fireplace, a brick garagefor your car, three bedrooms plus familyroom, sunshine galore, low assessments —MAKE YOUR APPOINTMENT TO SEEIT! $89,500 — near 55th & Cornell.... you are looking for a four bedroom,three bath house on the lake front in HydePark, chances are you won’t find any...but consider this gorgeous, spacious, “big-as-a-house” condo looking at park andblue water at 53rd & Outer Drive. Pricedto sell. 2500 sq. ft. for $ 126,500. Take alook!...a two bedroom “starter” apartmentnear campus is your choice, this is it! Newlarge kitchen with bath. Pretty hardwoodfloors — Private brick balcony. Parking.*62,500. Dorchester location. Put the pastin yourfuture!TTve in an historic landmarkThoroughly renovated apartments offer generous floor space com¬bined with old-fashioned high ceilings. Park and Iakefront providea natural setting for affordable elegance with dramatic views.—All new kitchens and appliances—Wall-to-wall carpeting —Resident manager—Air conditioning —Round-the-clock security—Optional indoor or —Laundry facilities onoutdoor parking each floor—Piccolo Mondo European gourmet food shop and cafeStudios, One-, Two- and Three-Bedroom ApartmentsOne-bedroom from $555 • Two-bedroom from $765Rent includes heat, cooking gas and master TV antennaCall for information and a appointment—643 1406CJCMemereflome1642 East 56th StreetIn Hyde Park, across the park fromThe Museum of Science and IndustryEqual Housing Opportunity Managed by Metroplex, IncThe Flamingo Apartments5500 South Shore DriveSTUDIOS & ONE BEDROOMS• Unfurnished and furnished• U. of C. Bus Stop• Free Pool Membership• Carpeting and Drapes Included• Secure Building• Delicatessen• T. J.’s RestaurantFREE PARKINGMr. Berning 752-380032—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday Dcccmbet 6, 1985Straight TalkAnsel Adams: An Autobiographyby Ansel Adams with Mary Street AlinderNew York Graphic Society, 1985400 pp, $50by Erika RubelAfter reading the autobiography of Ansel Adams Ifelt as if we had met in a coffee shop and had passedthe time talking about his life. One experience lead toanother, and each tangent was followed to its fullestextent. He often covered the same period of time morethan once, but always with a different focus. He triedto prepare his readers for this type of approach in hispreface, where he states his aim as not being to “re¬trace my life on a one-lane highway” but to explorethe many diverse threads of life. Through the myraidof experiences, thoughts, and feelings that Adams re¬calls, you are exposed to his diverse personality, butunfortunately it became difficult at times to recall thedifferent aspects of his life without some confusion. Itwas too easy to forget the aspects he had discussedpreviously, when he began to describe another. Thismade it difficult to step back at the end in order to seehis life as a whole. You come away with an under¬standing of Adams’ personality, even if it is without acomplete understanding of his life.His style is that of a storyteller. It creates a bridge ofintimacy that gives you the feeling of being talked tospecifically, that you are the only one he is talking to,not just one of many readers. Through his stories hetransforms the experience of reading the book into anencounter. This intimacy also creates a feeling of im¬mediacy. You don’t feel as if you are reading a histo¬ry. The lack of overall order in Adams’ portrayal ofhis life reflects the fact that it was a life that was beinglived at the time of the writing. If you look back on alife as an entity then there is a past tense attached to it.It is already finished, or at least the part of it that isbeing described. Adams presents his life on a contin¬uum, such as when you meet a person you may remin¬isce about the past, but by having the personality asthe focus, the life is in the present tense. This feelingof immediacy becomes ironic in this case becauseAdams died during the final editing of the text.In the preface Adams also states as one of his goalsthe desire to give the reader the “flavor of a good partof the twentieth century as seen through a life of cre¬ative experience.” In this endeavor he succeeds. Hisdirect involvement in the struggle for the acceptanceof photography as an art form and his close associa¬tions with the others involved, brings that period tolife. Anecdotes about his contemporaries turn thenames on the bookshelves into real personalities andbring to life