It is high time, perhaps, that readers and reviewers take a positive attitude towards the Advocate. The tendency in the past has been to emphasize its rather obvious deficiencies and to overlook or underplay the genuine talent which now and then appears on its pages.

The November Advocate contains a couple of pieces worth any undergraduate's attention and all but the poorest's thirty-five cents. It will also be of clinical interest to admirers of Jerry Kilty, since he has contributed two articles aggregating more than half the total wordage.

Kilty's long, knowledgeable essay on the state of drama at Harvard is the best thing in the magazine. The former Theater Workship president vigorously attacks the present lack of official, University-supported drama study. He explains the recent resurgence of good extra-curricular drama here by the return of technically trained veterans who knew enough not to make the usual mistakes of a fledgling group. And he warns that, with the passing of the veterans, Harvard drama will lapse into its pre-war state of hapless amateurism unless steps are taken to set up a program within the College itself.

Kilty's second contribution is a story called "A Moral Tale" about a four-star altar boy who turns out to be a pretty nasty little fellow after all. Though written with some good touches--such as a scene in which the saints in the church "watch" the boy steal from a collection basket--the story is unconvincing either as a satire of parish culture or as a psychological study of the child. An improbable ending, in which the boy showers a group of gaffers in a park with the pilfered church money and the old men have a sort of mystical experience as they grab for the coins, is contrived and hopelessly out of tune with the rest of the story. There are also two failures, only one of which seems intentional, to sell properly the "et cum spiritu tuo" response of the Mass. Kilty is a better actor than writer.

Besides the article on drama, two other pieces in the latest Advocate are good. The first is a welcome innovation in the form of a column--as yet untitled--by Geoffrey Bush. Far and away the best writer in this issue, Bush comments, New Yorker-style, on Archibald MacLeish and the Brattle Players with humor and imagination. His columns will be something to look for in future issues. the new department could and should supplant the self-conscious, posturing "Notes from 40 Bow Street" column, which provides vital data about the contributors, such as that they are enrolled in an advanced composition course, or that they are "currently at work on a novel."

A second informative article is a short history of Ivy Films by Andrew Hunt, containing the news that the makers of "A Touch of the Times" are contemplating a documentary on trucks (sic) for their next effort.

The rest of the Advocate--and it is, unfortunately, the really literary part--is of negligible value. A poorly developed story by Aristides Stavrolakes, "Sportsmen," contains a certain amount of realistic dialogue, stemming from Hemingway, between a weak personality who owns a barbershop and a couple of sinister characters who want to but it from him as dishonestly as possible.

There are also two poems. One, fashionably devoted to the theme of postwar disillusionment, is called "Faust 1945" and reiterates the tired soldier's discovery that there's no solace for the sterile soul in drink, dames, or solace for the other, a sort of love lyric by the Advocate's new President, is called "Song," and succinctly continues the tradition of conventional obscurity which has become, one is tempted to say, a hallmark of the magazine. This particular poem is written in three four-line stanzas and makes no pretense of intellectual content. Instead, it tries to convey a delicate mood, I think, by means of a "Toy Lady" and the change of seasons.

It would be nice to see the Advocate poets become really experimental, if that's where their hearts are; but it would be even better if they could venture out into the light and find something to say in verse.