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Summer Session Kansan
Tuesday, June 9, 1964
No Burning Issues
The columnists and the editorial writers and the commentators keep telling us that it's going to be long, hot summer, especially in places like Mississippi and Maryland. Anybody who reads even just the newspaper headlines knows that two national political conventions are coming up. Others know there will be a lot of baseball; some even know there will be carnage on the highways.
This is the expected, the predictable, the known. A new weather map tells us that Kansas is due for below normal temperatures in the next 30 days, but another such map, if and when it begins to get hot, may tell us the contrary story. Those of us who have spent many summers here know that it can get pretty steamy.
Because it gets hot here, and because the news may get hot in other parts of the country, we're hoping for a quiet summer. Many of you who will spend the next eight weeks here in the mountainous country of eastern Kansas will be hoping for the same. Most of the young folks who drive so perilously have gone home for the summer. Memorial Drive will seem a little less like the Indianapolis Speedway. The sandbars, which we are told provide fall and spring entertainment, will have fewer university students on them, doing whatever they do there.
As spring semester ended the Daily Kansan was having trouble from people who thought our editors opposed military training. Far from it. We assure you that we support—up to a point—the military action that the United States takes, but we also support the Student Peace Union in its idealistic approach (even though we believe its methods a bit befuddled at times). Like many other editorial writers we hope we have succeeded in avoiding a position on that touchy matter.
Those of us who are past 40 hope there won't be a lot of racial demonstrations on campus. It's too hot for it, and the University really seems to be trying to solve those civil rights problems that remain—and such problems seem comparatively few to the older folks who have seen so many changes in the past few years. Let us avoid controversy and go for a ride in the country instead.
We like the campus in the summer, up till the time the crabgrass overwhelms the lawns, and the leaves on the trees take on a dusty hue. The groves are pleasant, and the recreation department seems to be interested in providing easy-going things to do. In a week the band campers will be here, decorating the campus with their youth and good humor, and on Sunday afternoons and evenings they'll fill the air with delightful music.
Some veteran teachers say the summer is the best time to teach. Students who take classes in the summer normally are a bit more motivated—they've got to finish up those last five hours so Dad will be convinced they really graduated, or they're trying to get through a semester early. Or they're going to take the Western Civ examination they've been postponing; Descartes and existentialism apparently are easier to grasp in July than in January or May.
So, in our rambling way, we few who will be giving you the Summer Session Kansan are trying to tell you that we're not going to be putting out the Lawrence, Kan., edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that we probably won't be dealing with many burning issues, that we'll be telling you what's going on around campus and even a little bit of what's going on elsewhere.
If something catches on fire, or collapses (as the hyperbolic paraboloid did a few summers ago), or explodes; if some big spot news event takes place at deadline; if somebody important does something or doesn't do something—we'll try to call these to your attention. Otherwise the Kansan will be published in the mood of summer in eastern Kansas—quiet, lazy, casual, taking off from the pressures of the rest of the year to get braced for the blasts of September.
Modern Art Museum 'Must' for Tourists
United Press International
By Bart Kinch
United Press International The New York World's Fair is attracting visitors to the Empire State in increasing numbers as the summer draws near. If you plan to be one of the visitors be sure to put the Museum of Modern Art on your "must see" list.
The department plans to have 170 prints on view at all times in the Edward Steichen Photography Center. The center will have on file about 7,000 prints dating from 1839
The museum is located at 11 West 53 St. Its Department of Photography now has a permanent exhibition area located in a new wing on the third and fourth floors.
to the present. More than 1,000 photographers from more than 60 countries are represented in the unique collection.
The center has a "study room" where interested students may have access to prints not on display. Also available will be the department's extensive library of books and periodicals on photography.
"THIS NEW SPACE for photography means that the museum will always have a photography exhibition on view," the museum said. "In the coming months these will include one-man exhibitions by and a survey of the Photo-essay." Andre Kertesz and Dorothea Lange
The museum also announced
plans to increase its publishing activities in the photographic field. Thus far, 19 books have been published and an enlarged and revised edition of "The History of Photography" by Beaumont Newhall is scheduled to be issued in the fall.
The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 and became one of the first museums in the country to exhibit photographs. Its first exhibit was in 1932. In 1940 a separate department of photography was established.
EDWARD STEICHEN, for whom the new center was named, was director of the department from 1947 until 1962. John Szarkowski currently directs the Department of Photography.
Handwriting On The Wall
Of course, the museum itself offers many photographic opportunities to camera fans, so bring your camera along.
At the Fair itself, be sure to visit the Kodak Pavilion where exhibits featuring professional and amateur photography will be displayed in the salon area.
The exhibits will be changed regularly and will include both black-and-white and color.
