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Page 2 1 Thursday, February, 11, 1965 Writer-In-Residence Reflects t i i 4 .2HF Editorial Page 1 upinions or the uailv Tar Heel are expressed m its ortitnrini nir i - ZT w-rw. r- tr W O ; ' arzd columns, covering a wide range of views, reflect the versonal omnions of their authors. - II Safety Takes A Big Step The experiment is directed toward the eventual improvement of the campus traf fic problem, and whatever complications occur at first should eventually be re solved. We hope that this 60-day experiment will be successful. The accident potential on Cameron Avenue has reached such proportions that something must be done. Buy Bonds-Lots From5 the moment that Governor Dan K Moore addressed the N. C. General Assembly last week and said he was "deeply concerned" about the capital im- provement needs of the state-supported colleges and University, speculation has been rampant in legislative and educa tional circles concerning the possibility of a bond issue to take care of such needs. The decision by Dean of Men William G. Long to close part of Cameron Avenue to through traffic starting Monday has all the appearances of a forward-looking step. The closing, which win involve chain ing off the area between Memorial Hall and South Building, will be conducted on an experimental basis for 60 days, with a more permanent decision to be based on the results. The portion of Cameron Avenue which will be blocked off is perhaps the most hazardous hundred yards of asphalt on campus (with the possible exception of the intersection of Raleigh Road and Columbia Street adjacent to the Naval Armory). The volume of pedstrian traf fic in front of Y-Court is tremendous,, and two policemen are required to handle the crosswalks there during the morning hours. A further hazard is producd by vehicles which stop at Y-Court, thus blocking half of the narrow street and creating minor traffic jams and excellent opportunities for rear-end collisions. - Drivers who are in the habit of using Cameron Avenue may find the experi ment frustrating at first, and they are urged to keep the change in mind in order to cut down on traffic problems. A Good MSU We generally look askance at what we term Massive Student Undertakings. These are projects which involve hun dreds of students, hour upon hour of preparation, incredible logistics and often wind up in a complete mess, When Jim Medford first told us about the Mock United Nation meeting sched uled this week, we said that's nice and uttered- a silent groan (and a prayer). But what, we have seen so far of the U.N. gathering has given us faith in Mas sive Student Undertakings, The five hundred students who arrived at Carolina yesterday were greeted with .a registration process as swift and ac- curate as one would ever find in the basement of Hanes Hall. The delegates, many from schools far distant from North Carolina's borders, were quickly register ed, assigned to courtesy vehicles which will transport them about during their stay, and pointed toward the Assembly ahead with warm greetings. Of course, we also bid them welcome, and hope they enjoy their stay in the Southern Part of Heaven. The U.N. As sembly here should be a great experience, and we further bid them to truly appre ciate the work which has been done to make their visit less cumbersome and more enjoyable. And Away We Go UNC 107, Wake Forest 91. Tuesday night's astounding score was in marked contrast to the 107-85 shel lacking given our basketball team by the Deacons in Winston - Salem last month, and there were signs that the team has awakened at last to the angry cries of the campus. By rolling up their second straight 100-plus score and soundly trouncing a team that had sent them reeling earlier, the Tar Heels may have demonstrated a significant new attitude toward the game. Hard on the heels of campus rumors about4 dissention and apathy, they have come back to demonstrate the value of some ageless sporting qualities team work, hustle and desire. Once again, we voice our confidence in this Carolina team whose fortunes have alternated between suffering and elation during an unpredictable season. If they continue to perform as they have in their last two outings, Carolina fans may find relief from at least a few of their frustrations by season's end. It takes no more than one brief glance to see that such a financial program is not only desirable it is necessary. For instance: The state Board of Higher Education estimates that 10,000 qualified applicants will be turned away from our institutions . next fall because of overcrowding. By 1970, the state's schools will be required to handle an enrollment of 97, 000 as compared to their current load of 53,000. While the State Board of Higher Education requested $109 million this year for "urgently needed" capital im provements, the Advisory Budget Conw mission regretfully concluded that the" state could provide only $61 million half of it self -liquidating. Further, a bond issue in the neighbor hood of $100 million would not be a strain on the state's finances. We cur rently enjoy a: Triple-A rating on our bonds (highest of any state), and past experience has shown the ability of North Carolina to pay off such bond issues in advance without increasing taxes. . In short, we need facilities NOW, and the state can well' afford to pay for them in the future. Let's have them. Noah Would Blush From The News and Observer An American movie company, shooting on location in Italy, is gathering thous ands of animals for an Ark scene. It is reported that production was suspended for three days during a recent rain. There was the story