THDE MICHIGAN DAILY
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 1938
ever . . . Ford workers must be, first of all, do-
cile." This policy is ominously similar to the "Be-
lieve, Obey and Fight" slogan of Fascism. Further
Ford, as the Fascists, strongly opposes any form
of union activity, as can be seen by his persis-
tent and publicly avowed refusal to cooperate
with unions organized under section 7a of the
NRA and now with the Wagner Act.
When W. J. Cameron asserts that the em-
ployers should be the leaders of labor-for what
other meaning can be discerned in the statement
"only those who provide employment should be
the leaders of labor"-he is addressing himself
not to the workers but to the business men of the
country. He is appealing to all the forces of re-
action to rally 'round Ford's polices. Most Ameri-
cans think that fascism consists of salutes and
uniforms. On the contrary, our American brand
has been and is being perfected as a sort of bene-
volent despotism; a business dictatorship. Ford
has said, "We (business men and newspapers)
are on the spot. We must stick together. My son
and I will give you all the help we can." It is an
offer of leadership not toward real Americanism
but toward a rigid reactionary regime.
This is no mere question of a piece of legis-
lation. It involves our civil liberties, our eco-
nomic lives. The gauntlet is thrown. The chal-
lenge must be met by all the progressive ele-
ments in the country.
--Harold Ossepow
The Editor
Gets Told
0 . .
Dirndls: Pro
To The Editor:
We girls certainly enjoyed the little Saturday
style note. It's always so nice to have the men
notice what we wear, even if on rare occasions
we need suffer a slight amount of disillusion-
ment.
Now the girls about campus have various and
sundry reasons for adopting these silly and sty-
lish modes of dress. Need we enumerate them?
Suffice it to say that any interested male might
find quite a few of his own sex who think they're
kind of cute. We really need their support, you
know. At least one of them is clothesminded
enough to include one in his very own wardrobe if
he were a miss (chance for a pun.) (We are not
quite sure what our correspondent means by this
last sentence-Ed.)
In more direct response, my colleagues and I
present the following four points:
1. We do wear them in the rain.
2. Said "outfits" have been worn for centuries,
but with variations.
3. Gals don't wear 'em for the swirl.
4. Large numbers of these dresses--which they
really are--are neither striped, flowered, nor
electrically charged. But those are the ones that
seem to have caught the eye. Ah!
Some of us are now hoping that we will not
have a dir-ndl epidemic due to the comment, in-
terest and attention evinced by brave words. Else
we will have to return to the old ways of living
until something better comes along.
-A. C.
The Blockade Censors
To the Editor:
The motion-picture industry has been trying
to find out for some time just how American au-
diences will react to serious social themes in the
cinema. One of the results has been the recent
Blockade, a filn that honestly portrays the
plight of the Spanish people, and the leading ac-
tors, Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll turn
in excellent performances. As Walter Wanger,
the producer, has announced this film does not
take sides.,It seems, however, that audiences do.
They can tell the difference between the bomb-
ing ' and the bombed, and as the 10-year-old
coming out of Radio City Music Hall commented,
"Why Mama, those poor people who were killed
were the Loyalists." Where the movie has
been shown it has been well-received. In the
New York Times and the Evening Post there
were excellent reviews. Even the Hearst paper
in Los Angeles admitted that it was a good show.
It becomes evident that when moviegoers them-
selves have a chance to decide, it is all in the
same direction.
As could have been foretold, reactionary groups
have begun fighting the attempt to improve the
films. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church
and General Franco have banned the film-evi-
dently recognizing themselves in it. Much of
the opposition is undercover. It wouldn't do
to tell American audiences that they must not
see the picture. They might insist on looking at
it before making up their minds-a common
American fault. Yet the pressure has been so
heavy that the Fox-West theatres have refused
to exhibit it, and Hollywood ,with its eye on the
box-office, has halted production on Personal
History and Idiot's Delight, also significant films.
What is needed is box-office pressure to keep
the producers on the right road.
This is a chance for those who want better
movies to assert themselves, because 1lockade
has become a test case for films with serious
social themes. A phone call or a request to
the Michigan and the Majestic will bring one of
the best films of the year to Ann Arbor during
the sufnmer, and bolster the producers' courage
to make better movies. The management is al-
ways responsive to the box-office, and so let's
have better films for the same price. If you've
ever sat through a hammy double-feature and
wondered if movies ever really would improve you
ought to remember that it's now or never.
Sidney Coblenz
Dr. Sakanishi
Returns 0 0
By JOSEPH K. YAMAGIWA
The third series of lectures given under the
auspices of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies
will mark the return to the local campus of one
of Michigan's most talented alumnae, Dr. Shio
Sakanishi. Since the completion of her doc-
torate in 1929, Dr. Sakanishi has rapidly become
a leading interpreter of the Far East, and her
series of four lectures will be welcomed no only
by the faculty and members of the Par Eastern
Institute, but by the rest of the campus as well.
