Spectator's Journal

...Worse, perhaps, than having a durable observation taken from its ""Most good women are hidden t r e a - s u r e s who are only s a f e because nobody is looking for t h e m . " hits that ,Ire a COMI>LiME-NT :o ,t~( ~:lv, Stay Ahead of The News ...with fact-filled Issues in Brief from the ACU Education and Research Institute...

...h e s s . I give you b i t t e r pills in s u g a r coating...

...Donald Hamann and Shirley Herlong of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro discovered that stress and anxiety had no (significant) effect on music performance, a finding all the more important for being counterintuitive and probably dead wrong...

...EE Anonymity Too Soon No one has ever explained why it is easier for the human brain to produce a 500-page book than a one-line epigram...

...Ann and Frances, however, were far from cavalier, or concise, in stating their conclusion: "Results indicated a similarity of pitch-matching accuracy means which, in this context, suggests that male vocal modeling may not necessarily present unique pitch-matching problems to first graders...

...lsn't it inspiring to know that, even as the baby seals are being thumped brutally and Soviet peace-keeping forces are being called upon to pacify what our President refers to as the "freedom-loving" nation of Afghanistan, some Americans remain undeterred from their devotion to Art...

...is all too often forgotten...

...Maybe a few people, come to think about it...

...The man so unceremoniously bundled offto limbo by the Digest was Stanislaw J . Lec, hardly more than ten years in his grave...

...The name of the poor wretch who produced the gem--for gem it must be to get repeated often enough to qualify for "Anonymous"--is in danger of being lost beyond retrieval...

...It is easy to hang puppets...

...there is never a shortage...

...Or worse, he is confused wi(h somebody else who said something entirely differer . "l'hus, the newspapers regu!arl) attribute to Will Rogers lines that belong to Mark Twain, or the reverse...

...She was even credited in her own obituary (in the New York Times, no less) with a line of La Rochefoucauld's, written 300 years before she was born...

...A brief sampling, crisply translated by J acek Galazka, will give the flavor: In some c o u n t r i e s life is so open you can spot t h e s e c r e t police everywhere...

...But not everyone's results were so heartening...

...For instance, Patricia Flowers of Florida State University revealed in her paper that, according to her experiments, students who listened to African music qua music liked it better than those who had never heard it at all...

...At a time when serious music is under attack for b e i n g - - b e s i d e s ugly--lofty, cerebral, and of course elitist, the music educators at their national convention showed themselves to be anything'but indifferent to the concerns of both the popolo minuto and, incidentally, academic promotion committees...

...9 In the summer of 1979, ERI went to work on the subject of Iranian students in the United States...

...Denied: Highly creative women musicians show a "stronger endorsement of feminine characteristics...

...Metro, BART And The Failure of Mass Transit A ACU Education & Research Institute "onlie begetter" and handed to someone else is to have it relegated to the catch basin of "Anonymous" before its time...

...The pills a r e h a r m l e s s ; the poison is in the sugar...

...According to Miss Tollinger, highly creative women were "significantly [!] more self-reliant, ambitious, willing to take risks and to defend beliefs--desirable masculine traits...

...Whatever the other achievements of the MENC convention, it did put Kutztown State College on the map-though of precisely which state remains uncertain...

...One would like to think that the special quality of the authentic aphorist, the rarity of his gift, would cause his name to be universally treasured and chiseled into the stone of public memory...

...One of the quotes quoted, the best on the page by a wide margin, was attributed to "Anonymous" though the name of its author was well known to many on two continents...

...Book authors come in shoals...

...But at no time, ever, is thete more than the thinnest trickle of those capable of fashioning a mot that, in a sparse sentence or two, turns a laser-beam of penetration into the way things are or with a flash of insight exposes a hidden aspect of human folly...

...9 in June, 1978, ACU-ERI published "Repression in Vietn,~m," showing the dictatorial nature of the Communistregime...

