Books The Lond and Reluctant Stasis of Wan-li by John Updike.

Reflections DIGGING UP SCOTLAND by Alastair Reid. REFLECTIONS about Scotland and aspects of the writer's life. He was born and grew up in Scotland but left it as a young man. He was born in Galloway, a gentle, rural area in the southwest. Later the family moved to the flintier east. He has felt at home in...

The Theatre Off Broadway by Edith Oliver.

The Talk of the Town Jerome's Bus by Mark Singer. Talk story about Jerome Weinberger and his bus, the Mobile Sculpture Gallery. Jerome is a teacher-sculptor, who brings his '67 Chevy bus into SoHo each Saturday so that interested people can walk through it and view the art he has constructed out of found objects. Writer talks with Jerome...

Performance On the Great Lawn by Lillian Ross. Talk story, in the form of a song, about a performance by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They sang 20 songs on the Great Lawn of Central Park. The concert lasted 90 minutes. The money for it was put up by Fiorucci and Hirsh Enterprises. Half a million people attended...

Fiction Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett. The world of an elderly, dying woman is depicted in a stream of conciousness. (Enough. Quicker. Quick see how all in keeping with the chair. Minimally less. No more. Well on the way to inexistence.) The woman remembers nature, watches her memories float past. She is apparently alone in a...

Television Memoirs of the Cable Revolution by Michael J. Arlen. Column of THE AIR. Fictional account of a dramatic takeover of the nation's television sets by cable TV. In a parody of stories about political uprisings, cable is presented as a force pitted in mortal conflict with network broadcasting. Writer describes his friend and erstwhile lover L., who has broken...

Fiction Jacinto by Hildegarde Flanner. The narrator is given the responsibility of pasturing a billy goat named Jacinto. She prefers to think of herself as a "counsellor to a smart goat," rather than as a "goatherd." The goat belongs to her grown son and his children, but for some reason the job of taking him...

Comment by Veronica Geng. Writer questions the urban rhythms in "Model", Frederick Wiseman's documentary film about the fashion-model business, shot in Manhattan and recently shown on WNET-TV. Wiseman kept cutting away from the models to scenes of effortlessly gliding traffic that seemed to swim the city streets like fish in an upstate...

Fiction Challenge by Donald Barthelme. In 1981, sleek, space-efficient Japanese-made book reviews began to appear everywhere, and it was clear that the big, clunky American reviews were in Trouble City. Japanese reviews, rooted in the concept of Ma, or space interfacing with time, were large, forthright, ultra-modern, and yet warm. At the...

The Sporting Scene A RETURN TO GOLDEN GATE FIELDS by Bill Barich. THE SPORTING SCENE about return by writer to Golden Gate Fields, race track in Albany, Calif., to see if he'd learned anything about handicapping since his 10-week "interneship" there in 1978. Unable to develop a winning system then, he had proved to be a first-rate loser, equaled only...

Musical Events Leading Ladies by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Sanctuary by Bobbie Ann Mason. Talk story about a visit to a wildlife sanctuary in Pennsylvania, told in the form of a letter from a woman who took the expedition with her husband, Roger. They had moved from a 60 acre farm a few months before, so liked the idea of going to a wildlife...

Poetry Sea Noise by Harold Brodkey. The professorial sea...

Poetry I Need Help by Edward Hirsch. For all the insomniacs in the world...