Page 6-Sunday, February 12, 1978-The Michigan Daily The Michigan Daily-Sunday, Febr INKLINGS bert hoinback The FBI's top -secret v This week the Sunday Magazine initiates Inklings, a column which grants equal time to the faculty and gives our classroom mentors a chan- ce to meander through print along the lines of our ever-popular Ram- blings. We extend our heartfelt thanks to English Prof. Bert Hor- nback for stepping into untested waters. I'M STUDYING Greek in class this term. It's an odd feeling, after 14 years on the faculty here,. to be taking quizzes and tests instead of giving them, to be memorizing paradigms and doing homework every night. Oh, it's not that I don't do homework every night for the classes I teach - but this is a different kind of homework. And doing it, though odd, is fun. Ordinarily I teach long novels. David Copperfield is my favorite. I've taught it to more than 30 different classes here in 14 years, and have read it at least once a year since 1962. It's 950 pages long in the Penguin edition. And the reason I'm studying Greek this term is partly because of David Copperfield, though Dickens didn't know any Greek. A few years ago, as I was reading David's novel through again, I started puzzling in my head over why Dickens - or David - kept writing about being "happy". He says it so often and so earnestly toward the end that you have to take it seriously - and I did. Then, suddenly, in the middle of my puzzling, I realized that I didn't know what "happy" really means. I have been interested in words for a long time. When I was small I used to listen to all that Latin at church, and make up sentences out of it - English sentences - for myself. Maybe all sorts of kids used to do that. "Rita has a snotty nose." "How many got some wishes?" Anyway, I grew up listening to words, playing with them. Maybe I even became particularly interested in fiction because there are so many words in a nice long novel. (Oh, I like poems, too - partly because there are so few words in a good poem that you can deal with them one by one!) W HEN I looked up "happy" in the Oxford English Dictionary, I found to my surprise that it means something like "to hold all the pieces together." Etymologically, it comes to us through the Old Norse and Old English words for "chance" or "co- incidence" or "coming together". "Happen" is the same word. I say, "What's happening?" And you an- swer, "Oh, I'm happy." That trans- lates, etymologically, as something like "How are things coming togeth- er?" "Oh, they're coming together - they fit." No wonder David - or Dickens - is so interested in the word: that "to be happy" means "to bring every- thing together" is a really radical idea! "Radical." You know, that doesn't mean something wild or extreme; rather, it means "pertaining to the root" - from "radicalis". Do you see? "See." Maybe it's from "say", as in "to tell." Or maybe it's from "sequor," meaning "to follow" - as - in "to follow with the eye." If it's from "sequi", then it's a pretty interesting word. "Socius" is the Latin word from which we get the "friend" words, "social" and "so- ciety" (not that stupid non-word, societal, thanks), and "sociu" itself comes from "sequor." But if we go all the way back to Sanskrit, to "sak" and "sakis", we discover that the person I "follow" is my "friend." How's that? "There were these two people," the language says, "follow- ing each other down the street." And for saying that, the language is smarter than we are - a lot more intelligent than we are. "Intelligent." That means "to hold all the pieces together within" - within the head, of course, or with the mind. It also says that if you're going to get all-the-pieces-together out of your head - out into society, my friends - you'll have to put them back into words. That's practically the law, and it may even be religion. "Lego" is the Latin word behind all our "legal" words, and words like "intelligent." "Law" itself actually comes up the other side, through the Germanic languages, from "lag" and "lagh", words for "something laid down" or a "partnership" kind of connection. But "legislation" is literally what is supposed - by the language - to bind us together. And according to Augustine and most etymologists since, "religion" comes from "lego" too. It means "to put all the pieces together again" and presumes that tlhey were all together to start with! "Lego" says even more than this, though. Its Greek root means "to say", "to call", "to call by name." It's the word for "word" or "to word." (It's also the source of our word for the kind of bean that grows in bunches.) See INKLINGS, Page 7 URING 