Reading the fall Advocate at a single sitting is something like swallowing an unplucked chicken. You keep telling yourself how good the meat is, but all the while you are spitting out the feathers. Just as a poem or story almost catches you up, the author shoves you a mouthful of down.

This Advocate, then, should rest neatly by bedside or commode, and be consumed in modest chunks over a period of several weeks. As no pat theme lends coherence to the fall issue, nothing will be lost in the way of continuity. And, gourmandizing thus bit by bit, you will be able to winnow the tough from the tender, and wield the red pencil of your mind more boldly than the editors have done. After this belated moulting, the fall Advocate will be more fair than fowl.

Ironically, George Teter has contributed a brilliant little parody of this genre of undergraduate overwriting (at least I hope it is a parody) in which a couple intellectualizes and aesthetizes sex until it is anesthetized:

He balanced her in a luxus of mind, shimmering, orbicular .... eldetic smells of the sterness yet warmness of rum manufactured themselves somewhere in his brain, an acidotic Juice of eye, tympanum, olfactory endings, paplliae, ran over its pink cortex as from torn fruit flesh.

Yet this species of splendiforous prose creeps in with high seriousness elsewhere in the magazine, only to halt the flow of plot and glut the reader's palate. Joe Porter has fairly garnished his "introduction to a novel" with passages like

. . . His hair was translucent and slippery as spun glass, his skin white and soft as the flesh beneath a woman's breast, bluish in certain folds and hollows; his eyes gleamed liquidly as pale green jellyfish in shifting rays of sunlight. He lay curied and dreaming like a foetus swimming in formaidehyde . . . .

There is much fine writing in his piece, but Diabetics Beware!

Sidney Goldfarb offers a non-fiction counterpart to this literary gingerbread in his essay on Mexican braceros, an exploited captive labor force in southern California. We are glad to see this Mother Advocate innovation, and had Goldfarb presented his convincing facts more starkly, his plea would have had more impact. As it stands, he crusades with the polemical assertiveness of a National Guardian editorial, relating "his single moment of perception, a moment so horrifying that all the backwash of cynicism one necessarily collects after twenty years awake in America flushed to my eyes and forehead, shattering all sense of the possible with its own immense presence."

The best material in the Advocate is that which is most simple stylistically. Frederick Fields' taut etching of a squalid beat marriage-of-convenience that's lost its charm, has an arresting present-tense immediacy.

Also less pretentious, less purple, and more palpable than the Advocate median is "Set Theory," by Donald Bloch, a mature and controlled observation of a son returned from school to the familiar, petty bitchinesses of his parents. Bloch infuses the trivial "stuff of life" that makes up his story with an unusual intensity. Yet he does not languish turgidly over details, a favorite indulgence of Porter and Mary Seager, forcing the reader to rush his eyes downward, hungry for a little less talk and more action.

The Bloch couple cavil at one another largely to disguise the monotony of their marriage; indeed, escape from boredom is a dominant motif in this Advocate. Miss Seager's prisoner braids straw into rope for nine pages; Fields' defeated heroine chain-smokes and walks those back-alley streets so familiar to devotees of the garbage-can school of prose; Porter's Margaret thinks of herself as "a character in an impossibly dull novel" (a self-interpretation which Porter threatens to actualize). This preoccupation with boredom strikes us as significant. We have heard that content must determine form.

Advocate poetry seems dedicated, for the most part, to a willful and unnecessary obscurity. A poet should only make demands on his reader for essential reasons, and he must offer something substantial for the time and energy that explication requires. Bob Grenier is a better translator than original poet. I prefer Doris Garter in the bath to Doris Garter exploring a religious cosmos. And Susan Rich surpasses other more galactic rumblings with a little poem (less disturbingly fastidious than her drawing) of an abandoned doll. Her subtle internal rhymings reveal a feeling for line that is also found in parts of Robert Dawson's overlong poem about German prisoners of war in Minnesota. Portions of this work reflect the same evocative power of Cummings' "I Sing of Olaf" ("You think . . . it makes you worthy of control to have control./But my heart is bigger than your heart/And I will outbleed you.") Yet it lacks the swiftness and compression for which his incident cries. We find in this issue, as bonus, a poem which reads from the bottom up. An interesting conception, but contentively, I'm afraid, just a smidgeon more down.