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) IClassified Directory SILVER LAUNDRY-We call for and' deliver. Bundles individually done, no markings. All work guaranteed. Phone 5594, 607 E. Hoover. 3x LAUNDRY - 2-1044. Sox darned. Careful work at low price. 5x FOR RENT-Furnished apartment with private bath and shower. 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