Volume 3 - Issue 8

Page 1

Volume three, number eight I February 22, 1970

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Comment: OCD goes to court, as does the peace movement, and even the Panthers, but will the Pro Musica stay free?

Y alie Daily strikes again Like the outstanding college newspaper that it is, the Yale Daily News has never shrunk from taking on any number of awesome and powerful opponents whenever the cause seems just. Last year, as just one example, the News courageously conducted an open feud with the allegedly dictatorial Dean of the drama school, Robert Brustein, and twice called for his resignation. So it should come as no surprise to any conscientious reader of the Oldest College Daily to hear th at the News has now decided to take on the Yale Record over the humor magazine's use of the News trademark and copyright in an exam-time parody issue. Members of the News business staff have sent a letter to Record Chairman Thomas Carney threatening the Record with a law suit. The News is seeking all the profits from the issue (probably several hundred dollars from advertisers), plus another two hundred and fifty dollars for damages. Carney learned from the letter, that ironically, the News lawyer happens to be the Rec~rd's lawyer, and the Record now plans to get rid of him. Carney also says he may reprint the letter on the cover of the Record's next issue. Ah but things are becoming formal these days. Not too lo~g ago such a matter would have been settled in open contest on the bladderball field, where every man must be a man. Why just last year the News itself informally ducked out of a potential libel suit from Olivia's Restaurant (for referring to that establishment's produce as "scumburgers") with a few strategically-aimed soothing words and a printed retraction. Yet maybe the News does have a point after all. If the Record gets away with this travesty-which it really was since the parody issue was distinctly unfunny-who knows where it will all end? The Banner, the Alumni Magazine, even the Yale Scientific might get into the act. But please don't worry, felJows and girls of the OCD, for we, at least, have no intentions of going daily. Biweekly is just fine for us. And we don't plan on being particularly funny either, just for the Record.

Peace lives Can you smell it yet? Or see it or hear it? Rachel Carson, DDT and the silentis majoritatis notwithstanding, the first signs of a not so silent spring have already begun to show through here and there. The liberal-radicalrevolutionary animals are beginning to stir from their winter-induced dormant state. The hibernation was not a deep one this year, or a very lengthy one either. To be sure, .little ha~ lately been heard from the Moratorium Committee whtch seems to be involved in backroom discussions on what to do about next fall's Congressional elections (one of the Yale directors having gone so far as to drop out of the Law School to work on the Duffey campaign), but the other peace and revolution groups have begun to gear up again. With fascinating existential irony the anti-war people are beginning to use against the government the very cry they have so often found turned against themselves: law and order. The Boston Five, the Milwaukee Fourteen and the D.C. Nine are going back to court, but they are returning as plaintiffs, not defendents. A number of anti-war elder statesmen like Reverend Coffin, Noam Chomsky, Marcus Raskin and Stau~ton Lynd, for example, have initiated proceedings agamst the Dow Chemical Company for producing "chemical, biological, bacteriological, incendiary and asphixiatory weapons" which are being used to violate international law in Vietnam. Mentioned in the suit are napalm and a controversial herbicide, which is thought by some scientists to have mutagenic consequences for men. The plaintiffs contend that the Ninth Amendment to. t~e Constitution gives citizens the right to start a sutt tf the government refuses to do so or is violatin~ its own laws. In a slightly nitpicking statement to the Times, the group's attorney, Alan Scheftcn of Georgetown ~niver­ sity, said the suit is not desi~ned to test t.he legahty o~ United States presence in Vtetnam, but JUSt the legahty of particular actions the United States is undertaking there-like using napalm. He hopes thereby to keep the case from being thrown out of court as a "political question."

The New Mobe, in an imaginative exhibition of peaceminded creativity, has come up with an interesting legal maneuver of its own. As part of its Draft Week program scheduled for the second week of March, the Mobe will, in a seeming change of philosophy and tactics, start urging people to comply with the Selective Service Act, or. at least the part which says registrants must send to therr boards all information which may be relevant for future Selective Service matters. The Mobe plans to ask people to send their boards anything and everything they can think of as frequently as they can. Some suggestions are regular letters about the registrant's thoughts on the war, life, philosophy and the draft; all books, pamphlets and articles which have affected his thinking; also Bibles, sermons, speeches and, if possible, daily health repor_ts. The registrant is to ask his board to place all these thmgs in his file. The idea is to create so much busywork for the boards that they won't have time to perform their regular tasks of conscripting an army. The plan has its flaws of course (since, for example, the Post Office Department rather than the draft boards would probably be the first government casualty), but its poetic beauty cannot be denied. All concerned admit, however, that these are only minor harassing actions. Reverend Coffin thinks the Nixon public relations offensive has substantialJy limited the value of more peace movement p.r. efforts. At the same time the Chicago trial, aside from keeping the movement active during the winter, has shown that it is not always profitable to use the law to quiet dissent. So the sides are switching weapons. Next thing you know Spiro Agnew will be leading marches on the Pentagon, and Norman Mailer will file suit to deny him a parade permit. George Kannar

Panther 14 + winter = 8 In radical numbers parlance, the New Haven "Panther 14" just ain't what they used to be. As months of pre-trial hearings near an end, the "Panther 14" have shrunk to the "Panther Five plus Three," and the police privately indicate that they expect more drop-outs within the coming weeks. Of the fourteen Panthers arrested last year for the alleged torture-slaying of fellow Panther Alex Rackley, only five now being held in Connecticut jails will face trial on murder charges. Three more, including party chairman Bobby Seale, are fighting extradiction to Connecticut. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that all eight could burn in the Connecticut electric chair, if found guilty of murder. Six of the original fourteen are no longer connected with the case. Three defendants have pleaded guilty, and three more have had their cases disposed of for a variety of reasons. They include two juveniles and Frances Carter, who was granted irrrrnunity from prosecution but was still given a six-month jail term for contempt of court when she refused to testify last month. The three to plead guilty to lesser charges are Loretta Luckes; Warren Kimbro, the reputed former head of the local Panther chapter; and George Sams Jr. of Highland Park, Michigan who implicated Seale in the case after his arrestlastsurnrner. Sams, who local Panthers claim is a "police agent," said Seale assigned him and two others (Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas) the task of executing Rackley, a New York City Panther who, police say, was suspected by his colleagues of being a turncoat. McLucas, the only one of the alleged three-man execution squad not to plead guilty, will be tried separately from the other eight Panthers who are still asserting their innocence. Panthers say the severed trial for McLucas is an attempt to isolate and destroy him. Sources in the State Attorney's Office privately maintain that they have a tight case against McLucas, including a possibly damaging statement from the defendant himself. The case against the other Panthers is not altogether as convincing, at least according to testimony uncovered in weeks of pre-trial hearings. W. Paul Flynn, defense attorney for accused Panther George Edwards, says most of the testimony implicating his client is "hearsay based on hearsay." He and six other defense attorneys have tried to undermine the validity of tips and information continued on page 14

