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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, February 26, 1968
Aids the sick, not police
The students of KU have a new reason to respect Dr. Raymond Schwegler.
Dr. Schwegler is the health service director of Watkins Hospital. He recently stated the hospital policy of offering medical aid to students on a bad trip with psychedelic drugs with no reports being given to police and no student medical records begging released without permission
No effort is made, Dr. Schwegler said, to attempt to find out who is selling the drugs. In fact, he said, he's glad if student users never tell him where they obtained their high.
Schwegler said his staff is interested only in helping the student back to normal, medically and psychologically.
It is commendable to hear about an adult who is not hung-up on passing judgment on the use of drugs by young people today. Dr. Schwegler wants to do his job of helping people first, not confusing what is his business and what is not, which is often seen in the area of drugs.
What is more, Dr. Schwegler has no use for reports or medical forms for police use, which
indicates his respect for the rights of the individual student, even one in the shape that somebody on a dangerous LSD high would be in.
But all this is not to support drug usage, imply the extent of this problem is at KU, nor comment on Dr. Schwegler's personal feelings about the use of LSD, something he has not let interfere with the responsible performance of his medical duties.
This is simply to say that since the problem of LSD usage does arise, we are glad that there is at least one person who respects the right of the student, any student, and knows the sound reasoning behind giving the friends of someone who is dangerously high a safe place to bring him, without hesitating because of legal complications.
The temptation to do otherwise than this is one of that many of another generation would not be able to pass up in their haste to scorn drug usage by this generation.
— John Hill
Assistant Editorial Editor
Record review
"Strange Days" laments alienation in modern world
by Will Hardesty
"Strange Days," by The Doors on the Elektra label, is an album about a strange modern phenomenon—alienation.
The cohesiveness of the album is something akin to that of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." While The Doors album doesn't hold together as tightly as Sgt. Pepper's, it does have a very definite theme.
The album begins with a definition of the problem—"Strange days have found us/Strange days have tracked us down They're going to destroy Our casual joys." The complex and modern world is causing the alienation.
What is the solution? Perhaps love, perhaps just sex. "Love me two times, baby/Love me twice today."
Perhaps drugs are the answer. "... We linger alone/Bodies confused/Memories misused As we run from the dayTo a strange night of stone." Drugs may be the answer to escaping from alienation to the real world or to another world which is the individual's.
They also advise escape to either the "Horse Latitudes" or by going on a "Moonlight Drive."
If neither of these two possible answers are right, escape.
The problem is also in all the people around us. "People are strange." However, there is always hope of meeting someone else who can share your life with you, who can help you relate and escape the alienation, but sometimes, even though you have found the person, there is a problem—"I can't see your face in my mind."
"Tear your web away/Saw through all your bars/Melt your cell today . . . Unhappy girl! Fly fast away/Don't miss your chance /To swim in mystery/You are dying/In a prison/Of your own devise."
Even though people are strange and alienated, in "You're Lost Little Girl," The Doors say people know what they should do. "I think you know what to do I'm sure you know what to do."
"I Don't Know If Either Side Is Winning, But I Know Who's Losing"
Escape then. Find something else to use as a substitute. Music is a solution The Doors offer. In
"When the Music's Over," they say, "The music is your special friend/Dance on fire as it intends/Music is your only friend/ Until the end."
This album is much better than The Doors' first album. "Strange Days" has songs which are more exciting, complex, dynamic and technically correct than the first album.
The only thing lacking is one really big song which made it nationally, as "Light My Fire," which was on the first album, did. The only part of "Strange Days" which is hurting is one song called "Horse Latitudes." If this minute-and-a-half musical miscarriage could be removed, the album would really deserve the adjective "the greatest."
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Kansan book review
Death Had Two Sons' Dayan's best
It would be a disastrous thing to fall in love with Yael Dayan, but so easy to do reading her latest book and studying that laughing ugly photograph of her. At 29 she would surely have no more mercy for a worshipper than her famous father for his nation's enemies.
After her first two novels, Yael Dayan was recognized among modern Israel's best. With the publication of "Death Had Two Sons," her talent seems so certain that there is little risk in predicting that a young woman whose native language is Hebrew will become one of the finest contemporary novelists in English.
She began writing during her compulsory military duty and "New Face in the Mirror" reflected the young womanhood of an Army commander's daughter. This early autobiographical style was simple and direct, beautifully unadorned and seldom selfconscious. The world saw a new Sion, an Israel of young people and new—scarcely Jewish—ways. It all made Leon Uris look a bit foolish.
But with her second book, "Envy the Frightened," it became just as foolish to limit her as "the Francoise Sagan of Israel." From autobiography she had turned to character, from a "domestic" portrait of her own sex to a sensitive study of the human individual. Although the male protagonist is supposedly beyond the reach of female writers—as Virginia Woolf demonstrated—"Envy the Frightened" focused
upon the maturing of a very believable young man.
Now "Death Had Two Sons" polishes and deepens this study.
Daniel Kalinsky's career as an Israeli lieutenant is the heart of this swirling mixture of life in today's Sion. Elder European Jews and orthodox rabbis shift through a world that belongs mainly to the young, Tel Aviv dancers or kibbutz farmers.
Daniel, typical of Dayan's men, is at once supersensitive and hardshellled. The memory of the Nazi camps has locked out his childhood and robbed him of a compassionate rapport with his father. But his own affinity for poets and sense experiences has given him a very successful eye for his own love, loyalty, and guilt crises.
Daniel has seen the role of sacrifice from both sides, once as his father abandoned him in favor of his twin and again as his closest friend died doing Daniel's job. The young man, keeping a deathwatch over his cancerous father, cannot break through the shells of coldness he has built between himself and his world, cannot feel, cannot decide to offer his forgiveness and love to the father who left him to die.
Yael Dayan's narrative technique in "Death Had Two Sons" is the most ambitious, mature, and successful she has attempted. Not content with moving freely through Daniel's memories, she also interweaves those of his father and friends. Carefully she signposts each
shift of scene or date so that a growing richness and not mere confusion results. The extreme artificiality of the novel's structure is made to appear a work of nature, as accidental and organic as Daniel's own life.
"The tears did not just stream down his cheeks, his eyes were heavy with them and he was choking on them and there were tears thinning his blood making him feel feeble and unstable and he was six years old again and left alone searching for his father."
Nor is her insight to human problems merely regional. A newly-immigrated Polish Jew confronts friendly Bedouin tribesmen with a frailty of prejudice and a lack of understanding common to us all: "...all he could see were black robes and thick dark skins, a foreign language and strange customs. He did not feel superior, but they were simply not his equals."
Dayan's language is fresh and quick, accurate and frequently very compelling-
Here is a fine third novel by a young woman who can create male characters among the most absorbing in modern fiction. Here is that odd backdrop, a new land in a very old soil, described with loving honesty.
"Death Had Two Sons" will certainly be compared with Camus' "The Stranger" in its hero's disavowal of the polite but hateful social lie—nor will the comparison be to the discredit of Yael Dayan.