...Postal Service [..i ,Iranian Students: Who Are They...

...A cruel example of inflicting premature, and needless, anonymity on a gifted writer occurred recently in the Reader's Digest under the rubric "Quotable Quotes...

...Still, Lec himself would have had the true wi}'s attitude of detachment abofit such a matter...

...In her day, which is not yet entirely over, Dorothy Parker served as the legendary bulletin board on which every loose and drifting epigram and wisecrack was pinned by way of attribution...

...Martin's Press...

...A hard thing, considering how scant are the souls capable of producing a memorable line in the first place...

...Two months later, the issue was in the headlines...

...Burning s t a k e s do not l i g h t e n t h e dark...

...George Heller spoke on music education in Kansas from 1854 to 1870 and Reginald Buckner presented a paper on '"['he History of Music Education in the Black Community of Kansas City, Kansas, 1905-1954...

...D S P E C T A T O R ' S J O U R N A L A Rite of Spring The Soviets are in Afghanistan, baby seals are under attack again in the arctic, and consumers of perfume the world over continue to worry about the shortage of placenta coming from the Caribbean...

...Laree M. Tollinget sits on Kutztown's faculty...

...His sayings, so uncommonly incisive and fresh, made his name known not only in his native Poland but also in Germany, France, and England, and then, across the ocean, here in the United States where two printings of his Unkempt Thoughts have appeared...

...Similar in-depth, before-the-event analyses of major public policy issues--solar energy, the troubles of American steel, hospital costs, mass transit--have marked this series from the beginning...

...Charles Elliott and Nell Sins discovered that most music students respond "positively" to handicapped peers, although female students "tended to be more positive...

...Who, after all, would favor sun and surf to hearing about "The Effect of Participation in a MusicBased Arts Education Program on Non-Musical Factors of Selected Fourth-Grade Children...

...What happens, though, is that the bright saying, the gem-like epigram, the curtly comical remark, is taken up and endlessly repeated while the name of its author There opportunity In Am_er ca...

...on a network broadcast an immortal saying of Milton's is blandly handed to Winston Churchill...

...Bloomington, Indiana THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 ~5 Unique instructional games designed by university professors to make learning tun through brain-tobrain action Beginning games can be mastered by young ch;idren--tinal games will challenge intelligent adults These are the famous GAMES FOR THINKERS from WFF 'N PROOF Publishers...

...3 The Problem of Hospital Costs 15 Steel, Jobs And The EPA :; Cuba in Africa L] Compulsory National Service [ i East-West Trade !3 The TroubteWith Amtrak [! The Marijuana Dispute [] Solar Energy--Prospects and Problems :E Repression in Vietnam [ I Soviet Violations of SALT I The US...

...Paul Haack is from the University of Kansas but, significantly (as the music educators would say), in his paper he chose not to di~uss Kansas, as a state, at all...

...Now you can send in for one or more of these publications, for 50 cents apiece, plus postage and handling--or, for $25 a year, be placed on our special list to receive a l l of ERI's longer public policy studies, issue briefs, newspaper condensations, and newsletters...

...According to Alicia Gibbons, although probably to her chagrin (for her results are nothing if not ammunition for the enemies of the welfare state), elderly people with high morale are not necessarily more musical than elderly people with low morale, proof of which follows when she points out that the female elderly scored better on musical aptitude tests than the male...

...But there is little of the Oscar Wilde-Noel Coward style of juggling colored balls in the air about the essential Lec...

...WFF 'N PROOF (logic) 13.00" QUERIES 'N THEORIES(sci & lang...

...What is more, the subjects of the conventions' papers ranged beyond music, narrowly defined, to include, among other things, Kansas...

...When that happens a pall of antiquity beclouds the saying and its vitality and relevance drain away...

...The line appears on page 105 of a little jewelbox of a book called Unkempt Thoughts, published in 1965 by St...

...Another aborted thesis: Ann Small and Frances McCachern found that first-graders sing about as well after hearing a man's voice as after hearing a woman's...

...Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was a Polish poet and satirist who has been called "one of the notable wits of our dark time...

...E3 Sarkes Tarzian Inc...

...a literary interview transfers Wordsworth's definition of poetry to Keats...

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...Jamaica and the Caribbean F How Many Billions For Defense...

...Even so, the Music Educators National Conference held their national convention in mid-April and, judging by the abstracts of the papers presented there, it was a serious affair, notwithstanding the voluptuous a t t r a c t i o n s of Miami Beach...

...and virtually no one remembers that the phrase about less being more, so tediously trotted out in the better journals, really belongs to Robert Browning...

...The strings are already there...

...But the presenting of abstruse papers in lecture form is the hallmark of any great profession's national convention, and besides, not all of the MENC's papers were so pedantically narrow...

...We owe a debt to these conjurors of the phrase who express, brilliantly and succinctly, what we would all like to say ourselves if only we could get our thoughts into sharp enough focus and arrange the words in the right order...

...The saying he had so unjustly been detached from was: "In a war of ideas it is people who get killed...

...Affirmed: Women musicians reveal "androgynous personalities...

...We read of Nicky travelling in India, of Ffrenchy unabashedly breastfeeding her daughter on the sidewalk of New York's West End Avenue, of Ez making a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make amends with his abandoned son Jonathan in the name of peace in Vietnam...

...His aphorisms are, to quote Clifton Fad(man, "witty as they can be...

...And if anyone ever had a better reason for not coming to a party, I haven't heard i t . ' " But O My America ? is primarily a political novel, and in weaving together the personal, social, and cultural threads of the time, Miss Kaplan has superbly exposed the ideas of the counterc u l t u r e - - t h e i r hypocrisies, their groundlessness, and their lies...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980...

...but they also make the scalp crawl...

...In succeeding months, this analysis was fully confirmed by the pathetic spectacle of the "boat people...

...Here's what we mean: _9 In August, 1977, Issues in Brief-spotlighted "Cuba in Africa," in a well-documented and widely reprinted study...

...He was 57 when he died, but his reputation had spread far beyond the pages of the satirical weekly Szpilki to which he regularly contributed...

...Realizing that "little is known about the manner in which high school students value artistic objects, nor [sic} about their valuing awareness," he decided to do some digging...

...One of his epigrams goes: "The first condition of immortality is death:" --Richard Hanser Bumper Stickers That Say It All Order them in bulk quantities for your friends, club or political group...

...Her "Study of Creative Women Musicians With Implications for Nurturing Creativity in Music Students" dared both to subvert and shore up our conventional notions about music and sex...

...His own dark time did not prevent him from being, now and then, frivolous and a little naughty in some of his sayings-"Hay smells different to lovers and horses" for instance, or "Are naked women intelligent...

...Simply fill in and mail the form below...

...Born (in 1909) under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he lived to be imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, to escape and join the underground, and', after the war, t o become Cultural Attach~ of the Polish Embassy in Vienna...

...was, again, ahead of the news...

...They were also more childlike, a feminine trait, and conceited, a neuter trait...

...It is his grimly on-target political comment that will fend off for a long time to come the anonymity which the Digest so heedlessly thrust upon him...

...Being quoted in Reader's Digest would have made the name of Stanislaw J . Lec known to millions more in America if not for the curious slip-up which wiped it out with ~he eraser of "Anonymous...

...The results: Having been instructed in the value of art and music, students "demonstrated significant increases in the ability to assess personal values...

...What Miss Kaplan does most assuredly create in 0 My America/is a series of stunning portraits of her characters and their world...

...When the Teheran crisis broke in the fall, ERI's definitive issue briefl "Iranian Students: Who Are They...

...And at a pary Ez attends before he makes his famous speech, there is this splendid remark made by the wife of a psychiatrist about her son: " 'In fact, he would be here right now, but he's busy with the committee...