Books
I _9 I | i n u N R | D i i | n i m owl r | lamal They were free and yet they moved so casually through this precious element that it seemed wasted on them. There was no appreciation of...
...viewing the current scene, he turns (4) Critic and Essayist...
...F a l c o n e r near-universal tolerance which I have been describing as the outstanding characteristic of Falconer...
...The editor of the World Encyclopedia is not a shallow practitioner of his field...
...Before an hour had gone by the auditorium in the Freer Gallery was ablaze with debate and invective...
...6 ulur Girt Subseriptlo~ to Comm4m~em/ are muek mppreeiated 1 Year, $17 2 Years, g2 .50 The book loses some of its impact by the manner in which issues are confronted...
...a famous Hungarian author cried...
...Possibly this interest was stimulated somewhat by the fact that Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace operated a farm in the parish...
...Ligutti felt that F.A.O...
...with his office in Des Moines...
...and Archbishop Romolo Carboni of the Vatican Secretariat of State...
...Try some of these brainstormers culled froni the book (with little trouble at all) and see how well you score...
...An old and very ugly woman dried her tears with a scrap of paper...
...Over the years there has been such a dearth of probative information and material about the world of comic art that the temptation seems to have been too great to let anything get away that Commonweal: 379 might have any relevant connection with the field...
...A liberalism that reproaches 10 June 1977:382...
...What are the different facets...
...In 1964, he and Thomas B. Ross gave us The Invisible Government, a first shot in the revisionist interpretation of U.S...
...Take this example, as when Horn casts an appraising look at Garry Trudeau's drawing capability in Doonesbury: "rrudeau's draughtsmanship (or lack of it) has been noted in many quarters...
...Criticism of the comics has been loud and long...
...conventions, even giving them a retreat...
...Church tradition is dealt with in like manner in the next few chapters --leaving the ordinary reader more or less better informed...
...land conservation...
...George Higgins, Msgr...
...It alerts us to the complexity ot social issues...
...the nostalgia~hype on the jacket flaps, and that snapshot backside (authoress posed as the bust of an Irish Venus de Milo who's just finished jigging) and I entertained impure thoughts, expecting the worst: another post-"Vatican Rag" pie-throw at the pest's ordained ogres and all their pieties...
...p.148) This book raises some thorny issues and will no doubt arouse a good deal of feeling on many fronts...
...Were someone--especially one unfamiliar with the subject--interested in reading these relatively small volumes, I would suggest first going through Dr...
...It grew because a generation of "decision-makers" felt that the stakes were high enough to justify its existence...
...Throughout the entire book there does not seem to he so much a plea for freedom to choose what many have described as an "alternative life-style" but rather a plea for understanding the fact that some human beings are caught for whatever reason in a strait jacket of circumstances that at best needs to he coped with...
...The soul whose progress we are following throughout Falconer is Farragut's...
...Perhaps because his book is more directly polemic and argumentative, Father McNeiU emphasizes less the pain of the condition...
...It was my homosexuality that determined which city I would live and work in--New York would allow me to lead the sort of life, social and private, that my staunchly gay nature impelled me to...
...Yet his life and concerns are relatively unknown in Catholic circles today...
...Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins wrote to Ligutti in 193.9: "Among the experiments which have grown out of this last depression, I know none of more constructive economic and social value than the Granger Homesteads project...
...Brown sums his story up best when he states, It was my homosexuality that determined my choice of profession mI hoped to solve the riddle of my sexual identity in medical school...
...Witness his work in establishing a program for resettlement of thousands of persons displaced by World War I I and for a mass migration of immigrants to the United States...
...As he spoke, he thought, "who would indeed listen, or even care, about the influence comic strips have had on Picasso's painting of Guernica, or how film maker Alain Resnais used comic strip spatial concepts in Last Year in Marienbad, or how the Tarzan comics have been used to teach principles of the New Math in France...
...What comic strip inspired a full length ballet written by the composer John Alden Carpenter...
...Liberation theology and violence as a means to land reforms...