the excitement that was generated by thedevelopment of a new art form. He shares not only hisAspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958 Ansel Adams:From a Straight PhotographerCemetery Statue and Oil Derricks, Long Beach California, 1939experiences, but also his reflections. His presentationof his philosophy of photography as an art form re¬mains contained within the intimate framework hecreates. He doesn’t expound it, nor does he sit downand prove it; he merely presents it and explains it, nottaking for granted that the reader agrees, but present¬ing it to be considered. Adams believed that Stieglitzsaid it best when he said: “I have the desire to photo¬graph. I go out with my camera. I come across some¬thing that excites me emotionally, spiritually, asesthe-tically. I see the photograph in my mind’s eye and Icompose and expose the negative. I give you the printas the equivalent of what I saw and felt.” Adams be¬lieved in straight photography: “that is, photographsthat looked like photographs not imitations of otherart forms.” This philosophy also supported his workwithin the conservation movement for which he wasoften known. He was working to preserve that whichis exciting emotionally, spiritually, and aesthetically.For him nature expressed the most beautiful forms.The descriptions of the people he met, worked with,and philosophised with are captivating. His choice ofstories always seemed to capture the essence of theircharacters. One of his most engaging characters wasStieglitz. He was one of the names on the bookshelfthat Adams brings to life. Adams described one after¬noon in Stieglitz’s gallery where he was taking somesnapshots:As I finished photographing, a regal womanentered, decked with glamourous furs andjewels. She quickly glanced at the walls andthen accosted Stieglitz. “Mr. Stieglitz, mydaughter is studying art. She simply loves artand she adores John Marin. Can 1 borrow thenew Marin book for a week or or so for her?”This charming and inexpensive little book, acollection of letters in conversational essayform, was quite revealing of Marin’s personali¬ty.Stieglitz peered at her over his glasses for amoment and then said, “My dear woman,Marin’s book is for sale for two dollars andfifty cents. Please make out the check to the ar¬tist.”As he turned away she said, rather complain- ingly, “Mr. Stieglitz, she only wants it for atiny bit of time; she will bring it back to you assoon as she has finished it.”Stieglitz turned to her and let forth a sternlecture on art and the responsibility to keep italive. “The artist lives to create and contributeto the spirit; he is not interested in jewels exceptpossibly to paint them; he must work for a liv¬ing!”The woman, abashed, perplexed, perhapsfrightened, backed to the door while Stieglitzslowly advanced, talking continuously. Sheopened the door and fled. Stieglitz turned to meand said, “THAT should give her something tothink about when she takes off those damnedfurs!”It is only in his closing remarks about the people thatmeant a lot to him that he begins to lose his audience.His descriptions occasionally drift into thank you’s,like the ones you hear at an awards ceremony. Youfeel that the thanks should have been implied in hisdescriptions and not brought out at the end.Adams succeeds in presenting new perspectives onhimself, his work, and photography as whole. Hemakes one want to go back and take a second look athis work and the work of others with new understand¬ing and insight.The production of the book was handled excellentlyby Mary Street Alinder and the New York GraphicSociety. You can see that it was the result of a lot ofconsideration. The size of the book, though slightlylarge and cumbersome, is very appropriate for it is stillportable without any weakening to the impact of theprints because of their size reduction. The quality ofthe prints is excellent. The reproductions reflect thesharp tone that Adams’ work is known for. The bookincludes many photographs, but they never interferewith the text; only add to it. They often reemphasizethe feelings expressed by the words, and there was areal balance between words and pictures. You wouldnot be likely to flip through it and buy it just for thephotographs. Because of its production, this book willnot make it to very many coffee tables, the text willnot be ignored, and the pictures will be more than justflipped