Volume three, number eight February 22, 1970 Contents 3 7 10 12

The dilemma of the radical professor by Alan Trachtenberg Roller Derby in New H aven by Bryan Di Salvatore Love Story: a review by Paul Goldberger The book closes on the MAT by Daniel Mcintyre

Editors: Herman Hong Paul Goldberger Managing Editor: Dan Mcintyre Executive Editor: Stephen Thomas Business Manager: William Palmer Designer: Nicki Kalish Copy Editors: Richard Caples Stuart Klawans Production Manager: Jack Friedman Advertising Manager: Charles H. S. Chapman Assistant Editors: Bryan Di Salvatore George Kannar Edward Landler David Meter Sam Miller Circulation Managers: John Callaway Brant Switzler Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy David Freeman Mopsy Strange Kennedy Lawrence Lasker Jonathan Lear Michael Lerner LeoRibuffo Walter Wagoner Staff:

Richard Conniff, W. Curtis Francis, Patrick Lydon, Gus Oliver, Robert Parsons, Manuel Perez THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Third Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New JourTUJI is published by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. 3432 Y~e Station, New Haven, Conn. 06S20, and lS printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year. Subscriptions for Yale students are $2.00 per year and for Yale faculty and staff, $4.SO per year. For all others, subscriptions are $7 .SO per year ($4.SO for students). Newstand copies are SO¢ (30¢ for back issues). The New Journal ©copyright 1970 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation. No material from this publication may be used in any form without written consent from The New Journal at Yale, Inc. Call: 776-9989- at any time. Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts, should be accompanied by a stamped. selfaddressed envelope. Opinions expres~d in articles are not necessarily those of The New Journal Credits: Mike Lawler: pages 7, 8, 9 Chris Pullman: pages 3, 4, 5, 6


31 The New Journal ! February 22, 1970

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Culture and rebellion: the dilemma of the radical professor by Alan Trachtenberg

The following article, which originally appeared in Dissent was rewritten by the author for The New Journal. Mr. Trachtenberg, a member of the faculty of Pennsylvania State University, is currently Visiting Associate Professor of English and American Studies. He is teaching courses on twentieth century American literature and "The City: Images & Ideas."

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In the eyes of many college faculty members, the student activist movement wears the aspect of a sinister contagion. We hear accusations of "left fascism," of a new barbarism at the gates. Many people see the student protests as a symptom of larger, deeper disorders, a failure of authority throughout society, a collapse of cultural values which have stood for centuries, an epidemical regression to infantilism. In regard to the university itself, a common response is that student radicals seem willing to eliminate the baby with the dirty bath water, that while they have done a service to call attention to the need of reform, they have by now gone beyond a melliorist crusade and are attacking fundamental values without which no university is possible. The resort to violence-at least what looks like violence to most people-suggests that political goals have gotten enmeshed in antipolitical intentions: it seems hard now to distinguish whatever may be sound in their moral aims from the intolerable nihilism and anarchism, so-called, of their behavior. Listen for the tune, not the words, and you hear sounds discordant with the humane goals of social transformation many academics were initially attracted to. Does the movement take its character from the words or the tune? Has the tune which sometimes sounds like a rock ca- ' cophony, come to prevail over the words, the principles and theories of social criticism, or is the point that tune and words are now one, that the students have achieved an authentic expressive form for their political and social vision? Some older radicals seem already to have decided: if SDS is making a revolution, they say, they might very well line up on the other side. Social justice, freedom of thought and egalitarianism seem to have better defenders, they feel, among parliamentary liberals than among New Left anarchists. My own position is less certain, and I suspect that my mixed feelings and divided loyalties are shared by at least a small number of academics on every campus. Faced with growing pressure to line up against the students, to resist demands backed up by threat of force, to defend rational process and disinterestedness as ends in themselves, we are stuck in a dilemma. The pressure is to see the protests as discipline problems, as the Yale administration saw the disruption of some classes by radical students just before Christmas, and to define the campus issues under the heading of control and punishment. But in some moods student uprisings seem an avenging angel come to haunt us with our own little sins, compromises and equivocation, which suddenly loom as a major guilt-the guilt of being an academic, a scholar, a teacher, while wars rage and people starve. What kind of commitment is it we have made to Truth that takes locked files and riot police to protect? Does rational process include university-supported war research, ROTC, social engineering? Do we really mean disinter-

estedness, or passivity, and isn't neutrality often a cover for complicity? The way most universities are run, can we honestly speak of reason and humane learning as central values? These questions have bothered us long before the occupation of buildings. True, we may have allowed ourselves to drift into careers that have deflected our attention from such issues. For many of us, the academic campaign against the .Vietnam war a few years ago represented a repoliticalization, a reactivation of older ambitions and passions. I am not sure how widespread is the feeling of a strain between demands of career and demands of politics. But that is not exactly the dilemma I refer to, for it is a personal matter, a question of priorities in use of time and energy. Whatever doubt we may feel is not over militarism, racism, or the structure of social privilege which discriminate in education against the poor and the ethnic minorities. Whatever else, we feel the university as well as society at large ought to free itself from these intolerable conditions. But our own experiences have led us to value the university in a way apparently incomprehensible to student radicals. For most of us the university has represented access to a culture fundamentally at odds with that of the larger society, a countervailing culture that honors the development of consciousness, and reading, thinking and writing as the faculties of consciousness. It may sound excessive to say so, but the university has been a sort of salvation for many of us, salvation from the confinements and destructive ends, the dilution of ideas and culture, in the larger society. True, the academy exacts its own price, has its own intellectual and emotional pitfalls. Yes, scholarship and criticism is often exasperatingly pretentious, overwrought and stupid. The academic mind can be just as insulated from experiences outside its limits as any other and just as arrogant and patronizing about its own values. But why characterize the university only by its worst features? The university is perhaps the sole institution that makes accessible to its members the g~:ounds of self-criticism, the only formal "place" arranged for free discussion, where the inherited and the contemporary can confront each other openly, where a usable tradition can be elicited from the encounter of old and new. Only a few years ago colJaboration between students and faculty in behalf of a better university seemed natural. The enemy was seen as the administration. Its extensive bureaucracy, its machinery of manipulation, its budget-minded caution seemed to represent, as Thorstein Veblen argued in The Higher Learning in America ( l918), the invasion of business-minded habits of thought into the academy. We seemed agreed on the necessity of freeing the "higher learning'' from, in Veblen's words, "the manner of life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which it is placed." In the past year, however, the situation has tipped. Students are now more likely to find support, especially for demands of increased power over educational policy, from administrators who are coming to ~ee their function as one of diplomacy and negotiation. And from the faculty they are more likely to meet a stubborn clinging to notions of standards and integrity and traditional prerogatives. Faculty resistance