Summer Session Kansan
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Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member of Inland Daily Press Association, Associated College Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50th St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International, Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Published Tuesdays and Fridays during Summer Session. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
BOOK REVIEWS
VERGIL'S AENEID, translated with an introduction by L. R. Lind (Midland, Indiana University Press, $1.95).
Add to the previous accomplishments of KU's Dr. L. R. Lind a translation of the "Aeneid" in modern verse. The University student who probably is more attuned to the sluggish sixties can find here a tale, in language he can understand, that has survived many centuries and now occupies a position in the great triumvirate that also includes "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."
To Lind, "The Aeneid" differs from the Homerian epics in several respects. "Homer's epics live in a glow of Greek sunlight," he says. "The 'Aeneid' moves through gloom from dusk to dawn, from storm to peace, through a complex chiaroscuro of motion and quiet, peace and war, history and idyll, changing from book to book, at least eight of them brought to a close with the piercing sorrow of a haunting death:..."
This translation, Lind tells us, omits nothing of importance and hastily condenses no details. If it was good enough for Vergil it's good enough for him, he says. Nineteenth century translations could be considered modern, but not in the sense he would use the word "modern." But the famous epic poem has not been jazzed up, nor put in a form of most interest to devotees of comic books. The beauty remains, sharpened for modern readers.
Nor has the "Aeneid" been tampered with in the sense of recent revisions of "The Bible." The student who wants his "Aeneid" to start out "singing of arms and the man who first from Troy's shores" still has the music, but it's in a translation meaningful to readers of today and not merely to students of Victorian style.
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In the early years of the 19th century a polite guest did not ask for a bit of the breast, but for a bit of the bosom. Along about that time one young woman told a surgeon one of her limbs was broken, but she wouldn't say which one. And a doctor, forced to deliver a baby while the bedclothing covered the mother, once divided the umbilical cord in the wrong place because he couldn't see what he was doing.
These, and other fascinating, revolting, funny, and ultimately disgusting facts are revealed in an excellent article in the spring Horizon ($5) called "In B-d with Mrs. Grundy." "Disgusting" because one is repelled to see how prudery has been an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Fryer tells about the recent effort to ban Tarzan books because Tarzan and Jane allegedly had not been properly wed, about an English hospital where the nurses' dresses had to be lengthened because they revealed the knees to hospital patients, about a doctor who had to creep into a bedroom to deliver a baby so that he would not be seen, and how in Victorian times everything was covered, apparently, except what probably would have been called the "upper part of the bosom." Fryer suggests that if the sight of such flesh excited young men that that was something "ordained by a Higher Hand."
THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE is Peter Fryer, and he has a book coming out on the subject. It should be a dandy. Persons interested in censorship and the force of taboos within a culture will find Fryer's Horizon article a good introduction to the subject.
Choosing from the articles in this beautiful new issue is a task. Another that is particularly entertaining is by J. Christopher Herold, a busy, busy boy these days as he writes about the age of Napoleon. His subject is Jane Austen and her delightful books. The subject is a good one to accompany the article on Mrs. Grundy. Miss Austen's young lovers seemed quite unaware of the subject of s-x, though Herold says that the author herself, though quite virginal, was aware of the concept.
ART LOVERS WILL FIND a spectacularly beautiful article on Mantegna, with excellent reproductions. John Canaday is the author, and this critic for the New York Times handles his subject as well as that of Manet in the winter Horizon. Several full-color paintings are here.
Though there are other good pieces of writing here, the fourth and last I shall cite is called "The Rhine." It is written by Francis Russell, an author who knows the Rhine well, and spent some of his school days there. The enchantment of the river is enhanced by photographs of the castles, islands, wooded bluffs and storybook villages, and there is a special insert of a map of the Rhine which dates to the 19th century. If you read German, or even if you don't, this is a treasure.—CMP
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THE TEMPEST, by William Shakespeare (Signet Classics, 50 cents).
Robert Langbaum of the University of Virginia edited and supplied an introduction and notes for this new edition of the great play by Shakespeare. The editor summarizes the theme as "the perennial question that became particularly pertinent after the discovery of the New World—the question of whether nature is not superior to art, and whether man is not nobler in a state of nature than in a state of civilization."
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MOLL FLANDERS, by Daniel Defoe (Signet Classics, 50 cents).
In this novel we have one of the earliest novels written in English and one of the most influential. Defoe told the story entirely in the first person, and we encounter a candid woman on the make in 17th century England. Born in Newgate prison, Moll proceeds to final respectability, and her encounters with bigamy, incest, theft and prostitution are casual and part of her life.
Despite all this, Moll is natural and animal and consistently entertaining. Kenneth Rexroth, poet and newspaper columnist, provides an afterword.