July 1986

~~~ ~!'::::=.

JULY 1986 RUPEES FOUR

New Life for Liberty

July 1986

SPAN VOLUME XXVIT NUMBER 7

2

In Search of Liberty

4

New Life for Liberty

by John Russell

10 The Week America Was Born

by Jim Bishop

12

E.B. White-A Writer of Style

by William Shaw11, John Updike a11d Roger Angell

14 An Approach to Style by £.B. White

20

Technology to Fight Terrorism

by Steve11 Ashley

24 "This is Anita Raj From New York"

by Judy Aita

28

The Printed Word Feisty as Ever

by Jacquelin Singh

32

On the Lighter Side

33

The Reindustrialization of America

by Bruce Babbit

38

Focus On ...

40

Captivating Young Readers

by Vijay Tankha

42

Life After Retirement

44

A Ruined Retirement!

by George Nelson

45

A Collage of Joan Hall

by Himadri Dhamla

48 Leaves of Grass A Review by Darsha11 Si11gh Maifli

Publisher

James A . McGinley

Editor Warren W. McCurdy Managing Editor Himadri Dhanda Assistant Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor Ninnal Sharma Editorial Assistant Rocque Fernandes Photo Editor A vinash Pasricha Art Director Associate Art Director

Nand Katyal Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director Bimancsh Roy Choudhury Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

Y.P. Pandhi

Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Inside front cover-Stephen Northup, Discover magazine

Š 1980 Time Inc. 2-3- Schecter Lee; design Faye H. Eng and Anthony T . Yee. 4 top-U .S. National Park Service. 5- Leon Bodycott, American Heritage Picture Collection. 8 left-U.S. Camera (1959) and Library of Congress. 9-Margaret Bourke-White. 12- Jim Kalett. 21 bottom- painting by Dean Ellis. 23-United Press International.

24-25- Judy Sloan/Gamma-Liaison. 28- Avinash Pasricha. 30-Garry Watson. Daily News. 33- 0ffice of the Governor of Arizona. 34-35 top- Barry Fitzgerald/USIA; bottom-Arizona State University/ Stanton Photography. 36-NET Ben Franklin Technology Center. 38 top- courtesy World Health , WHO; bottom- Avinash Pasricha. 39 right- Nand Kumar. 41-R.K. Sharma. 42-44-courtesy Kraft Ink; copyright Š 1984 Kraft Corporation. 45-47- courtesy Joan Hall; 45 bottom-A vinash Pasricha. Inside back cover and back coverAvinash Pasricha.

Published by the United States lnfomrntion Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN anicles in 01her publica1ions is e11coura,ged, except when C<>pyriglued. For permission wrlte to lhc Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 25;

single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a receni SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg,

New Delhi I LOOOI . See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: The Statue of Liberty, America's most famous symbol, has undergone a $ 62-million renovation for a glorious lOOth birthday celebration on July 4. See pages 2-9.

Back cover: Basket weaver Jessica Lomatewama at the Hopi Indian Crafts exhibition held at the National Handicrafts and Handloom Museum, New Delhi. See also inside back cover.

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER For Americans July is a special and festive month, just as August is for Indians. It was on the 4th of July, 210 years ago, that the United States became an independent republic. This July assumes an added significance as the nation celebrates as well the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, its most beloved and enduring symbol. After a $62-million refurbishment, the statue is being rededicated by President Reagan on July 4 at a ceremony to be attended by leaders from around the world. Along with the traditional Independence-Day fireworks, th~ ceremony includes torchlight parades in period costumes, illuminations, the pageantry that goes with such joyous occasions and a massive show of bonhomie when ships from many friendly nations pass in review before the statue. Among these will be the INS Godavari, already on a good will mission to America. Our cover story this month corrmemorates Lady Liberty.

The name Thomas Jefferson is almost synonymous with America's Declaration of Independerx::e. It was he who drafted the original document on which the Declaration was based. The first four days of July 1776 were hectic and momentous, as representatives of the original 13 colonies met in Philadelphia, debated and rewrote the Declaration and decided unanimously to break away from the English yolk. The drama of those four days comes to life in these pages.

Farther along, we are proud to feature an appreciation of the American writer, E.B. White, who died last CX::tober. More than most writers, White had the ability to touch his readers in ways they would never forget. We might have chosen samples of his works from any number of sources--children's novels, essays, articles, short stories, letters. They all display White's wisdom and gentle writing style. In the interest of furthering that wonderful way he had with the English language, we decided to reproduce a chapter on style he once wrote as an aid to fledgling writers. In addition, we have two complementary articles, on American libraries and children's literature, each demonstrating independently the broad effect White has had on our national consciousness.

***

In stark contrast to that civilized life, we also present in these pages an article that I am sure we all wish were not necessary. It is on the latest technology designed to foil terrorist attacks on airports and aircraft.

It is sad but true that terrorism has suddenly assumed epidemic proportions, threatening populations in more and more areas of the world. The direct human costs are staggering. Last year alone, for example, some 800 major attacks left more than 2,200 dead or wounded, many incapacitated for the rest of their lives. Beyond even the tragic squandering of life and property is the pandemic of psychological stress and fear psychosis generated by these random, savage attacks and the irnneasurable damage they have done to the entire fabric of peaceful international relations.

Through intimidation and indiscriminate violerx::e, terrorists have converted city streets, businesses and diplomatic missions into battlegrounds, and forced governments and airlines to take the extreme measures we see in the article beginning on page 20. However, as persons and installations at obvious risk improved their security, terrorists have responded by becoming even more indiscriminate. No longer are innocent bystanders spared in the onslaught. The outlaws and anarchists can spread their hateful terror only as long as the forces of law and decerx::y are disunited and allow them to do so. It is only through international cooperation that the world can look forward to a more peaceful future.

--J.A. M.

In Search of Liberty l.Jberties with l.J~ "'~·~en.-.c-.t..-u.r....

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In celebration of the Statue of Liberty centennial this year, the Xerox Corporation recently sponsored the exhibit ''Liberties with Liberty.''

A sampling from the show, which was presented by the Museum of American Folk Art, New York City, is shown on these pages.

Long before the Statue of Liberty was even thought of, heroic female figures in various forms had come to symbolize A merica. As early as the 16th century, mapmakers and engravers characterized the newly discovered continent with the image of an American Indian queen astride an armadillo, bow and arrow in her hand . With colonization, the queen was replaced by a more docile Indian princess who appeared with such American emblems as the pine tree, tobacco leaf, Stars and Stripes, or the peaked Liberty cap, an ancient symbol. As the colonies then considered their own liberty from Britain , America took on the look of a plumed G reek goddess. As the pictures o n these pages illustrate, a number of variations on that theme were tried before the Statue of Liberty was installed in 1886, and became the accepted symbol of the nation .

Above: Weathervane Statue of Liberty, made byJ.L. Moll Iron Works, New York and Chicago, Ca. 1886; copper, hammered with original parcel gilding, 119x 121 x I I cm. Private Collection.

2

SPAN JULY 191\6

Sculpture of Miss Liberty; artist unknown; Tilton, New Hampshire, 1850- 60; carved and polychromed wood, 58 cm high.

The Barenholtz Collection.

Right: Ship Figurehead of Goddess of Liberty; artist unknown; region unknown; 1850-60, can¡ed and polychromed wood, 157 cm high.

Stare Street Bank Corporate Art Collection.

Farrigl11: The Liberty Money Bo.\, Israel Bindman, Corona, Queens, New York, Ca. 1880; carved and applied wood, 31x101x9 cm. Moquin House Antiques.

Above: Needlework of liberty in the form of the Goddess of Youth supporting the Bald Eagle; artist unknown; New Jersey or New York, Ca. 1800; silk, watercolor, sequins and mica embroidery, 60 X 63 cm. Daughters of the A m erican Revolution Museum.

A bove right: Painting of O ur Country is Free, Joe Miller, Illinois, Ca. 1870; watercolor 0 11 paper, 31 x22 cm .

Collection of Merle H. Glick.

Mount Airy Fire Company Hat; artist unkno wn; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ca. 1840; pressed felt, paint, gold lettering, 15 x 26 x 29 cm.

The Philadelphia Contributorship.

R ight: Watercolor of Colum bia; artist unknown; region unknown; early 19th century; watercolor on paper, 29 x 24 cm. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Katz.

3

New Life Lilierty

by JOHN RUSSELL

America has refurbished the Statue of Liberty for a glorious lOOth birthday celebration on July 4. Lady Liberty, who has welcomed countless immigrants and visitors to New York harbor, will now be adding another chapter to her colorful history.

Just renovated and refurbished for its centenary with funds raised from all over the United States, the Statue of Liberty in New York may well be the single most seductive structure erected anywhere in the world during the past hundred years. It bas a great location. It has stood up to everything that wind and weather can throw at it. It is part of a universal folklore. Yet when seen at firsthand, it never fails to astonish. "That's it!" we say to ourselves as the aircraft grinds round and round in a holding pattern above Lower Manhattan. "That has to be it!"

And we find comfort in the fact that it is still there, holding its lamp aloft and still (to quote its original title) "enlightening the world ."

It has a twofold magic. It stands, self-evidently, for an ideal of fair dealing in human affairs that is spelled out in the American Constitution and never fails to move an imaginative visitor. Once past that statue , we think, anything is possible, and all shackles are cast off. That idea is made visible not only in the forthright, chesty and protective stance of the statue itself but in the elementary fact that it has never fallen down. It comes, after all, not only from the studio of a sculptor but from the drawing board of an engineer of genius called Gustave Eiffel. He was in the business of making things that did not fall down , and he lived in an age in which it was axiomatic that all problems could be solved. For Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor who designed the statue itself, Eiffel was the ideal, the indispensable, the predestined partner.

Left above: Bartholdi's working models for the statue. Left: Liberty Leading the People by Engene Delacroix. 1830; oil on canvas, 4. 04 x 5.04 meters. it was considered so inflammatory that it was not hung in the Louvre until 44 years after it was painted.

Reprinted fro m the Sm1iliso11101r magazine. Copyright

4

Š John

Russell.

Eiffel and his contemporaries were of our own day, in that they preferred light, aerial , insubstantial-seeming but perfectly calculated structures to monumentalities of brick and stone.

Ever present in their imaginations were the disasters to which brick and stone had stood as sponsors. The Statue of Liberty doubles as a lighthouse as well as a statue, and Eiffel could not have forgotten the tribulations of the Eddystone Lighthouse.

First built in wood and stone off the coast of Devon in 1699, the 30-meter-high structure was washed away, with its designer inside it, in 1703. A second attempt, sheathed in wood, burned down in 1755. A third was eaten away by the sea and eventually had to be dismantled. Not until 1882 was the curse of the Eddystone rocks put to rest. These were somber auguries.

The Statue of Liberty was on every count a structure that had to be got right the first time around. Too much was riding on it for it to be anything but a total and lasting success. There was the pride of the Republic. There were the hopes of the teeming millions who, give or take a nought or two , would remember it as the first thing they saw in America. And there was the pride of the French people, who had struck off their own shackles more than once during the previous hundred years and did not care to have a fiasco on their hands.

All this being so, it was a piece of the greatest good luck that Bartholdi and Eiffel ever got together. As a citizen and as a man of his time, Bartholdi had all the right convictions. He believed in freedom the way Beethoven believed in it when he wrote the dungeon scene in Fidelio, and the way Verdi believed in it whenever he had tenor and baritone stand side by side at the front of the stage and sing of freedom , evoking the collective memory of the Risorgimento. During the FrancoPrussian war Bartholdi had been aide-de-camp to Garibaldi himself, and it was through no fault of his that Garibaldi did not succeed in his last-minute attempt to galvanize an army and stave off French defeat. Bartholdi had a sense of elan in his heroic monuments, and he had a sense of the colossal that had been nurtured by a journey up the Nile in 1856.

But-how to put it politely?- he did not have a sense of stability. The subjects of those headlong effigies of his looked as if they had been overcome by a cramp at an inconvenient moment. His most successful piece is the Lion of Belfort. Such are the associations of the heroic defenders of the stronghold of Belfort against the Germans that we pass over the fact that th1s particular king of beasts looks to be under sedation.

Bartholdi had a lifelong craving for gigantomania. Too late for the Colossus of Rhodes, he was just in time for the wave of very large standing figures that swept across Europe in the 19th century. From the unrealized 70-meter-high statue of Britannia that was fancifully proposed by John Flaxman as early as 1799, to the hardly less enormous statue of Arminius near Detmold in Westphalia, the urge to stand tall was felt all over Europe. In 1852 Bartholdi had witnessed the visionary zeal with which students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts threw themselves into a competition for an idealized lighthouse. The notion of carrying and casting Light was to haunt him throughout his life. 1n 1867, when the Suez Canal was nearly complete, he tried to get a commission for a gigantic female figure that would cast light not only from a torch held high but from a broad band around her forehead. Nothing came of it in Egypt, but Bartholdi was not the man to waste a good idea.

Nor did he have to wait too long to put it into effect. A born

The monument.al face somberly gazes past the sculptor's mother, who was the model for the statue's facial features. Such was her hold on her sons that Bartholdi hardly dared to get married (at 42).

republican by nature, and a witness to the decline and eventual collapse of Napoleon Hi's imperial regime in France, he dreamed of going to America and, once there, of making his fortune in traditional style. One of Bartholdi's great strengths, and one that served him well for the Statue of Liberty , was that he never recoiled from the obvious. He did not aspire to change the course of art, but rather to speak for the tried and the true.

As of the summer of 1865, he had been privy to the councils of those intelligent Frenchmen who wished to ensure that France once again became a republic- but a republic established within the law, and without bloodshed, and in a spirit of exalted enthusiasm.

It was in this same spirit, and borne along by the flood tide of sympathy for the United States of America that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, that Bartholdi set off for New York in 1871. He knew what to say, and he knew how to make people listen. " I will try to glorify the Republic and Liberty over there," he wrote to his chief adviser in May 1871, "in the hope that someday I will find it again here. " That quotation J draw, among much else that here passes as my own, from The Statue of Liberty by Marvin Trachtenberg, a book that I cannot recommend too highly. Like many another European visitor before and since , Bartholdi could not contain his enthusiasm at the sight of the New World in action. He meant it, as others before and since have meant it, and his enthusiasm got through to his hosts. Night after night he described to them the statue-unparaUeled in grandeur since

SPAN JULY 1986

5

NEW LIFE FOR LIBERTY continued

ancient times- and he also described the zeal, the generosity and the promptitude with which the French would take up the subscription. By the time each evening's fantasy was fuU grown, the money was there, the statue was built, and the ancient friendship between France and the United States had moved into a new and glorious phase.

And when he returned to France in the fall, Bartholdi really did have something to show for his visit. He had found the site-then caJled Bedloe's Island-and that site, complete with fortress, could not have been better chosen. It was the place of all places that no one could miss.

He had to bide his time before going ahead. In the end, $400,000 was to be raised in France and $250,000 in America.

The funding and building of the statue, though, were not so much a matter of warmhearted charitable activity as of political maneuvers in which timing was paramount. More even in France than in the United States, the idea of liberty had a great

6

SPAN JULY 1986

deal riding on its back in the early 1870s. In France, at least until the Third Republic was finally set up, it could not be pushed too far or too fast. Bartholdi did not get the official go-ahead until November 1875.

He did not see the Statue of Liberty in purely impersonal terms, or simply as a commission that would make his name, once and for all. As a native of Alsace, a part of France that had to be ceded to the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War, be thought of liberty in relation to the eventual freeing of Alsace from foreign rule. He himself did not go there for ten years after the Germans took over. He had a yet more cogent reason to dislike the new state of affairs: his mother bad stayed behind in Alsace and was separated from him.

The fact that Madame Bartholdi senior was one of the all-time great killer mothers of the 19th century did not prevent Bartholdi from venerating her-to the point, in fact, at which he borrowed her features for the face of his Liberty. It is a

Far left: Three commemorative coins have been issued by the U.S. Mint to honor the statue's JOOth anniversary. The five-dollar gold coin (top left) is the first one of its kind minted in more than 50 years; the silver dollar (middle) commemorates Ellis Island as the Gateway to America, and bears the now famous lines: "Give me your tired, your poor,/

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"; and the half-dollar shows a ship of immigrants steaming into New York harbor.

Profits from coin sales will go toward maintenance ofthe statue and harbor islands.

Left: Liberty's old torch has been replaced by a new torch (left below). Attended by the American and French fiags, here it is hoisted

into place. Featuring a gold-leafflame, it was crafted by French artisans. The new torch will be lit by President Ronald Reagan during a special ceremony on July 4. The spectacle, watched by many heads of state, will include dazzling fireworks, tall ships from countries around the world, including India. parades in period costumes and an audience of millions.

Miss Liberty's repairs: The inside story COPPER SKIN--~~~~~#k~~ft~~ STRIPPED OF TAR AND PAINT INSIDE

COPPER SAOOLES REPLACED

ARMATURE BARS

REPLACED WITH STAINLESS STEEL

~'/dJJ~':::,-;;..---CROWN

PLATFORM REPLACED. SPIKES REPAIRED 'ft.~\\ 'fl!Frt-----HEAO ARCHES REINFORCED. SECURED

CENTRAL PYLON - -- -44-- ' I SANDBLASTED, PAINTED SECONDARY FRAMEWORK SAN08lASTED, PAINTED

NEW HEATINGCOOLING SYSTEM

100~-+-l--HELICAL

STAIRS

NEW BALUSTRADES, TREADS, RE'ST STOPS

Liberty's iron framework, designed

by French engineer Gustave Eiffel, was not built as he planned (see sketches at left). The computer image (above) shows the shoulder joint 18 inches (45. 7 cm) out of line, the head off by 24 inches (61 cm). Thus, 1heir weight is transferred to the trusses of the central pylon along the length of relatively weak beams rather than at the strong joints. Two plans were proposed to repair the shoulder: to rebuild it as nearly as possible to Eiffel's plan, or to strengthen and brace the existing joint. which included a 1932 repair (shown in rose). Engineers favored the first method, historians the second.

The historians won. The 1984 additions are shown in orange, and the new reinforcing in yellow.

SPAN JULY 1986

7

NEW LIFE FOR LIBERTY continued

from the New York Tribune. "In view of the climate," the Tribune said, "it may be presumed that Liberty will be draped.

Indeed , she is always represented as wearing a sort of disheveled nightdress. There are those who believe that the Genius of American Liberty should be clad in trousers. No Frenchman, however, can be found who shares this delusion , and if the artist wilJ only spare us the odious Phrygian cap, we shaJJ be entirely contented with the orthodox style of drapery."

Bartholdi was not the man to go counter to opinion of that kind, even if his design had not already been virtually completed. (It has to be added that Madame Bartholdi in trousers might have made many a would-be immigrant tum tail.) He was not so much an original poet as an entrepreneur, a manager, a negotiator and a persuader. He also had an unfailing eye for a running mate. ln addition to Eiffel he had American architect Richard M. Hunt, and but for Hunt the statue would not have had the pedestal that nobly supports it, never once setting itself up as a rival for our attention.

No sculptor likes to see his work upstaged, and the relation of a sculpture to the ground beneath it is an edgy business.

Bartholdi's statue, 46 meters high and weighing 225 tons, had to be hoisted free of the existing fortress. But how free was free? It could not be held up in an INDIANS unconvincing, unorganic way. Nor could FOR it seem to have settled down on top of an LIBERTY undistinguished hump. To solve the probJay ant Kulkarni, lem , Hunt swiftly produced a design in a Brooklyn, New which mass and detail were ideally conYork, artist, won trasted. The final effect was neither to the Indians for push the statue to a height at which it Liberty logo comwould look like an irrelevant toy, nor to petition held early make it settle too close to the ground. We this year. Kulkarfeel at once that this statue is where it ni's artwork was among several submitted ought to be, and that it will stand there last year by various artists. The runnerforever. up was Suhas Tavkar of New York City.

As is the case with perfect stage Born in Bombay, Kulkamj graduated management, what Eiffel did for the in commercial art from the Sir J .J. School project passes completely unnoticed. of Applied Arts, Bombay, in 1971. StartOnly in his working drawings can we ing out as a layout artist, he rose to study the inner nervous system of the become art director, working for various statue- the intricate network of support magazines and advertising companies in that makes it possible for the huge Bombay as well as in the Arabian Gulf structure to hold its really rather awkbefore going to the United States in 1982. ward pose with immunity from mishap.