41 The New Journal I February 22, 1970

can be traced to a guild outlook, emerging tentatively from a dimly recalJed past when teachers were teachers, masters of a field and carriers of a culture, and students were students, who came to Jearn. It is a teacher's business to decide what is to be taught. Of course in some measure his decision is made for him by his culture. But how else can you define teacher? How can a syllabus be a negotiable issue? Moreover, teachers want to think that their subject makes a difference, that it is not merely a subject but an access to significance, an opening to a higher life. This idea of teaching has been called elitist, and in part it is. A major sociological fact of university life in the past generation is that many teachers, particularly in the humanities, bring to their work an unmistakable sense of superiority to their students. It rests not only on differences of training and expertness, but also on differences of values. It is felt to be a condition of life that to teach literature, art, and philosophy, it is necessary to wean most students from the culture of their backgrounds, a culture of provincial manners, of puritanical practices, of constricted, not to say crippling emotions. The students we have called "best" are those who display a sensibility for a "higher life," those who come to share our contempt for the mass culture of American society. The idea of a cultural mission of the university is frequently evoked by those who worry about the anti-intellectualism of students. This worry has been transferred, it is interesting to note, from the average, sluggish student-the typical middle-class American youth-to the radical and activist student, who is often also the "best. ..." Now we are taken unawares by the fact that even-indeed, especia/ly~ur "best" students seem no longer interested in any . version of the "higher life." This raises an extremely sensitive issue. Far from sharing our contempt-and fear-of mass culture, many students are now embracing it. A comment like Richard Goldstein's in The Poetry of Rock, that "America's single greatest contribution to the world has been her Pop (music, cinema, painting, even merchandising)," that "mass culture can be as vital as high art," must surely meet with wide approval among the young. This idea, put in such simple terms, reveals a dilemma. To be sure, notions of "high" and "low" tend to become formal conventions; genteel sanctions do frequently compete with intrinsic sanctions in "high" culture, and "official" academic values can stifle art and deny it the nourishment of new experience. The "higher life" does threaten to externalize itself, to yield to the satisfactions of an insignia, of manners and elegant speech-in short, snobbishness -instead of maintaining itself as an inner condition, a freedom and subtlety of mind and feeling. Moreover, the badge of culture, like aJI badges and uniforms, can be put to antidemocratic uses. Whitman charged that the word "Culture" was an enemy of Democracy. It separated people into castes, it projected an aristocratic hierarchy of worth. A hundred years ago he wrote: "Of all the dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn-they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account." It is still a danger. The academic idea of "high" culture, which was won

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against the genteel tradition of earlier generations, has often, and often unwittingly, served as a fence around a special preserve of experiences. The academy has seen itself as a means of liberation from the hold of bourgeois values-usually abstracted as "materialism," as if that exhausted the matter-and from the banalities and easy satisfactions, what Whitman called the "half sleep," of mass culture. Yes. But the alternative has tended to become a brand of its own. The exclusion of black, of immigrant, of working-class and ethic experiences from university culture is one instance. The insistence of "third world" students that the university not deprive them of their historical culture (even where they have to scratch to find evidence of one), not compel them to forget their language and their customs, but instead equip them with the means to foster cultural self-consciousness among their people, is precisely to this point. Anthropology alone should have taught us that there are many ways of conceiving a. "higher life," and that cultural deprivatron robs a man as ruinously as any other form of banditry. But the demand that the university redefine its cultural role in light of the multiplicity of American life (a severe undertaking under any circumstances) is one thing, and the demand, implicit in much of the protest, that it rej~ct the life of the mind altogether, is qurte another. One of the reasons for stiffening faculty resistance is an uneasy feeli!'lg that while the students may be acting out of and thereby reviving ethical imperatives, they may also be enacting a mindlessness we have always felt as an intimidating presence in American life. The quest for "pure" experience, the substitution of sensation for thought, the flight from discipline-these have been historical features of American culture. In conflict with opposite ideas identified with "Europe," ideas of tradition, authority, and complexity, they have leavened much of our literature and thought. But detached from their opposites, celebrated as self-evident goals in their own right, these impulses toward anarchic freedom lose the very conditions which made them meaningful, and radical, in earlier periods. Yes, our young radicals have rejected, with refreshing spirit and elan, much of the musty and cramped style of middle-class life. They are loose, if they are nothing else. But their rejection takes a form that might in the end reinforce the institutions they want to overturn. The glorification of Pop, for example, suggests that as profoundly as the young feel alienated from their society, they are right at home in its culture. Insofar as the mood of rebellious students represents skepticism toward the pieties of national life, toward the evasion of intellectuals and academics, and toward the present state of knowledge-especially the split between value and fact reflected in the absurdly compartmentalized university curriculum-the mood invites faculty support and alliance. But there is cause to worry and for criticism in the degree in which student radicalism deviates from democratic and socialist thought, and veers in the direction of a "counterculture" which is capturing many Americans. In part campus unrest conforms to the wave of changes in personal style that defy political or racial lines. It is a style that stresses the self-sufficiency of adventure, experiment, spontaneity.lt is a style of

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51The New Journal I February 22,

