Under the Condor-Part Three
Stillman, Whit
"Under the Condor-Part Three" Whit Stillman was the image which kept recurring to Jane as she planned her descriptive essay on Manhattan. The car in which she rode, Ben Pasquali's Volvo,...
...For Lisabetta the load has apparently been too great to bear...
...The past week had been one of shattering disappointment for him, and the Connecticut radio station they had tuned in was playing an uninterrupted ten minutes of old songs...
...The result seemed incredible: All it amounted to was twenty-five column inches, another half page or so...
...Her official deadline for turning in the essay was—as set by the Harvard Advocate's prose board—the Monday morning following Thanksgiving, less than five days away...
...There are any number of respectable family names that she might consider as an alternative—Plover, Tern, Seagull...
...Each morning and afternoon Lisabetta and Jane scoured South Beach for sandbugs with which to satisfy the bird's enormous appetite...
...Whit Stillman Under the Condor Part Three anyons" was the image which kept recurring to Jane as she planned her descriptive essay on Manhattan...
...Using this approach, she found that it was often enough to settle on a subject for the short, qualifying brushstrokes to be immediately suggested—for instance, her mother: warm ...Southern...
...and already two possible ones had occurred to her: alternately "Gotham: City of Canyons" and "New York: City of Canyons...
...To all Ben said Jane listened closely, watching for any indication by which to guage the depth of his disappointment...
...There just aren't three-hundred and twenty interesting column inches out there...
...Jane's feelings went deeper than that, but her kitchen duties prevented her from following them...
...In his actual handling of the car, as in his conversation, all Ben's awkwardness disappeared, which was a relief to Jane...
...During the summers of their childhood and early adolescence, Lisabetta had often come to visit the Reptons for a week in Edgar-town...
...This descriptive technique was far more allusive than the old sentence-bound one, but it still did not convey exactly what her parents were like, at least not to her own satisfaction...
...At the bottom of its pen the bird's lifeless form lay, its neck twisted back nearly 180 degrees...
...To characterize her parents Jane did not think that one or even more simple descriptive sentences would be adequate...
...The first thing which occurred to Jane that morning was that since Ben had dropped her off the previous afternoon she had not come up with a single thought, image, or idea for her descriptive essay on Manhattan...
...Typically she might approach the bird but then hesitate when, out of fear, it would frantically try to move away...
...When everyone was seated at the dining-room table for breakfast, Mr...
...Towards the end of the meal Mr...
...A kind of creative frenzy seized her...
...In addition, there is a resentment of the harsh business methods believed to have been used in the forming of some of the large American fortunes...
...Jane asked herself on Friday...
...If Jane were to characterize Nini—putting aside, for the moment, her present annoyance and traditional sentence structure —she would have used the following terms: young...attractive...
...dedicated...
...Jane turned away from the window...
...not efficient...
...For some time afterwards this person would probably feel sad about what she had seen...
...If she did feel better than other people, she wouldn't mind them thinking so—their supposition would be accurate...
...What I can't understand," Lisa was saying, "is why this idea never occurred to anyone else previously...
...But I was always much more interested in architecture so I decided to go with that...
...My Daddy wouldn't have wanted them in his home—he didn't approve of the sharp practices they used in their business affairs...
...In October Jane had decided that the first principle of her life must be just that: to live...
...There was no central thesis...
...For people whose minds work in the normal way—which is most people—there are three standard reactions to the sight of a bird struggling on the beach...
...It concerns Lisabetta and, I'm afraid, is quite serious...
...This person would see the bird, and probably feel pity for it, but just walk on by anyway...
...The images just came to her, filling up page after page in her notebook...
...Partly she was concerned at the ease with which the images came —maybe it meant that they weren't really first-rate...
...The second typical response is less sensitive...
...But her essay still lacked premises...
...This included Frey and Nini, her older brother and younger sister, and her parents, Mr...
...For a long while she had wanted to be on better terms with Nini, but her younger sister's resentment had remained a barrier...
...But it won't be appearing...
...Covering the walls and bureaus were mementos of American life in the early and middle 1970s, and on an upholstered armchair was a pile of old Steiff stuffed animals, staring dazed and glassy-eyed in every direction...
...Jane asked with a nearly hysterical tone in her voice...
...but to Jane it was completely understandable, though her own grief was not as searing...
...But Lisabetta doesn't feel that way," Jane said...
...next, "the Cousins...