1968 and 1969, the na- tional headquarters for the Radical Education Project (REP) was housed in a bulky, green-brick building on Ann Ar- bor's west side. From the printing presses in a roomy second floor office, Stuart and Janet Dowty, two tireless slogan-spewing firebrands, prepared anti-war pamphlets for REP's parent organization, Students for a Democratic Society. The Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion was uneasy about the project's activities, and plotted a covert program to disrupt the organization. In May of 1969, the FBI's Detroit office sent a memo to its national headquarters in Washington, sug- gesting that the anti-war activities of REP, whose financial condition was borderline, could be crippled by forcing the project from its Ann Arbor home. ... .REP, as a national project, has national mailing commitments, plates, printed materials, with return addresses, etc. A required move should cost them both time and money in making necessary administrative adjustments. They are known to be in a marginal con- dition, financially, presently, and space of the amount price range Dan Oberdorfer is a Daily staff writer. By Dan Oberdorfer they are presently paying should prove hard to come by. " The memo also noted that REP's lan- dlord-"a completely reliable, discreet, thoroughly trustworthy in- dividual" would not be displeased with the departure of his controversial tenants, and could prove an effective tool in the Bureau's plan. Later, that spring, REP's rent was, doubled and Dowty moved the project to Detroit. Dowty says he spent a small fortune switching REP's letterheads and mailing plates to accommodate the change of address he now knows-nearly nine years later-was instigated by FBI. The FBI's harrassment of REP and the Dowtys was a small and com- paratively mild part of 'its notorious - and frequently illegal -counter-intelligence programs directed against numerous political groups of varying size and slant. Known as Cointelpro, the Counter-Intelligence Program worked nationwide to disrupt such organizations as the Boy Scouts of America, the NAACP, Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other groups with a far more militant outlook. A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in May, 1976 concluded that Cointelpro was aimed at a "staggering range of targets" and capped off by ef- forts to cripple "students demon- strating against anything." The report stated that some of the operations "may have violated criminal statutes,' while others "involved the risk of serious bodily injury or death to the targets . . . The unexpressed major premise of Cointelpro is that the Bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order. . . and combatting those that threaten that order."- N OW,~nearly a decade later, the public finally has an ink- ling of the scope of the FBI's political harassment. Last Thanksgiving week, the FBI released 53,000 pages of heavily censored documents, and what some had suspec- ted all along, was now known for sure. This reporter spent three days visiting FBI headquarters in Washington, mesmerized by the mountain of papers and paying special attention to FBI ac- tivities in the Ann Arbor area. _ Because of their position as centers of student activism, the FBI's campaign against the anti-war movement in ' U GOOD COMPANY: POETS AT MICHIGAN edited by Jeanne Rockwell Noon Rock 70pp. $5.00 50 CONTEMPORARY POETS: THE CREATIVE PROCESS edited by Alberta T. Turner Longman, Inc. 355 pp. $12.50 A FTER SLOGGING through in- numerable time-line poetry an- thologies in innumerable, pedantic, time-line literature courses at Michigan, it's a great relief to see a pair of editors come up with fresh approach- es to the organization and study of poetry. Jeanne Rockwell, who earned her M.A. in journalism here and who cur- rently resides in Ann Arbor, has come up with a collection that should be of particular interest to anyone in the Literary College - most of the writers represented-are tied in some way to the University, including a number of current or former faculty members and poets who have read and lectured here. Alberta Turner, meanwhile, came up with the simple, ingenious idea of sen- ding a questionnaire to 100 contempor- ary poets - some well-known, some ob- scure - and asking them to answer a series of questions about one of their recent works. The fifty who responded provide a number of revelations about their poetry, and their feelings and atti- tudes towards the craft. Rockwell's book does a bit of the same for the University poets. The poems, along with accompanying pho- tographic portraits and capsule