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repudiation, and it brooks no interference with "free" expression. We see it in the arts: in theater and film and music. Most of all we see it in fashion. It might be mistaken for a new avant-garde movement, but an avant-garde with such popular appeal should make us suspicious. It is more likely that the mass media are catching up with the earlier avant-garde movements-Dada, surrealism, theater of cruelty -and detaching mannerisms and tactics from their theoretical foundations as a calculated critique of bourgeois culture and vestigial classicism and formalism. What was assault then, has by now become sheer mannerism, sheer sensation. The mass media are playing an unprecedented role in propagating a "counterculture" with the flavor of "now!" Think of the importance of rock. Its practitioners are no longer entertainers but gurus. The music and its makers are celebrated-the proper word may be promoted- not only for the excitement of rhythm and sound, but for their message, their litany of liberation. And their message inspires a craving for what? For more of the same, as the record industry well knows. The same message, the same inducement to "do your own thing" and to "let it all hang out" can be heard in theater, in film, in the very visible "underground press,' in the mushrooming "encounter groups." Writing in Esquire, Elenore Lester has described the message as this: "Try hallucinogens: they drive you out of your wretched mind. Try nudity: it returns you to your sanity. Try multi-media baths: they stretch the sensorium. Try confrontation: it cleanses the psyche. Try revolution: it energizes the environment." In its disregard for theory generally, the New Left has pretty much ignored the media and has failed to develop a critical point of view toward mass commu{lications. Slogans from McLuhan and murky fragments from Marcuse have served in lieu of analysis. This is not the entire answer, but neglect of theory has helped make radicalism susceptible to media exploitation-and the exploitation is blatant; mind-blowing is a major industry. There is a belief abroad that changes in hair style, in dress, in sexual habits constitute a rejection of the social order and prepare you for revolution. The new style is supposed to be more "authentic"; the fact that it is also fashionable does not seem to occur to its defenders. Some intellectuals, whose sensibility has been formed in the modernist movement, are sometimes prone to hail any sign of the "new" as a spark of life, and to enjoy the idiosyncratic and the bizarre for their own sakes, for the " hell of it." Rather than a process of mastering social reality by will and thought, revolution has come to mean something dangerously close to sheer impulse. Granted, the energy invested in cultural rebellion, in acid-rock insurrection against the old ethic of deferring pleasure for the sake of profit, may have a revolutionary potential. " In a culture judged as inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian,'' writes Susan Sontag, "it becomes a revolutionary gesture to be alive.... Bending the mind and shaking loose the body makes someone a less willing functionary of the bureaucratic machine. Rock, grass, better orgasms, grooving on nature-really grooving on anything- unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life." But what do these gestures fit a person for? What social alternatives do they imply?

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95% of films a re born of frustration; of self-despair, of poverty, of ambition, for survival, for money, for fattening bank accounts. SAMUEL FVLLER

It w as his duty to keep the Kingdom of the Movies free from the ancient enemy of the People-Art. BEN HECHT on LOVIS B . MAYER 5% of films, maybe leas, are made because a man has an idea, an idea which he must expreas. SAMUEL PULLER

Kee p up your hands, hone y. Give me a full shot of your equipment. RUSS MEYER

Give us a place to stand and we will film the universe. MOTTO OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CINEMATOGRAPHERS

Senator'a X-Sex H ex A Vex VARIETY HEADLINE

Only one thing I can't understand about it, J ack-in the chase, why didn't the Indians just ahoot the horses pulling the atagecoach? FRANK NUGENT to JOHN FORD The cinema is truth twentyfour times a second. JEAN-LUC GODARD

We'll make the pictvrea, let Western Union deliver the messaees. HARRY WARNER

Sometimea you wonder what it'a all about. ON FILM APPEARING SOON

Is the "American way" really in danger from such gestures? The fact is that the "American way" itself has cultivated these impulses, has set them up as its secretlyadm ired version of what it means to be " different." Are we witnessing the middleclass, in a mood of self-hate and anxiety about its "authenticity," turning against itself by turning itself inside out? The fa ntastic notion that if only the "uptight" middle-class would "turn on," war and poverty would cease, the air would depotlute itself, and capitalism self-destruct has become a pleasant fantasy, and for that reason so effective a piece of vicarious entertainment for the middle class itself. And the pugnacious idea that all authority is evil, rather than specific uses of authority, serves to obscure the causes of war and poverty within the present structure of society; it raises a straw man in place of concrete analysis. In the student movement there is a considerable amount of discussion of theory; but theatricality, gesture, the hope for "instant revolution"-not to speak of indiscriminate terror-seem often more prominent than the effort to arrive at clear, persuasive statements of issues and mapping of strategy. The cry for "relevance" is a case in point. It is another example of an emerging pattern of impatience with analysis and contempt for history.lt is a lso an example of the debasement of a good idea through sloganizing. Many faculty members are vulnerable to the cry because inwardly they apply a standard of relevance to their own work, but they recognize how complex, how tentative, how problematic the standard can be. The current idea of what is knowledge ought always to justify itself in light of criticism; that indeed is the function of intellectuals. Perspectives on the past always reflect, with greater or Jesser degrees of awareness, the influence of the present. Students make a valuable point when they attack much of what passes for "objective" knowledge as formalistic and ideological, as knowledge serving specific political and social aims under the guise o f neutrality. They are right to try to penetrate to the social purposes and uses of curriculum. But in demanding relevance students often assume that only the contemporary, which is to say the fashionable at the moment, is worth bothering about, that history, being dead, should be junked, that they themselves are the arbiters of wh at is relevant or not, living or dead. "Swamped with presentness," as P aul Goodman puts it, they seem unwilling to acknowledge that the "present" is a supremely difficult entity to define. Whitehead wrote that "the present contains all there is," that is, as an accumulation of the past, the present is the only possible locus of thought and action. This casts a somewhat different light o n "relevance." Of course the present matters in a way the past does not; the future matters most of all. With more of a regard for history, students who cry for relevance might be better able to extrapolate from the present the best possibilities for a desirable future. But it would be a hopeful sign if mixed feelings began to appear a mong the students as well. Recent history has raised the pitch of contradiction within society, and it would be strange if individuals did not feel the effects. Inner conflicts is a sign that history still matters. Such coofticts can serve as revelations of the state of the world, within and without. The faculty

might help keep alive a sense of the final uncertainty of the nature of student activism. It is senseless to exchange slogans, to hurl reproaches. It will be tragic if we allow the present agitation to settle in our minds as a discipline problem, just as it is tragic for radical students to feel no need for further education. It is hard to say where hope for arenewed university lies. But surely it does not lie in repression of any sort. "I n every era," wrote Walter Benjamin, "the attempt must be made a new to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it." Unexpectedly, conformism has appeared in the camp of rebellion as well as in the main body of society. But we cannot a llow that fact to obscure the larger questions, of what we mean by university, by society, by culture at all. It is ironic that we are moved to puni$h students who have, no matter how unceremoniously, raised these questions. A better motive would be to help transform their assault into a reasoned critique and a program for change. The immediate problem is to restore the possibility of discourse. •

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7 1The New J ournal ! February 22, 1970

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Roller Derby: Up, down, all around by Bryan Di Salvatore photography by Mike Lawler

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Friday night, colorless New Haven, down Grove Street, past the booming presses of the New Haven Fishwrapper and Evening News, right turn at the indifferent blacked-out neon ARENA in front of crusty, uggy and begrimed warehouse that has the aura of a cigar snuffed out in a cold egg yoke. Inside the empty hole strong arenaroma takes over: dirty socks, coughs and wino wet dreams. Unpainted, weary uncomfortable benches, grey concrete walls with forgotten aisle numerals. Cold and quiet, defaced and bored, one expects hobnailed storm troopers, but the arena provides only derelict, ne'er-do-well, maroon-coated mumbling ticket takers who begin taking tickets as soon as the bovine cigar-drowning manager of noth· ing tells them what a shit town New Haven is com· pared to Springfield and Waterbury where there are more seats and fans so he can charge the same amount but make more profit.

