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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday. August 2.1960
A Bit of a 'Dig' In Swan Song
As the Summer Session Kansan goes to press for the last time, the editors have only one regret, and who can complain about that?
The Kansan had every intention of publishing the list of students passing the English Proficiency Examination — just as it has done in years past. But, as those of you who have been around the campus for awhile know, the English department is very touchy about this examination.
HONESTLY, WE don't have the patience to fiddle with them. We asked for it. They said no. That's it. For the omission we apologize.
In other fields, we are somewhat happy that summer school is nearly over. Now maybe we can shake this head cold which certainly has been caused by plunging out of that ice box of a basement in the library and into the normal Kansas day.
We never thought we'd see the day come to attack air conditioning, but it has been "too much of a good thing."
AND SO ANOTHER effort ends. We're glad the Matzke's are safe, we're happy to see all the awards granted during the summer and we hope someone has learned something in these eight weeks
And if you get the chance, take note of the editorial below. It might be handy to take heed and go a step further in insuring a return to KU or other academic climes in the fall for a little more learning — from books or life.
Highway Safety
August is the time for vacations and trips home from school. With summer travel reaching toward a new peak and the record-breaking 442 highway deaths of the recent July Fourth weekend still in mind, one veteran traffic court judge has urged drivers of "unchecked cars" to have them inspected immediately as a basic safety precaution.
The judge explained that only 16 of 50 states have compulsory vehicle safety-check programs (Kansas is not one of them) while the remainder are on a "voluntary" basis. The big unknown, this judge reports, is if these unchecked cars are involved in a higher percentage of accidents and do they have a higher percentage of defects than those inspected.
IT IS HOPED that these unknown owners of possibly unsafe cars will check thoroughly into the condition of their vehicles and take necessary steps to put them in safe operating condition.
For example, consider one of the 10 points in a basic check the simple but vital windshield wiper. Perhaps the most important single factor relating to driving safely and prevention of accidents is that of driver visibility.
If the blade rubber is dried out from exposure, or if springs in wiper arms are weak from prolonged use, thewiper just smears or streaks as it moves back and forth across the windshield.
Studies show that on 60 out of 100 cars older than one year, the wiper arm pressure is too weak to provide clear wiping of rain, sleet, snow or road-muck spray. Even a new blade does not alone correct this condition if the arm pressure is too weak.
IT'S IMPORTANT to know this because in a study of accidents in which vision obstruction was noted, the National Safety Council reports, half of those mishaps involved obscurements such as rain, snow and road-spray on the windshield. The same deadly combination accounted for 39 per cent of fatalities in such accidents.
In view of record-breaking fatalities over the Fourth of July weekend it makes sense to say that the very least we can do is to drive a safety-checked motor vehicle. This checking can be done any time at a good garage or service station.
Even skillful drivers (and aren't we all) get into trouble with defective brakes, tires, lights, signals, poor visibility, etc. At the minimum, we should start with a safe car.
China, Germans Split
BERLIN—(UPI)—The Soviet Zone of Germany has ended its fleeting flirtation with Communist China.
They're still good friends, but the romance is dead.
For a while East Germany was courting China by imitating its doctrines in an apparent effort to get Chinese backing for a hard stand on West Berlin.
But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev broke up that love affair with orders to the East Germans to follow his line or face the consequences.
In obedience, East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht told a meeting of his central committee recently that the Chinese honeymoon was over.
He laid down the law that the Soviet Union alone is the Marxist authority and the theoretical spokesman for the communist world, informed sources said.
Khrushchev's order to the East Germans was said to be part of the Soviet campaign to reassert Soviet mastery in the complicated field of Communist ideology against Communist Chinese claims of the right to guard the purity of Marxist-Leninist doctrines
East Germans described this Soviet-Chinese battle as "extremely hot."
HOLLYWOOD—(UPI)—James T. Farrell, author of the famous "Studs Lonigan" trilogy, is fuming over movie treatment of his controversial opus.
Author Fuming
The Chicago-born writer, who sold the film rights to the novels cut of financial necessity, charges their entire point has been missed "because Studs' death is eliminated on so-called moral grounds."
In a letter to this writer discussing "Studs" on its silver anniversary, Farrell said:
"Studs Lonigan' needs no defense. It is unnecessary to apologize for it. This work earned its own way all over the world. It is loved by those who are called the people, and go to motion pictures.
"I defended it, in court and out of court. I did not flinch even when threatened with physical harm. I never beat a retreat before any force, power or threat concerning 'Studs Lonigan.'
"I spent as much, and more, money on it than I have received for the film rights. I sold it cheaply: I had to because of pitiless necessity and after years of tragedy and illness that I faced alone and paid for, both in terms of the pocketbook and of the heart."
"Studs," an unsparingly realistic tragedy of an Irish youth who lets his life slip aimlessly by, was completed by Farrell 25 years ago in a hotel in New York's Greenwich Village.
