One Writer's Beginnings

...Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations: I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture...

...Some are bitter, some resigned, some cautious, some just out for a buck...

...It is the record of a person, a family, a town, and an era...

...Whether or not the authenticity of the Shroud can ever be established beyond doubt (by carbon 14 tests...

...Further, Prof...

...John Heller, however, a Yale biophysicist, speaking for the rest of the team, asserted that McCrone had not removed his test samples from the Mylar tapes on which they were mounted, before analyzing them...

...It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own...

...It was, so to speak, a sacred puzzle reserved for us...

...As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me...

...Nevertheless, there is something about the Shroud that makes it especially interesting to the twentieth century: whereas most other mysterious religious phenomena seem alien to modern man, given our technological zeitgeist, it is precisely contemporary technology which has revealed to us the surprising facts about the Shroud...

...It must have been painful as well as pleasant to record for the public so many details of daily living, so many private facts, about herself and her forebears...

...I have always trusted this voice...

...In short, it is indemonstraI Listening, seeing, ONE WRITER'S BESINNINES Eudor8 Welty Harvard University, $10, 104 pp...

...In April 1983 she took time to reflect on her life, her writing, and the possible relations between them, with herself as subject and object...

...She took her camera along_9 Photography, like fiction, demands composition, form, and timing -- to capture the instant...

...It is, of course, an artful book -- written with love and Craft, and with one art, the fiction writer's, at itsheart...

...Nobody but me," that bitter expatriate invariably complains, "cares about quality...

...She does not theorize -- as in her stories, she presents...

...tellers around her...

...Of course this does not mean that she is rattling skeletons better left in peace...

...She gives us the materials to decide for ourselves why, from the many cared-for children of her time, her milieu, only one of them grew up to be Eudora Welty...

...Her fiction is most often set in the South, in Mississippi scenes she knows, and their tone is personal -- often first person...

...Nevertheless, I recommend his book for scientific data...

...Events in Jackson included Thurston the magician, one-night stands by Galli-Curci and Paderewski, and the silent films we revive today...

...finding a voice -- Delta Wedding, The Optimist's Daughter, The Ponder Heart, and Stories collected in 1980 -- might piece together some of the material in this book...

...It's a pulse...

...to honor Caesar's mother who died that year...

...Supposedly, people with talent are serving their apprenticeship so they can move on to the big screen...

...and Tribbe's for historical material...

...This obliged (or enabled) her to travel all over her state, helping to clean up after a tornado, or set up a county fair...

...There was one exception: the microanalyst, Walter McCrone, extensively quoted by Nickell, insisted, as already noted, that the so-called blood stains were only ferrous oxide pigmentation...

...Part H, Learning to See, is mainly family history, as it appears to a little girl visiting distant grandparents and later to the grown woman who puts it together...

...Well, unlike Buddhism, Christianity admits -- nay, asserts that it is a religion based on faith...

...While it hopes not to violate reason, it certainly transcends it...

...The coins have been identified as the "Julia" coins, struck in 29 A.D...

...Todd Gitlin interviewed roughly two hundred men and (a few) women who, with others, write, produce, direct, and manage network television, including its systematically associated production companies...

...Eudora Welty was educated before"writing" became a college subject...

...Max Frei, a botanist and pollen expert, whose testimony is regularly accepted in European courts of law, has identified pollen on the Shroud which could only have come from plants that grew in Palestine and Anatolia -- some of which have been extinct for centuries...

...They do make fascinating reading...

...There are talented guys and bad guys...

...As for the conjectural history of the cloth prior to its exhibition in medieval France,~ Dr...

...Since the scientific tests in 1978, by the way, new evidence has accumulated...

...Information Agency, points out that the first Jewish Christians were not in a position to flaunt any relics of the crucifixion...

...Mm.gas-et Wimsatt E UDORA WELTY is celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday this year...

...They use those shows to sell the largest possible audience to the advertisers who finance America's dominant and probably most profitable medium...

...This image is the only representation of Jesus Christ that satisfies my own theological and esthetic expectations...

...I wish, however, that Tribbe had not seen fit to include material on other "unexplained" images of Christ, all but one of which, to my mind, lack the nobility and credibility of the Shroud...

...Heller and his colleagues assert that their samples passed "six irrefutable tests" for blood...

...Travel might have perils such as a flat tire needing to be vulcanized, but also such rewards as ferries towed across a river by hand, where the deck was awash and bared feet could be cooled...

...Making & marketing culture INSIDE PRINE TINE Todd GitUn Pantheon, $|6.95, 360 pp...