a few years back of a power failure that cut off the fans and made a Valley Forge scene too com fortably warm for shooting, and there was also the time the British actor, play ing General Grant, got sick from smok nig cigars. But, perhaps, realism is what you see and not what you can't see. Movies laid in our Blue Ridge have been shot on the majestic peaks of Malibu,. and the drums of the safari are often audible along, the brush country of Wil shire Boulevard. The diamonds of Kimberly and the gold of the Klondike have been mined, simultaneously, in the mother lodes of the same fields, near the Rose Bowl, and Captain Ahab has chased Moby Dick across the menacing waves of a regular bathtub. By similar magic, the pools of Zanadu, the palaces of ancient Babylon, and the saloons of Dodge City change places in the course of one night, and, as Kipling once said, one weak-looking virgin' usually manages to get chased through, all these things. Of course, some of these European animals may balk at "salvation' via an immobile ark. They may be the grand children of the African animals who fled the jungle for civilization, to hide among men, when Teddy Roosevelt's term expired. lamk Sfadents Overpaid Faculty Editors'. Note: Knowles was UNC's first writer-in-residence last year. The article below is reprinted from the New York Times Sunday Book Magazine. Knowles is the author of "A Se parate Peace" and "Morning In Antibes." By JOHN KNOWLES . Just as- Socrates became a foot soldier in Athens, , writers these days sometimes teach. To make the transition easier the universities have created a special-sinecure outside the regu lar faculty progression and call ed it "writer-in-residence." I don't believe anyone is really sure what that is; certainly when I arrived in Chapel Hill more than a year ago; to func tion as the first writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina for two terms I didn't know, and they didn't know ei ther. I was to pervade the uni it seemed. But it is not easy to pervade 10,000 students, es pecially if they are not particu larly interested in being pervad ed. In addition I was to con duct one class in the writing of short stories. Although I had ne ver taught anything before ex cept the Australian Crawl, I did not foresee any special problem in teaching. After all I : h a d spent nine months of every year in some class or other from the age of 6 to the age of 22, and I felt that a sense of how to teach must have sunk into me and be waiting. A class in fiction writing, how ever, turned out to be not like any other class. It did, of course,, have certain character istics common to . all classes, first and foremost of these being the impenetrable stupidity and boredom which apparently reg ister on the faces of all stu dents, even a class as well-disposed as this one, as they gaze with looks, of marked aversion and hopelessness up at a teach er. I must - have : looked at my own beleaguered teachers just that way. for all those years. It never occurred to me as a stu dent that the expression on my face had anything, to do with anything, and it never occurred to any of my students now. Stu dents seem to feel that being in class is like being at the mov ies; the figure they're staring at is only a shadow, not a real human being looking back at them at all. Steeling myself against this battery of youthful torpor I went ahead with the class and learn ed a second awful truth: the teacher must supply the gaso line for a class, which does not, as I had assumed,, run somehow by itself; If the teacher runs dry the most unbelievable silence will then ensue. I had to learn to present a sovereign attitude of confidence at all times as to what would happen next or else these 12 young people would be gin to doubt my. existence, the class's and even their own. Yet the essense of . conducting a class in fiction is not to conduct it, to give it to the students. This course became much more like group therapy than a clas isn any academic subject. In class a student would read his story aloud, the other stu dents would comment in turn, I would give my reaction only af ter having had all of theirs, and finally the author, who had not been allowed to say a word be yond reading the story, could make any statement about the story or our comments he want ed to make. Everything that could - be done by the students was done by the students: for example, reading their own sto ries aloud instead of having them read-by me. It was-often an ordeal for them to do this, and that's why I made them do it. Any ordeal surmounted stren gthened their sense of them selves and anything that streng thened their sense of themsel ves made them better qualified for achievement in the writing of fiction. As the term wore on and they developed more' confidence in themselves and each other and me, they drew more and more on what they really felt and of ten hid. They were almost total ly uninterested in the state of the world; the atomic bomb might never had been invented; there was no Communism and not even any politics. There was only one social issue, race, on which they tended to think like integrationists but sometimes still feel a little like segrega tionists. For the most part what they wrote about was strictly person al: the incomprehension between parents and children, a feeling of alienation from home and home town, straightforward sex uality, the tensions of being ac cepted or not accepted by the group. There was a lot of vio lence in their work, there was quite a bit of dissipation; There was no hypocrisy and no , gen teel evasion and no circumlocu tion. They read Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Salinger