past. ®The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985—33Technical Precision Meets Literary Aesthetictheir achievements are a puff ofGilgameshtrans. by John Gardner and John MaierVintage Books, 1985304 pp, $9.85 (paper)by Stephanie BaconThe translator’s dilemma: if you knowenough to translate, then you know that ade¬quate translation is impossible. Strictly tech¬nical translation distorts the original, stiff¬ening its prose and stultifying its rhythm andtone. Less literal, creatively rendered transla¬tion may be more pleasant to read, since thetranslator’s marks are unobtrusive, but it toodistorts the original. The problem is an oldone, but this newest translation of the Gil¬gamesh at least attempts to find an innova¬tive solution to the translator’s quandary.The Gilgamesh consists of twelve frag¬mentary tablets, written in Akkadian by thepoet and exorcist Sin-Leqi-Unninni. The Ak¬kadian text is thought to be a translation ofan earlier Sumerian text, and indeed, storiesabout the king Gilgamesh are found in otherSumerian and Akkadian writings as well asin Hittite writings. This particular text wasfound in a collection of writings assembledaround 600 B.C., and it is though to be relat¬ed to writings dating back to 2700-2500B.C., during the life of the historical kingGilgamesh.Most translations fail to meet the chal¬lenge of this brief and badly damaged text;some are obscure and frustrating, whileothers interpolate too much, without ade¬quate textual support. Gardner and Maieremployed a best-of-both-worlds tactic. Ori¬entalist and Professor of English JohnMaier, with the assistance of AssyriologistRichard Henshaw, painstakingly examinedthe Akkadian original, with special attentionto the variety of potential interpretation.Further, they made use of other texts of theperiod, including an Old Babylonian versionof the epic, as well as a scholarly considera¬tion of that version (The Evolution of theGilgamesh Epic by Jeffrey H. Tigay, 1982)which was apparently quite influential. Thelate John Gardner (until recently a uniqueand imaginative voice in contemporaryAmerican fiction, criticism, and scholarship) took the responsibility of deciding upon thefinal reading of the lines. A very fine intro¬ductory essay and superb notes were thenadded by Maier. To their credit, Gardnerand Maier produced a “chaste” translation:the integrity of the poetic line was preserved,and the minimal translator’s interpolationswithin the text are bracketed. Longer inter¬polations of badly damaged passages are inthe notes, where they belong. Such detailedattention to the particulars was possible be¬cause they chose to translate each of the sixcolumns of each of the twelve tablets as sepa¬rate units, rather than translating an entiretablet at a time, as is more often done.This inspired collaboration between tech¬nical precision and literary aesthetic has pro¬duced what I believe to be the finest transla¬tion of the text in our language. In myprevious work with the text, I required theuse of five or six translations and many hours of careful cross-comparison with otherepics, to cull the shades of meaning whichare so delightfully apparent in this render¬ing.The Gilgamesh (which was only discov¬ered as recently as a hundred years ago) hasbeen, up till now, like an old brooch—itsjewels crusted over by sediment, the metal ofits setting hidden by long years of corrosion.Only now, brightly polished in this newtranslation, is its value apparent.As the earliest example of the epic form(though some still debate its epic status) thepoem presents a paradigm of heroism towhich we still relate today. And yet, as theproduct of a culture so remote from ours,the poem can be confounding to the modernreader. So many translations inadvertentlyemphasize the difference between Assyrianculture and ours; the Gilgamesh could neverbe more than an academic curiosity if therewere not a way for the modern reader to re¬late to the motivation of the text. Gardnerand Maier’s translation minimizes the dif¬ference and confusion to the point of makingthem unobtrusive.The Gilgamesh is the story of a hero-kingof that name, who ruled the historic city ofUruk (modern Warka); the poem is drawnfrom a larger body of myth about him. Thefollowing events are narrated: Gilgamesh is atyrannical ruler, so the gods create a man inthe wild to be his equal, and to challengehim. The wild man, Enkidu, is discovered byhunters, and is civilized and brought to Urukby