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All that is needed for a complete continuance of any Northeast industrial semi-pro shit city are black hunks of perma-ice by the aisles, because the crowd is street ugly and familiar. The Army field-jacketed psychedelic contingent from Kreski's with wimpy see-through mustaches and sideburns walk with hands in pockets casually che cking out other fieldjacketed would-be freaks checking them out. Some have dates, semi-skirted with cotton candy hair done in a rat's-ass. Sticky hair to go with sticky faces that you see on all the women. Sorry son, you'll never see your mother's face again, we just couldn't blast through this time. That Max Factor's the toughest sonofabitch I've seen. Everyone's face is done in casual paste. The fattest, unhealthiest crowd in the world. Dull brown and green overcoats, suits and sweaters. If you give the crowd a blurred scan, the impression is porridge with brown sugar; hold the milk. In the center of the arena is a radial striped, banked oval track, with a masonite surface screwed to drilled angle plates, giving the impression of a giant erector project. Carniv.l ride flimsy, it is a silent prop rather than the launching pad for ten roller skaters. A guard rail surrounds the track, well-padded, but cheapened w ith orange and black crepe paper. Fifteen folding chairs stare at each other from two lines in the infield, and two penalty boxes, also orange and black, sigh patiently behind them. The skaters sit alone, quietly talking, laughing, smoking. The girls are fine specimens 11nd smile brightly when signing autogr11phs. As the arena fills, they file to the dressing rooms, lugging sea bags, w•ving at the crowd.


81The New Journal I February 22, 1970

As the aren;~ fills, the announcer apologizes for the delay uused by the wrong starting time being an· nounced in the papers. But no one seems to mind, there's plenty of beer and anticipation, especially on the part of slumming Yalies, heavily armed with overdressed dates ;~nd high camp consciousness. Finally the announcer presents, for pre-game warm ups, ''THE NORTHEAST BRAVES." Oh boy. From op· posite sides of the arena come eight men and eight women we;~ ring green tights with yellow side stripes, dull silver trunks and jerseys with yellow numerals. The men h<~ve black skate shoes, the women white, knee pads for ;~II . The uniforms are well worn, torn, thin, faded, ;~nd wrinkled. Applause is non-existent, only scattered boos. Round and round the track go the mighty braves, some slowly, all indifferently, others racing and weaving, banking and coasting, stopping to slap a teammate on the ass, occasionally waving to the crowd. loosening up, but sloppily ragged and unfriendly. All the women have short hair and bulging leg muscles. Their mouths open and shut, open and shut, CHew, CHew, CHew, CHewing gum. Every girl. All the time. The faster they skate, the faster they chew in open mouth staggered precision. After a few minutes, the crowd is restless again, a bit unsure <~bout the upcoming entertainment. Finally, the Braves crawl under the railing and return to the dressing rooms. The aren;~'s rusty buzzer, sounding like the fart of • rnorb;~ck hawg, sounds. The ;~n­ nouncer p<~uses, then: " LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY BOMBERS." '

Hoot, holler, the arena comes alive with an affec· tionately orgasmic leap to the feat. Whistle stomp point clap scream and smile. The Bombers are really back. In comes the Orange and Black brightly cos· tumed team, swarming onto the track with natural enthusiasm and confidence. Bright smiles on all the skaters, fresh, sunny uniforms. " The girls and the boys are particularly concerned with keeping clean," captain Margie lazlo had said, and you bet your boots she was truthin'. Ah, the confidence was oozing from their skates, and New Haven hadn't seen any· thing so new and professional in many years. Round and round, faster, crisper, into serpentines and frisky practice blocking. Smiling and shouting to each other, Charlie O'Connell seeing an old friend in the crowd, comes over and ch;~ts for a while. So inform• I that local heroes can-talk to local hero wor· shippers, and the Bombers have the worshippers. A huddle and pep talk, break with a clap and the final w•rm up begins, a super fut serpentine, all thirteen teammates close quarter, nose to ass, once, twice, three times around counterclockwise ending with a full length hip slip side scrape spread eagle for one of the girls. Back come the Braves to much more enthusiastic booing as the crowd is up and itching for action during the National Anthem. The first period begins, and watch out, for the next ninety-six minutes, 'cause it' s jungle ball on skates and masonite, body contact and gorilla theatre as the jammers, two out of the five on a team, try to lap the pack and receive points for every enemy skater passed. Everything seems to be legal, and "JAM TIME" brings shrieks from the crowd anticipating ninety seconds of asses and elbows.

The two to watch are Margie Lazlo, number thirty· nine of the Bombers, and CathieRead, twenty-eight of t he Braves. Sweet Margie, 5 ' 9", twenty-seven years old, with dark h;~ ir tied in a pony tail, handsome and seductive like June Carter, with high cheekbones and bright eyes, unmarried, soft on the outside. But a finger-breakin' bone-stomp in' hot shot skatin' superstar whose innocent charm vanishes as Read shoves a Bomber over the rail, then leaps on Lazlo's back and pounds and tears. It's happenin'. Lazlo frantically kicks and slugs, bumps and swears, giving elbows to the ribs and chest of Read, who is a low class loud· mouth lucille Ball cachinating loser. Read is placed in the penalty box and the nex t time around lazlo knocks it over, Read with-in it. Read streaks to lazlo who side steps and pushes her into the fattest referee in the world and skates away laughing.

