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Tuesday, March 27, 1973
University Daily Kansam
KANSAN
To a Sunburnt Friend
I hope your sunburn hurts. People who stayed in Lawrence for spring break don't have your problem. Nobody here has seen the sun for a month and a half and it looks as if it might keep on raining. Once we thought the place was going to flood, and that we were going to sit on the roof or the Hall and wait and pick us up in hats.
A long-haired kid thought that they would drop depth charges and finish the place off while they were here. But a graduate student said that unless the University came up with a solution, the legislature would just not send any more money and finish the place off with a lot less publicity.
There is no truth to the rumor that the Kansas Turnpike Authority closed the Lawrence exits for lack of business while you were gone.
As it turned out, at the last minute the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided that Kansas was in the national interest and opened some gates to let the water through the Missouri River to avert flooding on the Kaw.
There was some talk of a food crisis, but some Lawrence merchants kept their stores open for a couple each day to avert the disaster.
B&G did not go to Padre Island.
They dutifully stayed and painted
the crosswalks with indoor house paint. You can probably still see some of the pain on the sheltered sides of some curbs. It was really a safe time for pedestrians, especially where there weren't any cars anywhere.
I was going to write an editorial to give Nixon the Chicken Man crime fighting award, but I thought I had better go to the library to find some facts to drop in to make it sound informed. The librarians went to the library and hadn't returned. (Mr. Nixon, you still can pick up the award if you call during business hours and provide proper identification.)
If you didn't read many newspapers while you were down there, POWs, Vietnam and Northern Ireland were still in the news, and the Supreme Court did something to mess up the school finance mess. The Kansas Legislature passed a no-fault law that allows something about it being no-fault only if you can prove that it is not your fault and is worth $500.
Anyway, the Kansas Bar Association pretty well saved you from the horrors of no-fault insurance. There was only one new war while you were gone and it was in Tanzania or somewhere like that.
Anyway, I hope your sunburn hurts.
Eric Kramer
A Dog's World
You won't find mention of the biggest area event over spring break on the front page of this or any other paper. And no, the reference is not to the unending torrents of rain, a count of the remaining old concrete hitching posts of East Lawrence nor other such exoticia.
THE event of the past week was the "36th All-Breed Dog Show and Obedience Trial," presented in Kansas City, Mo., Municipal Auditorium by the Heart of America Kennel Club, Inc., on March 18.
This incredible occurrence was what is called by canine affections "a benched show," meaning that most of the dogs had to remain on their respective benches for the duration of the show's advertised hours except when shown in "the ring."
The program from the kennel clan featured one of the most curious statements I've ever seen in print: "There is a total of 1529 dogs and 1608 entries." I didn't see fit to inquire as to the apparent discrepancy between the number of dogs seemed like the sort of question best forgotten at the moment it arose.
Although I didn't take an actual count, I'm willing to believe that there were at least 1500 to 1600 dogs in the city. The most those living in the Western world,
Constant variations of one cry rent the air during my time watching the dogs perform; "Cleaner to ring five. Two cleaners needed everywhere."
The dogs were benched in a lower level of the auditorium; the handlers put their charges through the paces and get up in the main auditorium area.
Predictable audio script, of course, but delivered urbally by an expert interpreter.
It took me a while to become accustomed to such cries as "Newfoundlands to ring two. Samoyeds to ring eight." I kept wondering if the
dogs were champion linguists, as well as odented, well-cared-for ani-
The scene downstairs defied description, if not belief. The crowds milling through the narrow aisles between the lines of benches were staggering. The old sayings about pets resembling their owners, or vice versa, seemed to take on a certain significance.
One particularly weary golden retriever was comfortably curled up on his bench, atop one of his owners. A slumbering dog lover had a paper tattered her own tired eyes; her husband catnapped in an adjacent chair.
One of the most beautiful Saint Bernard's imaginable was handsomely stretched out snoozing in his spacious quarters, while his owner, a large man with greying hair, stretched opposite him in a lawn chair.
Perhaps the main attractions of the show were the genuine friendliness and good nature openly displayed by the many people involved: owners, handlers, groomers and officials alike. All were willing to take the time to answer the most inane questions posed by spectators, and all appeared to be enthusiasts, rather than maniacs.