...The third kind of response, less common than the others, is in some ways quite a dark one...
...Stopping to think, she would decide that in causing the bird to flee she was adding to its pain...
...Jane sometimes had a difficult time at parties because she was not very good at small talk...
...The car in which she rode, Ben Pasquali's Volvo, was fifty miles northeast of New York, and before getting there Jane wanted to have some firm ideas for her essay...
...Anyway, this is the situation: Lisabetta has decided to drop her family name and take in its place the surname "Sandpiper"—her full name would be "Lisabetta Sandpiper...
...Houghton must have seen how shaken I was because immediately he said, 'Don't worry, young fellow, this happens all the time.' In fact, he felt that I should go ahead with the first issue anyway and showed me how the full eight pages could be filled out by using public-service advertisements, large 'compliments-of-afriend' boxes, and subscription notices with especially big coupons...
...feminine...
...In particular, Mr...
...At 2:30 Friday afternoon she went down town to buy a cocktail dress for that evening's party at the apartment of her roommate, Lisa Devigny...
...When she and Frey left the Devigny party shortly later, Jane could not bring herself to thank their hostess...
...No cook, domestic, housekeeper, or servant assisted them...
...Last Wednesday, exactly a week ago, I drove out to Haverill to the offset firm I had engaged to print the first issue of COTTON MATHER'S...
...I haven't told you the whole story of the first issue's delay, and perhaps I'd better...
...has tendency towards jealousy...
...The dinner plates Jane had finished rinsing and putting in the dishwasher now resembled a regiment of gilt-rimmed soldiers standing in close formation...
...gracious ...feminine...
...But even her happy childhood had its unhappy moments and, she knew, it was from these that all her impulse to write, to describe things, drew...
...With Frey behind her she walked into the living room and flung open one of its windows and looked down upon the canyon floor below...
...To describe is to criticize"—for her this was the most disturbing thought of all...
...The first and most common reaction is one of great sympathy...
...To the average American there is nothing more detestable than a person who both nas a lot of money and considers himself better than other people...
...The weather was seasonal...
...In "canyons," she knew she had found a particularly strong one, something good enough for the essay's title...
...Several of the Cousins already have...
...attractive...
...The Repton house was actually a nine-room duplex apartment spanning the fifth and sixth floors of 832 Park Avenue, near 77th Street...
...employees nearby, it was tremendously humiliating, not so much for me as for the magazine...
...Whether or not 18 The American Spectator March 1978 this thought was kind, she decided for the moment not to consider...
...On the Connecticut Turnpike their speed seemed to slow as Ben pulled into a series of toll stations where various amounts of change had to be paid over...
...The results so far," one part of the letter ran, "have been surprising and significant...
...Standing in the middle of the shop with Mr...
...After the toll Ben quickly rolled up his window and wordlessly accelerated...
...charming in front of company...
...Like a kind of tribute," Jane thought...
...Jane said: "I think Mom and Dad tend to see economic con- siderations in different terms than we do because they're members of the generation born before 1925...
...I'm no vet," her thought might go...
...has accent...
...He said that the economic factor was some- thing I should be aware of...
...Repton was called away from the table for a long-distance call...
...But this very inability, she believed, opened to her ways of thought which went deeper than the usual logic-bound-ones, or at least to new places...
...Mrs...
...A person responding in this way would feel a wave of pity for the bird and want to help it...
...All day long Lisabetta worked for the bird's recovery, with Jane at her side...
...And he's given them some- thing else that's especially important—social entrée...
...The most effective method of representation, Jane felt, was analogous to the fast-cutting technique of advanced filmmakers—the placing of a series of striking images together in rapid succession...
...Houghton, and several of his Whit Stillman works on Park Avenue in New York, but does not live there...
...I felt an overwhelming sense of uneasiness, the kind of acute emotional confusion which always seems to end in either an alcoholic binge or great creative productivity...
...For us worries come more from the inside...
...You're right that when it does appear it will probably, because of the delay, be a better magazine...
...maternal...
...On one level, her heart went out to him...
...Right now Lisabetta is quite a troubled girl...
...On each side separate traffic corridors extended to the north and south like twin asphalt-colored ribbons...
...Fifth Avenue, her first destination, sat like an expensive shopping corridor under the unseasonable November sun...
...Jane checked Frey's room that morning to see whether he was back yet from school, but immediately saw that he wasn't...