...and it offers few values in their place except those of scrutiny itself...
...Chapters on how his sexual orientation affects his work and his advancement in work, his relationship with th~ religion of his birth, and his feelings about how the scientific community, especially psychiatry and psychology, have responded, are all quite direct...
...The section on the human sciences and homosexuality could give rise to many objections and valid differences of opinion...
...p.l14) A number of sources are quoted to support his statement...
...Ligntti undoubtedly greeted as fulfillment of a dream "the Green Revolution" of the 1960s that brought the "miracle seeds" which increased food production all over the earth but he could not have anticipated the now-widening gap between rich and poor nations, exacerbated by overconsumption in wealthy countries and overpopulation in developing nations, rampant hunger, rumors of revolutions, pollution of the atmosphere and strident demands for a radical change in the political and social order to insure a fair distribution of resources designed to head off planetary disaster...
...Liberalism as a determinist, even if humanitarian, weltanschauung substituting social forces for individual responsibility is a desperate and barren denial of what we experience...
...He was an ecumenist in the 1940s, speaking in Methodist and Lutheran churches, addressing Protestant students on university campuses, inviting Protestant ministers and their wives to N.C.R.L.C...
...SARA C. CHARLES is a psychiatrist in Chicago and a medical school professor...
...Whose comic strip is the first to be reprinted in the Congressional Record...
...and as analyst of the comic form, he rises to (5) Aesthetician of Style and Iconography...
...One look at that angelic lass on the cover (lapsed into a post-communion trance or playing "Here's the church and here's ehe steeple...
...This h the problem of the Outcast Art...
...STU COHEN is a free-lanee journalist living in Cambridge, Mess...
...The Invisible Government began a stream of information which has in recent years broadened into a river of classic muckraking journalism...
...A woman rooted through her handbag to make sure she had the keys...
...Horn played a significant role in both efforts as co-organizer and co-author...
...McNeill expresses hi, own strongly felt bias, "most pay...
...A great deal more goes on before that soul's progress is complete, but it will be apparent from what has been said so far that this is no ordinary novel...
...And when he is reliving his climactic scene with his brother, Eben, Marcia appears in it as a warm and sympathetic figure...
...In Part I I and Part HI, Father McNeill attempts to suggest a more posifive approach to the moral theolow of homosexuality and its subsequent effect on pastoral ministry...
...One has the feeling, however, that it would he~ to be a Scripture scholar in order to weigh the evidence...
...JOHN ~usr~ is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indiampolis...
...Horn goes on to explain, the comics are like folklore, "inchoate unformed mythologies," but they are narrative in effect and belong to a literary discipline, the tale, the parable and the fable, and are meant to be read...
...Subtitled "Portraits from Childhood and Youth," it moves as a spare, piquant novel--4hat is, truer and more engegingly than most reminlmences of the sort...
...ADULT VOCAtiONS sNdal IWOpm fm' Ha n ' tmty-m, Wd . ADULT VOCA'HON$ liex 41H, C ~ l What giant of modern art regretted he had never done a comic strip...
...Her work has appeared in The Critic and other journals...
...The speech was innocent enough, dealing as it did with the wide10 Jm~ 1977:378 spread ~mpact of American comics and their heroes in France, Europe and the world...
...Yet they express pantomime and mimicry, and, as some show, "are a latter day outgrowth of the dramatic arts...
...Brown, perhaps best known as the Health Services Administrator of New York City during Lindsay's term, "came out" in a public press conference in October, 1973...
...That we ever expected differently is the problem...
...Again, possibly...
...he should be able to take his l~lace in the ranks of the foremost comic .artists...
...Ligntti emerges as a warm, profoundly spiritual man, not unlike Pope John in his wonderful sense of humor, a big man who could always manage to find time for little people...
...It is not, however, the analysis of the individuals and institutions that benefited from intelligence "business as usual" that we so desperately need...
...As we warm to these thoughts, we learn "comics are closer to movies than any other art form" in its movement, optical illusion, kinetic suggestion...