Currently Kulkarni works as an art direcThe statue was made of copper, beaten tor of a Manhattan advertising company delicately into shape over plaster forms, and has specialized in promotional prowhich were then discarded. What looks at first glance to have been built like the grams, corporate identity, advertising Great Pyramid, has in point of fact an campaigns and symbol/logo designs.

The fund-raising campaign through Ininterior that bears almost no relation to dians for Liberty has been launched by the ample and motherly forms of Barththe National Federation of Indian Orgaoldi's Liberty. Eiffel saw it as his task to nizations in America, which has pledged build a slender but strong metallic bone $100,000 for the statue . The Indian comLeft: An old photograph barely shows an munity's contribution will be permanentethereal Liberty wrapped in a vaporous cloud ly acknowledged at the Statue of Liberty from an armada of steam boms during and Ellis Island national monuments. a celebration. Right: The close-up of her head

matter of amazement that this prototype of freedom and generosity in human affairs should have been modeled on a woman who was a byword for bigotry. Such was her hold upon her sons that Auguste hardly dared to get married (at the age of 42) to someone of whom she might not have approved. His brother Charles went out of his mind partly, it was thought, because he was afraid to tell his mother he was having an affair with a Jewish woman.

The features of Liberty in Bartholdi's statue can be read as emblematic of perseverance and determination. They quite lack the emotional momentum, Jet alone the unambiguous sensuality, the revolutionary gore and the flaunting Phrygian cap that Eugene Delacroix had given to her counterpart in Liberty Leading the People, painted in 1830. As to which image puts the more invigorating case for liberty, there can be no discussion.

Delacroix's work was so inflammatory that it was not until 1874 that it was hung permanently in the Louvre, 44 years after it was painted. The Statue of Liberty was altogether more decorous.

This was in accord with the American taste of its time. In that context, Marvin Trachtenberg quotes an editorial of 1875

shows tourists looking through windows under her iron-studded crown.

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SPAN JULY 1986

structure, with its joints riveted and bolted together, that would make it possible for those forms to resist the pressures of all kinds that would otherwise have brought them to grief. We know that Eiffel took four years fashioning the armatures that support it.

Bartholdi showed something like genius in the way he placed his statue in relation to the ships that would pass it on their way to the New World. Ships would pass near enough for the statue to make its impact. but that impact would change from moment to moment. By trial and error over a long period , he got the statue to look right all the way from the first faraway sighting to the view from Battery Park.

There remained one final obstacle. T he people of America had to want the Statue of Liberty , they had to identify with it, and they had to put down money to get it. But rich people were often nervous of the notion of liberty. Poor people felt excluded from what seemed to be a remote, New Yorkish and wildly expensive undertaking. Besides, the Statue of Liberty was just too damned big. What if it was not art, but propaganda? A piece of offshore bluster? The statue was a gift from the French

in itself reason to be wary. Who were these foreigners to be foisting a statue on good American soil-and expecting Americans to pay to put it up?

If any one man put this right. it was Joseph Pulitzer. who had arrived in the United States from Hungary in 1864 with the idea of fighting in 1he Civil War. Pulitzer had done very well indeed in the newspaper business. If anyone could turn opinio n around. he was that man. I n editorials, feature stories and cartoons in the New York World and the St. Louis PostDispatch, he, as much as anyone, persuaded the American people that this was a statue that they just had to have. They agreed- just in time- and in October 1886 the Statue of Liberty was inaugurated , with Auguste Bartholdi way up inside the huge head, all set to pull the right cords. ''You are the greatest man in America today," said President Cleveland. Close on a hundred years later, it seems he had a point.

D About the Author: John Russell is the chief art critic o/The New York Times and author of several books, including The Meanings of Modern Art, Erich Kleiber: A Memoir and Paris.

TheWeek America Was Born

by JIM BISHOP

On the first of this month, 210 years ago, representatives of the original 13 American colonies met at the Second Continental Congress (facing page) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to debate, decide and declare their independence from Great Britain. Here, the author recreates the drama of those four historic days that culminated in the adoption of the Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776.

July 1, 1776

Certainly not a mandate, he mused.

The first of the resolutions by Virginia's Richard Henry Lee-calling for freedom of the united Colonies, and cutting all ties to Great Britain-was read and debated.

Those who favored Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, would vote for the Lee resolutions. It was served as a sample of the formal document to come.

It was no longer a question of whether the Colonies wanted to fight. If war was a fact, and the subjugation of the Colonies was the goal of King George III, then why cower before him? Why not, this day and for all the days ahead, renounce the shelter of his scepter and utter a final cry for independence?

The clock was approaching 4 p.m. John Hancock asked the delegates to vote at once on the Lee resolutions. The tally was nine to two. Maryland and New Jersey had joined the majority. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina asked for an adjournment until morning. It was seconded and granted.

Inside Jefferson's desk, his copy of the Declaration still reposed. It would be brought back again tomorrow , matching word for word the one on the clerk's desk. If the Congress voted on the matter tomorrow, Jefferson knew that it would either be the greatest day in American history or the most tragic.

Thomas Jefferson, an intellectual at age 33 , stepped out into the brassy morning sun that hung above the trees on the Delaware River. He walked down Seventh Street toward the State House in the city of Philadelphia.

Housewives in long swirling skirts, lace kerchiefs pinned to their hair, passed by Jefferson on the pedestrian path, some turning to look at the "easel" that made them believe the freckled redhead was an artist. In fact the "easel" was a portable desk, an invention of Jefferson's. When set upon his knees, the upper leaf could be raised by rachets to 35 degrees.

No one but Jefferson knew that, this morning, the desk contained an instrument that he had devised entitled "The Unanimous Declaration of the 13 United States of America." He expected that it would be read today by the clerk of the Second July 2, 1776 Continental Congress. Afterward , he imagAt 9:30 a.m. John Hancock rapped his ined , few of the delegates would resist the hand on the desk for order and announced temptation to shred , to alter, to obliterate that the Second Continental Congress would proceed with the business at hand. the high-blown philosophical phrases.

Every word would be at the mercy of 54 Hancock asked that a Committee of the other delegates. Jefferson would not ask Whole be resolved to consider all three of for recognition from the chair to defend the Lee resolutions, the first to be considit. Whatever be had to say was in the ered over again in the light of a nonunanimous vote. document.

Clerk Charles Thomson stood to read It was 9 a.m. on the tall outdoor clock at the rear of the building, time to call the the Lee resolutions: "Resolved , That these United Colonies Congress to order. As John Hancock rapped the palm of his hand on his desk for are , and of right ought to be, free and order, vote counters such as Franklin and independent states, that they are absolved John Adams predicted that the result would from all allegiance to the British Crown , and be seven in favor of independence (New that all political connection between them Hampshire , Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the State of Great Britain is, and ought Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, to be, totally dissolved.

"That it is expedient forthwith to take Georgia) and six against (Pennsylvania , New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Mary- the most effectual measures for forming land and South Carolina). Seven to six foreign alliances. would hardly be a victory for freedom.

"That a plan of confederation be pre-

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SPAN JULY 1986

pared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation. " Thomson polled the Colonies beginning with Georgia. Everyone was aware that as this vote went , so would go the Declaration.

It would pass , of course, but no one would be content with a nine to two vote, with two abstentions. The vote was 12 to zero , with one abstention . It was as close to unanimous as the Colonies could get. Overnight , three votes bad come to the radicals: South Carolina, Delaware and Pennsylvania. The South Carolinians , in their gentlemanly manner, had promised yesterday, "We may be with you tomorrow ," but few had counted on an abrupt change. Delaware had been won by Caesar Rodney's presence.

(The meeting had already started when Rodney arrived after an all-day and all-night ride from Delaware.) Pennsylvania had been the profound surprise.

The thing had been done. And welJ done. The fiery gentlemen had slammed the door on the King. There was no way for him to pass through it again, and there was no way back through that door for them. For good or evil, they were alJ revolutionaries now. Firebrands. It was , as John Adams maintained , a great day in history for freedom. The meeting recessed until morning.

July 3, 1776 This was a clear cool morning. The breeze was fresh out of the north , whispering that the heat spell had been broken. At 8:45 a.m., Clerk Thomson could look up and down Walnut Street and count the heads of approaching congressmen.

About 50 members were in the big room when the doorman closed and locked the double doors noisily. Once more, Thomas Jefferson sat at the back of the room , the portable desk open on his knees. Today, for certain, his Declaration of Independence would be read. He would say later that he fe lt oppressed and gloomy at the prospect of all these men voting yea and nay on every phrase in the document. Collectively , they could reduce its sense to nonsense. Their corrections, their alterations could hardly make it a firmer declaration, but they could weaken or destroy it.

Again Benjamin Franklin detected the depressed mood of the architect of freedom

Abridged from Modern Maturity by pcnnission or lntemational Creative Management. From The Birth oftht

and the supper hour, 4 p.m., was at hand.

Benjamin Harrison caught the signal and adjourned the meeting of the Committee of the Whole so that Hancock could preside to adjourn Congress until the next day .

July 4, 1776

~nd sat beside him to smile, to chat, to lend support.

The President pounded his desk with his palm. The clerk and the President conferred in whispers. John Hancock said that there were no more communications on the agenda. He would step down as Congress sat as a Committee of the Whole to hear the reading of the Declaration; Benjamin Harrison stepped up as presiding officer pro rem.

Men in the room turned to get a better look at Thomas Jefferson.

Harrison said that the draft of the Declaration would be read fully as a first reading, without interruption. Immediately afterward, if the members had revisions in mind, it would be read again, slowly, paragraph by paragraph. When the document had been edited down to its final words, the Committee of the Whole would vote whether to adopt it or negate the Declaration of Independence.

If the vote in favor carried , it would be properly enscrolled by a public printer, presented to the Congress sitting as a Congress, and signed by the President and clerk of the Congress. If the measure lost, it would lie on the clerk's desk until such time as the Congress desired to resurrect it, if, indeed, such a time should arise. Clerk Thomson cleared his throat and read the measure.

When Thomson had finished reading, James Wilson of Pennsylvania- who had spoken against it two days ago-stood to argue against consideration of it "now." The members had listened to the vivid phrases of divorcement from Great Britain, and the ringing final sentences of independence.

The gentlemen, still sitting as a Committee of the Whole, could no longer ignore this singular document. They asked to have it read again- slowly, a paragraph at a time.

Most of the delegates, though in accord with a Declaration of Independence, had literary pretensions and these were exercised i,n mutilating, amending and excising Thomas Jefferson's work.

John Hancock studied his timepiece.

The clamor for alterations had not abated,

ited Stares (William Morrow & Co . â&#x20AC;˘ New Yotk). Copyright

Š

Before the President rapped for order, the delegations were busy trying to reconstruct words and phrases which had vanished or been altered , so that they could proceed with the work at hand. For once, no one was late. There were about 50 men in the room.

John Hancock again resolved the body into the Committee of the Whole and stepped down to sit with Massachusetts Bay as Benjamin Harrison left the Virginia delegation to preside. Clerk Thomson stood to read the part of the Declaration which had been approved, and addressed himself to the remainder of the document.

"His Majesty" was changed , in all references, to "the King of England. " "Deluge us in blood" became "destroy us," and "everlasting Adieu!" had its exclamation point dropped and became "eternal separation ."

The word "subjects" became "citizens. " The Congress was improving the Declaration, although Thomas Jefferson was so offended that, in the years ahead, he would send copies of his declaration and theirs to friends , requesting that they tell him which one they liked better.

When the Congress reached the 27 indictments of King George III, it felt, in its collective wisdom, that Jefferson had gone too far. One of the items was stricken in its entirety. Some of the members took the floor to offer capital letters in exchange for lower case. They were especially irritated by the words "God" and "Nature" in uncapitalized letters. No one asked Jefferson about his foibles in grammar. The words , one by one, were killed and reborn.

There was no reason to believe that, having devised so many "mutilations," as Jefferson called them, the Congress would not change the final paragraph. This was the operative passage to freedom. One by one , members suggested alterations until so many were on the floor that the section had to be read and reread. At times the sense of the Declaration was lost. This, 6eyond doubt , was the most painful time for Jefferson, because it is in the last and first paragraphs that he let his words take wing.

As Jefferson squirmed over his portable desk, perspiring in the heat of a closed room, it is not too much to say that the

1976 by Jim Bishop.

deepest wound to his pride probably was the inclusion of Richard Henry Lee's graceful phrase: "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States .... " It may have been a grievous hurt because some members of the Virginia delegation said that his phrase originated with Jefferson when he wrote a rough draft of Virginia's new state constitution.

Hancock knew that adjournment would be late today. Congress was approaching the supper hour when the final changes were made. The Declaration of Independence was ready to be voted back from the Committee of the Whole to the Congress for a vote. A motion was made, seconded and carried as Harrison left the presiding officer's chair and gave it to John Hancock.

When Delaware voted " Aye!" the D eclaration of Independence became a fact. It was the seventh vote of 13. There was no pause ; no cheer. The poll continued. Virginia voted "Aye." So did North Carolina and South Carolina. The last "Aye!" came from Button Gwinnett, representing the youngest colony, Georgia. New York asked for the right to vote when fresh instructions arrived.

The chair granted the request.

The deed, at last, was done. Thomas Jefferson slipped his heavily inked copy into the portable desk and closed it on his lap.

Benjamin Franklin sat with his spectacles on his forehead , probably , waiting for Hancock to adjourn the session.

The President had other notions. He announced that a firm and true copy of the Declaration would be engrossed at the printer. It would be signed by John Hancock and, attesting his signature , Clerk Thomson. There was no need for the members of Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence to make it valid, but there would be a hue and cry for all signatories within a few days.

The final version of Jefferson's monumental work was, at best, a series of compromises wrung out of the minds and hearts of the congressmen through two days of labor. It is possible that no one was completely satisfied with it, and yet, in its accepted form , it seems to have captured more nobility of purpose than Jefferson's version. Everybody wanted to have it read once more, even though the time for amend0 ments had passed. That was done.

About the Author: Jim Bishop is the author of several best-selling books, including The Birth of the United States, The Day Lincoln Was Shot and The Day Christ Died.

SPAN JULY 1986

II

E.B.WHITE A Writer of Style Whether he was writing for children or adults, for aspiring writers or informed readers, E. B. White spun a captivating web of words. The following tributes from T he New Yorker are by the magazine's editor William Shawn, novelist John Updike and author and New Yorker fiction edilor Roger Angell.

T

he "Notes and Comment" page [the editorial page and always the first text page] of The New Yorker belongs to E.B. White . He began writing the editorials under that heading some months after Harold R oss , the first New Yorker editor , founded the magazine in 1925, and he contin~ed to write them week afte r week , with an endless flow of ideas and an unflagging spontaneity. for 30 years. He died on his farm in Maine [last O ctober], at the age of 86. As an essayist, as a humorist, as a stylist, he was one of Ame rica's masters. ln his paragraphs in The New Yorker he developed a new literary form: brief personal essays , conversational , lyrical , idiosyncratic, yet some how capable of striking some chord common to all of us. H e took events as they came along-ordinary household events, farm events, national

12

SPA N JULY l986

and world events-and, sifting them through his odd, playful mind , came out with conclusions and observations that were sensible to the point of genius. He was not a man for profundities or large abstractions: he stayed with the details of everyday living, which necessarily included tragedies and calamities of every kind- wars and political and social upheavals and natural disasters, and the rest-but he remained calm through it all, and even unreasonably optimistic, without ever lapsing into frivolity or foolishness. He never raised bis voice, in or out of print, but he had a lively conscience and he was an early and brave defender of civil liberties, social justice and the environment. His soft-spoken eloquence was heard. Humor pervaded whatever he wrote ; the touch remained light; he ra n counter to our century's fashion for literary despair, and did not try to tamper with his inexplicably sunny inclinations. For that matter, he sometimes seemed unaware of the very intellectual a nd lite rary fashions he was resisting. This most companionable of writers kept to himself in his personal life: a private man who, when he was not at his typewriter, did farm chores and spent fond hours with his wife (on whom he doted) a nd children and grandchildren

Reprinted by permi<sion;

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1985 The New Yorker Magazine. lnc.

and great-grandchildre n and neighbors.

He kept busy, too, with his own thoughts, which must have been as unexpected and pleasurable to him as to his reade rs, for , renowned as his writing was for its sin1plicity and its clarity, his mind constantly took surprising turns, and his peculiar mixture of seriousness and humor could not have failed to astonish even him.

Whether he was writing " Notes and Comment" regularly, as he did until 1955, or sporadically, as he did after that, Andy White also managed to provide the magazine with countless humor pieces , short stories, poems and tag lines for the newsbreak fillers , taking time out to compose a series of marvelous essays for Harper's and to write three children's books-Stuart Lit1/e, Charlotte's Web and The Trumpe1 of the Swan-which became classics. Jn his Comment pieces and his other writings, he did as much as any other single writer to set the tone and create the spirit of The New Yorker. Like his unforgettable mentor, H arold Ross, he left his mark on every page of the magazine, and his presence continues, and will always continue, to be felt in the pages. R oss was so enchanted with White's work that he had moments when he wished that all writers were E .B.

White. In his more restrained moments, he was content to welcome the diverse styles and diverse interests of his other writers and to accept White as just the model. For White did serve as a model, not only at The New Yorker but for many, if not most , American writers.

Other writers took their bearings from him, and learned from him a respect for craft and discipline and the language.

-WILLIAM SHAWN

W

hite had abundantly that most precious and least learnable of writerly gifts-the gift of inspiring affection in the reader. Affection and trust, for the writer we like is the one who never gives us anything less than the trustworthy truth , in his version of it, delivered up without fuss or shame. For some reason , I keep thinking back to White's version of his own career, transparently fictionalized as that of a Mr. Volente in a story called "The Hote l of the Total Stranger." It all began when a waitress in a Childs restaurant spilled a glass of buttermilk down his blue serge suit: "Mr. Volente had written an account of the catastrophe at the time and had sold it to a young and inexperienced magazine , thus making for himself the enormously important discovery that the world would pay a man for setting down a simple, legible account of his own misfortunes." The magazine, of course , was The New Yorker, and for more than half a century after that spilled buttermilk White's confessions, observations, poems and stories awakened the laughter and enhanced the alertness of its readers.

Elsewhere, too- in other magazines and in surprising forms , in his three classic short novels for children and in the revisions of a Cornell professor's guide to English usage- his intensely lucid brand of simple legibility sparkled. He would try anything, from a rondeau to a cartoon caption, from collaborating with James Thurber on a book ostensibly about sex to collaborating with his goddaughter on a nonposthumous volume of his own letters; .and everything in his widely assorted works is lit from within by a certain bold and jaunty restlessness.

Though timid about air travel, he moved nimbly on land and, in one series of essays for The New Yorker, dispatched letters from all points of the compass. He ranged far in his quest for artistic freedom. His young life was animated by a

number of sudden excursions and de partures. Mr. Volente recalls with pleasure "the renewal of liberty" that comes with quitting a job: "The sense of the return of footlooseness, the sense of again being a reporter receiving only the vaguest and most mysterious assignments, was oxygen in his lungs." Young and aspiring in an era when urban gaiety was plentiful, and witty humorists were common , he became a humorist, and , with his fastidious verbal timing and frequent sensations of bemusement, one of the best; but he was a humorist with broad perspective , a light-verse writer who could also ask, in the poe m "Traveler's Song," "Shall T love the worldffhat carries me under ,ffhat fills me full/Of its own wonder/ And strikes me down/With its own thunder?"

White was a man in love with beauty, with nature and with human freedom , and these concerns lifted his essays to an eloquence that could be somber and that sets them on the shelf with those of Thoreau. The least pugnacious of editorialists, he was remarkably keen and quick in the defense of personal liberty and purity of expression , whether the threat was as overt as M:;Carthyism or totalitarianism or as seemingly innocuous as the Xerox Corporation's sponsorship of an Esquire article (SP AN February 1978) or Alexander Woollcott's endorsement of a brand of whiskey. American freedom was not just a notion to him; it was an instinct, a current in the blood, expressed by his very style and his untrammeled thought , his cunning informality, his courteous skepticism, his boundless and gallant capacity for wonder.