a temple prostitute. Gilgamesh and En¬kidu meet, fight, and then become fastfriends. The two collaborate in variousheroic exploits and are entirely attached toone another. Later, as a result of some inper¬tinence to the gods which the two commit¬ted, it is determined that Enkidu must die.Gilgamesh is very distraught, and subse¬quently embarks on a journey to the nether¬world, to learn the cause and meaning of hisfriend’s death, as well as his own mortality.There he meets the sage Utnapishtim, theonly human ever to have become immortal,and hears the story of the flood. Utnapish¬tim is the Noah-figure in a story which bearsstriking resemblance to the Old Testamentstory. (It is for this parallel that the Gilga¬mesh has previously been best known.)Eventually Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, witha broadened, if not exactly joyous, accep¬tance of death. In the final tablet, whichdoes not appear to be in the linear order ofthe plot, Enkidu tells Gilgamesh of what hehas seen in the underworld, and especiallyabout the various fates of various types ofpeoples’ souls.Gilgamesh is the builder of cities (Uruk,famed for its walls and temple to Ishtar, mayhave been the model for the biblical Towerof Babel) and the conqueror of supernaturalmonsters. His worldly prowess transcendshis fear of death. In persuading Enkidu tojoin him in battling the giant Humbaba, hesays:Friend, who can scale (heaven)?Only the gods (live) forever underthe sun.As for men, their days arenumbered; kind.Here you are, afraid of death.What of your great strength?Let me walk in front of you,and let your mouth call to me, ‘Keepon! Fear nothing!’If I fail, I will have made myself aname..In their introductory essay, Gardner andMaier divide the epic in two phases: theApollonian and the Dionysian (afterNietzsche’s distinction in The Birth of Trage¬dy). The former, to which this speech be¬longs, is characterized by emphasis on “ma¬sculine” values, “control and rationality”; itis the realm of cause and effect. Valorous be¬havior is the cause of the desired effect: fameand the other advantages of heroism. Thelatter phase is characterized by matriarchalvalues, cyclical time, and irrationality—whatbecomes manifest for Gilgamesh as “terror,the dark night of the soul”. This dark night,defined by Gilgamesh’s denial of death, is astrange pilgrimage—he even takes on theaspect of death, unwashed, clothed in rags ofdog skin, unable to eat or sleep—and like anendless night, his long journey through thenetherworld is made completely in darkness.One of the more interesting ideas proposedby Gardner and Maier is that Gilgameshidentifies with Enkidu to such an extreme de¬gree, that Gilgamesh is actually taking onEnkidu’s earlier role of wandering in the wil¬derness, having no intercourse with humansociety. His crisis of the spirit, so differentfrom the casual courage of the Apollonianphase, is hauntingly rendered:How can I keep still? How can I besilent?The friend I love has turned to clay.Enkidu, the friend I love,has turned to clay.Me, shall I not lie down like him,never again to move?Cause and effect have ceased to have anyrelevance to the situation, for in the case ofdeath, they are intractable; Gilgamesh can¬not accept his friend’s death, especially be¬cause it implies his own imminent death. Thesage Utnapishtim, the focal point of Gilga¬mesh’s quest (if indeed his hysterical wander¬ing can be said to have a focal point, or evenbe called a quest) offers him no new strategyfor acceptance, only a sort of existential con¬solation:Do we build a house forever? Dowe seal a contract for all time?Do brothers divide sharesforever?Do hostilities last forever betweenenemies?...From the beginning there is nopermanence.The sleeping and the dead, howlike brothers they are!So smoothly rendered are these difficult pas¬sages, that the translator’s marks are invisi¬ble. And yet so faithfully rendered, that onemay interpret with integrity.In connection with the Dionysian phase ofthe poem, Gardner and Maier also raise thequestion ofthe “Great Goddess,” amother/earth figure embodied here by thegoddess Ishtar. It is she who, when her sex¬ual advances are spurned by Gilgamesh, setsin motion the chain of events which lead toEnkidu’s death. It is also she who, in theflood story, mourns the loss of her children.Gardner and Maier argue that while her pre¬sence in the Gilgamesh may appear to becontradictory and oblique, that