...Its prose is catchy but seldom cutesy, despite trips past the obligatory stations of teenage passion: tissuestuffed bras, petting-fondling crises, et...
...dividual has over his homosexuality...
...He suggests that many people are happy, healthy, welladjusted individuals who find no major conflicts in same-sex orientation were it not for the social, cultural, religious, and scientific forces that judge such behavior in one way or another...
...Did it romanticize the demoralization of the disadvantaged and rationalize the cruelty of the criminal...
...Sounding early on a tittle like a pre-teen Holden Caulfield, our heroine Martha charms us through her girlhood and the post-collegiate vocation that punctuates it...
...My guess is that professional theologians could be easily enticed into heated exchanges regarding the material...
...the proper cultivation of the land for the production of the things that human beings need on a fundamental basis and then, the problems of the people on the land...
...He parried, "Ninety percent of the novels are junk, 90 percent of the films are junk,"--and thrust home--"90 percent of Ph.D...
...It ends with the nightmare Leslie Bacon lived through after being falsely accused of bombing the Capitol...
...As Yzermans says, "He was propagandist, preacher, crusader, public relations director and spiritual father of rural life...
...It would seem that the road through this book would :be strewn with the broken bones and bodies of the artists of the most endearing art in the history of mankind...
...He contends that both moral and psycholo$ical thinking "tends to be prejudiced at its source bec__ause it begins on a questionable presuppmition . . . that the heterosexual condition is somehow the very essence of the human and at the very center of the mature personality...
...Your child gets mugged in the park: suddenly it's mute...
...It is true that at first the way Farragut's wife, Marcia, is pictured seems very harsh indeed...
...Commenting on a statement written recently by Charles Curran that "homosexuality can never be an ideal" McNeill counters "But then, heterosexual,ity as such can never he an ideal either...
...Haven't I paid my dues, stood up for the underdogs...
...In a talk at the Fordham Mission Institute in 1955 he summed up his life-theme, " . . . in the final analysis the problems of people and of nations are related closely to the land: access to the land on the part of the people, no matter where the land might be...
...and the Church could work together without intruding into each other's special concerus but he met at times with stern opposition from Curial officials and from NCWC figures, receiving strong support however from his friends, Msgr...
...Yzermans's biography helps to redress this benign neglect of a man whose work altered to no small degree the American landscape and the quality of life on the farm here and abroad...
...For ff there is any theme that unites these two books, it is that both relate to the pain, struggle, suffering and what seems to be interminable conflict in the lives of those whose sexual orientation is toward the same sex...
...Why should 1 be threatened, gutted with fear, spittled, with their resentment...
...and liberals, laughing at Leonard Bernstein's portrayal of Officer Krupke or at some of the self-martyred inhabitants of Feifferdom, have long known it...
...There are no pristine colors...
...In 1939 Ligutti was elected executive secretary of the N.C.R.L.C...
...The small town pastor became an international circuit rider of the gospel of the good earth...
...The second problem is serious, even more so because it is typical of writers in the field...
...Name the artist and the strip...
...so naively optimistic that it denied the existence of slobs or kid punks or the perpetrators of hideous crimes...
...McNeill begins his work by discussing the need to examine the traditional approach of the Church towards the homosexual...
...then he becomes (2) factual Reporter and Collaborator...
...This is a summary overview of color in the comics...
...Falconer is truly a parable for our times_9 FamtRar F a c e s , Hidden l a v e s : The S t o r y o f HomoscxRal Men i n America Today HAROLD BROWN, M.D...
...and in that dawn it gave rise to the two demonic archetypal spirits of the comic form, Happy Hooligan and the Yellow Kid...
...The book, though not particularly profound, is descriptive and does seem to get its point across--to give the average reader some insights into homosexual life and lifestyle...
...Let me hasten, therefore, to correct an impression...
...She never tires of blaming Farragut for her disappointments, never stops kicking him when he is down...
...The World Encyclopedia is quite obviously no dispassionate study of the problems and personalities in the comics profession...
...all hues and tints are variations of secondary reds, orange yellows, blues and greens which ~ake us back to the earliest days of the genre...
