There is no game.
Instead there is only being, being only
That which I am in you and you in me.
It is necessary only to agree.
Thus we are free.
Her "Roundel," in contrast, is tightly structured and musical.
Working with terse, ironic images, Sidney Goldfarb probes the crushing finality of death, a "salvation" that enters
In an iron uniform
With a cloth badge.
The Advocate's prose drought continues. Gerald Hillman sets up a psychotic counterpart between the colloquial jabberings of an Italian family and the stilted quarrel of a couple who live upstairs. All this either occurs in or comments on the passive consciousness of Willy, the title character, who has been nudged over some brink by the death of a woman named Anita. "Reality is reality, it's essential," says Mr. White, one of the upstairs wranglers. But Willy's reality rushes chaotically into his mind, scrambled and unpunctuated, hinting at a story line that never fully materializes. Hillman's attempted humor does not click, as witness
... He was obliged to report to her that the
character of little Victor, child so carefully
hewn from her illustrious shank, was analogous to acne painted like dimples.
His profundities are, frankly, over my head.
"Icarus" by Stephen Saltonstall is a novel about a sorely put-upon young man. The Advocate limits itself to excerpts. The hero ricochets helplessly from one bum rap to another, in a "world we perceive too well." His mother suckles ciggies, his father strangles cats. All the absurdities of life pass before him after a bicycle spill knocks him out cold. Sometimes Saltonstall's descriptive passages relieve the self-consciousness of his story; more often they compound it.
The last piece of fiction, "The Sentimental Journey of Arthur Friedberg," is simply clumsy and banal. David Ansen blows a paragraph of dull theme into several pages of dull plot.
It's all right to be alienated. But the Advocate's monotonous avant garde anomie turns away fellow-travelers as well as Philistines. The trick is to be artistic, and occasionally to snap out of it. Most of the pieces in the Advocate do not heighten or clarify what they talk about, nor do they entertain. They either grab the reader by the intellect and dare him to interpret them, or they flirt ambiguously with him. Too often the Advocate's authors "confound obscurity of expression with the expression of obscurity," as Poe put it. A good poem should sound good the first time around -- but it's entirely possible to slide through this whole magazine without being moved or interested enough by anything to want to understand it. If an Advocate writer stands silent on a peak in Darien, he usually stands there alone, while the public sticks to Chem 20 in the foothills far below.
And the poems and stories are too much alike. Almost all of them share the same cold-blooded, Absurdist detachment. The magazine needs some comedy, some non-In point of view, as much as it needs more polished and more comprehensible artists. In coming issues the Advocate should shove the mutant crab off its cover.