- JOHN UPDIKE

L

ast August, a couple of sailors paid an unexpected visit to my summer house in Maine: young sailorsa 12-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy.

They were a crew taking part in a statewide small-boat-racing competition at a local yacht club, and because my wife and I had some vacant beds just then we were willingly dragooned as hosts. They were fine company- tanned and shy and burning with tactics but amenable to blueberry muffins and our exuberant fox terrier. They were also readers , it turned out. On their second night , it came out at the dinner table that E.B. White was a near neighbor of ours, and our visitors reacted to the news with incredulity. " No! " the boy said softly, his eyes travel-

ing back and forth over the older faces at the table. "No-0-0-0!" The girl , being older, tried to keep things in place. " He's my favorite author," she said. "Or at least he was when I was younger. " They were both a bit old for Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, in fact , but because they knew the books so well, and because they needed cheering up (they had done badly in the racing) , arrangements were made for a visit to ÂŁ.B. White's farm the next morning.

White, who had been ill , was not able to greet our small party that day, but there were other sights and creatures there to make us welcome: two scattered families of bantam hens and chicks on the lawn; the plump, waggly incumbent dog, name of Red; and the geese who came scuttling and hissing up the pasture lane , their wings outspread in wild alarm. It was a glazy, windless morning, with some thin scraps of fog still clinging to the water in Allen Cove, beyond the pasture; later on , I knew the summer southwest breeze would stir, and then Harriman Point and Blue Hill Bay and the islands would come clear again . What wasn't there this time was Andy White himself: emerging from the woodshed , say, with an egg basket or a length of line in his hand; or walking away (at a mid-slow pace, not a stroll- never a stroll- with the dog just astern) down the grassy lane that turns and then dips to the woods and shore; or perhaps getting into his car for a trip to town, getting aboard , as he got aboard any car, with an air of mild wariness, the way most of us start up on a bicycle. We made do without him, as we had to. We went into the barn and examined the vacant pens and partitions and the old cattle tieups; we visited the vegetable garden and the neat stacks of freshly cut stovewood; we saw the cutting beds , and the blackberry patch behind the garage, and the place where the pigpen used to be-the place where Wilbur was born , surely . The children took turns on the old single-rope swing that hung in the barn doorway, hoisting themselves up onto the smoothed seat, made out of a single chunk of birch firewood, and then sailing out into the sunshine and back into barn-shadow again and again. as the cross-beam creaked above them and swallows dipped in and out of an open barn window far overhead. It wasn't much entertainment

SPAN JULY 1986

13

E.B. WHITE continued

for them , but perhaps it was all right, because of where they were. The girl asked which doorway mjght have been the one where Charlotte had spun her web, and she mentioned Templeton, the rat, and Fern, the little girl who befriends Wilbur. She was visiting a museum, I sensed, and she would remember things here to tell her friends about later. The boy, though, was quieter, and for a while I thought that our visit was a disappointment to him. Then I stole another look at him, and I understood. I think I understood. He was taking note of the place, almost checking off corners and shadows and smells to himself as we walked about the old farm, but he wasn't trying to remember them. He looked like someone who had been there before, and indeed he had, for he was a reader. Andy White bad given him the place long before he ever set foot on it-not this farm, exactly, but the one in the book, the one now in the boy's mind. Only true writers-the rare few of them-can do this, but their deed to us .is in perpetuity. The boy didn't get to meet E.B. Whlte that day, but he already bad him by heart. He had him for good.

Like some other people in my line, I suppose, I still remember the struggles I endured in my 20s, and even into my 30s, when J was trying to find my feet as a writer. What I was looking for, without quite knowing it, was a tone of voice-a way of getting words down that seemed to suit not just the story at band but me, the person who was trying to tell it. I kept getting it wrong, because I thought it was

incumbent on me to sound like a writer; I be clear, the way he was. If I could do think I half believed that if some editor or only that- how hard it turned out to reader caught a glimpse of me in the be!-1 might have a voice of my own underbrush of my own prose he would after all, and perhaps even a style in the order me out of there forthwith, because end, too, for I would be simply myself: the world of letters was posted. It be- my one and only. I think that this is longed to authors-the landed literary, White's special gift to us alJ. Almost whose tweeds and gestures and tones of without our noticing it, he seemed to take voice were known to us all, and copied, down the fences of manner and propriety of course, by those of us who secretly and pomposity in writing, and to invite wanted to belong. For a long time, then, I the rest of us , readers and writers alike, dressed up in the styles of my time: terse to walk the fields and spinneys and weedy and brave, like Hemingway; rough and pathways of our own thoughts and exlow-down, like O'Hara; sad and windy, periences, shadowed or shining, and to like Wolfe. I wasn't happy in these enjoy the outing and the day.

E.B. White was admired and loved by disguises, of course, but I didn't know any better; young writers have more readers of au ages, but, like other splensense about this today, I suspect. It was did donors, he found some critics as well.

White ~ho set me straight. I'd been It was said of him once that you could reading him right along, to be sure, but read his entire works and never know the qualities of "One Man's Meat" and that Freud or Marx bad ever lived. The "Quo Vadimus?" and the Comment barb glitters as it tlies through the air, but pieces and "The Fox of Peapack" and somehow it leaves the man untouched.

"Here ls New York" and the rest were so He would agree, one senses- another plain and so clearly pleasurable-a glass smile, another small shrug-but he of cool water, a breeze on one's face- would not then set about becoming more that they did not feel like literature. A politicaJ or more at one with his psyche. man who set down words that way, who He never wished his readers to think him obviously wrote only as be spoke, which deeper or wiser than he found himself to is to say clearly and quietly by habit, and be. Relieved of that frightful burden, he who seemed to finish many of his sen- got more of himself onto paper in a tences with a shrug or a smile, a shy lifetime than most writers come close to fellow , always on the point of sidling out doing. Our knowledge of him seems of the room-well , he was there to be wonderfully clear, like the view back liked and befriended but surely not to be down a series of steep meadows climbed emulated. It took me a while to see how on a cool day in autumn; and, looking foolish this notion was, but when l did back over that long path, one cannot see, I stopped imitating other writers imagine a leaf or a word that might have (even E.B. White), and tried instead to made it better.

-ROGER ANGELL

An Approach to Style

by E.B. WHITE

"Gel the little book!" said E. B. White of William Strunk Jr. 's The Elements of Style. It had been his textbook in 1919 in the days when Strunk was his teacher. When White's review of the book appeared in The New Yorker in 1957, Strunk had been dead a decade and his 43-page rulebook on the usage of English had passed into disuse, much to White's dismay. On seeing The New Yorker article, the publishers decided to reissue it with White's revisions, and a new chapter (excerpted on these pages) by him on writing.

Š

1959, Š 1972, 1978 Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. Rcprin1ed wi1h permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.

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SPAN J ULY 1986

Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes, slightly rl'!arranged, are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this article on style is a mystery story, thinly disguised. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may shape his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

Style is an increment in writing. When we speak of Fitzgerald's style, we don't mean his command of the relative

pronoun , we mean the sound his words make on paper. Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias. This is inevitable, as weU as enjoyable. All writing is communication ; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.

If the student doubts that style is something of a mystery , let him try rewriting a familiar sentence a nd sec what happens.

Any much-quoted sentence will do. Suppose we ¡take "These are the times that try me n's souls. " H e rc we have eight short, easy words, forming a simple declarative sentence. The sentence contains no fla shy ingredient, such as "Damn the torpedoes!" and the words, as you see, arc ordinary. Yet in that arrangement they have shown great durability; the sentence is well along in its second century. Now compose a ~cw variations: Times like these try men's souls.

How trying it is to live in these times!

These are trying times for men's souls.

Soulwise, these are trying times.

It seems unlikely that Thomas Paine could have made his sentiment stick if he had couched it in any of these forms. But why not? No fault of grammar can be detected in them, and in every case the meaning is clear. Each version is correct, and each. for some reason that we can't readily put our finger on, is marked for oblivion. We could, of course, talk about "rhythm" and "cadence," but the talk would be vague and unconvincing.

We could declare "soulwise" to be a silly word, inappropriate to the occasion; but e ven that won't do-it docs not answer the main question. Are we even sure "soulwise" is silly? If "otherwise" is a serviceable word, what's the matter with "soulwise?"

He re is another sentence, this one by a later Tom. lt is not a famous sentence, although its author (Thomas Wolfe) is well known. "Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness." The sentence would not take a prize for clarity, and rhetorically it is at the opposite pole from "These are the times. " Try it in a different form, without the inve rsions: The mouths of earth are quick, and the teeth th at fed upon this loveliness are quick, too.

The author's meaning is still intact, but not his overpowering emotion. What was poetical and sensuous has become prosy and wooden; instead of the secret sounds of beauty, we are left with the simple crunch of mastication. (Whether Mr. Wolfe was guilty of overwriting is, of course, another question-one that is not pertinent here.)

With some writers , style not only reveals the spirit of the man , it reveals his identity, as surely as would his fingerprints.

Here, following, are two brief passages from the works of two American novelists. The subject in each case is languor. In both, the words used are ordinary, and there is nothing eccentric about the constructio n.

He did not still [eel weak. he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutfu l lassitude of convalescence in which time. hurry, doing. did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in it!> well state the body i~ slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead

of the body thrall to time's head long course.

Manue l drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.

Anyone acquainted with Faulkner and He mingway will have recognized them in these passages and perceived which was which. How different are their languors!

Or take two Ame rican poets, stopping at evening. One stops by woods, the other by laughing flesh.

My little horse must think it queer To ~top without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiCul. curious. breathing. laughing flesh i~ enough . . ..

Because of the characteristic styles, there is little question of identity here, and if the situations were reversed , with Whitman stopping by woods a nd Frost by laughing flesh (not one of his regularly scheduled stops) , one would still know who was who.

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable.

Style has no such separate e ntity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that arc popularly believed to indicate style- all mannerisms, tricks, adornments.

The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.

Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A write r is a gunne r, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in. sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience: he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge. Here , following, are some suggestions and cautionary hints that may help the beginner find his way to a satisfactory style.

I. Place yourself in the background.

Write in a way that draws the reader's attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author. If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will become revealed finally, and not at the expense of the work. Therefore, the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none-that is, place yourself in the background. A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As he becomes proficient in the use of the language, his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge, and when this happens he will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate him from other minds, other hearts-which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward. Fortunately , the act of composition , or creation, disciplines the mind ; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it. too.

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E.B. WHITE continued

2. Write i11 a way that comes naturally.

Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw .

The use of language begins with imitation. The infant imitates the sounds made by its parents; the child imitates first the spoken language, then the stuff of books. The imitative life continues long after the writer is on his own in the language, for it is almost impossible to avoid imitating what one admires.

Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. Then when you write in a way that comes naturaJly, you will echo the halloos that bear repeating.

3. Work from a suitable design.

Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and exte nt of the enterprise and work from a suitable design.

Design informs even the simplest structure , whether of bricka nd-steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another. This does not mean that you must sit with a blueprint a lways in front of you, merely that you had best anticipate what you are getting into. To compose a laundry list , a writer can work directly from the pile of soiled garments, ticking them off one by o ne. But to write a biography, the writer wi ll need at least a rough scheme; he cannot plunge in blindly a nd start ticking off fact a fte r fact about his man. lest he miss the forest for the trees ....

Sometimes. of course. impulse and emotion are more compelling than design. A deeply troubled person , composing a letter appealing for mercy or for love, had best not attempt to o rganize his emotions; his prose will have a better chance if he leaves his emotions in disarray , which he' ll probably have to do anyway, since one's feelings do not usually lend themselves to rearrangement. But even the kind of writing that is essentially adventurous and impetuous will on examinatfon be found to have a secret plan: Columbus didn't just sail, he sailed west, and the new world took shape from this simple, and we now think sensible, design.

there a re i:>erious Haws in the arrangement of the material , calling for transpositions. When this is the case, he can save himself 1nuch labor and time by using scissors on his manuscript. f=Utling it to pieces and fitting the pieces together in a better order. If the work merely needs shortening, a pencil is the most useful tool; but if it needs rearranging, or stirring up, scissors should be brought into play. Do not be afraid to seize whatever you have written and cut it to ribbons; it can a lways be restored to its o riginal condition in the morning. if that course seems best. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing. and among the best writers .

6. Do not overwrite.

Rich, o rnate prose is hard to digest , generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating. If the sickly sweet word, the overblown phrase, are a writer's natural form of expression , as is some times the case, he will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor, and by writing something as meritorious as the Song of Songs. which is Solomon's.

7. Do 11ot overstate.

When you overstate, the reader will be instantly on guard. and everything that has preceded your overstatement, as well as everything that follows it, will be suspect in his mind because he has lost confidence in your judgment or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever o r however it occurs. diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy. fo r the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.

Rather, very, little, pretty-these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly depleting; we should all try to do a little better, we should a ll be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

9. Do 1101 affect a breezy manner.

The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman . and in hi~ innocence let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is Up the airy mountain. of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high Down the rushy glen. and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine , turn to spirits We darcn't go a-hunting the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old For rear or little men ....

Spontaneous Mc al work-an introductory paragraph that goes The nouns mountain and glen are accurate enough . but ha<l something like this: the mountain not become airy, the glen rushy, William AllingWell. chums, here I am again wilh my bagful or dirt abou t your ham might never have got off the ground with his poem. In disorderly clns~matcs. artcr spending a helluva weekend in N'Yawk general, however, it is no uns and verbs, not their assistants, that 1rying 10 view lhc Columbia game from behind two bumbershools and a give to good writing its toughness and color. glazed cornea. /\nd speaking of news. howzabout lossing a few chircc

4. Write with 1101111s a11d verbs.

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. This is not to disparage adjectives and adverbs; they are indispensable parts of speech.

Occasionally they surprise us with their power, as in

nuggets my way'?

5. Revise a11d rewrite.

Revising is part of writing. f ew writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after o n the first try. Quite often the writer will discover, on examining the completed work, that

16

SPAN JULY 1986

This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the

unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, be is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing the word "chirce," he is tasteless. humorless (though full of fun), dull, and empty. He has not done his work. Compare his opening remarks with the following-a plunge directly into the news: Clyde Crawford, who stroked the varsity ~hell in 1928. is swinging an oar again after a lapse of thirty years. Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indiana Flotcx Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.

This, although conventional. is compact, informative, unpretentious. The writer has dug up an item of news and presented it in a straightforward manner. What the first writer tried to accomplish by cutting rhetorical capers and by breeziness, the second writer managed to achieve by good reporting, by keeping a tight rein on his material, and by staying out of the act.

10. Use orthodox spelling.

In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.

In the original edition of The Elements of Style, there was a chapter on spelling. In it, the author had this to say: The spelling of English words 1s not fixed and invariable, nor does it depend on any other authority than general agreement. At the present day there is prac1ically unanimous agreement as to the spelling of mosl words .... At any given moment, however. a rela1ively ~mall number of words may be spelled in more than one way. Gradually. as a rule. one of these forms comes to be generally preferred, and the less customary form comes to look obsolete and is discarded. From lime to lime new forms, mostly simplifications. arc introduced by innovators, and either win their place or die of neglect.

The practical objection to unaccep1ed and oversimplified spelling~ is the disfavor with which they are received by the reader. They distract his aueation nnd exhaust his pa1icnce. He reads the form though automatically, withoul thought of its needless complexity; he reads the abbreviation tho and mentally supplies the missing letters, at the cost of a fraction of his attention. The writer has defeated his own purpose.

he consoled, she congratulated. They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word "said" is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing.

12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.

Adverbs are easy to build. Take an adjective or a participle, add ly and behold! you have an adverb. But you'd probably be better off without it. Do not write tangledly. The word itself is just a tangle. Do not even write tiredly. Nobody says tangledly and not many people say riredly. Words that are not use<l orally are seldom the ones to put on paper.

He climbed tiredly to bed.

He climbed wearily to bed.

The lamp cord lay tanglcdly beThe lamp cord lay in 1anglcs beneath his chair. neath his chair.

Do not dress words up by adding ly to them, as though putting a hat on a horse overly firstly muchly

over first much

13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.

Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is. In long dialogue passages containing no attributives, the reader may become lost and be compelled to go back and reread in order to puzzle the thing out. This is an imposition on the reader, to say nothing of the damage to the work.

In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the break would come naturally in a speech-that is. where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

"Now, my boy. we shall see." he said, "how well you have learned your lesson."

"Now, my boy," he said. ¡'we shall sec how well you have learned your lesson."

"What'~ more, tbey would never,'' he adde<.I. "consent to the plan."

¡'What's more,'' he added, ''they would never consent to the plan ...

14. A void fancy words.

The language manages somehow to keep pace with events.

A word that has taken hold recently is thruway; it was born of necessity and is apparently here to stay. In combination with "way," "thru" is more serviceable than "through"; it is a high speed word for readers who are going 70. Throughway would be too long to fit on a roadsign, too slow to serve the speeding eye. It is conceivable that because of our thruways, through will eventually become thru-after many more thousands of miles of travel.

11. Do not explain too much. lt is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after "he said," "she replied:¡ and the like.

(He said consolingly; she replied grumblingly.) Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker's manner or condition. Dialogue heavily weighted with adverbs after the attributive verb is cluttery and annoying. Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs, they load their attributives with explanatory verbs, sometimes even with transitive verbs used intransitively:

Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute.

Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin. so use Anglo-Saxon words; in this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one's ear must be one's guide: gw is a lustier noun than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.

If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have a bad time with Reminder 14. What is wrong, you ask, with beauteous? No one knows, for sure. There is nothing wrong, really, with any word-all arc good, but some are better than others. A matter of ear, a matter of reading the books that sharpen the ear.

The line between the fancy and the plain, between the atrocious and the felicitous, is sometimes alarmingly fine. The opening phrase of the Gettysburg address is close to the line, at

SPAN JULY 1986

17

E.B. WHITE continued

least by our standards today, and Mr. Lincoln. knowingly or unknowingly, was flirting with disaster when he wrote "Four score and seven years ago." The President could have got into his sentence with plain "Eighty-seven ," a saving of two words and less of a strain on the listeners' powers of multiplication .

But Lincoln's ear must have told him to go ahead with fou r score and seven. B y doing so, he achieved cadence while skirting the edge of fanciness . Suppose he had blundered over the line and written, "In the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-six." His speech would have sustained a heavy blow. Or suppose he had settled for "Eighty-seven." l n that case he would have got into his introductory sentence too quickly; the timing would have been bad.

The question of "ear " is vital. O nly the writer whose car is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; only he knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasi ng; o nly he is able to sustain his work at the level of good taste. So cock your ear. Years ago, students were warned not to end a sentence with a preposition; time , of course. has softened that rigid decree. Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end , sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else. "A claw hammer, not an ax. was the tool he murdered her with." This is preferable to, "A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which he murdered her." Why? Because it sounds more violent , more like murder. A matter of ear.

And would you write, "The worst tennis player around here is I," or, "The worst tennis player around here is me"? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment-although the me might not do in all contexts.

The split infinitive is another trick of rhecoric in which the ear must be quicker than the handbook. Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stovewood docs. " I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow ." The sentence is relaxed, the meaning is clear. the violation is harmless and scarcely perceptible. Put the other way, the sentence becomes stiff, needlessly formal. A matter of ea r.

There are times when the car not only guides a man through difficult situations but also saves him from minor or major embarrassments of prose. The car, for example, must decide when to omit that from a sentence, when to retain it. ''He knew he could do if' is preferable to "He knew that he could do it"-simpler and just as clear. But in many cases, the that is needed. "He felt that his big nose, which was sunburned, made him look ridiculous." Omit the that and you have, "He felt his big nose .... " 15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.

Do not attempt to use dialect unless you are a devoted student of the tongue you hope to reproduce. If you use dialect, be consistent. The reader will become impatient or confused if he finds two or more versions of the same word or expression.

In dialect it is necessary to spell phonetically, or at least ingeniously, to capture unusual inflections. The best dialect writers, by and large, are economical of their talents: they use the minimum, not the maximum , of deviation from the norm , thus sparing the reader as well as convincing him.

16. Be clear.

Clarity is not the prize in wntmg, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. T here are occasions when

}8

SPAN JULY 1986

obscurity serves a literary yearning. if not a literary purpose, and there are writers whose mien is more overcast than clear.