...This kind of tidy distinction makes some of the more voluble critics thirst for raw meat...
...but happily, the door to "the gardens of the mind" (in George Meredith's phrase) is there, just beyond the covers of the book...
...For over thirty years," according to Yzermans, "he was hopscotching around the world, studying farming methods, examining soil, promoting human de10 lune 1977:380 velopment, and being a friend and bridge between the local missionary and the director of agriculture and the field representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization...
...Brown knew...
...But she would genuinely be glad to disabuse him of his wasteful dream, if she could: "Don't you understand that she never existed, Zeke, and that she never will...
...B~E HOGARTI~ art/st and author, was for many years the illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip...
...In a recent world conference "The United States in the World" (Sept...
...How then, does the man on the front lines, the counselor, deal with the conflicted or suffering human being before him who finds hinaelf idanttlkd as homosexual...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IM BRIEF EAgTH ANOELS by Susan Cahill, Harper & Row, $8~93...
...It does a distinct service to thinking persons and is most likely a book of great personal courage...
...Instead, for my penance, I'll take a Latin missal to Mass next week and think of that lovable tease Martha (an occasion of sin if ever I saw one...
...The backgrounds are faded yellow, to buff and pale grey-green...
...chlatrlsts tend to deal in the practical order only with those homosexuals who have severe neurotic disorders or personality conflicts, and almost never deal with the hidden maiortty who have managed more or less to escape severe emotional disturbance because of their condition...
...It has emerged in spite of the Bill of Rights...
...It is risky for a biographer to go beyond his sources but in this instance I could wish that the author had taken a calculated risk and had read between the lines of his documents and letters to suggest to readers some insights into the spirituality, the irrepressible good humor, the inexhaustible energy of this extraordinary man...
...Like Rostand's Cyrano, Horn was equal to the aetack...
...It is perhaps an error to call this a fault of the book itself...
...This is a formidable tour-de-force Maurice Horn has given us, a singleminded perception (as we read in the Foreword) that "----constitutes not only a definitive study of a very important _9 . . art form," but as long as comics as a form prevails, it will continue " . . . to illuminate . . . 20th century civilization as a whole...
...But in one aspect, Horn declares, "we are in the presence of an altogether new and original form," which can " . . . take us into a paradoxical universe where time is neither consumed nor abolished: the universe of the eternal present tense...
...More, the use of the balloon is not only a function of dialogue, it is ambivalently "by n~ture a graphic form able to translate nonverbal aspects of language: tone, pitch, rhythm and accent...
...He suggests that priests and laymen engaged in counseling have become progressively aware that "conversion to a heterosexual orientation or total abstinence from all sexual expression are no longer practical pastoral aims in a majority of the cases with which they deal...
...the hats go on and off, flipping through the air with a pace that dazzles the eye while the ensemble of clowns, zanies and buffoons cavort in gleeful accompaniment...
...His organization of his materials is uncluttered, felicitously free of nitpicking footnotes...
...And sadly enough it bringe home once again the fact that the Church has had---and continues to have---great difficulty in understanding and responding to human sexuality--of whatever orientation...
...Earth Angels is a hell of a good read...
...The comment goes on, with even-handed charity, though ambiguously, "It should be ment4oned, however, that his drawing style consisting of a line reduced to Rs simplest expression, perfectly suits the purpose of the strip which is literary and not visual...
...This has caused critics in some quarters to quarrel with the Horn approach, for the style is so clearly the editor's, that the book is measured by its rigorous, arm's length, even ad hominem manner...
...A rare prison visit finds her responding to Farragut's solicitous inquiry about the house with a curt "Well, _9 . . it's nice to have a dry toilet seat...
...Here they axe: What is the universally-acclaimed greatest comic strip...
...This book is really the story not only of the events of his life that led to such a self-exposure but of the lives of many of the homosexuals whom Dr...
...He then traces scriptural references to homosexuality, a section that reads interestingly enough...
...It was a revelation----a picture of the things the government does in our name...
