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October 14, 1970 - Image 5

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The Michigan Daily, 1970-10-14

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Wednesday, Octob r 14, 1970

THE MICHIGAN DAIUY

Page Five

Wednesday, October 14, 1970 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five

b
0
k
s

Entrance

to

Porlock: A

journey into

the woods

Frederick Buechner, T H E
ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK,
Atheneum, $5.95.
By JOHN VON B. RODENBECK
The Entrance to Porlock is
Frederick Buechner's fifth novel,
the first one I have read, and
in my judgment, a brilliant
book. Its title, of course, should
recall the man from Porlock
who interrupted Coleridge's
famous dream with the reality
of an unpaid tailor's bill. As
Tip, one of Buechner's char-
acters puts it:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for they shall see Porlock.
Porlock; you may remember, is
where the poetry and drama
are . . . Porlock is where the
shadows are thickest. Por-
lock is where Grandfather saw
Shakespeare. Porlock is where
the secret is both known and
told, and it is the place I visit
often in my dreams.
Poised like any work of fic-

tion at the entrance to this Por-
lock, the book seems to take as
its central idea the recurrent
perception that life itself may
be a dream, that reality is un-
real.
"There is," as Tip says again,
"another way of putting it."
Peter Ringkoping, an octogen-
arian of Danish extraction, is
interested in donating some
acres of marginal land to a
mental institution run by an
old friend. He saves on taxes.
He propitiates the gods. The
old friend invites him to come
up and talk about it. His old-
est son, Dean Nels Ringkop-
ing of the Putnam School,
comes along to watch out for
the family interests. His
younger son, Thomas, wit and
bon vivant, comes along for
the ride Thomas Rinkoping,
Jr., known to his intimates
as Tip, come along to help
with the driving mostly. They
hope to make it up and back

in one day, but the car breaks
down and they have to walk
the last couple of miles. . .
Here in a nutshell is most of
the "plot" of the book, its giv-
en "reality," which Buechner
creates and accepts as a dazzling
opportunity for taking us up
to where the book itself stands
at the entrance to Porlock and
perhaps even a little bit beyond.
Buechner is making full use,
of course, of the essential qual-
ities of prose fiction, its prosi-
ness and its fictionality, its sim-
ultaneous debts to the real and
the unreal, His writing is spare,
lucid and colloquial and his
characters speak as in fact real
people might speak, which is
quite sufficient to suggest in
them, as in us all, a kind of
walking madness. One recalls
Robert Frost, Ray Bradbury,
and R. R. Laing, as well as the
Shakespeare of The Tempest.
For his wonderfully suggestive
epigraph, however, Buechner
chooses a more recondite source:

"Truly I should be ungrateful if
I failed to mourn for the man
who gave me my own lovely
heart. I should like to cry a
little, because Oz is gone, if you
will kindly wipe away my tears,
so that I shall not rust."
Unlike The Wizard of Oz,
Buechner's book is not a fan-
tasy. His New England land-
scape is crossed by no Yellow

Brick Road and offers no ex-
ternal encounters more danger-
ous than with the outraged
owner of a run-over cat. There
are two wizards in it, not just
one, but their magic fails as of-
ten as not and it is earthly in
any case. The sense of strange-
ness that Buechner evokes is
achieved not by fantasizing at
all but by the kind of verbal

magic that naturally results
from sheer intensity of focus on
the real and the effort to word
such intensity with communica-
tive appropriateness. Let us lift
out of its context, for example,
a paragraph describing Sarah,
Peter Ringkoping's wife, as she
moves through the woods at the
mental institution run by Hans
Strasser who is her old lover,
her husband's old friend and
like her husband a Prospero of
the mind:

for a moment and close her
eyes to the sudden fragrance
of earth, tree, mold, the un-
bearable freshness of it rising
all about her, a curlicue of
blood at her chin.
For all, its brilliance The En-
trance to Porlock does not pre-
tend to "greatness" which in
so much of our current writing
is an entirely non-literary attri-
bute. It represents rather a
strain that runs much more
richly through twentieth-cen-
tury English fiction and that
has not notably reappeared in
American novel-writing s i n c e
Cabell, a kind of writing direct-
ed not at a literate public but
at readers, at the sort of people
who regard reading as an ac-
tivity full and sufficient to it-
self. If it rarely provides either
socio-politico-economic insights
or runaway best sellers, this
kind of writing nevertheless
does provide the best standard
by which other prose fiction
can be judged.

