Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" The Chicago Tribune Reviewing Vivian Gomick's The Romance of American Communism, Mr. Richard J. Walton undoes the accumulated evil of the late Colonel Robert R....
...March 12, 1978] Commonweal American history made comprehensible to mental defectives: Franklin D. Roosevelt, for all that he was decried and denounced by all those members of the Union League Club who used to troop down to the Trans-Lux to boo him, nevertheless all but single-handedly saved capitalism in America...
...That may not sound like much, but anyone more than 45 or so will remember—or should—that it was only the day before yesterday, in historical time, that most Americans saw the Communist Party as a monolith composed of verminous sub-humans: subversives, traitors, defilers of all America stood for...
...We can vigorously scrape a carrot, pull a lettuce to pieces, slice a tomato, or gut an apple and not feel a twinge of sympathy with that life we are destroying and exploiting for our selfish use...
...CURRENT WISDOM The Chicago Tribune Reviewing Vivian Gomick's The Romance of American Communism, Mr...
...Gornick has revived them as ordinary, which is to say as extraordinary for, as Gornick brings them to life in these crowded, lively pages, the Communists were often our best people...
...Robbins does not hesitate evidently to pass off definitive judgments on certain greats of the literary world: Fitzgerald...
...January 1978] Rolling Stone The selfless aspirations of Mr...
...The volupt visions of Miss Gloria Steinem, feminist metaphysician: In some very basic ways, American women are in bed with Jimmy Carter—and it's a long time until morning...
...An emasculated alcoholic, incapable of constructing a plot...
...January /February 1978] Ms...
...What is Vivian Gornick's achievement...
...Marcel Proust...
...If one less kid gets 'queer-bashed' because of that song, it's done plenty...
...the peculiar stillness and grace of the saint, the idiot, the child is there in his deep-set blue eyes and his detached smile...
...I only wish to establish the fact of our insensitivity...
...The French...
...I reserve for the moment the question of morality...
...A lifelong Communist Party functionary, Nikowsski—a tall, handsome, blue-eyed man—is something of a romantic figure in the American Left...
...If, by some not quite imaginable process, Hoover could have been re-elected in 1932, he probably would have been too selfconscious to hand the capitalists any more than they had already stolen, would instead have become the great social engineer his life prepared him to be, a socialist by any other name...
...March 11, 1978] The New York Times Magazine The true-life confessions of Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, author of over 400 magazine articles and 25 books: Like anybody, I have my passions, I have my hates...
...Tolstoy or Dostoevsky...
...A book of such quality that it alone would justify a lifetime of writing...
...They were pictured—often by those who should have been most aware of the falsity of this collective portrait—as political animals who were fair game to be hounded mercilessly and routinely deprived of their basic rights as citizens...
...Finally, the guy broke a window, reached inside and opened the door and dragged the woman out," said Antic...
...Hemingway...
...The woman put her car in reverse and was trying to back up...
...The naked guy jumped off and started running around the car trying to get inside to the woman, who apparently had locked the doors...
...Asked what this meant in practice, a black sales clerk said: "It means they don't want us messin' with their women...
...Obviously we are suffering from a deeply ingrained fauna chauvinism, the vegetarians along with the rest of us...
...she might pull a fender off my car...
...February 17, 1978] 38 The American Spectator May 1978...
...He is a tall, bulky man with a thickness of iron-gray hair that falls to either side of his face from an uncontrollable part in the middle of his head, and his craggy features bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the English actor Peter Finch...
...Slim, medium-sized, with young dark eyes, a beautiful bald head, and a white spade beard, Lanzetti—an intellectual of the Left (writer of endless books, articles, and pamphlets) with the life-regenerating air of a Picasso, surrounded by women, children, grandchildren, children of the age of the grandchildren—is a man capable of speaking at a passionate, infuriated pitch alive with facts, anecdote, analyses, war stories about the Left and America that fill him with force and youth and compellingness...