...Shortly the ribbon-like highway on which the Volvo rode extended into the opulent Christmas-wrapping of New York...
...She approached the bird directly but carefully, imitating sandpiper mannerisms in an attempt to reassure it...
...Between them was a raised, enclosed garden area—like an island amidst the traffic lanes...
...A moment later he added: "Great wealth can be both a burden and an obligation...
...That's no problem...
...By 9 p.m., Frey, Nini, and Jane were all ready for the party...
...With that Jane had no quarrel...
...My idea is that the teenage girl character would be happy and well-liked by her classmates—in fact, completely well-adjusted to her environment...I don't think a normal girl has ever been treated in fiction before...
...To almost everyone her behavior seemed peculiar, crazy, different, unfamiliar...
...Now she joined her sister in the kitchen and together they prepared a lavish Thanksgiving breakfast for the senior Reptons...
...There's a huge difference, though, in the amount of money doctors and architects make...
...charming...
...With the expanse of urban landscape spreading before her, Jane searched for, and found, the phrase to characterize it: "a steely, bluish gray...
...The Repton house was turned into a hospital...
...Holding the bird gently, she carried it back to the Reptons' with Jane at her side...
...The rush of images pleased and calmed her, but something was still lacking...
...If she failed she had decided to transfer out of English and follow whatever lead the university's aptitude testing service could give her...
...While Frey worked on getting the grease out of the roasting pan, he added another thought on architecture: "To be successful as an architect you have to believe that what you are doing is right and that what everyone else is doing is wrong...
...Houghton, I handed over all the material for the issue, but in a few minutes he came back, saying: 'I'm afraid we're a little short on copy...
...Repton and her daughters looked at each other with concern, not so much in their eyes, Jane noticed, as in the features around them, such as the eyebrows...
...However, the negative thought patterns she often had while walking still plagued her on Lexington Avenue...
...Out-of-towners, whether they come from London or Los Angeles, always go on about that ad nauseam...
...Her mind simply wasn't oriented that way...
...But she seems to have set herself upon being 'Sandpiper.' It seems eccentric to me...
...From the kitchen her sister Nini needlessly added, "Frey's not back yet...
...Very well," Jane said, and explained about the hospital research project Jim had been con- ducting on the psychology of sleep and wakefulness...
...Repton put aside his newspaper—the New York Times—and said, "What I am going to say I expect each of you to keep in confidence...
...Tim's...
...If the filler material Mr...
...To some people her efforts began to seem almost obsessive...
...Now she added to it a second one: to care...
...The reaction of Mrs...
...One morning in the July of their eleventh year Jane and Lisabetta had gone out to the eastern edge of South Beach to read, loaf, body surf, and lie in the sun, when they noticed a shorebird limping with its right wing outstretched, obviously hurt...
...So, reluctantly, she would return to her beach towel, often looking up to see whether the bird was still there and to make sure that no dog approached it...
...What embarrasses me most in retrospect is the tremendous egotism of my assumption that I could accomplish what the greatest magazine editors in history all failed to do—produce a magazine fascinating from start to finish...
...1=1 The American Spectator March 1978 21...
...Lisabetta was Mr...
...Janie, if I didn't feel you could handle this maturely I never would have told you any of it...
...Jane could sense his persisting depression...
...Much later that evening, Jane stopped by her parents' room to say goodnight to her mother and, with Mr...
...what gives me the right to describe things...
...Probably not...
...Before I made my decision Dad mentioned this to me...
...This person would see the bird, approach it directly, pick it up, and, probably in the company of some friends, carry it home...
...Traditionally in western culture great emphasis has been placed on thinking...
...Northern...
...Under this pressure her sense of perception had been heightened to an almost dangerous extent...
...A stream of interesting ideas and notions began to emerge, many of them quite subtle—for instance, a new way for handling second-class mailing information...
...They were raised in the worldof scarcity before the affluent society began around 1950, so for them external concerns--money, high salaries, a large income— are of disproportionate importance...
...It hurts her that, simply because her last name is Rockefeller, people should hate and resent her...
...impersonal...
...Back in her own room, under the bedcovers before putting out the light, Jane slipped a folded piece of brown paper out of a Corn Union hospital envelope...
...In Cambridge the pedestrians had depressed her, but here they seemed well dressed and reasonably happy...
...Repton was a partner in the prestigious New York law firm Solitary, Poor—but his principal work was as legal counsel, advisor, and friend to the Rockefeller family...