It is indeed a strange and wondrous land we inhabit. I didn't attempt to establish the total cost of the event, preferring instead to simulate delight at the peculiar human dimensions that generate such efforts.
I even managed to avoid such heated political controversies as those surrounding the respective of the various retriever breeds.
My condolences to those of you who missed this most enjoyable event due to sand, sun or snow fetishes. May be next year.
—C. C. Caldwell
James J. Kilpatrick
PHAISTOS, Creté-Coming to Greece, for any Western man, is coming home. The journey is a pilgrimage, not of the heart, but of the mind, an intellectual experience. It's a place where the mountains, Creté, in the womb of these great mountains, the whole umbilical cord began.
Ancient Greek Inspiration Lingers
We stand, silent, in the ruins. This was once a summer palace, we are told, used by the kings of Mina as respite from the heatear along the island edge. It is a shape of an owl's head, with the wind keen. Among the stones, anemones are bravely bending—snow-white, blood-red, royal purple. As far as one can see the terraced hills are garrisoned by olive trees, old men with silver hair between the trees the grapevines grow.
the imagination builds upon these mute, abiding stones. The very flowers spring to life. Eyes closed, one sees the court of Radamanthan, son of Zeus; a retinue of soldiers, servants, maids and artisans. They once were here, 4,000 years ago, caparisoned in gold and crimson. Now they move again among the alive trees, up to where he can work. They dispense justice, worshipping their gods. A guide has picked some red anemones. He lays on a wall: slain princesses, with diadems of daïnes in their hair. In
The stage empties. Only the stones remain, only the wind and flowers. We hear, somewhere close at hand, the sad, sweet music of a shepherd's flute. It is an old man, with a bark-brown face and a bark-brown cap, come to sell a pipe as a bark-brown sword. He is a plaintive shepherd's tune. Were these the songs that Radamanthus heard?
"I laugh till I cry," a critic wrote, "and in some tender moments, cry till I laugh."
He woes a gypsy girl. Chivalric but extremely innocent, he wins her admiration by bluffing his way out of a sensual situation. When she offers her hand, he ships it into his pocket.
We go to ancient Knossos next, outside Heraklion, and spend a sunny morning recapturing the life of Minos, greatest of the kings. Here was a city, so the guidebooks say, of a hundred thousand persons and at least a thousand legend. Here in this palaeolithic maze, Thesesle siew the minotaur, and Daeoek siew the maze, escaped on artificial wings.
Chaplin's continuous dance with life began to gain momentum in 1913 shortly after he left
alhouette against the sulken sky, the cypresses stand as sentinels have always done.
The realities of Minao are more impressive than the myths. This was a civilization, two thousand years before Christ, that valued beauty, grace and manners. The potters could have left their massive jars in common clay; they painted them in gold and inscribed the names they built could have left the walls un装饰ed, but Minao; they summoned artists to the royal rooms, and they used frescoes of blue dolphins leaping.
We spend another day, back in mainland Greece, see the land that Agamemon saw. It is raining this day, off and on, and the sun is shining through a wet, but the climb is worth the effort. One struggles up and up, and up again, and suddenly the illiad comes true. Shafts of sunlight flood the Argive plain below; far cry from the desert of ships. Here Agamemon summoned troops to fight in Troy. Here his faithless wife conspired his murder. These were the stones that looked upon the passions of the warriors, and those who wondered the poets's saints and men!
He denies his own needs to retrieve money stolen from the house. He doesn't know, snips the money back into her pocket. Yet Charlie's sense of character and reality is such that he can be so patient and takes back a few bills.
Finally, we pursue our pilgrimage from Corinth back to Athens—to the Parthenon, where we meet the philosophers once walked along. And late of an afternoon, overwhelmed and inarticulate, we voice the same bansalities that we had at Corinth, voiced by how beautiful! How perfect
And we ask ourselves the banal question: What of us? What is our civilization leaving to the archaeologists who may excavate Chicago, Washington, and Denver, 3,000 years from now? Minoa fell, and Agamemnon the old age of Perseus to grind out the turn we come. We ought to strive, it seems to me, to leave as much behind.