But since writing is communication , clarity can only be a virtue.

And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!" Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, "Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforwa rd fashion!"

Clarity, clarity. clarity. When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh: do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorte r sentences.

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is a destroyer of life. of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign. heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Usually we think only of the ludicrous aspect of ambiguity; we enjoy it when the Times tells us that Nelson Rockefeller is "chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, which he entered in a fireman 's raincoat during a recent fire , and founded the Museum of Primitive Art." This we all love. But think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity; think of that side, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

17. Do not inject opinion.

Unless there is a good reason for its being there , do not inject opinion into a piece of writing. We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great. To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which , in any event, may not be relevant. Opinions scatte red indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism on a work.

Similarly, to air one's views at an improper time may be in bad taste. If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats. The writer of the lette r asked a civil question ; attack cats, then , only if you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are o ut of sympathy with cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the dedicatory ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight.

18. Use figures of speech sparingly.

The simile is a common device and a useful one, but similes coming in rapid fire, one right on top of another, are more distracting than illuminating. The reader needs time to catch his breath ; he can't be expected to compare everything with something else, and no relief in sight.

When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don't start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

Do not use initials for the names of organizations or movements unless you are certain the initials will be readily understood . Write things out. Not everyone knows that NAACP means National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will some day encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials. A good rule is to start your article by writing out names in full , and then later, when the reader has got his bearings, shortening them.

Many shortcuts are self-defeating; they waste the reader's time instead of conserving it. There are all sorts of rhetorical gambits and devices that attract writers who hope to be pithy, but most of them are simply bothersome. The longest way round is usually the shortest way home, and the one truly reliable shortcut in writing is to choose words that are strong and sure-footed, to carry the reader on his way.

20. A void foreign languages.

The writer will often find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

The young writer will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. He will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of his society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem, for the beginner, is to listen to them , learn the words, feel the excitement, and not be carried away.

Today, the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation. With its deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of the parts of speech, it profoundly influences the tongues and pens of children and adults. Your new kitchen range is so revolutionary it obsoletes all other ranges. Your counter top is beautiful because it is accessorized with gold-plated faucets . Your cigarette tastes good like a cigarette should. And like the man says, you will want to try one. You will also, in all probability, want to try writing that way, using that language. You do so at your peril, for it is the language of mutilation.

Advertisers are quite understandably interested in what they call "attention getting." The man photographed must have lost an eye or grown a pink beard, or he must have three arms or be sitting wrong end to on a horse. This technique is proper in its place, which is the world of selling, but the young writer had best not adopt the device of mutilation in ordinary composition, whose purpose is to engage, not paralyze, the reader's senses. Our advice is to buy the gold-plated faucets if you will, but do not accessorize your prose. To use the language well, do not begin by hacking it to bits; accept the whole body of it, cherish its classic form, its variety, and its richness.

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. The businessman says that ink erasers are in short supply, that he has updated the next shipment of these erasers, and that he will finalize his recommendations at the next meeting of the board. He is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of-every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.

The only question is whether his vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one wishes to do so. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than his precise meaning. Not all such words, of course, can be dismissed summarily-indeed , no word in the language can be dismissed offhand by anyone who has a healthy curiosity. Update isn't a bad word; in the right setting it is useful. In the wrong setting, though , it is destructive , and the trouble with adopting coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves where they do not belong. This may sound like rhetorical snobbery, or plain stuffiness; but the writer will discover, in the course of his work, that the setting of a word is just as restrictive as the setting of a jewel. The general rule, here, is to prefer the standard.

Finalize, for instance , is not standard : it is special, and it is a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word. Does it mean terminate, or does it mean put into final form? One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know either, and doesn't want to know.

The special vocabularies of the law. of the military, of government, are familiar to most of us. Even the world of criticism has a modest pouch of private words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nin1ble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. Of these critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote: ¡' .. . they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons." The young writer should learn to spot them-words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in afr, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound .

The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream , shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time. To suggest that a young writer not swim in the main stream of this turbulence would be foolish indeed, and such is not the intent of these cautionary remarks. The intent is to suggest that in choosing between the formal and the informal , the regular and the offbeat, the general and the special, the orthodox and the heretical , the beginner err on the side of conservatism, on the side of established usage. No idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden; there simply is a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.

"But," the student may ask, ''what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: Then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion , or laziness-the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.

0

SPAN JULY 1986

19

Techno logy to Fight Terrori sm by sTrVLN ASHLEY

In the wake of the recent terrorist epidemic. the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has accelerated a classified research effort in laboratories across the United States to develop new, sophisticated techniques to detect weapons and bombs before they get onto planes. Four million dollars has been diverted from other FAA projects and added to the earlier $11.3 million airlinesecurity-research budget for 1986. The program is moving on several fronts to find ways to thwart the terrorist threat.

Among the important developments: • A device that will shower baggage with low-energy neutrons. 1f explosives are present, the nitrogen compounds in them will release gamma rays, which will be detected, setting off an alarm.

• A computerized bomb-recognition system that will analyze the outlines and density patterns of weapons in digital X-ray images of luggage to spot bombs that human eyes might miss.

• A supersensitive chemical detector, now used to analyze air-pollution samples and to find cancer-causing additions to preserved meats. adapted into an accurate bomb sniffer.

• Chemical and electronic tracers for use as taggants in the electric blasting caps employed in many bombs, making them detectable by special devices.

To find out what has been done on these and other fronts, when the research

might bear fruit, and what the chances are of success, I talked to government law-enforcement officials. airline executives, security experts, scientists and engineers in the field. Most of the time they were unwilling to reveal details about their antiterrorist work. As one security expert told me, "Once the terrorist knows what kinds of security systems he's going to face, it's relatively easy to devise countermeasures. Security depends a lot on secrecy and deception." Nevertheless, by piecing together references from interviews and collecting data from diverse sources, a general picture emerged of the investigations under way and where they are leading.

Ifs important to rcalile that the history of skyjacking in the United States is a relatively short one. Joseph K. Blank, a former FAA official and president of Avsec., Inc., an aviation security firm based in Washington, D.C., points out that "the first hijacking of a U.S. aircraft took place on May I, 1961. Before that, air piracy, as it was called then. wasn't even a crime." Blank served on the federal task force that instituted today's familiar airport screening system in which airlines arc responsible for hiring the personnel and buying the equipment to guard aircraft boarding gates.

Passengers must pass through a magnetometer (metal detector) and are observed to determine whether they con-

form to the profile characteristic of most terrorists-mid-to-upper 20s, nervous, unable to maintain eye contact. wearing a new suit of clothes, and so forth. Carry-on baggage is screened with an X-ray machine. "In general." Blank says, "the screening program has been very successful. but it docs depend on the human operators. After checking so many people and bags without finding anything, the guards tend to get somewhat complacent. lt can be boring, monotonous work.

Shifts have to be short, and the guards must be highly motivated."

Just what can go wrong with the human side of security systems was demonstrated last year at San Francisco International Airport, when undercover police who were testing security reportedly managed to get a gun and a disarmed grenade past boarding-gate guards by staging a diversion and by using other methods. It should be said that many other unsuccessful infiltration tests went unreported. But it is to stop this kind of occurrence that the FAA technologydcvelopment program emphasizes automatic weapons-detection techniques that don't require expert operation or even human intervention. Another goal is to cut personnel costs.

Security experts say thal the war against air terrorists at the airport terminal is based on one fact: The potential hijacker or bomber has a relatively

Taking Measure of Terrorism A combmation of sophisticated baggage-inspection teclmology. physical barriers to e111ry, remote surveillance and tight security procedures, the supersernre airport would resemble an armed camp. Though many of the security measures depicted would be redundant in one facility, the re11dering (facing page) gives an idea of the obstacles a terrorist would face. Checked luggage would be inspected for weapons hy either ticket-counter X-ray machines or by X-ray scanners and bomb sniffers along the central conveyor belt. Passengers and carry-on baggage

20

SPAN JULY l'»W>

would be screened by metal detectors and X-ray machines before ellleri11g holding areas. Airport employees, food, cargo and supplies would be screened before the air-operations area.

Lockers, restrooms and other potential hiding places would be located behind the security checkpoints. Should a suspect bag get 011 a plane, the aircraft would be moved to a remote part of the airfield, where a mobile X-ray screening unit would inspect the baggage. If a bomb does explode 011 an airborne plane, blowout panels would allow the force of the blast to escape.

R<pnn1cd from Popular Sama "'''h p<rm1<.,on Copyright© 1985 Time~ M1rre>r Mngnrnc,, Inc.

Simple machines that X-ray hand-baggage (left) are no longer adequate to meet the growing threat of terrorism in the air. With terrorist methods becoming increasingly sophisticated and deadly, the U.S. Government has accelerated research efforts to develop technology for detecting bombs and weapons before they can get onto aircraft.

Vl0£0 CAMERAS EXPLOSIVES SNIFFER CHECK·IN-8AGGAGE X-RAY SCANNER

I

BULK·BAGGAGE X·RAY SCANNER

• .··r-

-

CONVEYOR BELT

:-ECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT TERRORISM co111i1111ed

limited choice of weapons. Find those weapons before he gets them on a plane, and the threat is gone. He can use guns and knives, of course, but these weapons usually contain enough metal to be readily located by baggage X-ray systems or to be detected by the magnetometer. (The FAA is looking into technology that will detect weapons constructed with a minimum of metal compone nts.)

A far more serious problem arises when the terrorist tries to smuggle explosives aboard a passenger aircraft. Consequently, much of the work being carried out today is aimed at the detection of explosives. And to do that, machines are being designed to try to pinpoint a particular physical property of explosives that will be a sure tip off to their presence.

"The one common denominator among almost the entire range of explosivesincluding black-powde r-filled pipe bombs; bundles of dynamite with blasting caps, timers and batteries; grenades; and sophisticated pressure-sensor-det onated plastic explosives-is that they contain nitrogen compounds," says Dr. D C\n iel Garner, chief of the fo rensic-science laboratory at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BAT F) National Laboratory Center in Rockville, Maryland. That one feature is the basis of many approaches to bomb detection that are currently under development.

The most promising high-technology bomb-detection device, according to experts, is based on a technique called thermal neutron activation. In this system, thermal, or low-energy, neutrons, emitted by either a radioactive emitter or a neutron generator would be directed at luggage passing on a conveyor belt. If a piece of luggage contains an explosive. the neutrons strike the nitrogen-atom nuclei in it, bumping them up to a higher energy state.

The atoms then decay back to their normal energy level, and in the process the nuclei rid themselves of excess energy by spitting out a high-energy gamma-ray photon (I 0.8 million electron volts). A gamma-ray detector can instantly detect the presence of such photons and set off an alarm.

According to researchers close to the project, a bread-board version of the machine, built over the last few years

by Westinghouse Electric Corporation engineers, sits today in a high-security lab at the FAA's Technical Center in Pomona, New Jersey. Though the current machine is relatively unwieldy (it sits

22

SPAN JULY 1986

atop a 2.5-meter by 11.5-meter trailer), it reportedly works as intended. Now an effort is being made to miniaturize the machine so it would be suitable for airport use. A competition among companies willing to build a prototype machine is now planned. The device could go into production by 1987.

Another promising, though slightly later-term , project is based on a technology now being used to analyze nitrogenoxide pollution in the atmosphere, carcinogenic nitrosamines in preserved meats, and the remains of explosions in Federal Bureau of Investigation and BATF forensic laboratories.

The process is called chemi luminescence, and it takes advantage of the fact that certain compounds- such as those in explosives-can be made to glow in easily detectable ways under the right conditions. In operation , such a system would work like this: An air sample would be taken from each piece of luggage, perhaps with a device that squeezes air samples out of bags. The air sample would then be passed through a 900-degree-Celsius furnace that breaks down any trace compounds present into their molecular components. The sample is then mixed with ozone. If certain nitrogen compounds from explosives are present, they would form nitrogen oxide in an unstable, excited state. The molecules would then decay , emitting photons with a specific energy (chemiluminescence) that are detected by a photomultiplier. Because the energy of the photon can be accurately measured, its detection would be a sure sign of nitrogen compounds and , it is hoped, explosives. This process is being developed by vapordetection specialists at Thermedics in Woburn, Massachusetts, under the direction of David H . Fine.

Yet another vapor-detection device derives from work done years ago in developing the Mars Viking spacecraft.

One fun ction of this craft was to measure the traces of gases in the thin upper atmosphere of Mars. To calibrate this equipment, an extremely sensitive device called the atmospheric-pressur e ionization mass spectrometer was built. More recently , a Toronto-based company called Sciex used the modified device to detect airborne contaminants such as dioxin and methylisocyanate in extremely small concentrations. It is said that the machine can detect materials at con-

centrations of one part in a million million (analogous to one second in 320 centuries).

This supersniffer could be modified to help thwart air terrorists. Such a device has already been made part of a $20 million cargo-container-exa mination system that includes a high-energy X-ray machine. The system is marketed by a joint venture of Sciex, British Aerospace and several other firms. A prototype system is now undergoing field tests, and two systems have already been sold in the Middle East, where, of course, security problems are most severe. The system can reportedly be used to sniff fumes released by fl ammable liquids in baggage or. perhaps, from the ai r-outflow valve of aircraft.

The Sciex machine operates as follows: A gas sample from baggage is taken into a small orifice, whe re a steel needle subjected to high voltage ionizes molecu les in the air. By transfer of charge through collisions between molecules, the trace explosive compounds also become ionized. The ions are then accelerated by an electrostatic field down a series of opposed metal plates with constant and rapidly varying electric fields between them- a so-called quadrupole mass filter. The varying field creates what engineers call a stability region, which allows only the ions of a specific mass to pass through to a detector. In this manner , the trace compounds associated with explosives are selected and analyzed.

Working along a different path , some researchers are devising ways to make explosives easier to detect. For example, Russell N. Dietz, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and others are working on placing various easily detectable tracer materials into such things as blasting caps, which are often used in terrorist bombs. The manufacturers of such products would tag them at the factory.

For instance, Dietz and a colleague have registered a patent on a blasting-cap plug composed of an elastomcric material impregnated with a chemical called perfluorocarbon. Perfluorocarbon gas is not widely found in nature and can be easily detected by a device called a continuous tracer analyzer. The concept could be used to screen baggage at airports.

In an effort to automate baggage inspection and at the same time make it more reliable, programmers are trying to

, The image of a bag passing through a scanner at an airline ticket counter helps a technician in a remote station decide whether he should press the "go" or "no-go" button.

teach a computer how to fin d bombs looking at digital X-ray images of luggage. In this system , built by American Science and Engineering, Inc. , of Cambridge , Massachusetts , a high-resolution X-ray machine and a computer are connected. The system can detect and differentiate among a vast range of material densities. It then uses pattern-recognition techniques similar to those used by machine-vision systems now inspecting automobile bodies for defects on modern assembly lines. Such a system might spot explosives that would be missed by the human eye.

Another concept that shows promise is called dual-energy radiography. In this technique an object is subjected to X-rays of two different energies in consecutive imaging scans. Because each constituent element absorbs a slightly differe nt amount of radiation depending on the energy used , a computer can select specific elements by comparing and processing the two X-ray images. For example, in medical research it has been able to "erase" the bones from X-rays of soft tissue. One suggestion is that the device could pick out mercury fulminate, found in most blasting caps (mercury is a strong absorber of X-rays).

Many other techniques that have been or may be investigated in the FAA research program are: • Nuclear magnetic resonance, which employs static magne tic and radiofrequency fields to excite and detect atomic nuclei , was rejected because it tended to ruin magnetic tapes.

• Computerized tomography, used to make three-dimensional images of inter-

nal organs for medical purposes, is being evaluated, though some believe it is too slow and expensive. in • Fast-neutron interrogation, which baggage is bombarded with highe ne rgy ne utrons, is being considered.

The fast neutrons would collide with nitrogen nuclei in explosives, which would emit radiation that could be detected and analyzed.

• Various tuned-frequency laser techniques that work by exciting nitrogenoxygen bonds into betraying their presence by vibrating or releasing light are being examined.

• Extremely sensitive bomb-sniffing dogs might be bred.

• Antibodies created through advanced biotechnology techniques could be used to detect specific explosive compounds. This system is speculative, but it might be possible to design antibodies that would grow rapidly in the presence of explosives.

Many problems remain before any advanced system is put to work spotting explosives. Any practical system, for example, must be able to process a lot of bags-one rule of thumb is a minimum of ten bags per minute . The system must also be affordable and must not cause many delays. Airline executives say that each hour a passenger plane is on tbe ground costs them $20.000. The delays are r elated to the false-alarm rate. As one security expert explained: " With from two to five bombs coming through in 400 to 500 million bags each year, you can see that to avoid unnecessary delays your black box should have a false-alarm rate of less than one in 200 million bags.

That's extremely hard to do. '' The FAA has begun discussing with a irline executives the possibility of introducing mandatory rules that would make it more difficult to place bombs in checkin baggage. Under consideration are the banning of curb-side check-in systems (only ticketed passengers could check luggage) and the holding of freight , cargo and mail overnight unless they are Xrayed or hand-inspected.

One current technology that would help protect check-in baggage without creating delays has been operating for several years at an airport in Saudi Arabia. Philips Electronic Instruments, Inc. , has provided the Saudis with a check-in-baggage X-ray screening device that is built right into the ticket counter.

In this system , according to Rijk H. van Ee of Philips. "A trained security technician analyzes the X-ray image of checked baggage from a remote station and presses a green [go] or red [no-go] button, depending on whether he sees weapons.

If something suspicious is spotted, a guard is alerted to do a hand search. In this way , the pa'ssenger is kept with the suspect baggage. One remote station can process seven o r eight check-in counter~ at a time. In addition, tbe ticket agent is not involved."

"Of course ," says Joseph Blank, "all screening systems depend on isolating the air-operations area of the airport in the usual ways- perimeter fencing, security lights, guards." The FAA's program also includes the investigation of new ways to halt ··weapons and explosives entry via supply truck, airl ine/airport employees, airport-perimeter intrusion and entry via general-aviation aircraft. " Indeed, from an office used as a laboratory test-bed for security measures, Ed O 'Sullivan , manager of the antiterrorist planning group set up a year and a half ago by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey , said that his group is looking into using such things as hidden pinhole cameras for terminal surveillance, patrol robots and infrared imaging systems to protect remote areas of airports, and airport-personnel accesscontrol systems based on "eye-prints"photos of the veins in employees' eyeballs.

Yet another approach is to make aircraft more or less bomb-proof. Thomas W. Ashwood, director of aviation security for the Air Line Pilots Association, says, "If you place blowout panels around the cargo holds that are designed to shear at certain pressures, or install vents, the force of the blast could be allowed to escape without doing major damage.

Several layers of bomb-proofing nylon hung on the cargo-hold wall could lessen the exposure to shrapnel. " "I think everyone in this business realizes that no matter what technology you use , completely airtight security is impossible ," van Ee says. "I do believe that screening systems and the like act as a great de terrent to all but the most determined terrorists."

O About the Author: Steven Ashley is a senior editor with Popular Science magazine in New York.

SPAN JULY 1986

23

'THIS IS

RAJ ANITA FROM NEW YORK'

by JUDY AITA

The young and gutsy team of the Bombay Broadcasting Network is reaching out to audiences in America and India with its bright television features that tell India's story.

In recent months, the Festival of India in America has come aHve for people in India through a series o f lively, well-made TV features focusing on the major events and the people who made them a success.

And for the past five years, India itself has been coming alive on television screens in a number of American cities in special programs that gi~e viewers a firsthand glimpse of what is going on in the subcontinent- from the latest happenings in the movie industry to news from the Prime Minister's house.

The storyteller in each case is New York's Bombay Broadcasting Network (BBN), a young, gutsy and enterprising o rganization that has risen from a one-woman, one-desk outfit to its present strength of 19 staffers and an audience of millions in just five years.

"It's am azing," says Anita Raj, 31, the vivacious vicepresident and anchorwoman, sitting in her New York office.

"When I was in India in December people would recognize me in sari stores and hotel lobbies. T hey would come up to me and say, â&#x20AC;˘Are you ... ?' and I'd say, 'Yes.' I had never cared about how I dressed before," she laughs. "I'd just tie up my hair and go out. Suddenly I felt I had to take care.

