After quickly passing over the distracting decadence displayed on the cover of the Registration Issue of the Advocate (a cover strewn with stems, a sword, knife, bottles, brushes, legs, a violin bow, its violin, all complementing a long, angular girl fiddling in a proper literary manner, while the world burns) one finds little of much interest inside the magazine. Other than the happy choice of including no new poems, the editors seem to have made little effort to make the magazine palatable.

Since the editors of the Advocate have changed their format by de-emphasizing the biographical notes about contributors, the new Advocate reader will not receive the usual warning of "Mother Advocate welcomes to her bosom." However, the reader will probably be stopped by the first story in the issue, John Mautner's An Enchantment, which very likely will not produce that effect in the reader. The story, as well as its component parts, partakes of a diarrheic length. If the author is interested in attracting readers, he should take the advice he offers almost midway through the story... "but enough is enough! This is not a brochure for a hiking club." "An Enchantment" is built around an intriguing situation for exploring personality, but loses effectiveness because the narrator is very little described. The story can be somewhat improved by re-reading the introduction after finishing reading.

The second monument in the Advocate is a translation of the third act of Moliere's The School for Wives, by James A. Matisoff. The translation seems good enough, but why the Advocate should feel it is making a contribution to Harvard literary creativity by filling nine complete pages with a Moliere play or why anyone should be interested in reading it is difficult to understand.

For most purposes, the Advocate begins on page 16 with three stories written in Mr. Bush's writing course this summer. Two of these are quite short stories by Mary Montgomery, Courage of the Earth and The Boy and the Lady. Miss Montgomery creates an understandable human situation in her love affair in the well-titled Courage of the Earth, one which anticipates and leads to the inevitable climactic moment, only to be dragged down to the level of an inverted dirty joke by the last sentences ... "Then she did something the courage for which she hadn't imagined was in her. She kissed his cheeks and nose."

Her second story suffers from the same agonizing lack of fulfillment and completeness. Her characters are little enough developed to be above flatness, and the plot does not proceed or end. Though these stories may be eminently unsatisfying, they do show a refreshing empathy for people and their behavior.

Susan Douglas's slice of life, The Visit, is certainly the most readable story in the current issue. It interestingly portrays a college girl's conflict between allegiance to her farm family and to the values of the richer city. A most amusing and dramatic incident of this is the interruption of the girl's "Dr. and Mrs. Allen have a tremendous amount of savoir faire," by the more important escape of her father's cows from the pasture. Miss Douglas is aware of the effect of the city on the farm girl, making them demand such needless conveniences as inside plumbing and all, but she fails to make plausible the severe temper tantrum of her heroine about such matters. The girl had previously appeared as a "Good morning, Mummy," type. Although Miss Douglas has attempted less than her fellow contributors, she has achieved much more.

The current issue of the Advocate would certainly indicate that the magazine has little power to attract writers to its ranks from Harvard or Radcliffe. There of the four stories are by girls visiting Cambridge for the Summer. The other two pieces were products of the Advocate literary board. Better writing is being done at Harvard, but the Advocate seems to lack either the reputation or the initiative to elicit it.