J


9 1The New J ournal ! February 22, 1970

Lazlo pounds Rosetta Saunders with three knockdowns. Her elbows are all over the track. Three minutes into the third period, Sandy Dunn of the Braves neck-bashes a Bomber into a guard rail and rabbit punches the neck. No penalty, but Lazlo comes around and windmills fists into her face, knocking her down, and Lazlo skates away satisfied. Round and round. Elbows, knees, spread eagle back slides, guard rail flip overs, tripping, kicking, "Lazlo, I'm gonna tear your eyes out. Get me outta this goddam penalty boxllll" Round the corner, blood and passion in their eyes, knocking, clubbing, oh my god what would they be like in bed. Carolyn Morehead, thirty-six for the Bombers, blond and smiling, spread eagled, angry and pained, she belongs on a commune. Just what is SHE doin' here? Those almost revealing uniforms. Don't give me this dike shit. Those are real women. I love you Bombers. The men's alternate periods at first seem anticlimatic, but the pure excellence of their skating ability commands attention. The Downhill Racer moves, gravity defiance, G-forces grinding on turns, sharp pivots, screeching turns on overcrowded track, weaving in and out behind the pack, looking for the hole, dig in and accelerate. Off balance knee bend spread eagle, but make it up and keep skating. Tony Roman, Bombers thirty-seven squatting between Braves' legs for points, then obnoxiously skating around infield, making faces at Braves and the referees, a Mickey Rooney smart ass showoff, but the best skater on the track. If he's bitten off a bit too much, he stands wimpering behind the only skater alive who can wither the pack with one glanceCHARLIE O'CONNELL. Brought out of retirement last year, big number forty takes no truck from any skater. Fifty thousand dollars worth of pig iron, Charlie is Babe Ruth, Duke Kahanamoko, Casey Stengel, Don Schollander and Jean-Claude Killy. O 'Connell's the name but he looks like a cross between John Wayne and Broderick Crawford. No one gets by the massive hulk of Charlie O 'Connell. Silent player-coach Charlie, roaming the oval like the biggest meanest mountain cat, knocking Woodberry of the Braves over the rail into the stands and standing proudly, impassively, as the world considers a broken neck. O'Connell swooping up and pulverizing a just-fallen jammer with his skates. No one but Charlie has four double knock downs in ONE JAM TIME. He drifts along the oval like a runaway box car, try to pass him for the point and POOM in the rib, Kooof, into the shoulder, pound, pelt, pulverize, maim. Charlie O'Connell bruises bodies. Go Charlie. The crowd cannot believe his wonderfulness. The men continue skating, spinning around, off balance and into the rail, leaping back and into the pack with delicate control, helmets and fists flying , jaws chawing, faster, faster, Shattuck of Braves stomping on Selesta's stomach, kneeing his neck, skates to the ribs. Round and round, close quarters, trip, slide, bump, mash, kick, stomp, elbow. Finally, with a close-quarter weaving reverse spiral last minute effort, Roman and O' Connell, Mutt and Jeff, fail to score, as the Braves sneak away thirty-nine to thirty-six, as the Truth or Consequences buzzer ends the match.

The crowd leaves, with shaking heads, half the lights are d immed. Several of the skaters return quickly for a two-hour bit by bit dis-assembling of the track. Tomorrow they skate at two P.M. in Providence, the next day in Boston. Unload the truck, set the track up, take it down, load the truck, skate in between. Get drunk at night. Drive to Boston, down to Charlottesville, over to Omaha, Chicago. Set up, skate, take it down. Good-bye Charlie. Good-bye sweet Carolyn and Margie. Good luck to you all. • ¡


10 I The New Journal I February 22, 1970

'¡

Slick, sentimental, almost camp, but good by Paul Goldberger Love Story by Erich Segal. Harper & Row, 131 pages, $4.95.

Yes, Erich Segal did write Love Story. This business that he did not-that it is much too good, that no one who writes movies like Yellow Submarine and teaches classics at Yale and runs ten miles a day can possibly write a good novel, too-is aJI a lot of bunk, and furthermore, it begs the question. Segal can do almost anything, it should be evident by now, and it is high time his skeptics admitted it. So all right, then-the real question must be, is this novel the deep and profound piece of literature we should expect from such a diverse mind, or does it smack of the work of- dare I use the word?- a dilettante? No, this, too, begs the question. Love Story is slick, and it is obvious that Segal was having a good time when he wrote it (the frequency with which Yale personalities pop up as minor characters proves that). But this isn't what matters. For despite its slickness, despite its predictable plot, Love Story is a very good novel. There is really no reason why it should be so good. Not only is it too smooth, it is so sentimental it is almost camp. The story is simple: Oliver Barrett IV, rich, WASP-y Harvard jock, meets Jennifer Cavilleri of Radcliffe, a poor "American of Italian descent and a music major." They fall in love, marry despite the opposition of his parents, and live happily until tragedy occurs. There is no mention of drugs, and the sex is implied, not detailed. Surely no self-respecting Y alie would be caught dead reading something so ridiculous. Why, then, with every reason in the world for it not to, does Love Story so nearly perfectly succeed? First, it is a splendidly written story. Segal writes in that rare style distinguished by nothing unusual at all: it is not too terse and journalistic, neither is it too flowery and embellished. The only proper word for it is graceful. Every word, every phrase, is in its perfect place, distinctive but not such a bon mot as to detract from the effect of the whole. I found myself (to my astonishment) wondering whether I should want to change so much as a word. Love Story, like the film The Graduate, belongs to that small class of works that are not of great scope or great significance, but are special simply because they have nothing wrong with them. Good construction alone does not a novel make, of course, but there is more to Love Story. Segal has a remarkable way with characters-not for creating them, for they are almost laughably stereotyped, but for making them transcend their pre-cast identities and emerge as semblances of real people. How odd this, too, is after years of reading novels that spend a hundred pages analyzing a character's hangnail and at the end of it all say no more {if not much less) than Segal does in his sparse, scattered pages of description. As with the sketch whose few lines are so well placed as to make the eye fill in the depth exactly as the artist wishes, one feels here as though he knows Segal's characters much more than he has any right to. It is perhaps a bit easier for the reader on a college campus, for he can fill in the gaps with people he knows to create his own image of the snotty-but-wonderful Radcliffe girl and the Harvard jock who is too good to be what he is. And Segal also cheats somewhat, as he deftly selects scenes that will allow some - just enough contrad ic-