and Camus, and they called a spade a spade. Despite the look of stupidity and boredom on their faces, they did not miss anything, es pecially any personal de tail about me, my socks once happening very slightly not to match, or a trace of regional accent deeply buried in my speech, or any shadow of a pre dilection I had for anything. Week after week they sat there, slowly and methodically -a n d tranquilly taking me apart. Yet it was outside the class room that I had to discover what a writer-in-residence was. I avoided faculty gatherings, feeling that I was not suppos ed to pervade the faculty, and feeling also they regarded me, teaching that year at the col lege level and holder of no aca demic degree higher than Bach elor of Arts, the way a surgeon would regard a butcher. For my part I thought of them as us ually intelligent, sometimes in teresting, and even occasionally gifted people who did not re quire, did not want, much va riety or change in their lives. I was also surprised to dis- "I Still Think We Should Have Pul 'Beat Carolina' On Unr Jeisies" . .;F -4v:-xs: . X v., .- - " 4 f r- s s Entered as second class postage at the post office, Chapel Hill, N.. C cover that the starving, slaving teacher sacrificing all for learn ing is very definitely a thing of the past. An affluent air of un hurried ease pervaded the fa culty; above the instructor level a great many of them seemed very well paid,- sometimes ex tremely well paid, and rather underworked, and this is ture of all important college and uni versity faculties in the United States now. The faculty and I passed each other leaving a wide margin for clearance, and I spent my time with the stu dents. They gradually evolved to suit themselves what my role was to be. My first inkling of this occurred in a beer cellar where a three-piece band was blaring rock-'n'-roll music in the foreground and a member of the Freshman Class, his black hair brushed forward to the clownish, strong, unlikely face, eyed me excitedly and then came across to me and with out any preliminaries shouted above the music, "Where is the significant?" After a moment I rorared back that the significant was within ourselves. This pleased him tremendous ly; everything I said pleased him tremendously. "Where is it within me?" he then asked. "Well, who do you love?" "My motorcycle." That stopped me cold for a ' minute, but than I counterat tacked, telling him that for most of humanity most of the time the significant had been the little plot of cultivated ground that supported their liv es generation after generation and that he was enormously privileged even to be in a posi tion to ask such a question. That pleased him a lot. But for the most part the students did not ask me large or even small questions. They did not want me to say anything in particular: they just wanted me to be. One night the varsity football team invited me to a party. The last thing they were interested in was any literary discussion with me. "Phyllis," someone would say to his girl, "get up and dance with the writer-in resi dence." "Look. The writer-in-residence wears green corduroy pants." , - "I didn't know- writer-in-resi-dences could dance." "How old do you think the writer-in-residence is?" "I don't think he's in too bad shape, for a writer -in- resi dffice.'" That night I realized who I was in Chapel Hill. I was the intellectual mascot, the academ ic equivalent of the ram trotted up and down the sidelines by the cheer leaders at football games, to be brought out on certain oc casions as a symbol of the uni versity's connection with active writing. However, I could also be us-d as research material: 10 of the university psychiatrists asked me to discuss my work with them. We met after dinner with their wives to analyze my novel "A Separate Peace." I agreed . with some of their comments, disagreed with others, and very much admired their dedication to the most crucial field of sci ence in existence. There were, however, oversimplifications I felt Freud himself would never have tolerated. "Do you have an older bro ther?" one psychiatrist asked. "Yes." "A-ha!" he cried triumphant ly, walking away, everything about my novel explained. WTorse, they seemed to assumo that any writer would benefit as a writer by being psychoan alyzed, while I feared that after an analysis a writer might no longer have the emotional vis ion that impelled him to write ; in the first place, to want to write, to have to write. Curious ly enough several of their wives sidled up to me and murmured that for them my novel was s good book about what it seemed to be about, hinting that I should not take too seriously what their husbands were saying. Perhaps this behavior was motivated by penis envy cr identification with the aggressor, but I just took it as an honest expression of what they really thought. Not everything can be different from what it seems, I hope. Nor is literature an extension of a symptom or a ramification of psychiatry; psychiatry is among other things, a promising new growth on the great ancient trunk of literature. They told me about the "ex quisite sensitivity" of many of their schizophrenic patients, and I thought, good God, it's the ex quisitely sensitive people who are locked up these days, and all the crude louts are free. I asked them what the principal psychological problem amorg students was and they answer ed immediately: sexual identi ty. So the shimmering, motionless fall and the brisk little winter & long sensual spring went by in North Carolina." I'm not sure I was pervasive enough, or that I provided what they hoped for from me. But writers are sel fish people at heart, selfish in the claims of their work. Since they left me great amounts of time for it, and since by defi nition a Southerner who is also enlightened is the most charm ing American there is, I was happy there and grateful. A Pap er Route Is A Soggy Affair jii.' f 'lyiiis i. . .!. i. if imiiue i. ; lfWfr &A9V ' .v...