The Hill With It
by john hill
I was surprised to see the leprechaun, even though it was the day before St. Patrick's Day.
I saw a tiny old man with a kindly face, Santa-Claus smile, twinkling eyes, selling dirty French postcards.
"GOTCHA!" I yelled as I lunged for him, grabbing him by his bright green vest. Everyone knows if you catch a leprechaun that you get three wishes or a pot of gold or something.
"OK," he said, with a bored expression on his face. "So what does that make you? Not-it, or something?"
"Don't I get a pot of gold at least?" I asked, rather disappointed.
"YOU COLLEGE KIDS," he mumbled to himself, "all you think about is pot. . .."
"Look, it's the day before St. Patrick's Day and I just caught a leprechaun. Don't I get something for it?"
I would have groveled at his feet but he was only eight inches high.
"ALL, RIGHT, all right. I'll give you three wishes," he said, disgustedly. "You mortals . . . all the time it's 'gimme this, do that'." . . .
But I wasn't listening. Being more mortal than the average mortal, my mind was busy dreaming of all these distant wishes that every college man hopes for but never really expects to see...
A room on the third floor of GSP . . . a good seat at Allen Field House . . . the campus loudspeaker broken . . . a paisley XKE with a built-in bar, stereo, and circular bed . . . food at McCollum Hall . . . the 1966 Jayhawker. . .
"WAIT A MINUTE." said the leprechaun. "You're probably thinking typical mortal wishes—"
"They are not immoral!"
"Mortal. Anyway, why not ask for happiness, success, peace of mind, etc. You ought to know what happens with these tricky material wishes —don't you ever watch Twilight Zone?"
"Yeah, maybe you're right. OK! Here goes Wish Number One! I now hereby solemnly and officially declare that I wish for—"
"HOLD IT," said the leprechaun, lighting his small pipe and then blowing soap bubbles. "It ain't that easy."
"But I thought all—"
"Sorry but this is the twentieth century. There are quite a few forms to fill out. First of all, your Student Wish Number is 31711 and you must see your student wish adviser. He has to sign his approval on all three wishes that you make."
"I KNOW THAT he doesn't know what you want, but don't let that stop you. We don't. Now fill out all these forms in triplicate, write your name and address down on all 23 of these cards, and then turn in your car registration number. When you do all this, use lots of carbon paper and numbers because that adds an official air to it all and—"
"Is it always this complicated?"
"Of course. Now after you pick up your Wish Packet,then—"
"I GUESS MAYBE we just better forget about the whole thing," I said, disillusioned.
"Sure if you want to. But those of us in the wish business are quite modern. Well, have a nice St. Patrick's Day, laddie," said the leprechaun, and disappeared in a puff of green mist
Sure n' begorra, I said to myself as I walked away, trying to step on as many four-leaf clovers as possible.
KANSAN TELEPHONE NUMBERS Newsroom----UN 4-3646 ---Business Office----UN 4-3198
The Daily Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas, is represented by National Advertising Service at East 50 St., New York, N.Y. 10022. Mail subscription rates: $5 a semester or $9 a year. Published and second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the university year. Accommodations and Sundays, University holidays and examination fees. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the Daily Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin.
The opinions expressed in the editorial column are those of the students whose names are signed to them. Guest editor views are unspecified by the editor's. Any opinions expressed in the Daily Kansas are not necessarily of The University of Kansas Administration or the State Board of Regents.
EXECUTIVE STAFF
managing Editor ... Joan McCabe
Business Manager ... Tony Chop
Editorial Editors ... Dan Austin, Barb Phillips
Computation Center Short Course:
Fortran IV, Mon.-Fri. (Mar. 29-31),
3:30 p.m., 302 Su. Enroll in 110 Su.
Ext. 3776).
Official Bulletin
168. Signa Xi Lecture. 7:30 p.m. Prof.
Cora Downs, KU. "Development of
Flourescent Anti-body Method."
Dvehe Aud.
Die Olympiaden das deutschen Vereins werden am Donnerstag den 16 Marz um 4:30 im Jayhawk Raum der Union staffindten.
TODAY
College Life, 9 p.m. Chi Omega house, George Blood, Young Life director, K.C.
Daily Kansen
Thursday, March 16, 1967
An English author of great promise
UDK Book Review—Books by Anthony Burgess
2
(Editor's Note: This is the first of two parts of a review of novelist Anthony Burgess. The second part will concentrate on Burgess' recent publication.) By SCOTT NUNLEY
Carefully Burgess drills the reader in this street lingo. Working with his own Huck Finn, Burgess allows the narrator to reveal more about himself than he realizes. The sound and feel of a horrifying future welfare-state surround the reader with life. As the narrator undergoes a "rape" of himself, and encounters only frustration in his attempts to readjust to the world, the reader is swept powerfully along.
"The Doctor Is Sick," the best of his early (1960) novels, concerns Dr. Edwin Spindrift, lecturer, who has become infected with words—"He had lived too much with words and not what the words stood for. James Joyce had been such another." The technicians at his clinic discover a tumor, but Edwin's real problem is that he has been living locked within words and outside of life.
In the process of "breaking out," Edwin becomes a fugitive in a series of comic chases—from doctors, police, TV studios, and London mobsters. "The Doctor Is Sick" is always an entertaining novel and becomes an hilarious one in scenes where Edwin offers flagellation to a "kindly" thug in exchange for freedom.
WITH "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE" (1962). Burgess achieved a tour de force of his interest in language and sensation. The novel's narrator is a teenage rapist whose language appears to be incomprehensible: "Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of erasing any more pretty polly to tolchok some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood."
Anthony Burgess is one prolific British novelist who, since 1960, has earned the right to be considered the best of the current English writers. In less than ten years, Burgess has published ten novels, all of them good and many of them brilliant.
Burgess' first published stories dealt with his experience as a civil servant in British colonial Asia. The stories "Time for a Tiger" (1956), "The Enemy in the Blanket" (1958), and "Beds in the East" (1959) were collected in 1964 as the novel "The Long Day Wanes."
ORIGINALLY A COMPOSER, Burgess was drawn to linguistics and his work reflects that interest. Burgess himself is a scholar of James Joyee, and recently published an edited version of "Finnegan's Wake."
"A Clockwork Orange" is a fine novel in spite of this apparent weight of linguistics and sociology because Burgess' first concern is to create human beings. Language and sensation are important themes of Burgess' work, but only as they are the sparks of man's collision with the world.
IN "NOTHING LIKE the Sun" (1964), Burgess demonstrated that he could control his explosive prose in delicate shadings. Here is the "real" William Shakespeare, from Stratford to London, from haystack to lord's bedchamber, from light to dark mistress. In the process of living, Shakespeare is naturally in the process of creating his own language. In four years, Burgess had proved himself to be more than merely a satirist or humorist or sensationalist.
FEIFFER