...These were thingg a story writer needed to know...

...The whole book is engaging...

...Heller, too, is on occasion too anecdotal for my taste...

...Mother encouraged her daughter's interest in writing fiction, while father urged her also to find a way to make a living_9 The Massey Lectures appear here as the three sections of the book: Listening, Learning to See, Finding a Voice...

...One cannot laugh off facts like these...

...Frank Tribbe, an attorney who was for twenty years Assistant General Counsel of the U.S...

...The television industry is an old boys' network of fellas out to earn the big buck by manufacturing kitsch...

...The trips were wholes in themselves_9 They were stories_9 Not only in form, but in their taking ondirection, movement, development, change...

...Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had...

...Beyond the people and the stories is the focusing excitement, the framing function, of travel itself...

...Though roughly chronological in order, as chapters they overlap, because, as the author both points out and demonstrates, neither sequence nor memory is a fixed thing...

...She learned from listening, to that inner Voice, and to the story...

...They weaken an otherwise sober presentation...

...But among the normal childhood events described in Part I -- learning to read, school, Sunday School, the arrival of two brothers -- one factor seems the most important to her, and perhaps the most indicative of her future calling...

...Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology has judged that both the material and the weave of the Shroud are totally consistent with first-century textiles and looms...

...As regards the medieval bishop who claimed to have detected artistic forgery, all sorts of petty jurisdictional quarrels might have led to his accusations...

...the picture it bears will probably remain in my mind as the true visage of the Rabbi of Nazareth...

...Computer enhancements of Shroud photographs has suggested the presence of coins on the eyelids of the figure (consistent with first century Jewish burial customs...

...Childhood's learning is made up of moments...

...So much for the silence of Scripture...

...Born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives, she is one of a renowned crop of Southern writers: William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Spencer, and Flannery O'Connor among them...

...She comes from a family exemplary in outward matters and warmly united at home...

...Conclusion...

...and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it...

...The Shroud of Turin is not about to demonstrate it...

...Her mother, who had grown up in West Virginia, was introspective, moody, almost morbid in her concern for her family's welfare -- a romantic who kept an open novel, floury on top, on the kitchen shelf while she baked her family's bread...

...A reader of her short stories and novels ble...

...A "Southern School" they of course donot form, unless from their work one wishes to conclude that Southern writers are idiosyncratic...

...He was, indeed, silenced by the very pope to whom he appealed for a condemnation of the Shroud...

...Towns had edges, stopped where the country began...

...Father's family, farmers, seems to live less dramatically, but for a child there are wonders on a farm too, a springhouse, a great barn, and again, affection...

...9 . . My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too . . . When I write, and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes...

...It isn't steady...

...In any case, their own Jewish background would make them hesitant to revere "images" -- especially one which would have been ritually impure in the first place, owing to its contact with a corpse...

...Inside Prime Time presents the richest information ever collected on the inner workings of America's chief culture industry...

...Most paintings, for my taste, are either too "pretty," too "Aryan," or both...

...Here she is speaking autobiographically (one hopes no official biography will be attempted) and from the heart...

...This book, first delivered as the inaugural William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, is the result...

...Ever since I was read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear...

...Part HI, Finding a Voice, carries the author through college, and work during the Depression for the WPA...

...All seem to be filtered through the eyes of that disgruntled writer or producer...

...Their Commonweal: 342 marriage faced difficulties internal and external, but their love was never in doubt...

...She draws, as a writer must, on her own experience, but not directly, as she explains...

...Muriel Cantor reported a similar phenomenon in her 1971 The Hollywood TV Producer, although she emphasized how a concern for perfecting cinematic skills leads some men to tolerate network interference rather than to seek professional autonomy elsewhere, as others 1 June 1984:343...

...She learned, she says, from her own mistakes...

...Gaye Tuchman E VERY now and again, a disgruntled Hollywood writer or producer, whose slightly unorthodox idea for a series has been "ruined" by the networks, bares his soul and tells all: TV chases after money...

...But I'm not unbiased...

...Her father, brought up on a farm in southern Ohio, was curious about practical matters -- he kept maps, a telescope, and a gyroscope in the living room, a barometer on the dining room wall, and made and flew excellent box kites...

...Mother's clan,, the Andrews, live on a mountain top, where water comes from a well hundreds of feet deep, and the only access to the outer world used to be by boat or raft down a fiver often in winter iced over...

...What of Nickell's other objections...

...By this means, breaking the ice, Eudora's mother Chessie had carried her dying father to a hospital in Baltimore, and brought his coffin home again...