The schedule of lectures is as follows: Monday,
Problems of Life and Death as Illustrated in
the Classical Noh Drama; Tuesday, Discipline
through the Art of Flower Arrangement; Wed-
nesday, Discipline through the Tea Ceremony,
Insect Listening, etc.; Thursday, Man and Na-
ture in Japan.
Dr. Sakanishi, Japan-born but educated both
in her native land and in the United States, is
to be admired and envied for the wide range of
her interests and for the excellence of her pub-
lications. A sensitive and alert temperament has
been combined with the discipline of Western
training to give us a figure in the fields of litera-
ture, art, and folklore, whose productions every
student of the Far East must follow. Her pro-
fessional labors as curator of Japanese books
at the Library of Congress have made that li-
brary a leading Western repository of Japanese
books. But she has also found time to plan and
partly to carry into execution a series of transla-
tions from modern Japanese poets, which, when
completed, will give us a splendid cross-section
of the world of Japanese poetry as it is found
today. Marshall Jones of Boston has already
published her translations from the works of
Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa Takuboku, and Ito
Sachio; and the forthcoming translations from
the works of three other major poets will com-
plete the series. Dr. Sakanishi, however, has
also cut across cultural and geographical boun-
daries and taken us to China. She has translated
an important Chinese treatise of the 11th cen-
ury, under the tittle of An Essay on Landscape
Painting, which was published in 1935 by John
Murray, London. The notes,, articles, and re-
views which she has contributed to various pour-
nals swell the list of her publications, each
marked by a thorough knoweledge of her sub-
ject, whether it be a passage in Chauce'r, an'ob-
scure item in the folklore of Japan, or a general
description of the book industry of her native
country.
* * *
The 'Kyogen
I should like, however, to enlarge upon her
latest volume, the Kyogen, in which she has
turned her talents to the translation of 22 of
the comic interludes of Japan. These interludes,
more carefully defined by Dr. Sakanishi as
"folk-plays portraying the less complex emotions
and everyday experiences and simple personali-
ties in their own language," go back at least to
the 14th century, and still serve as welcome relief
in every progrem of the noh drama. English
translations o fthe kyogen have so far been
found in the musty transactions of learned so-
cieties, in' scattered popular magazines, and in
book form they have appeared in two volumes
by A. L. Sadler and Yone Noguchi. With the
publication of Dr. Sakanishi's volume, approxi-
imately 65 kyogen are now translated out of an
extant canon of 200, and we may now say that
even Western readers may becomei reasonably
familiar with the kyogen.
The kyogen must, of course, be considered
along with 'its more serious, sometimes tragic,
and characteristically pessimistic anti-type, the
noh drama. Certainly the kyogen derives part
of its "point" from its juxtaposition on the
stage with the noh. The kyogen, however, are
meant to be complete in themselves, and some
of them, like The Melon Thief and The Bird
Catcher in Hades, achieve a unity and precision
of composition which make them tiny gems of
plot structure. The action is always brisk and
sometimes even farcical in its boisterousness.
The dialogue is breezy and unashamed in its
use of stock jokes and puns. Thus the Japanese
are shown enjoying their own special brand of
fun and putting into practice their own notions
of humor.
* * *I
Sociological Significance
Perhaps more interesting than the aesthetics
of the kyogen and its value as entertainment is
its sociological significance. Taking its best
forms in the Ashikaga era, when the prevalent
systems of government and religion were such
as to grate upon sensitive temperaments, the
kyogen voiced many a criticism of the daimio
or lord and the bozu, or priest. The lords, as in
The Ink-Smeared Lady and The Buaku, are ig-
norant, boastful, hypocritical, or otherwise fool-
ish, and the butts of their servants' practical
jokes. The priests, as in The Ribs and the Cover
and The Six Who Became Priests, are depicted
as being false, wicked, and irreligious; and often
appear to be as foolish as the daimo. Foolish
dealers, foolish women, and foolish country
gentlemen are characterized and sometimes, as
in The Letter "I and The Fox Mound, foolish
servants also.
No doubt the satire, though broad, was often
the outward expression of inward grievances. It
is no wonder then that the kyogen were generally
anonymous, and that they voiced for the first
time in Japanese literature a kind of masked
contempt for the rich, the powerful, the priestly
and above all, the foolish.
The scholarly yet readable introduction to
Dr. Sakanishi's volume contains an historical
account of the kyogen, and a most'valuable sec-
tion on the nature of Japanese humor, whose
very existence has sometimes been doubted by
THEATRE,
By JAMES DOLL
Idiot's Delight
WITHOUT going into the whole
complicated question of the pro-I
paganda play, without going out of
the way to call up the disagreeinent r
this discussion always brings up, let a
us say that a play with ideas (like anyt
other play) is only a good play if it'sd
good theatre. In this play of Robert E.c
Sherwood's he has shown us Europe
at the beginning of the next war. He
has shown us individuals caught in
the morass of fascism and naziism.