she is indeedan influential character in the story. Thetranslators believe that the mother/earth go¬ddess of pre-Judeo-Christian religions un¬derwent a traceable defilement and de-em¬phasis in religious thought, until her finaldethronement early in the Judeo-Christiantradition. This fascinating thesis makes thebehavior of Ishtar (and her power of sexuali¬ty, of which the Great Goddess was laterstripped) a subplot of utmost interest.Gardner and Maier are to be commended forbringing to the fore an issue long ignored bypartiarchal academia.I must admit, to being completely wonover by this book. The graceful and faithfultranslation is rivaled in appeal by a succintand thought-provoking essay, not at all di¬dactic and full of new ideas. Finally, thenotes on each column are really a rare treat(imagine that, if you will) because they cross-reference quite thoroughly the most intrigu¬ing sources, and they explain, without in¬dulging, the translator’s biases. So until youlearn the Akkadian yourself, you just won’ttop this book. £End of an AffairBurnt of my own flameBy vicious gentility,I retreated that night.I lay on my bed and 1Talked to my bear, and with a winkHe sent me back.Through my blanket I flowed intoA rubber ball,To a place where filet of soul graces no menu,Where every tree fall, anywhere, is heard and mourned,Where the apple lies rotting in the grass.There the cross is emptyAnd so is the tomb and so isOswald’s gunAnd all are free, at last.There once I rode a halcyon while underneathA myriad of spectrumed dolphins dove throughPoseidon’s fingertips.Zephry’s brushed my hair; and 1 rose higherAnd higher like an unschooled comet.But then I plunged downward as my mount dissolvedAt nine in the morning to the growling buzz of the alarm clockAnd I found myself in a new place.And here I could not stop speeding locomotives, norLeap tall buildings, even in several bounds.And here rejection reignedAnd here the sky was bleached a tidy grayAnd here Poseidon floated limp under a slick of oil.And I knew that I was home.And, reaching for the gin, Jesus wept.—Andrew Rudalevige34—The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985CLASSIFIEDADVERTISINGClassified advertising in the Chicago Maroon is$2 for the first line and $1 for each additionalline. Lines are 45 characters long INCLUDINGspaces and punctuation. Special headings are20 character lines at $3 per line. Ads are not ac¬cepted over the phone, and they must be paidin advance. Submit all ads in person or by mailto The Chicago Maroon, 1212 E. 59th St.,Chicago IL 60537 ATTN Classified Ads. Our of¬fice is in Ida Noyes Rm. 304. Deadlines: Tues¬day & Friday at 5:00 p.m., one week prior topublication. Absolutely no exceptions will bemade! In case of errors for which the MaroonIs responsible, adjustments will be made orcorrections run only if the business office isnotified WITHIN ONE CALENDAR WEEK ofthe original publication. The Maroon is notliable for any errors.SPACEAPARTMENTS AVAILABLEStudios, one, two & 3 bedrms some lake viewsnear 1C, CTA & U of C shuttle, laundry,facilities, parking available, heat & water in¬cluded. 5% discounts for students. HerbertRealty684-23339-4:30Mon. Fri. 9-2on Sat.2 Bedrooms, 2 bath, large sittingroom, finecurtains, washing machine plus otherfacilities. Corner apartment of the 6th floor atUniv. Park Condo. $800.00 per month. Call 684-0178This lovely 1894 restored row house is inPullman, a section of Chicago that has naturalhistoric landmark status. It is an easy tenminute I.C. train ride south of the 59th St. sta¬tion. Pullman is an attractive and economicalhousing alternative for U of C faculty staff andHyde Park professional people. Taxes are alow 460/year. Parking is plentiful. 3 bedrooms.Formal dining room. Only 68,500. Join thePullman community; sense the historic pride.URBAN SEARCH 337-2400.One bedroom in spacious two bedroomhalf block to campusAvailable nowCall Dr. Janice Arnold 363-8284 or pagein hospital 962-6800.Sublet Winter Quarter 1 bdrm, furnished, nearcampus 288-6697, eves.Female To Share Two Bedroom ApartmentOne Block From Campus Available JanuaryFirst Thru June Call 241-7461 493-2882. *3 - BEDROOM - BASEMENT APT. - FULLYRENOVATED WALL-TO-WALLCARPETING, RECESSED LIGHTING, OAKDOORS. GREAT CLOSET SPACE ANDMUCH MORE ACROSS FROM CO OP SHOPPING CENTER S500.00-INCL. HT. 12/15 ORBEFORE 764-2493-525-3373.SWF Med Prof has 2bedroom/bath to share265/mos+utilities. No