...Luigi Ligutti, whose name is almost synonymous with the rural fife movement, was an innovator, ecumenist and land reformer long before he served on three Vatican II commissions...
...Beyond this, the balloon transcends speech "addressing itself to naked t h o u g h t . . , free of all the restraints of organized expression...
...COHEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Stetnteh (Cost...
...Forgive me, father, and sisters too, for I have sinned...
...Because Susan Cahill graces her narrator with vulnerability and the talent to perceive the human beneath the stereotype, Martha interests us as much in the anomalies of relationship and growth as in the trappings of her Catholic experience, and Cahill herself is able to avoid that reflective pitfall, condescension...
...The problematical state of the art, as Horn seeks to define it, lies in the fact that "the canons of traditional aesthetics do not apply to this new form...
...His final word to us is an admonition to "Rejoice...
...Brown's account and then following up with Father McNeill's...
...Possibly, but I doubt it...
...Although Farragut portrays his wife as cruelly mistreating him when he returns home from a drug cure with a seriously weakened heart, we are given this interesting comment as well: "He was in too much pain and fear to realize that the homecoming of a drug addict was not romantic...
...It asks us not to accept (and rightly, I believe), without scrutiny, traditional notions, like ownership and retribution...
...Was their liberalism (and I use the term, uneasily, for whatever vague outlook unites of S.D.S., A.D.A...
...In reading this biography of Ligutti, one senses the shock and disappointment that this apostle of the good earth must feel in contemplating the state of the ecology, described by some futurologists as a Frankenstein monster breathing out threats of slaughter to the human family...
...But Ligntti thrives on problems...
...As regards moral theology, Father McNeill seems to be saying that in the past all homosexual relations were seen as "subjectively and objectively mortally sinful and thus left the Catholic homosexual with no morally acceptable alternative except a life of total abstinence from sexual activity...
...In the statement, "There is in a cry of despair almost Kirkegaardian in its accent, and thoroughly modern in its premise," name the strip and its author...
...theses are junk...
...A man stooped to pull up his socks...
...The bulk of the book communicates with deep feeling how different homosexuals have dealt with such issues as "keeping it a secret," if and how to relate the fact of homosexuality "to one's parents and how a homosexual can experience "life in a small community versus the relative anonymity of the big city...
...Harcourt Brace, $8.95 The Church and t h e Homosexual JOHN J. McNEILL, S J_9 Sheed Andrews and McMeel, $I0 SAJRA C. CHARLES, M.D...
...1) He stresses the new self-awareness of the homosexual community and their insistence not only for recognition but for some more appropriate pastoral response from the Church...
...Whether you conceive of the activities o f U.S...
...mary analysis, biographical data, hundreds of illustrations, directories of comic book publishers and syndicates, it carries indices, glossary of terms, contributors' notes, award winners, bibliography, and the like...
...John O'Grady, William Gibbons, SJ...
...p.129) Such an assumption, he maintalns, rules out the achievement of a hommexual relationship as fully mature and constructive...
...p.30) The core issue, in Father McNeiU's approach, seems to be that homosexual acts are to be d~stinguished from a homosexual orientation--the former suggesting some freedom of choice, the latter little freedom and therefore distinct moral issues...
...In his foreword, the author says, "I have attempted no more and no less than to recount the life of a man from available sources...
...Yzermam has written a biography in a brisk, lively style, eminently clear...
...Perhaps onethird of Wise's case material has already been drllmmed into the consciousness of any daily newspaper reader...
...Scholars of various disciplines will no doubt gladly assess them and respond...
...The answers, good friend, are in the book, and you'll have to get it to find out...
...One could of course think about welfare reform and social deprivation--these are not, after all, irrelevant---but that is a ludicrous response...
...and the N.A.A.C.P...
...If so many middle-class liberals chafe at their own convictions, bark at their own selves, under the pressures of our metropolises, isn't that because these convictions have so little to say about the immediate problems they face...