"I thought to myself: people are really watching this thing, aren't they?"

Anita Raj drew immediate plaudits with the very first BBN Festival of India program aired by Doordarshan. It was professional , slick and attractive. The same could be said of Raj. As the credits unrolled at the end of the telecast, viewers saw that she wasn't just a glamorous broadcaster but very much the woman behind the scenes too.

In fact, when the company started in 1980-as the Bombay Broadcasting Company (BBC)-she was the entire operation.

It all began with Hindi films. The Bombay Holding Company owned two movie theaters that showed Indian fi lms in New York . It spent a lot of money advertising the movies and so it made sense to pool resources and produce a film program for television on the lines of "That's Hollywood" and "Entertainment Tonight," shown on American networks.

"It was a natural, given India's film industry which is the

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUDY SLOAN

Facing page: Bombay Broadcasting Network's vice¡ president and anchorwoman Anita Raj. Top 10 botlom: Sujata Joshi at editing console; newscaster Gita Bajaj; cameraman and producer Chris Mendes; and editor lnd11 Krishnan.

SPAN JULY 1986

25

''TH IS IS ANrTA RAJ ..... cn111i11ued

most prolific in the world ," Raj says ... We decided on this program because we wanted to do something we knew; we were in the movie business. Besides, doing such a pure entertainment show , you cut across all boundaries. You don't have to worry about politics or religion. You get to everybody. There is no conflict of interest. " The Bombay Broadcasting Company bought time on a UHF (ultra high frequency) channel , Channel 47, which airs Spanish programs during the week, but is available to independent producers on weekends. The station is used by Polish, Italian, Chinese , Japanese , Korean , Indian , Pakistani and other producers who represent the ethnic communities that have given America the " melting pot" sobriquet.

I

n the beginning, Raj ran the show single-handed. She collected money from the show's sponsors, called distributors, obtained and reviewed films , selected the scenes she wanted, transferred them on to videotape and wrote the script for the show. She had to develop contacts, find equipment, hire staff.

Within two months , filmmaker Chris Mendes landed in New York from Bombay and joined the staff.

On Saturday morning February 7 , 1981, at 9 a.m., the tledgling company premiered its one-hour program called "Cinema Cinema." Raj knew it wasn't going to be a walkover.

There were already two Indian programs being aired in New York. Though one closed down about three months after BBC began operations, the going was tough. "We were the new kid on the block. People weren' t too keen to give us a chance to survive."

But BBC had worked out its formula for success strategically. ¡'We picked Saturday mornings because we knew that from 9 to 10, people are definitely home. We began with music so that even if they were sleepy, it was okay. We weren't taxing their minds too much."

Saturday morning was also a good time for New York's Indian merchants and restaurateurs to advertise so that they could attract potential customers over the weekend.

The formula worked . But Raj discovered that she had a lot to learn. "Like everybody else, l had been seeing films, but I wasn't a film person. l didn't know historical data or things about this actor or that actress. I never grew up having screen idols," she remembers. " But when you are thrown into a situation you learn very quickly. " Raj may have been inexperienced but she was well qualified. She had a masters degree in television and theater from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. This, coupled with her background in classical Indian music and dance , drew her to a career in the performing arts. Her involvement with broadcasting started when she decided to "dabble in TV in college." She stiJI seems surprised at the success she has made of her TV career.

By the spring of 1982, Bombay Broadcasting had three full-time employees and one part-time production assistant.

BBC moved into the Ed Sullivan Theater building on Broadway in the heart of New York City's theater district, a perfect setting for a fledgling television company. lt was the home of one of the most famous programs in the early days of American television , "The Ed Sullivan Show,,. and it now houses the offices of a successful weekly TV comedy show and a variety of production

26

SPAN JULY 1986

companies, dance and recording studios and talent agencies.

BBC didn't even have its own production equipment , so the staff planned the shows in one place, then braved New York City traffic to use production facilities of another studio across town. As the company grew , it first bought a camera, microphones and lights to send with the crew on an assignme nt to India. Afte r that came an off-line editing console and decks.

Now the staff is anxiously awaiting the completion of a new control room and the renovation of the studio.

That first BBC trip to India was to the movie industry in Bombay. The crew stayed for three weeks , interviewing stars and filming behind the scenes. "Playing songs and excerpts from films was one thing, but to really go and talk to the stars was another," Raj says. " It was such a success! " lnterviews with visiting Indians in New York also proved popular. In those early days Raj 's office was itself the studio.

The staff lined three sides of the room with empty tape hoxes for sound proofing.

"When J think of the number of important people, like Zubin Mehta, Ravi Shankar, Kabir Bedi and Asha Bhonsle, who came and sat in that little room , whom I've interviewed and who have been so nice and didn't comment at alJ on the small makeshift studio they were being interviewed in . . . ," Raj laughs and covers her eyes in embarrassment.

"They were all very cooperative and interested in what we were doing," she adds. As gratifying as such response was, however, it couldn't make the problems, mainly of finance , just disappear. Says Raj: "Many, many times I asked myself, 'Is this really worth it?' I don¡t know how we kept going . There were times when I wanted to just fo rget the whole thing. But there was always somebody to say: ' No, no, let's just see two or three more weeks. ' "

T

elevision , she points out, is an expensive medium.

Equipment and airtime are costly and then there are staff salaries and office expenses. "And it takes so much time-about 100 hours of research , filming , editing for a seven-minute story ," she adds. "Even though we were not doing what intellectuals would call 'thinking type' interviews, we tried to do whatever we knew best, and to do it well. And I'm never' satisfied. f always wish T could do better and that I had a little more time to do this or to ask that question. When I see the playback of an interview, for example, sometimes I could kick myself for not doing some things differently. " The first year was the most difficult , Raj says, because the company had to attract an audience , hold it, get advertisers and establish itself in one of the world's most competitive cities.

The staff gradually started tailoring their scripts not just to first-generation Indians and Asians but also to the second generation growing up i.n the United States-the teenagers.

Says Raj: "We wanted to talk informally , use American expressions that they could indentify with. For example , we would compare one of India's top stars with a popular American star like Elvis Presley. " While the 1980 census lists the number of Asians and Indians in the New York area at 70,000, Raj considers this a very low estimate. She puts the figure at 200,000. Channel 47 has a range of 80 kilometers and covers all of New York City's five boroughs ; part of heavily populated, residential Long Island to the east; Westchester county and the state of

Connecticut to the north ; and south into New Jersey.

The big year for Bombay Broadcasting was 1984. The company added Chicago/Milwaukee to its large viewing audience in September and then in D ecember premiered in Los Angeles/San Diego. In April last year, San Francisco too tuned in, to be joined by Washington , D.C. , in September. That same month , ten mjnutes of news of the subcontinent and 20 minutes for features were added to the New York menu. Earlier tills year, with its expansion into other areas, BBC changed its name to Bombay Broadcasting Network.

As expertise and audience have grown, the team has been looking for new stories outside the film industry. Among items that have been featured in the expanded version of "Cinema Cinema" are clothing designer Ralph Laure n's involvement with India, profiles of successful Indians, the story of how Indians and Pakistanis have become owners of 80 percent of the subway newsstands in New York, the Indian takeover of the semiprecious gems and diamond business from the Jewish community in New York, Indians in California 's Silicon Valley-the heart of the U.S. computer industry (see SPAN July 1983)-and even controversial subjects such as battered Asian women.

Peter Jennings, a top American TV journalist who was a reporter in Calcutta and Bangkok, spoke in an interview with Raj about "so many wonderful memories.'' It was just the type of feature Bombay Broadcasting wants to do more of, Raj says.

The Festival of India provided new challenges to the network. Before the Festival opened , Raj went to Delhi to interview Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. While waiting for the appointment , the enterprising young woman made good use of her time. "I visited the performing artists, the jugglers, acrobats and craftspeople who were scheduled to be part of the Festival.

I went to the artists' complex where they were rehearsing, thinking it would be fascinating to do a curtain raiser. It suddenly struck me that no one else was doing this in America.

I would go back with the only piece of footage to whet people's appetite. With our coast-to-coast network, we could tell everyone across the United States: 'This is what is going to happen when the Year of rndia starts."'

The program was shown in May 1985 and generated a tremendous amount of interest. Meanwhile, Doordarshan was . looking for someone in the United States to cover the Festival for its viewers in India, and "it all tied in well," Raj says simply.

"We were there, we were on the air for four years, we had experience. We sent samples of what we had done. So on faith and whatever, Bombay Broadcasting won the go-ahead to produce Festival of India segments for Doordarshan." The coverage included the Festival's opening at the Smithsonian Institution and the inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. "We were told that our program was watched by 300 million people, a mind-boggling figure, much more than the Superbowl [the American football champio11ship that yearly draws the largest television viewing audience in the United States]." says Raj .

Doordarshan has now asked Bombay Broadcasting to send programs o n anything else " we think would be of interest."

The company is like one big family. Everyone on the rolls, ranging in age from 22 to 31, pitches in to get the job done. Raj remembers one satellite feed to India that was actually a

24-hour stretch when everyone took turns sleeping on the couch in the reception area.

Young Raj is the team's veteran. She arrived in the United States about a decade ago as a graduate student and then, after graduation, moved to New York where she has re latives. It was here that she met her businessman husband and became affil iated with Bombay Broadcasting.

After Raj , the member with the longest tenure here is Chris Mendes. In film production in Bombay, he found his way to New York after an assignment in Europe felJ through.

Producer , director and cameraman, Mendes, in what appears to be true BBN spirit , also sees to it that the pape r moves smoothly through the teleprompter during newscasts.

Anchorwoman Gita Bajaj has been with the network for two years. A former Doordarshan reporter, Bajaj joined the team after getting a masters degree in journalism from the University of Georgia.

T

he newest member is John Dawla from Bangladesh. In New York a few months ago, on holiday from his job as an economics reporter for German television, Dawla tuned in to BBN and was surprised to find how nostalgic he was for news and entertainment from the subcontinent. "Working and living in Germany I didn't realize that I missed home. I guess you could ca II it suppressed nostalgia."

Dawla does features and announcing for the network, an upbeat change from his German assignment, which consisted primarily of reporting on the growing poverty problems in Europe. The contrast, however, is not just in the types of stories but also "the homey atmosphere and spirit of cooperation" at Bombay Broadcasting .

Visiting the network's office you also get to see the verve, the quick pace and the enthusiasm. People pop in and out holding impromptu conferences over the noisy hammerings of workmen. Indu Krishnan directs a newscast; newsanchor Bajaj films her segment of the show; a tall , blond young man introduced as Eric sits in an editing room. During another visit Sujata Joshi , who started as a summer intern two-and-a-half years ago and stayed, is busy editing a program. For some time, Raj herself slips into Joshi 's seat to lend an editing hand.

What Raj likes most about her job is "meeting, talking with and interviewing a wonderfully wide cross section of people."

Dawla recalls his surprise at receiving about 25 calls from viewers in an hour or so one Saturday morning after "Cinema Cinema" was a ired. "There are people out there watching and interested enough to call,,. he says. There were questions, criticism and encouragement not only from the Indian callers but from Americans and listeners from non-Indian immigrant groups as well.

What does the future hold for this enterprising group? '¡r would love to produce programs for India ," Raj says. " Festivals of India will come and go, but I have found that India has an enormous reservoir of good will in the Un ited States, among the real movers and shakers, be they in fashion , politics o r business. India has touched Americans on many levels and in many ways. There is now so much that we can draw on for stories. I'm excited about the possibilities this gives us for Bombay Broadcasting."

D About the Author: Judy Aita is a SPAN correspondent in New York.

SPAN JULY 1986

27

Despite the enticements offered by the electronic age, children have not turned their backs on books. With the active encouragement of American public libraries-more books, exciting programs, story hours-youngsters are reading more than ever before.

The Printed Word Feisty as Ever hy JJ\COUl:l IN SINGl-1

For those of us who harbor the rankling fear that the printed word is on its way out and that the electronic age is about to take over the world of books. a visit 10 the children's section of an American public library is a great morale booster.

It has often been said that electronic media. such as television and video cassette recorders, and, indeed, the computer itself with its special language. will soon render our children illiterate as far as the printed word goes, while our own reliance on reading will hasten our obsolescence. It did appear for a ti me during the 1950s and 1960s in America that children were becoming mesmerized by the images on the television screen to the exclusion of all else. and a good deal of time, effort and money went into researching the probable outcome of what seemed to be a near total enslavement.

Now that the United States is well into its third generation of television watchers. who arc more than ever surrounded by high-tech wonders, it appears that earlier fears were unwarranted: it simply has not come to pass that children turned their backs on books.

That they have not, that books in America-especially children's books-are being produced in greater number today than ten years ago is due in great part to the enterprise of the public libraries in the United States.

These have been in existence in some form or another since colonial times and have enjoyed legal status for more than 100 years; but it has only been since the 1920s that they began diversifying their services and, as a start, opened up special depart.ments for children. rt was about that time also when the American Library Association (ALA) began giving more importance to children's books and, among other activities, established the Newbery and Caldecott awards, the prestigious annual prizes for excellence in writing and illustration, respectively, for juveniles. All this has led to librarians' taking a greater interest in the processes that bring about the production and distribution of books for children, and to reviewers' and critics' taking more seriously the quality of these books. The active encouragement of the ALA has also stimulated many first-rate adult-book writers to turn About the Author: Jacquelin Smgh is a teacher at the American

Embassy School in New Delhi and a regular contributor to children's magazines. She has wrmen several educational books for children and one novel.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AV!NASH PASRICHA

their talents to writing for children.

Meanwhile, the new media have come to stay. They occupy space beside the book collections and enhance the library's basic function as a repository for the culture and recorded history of mankind. However, the primacy of the printed word remains intact.

This. at any rate. is the tirsthand impression I received during a recent visit to California where-thanks to my two granddaughters-I got a chilJ's-eye view of what is happening. It is, admittedly, a subjective impression. but all the more intense for having been received in depth. I had the whole summer to observe Sim and Sabrina at their leisure activities, unencumbered by school assignments and presumably doing what they chose to do. And how did they pass their time'' They did, indeed, spend a lot of 1t in front of the television set. watching everything from cartoon shows to wildlife programs and sneaking a look at the pop-music channel whenever they could. But their attention was invariably divided. They would interrupt their viewing to get an ice lolly from the refrigerator, take a dip in the backyard swimming pool, or drop everything to play house with their friends from down the block.

Often they would abandon television altogether to sit at the top of the stairs with their friends gathered round, all of them poring over a book while listening to the audio-cassette that went along with it. They could recount Charlotte's Web by E. B. White down to the smallest mcident and never tired of talking about Wilbur, the pig, and his barnyard friends. l lowever, if asked what they had been watching on television, even a short time after the program was over, they would be hard put to say, and, in fact, seemed uninterested in discussing it-a case of in-one-eye-and-out-the-other.

Visits to schools, learning centers and children's libraries in Conejo Valley in southern California. where my daughter's family lives, confirmed the informal assessment that I had made at home: that the new media arc being made to enrich. but by no means to replace, the printed word. (See related story on page 40.)

Walking into the community's new library in Thousand Oaks, my excited grandchildren in tow , was like entering a new and vibrant world. Four hundred square meters of this 5,500-square-meter facility arc set aside for the children's department. lts soaring ceilings and spacious layout give it an open, expansive look. At the same time, bright decorations that appeal to children

SPAN JULY 1986

29

THE PRINTED WORD continued

define areas and break them up into smaller, more manageable units, giving an air of informality and relaxation. Furniture, scaled down to child size and placed in cosy corners for reading and browsing, prevents the building from overwhelming its young patrons.

Books figure prominently in the displays and are enlivened by puppets and other material available on loan, such as phonograph records and cassettes of children's songs and stories, cassette-book combinations and feature films, many of them Walt Disney titles that have been transferred to video cassettes. For in-house programs, the library has a variety of aids such as 16 mm, overhead, slide, opaque and filmstrip projectors, as well as audio-cassette players.

As one of the more than 10,000 public libraries, with an additional 5,000 branch libraries, the Thousand Oaks facility belongs to a vast network. While it is not unique, it is an example of one of the best libraries of its kind. It serves the 94,000 residents of the locality on income derived from a variety of sources. As with many suburban libraries, it relies not only on funds from local property taxes but also on interest income, municipal general funds, fines and fees, state funding, federal revenue sharing and private donations. Vigorous support groups sponsor special projects such as family film nights, which are offered free every month by the library. Another project is the commissioning of a mural for the children's section to further enliven the area. As the artist works on the mural, an assignment that was expected to take several months to complete, children have the benefit of literally watching the creative process unfold.

Again, in common with many suburban libraries, the Thousand Oaks facility has had a short history. Only 37 years ago it began in a local general store where a couple of shelves were turned into the "library." The storekeeper was the first librarian and, even then, there was a generous space set aside for children's books.

Now. a staff of one senior librarian, two full-time and five part-time library assistants, aided by volunteer workers, look after the children's department. In conversation with April Johnson, who heads the section , I learned that Thousand Oaks Library has recently enjoyed an increased budget that has enabled her department to purchase more books and other materials and to expand the working hours to include Sunday afternoons. In 1981 only one or two special programs a week were available to children; now the average is 16. "During the past four months we presented story hours and craft programs, class tours and book talks to nearly 11,000 children in 188 programs," she says.

The biggest change in library services for children over the past decade has been the dramatic expansion of projects like these that reach out into the community. If my granddaughters had had the time and energy to take advantage of all the special activities devised for them by April Johnson and her staff, they would have had time for little else during their summer holidays. For children who were unable to go to a summer camp, there was the summer reading club, "Camp Readamucha," for 6- to 10-year-olds. Participants watched puppet plays,

30

SPAN JULY 1980

listened to stories, sang songs around a campfire one eve111ng and attended a "Peter Rabbit Dinner Theater," where the audience was asked to bring along a picnic dinner to eat on the library lawn while watching the show.

Nature crafts and a special study of the native American Indians of the Conejo Valley were part of the summer program as well. To end it all there was a camp carnival.

A suggested reading list, centered on the theme of going to camp, accompanied these summer activities, and parents were encouraged to get involved in the programs and to read to their younger children once a day.

Holiday times are occasions for special programs in most libraries. Since autumn means Halloween time for children in the United States, with delightfully scary witches, goblins and black cats, activities center on mysteries and stories of the supernatural. At Thousand Oaks the 11- to 14-year-olds were introduced to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and joined together in creating their own tales of mystery and suspense. For younger children, the library staged spooky puppel plays and provided training in simple crafts- all in the midst of a sumptuous display of books on the season.

An annual autumn activity at Thousand Oaks is the "Write Along With ... " writing competition for youngsters up to age 14. Published children's writers of the Los Angeles area provide story beginnings that the contestants then complete. Two authors arc invited each year to participate, and last year I had the honor of furnishing a story beginning to which the 10-year-old girl winner of the contest wrote a splendid middle and end. Local authors also participate regularly in discussions on how books evolve from an idea to the printed product, while young library patrons are encouraged to enjoy their own creative writing experiences.

As Christmas approaches children get together at libraries for traditional stories and songs and become involved in creative pastimes of making holiday cards and gift items. The Jewish holiday, Hannukah, is also observed. Even the subject of New Year's resolutions provided an afternoon of stories and fun at Thousand Oaks this year. This continual cornucopia of offerings draws the children and their parents into the library and, more important, gets children and books together in an atmosphere of relaxation and fun .

Even more far-reaching than these informal programs April Johnson. head of the children 's srcrion at Thousand Oaks Library in Conejo Valley, southern California, reads 10 enthralled audience during the library '~ swry hour.

ti/I

is the work done in cooperation with the schools. As with libraries all over the country, Thousand Oaks holds regular classes during the school year for children in grades 4 to 6 that include a library tour, instruction on how to use the catalogs (now on computer screens!) and an overview of reference materials. The children's department at Thousand Oaks has also begun a unique readalong program between library and classroom where a teacher selects a read-aloud book from a list of suggested titles while the class tours the library. Afterward the librarian reads the first chapter of the chosen book to the children. The teacher then continues the reading of the story in her own classroom at school. Then the library staff furnishes a list of activities appropriate to the various grade levels.

The children's department publishes several booklets addressed to the teachers. One is a pamphlet entitled Working Together, spelling out how teachers, in cooperation with the library staff, can get the most out of the facility. Library Livewire is a periodical that features

articles of interest to instructors who want to put their students in touch with the advantages of using the library.