smoking/pets. Full turn,respon.people only 288-2153 eves, avail 1/1.ROOMMATE WANTED: 1 bedroom avbl. inIrg apartment, very conveniently located at5337 S. Kimbark $180/mo. Call anytime: 493-8485.WINTER QUARTER SUBLET Bedroom in 4-bedroom, 2-bath apt. Great housemates.Located 52nd & Kimbark. $185/ mo + utilities.Pearl 643-6080.SPACE WANTEDFacutly member needs 2 bedroom apt ortownhouse beginning March 1st 1986. Prefer onor close to campus. Call 955-2078.PEOPLE WANTEDSecretary to Vice President, McCormicTheological Seminary: Serves as secretary,assists in managing and organizing fundrais¬ing and special events; maintains prospectresearch program; must type accurately 60-65wpm; will transcribe from dictating equip¬ment; experience in operation of computer andword processor desirable. Call 241-7800 exten¬sion 216. AA.SERVICESJUDITH TYPES and has a memory. Phone955-4417.LARRY'S MOVING & DELIVERY. Furnitureand boxes. Household moves. Cartons, tape,padding dolly available. 743-1353.UNIVERSITY TYPING SERVICEWordprocessing and EditingOne block from Regenstein LibraryJames Bone, 363-0522PASSPORT PHOTOS WHILE-U-WAITModel Camera 8i Video 1342 E. 55th St. 493-6700.CHILDREN'S PHOTOGRAPHYThe Better Image Studio, 1344 E. 55th. 643-6262.EDITING AND PROOFREADING. Promptand thorough. Call 363-6964 morn. 10-12, eve. 6-9.FAST FRIENDLY TYPING & EDITING -Theses, resumes, all mat'ls. 924-4449.RICHARD WRITES. Get professionalassistance in putting your thoughts on paper.548-3040.Professional typing. Oak Park, call Dianne,days 386-6888, eves. 386-6253.MENDING 493-9653.BOOKCASES-Custom-made from solid oak,birch or pine, and delivered stained, oiled, var¬nished or painted. Call David Loehr at 684 2286. COMPUTER-SEARCHED ANNOTATEDBIBLIOGRAPHIES All subjects, Access to allmajor databases. Fastest, most thorough ser¬vice available. (Isn't your time worth morethan $1.50/hr.?) Also available: newswire ac¬cess, "clipping" - referencing (major papers 8,jours.),...etc.***24-Hour Blitz ServiceAvailable*** WORD PROCESSING Lowestrates. Prompt service. Pursue Excellence andBeat Those Deadlines1. Call HYDE PARKRESEARCH SERVICES 324-9459.Trio Con Brio Classical 8> light popular musicfor weddings 8> other events. Call 643-5007.PROFESSIONAL TYPING SERVICE latestword processing equipment, service includes:resumes, term papers, charts, etc. Documentretention available. LOOK TO A PROFES¬SIONAL, please call 667-5170 for more informa¬tion.CHILDCARE, my home by UofC, warm exp.,refs. Full/part time. Dalia 493-6220 exc Frieve/Sat.FOR SALEVIDEOTAPE RENTALS$2.50 per nightModel Camera & Video, 1342 E. 55th 493-6700.1978 CHEVY NOVA 53000 mi, 2dr„ PS, PB,AUTO. v. good cond. $1075. Call Peter, 288-2393.MOVING SALE 1977 Plymouth Arrow GoodCondition $575 or best offer. Bedroom set,couch wicker chairs, desk, and more Call 241-5848.Artisans 21 Gallery has original Gifts by 3Jewelers, 3 Potters, 2 Weavers, 3 Painters plusStained Glass, Paper Mache and Fabric Art.5225 S. Harper in Harper Court. 288-7450.FURNITURE : Scand. design: mesting tables,book cases, cupboard; Jap. period inlay desk,Breuger chairs, bar stool, Toshiba stereo,white round metal table. Phone 752-6559.SCENESONE MINUTE STORIES, a new anthologyperformed every Sun at Woodlawn Tap, 3:30-5pm, 1172E55, by the Clothesline School of Fic¬tion, It's fun!PETSTemporary home for small sociable dog, forshort or longer stays. Compensation. 288-3008.SSS&FUNPeople needed to participate in studies oflanguage procesing, reasoning, and memory.Will be paid $4-5 per session. Call 962-8859 bet¬ween 8:30 and noon to register.UNSURE ABOUTABORTIONDO YOU HAVE OPTIONS?Free pregnancy counseling with licensedclinical social workers. Free pregnancytesting also available. Call 561-5288.THE MEDICI DELIVERSDaily from 4 p.m. call 667-7394.FREE ORGAN RECITALSThomas Wikman plays the beautiful baroqueorgan at Chicago Theological Seminary 12:30PM every TUES. FREE. 5757 S. University.EARN MONEY WHILEYOU HAVE FUN WITHYOUR FRIENDSWe are looking for groups of 4 friends to par¬ticipate in a drug preference study. You andyour friends will spend one eve. Each week forseven weeks in our recreational area. Aftereach eve. you will be required to spend thenight in the hospital. Each person will be paid$245 for their participation, so RECRUITYOUR FRIENDS! Only non-experimentaldrugs involved. You must be 21-35 and be ingood health to participate. Call 962-3560 bet¬ween 3:30 and 6:00pm M-F for more informa¬tion. Ask for Joe.BRADLEY ORIENTALCARPETS CHRISTMASOPEN HOUSE-SALESATURDAY-SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5-6. 