...Diane Vinson is a remarkably beautiful woman who looks fifteen years younger than her sixty-two years...
...At first I thought the guy had found a new way of streaking...
...Eric Lanzetti, sixty-two the summer I met him, is a whirlwind of a man...
...Somehow the ooze from a severed rubber-plant branch is less terrible to us than the gush of blood from a stuck pig...
...Walton, a few analytical passages...
...When we slice off wheat at the ground with our huge machines, nobody identifies with that oceanic loss of life...
...He is a tall, well-built man with liquid dark eyes, thick black eyebrows, and a mass of silver hair that surrounds his face like an aureole...
...He picked her up and carried her kicking off down the street...
...March 26, 1978] The Humanist Beyond anti-vivisectionism, beyond vegetarianism, onward ever onward with a Robert L. Tyler: Why are we so unfeeling...
...Richard J. Walton undoes the accumulated evil of the late Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune with one colossal effusion of enlightened insight: So we have had to wait for the time and the writer to come together...
...As can be surmised from Miss Gornick's descriptions of these worthies, she is a health-food nut, unmarried, and living in a nudist camp somewhere in Southern California: Dick Nikowsski is seventy years old...
...February 19, 1978] The Great Books Series And now from the very book reviewed so exactingly by Mr...
...To bring to life as human beings the people who constituted the American Communist Party...
...He recalled that the race bar dates back to the time when polygamy was de rigeur, and the Elders were distressed by visions of a black patriarch with a flock of white wives...
...Her body is slim and lithe, her hair burnished and abundant, her blue eyesclear and serene, her head held at an angle of attentive repose...
...Not bad, one remembers their characters...
...Norma Raymond, still beautiful at fifty-seven —dark eyes, dark hair, a marvelous laugh—was known as the Perle Mesta of the CP...
...Hitler, Stalin, Exxon, Gulf, the rich, the insensitive, the powerful...
...The sense of narrative, but he didn't know how to write...
...Tom Robinson, Meistersinger, as handed down to Rolling Stone, voice of the young intellectuals: "I write socialist music, music for the people, popular music, pop," Robinson says, traveling by bus from a gig in Brighton to his London home...
...Too elitist, especially Alexander Dumas...
...Tall, blond, athletic, Dougherty's looks instantly recall the perfect proportions of face and body that inform a Greek statue...
...Then I saw he was arguing with a woman inside the car," Antic, 23, said Friday...
...The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick [Basic Books] L'Express An American in Paris—a distinguished French weekly interviews Harold Robbins, the American Aeschylus: "I am the best American writer since the death of John Steinbeck....I need space to express myself, especially when I give interviews...
...Anthony Ehrepreis is sixty-four years old...
...I yelled at the naked guy to make her stop...
...February 9, 1978] The Minneapolis Tribune Tense drama occurring in historic Peoria, Illinois, reported by the Associated Press and presented on the pages of the Minneapolis Tribune: Diana Antic said she was driving home for lunch when "slowly coming right at me was another car with a naked man sitting on the hood...
...Antle called police, who said they found Robert Corder, 24, and his girl friend, Raynell Willis, 22, locked in a bathroom of his apartment...
...What a splendid, moving book has resulted...
...We're not into 'gay power.' It's one song, and I'm the only guy in the band who's gay...
...Dougherty has as well a dreamy, otherworldly look about h;tn...
...March 26, 1978] Observer Magazine A pregnant moment in the midst of a most scholarly and high-minded disquisition on Mormon theology presented verbatim from the illustrious Observer Magazine of London: The handful of blacks in Utah live in the shadow of a dogma that declares them to be "cursed sons of Cain...
...Police said Corder was booked on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest...
...Sam Russell is sixty-eight years old...
...Passie...
...Will Barnes likes to say he is as old as the century....He is a tall, muscular man in magnificent physical shape who wears glasses only to read 'and looks like an intelligent John Wayne...
...The approaching car hit me and we locked bumpers...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
