The Talk of the Town Queening It by Alastair Reid. Talk story in which the writer receives a guided tour of the docked Queen Elizabeth 2 with Neil Osborne, Cunard's manager of marine and port operations in New York. The QE2 is the last surviving liner on a regularly scheduled trans-atlantic run. With Mr. Osborne, a Scot, who had...

Musical Events Grand Opera by Andrew Porter.

Fiction I'm Worried About Future Oil Supplies! What's Exxon Doing to Help? by George W. S. Trow. Exxon is helping a Minnesota couple, Sally and Smithy Smith, to take up all the old tile from the forties and expose some of the finest example of carved brittle work. "It's too ritzy," Madge said, and had it covered with tile, using energy supplied by Exxon. Exxon is encouraging...

The Theatre Troubled Gods and Mortals by Edith Oliver.

The Air The Death of a Crane Fly by David Wagoner. It falls from the air...

Fiction Company Manners by Katinka Loeser. The narrator lives in the country with her husband, Gladstone, and two cats. It is September and the early morning weather indicates that it will be a perfect day. The writer has constant apparitions of Death, whom she calls "Our Common Destiny," and whose friendship she resists. There is some...

Onward and Upward with the Arts III-THE BLOCKBUSTER COMPLEX by Thomas Whiteside. ONWARD & UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about book publishing and how it's been taken over by conglomerates. Often the old-timers who stay on cannot adjust to the new management's emphasis on profits above all else. Tells about the unsuccessful attempt in 1978 at a takeover of the independently owned...

The Talk of the Town Figgie Report by Ian Frazier. Talk story in which writer plans to tell about a recently released study called "The Figgie Report on Fear of Crime: America Afraid." First, however, the reader is asked to go through a number of security measures: he must present several forms of identification before he can pass from the...

A Reporter at Large 1980: ANDERSON by Elizabeth Drew. A REPORTER AT LARGE about the problems that have plagued the independent Presidential candidacy of John Anderson. Although Anderson had at the outset said that he would withdraw from the race if it was clear that his candidacy would lead to Reagan's victory, he now is in to stay. But...

The Current Cinema The Man Who Made Howard Hughes Sing and The Iron-Butterfly Mom by Pauline Kael. Review of "Melvin and Howard", directed by Jonathan Demme. It is about the Howard Hughes will, known as the Mormon will, in which Hughes left a large sum of money to Melvin Dumme, who supposedly came to his assistance and picked him up on a lonely highway one night. Dummar...

The Talk of the Town New Season by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about the cultural activity in the new season. At the Whitney Museum there is a retrospective show of paintings and drawings by the American artist Edward Hopper. A few blocks north, the Metropolitan Museum has a show called "The Vikings", a collection of medieval Scandinavian weapons, coins, jewelry...

Comment by Jonathan Schell. Throughout this remarkably empty, dispiriting election year, the voters have obviously had difficulty making up their minds about the candidates. Edward Kennedy's story is characteristic. His standings were high before he decided to run and after he was defeated, but plummeted during the actual candidacy. It seemed that Democrats wanted...

Poetry The Doorman by Les Murray. The man applying rules to keep me out...