11A.M.-8 P.M. This special Christmas sale willinclude both Afghan-Belouch prayer rugs (firsttime in over three years) and vegetable-dyeTurkish Kilims, all at special Christmas prices($150-250). I also have many new ROOM-SIZEcarpets. In addition, I have several semi¬antique Afghan-Belouch donkey bags for sale.With the gift-giving season approaching, it'sthe perfect time to consider buying an orientalcarpet. Unlike commercial carpet retailerswho purchase rugs UNSEEN and in MASSquanity, I feature one-of-a-kind carpets forless. I have impeccable references andnumerous satisfied customers in the Universi¬ty community as well as a FOUR-STAR ratingfrom a major Chicago shopping guide.Whether for your home or to give as a present,I will be happy to help you in selecting a carpetto meet your needs. FOR ADDRESS IN¬FORMATION OR TO SET UP A PRIVATESHOWING AT ANOTHER TIME, CALLDAVID BRADLEY 288-0524.FEELING SAD,DEPRESSED, BLUE?If so, you may qualify to participate in a studyto evaluate medication preference. Earnmoney for your participation in this 4 weekstudy. Involves only commonly prescribed,non-expermental drugs. If you are between 218< 35 years old and in good health, call 962-3560between 8:30li 11:30 a.m. for further informstlon. Refer to study D.The Chicago Literary Review, ACHTUNG! GERMAN!Take April Wilson's GERMAN COURSE thiswinter and highpass the spring language ex¬am! Two sections: MWF 11-12 8. MWTh 6-7.Both begin Jan 13. Fun classes 8< readings.Cost: $200 for 15 weeks. For more informationand to register, call APRIL WILSON: 667-3038.MOVING INTO HOUSING?Before you have to go to the housing office callme 8< take over my contract no difference bet¬ween the two except I can leave. David F. 753-2661EDWARDO'S HOT STUFFEDDelivered right to your door! Edwardo's-Thesuperstars of stuffed pizza. Open late everynight Call 241-7960-1321 57th St.241-7960.GREAT EXHIBITS!And much, much more at the ComputationCenter Open House, Friday, December 6, 3-5PM, 1155 E. 60th St. (across fromRockefeller)!EARN CASH ON BREAKWe need four healthy male researchvolunteers. We pay $100 for 16 hours, of yourtime. Contact Dr. Watson Wyler Children'sHospital 962-6432 weekdays 8:30-4:30.AMIGA IS HEREFor information call Anton Vogelsang 753-2233.STAY HEALTHYTry our line of herbal health-care products.Weight Control Program. Cardiovascular. GlBone Metabolism. Energy and Alertness. Skin-Care. Nutritional Balance is the key. For moreinformation call Ed at 363-7570. You owe it toyourself.EARN YOUR TUITIONI need a few highly motivated people to helpdistribute a line of herbal health care products.$400-$1200 per month part time, S2000-S6000 permonth full time. Earn your keep! Call Ed at363-7570.HOW CAN THE ARMSRACE BE STOPPEDA free symposium presented by theBULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS,Dec. 12, 2-5:30pm. in Mandel Hall. Come meetour distinguished panelists: Ruth Adams, Rev.Theodore Hesburgh, Kevin Klose, WolfgangPanofsky, John Simpson and Jerome Wiesner.John Calloway ow WTTW-TV will moderatethe symposium.SUMPTUOUS FOOD!And much, much more at the ComputationCenter Open House, Friday December 6, 3-5PM, 1155 E. 60th St. (across fromRockefeller)!HANNUKAHCANDLES&MENORAHSHannukah Candles 50‘, menorahs $1.00 andDreidles 15‘. Pick them up at Hillel, 5715 S.Woodlawn.JAZZ BANDJazz big band and tiny groups need musicianswho like jazz and play horns, saxes, bass,drums and percussion, not to mention flutes.Call Michael 752-4293.2 FORI HOLIDAYFITNESS SPECIALStay fit for the holidays with Jazzercise! Bringa friend and register 2 for the price of 1.Classes offered at 6:05 pm and 7:15 pm onTues. and Thurs. at the Hyde Park UnitarianChurch at 57th and Woodlawn. For more infocall239-4536. Classes start Dec. 5.AMAC CRACKEDAnd much, much more at the ComputationCenter Open House, Friday, December 6, 3-5PM, 1155 E. 60th St. (across fromRockefeller)!ONE BEDROOM FOR SALETraditional Elegance Is Timeless...A rare east tower, lakeview, one bedroomopportunity is now offered for Januaryoccupancy at THE PAR KSHORECOOPERATIVELOCATIONE. Hyde park, at the park and lakebeach.1765 E. 55th Street, U/C bus at door.Convenient to Coop Mall, 1C, and CampusAFFORDABLE ELEGANCEIdeal for faculty or grad coupleMorning sunshine and three lake viewsMonthly charge is $611 which includes$5400 yearly tax deduction, NO MORTGAGE,fireplace, refirgerator, and stove.