...Father Ligutti began his career as pastor of a small country parish in Woodbine, Iowa in 1920, then moved on to Granger, Iowa in 1926 into a parish riddled with poverty, poor housing and brgken homes, all of which worsened with the outbreak of the 1929 depression...
...Brown's frequent differentiation between the effeminate homosexual and the homosexual with whom he clearly identifies---the man who appears outwardly masculine despite his same-sex orientation...
...Hence, it seeks to stake out a sweeping, catch-all approach, so that besides history, chronology, sum...
...all the time I pray...
...An American police state has evolved," says Wise, "operating in the shadows side by side wi~h the legitimate system of government...
...But the scrutiny continues, undeterred and workmanlike: "Unlike such otherwise divergent comic strip satirists as AI Capp and Feiffer, he (Trudeau) lacks conviction...
...She shows a sharp eye for Farragnt's weaknesses, as well as a sharp tongue: "Do you still dream about your blonde...
...FATHER JOHN B. SHEERIN, C.S.P., past editor of The Catholic World, is a syndicated columnist in the Catholic press...
...Regrettably, space is a problem...
...Potts too experienced...
...It grew despite, or perhaps because of, its excesses...
...Domestic economy, election reforms, international affairs: liberalism chatters on...
...The average reader probably has to give the round to the author whatever its relative scientific merit, for the argument seems based on the weight of the interpretations of apparent Scripture scholars--most of whom are probably unfamiliar to the lay audience...
...And I would be curious to know Father Ligutti's positions on certain burning issues: Humanae Vitae in r ~ lation to overpopulation...
...or as scholar, he is (3) Historian of the Comics...
...Ligutti attracted national attention in 1934 because of his role in setting up the Granger Homesteads, the purpose of which was to move families from shacks around the mine areas at Granger to provide the inhabitants with decent housing and enough land for cultivation...
...One solution (and i t is the most frequent, if the least enlightening) is to put the comics beyond the pale, to write them off es non art . . . and non-significant...
...the effect is that of watching a juggler ,in a carnival...
...Tke World Emege/opedla et tke Comics MAURICE HORN Chelsea House, $30 B ~ lmOGAITB Editor Maurice Horn might have appended a subtitle to this 785-page oversize volume, The World Encyclopedia o/ the Comics, with over 800 blackand-white illustrations, 1200 alphabetictl entries and a lO,O00-mme index ~"The Outcast of the Art World: a Compendium of the Most Voluminotm Art in the History of the World, of the Art That Isn't There...
...My curiosity however does not detract from my appreciation of Monsignor Yzermans's work...
...He has had two major exhibitions at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre in Paris...
...For example: "the comic strip artist 4s not concerned with art problems, problems of form, spatial relationships, and the expressive movemerit of fine...
...His touchstone for discussion is Charles Curran's work, Catholic Moral Theology in Dialogue...
...Since his parishioners were farmers it was understandable that Ligutti should develop an interest in farm life and in the National Catholic Rural Life Conference...
...sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Allied Council for the Arts and the Smithsonian Institution, which brought hundreds of scholars, academics and experts together, one of the speeches on Arts and the Media was given by author and editor, Maurice Horn, on "American Comi~ in France...
...The American Police State is far from a mere compilation of horror stories...
...JOHN DRUSKA THE AMERICAN POLICE STATE, by David Wise, Random House, $12.95...
...No reason to have left the material out, but it does add some intellectual drag to an otherwise wellcrafted narrative...
...If there are many writers and marginal historians of the comics today it is because of the first world Exposition of the Comic Strip (1967) in the Louvre at Paris mounted by the French Socerlid society (a group dedicated to the research in the comics), and the simultaneous publication of its unsurpassed catalogue which quickly took its place as the definitive History of the Comic Strip, a w~tershed book from which all subsequent histories are measured...
...Kraft's telephone...
...and from that day to this, transplanted to America, he has been the leading protagonist and expositor of the comic idiom in the U.S., and is one of the few first rank historians of world renown...
...This is the problem that surfaces as we leaf the pages and confront the panorama of material...
...But even liberalism in a more genuine form is of little help often enough...