biographies, create their own kind of in- sight without analysis. It humanizes just a little those people you hear at oc- casional readings, or those faculty folk whose work you were unfamiliar with Tom0'Connel/(. is Co-g4itor , qf the Sunduy Magzi, Poetry scene. Nationwide and local microcosm By Tom O'Connell or unaware of. Lemuel Johnson, an as- sociate professor in the English depart- ment and a poet whose work I had never encountered, has contributed a fascinating piece, clashing brutal, primitive images against a Christian influence. And who would suspect the same department's mild-mannered Bert Hornback of producing "Wringing Necks," a savagely droll poem about the death of a chicken. The University's recently departed Donald Hall comes back to entertain with "0 Cheese," a very witty work that explores some rarely considered attributes of this dairy product: "Reblochon openly sexual; Bresse Blue like music in October; Caerphilly like pine trees, smallat the timberline; Port du Salute in Love; and Caprice des Dieux eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess. " All in all, the majority of the poems are of a: high, ealiber, and Good, Com- .pany.,lives-Up to its name. With such fine resources, Ms. Rockwell will, I hope, produce a second edition some time in the future. This paperback may be a bit difficult to find; it is only on sale at Border's Books, the Paper Mill at Kerrytown and the Hopwood Room in Angell Hall. ALBERTA TURNER'S study of con- temporary poets has been out for a while, but it was not until last week that Longman, Inc. broke down and came across with a review copy. It is just being released in paperback. This work is weighted down by the legendary millstone with its primer- like introduction, although one should perhaps be grateful that its very super- ficiality lends the introduction its sole redeeming value - brevity. However, if one has great fortitude and slogs through the introduction (or, displaying wisdom which I must lack, skips over it entirely) one will arrive at the reward- ing heart of the work: the thoughts of some of today's finest poets. The hundreds of essays that have been written, about the . creative process, rand about the emotions, rational thought, and instincts that guide it, all lead to one inescapable conclusion. And the conclusion is that we don't have the faintest idea of how the process really works, so that writing essays about it is very silly. Every artist, actor, writer and com- poser' approaches his work in a dif- ferent fashion, developed according to his own unique needs. The main con- tribution that 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process makes, then, is not the provision of a key to creativity; rather it provides the chance to discov- er a bit more about one's favorite poets, a chance to explore their own nature and the nature of their work. The aforementioned Donald Hall, for example, describes his approach to "The Town of Hill," a poem about a town abandoned and flooded to allow" construction of a darn some forty years ago. This 24-line piece, according to Hall, went through a remarkable 50 or' 60 drafts before he was finally satisfied with it. "I felt that there was something to pursue," Hall writes, "some quarry to be hunted, if I pursued the implica- tions of these words in this rhythm." P HILIP BOOTH, in discussing I"Dreamscape," describes the dif- ficulty of maintaining momentum and power in poetry. Asked how "Dream- scape" began, he replies, "From the beginning. Always from the beginning, trying to recover the original impulse and move the poem with it. Always, back to the beginning, to be moved by the impulse, to make the poem move." Questioned on. what techniques he con- sciously- uses, Booth answers that "a poet in the process of writing need be no more or less aware of "techniques" than a skijumper approaching the lip of a jump ... he has already learned by ex- ample, practiced every possible technique ... what may once have felt mechanical becomes, in process, organic." _Jon Andersn's despription of his SeeBOOKS, Page 7 On campus:s Dirty tricks, FBI style TO FROM SUBECT: T: DIRECT R, FBI (100-449698) SAC, DETROIT (100-35576) COINTELPRO - NEW LEFT Re Detroit letter to the Bureau, dated 7/22/69. UNI TED STATES (NMENT Memorandun By Dan'Oberdorfer POLITICAL DIRTY TRICKS, FBI style, required a preponderance of vicious imagination, never-ending preparation, and an arrogant dis- regard for the victims of the pranks. In late 1970, the Detroit office of the FBI-in an effort to thwart the distribution of information published by the Black Panther Party and the Radical Education Project-planned