(W/l closets, W/W carpeting, large rooms.SAFETYClosed circuit tv security system24 hr. guard, laundry in building.Free parking in lot across the street.VALUE 684 7895Selling price $3950 firm, by owner.Serious Inquiries Only, 8-8pm. 684-7895MOVING; MUST SELL BY DEC. 8th.Will Consider Rental.LOX, BAGELS &THE SUNDAY TIMESNeed a study break? Come to Hillel's Sundaybrunch on Dec. 8 from 11 to 1 PM. For $2 youget a bagel 8, lox sandwich with cream cheese,onion, tomatoe, green pepper, orange juice,coffee oi tea, danlsh, the NY Times and theChicago Trlb. See You there!Friday December 6, 1985—35 /MACINTOSH512K UPGRADE $299Upgrade your 128K Macintosh for only $299.Full 90 day warranty on parts and labor. Freepick-up and delivery in Hyde Park area. Toorder please call 363-5082.Cyberstems, Inc.Developers of computer hardware and soft¬ware.WINTER WORKOUTBuild up the strength this winter to learn thebasics of rowing this spring! UC CREW invitesyou to Bartlett Gyn, 5:45 A.M. Mon, Wed., Fribeginning 1/6/86. Open to all members of theuniversity committee.FANTASY GAMERSThe Fantasy Gamers meet Saturdays at noonin Ida Noyes. Stop by for a day of role-playing,board or war-gaming. Pendragon, SpaceMaster, V&V, AD8.D weekly. Diplomacy,Champions often.WANT TO ROW?UC CREW winter workout begins Mon 1/6/86,5:45 A.M. at Bartlett Gym. We'll be meetinghere Mon, Wed, and Fri. Join us for a challeng¬ing winter and a successful spring!CONGRATS TOOBS WINNERS!RAFFLE WINNERSARE:1st prize - Lisa Abrams - plane ticket.2nd prize - Zeverie More - Kodak Camera.3rd prize - Mark Tebeav - $25 Traveler's check.ENGLISH ASASECOND LANGUAGEANDFOREIGN LANGUAGEFOR COLLEGE CREDITForeign Languages for college credit: English,German, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese,Spanish. Also Adult Ed: Dutch, Hindi, Chinese,French, Spanish, Italian. Low tuition.Register-by-mail for January. Loop CollegeDowntown: 984-2816.TOMORROW-8:07 PMDon't miss "Don We Now...VII" with theaward winning Windy City Gay Chorus. A pro¬gram of holiday music at the People's Church,941 W. Lawrence, tix $9 8, $6 in advance, call227-3853.MACHINE ROOM TOURS!See the Amdahl, Chip Dale and much muchmore at the Comp Center Open House, Friday,12/6, 3-5 PM, 1155 E . 60th St.HOLIDAY CHORAL MUSIC...with the Windy City Gay Chours. Be at thePeople's Church at 8:07pm, Dec 7th to hearthe national award winning chorus. Tix $10 8.$7 at the door. Call 227-3853 for details.LANGUAGE COURSESare offered to all Graduate Students throuh theCommittee on Academic Cooperation at theLutheran School of Theology (1100 E. 55th St.)inFRENCH • GERMAN • LATIN • SPANISHFor further information and registration callProgram Coordinator: Susanne Schafer 493-4350 or instructor. See specific ads belowFRENCH COURSESBEGINNING READING FOR EXAM PREP.Time: to be arranged, beg. Mo, Jan 9, 7pm,Room 309. Fee:$125. Call Constance Greenleaf,955-4783.ADVANCED FRENCH GRAMMAR ANDREADING FOR EXAM PREP. Time: Mo/Th6:45-8:45 pm, beg. Jan 6. Room 303. Fee $240.Call: Silva Tokatlian 753-3553.SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. Time:Tu 6:45-8:45 pm. Room 205. Fee:$125. Call:Silva Tokatlian 753-3553.GERMAN COURSESBEGINNING READING FOR EXAM PREP.Time: We 7-8 pm, Fr 3-5 pm, beg. Jan 15. Room301. Fee: $240. Call Susanne Schafer 493-4350ADVANCED READING. Time We 7-9 pm, Sa9-11 am, beg. Jan. 15. Room 303 Fee:$240. CallGerlinde Miller, PhD, 363-1384.CONVERSATIONAL. Time: to be arranged.Call: Friedrich Schuler 667-1451.LATIN COURSESBEGINNING LATIN. TimeTu/Th 7-9 pm, beg.Jan 14. Room 206. Fee: $240. Call: CharlesJones, 785-6488ADVANCE READING FOR EXAM PREP.Time Mo/We 7-9 pm, beg Jan 13. Room 205Fee: $240. Call: Jerome Parrish 978-4873.ADVANCED READING. Time. Mo/We 10-12am, beg. Jan 13. Room 203. Fee: $240. CallKathy Krug 643-5436.SPANISH COURSESBEGINNING READING FOR EXAM PREP.Time: Mo/We/Fr 6-7 pm, beg. Jan 6. Room203. Fee: $260. Call James Savolainen 241-6358.ADVANCED READING FOR EXAM PREP.(5 weeks). Time Tu/Th 6-8 pm, beg. Jan 14.Room 203. Fee: $125. Call James Savolainen241-6358.BEGINNING CONVERSATIONAL. Time: Mo6:30-8:30 pm, beg. Jan 6. Room 205. Fee: $125.Call Sonia Csaszar 493-7251.INTERMEDIATE CONVERSATION. Time:Th 6:30-8:30 pm, beg. Jan 9. Room 205 Fee:$125. Call Sonia Csaszar 493-7251.i0\William H. Ray School, October 1985 Photo by David Miller36 The Chicago Literary Review, Friday December 6, 1985