Further, the staff works closely with teachers, especially in the high schools, to help structure students' research assignments so that they can take full advantage of the library services.

Getting the children into the library and introduced to books is just the beginning, however. Johnson says that because librarians read and recommend books to children, they take seriously their role as tasternakers. "If a child likes a book we suggest, he or she will recommend it to friends. It's like a chain reaction."

Looking ahead, Johnson anticipates that children's library services will continue to be on the rise. "As citizens of the future, children need to be educated on how to use a library and on what they can gain from using it ," she says, "but it is the children's librarian who can foster a love of reading in the child."

With this kind of commitment, the future indeed looks o bright for the printed word.

A LIBRARY MEDIA CENTER IN DELID The Library Media Center at the American Embassy School (AES) , New Delhi, is a unique facility, combining its services to AES students, their parents, who are regularly involved in programs and, informally, to the larger community of Indian schools and libraries.

Its 23,000-volume book collection is enriched by filmstrips, learning kits, transparencies, audio-cassettes, maps, phonograph records, periodicals on microfilm and video-cassettes that are coordinated with the course offerings at various levels.

Because elementary children have their own requirements, the school bas created a separate facility for students in kindergarten through grade 4, with furniture and acces~ sories appropriately scaled down and decor designed to give young children the feeling of being at borne. Bright mobiles hang from the ceiling and blow-ups of the works of well-known children's book illustrators enliven the walls. A basket full of stuffed toys and puppets awaits young patrons, who pick up their favorites before settling down on cushions to listen to a story being read to them, or a ballad sung to the accompaniment of a guitar. This is not to say it is all fun and games. Elementary schoolchildren receive regular, sequential instruction on library use, appropriate to their ages and, as an added help, easy-to-read books are colorcoded with red labels on the spines for easier identification.

The high school and middle school library, on the other hand , is more fom1al and businesslike to serve users who, for the most part, are looking toward college and the demands it will make for efficient research work. The collection of books in English as a second language is extensive to accommodate the many students who are not native speakers of English . A photocopier is available for duplicating material to illustrate class presentations and reports.

There is also a computer for students' use.

Book talks are another offering and are coordinated with the curriculum. The staff prepares bibliographies on a variety of subjects as aids to both teachers and students.

Yet, it is the outreach program that constitutes some of the more innovative services that the AES Library Media Center offers. For the community of students and their parents there are poetry readings and poetry writing. One year parents were invited to join their children in creating poems together on Saturday mornings.

Father's Day is celebrated with a special Saturday morning at the library when fathers are honored guests and share fun amidst creative activities with their young children. The library has a couple of fundraising strategies to enhance its book-buying budget. One is a yearly International Lunch; another is the sale of tote bags with the AES emblem. Last fall, after having lots of poetry read to them, elementary school

students participated in on-the-spot poetry writing. The result: a selection of poems published by the school and sold at the annual pre-Christmas book fair. The proceeds went to the AES book fund.

The AES Library Media Center reaches out farther, in an informal way, to the greater Indian community. It has helped several institutions with advice in setting up their own libraries, or in improving what they already had. Among these are the Rishi Valley School near Bangalore, the Bombay International School, Welham Boys' School in Dehra Dun and the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Sport in Rai, Haryana. Library Media Coordinator, Bandana Sen, has visited these schools at their invitation to consult on their needs and goals, and representatives from these schools have visited the AES facility as a follow-up.

Closer home, the center has sponsored several workshops for librarians from Delhi schools. Besides these more formal programs are the constant unofficial visits by school personnel from various institutions in Delhi as well as from outside the capital.

Sen also keeps in touch with Indian publishers, especially those bringing out titles for children. Jn fact, recently a storybook written by a middle school student for the annual writing contest that the library sponsors was published by one of the leading -J.S. Delhi-based publishers.

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The Reindustrialization 0 f America

by BRUCE BABBIT

Recent technology-driven changes in the American economy have put state and local governments in the forefront of industrial innovation. According to the author, who is governor of Arizona State, the most important element of this public initiative is the new awareness that the fruits of university research are best harvested through a dynamic partnership between local authorities, business and educational institutions.

State and local governments across the United States have discovered scientific research a nd technological innovation as the prime forces for economic growth and job creation. And local officials bave also uncovered a broad base of public interest that can be translated into support for aggressive action programs. With the exception, perhaps, of the post-Sputnik era, such "grass-roots" enthusiasm for science and technology has not been seen since the 19th century, when communities vied to finance tbe transcontinental railroads.

This renewed public interest in industrial innovation and techno logical progress is rooted, in some measure, in the sharp economic recession and increase in unemployment that began in 1980. It is a product of Japanese competition a nd of a growing awareness that helping new, small businesses creates more jobs ¡than trying to lure giant smokestack industries. There is a realization that technology-the application of scientific knowledge- is the basis for economic expansion and diversification, the key to the formation of new businesses and the competitive survival of old o nes. This is very much a grass-roots phenomenon, developing a nd taking shape through independent efforts in thousands of communities , hundreds of universities and 50 state legisla tures.

Across the U nited States, state governors have appointed public commissions to examine the role of state a nd local governme nt in economic revitalization and to make recommendations for stimulating economic growth . In some states, the recommendatio ns of these commissions amount to a state industrial policy , a comprehensive plan addressing all aspects of governmental performance, including taxa-

tion , expenditures, regulatory policy , infrastructure development and education.

Other states have proceeded more cautiously, emphasizing such areas of traditional concern as public schools and better roads.

Typically , however, state programs recognize that economic development is linked to technology and that technology , in turn , builds upon scientific research, public education and the investment of capital.

Why should states be involved in a ll this?

In part because they have unique capabilities that fl ow from a long-standing relationship with education. E le mentary and secondary education is a state and local responsibility. State universities have long been the center of agricultural research, and in rece nt years they have expanded into medicine , computers, e lectron ics, bioen-

gineering, materials science and other fields.

State economic-development planning, the involvement of states in budgeting university research and the demand of the private sector for university excellence have made it possible to build close connectio ns between unive rsity resea rch and economic development and job creation.

Trend Toward Decentralization Recent changes in the American economy have enhanced the role of state and ' local governments in fo rmula ting industrial policy. In past decades, technology had a centra lizing impact. Only massive multinatio nal corporations commanded the resources for large-scale projects such as nuclear power plants , jet transports and huge mainframe computer systems. Giant corporations joined with big labor and big government to dominate U.S. economic life. Washington a nd Wall Street (New York City financial district) made economic policy, and governors a nd state legislators contented themselves with placing advertisements in the Wall Street Journal offering tax breaks and discount real estate to a ny company willing to locate a branch facility in their states.

The microelectronics revolution is now exerting an opposite, decentralizing force in the American economy. Big growth in the technology sector is coming from hundreds of new companies that did not even exist a few years ago. From Massachusetts to California, software companies in backyard garages are taking root and moving into the national market overnight. The near mythical story of Apple Computer inspires dissatisfied and restless corporate engineers to think about starting their own businesses.

The process of decentralization has also been accelerated by the liberation of industry from the constraints of geography. A computer circuit manufacturer o r software company. with a high value-added product and insignificant transportation costs. no longer needs a deep-water port or proximity to coal fields a nd steel mills. The new technology enterprise is free to locate anywhere its founders wish to go.

The technology-driven decentralization of the American economy a nd the dominant role o r small business in job creation were confirmed in 1979 by a landmark study undertaken by David Birch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT).

Based on a computerized analysis of six million businesses in the United States,

Reprinted from Issue~ in Sdenct' ancl Tecltn~log_v . Copyrig_hl Š by rhc National AcadGmy of Si:it!n..:es.

SPAN JULY 1986

33

THE RErNDUSTR!ALIZAT!ON OF AMERICA co111i11ued

Birch concluded that small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) generated two-thirds of all new jobs. Here were hard data reaffirming the diversity and decentralization of the American economy. The Birch study conveyed a strong message that state and local policies could be the crucial factor in the use of science and technology to create and sustai n new companies and new jobs.

Nearly every state has increased its support for university-based research and development. In the Western states, state legislatures, lobbied by both businesspersons and academics, have come to understand the crucial role that Stanford University played in providing the ideas, research and scientific and engineering talent that produced California's Silicon Valley (SPAN July 1983). In the East, Harvard University and MIT did the same for the high-technology companies that flourish along the Route 128 research-industrial corridor near Boston, Massachusetts.

A few years ago, in Arizona, a group of companies banded together and offered "matching grants" to induce the state legislature to fund a $50 million microelectronics and engineering center at Arizona State University. In 1984, the Arizona legislature, recognizing the potential of biotechnology and medical science, established a statewide commission , modeled after the U.S. National Science Foundation , to provide $3 million a year in grants for medical research in the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

The pattern has been repeated in many other states. Texas has committed more than $100 million in support for science and technology in the University of Texas system. North Carolina has budgeted $40 million for a multiuniversity microelectronics center. And Michigan plans to spend more than $100 million for major efforts in industrial technology. robotics and molecular biology. In most cases, these programs have been linked with increased support from industry and private donors.

What is noteworthy is that behind this funding lies a new awareness that the fruits of university research and development activity have little economic value unless they are systematically harvested in the marketplace . Every student of Japanese industry knows that while basic research remains an American strength, the Japanese are highly successful at translating research into marketable products. Many state technology programs have recognized the traditional wall that separates the university from the business community as a barrier to

34

SPAN JULY 1980

innovation and business development; steps are being taken to eliminate the barriers and to build bridges of cooperation.

University-Industry Research Ties Research parks are proliferating across the country. Perhaps the best known are those at Stanford and at Princeton University, and the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. The University of Utah Research Park is noteworthy because of its successful initiation in a state without a strong tradition of high-technology industry. The park was established in 1977, adjacent to the University's Salt Lake City campus. University participation was actively encouraged, and produced an interesting mix of commercial ventures. Work in the electrical engineering department gave rise to a computer graphics company. The biology department pursued research that led to the formation of a public company that uses plant genetics to create new strains of native intermountain plants. And the park's artificial heart research produced a medical products company that has expanded beyond the confines of the facility.

To be effective, a research park must have more than a prestigious location with the word '¡university" in its address. Success relies on a solid linkage between industry and university personnel working on shared research, a carefully thought-out university patent policy that encourages entrepreneurship and a supportive university administration. The availability of venture capital and professional management ski lls is also important. Most universities have little notion of the potential commercial successes languishing in their research laboratories. To stimulate university interest, a few years ago Control Data Corporation devised a program called "Quest for Technology." For a negotiated fee , including royalty participation , Control Data arranged with several universities to conduct systematic analyses of all oncampus research to assess the prospects for commercialization.

These emerging university-business ties raise subtle issues of academic freedom , proprietary restrictions on the dissemination of information , patent and royalty rights and other issues. But such problems are being resolved as they arise. The skeptics who warn against greater cooperation might recall the origins of one of America's greatest universities. In 1865, leaders of the Boston industrial community tried to persuade Harvard College to modify its rigidly classical curriculum and provide more ap-

Increased interest in technology development at the state level is reflected in higher financial support for university research labs, such as the Engineering Research Center (Left) of Arizona University. One of the finest in electronics and computer sciences, the center is also actively engaged in increasing computer literacy among the young (above).

pLied science and engineering. Frustrated by an apathetic response, they threw their support behind a more practical new institution-the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A step beyond the research park is the "incubator facility ," in which government, the university and industry join to provide a full spectrum of the management, technical, professional and marketing services necessary to aid in the start-up of a new technology enterprise. Pennsylvania, with one of the most extensive programs based on the incubator concept, has established centers in partnership with universities, industry and organized labor. Each Ben Franklin Partnership Center provides a one-stop

cafeteria of services for the technology entrepreneur. An aspiring businessperson can obtain assistance in preparing a business plan or feasibility study, as well as access to employee training and capital.

One such center in State College, Pennsylvania , uses a vacant school building, renovated and leased at $30 per square meter. Another center uses an old building on the campus at Lehigh University, together with shared space at a Bethlehem Steel Corporation research center. One start-up business consists of six out-of-work photographers who have developed a process for linking photography with computeraided design and computer-aided manufacturing techniques. Another new firm using

SPAN JULY 1986

35

THE REINDUSTRIALI ZATION OF AMERICA continued

incubator space ¡and facilities developed a computer program for storage and retrieval of newspaper archives, a process requiring use of the mainframe computer on the Lehigh campus. In each case, the availab¡;lity of support and business consulting services was essential to the venture's success.

These new programs to h arness university resources to technology and busi ness development have strong roots in American history. During the Civil War in the mid19th centu ry, the U.S. Congress enacted the Morrill Act creating land-grant colleges with agricultural research stations. The agricultural experiment stations pionee red research in human nutrition. They developed the hybrid corn (maize) and wheat that revolutionized agricultural production. Research at these agricultural stations also aided in local economic development. Work at the University of California at Davis gave birth to the California wine industry. In the early 1900s, experimentation with varieties of Egyptian cotton led to the pima cotton that became Arizona's major farm crop.

The Morrill Act also provided a unique American model for transferring university research to economic production. Today's research parks and incubator programs are attempting to do the same for modern technology.

Renewed Interest in Education The technology revolution has also revived public interest in education. A century ago, most Americans worked on farms.

Productivity required a strong back , and an ability to read was sufficient education for most. Fifty years ago, most Americans worked on assembly lines and in other industrial jobs that required basic literacy and some apprenticeship trajni ng. By the end of this century. however, vast numbers of Americans will be working in in fo rmation and technology jobs req uiring solid quantitative skills and a measure of computer literacy as a condition of e mployment.

The information revolution has accelerated the need for an educated work force, which in turn . has spurred educational reforms throughout the United States. The most basic reform is the introduction of strong curriculum standards. Before 1980, most states did not have minimum secondary school graduation requirements, and it was not uncommon for secondary schools to graduate students with as little as o ne year of English language study and with no mathematics or science instruction at all.

This trend is rapidly being reversed.

36

SPAN JULY 1986

The state of Pen11sylvania's Ben Franklin Partnership Centers offer "incubator" space and business support for technology entrepreneurs; here, research chemists work at Polar Materials, a Ben Franklin incubator company that is developing plasmacoating tech110/ogy.

Tougher academic standards and objective performance requirements, with greater emphasis on mathematics and science , are now the rule across the nation.

In recent years, teacher shortages have become a serious problem , particularly in science and mathematics. Qualified mathematics and science teachers can often double their salaries by simply crossing the street to work fo r a local technology company. To prevent this from happening, extensive efforts are under way in most states to improve teacher performance and to raise salaries.

Efforts to reinvigorate public education have been matched by renewed attention to vocational education in both secondary schools and community colleges. Vocational education, which originally grew out of links with the county agricultural extension service, has all too often lagged behind the rapidly changing requirements of the marketplace. Many states now have programs under way to match training to the needs of the business community and to ensure that students are well grounded in basic literacy and computational skills.

The last wave of educational reform crested in the late 1950s, when the first Sputnik Earth satell ite sent a message that U.S. science and technology was lagging. At that time, America responded from the top down by enacting the National Defense Education Act and by vastly increasing the budget of the National Science Foundatio n.

There was immediate improvement, but the

changes were not supported by sustained public interest and commitment. Perhaps the lack of sustained commitment was the byproduct of imposing broad reforms from the top down. There is reason to believe that the reforms of the 1980s will be more long lasting: They are being won at the local level with persistent leadership, intense debate and widespread public involvement. The reforms are coming more painfully and more slowly, but for precisely that reason they are likely to be more permanent.

Financing Technology Enterprises Another area of state activity in the United States is the financing of new technology enterprises. Starting up a hightechnology business is the ultimate risky adventure. Developing a new product typically takes several years. The lemons ripen early and the apples seem to develop more slowly. The reward can be very high, but so is the risk of fa ilure.

The typical venture requires several million dollars "up front," and the entrepreneur with a new idea and no track record of previous success can have a difficult time finding capi tal. Traditionally , the local bank has not been a very good bet. However, the banking industry is beginning to change.

Many banks are training loan officers to deal with the special problems of technology start-ups and are providing them with info rmation and referral sources to guide risktakers to o ther fonts of capital.

Some states have begun to consider pub-

lie pension funds as a source of venture capital. A landmark study of California pension funds initiated by former Governor Je rry Brown suggested that the multimillion-qollar California pe nsion funds, traditionally invested in Wall Street (stocks, bonds and similar instruments), could be used at home to stimulate technology growth . Based on this study, a number of proposals were advanced to use portions of various funds for investment in new hightechnology enterprises in California. Many other states have followed suit, typically earmarking 2 to 5 percent of their funds for investment with venture capital companies.

The cumulative national total of these changes will add many hundreds of millions of dollars of previously unavailable capital for innovative new enterprises.

The classic source of start-up financing is the private venture capital company. Venture magazine's list of the 100 largest venture capital firms reveals that one-third are located in New York and another third in California. This uneven distribution of capital and the clear link between risk capital and technology development have prompted some states to use public funds to enter directly into venture capital.

Public venture financing originated in the New England a rea (northeastern United States) and the Great Lakes region in states that were heavily impacted by the economic stress of the last decade. A prototype is the Massachusetts Technology Deve lopment Corporation, established in 1979 by the Massachusetts legislature with an appropriation of $2 million. So far, the Massachusetts fund has provided venture capital to more than a dozen new companies.

The most comprehensive state initiative to date is a Rhode Island proposal called the ¡'Greenhouse Compact." In 1982, the governor of Rhode Island appointed a Strategic Developme nt Commission to formulate a plan for reviving the state's stagnating economy. The comrmss100 hired Ira Magaziner, a nationally known industrial policy advocate, to prepare a detailed analysis of the state's economy and to recommend action. In November 1983. the commission recommended improving the business climate by modifying taxation , expenditure and regulatory policies. More significantly , the commission concluded that traditional laissez-faire policies were not enough. " Measures which improve the state's business climate will not by themselves be sufficient to tum around the state's economy,'' the commission reported. It then

proposed making Rhode Island a test-bed of industrial policy ideas.

The resulting proposals resemble many of the policies being advanced at the national level for creation of a successor to the old Reconstuction Finance Corporation to invest public funds for expansion and modernization of industry. The Rhode Island plan called for $130 million in grants and loans to expand traditional industries, including fishing, boat building, jewelry manufacturing and tourism. It also proposed investing $90 million in new technology industries through a $ 40 million venture capital fund and $50 million to support research "greenhouses.'' The greenhouses were perceived as independent nonprofit institutions that would take technologies that were well advanced in basic researchsuch as those involved in new clinical drugs and robotics-and accelerate the process of commercial development.

Compared with other state efforts, the Rhode Island proposal is heavily weighted toward existing industries and somewhat thin on support for education and basic research. In June 1984, the "Greenhouse Compact'' was submitted to the voters in a special referendum. After a heated campaign, it was rejected by a four-to-one margin. State leaders differ on the reasons for the overwhelming defeat. Some see it as a wholesale rejection of the concept of industrial policy. Others label it an antitax vote or even an expression of voter concern about charges of corruption in local government.

Rebalancing the System It is too soon to tell whether the Rhode Island episode re presents the high tide of state activism. It is also still too early to evaluate many of the new experimental programs being carried o ut in other parts of the country. But it is certainly time to begin posing some questions.

For example, can the state carry the financial burden of reforming public education without increased federal assistance?

Can 50 states subsidize expensive basic research without duplication of effort and inefficiency? Can states, working with trade unions, industry and the financial community, enhance the processes for translating basic knowledge into practical applications for the marketplace? To what extent should government attempt to pick technology winners and losers by allocating capital?

Even at this early point, it seems clear that public education will emerge a strong winner. Elementary and secondary educa-

tion is a traditional state and local responsibility in America, and the renewal of public interest bodes well for science and technology, for U.S. economic competitiveness ~rnd for U .S national security. The push for higher standards and student performance is still gathering momentum. The campaign for adequate salaries and merit pay, however, is moving more slowly, because of opposition from taxpayer lobbies resisting additional public expenditures and from teacher organizations opposed to merit pay.

State university systems are also a clear winner. But there are questions of emphasis and direction. The explosion of support for electronics has not been matched by support for research basics-mathematics and the physical sciences-and there has not been adequate consideration of the relationship between federal and state support for scientific research. At the federal level, the National Science Foundation has been a strong force for coordination and peer review, but there are few comparable institutions at the state level.