Over the years, while he could afford it, he refused to yield it to the movies because he feared the treatment it would receive. It cost him luxury.
"Studs' was not a best seller in the 1930s," he said. "It never made me rich, and never provided me with enough for my full support. Today, all I have are my books, a few old suits of clothes, my inexpensive pens, property worth less than $2,000.
"And this is not because of a wasted fortune. I have done more or less what many writers do. I finished 'Studs Lonigan' when I was 30. I went on toward the completion of my life work. I continued doing this, and I have been doing it at the risk even of health and length of life. My few close intimate of these days know thus for fact."
Farrell now lives in a midtown Manhattan hotel.
"I shall do new work and I can," he said. "I am dedicated for the rest of my life to a new 'Comedie Humaine' of our days and years, a series of at least 20 volumes. For it I have risked everything, as I have for other work.
"I am proud not to be rich because I gave myself and my time to creative struggle and to the life of our days and years. I hope I am making my small contribution. If I am remembered a little for that, my years will not have been in vain.
"The solidarity of art is at the core of the moral content of our lives."
The movie version of the Lonigan trilogy, titled "Studs," has just been released by United Artists. The three novels now have been republished in a new single-volume paperback edition by Signet books for newsstand sale.
BEST SELLERS
(UPD)
(Compiled by Publishers' Weekly)
THE LEOPARD—Giuseppe di Lampe-
dusa
THE CHAPMAN REPORT—Irving Wallace
ADVISE AND CONSENT—Allen Drury
James Michener
THE APEA OF PLAZA
THE LIFE OF
FLOOR—Theodore H. White
TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM—
THE LIFE OF
THE VIEW FROM THE FORTIETH
FLOOR—Theodore H. White
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE—William Styron
THE CONSTANT IMAGE—Marcia Davenport
TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM
Nevil Shute
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
News Room Phone 711
Editors Dick Crocker
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Business Manager Clyde Brown
Business Office Phone 376
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
SISTER CARRIE, by Theodore Dreiser. Dell Laurel Books. 75 cents.
Since Dreiser's celebrated novel entered the public domain, it has been published in several paperback versions, one of which is the attractive volume in the Laurel series. It benefits from a distinguished introduction by Alfred Kazin, which, unhappily, is the same introduction written for other Dreiser volumes in the series.
"Sister Carrie" is a work that is admittedly a landmark in literary naturalism, so controversial that its own publisher withdrew it after publication in 1900. The reader of 1960, unaware of the fight for realism in American literature, may find it as tame as Harold Bell Wright or Gene Stratton-Porter, the early century contemporaries of Dreiser.
THE GENTLE READER of 1900 was meant to have been shocked by the novel. True, it was a meaty kind of subject matter — farm girl in the big cities of Chicago and New York, preyed on by men, unable to find work, rising to success of a sort through many vicissitudes.
There is little shock today. There are a good many questions, however. Dreiser is lashing out at society (for an objective chronicler of society he takes some pretty subjective positions) for not providing better for its more unfortunate children.
But is Carrie an unfortunate? She takes up with the flashy traveling salesman Drouet and become his mistress, ostensibly because the city will not provide work for her. She has worked a few days in a shoe factory, but she becomes ill and then fails to find another job. A close reading will indicate that she doesn't try too hard.
WHO IS THE REAL predator here? This Carrie can take care of herself. She engages in a flirtation with Drouet's "resort manager" friend Hurstwood, but the flirtation palls when she learns Hurstwood is married. She kicks out Drouet (this timid little girl from a Wisconsin farm) because he didn't tell her about Hurstwood. Then Hurstwood shanghais her to Montreal and finally to New York. Then she naively marries this man whose wife has just filed for divorce.
Then begins Hurstwood's downfall, right down to his suicide in a 15-cent-a-day flophouse that thoughtfully provides gas. Carrie becomes a popular star of the Broadway stage. But is she really happy? Has she really found success?
The plot in its bare outlines is as corny as any 20th century soap opera. But "Sister Carrie," like most other novels by Dreiser, builds up its power through the force of the subject matter. One feels for Hurstwood, and one feels for Carrie, as she eats sumptuous meals at Sherry's ($1.50 a plate!) and strolls Broadway, admiring the bejeweled ladies and the beautiful carriages.
DREISER PRESENTS in the novel a traction strike that indicates his strong sympathy for the downtrodden working classes. The same strike may have inspired William Dean Howells for a similar sequence in "A Hazard of New Fortunes."
The differences between "Carrie" and "Hazard" are many, however. Howells, a great-minded, compassionate man, was not yet ready in 1890 to take a socialistic position. Ten years later Dreiser was quite ready. Dreiser places himself as firmly on the side of labor as Howells a decade before had placed himself in a kind of literary no man's land, where the protagonist can only say, "Nothing can be done for these people." Something can be done, Dreiser says, and he speaks strongly for that something throughout "Sister Carrie."
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"FRANKLY, I HADN'T PLANNED ONTHAT KIND OF AN EVENING."