But he has woven his ideas about the
mess the world is in into a plot of
highly effective theatricalism. And he
has tinseled it with characters thati
have just enough odor of grease-pointt
to make them interesting on the stage,
but still credible..
There is none of the endless dis-
cussion more suited to a round-table
that Sidney Howard indulged in in
The Ghost of Yankee Doodle. The
drawing-room trumpery of Rain
From Heaven has been rejected in
favor of melodrama which is per-
haps the most fundamental basis of
theatre.
In his review in The New York
Times the morning after Idiot's De-
light opened, Brooks Atkinson said:
"Mr. Sherwood's love of a good -time
and his anxiety. about world affairs
result in one of his most likeable en-
tertainments . . . It represents 'Mr.
Sherwood's taste for exuberance and
jovial skullduggery. Having fought in
the last war and having a good mind
and memory, he is also acutely aware
f the dangers of a relapse ito blood-
shed throughout the world today. Ilis
leg-show and frivolty in Idiot's De-
light are played against a background
of cannon calamity, and it concludes
with a detonation of airplane bombs.
At the final curtain, Mr. Sherwood
shoots the works .
"Mr. Sherwood's talk is not con-
clusive, but it is interesting. In the
course of the play he does manage to
rbow that all but one of his charac-
ters are helpless vic;Ams of inter-
nationalism, drawn unwillingly into
contests between fear and inferiority,
jingolism and bravado. Idiot's De-
light draws that grotesque distinction
between the personal, casual lives
people want to live and the roar and
thunder that crack-brained govern-
ments foment. As the hoofer says,
the people are all right as individuals.
They are bowled down by a headiong,
angry force that is generated apart
from themselves."
Because he makes the audience re-
lish his characters and situations, his
song and dance, Mr. Sherwood was
able to make the upholstered Theatre
Gu:td audience sit and watch a play
that had some important and timely
ideas.
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 1938
VOL. XLVIII. No. 18
DAILY OFFICIAL BULLETIN
Publication in the Bulletin is constructive notice to all members
of the University. Copy received at the office of the Summer Session
until 3:30; 11:00 a.m. on Saturday.
Graduate Students: Without good
and sufficient reason courses may not1
be elected for credit after Tuesday,
July 19; courses dropped after same
date will appear on the students' rec-
ord as dropped. Dean
Notice to Seniors: The next exam-
ination in F o r e i g n Languages
(French, German, Italian, Spanish)
for the New York State teacher's 1h-
cense is scheduled for Aug. 6 at 9:15
a.m. All seniors who may be in-
terested in securing a license to teach
in New York State should notify
the office of the Department of Ro-
mance Languages (112 R.L., tele-
phone extension 406) by Wednesday,
July 20, so that papers may be sent
here.
Students, College of Literature, Sci-
ence and the Arts: Except under ex-
traordinary circumstances, courses
dropped after Saturday, July 23, will
be recorded with a grade of E.
Students, College of Literature, Sci-
ence and the Arts: Students whose
records carry reports of I or X eith-
er from last semester or (if they
havernot been in residence since)
from any former session, will receive
grades of E unless the work is com-
pleted by July 27.
Petitions for extensions of time;
with the written approval of the in-
structors concerned, should be ad-
dressed to the Administrative Board
of the College, and presented in
Room 4, University Hall, before July
27.
Colleges of Literature, Science, and
the Arts, and Architecture; Schools of
Education, Forestry and Music: Sum-
mer Session students wishing a tran-
script of this sumer's work only
should file a request in Room 4, U.H.,
several days before leaving Ann Ar-
bor. Failure to file this request wail
result in a needless delay of several
days.
Approved Houses for Women: All
women students who were recog-
nized as seniors when enrolling for
the Summer Session are granted 1:36
permission on Saturday nights. Those
who will not be seniors until the end
of the Summer Session are not en-
titled to this privilege.
Approved Houses for Women:
Sign-out slips for the first three
weeks of the Summer Session are
now due.
High School Clinic BaMi Concert.
A band concert by the boys and girls
of the Band Clinic now. in szssion
will be given Sunday afternoon, July
17, in Hill Auditorium, at 4:15 p.m.
The general public, with the excep-
tion of small children, is cordially
invited to attend.
Vesper Service: The Second Sum-
mer Session Vesper Service will be
held on the Library Terrace, Sun-
day evening, July 17, at 7:30 p.m.
Kenneth W. Morgan, Director,
S.R.A.
"Problems of Life and Death as II-
(Continued on Page 3)
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