State initiatives to enter and manage the risk capital market are more ambiguous.

States are powerfully attracted to the electronic glitter of Silicon Valley, but the ingredients of that success are not well understood. Not everyone believes the re is a shortage of venture capital, and some argue that there is already too much money chasing too few deals. Others question whether it is realistic to replicate Silicon Valley, and they advocate more attention to the relationship between high technology and low technology, or the process of using electronic technology to upgrade and revive traditional regional industries.

Nonetheless. one overall trend seems clear. The flurry of governmental activism at the state and local levels amounts to an important rebalancing of the American system. The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once characterized the states as " laboratories of democracy," suggesting that the federal government should stay its heavy hand and learn from state experience before applying any one model to the entire country. The best new approaches to reinvigorate scientific research , to build new patterns of public and private coope ration , to stimulate educational reform and to promote savings and capital investment are beginning to bloom somewhere out in the American heartland. It is still a Little early to pick the fruit, but the country is confident that harvest time is not too far away.

0

SPAN JULY 1986

37

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ Fight Against AIDS Scientists in the United States have taken a first step toward finding a vaccine to protect humans from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a lethal virus that breaks down the body' s natural resistance to infections, including pneumonia and certain rare cancers.

Using genetic engineering techniques, researchers have developed an experimental vaccine that produces antibodies against the AIDS virus in mice.

They hope the new vaccine can eventually be used to stimulate the human immune system to create antibodies to neutralize the AIDS virus.

Scientists at a biotechnology subsidiary of the Bristol-Myers Company in Seattle have already successfully used the vaccine to produce antibodies in monkeys. The vaccine has been genetically engineered from the vaccinia virus, which was earlier used in a vaccine that eradicated smallpox from the world almost a decade ago. In the new research, the vaccinia virus has been remodeled to include a key gene of the AIDS virus that directs the production of two surface proteins, one required by the AIDS virus to attach to and invade cells, and the other having important structural functions.

In the animal tests, cells inoculated with the modified vaccinia virus reacted as if they had been invaded by an AIDS

Seen through an electron microscope, the AIDS virus resembles an exotic flower.

virus and produced antibodies against it.

It may be possible to use the remodeled vaccinia virus directly as a vaccine or as a means of producing large quantities of the surface proteins for use as vaccine materials, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, coordinator of AIDS research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

However, he says that further studies are needed to demonstrate that the antibodies produced by the new vaccine actually protect against infection with AIDS virus. AIDS patients generally have high levels of antibodies against the virus circulating in their blood, yet these antibodies do not seem to provide protectic~m.

On another front, the search for drugs to cure those already stricken with the

deadly disease is also under way. One such drug is azidothymidine (AZT). One of eight antiviral compounds under intense study, it is the first anti-AIDS drug to move into advanced trials on humans.

In addition to its ability to stop the AIDS virus from multiplying, AZT, preliminary indications show, might help rebuild the shattered immune systems of AIDS patients. A recent study by the U.S. National Cancer Institute reported that the drug boosted the immune systems in 15 of the first 19 patients to receive the drug. It also produced short-term improvements in some of their symptoms. However, Dr. Robert Yarchoan of the Cancer Institute notes that. although the patients showed some improvement, "they still have AIDS. We do not know if the drug will be useful for patients in the long run.

We have no evidence that AZT is a cure for AIDS. " AIDS, believed to be always fatal, is a sexually transmitted disease that experts say cannot be spread by casual contact.

Transmittable through blood and semen, it is most often spread by means of intimate sexual contact between male homosexuals or male bisexuals. Although there is still no proof that women can transmit the AIDS virus to men during sexual contact, The Lancet, a medical magazine, reports the first discoveries of the AIDS virus in vaginal and cervical secretions. The virus was found in 8 of 22 women examined.

Cooperative links In May, India and the United States signed four agreements under which America will loan $44.65 million for ongoing projects in irrigation, social forestry, agricultural research and technological innovation in India.

The largest share of this aid, $24 million, will go to the Hill Areas Land and Water Development Project as part of a continuing effort begun in 1984 to improve irrigation in Himachal Pradesh. The new loan is the fourth increment for that project. American contribution will ultimately total $ 54 million.

Under the second agreement, the National Social Forestry Project will receive a loan of $14.9 million and a grant of $800,000 to provide employment and raise income levels among the rural poor through planting saplings on marginal land for timber, fuelwood and fodder in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. This is the second installment of a $80 million American commitment for the project.

The Agricultural Research Project will receive a grant of 38

SPAN JULY 1986

$3 million to upgrade agricultural research and development facilities in India. The total U.S. contribution to the project will amount to about $20 million.

Under the fourth agreement, a grant of $1.95 million wlll be used to accelerate the pace and quality of technological innovation in India's private sector. The United States will eventually commit a total of $10.6 million for the project.

Ben Shahn Retrospective Wind Power Standing 50 meters high, an experimental Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (drawing) incorporates the latest in wind-harnessing technology. Soon to be installed on the high plains near Amarillo, Texas, the giant egg-beater will produce 500 kilowatts of electricity an hourina45-kmphwind , almosttwice that of the current generation of vertical-axis wind turbines in the United States. The turbine, which will be the largest in the country, has been designed by Sandia National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy in its efforts to develop inexpensive and clean sources of energy.

Last month, Delhi paid tribute to Ben Shahn (1898 -1 969), the celebrated American graphic artist, painter and muralist, when the Art Heritage gallery held an exhibition of the prints of some of his most famous works. Included were portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King (the King portrait was commissioned by Time magazine for its March 19, 1965, cover).

Shahn is best remembered for his sensitive portrayal of such American themes as the Depression, the New Deal, the post-World War II resurgence and the Civil Rights movement. "To Shahn ," says an introduction to the exhibit, "art was not just color, line and form on the flat surface of paper or canvas. Art was nothing if not infused with life itself."

Accident-proof Nuclear Reactors The recent reactor accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union has again focused attention on the safety of nuclear power. However, there's better news on the horizon. Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago have developed an experimental reactor that promises to be "accident proof." It will be able to protect itself against any mechanical malfunctions or human errors. The new reactor uses liquid sodium to remove heat from the radioactive core, instead of pressurized water.

The device successfully passed some of the most punishing tests ever designed for nuclear power reactors last April at a remote, specially equipped Department of Energy laboratory in Idaho. One test involved something that no operator of a commercial nuclear power plant would ever dare do. First, the engineers turned the 20,000-kilowatt reactor up to full power.

Then, they stopped the flow of coolant through its uranium core, ordinarily a prescription for disaster. Normally the fuel rods and their metal casings would rapidly build up temperature and begin to melt. If still unchecked, this molten puddle of radioactive fuel would burn its way through the reactor's bottom and through the floor of the reactor building- ending up in the subterranean water table and spreading contamination widely.

However, none of those things happened during the test in Idaho. After a brief rise in fuel-core temperature, the reactor shut itself down without any help from the technicians.

The new experimental reactor may be safer in other ways than present American designs, according to Argonne scientists. In the conventional pressurized water system, the fuel undergoing nuclear fission transfers its heat to surrounding water in a closed reactor vessel. This hot water, under extremely high pressure, flows through a heat exchanger, resembling a radiator immersed in water. Coils carrying the superheated water heat a nonradioactive column of water, which turns into steam and drives a power-generating turbine.

I

He summed up his approach to life with these words: " If man has lost his Jehovah, his Buddha, his holy family, he must have new, perhaps more scientifically tenable, beliefs to which he must attach his affections .... But in any case, if we were to have values, a spiritual life, a culture, these things must find their imagery and their interpretation through the arts."

The problem with water is that it has a low boiling point- 100 degrees Celsius. It must therefore be kept under very high pressure to prevent it from boiling away and leaving the hot reactor without core coolant. A small pressure leak could cause a catastrophic accident. In comparison , liquid sodium has a boiling point of 871 degrees Celsius and can therefore absorb a lot more heat from the reactor's core-even at normal atmospheric pressure- without boiling away.

This low-pressure operation also means a simpler, more compact reactor design. The new reactor is so small that the entire reactor vessel- not just the core- can be submerged in a pool of sodium coolant, providing an extra measure of safety.

A safety factor built into the fuel of the experimental reactor caused the automatic shut down during the April test. When a conventional reactor overheats, operators must act quickly to slow down its nuclear chain reaction- the rapid bombardment of neutrons, which is the source of heat. However, when the new reactor overheats, the high temperature causes its specially formulated uranium fuel to expand, forcing the atoms farther apart. Since the neutrons have a longer distance to travel to keep the reaction going, the heat-producing neutron barrage s¡lows down and ultimately stops on its own- without human intervention.

In Sweden, scientists have developed another improved reactor design. Called the Process Inherent, Ultimately Safe (PIUS) reactor, it consists of a standard pressurized water reactor that is totally submerged in a deep pool of water. Should the reactor's fuel overheat, water from the surrounding pool automatically floods the core and cools it. Moreover, boron suspended in the water interacts with the uranium fuel to shut down the chain reaction. As in the new American experimental reactor, this takes place without the help of technicians.

The new reactor designs, researchers believe, will elimi nate potential risks resu lting from human error or equipment fai lure, and will make nuclear power a more attractive energy option for the world .

SPAN J ULY 19116

39

Captivating Young Readers

by VIJAY TANKHA

Not long ago a mother complained that her 12-year-old daughter didn't read at all. Despite two shelves of books bought for her, the child could not be persuaded to enjoy reading. She just didn't like it.

What with the pressure of homework and playing, the demands of friends and the importance of keeping up-to-date with her favorite television serials, the girl had little time left for what was in any case not a preferred pastime. No r was her indifference to her beautiful Library exceptional. Many children today take only a passing interest in books.

During the Seventh International Book Fair held at New Delhi last February, I was fortunate to discuss these and other aspects of children's literature with D r.

Nancy Larrick, a distinguished educator from the United States who had been invited by the National Book Trust of India to read a paper at their seminar on children's books during the fair. Larrick has been involved in this field for three decades and has a string of awards and citations to her credit.

The reading habit in children needs to be nurtured Jong before the child can actualJy read, says Larrick. Before a child can read be or she must be taught to listen . As their first teachers, parents often determine not only the attitudes but also the abilities that their children will later display. "By the time children enter kindergarten, they have achieved 50 percent of the intelligence they will have as adults. The first four years are called the peak learning years," Larrick writes in her book , A Parent's Guide to Children's Reading,* published in 1958, now in its fifth revised edition (Bantam Books) .

"This book really originated," Larrick says, "in the minds of the U.S. National Book Committee-comparable J think to your National Book T rust. The objective was to get everybody reading, adults as well as children. But they concluded that the place to start was with the little ones.

There was then no book directed to parents to help them to encourage their children to read before they went to school ; so I was asked if I would work on this book since I had done research in the • Available at the American Center Library in New Del.hi.

40

SPAN JULY 1986

field (at New York State University) ."

The book gives down-to-earth practical advice about how to encourage children to read, explains why it is so important to do so and lists books for children of different age groups, concentrating on ways parents can involve themselves in the lives of their young.

For instance, in outlining general points to keep in mind when choosing a book for preschool children , parents should look for books where: • The type is large and clear.

• The vocabulary is simple.

• Sentences are short and follow the rhythmical pattern of conversation.

• Printed lines are short, with the line break coming at natural pauses in conversation.

• Pages are uncluttered, and white space is plentiful.

• Pictures give clues that make reading easier and more interesting.

A Parent's Guide is uncluttered with theory, is written in a simple, direct style and bristles with practical and healthy suggestions on every page. In the year following its publication, it won the Edison Foundation Award as an outstanding contribution to education.

A child's vocabulary when he or she starts school may vary from as few as 4,000 words to as many as 32,000. At the upper end of the scale are those children who have been read to by concerned adults. "The child with the higher vocabulary is much more apt to go ahead with reading and with everything else, and the child with limited vocabulary is tagging behind all the way. And the parents make the differe nce," Larrick says.

If the purpose of encouraging chi ldren to read is to increase their vocabulary, then surely, with the development of audiovisual technology, particularly television, the role of parents in the acquisition of language by children can be minimized. The media can give access to a wide range of experience Jong before the child learns to gather this from books.

Isn' t there the likelihood that TV will make literature in general and children's Literature in particular largely unnecessary? ··1 hope not," Larrick says. Studies have shown that television is no substitute for the reading habit. And where TY

is substituted for books, the results are anything but desirable. In the United States , on an average, children between 2 and 5 watch television more than 4 hours a day , or close to 6,000 hours before they enter the first grade (at age 6). During their school years, they spend more time watching television than they spend in their classrooms. And yet teachers from all over the country r~po rt that heavy viewers are likely to remain inarticulate and their attention span reduced.

"Television," says Larrick, "is strictly one-way. There is no participation demanded or even possible for young viewers. They cannot stop and say, 'H ey, what does that mean?' as they can if an adult is reading a story to them. Sitting in front of a television a child is flooded with words , most of which are not directed at him in any case. Some children seem to turn off.

They watch, but they don't hear. Or they are entertained but they won't analyze or react. They just seem to be passive recipients. One child I questioned about a program he had seen, which I hadn' t, said, 'I don't know, l was only watching.'

Another, when asked to describe what she bad seen , replied, ' Do I have to put it into words?' Heavy TV viewers generally make the lowest scores in school. Jn the home where the child has been read to, where there are books and magazines, where there is conversation between children and parents , they are doing much better.

The most popular stories for children are those that allow them to join in , says Larrick. "As in the story 'The House that Jack Built'; with the repetition of each line, something new is added and the cumulative rhyming is very effective in its appeal. Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats is a well-known children's favorite and 2year-olds will join in with glee on the refrain ' millions and billions and trillions of cats,' although they don't know what it means. You rarely get such involvement with television."

But for better or worse, TV certainly has had an impact on children's literature by altering the tastes of the children themselves. They now demand from the books they read some of the directness that they get in TV programs. Larrick points out, "Our television programs drop right into the middle of the action.

We used to have children's books that would begin 'It was a clear day, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a leaf was moving'-and not a child was following.

Instead, many children's books today plunge right in. One of our most popular books, Charlotte'sWebbyE.B. White, has the unexpected combination of a spider and a pig and a rat in a barn. This book is immensely popular with both adults and children. It begins with the line 'Where's Pa going with that ax?' Well, you can hardly stop reading."

Children also like stories written in the first person. A story about a 10-year-old boy that is written from his point of view gets across better to a reader of the same age. The reader is in fact thus given the central place in the narrative, and this is a device used very successfully by many children's writers today.

One thing to watch out for, she warns, is trying to make children read books that are not written for them at all. While it is true that children often read¡ books written principally for adults (a way of appearing more adult themselves), sometimes they are encouraged or even compelled to read books that they cannot possibly enjoy, and this may often tum them off reading altogether.

While parents or teachers can encourage children to read, it is after all the child who must enjoy the reading. Nancy Larrick found out long ago that children's own critical acumen could be relied upon.

Most of the 14 anthologies of poetry for children that she has edited have been compiled with the active aid of numerous children whose preferences and perceptions she has learned to trust. "Children respond to poetry. For one thing, they like short pieces, and a poem is a complete little picture. Look at 'Jack and Jill,' a nice little story in eight lines. The

rhythm and rhyme are infectious. Many library system. While each state has its poems are meant to be sung and children own educational program, it is mandacan join in gaining a sense of the music as tory that every school have a library and a they repeat the words." full-time trained librarian. If there are as In one of her anthologies there is a many as 500 children in that building, the poem entitled " Is God Dead?" I asked school must have two full-time, trained what she thought about introducing chil- librarians. This gives children a great dren to the uncertainties of human exis- opportunity to select books, read magatence. "That was a selection of poems zines and make use of the facilities compiled with the help of more than one provided." (See story on page 28.)

Libraries can do more than merely hundred young readers. And that particular poem was, in fact , written by a provide access to books and reading 14-year-old who gave it to a neighbor, materials. "In Orlando, Florida," Larrick who gave it to me. " The anthology itself, continues, "the public library serves not On City Streets, contains poems on the only that city but the two counties adjoinurban environment that most American ing as well. A few years ago, it was children are familiar with and respond calculated that they had 100,000 children readily to. "Many of our children are under 12 served by five librarians. They coping with grown-up problems," Larrick quickly concluded that they needed help. says. "In the United States, children are A program was started called Sharing very adult. I don't know that I like that, Literature with Children, offering to train but I think that television may have had adults and teenagers in how to read to preschool children. They trained about something to do with it."

Many books written specifically for 25 ,000 volunteers, and promised that if children today, explore some of the parents joined together in a group of at deeply personal problems that children, least six adults anywhere, the school system would send someone to demonlike grown-ups, can and do face.

The important thing is to expose chil- strate how to read to children and to dren to as wide a variety of books as create puppets that would make the story possible- fiction , biography, fantasy, more interesting. The parent groups also poetry, realistic here-and-now stories. In received a big basket of books to show fact, the greater the variety, the more them the kinds of books that could be likelihood that a child will be able to find borrowed from the library. That allowed and pursue his or her own interest. Many the librarians to reach those children children who read comics, for instance, whose parents were not themselves do so because they have nothing better to library users." read. They have not been introduced to Sometimes children take over books good literature. They have not learned that were originally written for adults. how to get into a book.

The Diary of Anne Frank is one such While the role of parents in developing book that Nancy Larrick speaks of. " Our a taste for reading among the young young teenagers know it well. I was in remains crucial , Nancy Larrick details Amsterdam last summer with two teentwo ways in which schools and public age girls. And the one thing they wanted institutions in the United States have to see was the home of Anne Frank. It helped to foster the reading habit: "A was not on our schedule and it was great many of our schools have a period pouring with rain that day, but we every day of what they call SSR (sus- trudged through the streets to get there. tained silent reading). During that They knew every detail. They recognized period, the teachers read, the principal every window, every door, because they reads, the children read. Everybody in bad read the book so carefully. That the building stops all other work, and for book has what many children look for- a 45 minutes or half an hour, everyone is high emotional pull. As the two girls reading. This is seen as a remarkable came out, one said, 'It makes me feel influence, because children have time to guilty because I have not worked for get into a book. If you read 45 minutes peace.' If a book can do that, then into a children's book, you are pretty far readers are getting something out of it. " 0 along! You don't want to stop, if it is a good book.

About the Author: Vijay Tankha is a lecturer " Another thing we have in America in philosophy at St. Stephen's College, Univerthat I'm very proud of is our school- sity of Delhi.

SPAN J ULY 1986

41

Life liter Retirement More and more elderly Americans are leading active lives in their retirement years. Most catch up with hobbies they had no time for earlier; many, ingeniously, make their hobbies pay. Kraft, an American food processing company, recently got in touch with its retirees to see how they occupied themselves. A few are profiled here. And then, of course, there are people like George Nelson (see page 44) whose retirement plans don' t quite work out....

Virginia Ries and her husband, Jack , moved to Sun Lake , Arizona, after she retired in 1983 from her job as a secretary at the Kraft headquarters in Glenview, Illinois.

"My former co-workers gave me a new golf bag and clubs when I retired," sbe says. " I had played the game occasionally, but retirement seemed like a good time to start learning in earnest. I try to play several times a week. " The Rieses learned about Sun Lake, a retirement community in the Sun Belt, through another Kraft retiree.

"Jack likes the dry weather here because it's good for his health ," says Ries. "We both enjoy the variety of activities- swimming, exercise classes and bicycling. Best of all, we have made many new friends."

42

SPAN JULY 1986

Wilburn Hoffman bas many hobbies to keep him busy in retirement, but says that fishing and shrimping are still the two he enjoys most. Above, he demonstrates bis shrimp-casting technique. Hoffman, who retired from Kraft's New Orleans sales office in 1982, now lives 200 kilometers away in Lafayette, Louisiana, close to many fishing spots.

Another hobby is bowling, which he learned from his wife, JoAnn , who, he says, has the highest average in Lafayette. "She bowls in a lot of tournaments," says Hoffman, "so we often combine trips to these bowling events with visits to relatives in other states.

"One of the nice things about retirement is being able to do a number of things at your leisure. "

Jim Goodwin lives in Rogue Valley Manor, a retirement community nestled among the scenic mountains, forests and rivers near Medford, Oregon. "All the outdoors is at my front door for fishing, picnicking, rockhounding, or just roaming for sheer enjoyment ," he says. The hobby he enjoys most is rockhounding. He searches for precious and semiprecious stones that he shapes, polishes and mounts for jewelry. He has done this for 40 years, but despite this timeconsuming avocation, he joins in community activities as well.