~


11 I The New Journal I February 22, 1970

...,

tory traits to appear in his characters to give the illusion of greater depth. But the effect is still there, and the ultimate portrayal is so good that it takes almost a conscious effort not to care deeply about the characters, and even more of an effort (for Cambridge is not so far away!) not to identify with them. It is not impossible that there is a large audience for whom this book will fail miserably. Businessmen, the most academic of our scholars, and the most liberated of our women are not likely to enjoy it. But it has been loved by matrons (it was just excerpted in Ladies Home Journal, perhaps making Segal the first Yale professor to have written for both that publication and Yale Classical Studies), for the book's unabashed sentimentality was enough to win that group. College students make strange bedfellows for Ladies Home Journal readers, but there are still reasons why they are reading the same book at Yale- reasons that go beyond its graceful execution. Segal has perceived that the revolution we aU talk of being in the midst of is in a large part a romantic one, a movement not so much forward as backward, away from technology and organization and towards nature and people. The most radical fringes can be called exceptions, but the moderate dabblers in the youth culture have surely adopted many romantic characteristics. What Segal has done, in effect, is to play upon these romantic tendencies by taking them one step further into the realm of sentimentality. Love Story is a trick, a joke, a pun on th ose among us to whom an alliance with the forty-ish matron set would be anathema. Segal has tricked us in to reading a novel about youth today that has little sex, no drugs, and a tear-jerking ending; and worse, he has made us Jove it, ponder it, and feel it to be completely contemporary. We are, deep down, no better than the sentimental slobs who sit under the hairdryers every Friday afternoon. It's all the same underneath. Segal has our number. But, ho-before we take up arms against this man who dares to tell us we are not so very different- SegaJ is not hinting at a coalition between the readers of Ladies Home Journal and Rolling Stone. That isn't where it's at, and even if it were, it wouldn't matter. For what is important is not that Oliver and Jenny span time (in some ways they do not, and are very much of the 1960's) but that we, in the role of readers, are not so different from those who have gone before. It is good to know that there is still room for a warm and tender story; too often all of us-revolutionists and reactionaries alike- get so caught up in the cynicism of the age that we lose the desire, the wonderful old-fashioned desire, to delve into a joyful piece of literature, to love its characters, to enjoy it for the mere sake of its own excellence. Such a book is Love Story; it is warm and eloquent, and fo r this it is wonderful, nothing more. If we are unable to appreciate this, how far have we really come? Oliver Goldsmith once noted, "They liked the book the better the more it made them cry," and, cynical though this observation may have been, its implications are not really so awful at all.

•

Shows start at 7:00 and 9:30P.M. unless otherwise noted Thursday, 19 Feb. Experimental Program:

Stan Brakhage's MOTHLIGHT SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD, Part 3 George Landow's FLEMING FALCON Warren Sonnebert's WHERE DID OUR LOVES GO? Ron Rice's CHUMLUM George Wieland's SAILBOAT Friday, 20 Feb. Roberto Rossellini's PAISAN (1946) Saturday, 21 Feb. Kenji Mizoguchi's SHIN HElKE MONOGOTARI (Taira Clan Saga) Tuesday, 24 Feb. Jean Renoir's LA MARSEILLAISE (1938) Wednesday, 25 Feb. Roger Corman's THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE (1967) with Jason Robards and George Segal Thursday, 26 Feb. Samuel Fuller double bill:

PICK-UP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) With Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, and Thelma Ritter THE STEEL HELMET (1951) with Gene Evans, and Robert Horton one show at 8:00p.m.

Friday, 27 Feb. Orson Welles' THE IMMORTAL STORY (1968) with Orson Welles and Jeanne Moreau

Luis Bunuel's SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965) with Silvia Pinal and Claudio Brook Saturday, 28 Feb. Sergio Leone's FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1966) with Clint Eastwood Tuesday, 3 Mar. Kanji Mizoguchi's YANG KWAI FEI never before seeh in New Haven Wednesday, 4 Mar. Fritz Lang double bill:

CLOAK AND DAGGER (1946) with Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1962) with Marlene Dietrich, Mel Ferrer, and Arthur Kennedy

one show at 7:00p.m.




The Yale Symphony Orchestra ]ohnMat.tceri, director Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of theYale School of Music

Alvin Singleton (M.M.A. '7 I) Mestizo II (first performance) Pat.tlHindemith (Faculty '40-'53) scenes from "Marries der Maler" Judith Fay, soprano Richard Anderson, baritone Richard Parke, tenor The Whiffenpoofs of I 97 o Charles lves (Yale '98) Symphony No. 4 (first New Haven performance) John Kirkpatrick, piano solo Yale Bach Society Paul Althouse, conductor Woolsey Hall Friday evening at 8:30 Admission Free February 20, I970

straints of the administration of Yale College to prepare teachers, instead of what Yale should do to prepare good teachers." Mr. Lindley felt that whatever the plan they carne up with, it would not be a commitment to teacher training. Although he views the members of the committee as "well-meaning" he sees their function only as providing undergraduates enough of what they're pressuring for, in this case an access to a teaching career, rather than in making a positive statement of what the university should be doing to meet the need of training teachers. The program's director, Edward Gordon, did much to summarize the question of Yale's commitment to secondary education in light of the cancellation of the MAT program in a statement to the graduate faculty when the cancellation was decided upon. ''Though our program has been small, it has been influential. Eighty-five percent of our graduates since 1951 have remained in some form of education. They are becoming important in developing curricula, writing textbooks, and running schools. · "Our program has been imitated all over the country. If Yale says now that it is unimportant, it will be making a statement of public policy that I disagree with. "The training of undergraduates as teachers may be equally important; we have now sixty signed up in our current undergraduate teacher training program. It does, however, seem to me that to concentrate only on the graduates of one college is far less professional. "As you know, the work of a relatively few, well-educated teachers in secondary schools is ultimately useful to colleges and graduate schools. The MAT program has produced teachers who know what good college and graduate education is. They, in turn, are more likely to take to the schools the standards that wiU stimulate the best in their students. They will also recommend colleges to their students. "The MAT program has never pretended to be adequate as Yale's commitment to public education. There should indeed be programs in research and administration, but they will be futile if there is not a greater supply of intelligent teachers in the classrooms. The central fact of education, as well you know, is what happens between the teacher, the student and the idea." •