...What comic strip did the famous German Expressionist and Bauhaus painter, Lyonel Feininger, draw for the Chicago Tribune...
...In an issue so emotionally laden anyone knows that authorities can be found to support whatever Commonweol: 377 theory best reinforces the point one whhes to emphasize...
...2730, Washington, D.C...
...the Jewish people and their "tie to the land...
...George in the arena of the m'ts lays to against the dragons who would destroy the hapless half-wit, the beguiling village idiot, the Funnyman...
...Junk...
...she asks in the course of a later visit--"that blonde who never menstruated or shaved her legs or challenged anything you said or did...
...Systematic change is impossible without such an understanding...
...I'd mention a few of the book's venial sins to even the score.--some hip rhetoric here and there, as in its injunction against Jim Crow...
...It is from this embattled position that the World Encyclopedia seeks to move out to meet its adversaries...
...It is a story which begins in innocence and immaturity, classic and mythic, which bespeaks the morning of the modern age of alienation, whose hero is the bungler, the simpleton and the clown...
...The character of the color is especially ingratiating since the treatment takes on the quality of newsprint tearsheets which project the feeling of older, seasoned, vintage pages taken from period archives long removed in time...
...My gratitude goes to him for having given us a very readable biography of a great figure in American history, a priest who loved God and the good green earth...
...His latest offering is The American Police State...
...In the end, asaimt the detractors, he seems to create an ambience, a turnaround to a state of affirmation and esteem...
...I think of men like John Courtney Murray, Congar, Suenens...
...Common sense, an insistence on dignity and decency, to the point if necessary of force, and finally an abiding of the ambiguity which inevitably will mark our every effort to resolve conflicts---no political philosophy can substitute for these...
...All in all, looking and lingering over the eclectic assortment which ranges from the days of Little Nemo and the Yellow Kid to the most recent exotic productions from France and Italy to Japan and the Philippines, one gets a truly heady and nostalgic feeling of sampling rich, fine old wine_9 And as we plunge deeper, we find points of arrest in the text that slyly provoke the imagination...
...This list could go on...
...Better say it is a new version of an old story form, a parable_9 In this post-Yeatsian stage of things when many of us still feel we are, as the poet says, "turning and turning in the widening gyre," the falcon unable to hear the falconer, how remarkable that John Cheever has found a way to circle back within earshot...
...intelligence agencies...
...It begins with a "short greyhaired man atop the telephone pole" setting up the bug on columnist Joseph 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS JANET GROTE[ is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker...
...Harold Brown's recent autobiographical account of his homosexuality...
...One of the major reasons Horn's book has not been popular in some sectors of the cartoonist's confraternity is that Horn as Editor wears five hats: as encyclopedist, he is (1) the neutral Editor...
...the entire panel was focused on elite and pop culture, and comic strips, with Maurice Horn at the vortex of the fray...
...And he goes on to argue, "Because the comics present so many facets, each mirroring the rule of different art forms, they present thorny epis~emological problems that need to be cleared away if one desires to achieve any understanding of the form...
...It must be said at the outset that this book is an extraordinary, resourceful, and polemical defense of the comic strip...
...Is it, then, not liberalism but middie-class-ness that is the issue, the root of their shock of not being exempt from the disorder and danger of city life...
...In all the chapters the communication of tremendous conflict and pain is clear...
...Lichtenstein pa4nts the portrait of a whole society...
...Now suddenly Horn upgrades him with a fine-honed, evaluative complimentary judgment: "When Garry Trudeau finally sees fit to express a strong viewpoint (whether moral, political, aesthetic...
...A curious theme, minor perhaps but noticeable, is Dr...
...But that, too, seems too easy...
...We remember that she has seemed deliberately cruel only when Farragut is involved in justifying himself in her regard...
...The stretchout of information is like an allembracing spectacle, data, commentary, aesthetics, criticism...
...Leonard is too smart and Ms...