"The golden years of our lives are not for sitting down ," he says, "but for enjoying and standing tall with a full life of activity." At 78, Goodwin is doing just that.

Harry Rohr says, " My wife and I are having the time of our lives.,. Rohr worked for the Breyers ice cream division of Kraft in Philadelphia for 34 years and had expected to stay in the city after retirement. But for the past six years he and his wife. Jessie, have lived on a 17-hectarc farm in Northampton, Pennsylvania. Their daughter, Connie, whose hobby is raising sheep, lured them to the country, and they've never regretted it.

"We raise sheep, chickens and steers. Most of our crops-alfalfa , corn, oats and wheat-serve as food for the animals. We have our own fishing stream and plenty of grounds for hunting. There is a lot of work, but it's peaceful; and you experience the feeling of getting back to nature."

Frank Norris has pursued dual careers since retiring in 1978 as senior group leader of Kraft's Edible Oils Laboratory in Glenview, Ulinois. He is a part-time consultant with the American Soybean Association and plays violin in symphony orchestras.

He recently ended a 13-year association with the Northwest Symphony, for which he was also treasurer. He now plays with the West Suburban Symphony.

Norris says he has learned a lot from his work with the American Soybean Association. "Through the association, l have seen a number of cultures and countries. The job involves inspecting soybean processing plants as well as giving lectures and advice on improving these facilities, and increasing sales of products."

Philip Moskowitz retired in 1980 from his job as supervisor of general accounting at a Kraft plant in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and began a new career in oil painting. "I've been painting since I was 12 years old," he says. "But in the last few years, I've painted more than ever before, averaging about ten new pieces each year."

But painting remains just one avocation for Moskowitz, who works part-time as an accountant in a realestate agency, travels extensively with his wife, Carolyn, and takes courses toward a masters degree in fine arts.

"My philosophy in retirement is the same as it was when I worked at Kraft," he says. "You simply have to like what you're doing, and do it as well as you can. "

Norman Scaman has always enjoyed collecting things, even during his 30 years with Kraft in various sales jobs in the Chicago area. When he retired in 1972, he turned his collection into a museum styled after a tum-of-thecentury grocery store. "The Olde Country Store" (above) is in Brookfield, Illinois, near Chicago; the museum building was the city's first town hall.

"The only criterion that I put on my collectibles is that they be old and interesting to me. The museum is a hodgepodge of goods. I have everything from early 1900s clothing and a potbellied stove to comic books, baseball cards, packaging from early foods and an ice box." Seaman's wife, Evelyn, dresses i.n period costumes to add to the authenticity of the setting.

SPAN JULY 1986

43

LIFE AFTER RETIREMENT continued

A RUINED RETIREMENT!

Bill Fleming has turned his long-time hobby of woodcarving into a full-time pursuit since retiring from Kraft's Jacksonville, Florida, sales office in 1981. He is vice-president of a cooperative art gallery, where bis works are sold to the public.

"Each of our 38 members contributes one day's service to the gallery a month for the privilege of displaying his or her works," Fleming says. " A percentage of the sales goes to the gallery and the artist gets the rest.

Shoppers like it because they can see a variety of handicrafts under one roof.

I'm the only wood-carver in the group." He also works with furniture restorers, handcrafting ornate wood pieces that are missing or damaged.

by GEORGE NELSON

Yesterday was the first day of my retirement. r file this report on it in hopes that others may benefit from my mistakes.

I have just turned 65 and have worked 46 of those years, time out only for unemployment and the Army. I had made up my mind to retire as soon as I hit the magic number , and I began notifying appropriate authorities, colleagues , friends a nd relatives. Fear on my behalf was a universal response.

"What will you do with your time?"

"You must make plans."

"Make a list of all your interests and work out a schedule for each day. " "If you fail to keep busy, you'll waste away. Look what happened to my father. And Uncle Fred!"

I refused to panic. I decided to read as much as I could about retirement. I'll summarize what I read: "What will you do with your time?"

"You must make plans. " "Make a list of all yow- interests a nd work out a schedule for each day."

"If you fail to keep busy, you 'II waste away.

Look what happened," etc.

The days were dwindling. I had to move fast. I enrolled in two courses- "Least Known and Least Read Books of the 20th Century" and "Painting for Beginners. " I have never been able to draw. In high school, when drawing was a required course, I enlisted all my family members to make drawings so I could pass them off as my own.

I thought of volunteering my services to the Bronx Zoo to assist in taking care of smaller monkeys. I thought this would help overcome my general loathing of dogs and cats, which I have been known to kick when nobody can see me. I also volunteered to teach senior citizens how to drive sports cars.

This, combined with subscriptions to the theater, ballet , opera and symphony, seemed as if it would keep me busy. Fortunately, my retirement income would cover the expense.

There was my retire ment party, which I enjoyed. Then my last day of work. I packed up my gear, which fitted into a small brown envelope, and went home.

Yesterday, I began a new life. I had set my From The /n1crna1ional Herald Tribune. Copyright

Vivian Hallenborg worked for Kraft as an accountant in Chicago, but she moved to the retirement community of Costa Del Sol in California after leaving the company. "Leaving friends and the life I had known was extremely difficult," she says. "However, my son and his famil y live nearby now, and I wanted to be close to them and it's fun to be with them."

Her hobbies include ceramics, read-

Š

clock radio to go off at the same time as when I was working. I would do my usual sit-up exercises and h11rry out to the street for a brisk three-kilometer walk in 40 minutes , to meet the current health standard. I would shower , have the customary breakfast of orange juice , muffin and coffee , then head for the subway to the Bronx Zoo to begin my orientation lecture at 9:30 a.m. My activities there should wind up by noon, I figured, and I could take the subway down to Greenwich Village, stop in a luncheone tte for a sandwich a nd begin my two-hour class on books at 2 p.m. I would have a half hour to get over to the driving school. then put in an hour explaining the stick shift.

I'd be home for dinner by 6 p .m. and out again at 7. The painting course began at 8 p.m. and would finish at 10. J'd be home in time for the 11 o'clock news. And then to bed.

Everything seemed exactly right. A misfortune occurred, however. My wife, thinking I was to begin a new life, turned off the alarm on the clock radio .

I overslept by three hours. Three hours!

When I woke up a nd saw the time , I was frantic. I would miss the Bronx Zoo completely, not to mention everything leading up to it.

"D on't panic." said my wife, '¡Just have a good breakfast."

Which J did.

"Then go get the papers."

Which I did.

On the way back, I noticed that the sun was shining and the park benches were e mpty. My wife came along and said, "Why don't we sit down?"

Which we did.

I was getting ready to leave for my 2 p.m . class, but some kids turned up with bats, gloves and a ball , and said they needed an umpire. I couldn't resist. The game didn't end until 5:30 p.m. We went home a nd had dinner. I dozed off during the evening news. By the time I woke, all we could do was watch a late movie and go to bed.

If things keep up this way, my whole retirement will be ruined.

D About the Author: George Nelson recently retired as vice-president of Warner Brothers.

1986 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

ing, knitting and growing potted plants. As a volunteer. she delivers food two days a week to home-bound residents throughout her community.

"I've always wanted to reach a point in my life where I could do exactly what r desired- what I felt was important," she says. "I've been involved with volunteer work since high school and feel fortunate to be able to continue helping others."

D

A Collage ofJoan Hall

by HIMADRI OHANDA

Almost in a fit of absentmindedness, Joan Hall strayed into the field of collagemaking. This master of the collage, well known in America and many parts of Western Europe, started life as a rebel against graphic art. Her painter mother and photographer/sculptor father "encouraged" her to be an artist from the moment she learned to hold a pencil. "And of course I rebelled and tried to do everything but be an artist. I went to dance school for a while. I was in the theater. I learned welding for metal sculptures." She even did some work

brief periods might give one the impression that Hall is a rolling stone. She thinks otherwise. "I was at the Instituto de Allende in Mexico. There too I did many things to find out what 1 was most interested in, and it is there that l became convinced that nothing I did had been wasted. Every one of the disciplines I trained in has been useful for my present work."

Joan HaJI is a successful commercial artist who bas exhibited in prominent art galleries, is lauded by her peers, endorsed by eminent art academies and wooed by

in stained glass while she was in England,

prestigious publications like Time magazine

at Canterbury.

"It was not until I had dabbled in the various media that I realized graphic art was where I belonged," says Hall.

Last January, Joan Hall brought an exhibition of her works to New Delhi. Hall's visit was not her first to India. She likes being here because "I feel there is something harmonious about Indian culture for me. I mean the people, the arts, the music, the streets-their sounds, their smells, their color. I want to experience it more, so I keep coming back."

The number of things she delved into for

and The New York Times Book Review, to say nothing of the numerous book publishers who covet the jackets she. designs.

It was serendipity that brought Joan Hall and the techniques of collage together.

During her travels in Europe, her curious eye searched out things that she fancied.

"I collected so many little things-pieces of paper, nostalgic bits of terracotta, anything that attracted me," she recalls. "Little things I found while walking on the

beach, like pebbles and shells of different sorts, pieces of wood. I picked them up. I kept adding things to my collection ."

She kept these things in a box, or pasted them together for safe-keeping. "Once I put a piece of lace in a box next to a bone I had found. Along with these two I placed a Victorian photograph that had beautiful sepia tones and an ivory color. And all of a sudden, I looked at these pieces and was excited, 'My God, there is something about this.' This was quite an accident. This was a work of art in itself. " Then, one day, a friend of Hall's, a professional photographer, came to her studio in New York and chanced upon her collection. "There were boxes and cardboard sheets and the little 'collages' I had all over the place," Hall remembers. "She looked at them and said, 'Maybe you should take them around. Perhaps you can sell them. A record cover or a book jacket could grow out of this.'"

Naturally Hall found this to be a good idea. She was then teaching hatha-yoga in a New York health club to make a living, and a little extra money would help. Since she had left dancing she had been practicing yoga as a means of exercise for 15 years.

"Even though I have always been interested in India and Indian culture," Hall says, "still I took up yoga only to keep fit, not for any religious reasons. Yoga, l felt, was right for my nature. It had the right mixture of exertion and relaxation for my temperament. I am not the kind who wants to run or jog. I don't like to do aerobics. I like to swim, but in yoga I found something in the exercise that appealed to me. It makes me feel good."

In early 1973, she took a sampling of her collection to The New York Times-to its book review section. "I showed them one of my pieces, which was a wooden box with some photos and some other elements, and sure enough they immediately bought it to illustrate an article on poetry." After that happened, she began to build a portfolio.

"And this was the beginning of a career."

Despite having her work in great demand, she did not allow herself to become so commercial as to lower her meticulous standards. "For me the inside <>f a collage is as important as the outside, even though people do not see the inside. At least I know it is there. For me the craftsmanship is important, and this, 1 think, came from my stained-glass training, the patience it required. I became fanatical about meticulousness-to the point where I sometimes missed my deadlines. I

SPAN JULY 1986

45

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JOAN HALL continued

wanted it to be so right," explains Hall.

Although Joan Hall is essentially a fine artist, she finds no conflict in using he r craft for commercial purposes. "What is more interesting to me is that commercial art is becoming more prestigious today in the United States." There is no longer a stigma attached to such art. People used to think that a fine artist should not yield to the temptations of commercial art. " As a matter of fact one gallery told me not to tell people that I had done a ¡cover for Time magazine."

When Hall asked why, she was told , " It will hurt you as a n artist."

This she found curious. All art is creative work . "The differe nce is in knowing whose proble m one is solving-yours or theirs.

The only proble m with commercial art is that you cannot touch yourself as deeply on a spiritual level. And you don't reach beyond a certain level. For an artist, I think that is ve ry important. It is the motivation to be an artist in the first place. On a commercial assignment, one is mainly working at a superficial level. First , because you don't have the time, then because they are telling you what to do. " Not only should the two forms of art go hand in hand, she feels, but within itself art must also blend the new with the old , the dream with reality, perhaps even the whimsical with the political. " What I am trying to do is juxtapose images that are classical with surrealistic dream images."

Joan H a ll does not see her collages as either intellectual or sociological statements. ¡"I think of them as dream statements. To me they are more visionary and symbolic than anything e lse. All I can say is that when Marc Chagall paints lovers flying over the moon we know that people don't fly. But we also know that lovers do fly . You know wha t it's like. So in that way it is symbolic. " Symbolic or otherwise, Joan Hall dreams 0 the dreams of huma nkind.

A cover for Time.

47

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Each nation tosses up, sooner or later, a poet who, more than anyone else, the instinctively grasps essence of its genius and character. It appears as though there were a mysterious chemistry of sentiment continually at work to produce such a person, and when the wandering airs and energies come magically together in one vessel, the song of the spirit rises to become a song of the people in the widest sense. A voice is needed to crown such a moment.

And such a voice was Walt Whitman's. He turned the emerging American Dream into a condition of song and story whfoh no one coming after him has been able to master to that extent. And it is the Whitmanian Moment that has changed ineluctably the entire tone and tenor of American literature since the publication of Leaves of Grass (1855). It may be appropriate to call it the "American Book of Genesis," for no other volume so fuJly comprehends and orchestrates the dialectic of the primal , Adamic dream in all its richness, innocence and contingencies. Despite acknowledged Whitman's brashness, the book has remained a tremendous force in American letters since the moment of its celebration by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw in it " incomparable things said incomparably well."

Not all his detractors, since George Santayana called him "a barbarian" divorced from the inner aspects of cultures and civilizations, have been able to dismiss him so easily.

No wonder, then , Leaves of Grass continues to be pubDarshan Singh Maini, a former professor of English at ¡Punjabi University, Patiala, contributes regularly 10 several magazines and academic journals.

Leaves of Grass

by Walt Whitman Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (eds.), Prentice-Hall of India, New Delhi, 1986, 1,008 pp., Rs. 95.

fished in new editions and formats with all kinds of amendations, revisions and commentaries. The latest edition is undoubtedly the best of its kind, and will do duty for the pundit and the lay reader. The kind of spirit, erudition and insight that have gone into the making of this volume show, among other things, how research scholarship in America has acquired a certain purity and rigor. of thought.

To begin with, it is important to note that the editors of the volume under review have prese1.1ted the full canon. The mere publication of 22 poems that have never seen the light of day makes this enterprise, complete with text, the prefaces and select cnttasm, a compendium that anyone will treasure.

Perusing the poet's numerous statements on the nature of poetry, and on the rationale of his own exercise, it becomes clear enough that Whitman in his own passionate, but well-pondered way had nearly as monkish and evangelical a vision of poetry as Henry James had of the novel in his prodigious prefaces and critical essays.

Thus, when the Whitmanian verse is read in conjunction with his own animated comment, we begin to see why he wanted his poems " to be in spirit poems of the morning." Which is to say that he saw them as poems of innocence and initiation, of health and vitality, of hope and promise. It is this aspect that explains their rapturous

excess and their spread. It is ence than of meditation, indeed in the sonorous ico- perusal and application.

Still, it's somewhat surprisnography of fact and detail, and in the pervasive imagery ing that Whitman's radical of eruption, plunge, sweep, departures from this thought swing and flight that the have not been properly taken Whitmanian muse best ren- note of in the evolution of ders the archetypal yearnings the Whitmanian world-view.

The Punjabi poet, Puran of the Yankee spirit.

Though the critical essays Singh, perhaps the greatest and extracts that form the Whitmanian poet outside the 216-page commentary are United States, was of the fairly comprehensive and view that all life-denying representative pieces, and in- Brahminical thought and ceclude the comment of critics, rebral superstructures were poets, cultural historians and wholly inimical to the kind social scientists-giving the of poetry that Whitman had reader an overarching view spawned to celebrate the of Whitman's achievement senses, and to bind man to and fortunes- the very na- man in an expanding orbit of ture of the exercise here ex- human relationships. And he called him "the Guru's Sikh cludes some important criborn in America!" tiques, particularly of a neOn the form, structure, gative kind. In certain ways, Emerson's insightful and language and style of celebrated comment that "Leaves of Grass," we have Leaves of Grass was "a re- some out.standing critiques, markable mixture of the particularly those of Basil de Bhagvad Gita and the New Selincourt and Roger AsseYork Herald" remained a lineau. It is well argued that it would be wrong to apply and seminal statement, Whitman criticism has fas- the architectural metaphor to tened on it in one form or the structure of this great expanding poem that in the another.

The influence of Vedantist end became a mighty paean thought on Whitman is by in praise of the American now a small industry by it- ideals of freedom , justice self, and both American and and equality. Though a cerIndian scholars have gener- tain amount of conscious ated enough heat and light in thought has determined its this regard. It's true, there is form , it was not raised as something in the pith and some kind of a cathedral, grain of Whitman's verse brick by brick.

It is better, therefore, to that comes, in certain ways, close enough to the heart of see it passing through its Hindu metaphysic. It's a nine "Jives" as a blossoming question of opinion as to its tree that kept sending out sources and its strength. Un- new branches and sprouting doubtedly, a splendid poem new leaves. Other important like " Passage to India" could critiques-those of D.H. not have been possible with- Lawrence, Randall Jarrell, out some spiritual corres- Richard V. Chase, Gay Wilpondences and affinities. son Allen-in varying deYet, most such critics, rep- grees show how this spiritual resented here by Malcolm vagabond and harlequin, a Cowley and V.K. Chari , product of Dutch and Ehseem to be agreed that the glish ancestry, brought a new Hindu thought coming to breath to American poetry through his faith in the ethic American via Whitman transcendentalism was more of experience and in the dio a matter of aura and ambi- vinity of language.

â&#x20AC;˘ HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEXT ISSUE

In Paul Taylor's Footsteps One of America¡s premier choreographers, Paul Taylor has developed a style that interweaves the experimental and the classical. l le is infl uenced by the world of subways, airports, TV, movies. cars and yet also responds to the great, formal structu res of the past.

The Rishi Family Twenty-two years ago, an Indian doctor and his wife went to the United States where a daughter was born to them. A year ago Shanta Rishi graduated from high school. This story of two generations of Rishis is perhaps typical of Indian immigrants, melding two cultures as they move into the mainstream of American life.

Harvard at 350 SPAN marks Harvard University's 350th year with the reminiscences of former editor and Harvard alumnus Mal Oettinger at his 25th reunion. He speaks of the Harvard style, the merriment, the nostalgia, the old friends barely recognized ... and, as he saw co-eds in the hallowed halls, the realization that things had changed.

Images of America A Portfolio drawn from an exhibition of photographs currently touring India, this is an evocation of America in an earlier age.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY AVINASH PASRICHA

Hopi Indian Craft ANIMAL SPIRJT PRAYER

Four American Hopi Indians came to New Delhi in March/April to exhibit rm struggling to their skills and artifacts at carry an armload the Handicrafts and Handof sweet Iooms Museum under the fresh corn ... still moist auspices of the Indo-U.S. from the last rain.

Subcommission on Education and Culture. The A bullsnake Hopi-the name means taking refuge "one who follows the curled around the coolness path"-live in the state of of a Arizona. Their village of strong Oraibi was settled in the corn plant.

11th century and is believed Our eyes meet. to be the oldest continually r walk past. inhabited settlement in the Neither of us says United States. They have "hello." developed a rich and complex social structure and a resplendent ceremonial life, and have been remarkably successful in maintaining their traditional ways.

The "path" they follow is of a balanced relationship among indiLomatewama Š 1985. viduals and between the people and the universe, as guided by a covenant made by the god Masau'u with their forefathers. The four artisans are Ramson Lomatewama (above, with a Delhi handloom weaver), a skilled rack weaver and poet (see poems); his wife Jessica (back cover), a weaver of wicker and sifter baskets; Vera Pooyouma Jenkins, a potter and basket maker; and Hartman Lomawaima (below with Vera), exhibit curator and soon to be chiefof the Hopi tribe.

A CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE

Toward the south is antelope mound.

It is a spirit home.

In midst of winter before sunrise young men pray.

Desiring that the rabbit fox deer elk

be plentiful.

A prayer feather planted in moist snowcrust earth carries the prayer to the animal spirits.

Poems by and courtesy of Ramson