Panthers continued from page 2

which police obtained from two, as yet unidentified, Panther informants. All the while, the Panther lawyer.s have been insisting that their clients should be granted bail and released pending trial. The six Panthers being detained in Connecticut have claimed that they have been "'harassed and both mentally and physical· ly intimidated"' in jail. The greatest setback to both defense lawyers and Panther supporters, so far, has been the guilty plea of Warren Kimbro. Although Sams has been labeled a police agent from the start by local Pan~ thers, they have been unwilling to cast their former local leader in a similar opprobious light. Rather, they have charged that Kimbro was pressured into a confession by Sergeant Vincent DeRosa, a member of the New Haven Police Intelligence Division and an old acquaintance of Kimbro

who visited him in prison, four days prior to his guilty plea. Kimbro said he initiated the discussion with Sergeant DeRosa, but Kimbro's former lawyer, George Johnson, claimed that DeRosa's visit was in violation of Kimbro's constitutional rights. Johnson, who since has been discharged by Kimbro, said he never was notified of the sergeant's visit. Kimbro, in rebuttal, said be was "sick and tired of being used." The only pressure on him to plead guilty, he said, was "the pressure of conscience." But, there undoubtedly have been other pressures on Kimbro, besides simply those of "conscience." His brother, William, a member of an out-of-state intelligence unit, has told this reporter in a telephone interview that he did visit Kimbro, shortly before he entered his guilty plea. Beyond that, William Kimbro would not elaborate. In addition, this reporter discovered in New Haven County court files that Kimbro's wife, Sylvia, instituted divorce proceedings against her h!Jsband, whose bouse at 365 Orchard St. was once the local Black Panther headquarters. In a motion for Kimbro to vacate his house, Mrs. Kimbro's Ia~yer, David M. Lesser, said Kimbro "permitted his acquaintances the continuous use of the premises" without his wife's consent. That divorce motion was filed in April, 1969. One month later, twenty New Haven policemen raided the Kimbro house and arrested every moving body inside on charges of murder and kidnapping-everyone, that is, except for Mrs. Kimbro and a monkey found in the kitchen. According to testimony from Inspector Stephen Ahern, brother of the New Haven police chief, Mrs. Kimbro was later arrested at her own request for "disturbing the peace." Some Panther defense lawyers maintain that Ahern's remark may have been just a "red herring" in an attempt to link Mrs. Kimbro with one of the two unidentified informants, one of whom is a female, according to the police. Beyond the "whodunit" aspects of the proceedings, several important questions remain. Will Bobby Seale's lawyer, Charles Garry, be allowed to represent his client in his toughest court fight ever? Will the Panther trial(s) in New Haven turn into guerrilla theatre? And what, ultimately, will happen to the local Black Panther organization? As to the first question, several legal sources interviewed who asked to remain anonymous said they felt that Seale, who is slated to face re-trial in the Chicago conspiracy case on April23, will not be allowed to have Garry as his counsel. For the second question, one can only speculate that clashes between the Court and the Panthers, who have been quiet so far, might begin if and when they face separate trials. State's Attorney Arnold Markle, by asking for separate trials, would be undercutting Black Panther attempts at "solidarity." And as for the future for the local Panthers, that may depend as much on the trial itself as on anything else. According to informed sources in the police department, the Panthers numbered eighteen prior to last year's raid. and zero following it. Now, again according to police sources, through the efforts of out-of-town chapters, the party has grown in strength to a current estimated size of twenty-five members. The New Haven Panthers, headed by area captain Doug Miranda are trying to build a community base through their free breakfast program

'


...

151 The New Journal! February 22, 1970

and political "consciousness" campaigns. Still, they have to disprove the charge that they executed one of their own if they want to save their brothers' and sisters' necks, and maybe even their own. Thomas R. Linden (Mr. Linden, a Yale senior, is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and is covering the Panther trial for that newspaper.)

ProMusica

..

Few people know what krummhorns, kortholts, and sackbuts are. Of those that know they are musical instruments, fewer yet know how to begin to play them. Last October, Yale discovered that a good number of people wanted to learn when the New York Pro Musica spent a week in residence here. The Pro Musica's week of concerts and rehearsal seminars, though, was only the first half of an experiment in the teaching of old music at Yale. The second half of the experiment will be conducted next week when the Pro Musica returns to present a new production of a liturgical drama. This experiment may lead to the long-term residence at Yale of the Pro Musica, one of the few groups in America to present faithfully the neglected works of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque. The Pro Musica's appearances at Yale this year was arranged by Professor William G. Waite, Director of Graduate Studies in History of Music and Richard French of the Pro Musica Board of Directors. The appearances were regarded as a trial run for a possible term of residence. The two concerts presented September 30th and October 3rd and the seminars conducted between the concerts were met by an unexpected response. At the first program, the Pro Musica performed music of the Italian Courts at the end of the Renaissance, including madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi and works of less renowned composers Cristofano Malvezzi, Giaches de Wert and Bastian Chilese. Despite the fact that it was a Tuesday, Sprague Hall was packed, predominantly by the young. One faculty member saw it as a "Woodstock in miniature," and the feeling of the audience was serious and appreciative. Medieval and Renaissance music of England was the program for the second concert on Friday. The music of William Byrd, John Bull, Orlando Gibbons et al brought out an even greater crowd than had shown up Tuesday. The Pro Musica's appearance at Yale in March is planned to be more intensely integrated into the existing curriculum than was its appearance in October. Instead of conducting independent seminars on old music, the Pro Musica will visit the classes teaching the performance of old music. Outside of this week-long activity, the members of the ensemble will participate on March 5th in a joint seminar of the faculties of the French and History of Music departments. The seminar, to be moderated by Professor Howard Garey, will discuss relations between poetry and music in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which will be musically illustrated by the Pro Musica. The central program, though, of the Pro Musica's residence this month will be the new production of a twelfth century Easter play-the Resurrection Play of

Tours. A dress rehearsal will take place Friday, March 6, following a medieval studies symposium in the morning and a panel discussion concerning the liturgical drama in th e afternoon. The actual performance of the Resurrection Play wiJl be presented Saturday evening at Christ Church on Broadway. The events planned for March are far more extensive than those of October. The plan, after all, is to pack into a week what might take place in two months of permanent residence. Permanent residence at Yale for the New York Pro Musica would mean perhaps two to three years of the ensemble being based at Yale, spending half the year at Yale and half the year touring. The Pro Musica's duties here would be as performers in residence to aid in the performance and teaching of performance of old music. They would fit into the curriculum much the same way they will fit into it during this visit. While in residence, the ensemble would remain an autonomous group merely housed in university buildings. The Pro Musica would retain its own trustees and funds, as well as its collection of one hundred twenty-five instruments. Unfortunately, there is one major obstacle to be overcome before the New York Pro Musica comes to stay-and that is money. The ensemble's two weeks of residence in October and March are being paid for by the university. But a permanent residency for the Pro Musica may cost about one hundred thousand dollars a year and Yale at this point is unwiling to put that much more into the field of music.

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the yale dramat presents

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Erich Segal began his movie career as co-author of the Bead es' Yellow Sttbmarine and has since composed numerous screenplays. H e has recently written two films for producerdirector, Stanley Kramer, the first of which, R.P.M., stars Anthony Quinn as a college professor caught in a crisis of values.

Also the author of scholarly books and articles about GrecoRoman antiquity, Mr. Segal lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches Classics and Comparative Literature at Yale.

Love Story is his first novel.

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