to stage a stink bomb at- tack on the groups' newspapers and pamphlets. Accor- dingly, a bizarre series of requests was relayed to the FBI laboratory in Washington. One memo stated: "The Bureau is requested to prepare and furnish to Detroit in liquid form a solution capable of duplicating the scent of the most foul smelling feces available. In this case it might be appropriate to duplicate the feces of the specie sus scrofa. " This devilish substance is otherwise known as pig excrement. Detroit wanted a quart supply of the liquid along with a dispenser which could squirt a narrow stream roughly three feet-presumably to contaminate the "numerous virulent revolutionary treatises" which freely floated into the public domain. However, when FBI headquarters wanted to know more about the operation-especially security plans to avoid being publicly embarrassed by the exploit-Detroit decided to cancel its scheme. This prank and other abuses were part of the FBI's notorious and frequently illegal three-year Counter In- telligence Program (nicknamed Cointelpro) aimed at uprooting the anti-war movement. A favorite ploy was to send anonymous letters to the parents of students protested against the Vietnam war. Under this program, the Bureau was advised pre- viously of the results of COINTELPRO action directed against New Left leaders among the younger faculty members at the University of Michigan (U of 11), Ann Arbor. Michigan. The au was advised that two such individuals, W former professor of sociology, Uformer professor orchemistry, U of M, both were dropped from the U of M faculty on the completion of the school year, 6/69. A t * E en New Left sponsor at the U of M, Professor is now added to that list, inasmuch asj~L has terminated his employment at the U of M and commenced employment 9/69 with the University of California, It was learned through CSDE l htIile on was not required to terminate this em jgpyrent and had the option of remaining at the U of M, priva tely made it known to source that he decided to leave the U of M faculty in view of the repression setting in at the U of M, am evidenc e h~Ie termination of employment there by prof essors ,and I It would appear from the above that three faculty members may have therefore been removed from the V of M faculty as a conseq~uence of Detroit's earlier COIN'VELPRO activity. 2 - Bureau (RI) 2 - Detroit JRC/klh (4) REC / DATE: 9/22/69 Michigan focus Lansing and areas. The tacti groups against ted; the Burea Dowtys, for ex their eviction. While local spiring with RE bor, FBI agent, ted the Internal and instigated a personal finan( with what Do matory, unsub accusing him o the financially hoped the adde send REP sta audit conclude were in scrupu the midwest ir People's Frie: learn of the IR the agency sen could obtain a the Freedom of "It's slander ned," Dowty maneuvers ag were, living or savings Janet working for wh thwhile couse, cop accuses us ,in one documen in marginal which it always they accuse us c Until 1971, e operations, Cc - guarded secre FBI. In May o wary vigilante Commission t burglarized the Pennsylvania. nation includi ts, sat glued to pionship bout o mission made o files, bulletins, ts-everything1 The group off booty to the p faced with wha tial time bomb later, in a dire( FBI director J. all Cointel prog screeching hal the directive, where it is telligence acti (which will) b dividual basis; HE N] closure Then group, of Informatio cessfully sue behalf of NBC and obtained c tives that initia programs a movement, w "New Left.' documents the of six other Cc because the do telpro-New Le: following: -Cointelpro- -Cointelpr Hate Groups -Cointelpr USA -Cointelpro- See 22 SC? EP30196 - s I~ U.S. Saving -iv,yI ad mi Pye IProll Sau,',t Plan In this memo, dated Feb. 22, 1969, the FBI claims credit for the University's refusal to grant tenure to two profs. and for a third teacher's decision to quit. ne letter, delivered to the parents of an Ameri- can University student who spent the summer of 1969 living inta Detroit co-op, warned that their daughter had contracted "a serious infection" while keeping house with a group of "morally bankrupt people" in the "sexually mixed collective." At other times, the FBI scoured The Michigan Daily to report on campus activities and to keep an eye on the staff, which according to the FBI, wrote "disparigingly of the Bureau and its Director." However, the FBI in Ann Arbor was most concerned with manipulating the University administration to insure it handled student disruption with the appropriate tactlessness. See DIRTY TRICKS, Page 8 I' % N r .t k 1 ' :tF aq 4 e f . .. ! f a.i S. !x.g