Category: American Proscenium

ABC launched Call to Glory with an heroic promotional effort during the Summer Olympics. The series, which chronicles the life of a reconnaissance pilot and his family in the early 1960’s, is frequently described as unabash­edly pro-American. Obviously, ABC hoped

Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman

Cleanth Brooks has been named the 1985 Jefferson Lecturer by the Nation­al Endowment for the  Humanities. Mr. Brooks, who is best known for his works of literary theory and his exposi­tions of William Faulkner, is one of the last of

French Proscenium

William Styron was recently honored by the French government, which made him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In accepting the award, Styron remarked, “Vive la France, Vive l’Amerique and all good things.” Styron may not have a

The anonymous reviewers at Chronicles of Culture don’t seem to like any­ thing except right-wing polemics. The problem is the usual plague of the self­righteous: they have no sense of humor. For them, Roy Blount Jr. is “a humorist of

In Art, as in most areas of life, California is ahead of the rest of us. A new set of California laws, collectively known as “An Artist’s Bill of Rights,” prohibit the buyer of a work of art from making

George Balanchine died a year ago April. Last July the Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, John Taras, was finally persuaded by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater. In a recent interview with Dancemagazine, Taras observed

The magnitude of mental confusion in which this society exists–actually, considered normal and permanent by historians endowed with a sense of humor–overwhelms us on occasion. In August, three months before the elec­tion, a Gallup poll found that Walter Mondale and

We received a piece of direct mail sent to us from an outfit in San Francisco entitled U.S. Out of Central America. There we could read: 

We are not from the left or the right, we are not from the

At the Crossroads

Not long ago, Mr. Theodore White, connoisseur of presidential elections, crafted a well reasoned, though intellectually prefabricated, article for the New York Times Magazine. His was a solid analysis of this country’s shifting political geology: some major

Once again, President Reagan has spoken out about the collapse of the American educational system (and correctly so) and stated facts that will hit anyone who has an average IQ, and one that is uncontaminated by liberal orthodoxy, with a

The Ingersoll Prizes

On December 8, 1983, in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, The Ingersoll Prizes were awarded for the first time. Mr. Jorge Luis Borges was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, and Mr. James Burnham received

Voices are heard from the British Is­lands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in