Kid's poetry: A sock in the pants

r

Kenneth Koch, WISHES,
LIES AND DREAMS, Random
House, $7.50.
By LIZ WISSMANN BRUSS
Wishes, Lies and Dreams is a
book by a poet about the poetic
process. Teaching Children to
Write Poetry (as it is sub-titled)
is also an anthology of verse by
children. Since these are the
categories under which Mr.
Koch's'book might, however hid-
eously, be discussed, I state
them clearly. Because it is in
avoiding the connotations of
either category that the merit
of the book lies.
There have been collections of
child-poetry before; indeed, a
book such as Miracles (for ex-
ample) would never descend to
anthologizing s-o m e of Mr.
Koch's collection:
I wish I could fly
And fly all over town
I would go through houses
and pay a visit to
everyone,
I would go to Charles C's
house to talk and have some
fun
And then I would fly home to
have fun the rest of the day
At my own little house.
But Mr. Koch's accent is never
on the miraculous. There are no
accidents in this volume, no
"found art." Neither are there
"six year darlings of a pigmy
size," noble savages, or vague
allusions to the doctrine of In-
nate Ideas. Mr. Koch's is purely
a developmental psychology,
and his experiment with the
students- of P.S. 61 in New York
will, superficially at least, be of
more interest to the followers
of Piaget than, of Proust or
Pound.
The book is the result of two
semesters work in a New York
City grammar school with chil-
dren ranging from four to
twelve years of age. A great
deal of the essay which fronts
the collection has already been
reprinted in the New York Re-
view of Books-thus defining its
audience and participation in
the growing tradition of Radical
Education. Mr. Koch's project
makes, a neat contrasting case
to the work of another poet edu-
cator, Matthew Arnold, almost
exactly a century ago. Plainly,
Arnold would have been appal-
led. Or, at least, contemporary
educators of the Arnoldian per-
suasion are likely to see a, lot
more "Anarchy" than "Culture"
on Mr. Koch's pages. What man-
ner of "Touchstone" can we find
in:
A horse is as brown as a pony
Wood was brown when I
painted it
Give me some brown paper or
I'll sock you in the pants.
But it is a distinctly anti-
Arnoldian position which has
motivated Kenneth Koch, Ron
Padgett, and the Teachers' and
Writers' Collaborative:
"Before (this project) poetry
was kind of a dead subject in
the school (dormant anyway).
I For all their good will, the
teachers didn't see a way to
connect it with the noisy,
small, and apparently prosy
creatures they faced in the
classroom.'
A part of this deadness is surely
the result of, reducing the vi-
tality and effort of a process
into the fixed touchstone of a

product, around which cluster
the sticky webs of social status
and education by fiat. There
are, to be sure, art-works, where
the activity has been defined as
an act. But a dangerous super -
stition among art-educators (on
any scholastic level) would
make what is after all a dis-
tinction in logic and point of
view into an absolute, the semi-
allegorical figure of Poesy. The
result is something which can
be acquired like an antique, and
spoken in fragments like an in-
cantation in which we no longer
fully believe.
The method which is implicit
in Wishes, Lies and Dreams is
the ancient and re-discovered
technique of the use of "topoi."
Rather than perscribing con-
crete models which the children
must learn to copy, Koch gives
them a conceptual schema -
Wishes, Comparisons, I Used
to/But Now. If I Were the
Snow, and Spring, Being an
Animal or a Thing, etc. The
benefit of this is two-fold: it
allows his students to see some
of the ways in which poetry
functions. Moreover, each stu-
dent learns how to control lan-
guage according to a more ab-
stract plan. The experience of
control over expression is sys-
tematically enlarged as the stu-
dents learn to use expression to
shape and control once terrify-
ing or bewildering events like
"Dreams":
I dream of many colors mak-
ing a pattern.
I clutter my mind with arith-
metic examples.
I try to play piano in my
sleep.
I dream that every day is
October ninth.
But the development which
K o c h chronicles is inter-per-
sonal as well. The students read
their poems aloud and build
upon the suggestions they gath-
er from what others have done
in their poetry. This is more
than an enactment of "Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent"
-it is a training in intellectual
morality. To I e a r n, as these
children have, that concepts
are not property, that both lan-
guage and literature can only
grow more refined in an atmos-
phere of dialogue and critical
inter-action is something few of
us have been taught. It places
Koch's efforts in a school more
ancient than Arnold's, and-to
me, at least, more venerable-
the school of Athens and the
radical education of Socrates.