...Some people affect not to care one way or another...
...Her brother Frey she would have described in somewhat different terms: handsome...
...In her postcards home she had taken to using sandpiper scratch marks instead of her signature...
...For several moments Jane lingered upon two lines at the very bottom of the letter's page, and then she returned it to the enve- lope and flicked off the light...
...Of course, Jane knew, she had no special "right" to describe things...
...Neither she nor Lisabetta had minds which worked in the familiar ways...
...The Reptons are one of this country's old service families...
...The motive of a Rockefeller wanting to change his name should not be hard to understand...
...I only feel the last part...
...A wall calendar picturing architecturally notable buildings was the sole decoration —the whole effect one of spare modernity...
...Don't," he said, "just talk about how tall the buildings are...
...What's happened to Lisabetta...
...For a moment I seriously considered what he was proposing, I was so anxious to bring the magazine out before Thanksgiving...
...A Vineyard Haven vet was consulted to prescribe proper treatment for the bird...
...Because to Jane now description was living, and the most devastating criticism of life she dared neither contemplate nor describe...
...In Mobile my family occupied a similar position, except the term we used there was 'aristocracy.' By our standards, the Rockefellers are nouveaux riches...
...Mr...
...Well,' he said, 'there are nearly seventy inches here.' "Seventy inches—that meant less than two pages of text...
...For Jane one of the important attractions of return- ing home was the opportunity to see her family again...
...America has no hereditary royal family or nobility...
...Fortunately for me, it turned out to be the latter...
...She thought of the descriptive essay lying unfinished in her room upstairs, of the snobbish thoughts she had once had about pedestrians in Cambridge, of discarded stuffed animals with no one to love them, and of the burden of carrying a distinguished Old Service Family name...
...She couldn't have believed that—her own childhood had been quite happy...
...In contrast to these reactions, Lisabetta's was one, not of pity, but, rather, of complete identification...
...Just plain 'Piper' would be perfect...
...The Reptons had not been immune to this epochal shift...
...Repton said was, first, one of worry and sympathy for Lisabetta in her troubles and, second—though this might seem callous—an appreciation of the story simply as an interesting piece of information...
...Jane did not actually believe the myth that all writers had unhappy childhoods...
...We've grown up in the tall buildings, looking down...
...Repton not yet back from Pocantico Hills, they got onto the subject of the Rockefellers...
...I've had an idea for a fictional short story, but I wouldn't know how to do it myself, so maybe you'd collaborate on it with me...
...In fact, some of the design innovations—such as my proposed margin treatment: not having any—just opened up more space to be filled...
...then his sons, "the Brothers...
...Houghton had suggested could have been done in an interesting way, everything would have been fine, but to come up with a novel way to handle each bit of padding could have taken months...
...The bed was raised five feet from the floor, with space underneath forhis bureau, chair, and sloping designer's desk...
...That Frey was now a graduate student in architecture at Princeton partly explained the imaginative arrangement of his room...
...his wife...
...The only alternative was to run the ads and the subscription blanks the same old way they have always been run, and that I couldn't do...
...The surname she has chosen is unusual and, I feel, inappropriate...
...Maybe I was wrong...
...Finally, on Saturday evening, Jane's parents had insisted that Lisabetta join the rest of the family for dinner at the Harborside Inn...
...He asked how Jim Van Blanck was...
...The passage of time Jane found hard to characterize without falling back upon the old clock-bound way of reckoning it...
...somewhat spoiled...
...By how much?' I asked...
...So I decided to calculate exactly how much new material was on hand, in terms of space...
...The lights of the lobby of 832 Park Avenue illuminated the tears rolling like droplets of water down Jane's cheeks...
...Reexamining the material in search of an explanation, I realized what should have been obvious to me all along—that these were not big-space ideas...
...As a lawyer, advisor, and friend, your father has been very valuable to the Rockefellers, Janie...
...H. Barton Repton and Mrs...
...Otherwise I couldn't tell you...
...has no accent...
...Lisa continued talking excitedly about her idea, heedless to the insensitivity and even cruelty of her tone: her thoughtless mocking of the fact that many people—the case of Carson McCullers immediately came to Jane's mind—had childhoods less happy than her own...
...Because the Rockefeller family is well known for being one of the richest, many people assume that their fortune was built up by sharp practices, too...
...The weather was seasonal...
