Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR COLUMBIA I want to congratulate you for your most valuable issue on Columbia University ("Columbia in Turmoil," NL, May 20). Some of the contributions—namely the articles by Professors...
...Some of the contributions—namely the articles by Professors Dankwart A. Rustow and Amitai Etzioni—were extremely illuminating and should be read and discussed in seminars...
...Art is reduced, like every other aspect of human endeavor today...
...He is also, incidentally, a very good critic...
...I would gladly give my eyeteeth to—and for—her any time...
...Too much work in the arts today, rather than examining these realities of our existence, reflect them in the chaos and disintegration of discipline on the part of the artist...
...Boston, Mass...
...Munzberg's question in return, "But don't you want to be a spectacle...
...We felt that they did not prepare us for the revolutions that were taking place in the streets all around us...
...Ignatow's poems speak of our "slowly slipping back toward the instincts," but his work does not suffer from that quality itself...
...He seems to alternate between writing about actresses who turn his stomach and actresses who make him writhe with lust...
...In Italy, for instance, Giovanni Papini wrote a pamphlet entitled, Chiudiamo le scuole...
...Teaneck, N.j...
...she balances her postnasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile...
...so untalented and homely, and so blithely unaware of it all...
...On the girls in the film Benjamin...
...My generation already felt in the early '20s in Central Europe that universities as they have been conceived from earlier ages were outmoded, and unable to answer our then revolutionary anxieties...
...Margolis quotes with apparent approval Munzberg's remarks to the Negroes who shouted at him to stop photographing them...
...His unsympathetic question in itself almost elicited the response he received...
...The Negroes say, "This ain't no zoo . . . You can't make a spectacle of us...
...Anna Gael is an absolute stunner, and a few others are worth a lipsmacking or two...
...New York City William Stone SIMON Your film critic John Simon is very interesting...
...Incipit vita nuova...
...Of Liza Minelli...
...seems to me to have warranted the "unprintable" reply he received...
...it becomes a veritable nipplorama—at times there are enough nipples constellating the screen to turn it into a milky way...
...For every Nabokov, who explores the helpless lust and dissipation of sexual obssessions, there are scores of others who parade sexual perversion in their work as an entertainment...
...What astonished me most in reading Rus-tow's analysis was that the major pillars of Columbia's establishment acted the same way the characters in Chehov's plays did while the old institutions were falling down...
...When it comes to the women he likes, he seems to be practically climbing the wall: "Young Judy Geeson in the altogether is the loveliest sight in movies so far this year...
...After all, these people are victims, not victimizes...
...All this alternate groaning, snorting and lipsmacking adds a new dimension of feeling and erotica to film reviewing, making me turn to Simon first to see what sounds he is emitting this week...
...Perhaps they are becoming that way, and I was glad to read a piece that was honest enough to break out of conventional liberal sentimentality toward Negroes...
...a sick smile befitting a calf's head in a butcher shop, an embryonic laugh that emerges as an aural stillbirth, and an epic case of fidgets...
...Those who travelled to Washington to protest against the poverty and desperation of their lives should be credited with a more dignified motive, I think, than wanting to be spectacles in the way Munzberg means it...
...Some at that time even shouted that the universities should be closed...
...But Margolis' uncritical attitude toward his German companion makes me wonder if he was himself equally ambivalent toward Resurrection City, and if this attitude in some way provoked some of the hostility he reports so vividly...
...Eugene Leeds ERASING THE LINE I liked Robert Bly's review of David Igna-tow's poetry ("Slipping Toward the Instincts," NL, May 20...
...Of Sandy Dennis...
...It appears that more than ever artists are succumbing to the madness about them, erasing the essential line between the participant and the objective observer...
...New York City Arnold Snyder...
...Bogdan Raditsa Professor of History Farleigh Dickinson University RESURRECTION CITY Your article on Resurrection City by Richard J. Margolis ("Building a Ghetto," NL, June 3) is a chilling, acerbic piece of reportage, one which supplements the bland coverage of the daily press...
...Disconsolate at the sight of so much utter, unattainable loveliness...
...But some of the remarks that Margolis attributes to his companion, German photographer Peter Munz-berg, lead me to wonder if Margolis' impressions are entirely balanced...
...Munzberg's other comment, that "It reminds me of the days before the Nazis came to power," also strikes me as strange...
...For every Pinter, who with restraint and passion reflects upon our situation, there are 10 others who scatter violence and destruction upon the stage without the direction and control of art...
...Let's Shut the Schools...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