...Against these mindless, dogmatic contentions by critics who neither read nor study the comic form, Horn levels a rebuff: "One can very well sympathize with the resentment and frustratiou of the critic who finds all his neat formulas of little or no use . . . . The comics simply refuse to be pigeonholed...
...If we believe that those measures of social betterment that are identified with liberalism would spare us from painful choices, then we should revise our beliefs...
...Brown, on the other handmwere he alive todaymwould probably be quite pleased not only to have his work asI0 June 1977:J76 sociated with Father McNeill but would undoubtedly take some comfort that this priest's book exists...
...The intelligence establishment did not "just grow" like Topsy...
...She has been, in some sense, a phantasm all along---just as unreal in her implacable selfishness as his dream blonde in her docility...
...Like some forensic defender of the innocent, this St...
...sixty-three pages of four-color comic book and Sunday newspaper reproductions...
...It is the latter aspect that is distressing...
...intelligence agencies as reflections of a "rogue elephant" or a "rogue Presidency," The American Police State is a compilation of the excesses...
...He was in at the heginnings of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and was appointed Vatican observer in 1948...
...People i l , r VINCENT A. YZERMANS Liturgical Press, $10.50 ($8.50 paper) JOHN B. NHIEElUN "Pre.Vatican H" has become a term of contempt and yet the best minds of that Council were molded in the period before Vatican II...
...It does not contribute much that is new--rather it consolidates in one readable book some of the major arguments and trends...
...She is perilously close to a caricature of the frustrated suburban wife...
...Msgr...
...Along the way, Wise chronicles the civil liberties violations of the FBI, CIA and IRS, among others...
...And it was my homosexuality that lay at the root of my decision to resign some eighteen months after I had attained the pinnacle of my profession...
...Our past indebtedness to David Wise is great...
...It struck me as I read these two works that John McNeill may be mildly displeased that his book, The Church and the Homosexual, as been coupled in the same review with Dr...
...After 1964, Wise followed the success of The Invisible Government with The Espionage Establishment and The Politics of Lying...
...Or did this liberalism admit of such harsh reality while softly denying that it should ever confront them...
...Or a comparison with fine art: 'The cartoonist tells a little story...
...Let me amend myself...
...What will I tell my friends at homeuthat we came away from the conference speaking only of the comics...
...There was no appreciation of freedom in the way they moved...
...Anecdotal illustrations of homosexuals who have married and the nature of both their promiscuous and loog-term relationships are all discussed and the author tends not to make judgments of such situations as much as he pleads with his readers to acknowledge their existence...
...land use...
...Yet, not so, exactly...
...And a major insert, central to the book, is a positive joy...
...The American Police State suffers from two problems----one timing and one potentially terminal...
...These were their constraints, the signs of their confinement, but there was some naturalness, some unself-consciousness about their imprisonment that he, watching them between bars, cruelly lacked...
...A younger woman, glancing at the overcast sky, put up a green umbrella...
...His emphasis is mainly on the religious response to the homosexual condition and he presents forceful and what appear to be relatively accurate historical sources to bolster his approach...
...And from that day to this, the issue in the beloved art, now spread worldwide across continents and generations, has been the upgrading and acceptance of its halfwit~ misfits, dwarfs and monsters in the art that isn't there, the art of the comic strip...
...The pressure in this book comes not directly from describing the pain of the conditionmrather it appears to be strikingly important to the author that you not only take his arguments seriously but that these arguments he accepted as true...
...and even its grammar of 'shot,' 'sequence,' and techniques of cutting and framing, "the variations of angle and perspective . . . are present in both forms...
...This chapter reflects the arab/gu/ty of the scientific approach but it does not reflect sufficiently the necessity for further exploration and understanding of the roots of same-sex oriantmion since in other sections of the book, moral arguments are dependent in part on the relative control the in...
...The only ideals involved in all questions of sexual orientation are the great transcendent questions of justice and love...
...the incredibly short shrift it gives to Martha's college career--if I weren't Commonweal: 381 so heartily sorry for my almost-mortal error...
...It puts down in bold print some of the very real moral and human issues that are not just going to fade away...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 12