Derek Maitland, THE ONLY
WAR WE'VE GOT, William
Morrow, $5.95.
By JIM NEUBACHER
Since Catch-22's revival on
film, and the subsequent re-
printing in paperback, it has
only been a matter of time be-
fore someone appointed him-
self Heller-of-the Vietnam-War.
Derek Maitland spent a total
of 11 months in Vietnam, 10 of
them as a reporter for the right-
wing Copley News Service, and
FLASH! He saw himself as the
chosen one. He flew straight to
London and banged out his
book.
He has done a fair job of cap-
turing the flavor of the war,
complete with the terminology
and GI lingo. And his plot is
zany enough. Even his char-
acters are strange (ala Heller,
who else). All in all, Derek Mait-
land succeeded to the extent of
drawing a grudging acknowl-
edgement from an East Coast
Reviewer that his book looks
"like the Catch-22 of the 70's."
But Maitland himself has run
smack into his own sort of
Catch-22 of war novels. It goes
something like this:
Anyone who wants to write
a serious novel about war has
to be crazy. If you're not
crazy, and you're sophistic-
ated, you'll write a penetrating
satire about the absurdity and
gross contradictions w h i c h
flourish in time of war. Any-
one who can laugh about the
absurdities and gross contra-
dictions of the war in Viet-
nam has to be crazy.
I'm sorry, Derek, but it just
isn't funny. "Gooks" getting
their guts blown out just isn't
funny. Generals who fight wars
because they don't want to go
back to Fort Bragg and a big
fat wife with a bigger mouth
aren't funny.
Satire revolving around ra-
cism in the barracks just isn't

funny, Mr. Maitland, nor is the
spectator of wide scale prosti-
tution among South Vietnamese
women, hungry for the money
of rich American GI's.
Sgt. Schlitz, General Cretan,
Leaping Prick et.al. just don't
make me laugh.
And, if we go so far as to
grant Derek Maitland with the
intellectual aim of provoking
this very reaction of disgust, if
we credit him with writing a
powerful anti-war book in the
guise of comedy in order to
sneak onto coffee tables in mid-
dle-American homes, then we
deserve to ask him one favor.
Go away and come back in 15
years. Maybe it will be funny
then. In the meantime, the
newspaper provides all the nec-
essary disgusting stories I need.
And it's cheaper.
AIRPORT
LIMOUSINES
for information call
971-3700
Tickets are available
at Travel Bureaus or
the Michigan Union
32 Trips/Day

L

~~

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low O91ice p vt
PiX 1damI
kill
'4k t

Come to the Regents
meeting on Thursday and
demand more housing.,

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IN B
sales,
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INDI
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But If
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the Mid
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STU
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part o
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IMPROVEMENT

you will
rtunities
RICS!

want to discuss
with Minnesota

ta FABRICS asks:
What Does
vRO WT H
Mean To YOU
BUSINESS - it may be more
bigger profits or more em-
es.
VIDUALLY - it may be
cal, mental or educational.
Your Personal Answer is

17i

LONG RANGE
BUSINESS CAREER

Today's Writers .. .
John' Rodendeck is an as-
sistant professor in the English
department and a sometime
screenwriter of horror movies.
Liz Wissmann Bruss, a doctoral
studept in English, was recent-
ly married to another Daily re-
viewer. Jim Neubacher is a
Daily editor and last year's
winner of the Scholastic Cre-
ative Story Award.

_^- -- i I I

ota FABRICS stores are the fastest
g retail fabric merchandisers in
dwest. Four new stores opened in
in less than a year ago. New
are scheduled here and in the
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kee. The GROWTH is here!
Mr. Duane Hansen
will be on campus
THURSDAY, OCT.15
at the
DENT ACTIVITIES BLDG.
k with you about becoming
f the management team!
nesota FABRICS

LED ZEPPLIN III

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plus tax

AUSTIN
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GENERAL OFFICES
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St. 'Paul, Minn. 55108

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1217 S. Univ.
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Phone 769-4700 1

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UNION-LEAGUE

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CGRRD )

General Sales Ticket Schedule
HOMECOMING '70
Thursday Concert-STEVE MILLER BAND and BREAD
October 22, 1970
Tuesday, October 13-12-4 Union Lobby
Wednesday-Friday. October 14-16-10-4 Union Lobby

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043
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D/L/D
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dates
12/23-1/4
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weeks
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