Anniversary of Chaplin's Return
(C) 1973 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
By LINDA SCHILD
Kansan Editorial Writer
Starving in a cabin somewhere in the frozen north, Charlotte looks at the shoe perched on a plate in front of her. She listens to usiasm, touched by a gourmet's restraint, he carves it as he would a prime rib of beef, salts it to taste, then eats it, savoring each bit, twirling the sheoakles around his feet, sucking the nails in the soles as if they were small bones.
The bittersweet Chaplin of the silent film. His antic sincerity brings laughter-choked tears to the eyes of audiences whom he has already exhausted with laughter. His painful disapointment just as readily catch his audience in a web of compassion.
Twirling his cane at a fancy party, the interloper, trying desperately to be socially acceptable, stabs a turkey and inadvertently swings it over his head.
A drunk struggling to conquer an insistently malevolent Murphy bed, which cunningly employs masterful avoidance maneuvers against him. He advances stealthily, retreats, nonchallengely ignores the adversary's actions in his ferulous leap. He allows the bed no advantage but in the end must respeite in the bathtub.
the Karro music-hall act, an English group that was touring American vaudeville theaters, to join the Keston film company.
The film business was young and precarious, but Chaplin had a family to support, and Keystone's director Mack Sennett, who had introduced slapstick comedy to his company, would double his actor's salary and guarantee him one year's employment.
Chaplin did not mesh well with the cogs of Sennett's comedy machine. To Chaplin, the comic world was a means of reaching the realm of man's serious thoughts. For Sennett, physical comedy was an end in itself. He converted human beings into machines that could be shot or could be dropped from tail to nose. And then he closer the character came to death, the funnier, because the audience knew that machines couldn't be killed.
The day came when Sennett, chewing on his cigar, muttered, "we need some comedy gags here," and instructed Chaplin to put on a comedy makeup; anything would do.
Individuality was Chaplin's artistic sustenance and his character's breath and blood. The artist himself heard above the rumble of Sennett's industrial complex. Chaplin returned to the set wearing the collage that served him best throughout his career: a pair of black leather shoes, a pair of fatty Arbuckle's enormous pants, a tight jacket of Chester Conklin's and a derby夹 cane. The nose-smudge of Chaplin makes his character seem older than hiding his expression.
Thus, feet askew, Charlie the tramp, the little fellow, a man without material goods who owned the world through his inventive imagination, began his bout with society.
Chaplin had begun his bout as a child. He learned about society by looking up from the bottom layer. Chaplin's parents were
obscure ballad singers of the poorest class of English society. His father, a drunk, died when Charles was five. His mother, who fought her own battle against ill health, sent Charles and his older brother Sydney, to a London porchouse for two years. He also portrayed himself in his films. He also knew how to incorporate the saving grace of humor into bitter situations.
The mixture of pragmatic rakishness and naivete in Chaplin's character brought America to its knees before him. Ridiculous as Charlie the tramp was, he was human.
Charlie had a touch of the antihier about him that dismayed critics but overly charming. He clad in cavalry rogue, a dandy and a sentimentalist. He was a genius at utseless endeavors but inept at the tasks placed before him. He was always alone, always an outsider, not wanting in what he could not go. Most of his attempts at acceptance were heartbreakingly unsuccessful, yet Charlie had the ability to during and ingenuity consistenly pick himself up and start over.
activities.
Chaplin became a star during the decade when the concept of stars was born. In so doing, he lost much of his privacy to a demanding public. Fans confused him with his creation. They claimed the right to censor the actor-director in his off-screen
The character of the little tramp left the film world shortly after sound was introduced to the industry. He was a creature of moods, which were best conveyed by the eloquent exposition of his feelings in *Tommy*, Chaplin himself left the United States after a European vacation in 1952, when, armed with the suspicion that Chaplin was an "unsuasive character," the attorney general refused to allow him to re-enter the country.
Last April, during the annual Chaplin presentations, Chaplin and America resolved their differences.
"What difference does it make whether I eat mustard with ice cream or put sugar in beer, except on the screen?" he asked. Chaplin's morals and his affection for "sentimental edibles" laid down by those with the American people or with their leaders. He was accused of sexual indiscretions and subversive activities.
Chaplin is an old man now, paucity, white-haired and in his hands. In the industry lost during his 20-year exile is an open question, although in adjusting to sound his qualities began to decline in quality.