...In this country there is an attitude that rich people lead lives significantly different from other people...
...That was Mr...
...On their return she rushed upstairs to see how the sandpiper was...
...On Park Avenue all even-numbered buildings are on the western side of the street, giving them eastern exposures and so morning sun...
...At 9 o'clock on Thanksgiving morning Jane was awakened by the sunlight which flooded her room for fifteen minutes...
...but now we are beginning to see it also as the time when one's dreaming self goes to sleep...
...The first was more imaginative, but the second, she felt, probably better as a title—less subtle and so more accessible to readers...
...Repton), cranberry sauce and jelly, two gravies (with and without giblets), turkey with oyster dressing in the crop and celery in the cavity, salad, pumpkin and mince pies, fruits and nuts with their coverings still on, and the various courses all capped off by a choice of coffee with or without caffeine...
...It didn't answer any questions...
...I wonder if those smug historians who find it so easy to write in a negative way will ever realize how destructive and hurtful their words have been...
...They walked back along the avenue toward 832, and it was then that the realization that her old friend Lisabetta was in grave trouble first really struck Jane...
...The time Jane had for pondering these literary distinctions was running out...
...What I proposed was a magazine of eight large-format pages—forty column inches to each page...
...Since her decision the previous month to concentrate her writing in prose, the continued importance of metaphor had surprised her...
...In the past people looked upon morning simply as the time when their conscious selves woke up...
...That's just the point...
...I finally realized that the whole notion of an entirely interesting magazine was from the beginning impossible...
...If pressed, however, she would have admitted that it was to Frey that she felt closer...
...The city, she thought, wore this color like a uniform...
...Apparently I had made a serious miscalculation...
...To this meal thirteen diners sat—five Reptons, five relatives from Jane's father's side of the family, and three unrelated guests...
...The smugness of what Nini said—the implication that she knew more than her sister—grated on Jane...
...on another she was concerned that a personal conversation should take up so much of the time she had left to plan her descriptive essay on Manhattan...
...Some of the ideas were so novel they frankly scared me...
...Rockefeller...
...Repton represented the interests of Henry Rockefeller, one of the six Brothers...
...H. Barton Repton, who was the former Miss Betty Rue...
...Shortly afterwards her dreaming self woke up...
...intelligent...
...This person might afterwards feel regret at what happened, but without much compassion...
...But Lisabetta is a kind and sensitive person...
...Ben slowed the car for another toll stop, silently paying and reaccelerating...
...Saying the Lord's Prayer she inter- rupted the usual language to give special thanks for the year, to mention Lisabetta, and to ask "please let things work out between Jim and me...
...When all the guests had left, Frey helped Jane clean up and gave her some advice for her essay...
...By the time Lisa Devigny came up to greet her, Jane had already finished her fourth rum coke...
...And she thought of a world full of people who hate other people because of their last name, and people who look down on other people, or don't want to get involved...
...What her essay cried out for was a central theme or metaphor, but that might jeopardize its spontaneity...
...Altogether they became "the Family...
...You know," Jane said, "from one perspective it is disappointing that the first issue of COTTON MATHER'S could not come out in time for Thanksgiving, but looking at it another way, it's possible that the delay will one way or another make it a better magazine when it does appear...
...The traditional descriptive sentence typically caught one trait or quality in isolation as a still camera would catch and freeze a single moment in time...
...For three hours that night her sobs pierced the stillness of the Edgartown street, and after the sobs stopped she plunged into a period of deep mourning, declining to go sunbathing for the rest of her Vineyard stay...
...And this explained why she and Lisabetta had become friends...
...Nini suggested that they all hold hands during grace, but Frey put his hands in his pockets, so the circle was left incomplete...
...The Rocket fellers are in some ways almost a dynasty as well as a family, and in their private lexicon each generation carries its own esoteric name: First was the founder, "John D...
...Repton and Nini to what Mr...
...a senior at St...
...In past summers Lisabetta had often visited the Reptons in Edgartown...
...But the Rockefellers are great friends of your father, and I have found them all gracious and without a trace of sharpness...
...But Lisa said that she had especially wanted to talk to her...
...She seemed to realize just how it would be to have a hurt wing and be left helpless on a beach crowded with large and not necessarily friendly human beings...
...That others should be fawning or deferential because of it is to her just as disturbing...
...Thanksgiving Dinner was prepared solely by the Reptons...
