Comment by Julie Hayden. A claustrophobic friend was in the hospital this spring & has written to let us know she's on her feet again. In the hospital she found an absence of joie de vivre. She mentions flowering trees & quotes from A.E. Housman. At home, in Greenwich Village, she collected her mail...

The Talk of the Town The Bicentennial Beat by Geoffrey T. Hellman. Talk story about 2 Bicentennial display at the Morgan Library on E. 36th St. Mrs. Engelhard has lent the manuscript of the original proclamation of the Louisiana Purchase signed by the purchaser Thomas Jefferson for the current exhibit "America from Amerigo Vespucci to the Louisiana Purchase...

The Talk of the Town Arrangements by Richard Harris. Talk story about the preparations for the Democratic National Convention, at Madison Square Garden. The writer met Mrs. Azie Morton, 40, the person in charge of the Convention's "arrangements," in front of the Statler Hilton Hotel. She served in Washington as the special assistant to Bob Strauss, chairman of the...

Fiction The Captured Woman by Donald Barthelme. The captured woman asks if I will take her picture. I shoot four rolls of 35 mm. Soon the house is full of her portraits. I first met her at a cocktail party. She's 32 last August, sportsminded, and married to a decent man, with whom she has a little...

The Current Cinema White Dreams by Penelope Gilliatt. Review of Altman's film "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson...

Musical Events Giant to the Mind by Andrew Porter.

Our Local Correspondents STILL HERE by Eugene Kinkead. OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS about N.Y.C. in the Revolutionary period and objects then on view that we can see today. In 1776 the city consisted of 24,000 people at the tip of Manhattan Island...

Our Footloose Correspondents AMERICAN SONG by Whitney Balliett. OUR FOOTLOOSE CORRESPONDENTS about singer Barbara Lea's recording session for her hour-long segment in series of radio programs called "American Popular Song, with Alec Wilder and Friends." Composer Alec Wilder is assembling 26 hour-long programs, each given over to a first-rate singer singing first-rate American songs...

Profiles A Resonance With Something Alive~II by Henry S. F. Cooper. PROFILE of Dr. Carl Sagan, the controversial Cornell professor of astronomy who believes there is life on Mars and is a member of the imaging team of NASA's Viking 1 and 2 missions to Mars this summer. The imaging team will study the visual data sent back by the space...

The Talk of the Town Loud by Hendrik Hertzberg. Talk story about a rock and roll party on Monday night, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the rock magazine called "Crawdaddy." It was held in an upstairs gallery at the Public Theatre, formerly the Astor Library, on Lafayette Street. Mentions guests. A rock band called Southside Johnny and the Asbury...

The Race Track Two Fine Fillies by G. F. T. Ryall. Max Gluck, whose Girl in Love won the Mother Goose Stakes a few weeks ago, saw his Drama Critic take the 78th running of the Fashion Stakes, at Belmont. Out at Hollywood Park, his Pay Tribute, a $29.80 long shot, sailed home by more than three lengths in the $250,000...

Fiction Look At A Teacup by Patricia Hampl. In 1939, in Chicago, my mother was buying dishes that had come from Czechoslovakia because they made the best china and she was marrying an American Czech. That was the first year of the war, when Europe began to eat itself raw. The teacups are mine now, because I'm her...

Books The Good Soldier by George Steiner.

Poetry For A Child Going Blind by Dan Masterson. I have awakened her...

Poetry A Prayer by Philip Schultz. Downstairs, a woman...

Poetry 1949 by Frederick Morgan. Under the arbor...