But Chaplin gave his greatest gift to the film industry and to his audience long before he fell into disrepute. Chaplin unearthed the comedy in the general confusion from which we all suffer. In his
To the public, the actor has become a ghost of his own creation. The graceful waddle of a man who inspired half a century of American comedy. Even as the figure recedes, he gives his cane a raikh twirl, assuring his audience that will recover his memory and those of life. He may often be a loser, but never a defeated one.
unpretentious little tramp, he made comedy true to life. His excellence was that of simplicity.
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Readers Respond
Administrator Explains Grants
Travel Grants
Having been directly involved in evaluating the Pearson Interpretive (PIHF) for the past four months, I find it impossible to remain silent in view of present circumference. We recently voted by mail ballot to disassemble the War for the Confederacy requirements that it presently fulfils. This decision, in effect, in effect, has successful operation of the Pearson Interpretive.
To the Editor:
Travel vouchers and reimbursement for travel expenses are indeed processed by the very capable Business Office staff in the office of the organization, in halls, but in no way can that office be said to provide the funds out of which travel grants are awarded. The Kansan writer corrects the provision provided either by state allocation to KU or by money received by the University from a source, both public and private.
As a frequent participant in decisions on travel grants to both students and faculty, and as a member of the university grants on various occasions over the years, I should like to offer a short introduction to the prehension which many readers may have carried away from reading an article in the March 8 issue.
So before anyone applies for a travel award, it is important to consider applying to the appropriate dean after securing a department endorsement (or faculty endorsement) or graduate student(s). In these days of fiscal austerity there can be no shortage of incoming for either faculty or students, but this is the route to becoming the Business Office provides to
Retrospective To the Editor:
I have been a member of the assembly's Educational Policies Committee for November; the major task of that committee for the first two years was to examine and evaluate the Pearson program. Countless hours were spent in meetings in an attempt to improve the program as well as its disadvan
It is also dishearring to feel an overwhelming sense of disgust with an organization in which I myself am involved. I find myself doubling the moris of the College where I study and disgusted with the philosophy of education that the assembly apparently is striving to establish.
NEWS STAFF
News Advisor .. Suanne Shaw
Editor .. Joyce Necerman
Associate Editor .. Silly Carlson
in any case, principal responsibility who should receive a travel grant how much the grant should be worth (both subject, as again correctly stated by the writer, to the level of chancellor and the Board of Regents) he receives and resumes in the university's administrative officers, mainly the vice chancellors and the deans of the university.
Chriss Davis Leawood Junior
BUSINESS STAFF
Business Advisor ... Mel Adams
Business Manager ... Carol Darks
Aust. Bus. Mgr ... Chuck Goodchild
Some travel grants are tied to federally funded research grants made to departments or to institutes. Travel is considered an essential
part of the research project in
improving grant administration,
the article seemed to suggest, travel
grants frequently cover only that,
and not the costs of food and
education.
those who make inquiry to it about travel grants.
Arnold H. Weiss
Assistant Dean, Graduate School
Finally, in January, our recommendations were submitted to the College Assembly. Although the assembly voted to grant permanent approval to the PHPH, the riders renders the program ineffective.
tages.
It is indeed sad to witness the downfall of an innovative program for the simple reason that it has been successful in developing new perspectives and in motivating a number of enthusiastic students.
One of the major reasons for criticism of the PIHP lies in an accusation that the instructors are proponents of "advocacy teaching." Some persons said they were taught the right of the student to form his own opinions. However, many courses at this University could be considered exemplary of advocacy teaching. Such courses are frequently of much lower quality than the PIHP.
Many of the inpid, mundane courses I have taken have been taught by professors who had no opinions of their own to offer. Is it possible for students to fringes on my rights as a student if I am denied the option of taking a course that I feel is meaningful and that I consider a contribution with permission. To be presented with permission of facts enriches my power of
evaluation and helps to make a class a worthwhile experience.
This issue brings to light a question regarding the worth of the College Assembly as a value measure, making long-standing members of the assembly who had prejudged the Pearson Program ignorantly, and of the EPCP and immediately proceeded to pursue their own vested interests, which frequently were purely political or
WHEN IT RAINS ...