...But as Manhattan natives our perspective is different and quite a bit more sophisticated...
...Driving back to Cambridge," Ben said, "I was in a state of complete depression...
...But she dreaded that...
...Those kinds of things did not come easily for her...
...The room illuminated was like a museum of a young woman's youth and childhood...
...I'm sorry," he apologized to the assembled party upon his return...
...Work on her essay had been going well all morning, so well that it almost made her feel nervous...
...In the Repton apartment all the bedrooms were on the second floor except for her brother Frey's tiny suite—bedroom and bath—sandwiched between the kitchen and the back door...
...I have often gotten the impression from all the historical accounts of the Rockefeller family that the authors are more interested in being critical than fair...
...Jane blurted out angrily, and then instantly regretted having done so...
...From the living-room window she was looking down at the twin asphalt ribbons below: They seemed bigger than they had from her room upstairs...
...second, "Junior...
...has high standards ...brilliant...
...As you all know, the Rockefellers are a very wealthy family...
...From the way things were going it began to seem possible that a first issue might be brought out, not before the holiday, but at least soon afterwards...
...But then in trying to push a cherry bomb down the bird's narrow throat he would cause its neck to snap, inadvertently killing it...
...When I was in college," Frey said, "the career choice I faced was between architecture on one hand and medicine on the other...
...and, finally, "the Second Cousins...
...able to think visually...masculine...not willing to suffer fools gladly., With both her brother and sister Jane shared a common background, and their early years they had all spent together...
...Her emotions a mixture of anxiety and nervousness, she slipped out of her bed and walked over to look out the window at the avenue below...
...Rockefeller's daughter, and of all the Cousins, she was the one to whom Jane felt closest...
...And maybe there was something superficial about her whole descriptive approach...
...I'm afraid I've got to go out to Pocantico Hills right away...
...Or, in her father's case: hard - working...
...Before they left, their father had told them how the situation with Lisabetta stood...
...Even if she could reach the bird safely, she might tell herself, there was 20 The American Spectator March 1978 little she could do for it...
...Jane felt as if she were seeing her roommate's true nature for the first time—the smug teenager inside the body of the twenty-year-old college student...
...Historians have compounded this problem...
...It was a question she had difficulty answering...
...There were others, too...
...The highway before her seemed to extend like a ribbon into the distance, occasionally forming into bows...
...Their feeling was that for twenty years their parents had done a tremendous amount for them, so that any gesture of gratitude was entirely appropriate...
...Only four days were left until her deadlines...
...successful at law . . . masculine...
...instead, there is a widespread belief in egalitarianism...
...The wealthy, in their freedom from money worries, seem to contradict this, and as a result are bitterly resented by many people and held in excessive awe by others...
...The story would focus on a main character—she'd be a girl in her early teens...
...Furthermore, the unofficial deadline she had set herself for completing a major work in prose was then, too...
...From our vantage point what's noticeable is not the tallness but the canyon effect...
...That's why you're not a writer...
...On the menu were lima beans, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes ("yams" to Mrs...
...At the Devignys' party the guests all seemed extremely well dressed to Jane—many were friends of Lisa's elder brother and sisters, and there was a sprinkling of men in black or white tie and women in evening gowns—evidently they were going to other parties afterwards...
...My feeling was that bringing out a first issue was crucial for the magazine, but that it seemed doubtful whether it could ever come out...
...Traditionally this was "maid's room," but during the late 1960s there was a time when, in apartments all over the upper east side, the housekeepers had moved out of these rooms and the elder brothers had moved in...
...But it was a personal deficiency she did not mind so much because, to her, small talk did not seem very important...
...To the offset firm's manager, Mr...
...The result is that the Rockefellers have become known not for all they've done for others, but simply for being very rich people, The American Spectator March 1978 19 with the implication that they think they are better than other people...
...But that would have meant going against its whole purpose: to demonstrate that a publication could be put out interesting in each of its parts, no matter how small or seemingly routine—masthead, pagination, article titles, everything...
...a world full of smug historians, sharp business practices, boys with cherry bombs, cruel teenagers, and a dead bird lying at the bottom of a pen with its neck turned at a 180-degree angle...
...and their children who, in Family terms, were part of the Cousins...
...Ben reached out somewhat clumsily with his right hand and flicked off the radio...
...dedicated...
...In fact, for security reasons we consider it almost desirable...
...It can also be a responsibility and an opportunity...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