-..-.w.-. --iiWiVlriVvi-K'-v-y-v---- r7 "VI "I 3"- ? 'i - A 7 Letters To The Editors Alpha Gam Pall Unavoidable Sorority Pledging Up To Individuals Editors, The Tar Heel: Concerning your editorial on Alpha Gamma Delta, I agree with you on certain points. I feel that the passing of Alpha Gam is a very significant loss. I agree with you that the Pan heUenic Council has a more than capable leader in Jean Dillin. The brother's keeper concept is a fine. one. However, I wonder how much the brother's keeper ideal has to do with this situation, which is concerned with a personal de cision of. pledging a sorority. How could the Panhellenic Council agree to keep hands off 10 or 12 qualified rushees? Are you talking about things or peo ple? Each rushee has the right to her own personal decision. How much influence could be exerted on a girl in regard to her pledging? It is possible to make "deals" about things, not people. Pledg ing a sorority is a girl's per sonal decision. It is up her to make it; it is up to each soro ity to put forth its best effort. Of course rush is competi tive. But so is life. It would be wonderful if something could be done about it; if we could be our brother's keeper in ev ery situation, if there were no losers, only winners. Idealism is fine but not always possible. Consider some other points. Could the rushees have been more open minded? Who is responsible for allowing the da maged reputation of Apha Gam to snowball? Perhaps the IBM computer should take over. Then, person al decisions would not be neces sary. There would be no damag ing repercussions. Simply feed each girl's personal data into the machine and Rath Anderson Kappa Kappa Gamma Documentaries New, Different Editors, The Tar Heel: Congratulations to those re sponsible for the selection of films for this semester. Not on ly is the regular fare far above average in quality and interest, but last Saturday's substitution of three shorts was a welcome exposure to two experimental attempts and an excellent ex ample of documentary. Thank you. David Langmeyer 51 Davie Circle By ART BUCHWALD The N.' Y. Herald-Tribune WASHINGTON A man works hard all his life, trying to make something of himself, overcome his poverty-stricken years, and achieve security and happiness. And then all of a sud den one day his son takes on a newspaper route and the man finds himself back where he started from. This happened to me last week. My 11-year-old son had managed to get himself a news paper route, but on Saturday he went off on an overnight hike with the Boy Scouts. At 3 o'clock on that rainy afternoon my wife informed me someone had to de liver his newspapers. "But it's raining out," I pro tested. "And besides the North is playing the South in football." "It's all right," she said, put ting on her gaioshes. "I'll de liver them. A little rain never hurt someone with a cold and a 101 fever." "Okay," I said, "I'll deliver the damn papers. What really hurts is I don't even write for the paper he's delivering." "Here's a list of the houses," my wife said. "Joel's written aown tne instructions as where to get the papers wxiat io ao. I took the list, put on a rain coat, boots, and rain hat, and went out in the pouring rain. The truck came along at 430 Where's your bag?" the driver wanted to know. 4"What bag?" "Tcrkeep your papers dry, you idiot. How many times do I have to tell you guys to your bag when It rains." Vell, you see, sir, this isn't really my route. It's my son's route. I'm just just filling in for him today." "That's a lousy excuse. Okay, keep them under your raincoat and next time don't forget your bag." - . "Yes, suvril remember." tvh. to and He roared off, splashing ter all over my psmts. I studied the list, but it wasn't easy. Between the rain and my son's handwriting it was kind of blurred. The first two houses didn't give me any trouble tut at the third a man came to the door. "We didn't get our paper last Friday," he said. "That's a shame," I said. "Actually nothing much happen ed. You didn't miss anything." "I'm not paying you for Fri day." "Suit yourself," I said as the rain dripped down on my face. His wife came to the door and pulled her husband away. As she closed it we heard her say, "You shouldn't yell at the poor man. It's probably the only job he could get." In the next block a lady came to the door and said, "I for got to pay you last week. How mush is it?" "I don't know," I said. "Well, here's a dollar and a 10 cents tip." "Thank you, ma'm." "And the next time don't throw my paper ousnes." By this time the list was pret ty soggy and I couldn't read it anymore, so I decided the onlv fair thing to do was to lea we a paper at every other house until I ran out. It worked until I came to err: house where an 11-year-old girl ran out and said, "Hey v. don't take that paper " "It's free," I said. "You get off our property," she said. A boxer came to the door and started grcwiin-;. I stopped running a bloc 5a ter. 1 fInnUy hours, I had gotten rid of. all the papers and was br.ck at my house. As I soaked mv feet m a pail of hot water and drank a tumbler of hot rum, ihe thought occurred, me that it's ?JiCh etSier. to W3 news "X? 11 to deliver them. And healthier, too. ! please hi the
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Feb. 11, 1965, edition 1
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