Casual How I Write My Songs: by Bill B. White. Casual in the form of a songwriter's instructions on how to write a song. Writing songs is a basic human trait, White says, though it still requires concentration and hard work. The most important thing is to put true life into your songs. All kinds of things can give you...

The Talk of the Town Opera at Seth Low by Jane Boutwell. Talk story about a class in Smetana's "The Bartered Bride" which Metropolitan Opera director, John Dexter, is conducting for sixth-grade students at the Seth Low Intermediate School in Brooklyn. The occasion for the new course is the Met's sparkling new production of the famous folk opera; the purpose is...

The Current Cinema by Pauline Kael. Review of "Midnight Express". The audience is told that this film is "based on a true story", from a book by Billy Hayes. The writer says that the "true story" is used merely as a taking-off place for the movie-makers' sadomasochistic and homerotic imaginations. College boy, Billy Hayes...

U. S. Journal TINK by Calvin Trillin. U.S. JOURNAL: SAN FRANCISCO about Josiah Thompson (known as Tink), a Haverford College philosophy professor who became a private detective in San Francisco. Tink, a Kierkegaard expert, began working part-time for Hal Lipset, a prominent San Francisco detective, during his sabbatical in 1976; then, a few months later, became...

The Current Cinema MOVIE YELLOW JOURNALISM by Pauline Kael.

Fiction Not For The Sabbath by Isaac Bashevis Singer. An 11-year-old boy hides and listens while his Aunt Yentl tells two neighbor ladies a story. In Lublin, a village in Poland, the second wife of Reb Yissar Mandlebroit, Dosha, caught her son Yankele's teacher,Fivke, whipping the boy in school. When Dosha threw hot soup in his...

The Race Track by G. F. T. Ryall. At the Keeneland sales last week Nelson Bunker Hunt bought Slip Screen, in foal to Sir Ivor, for $710,000...

Recollections by Jamaica Kincaid. Talk story about a luncheon in honor of the late Elvis Presley to promote McGraw-Hlll's forthcoming book, "ELVIS: Based on the Recollections of Lamar Fike and the American People," by Albert Goldman. A girl at the luncheon said they hadn't actually finished the book yet. They'd just begun to...

Annals of Science I-DNA by Horace Judson. ANNALS OF SCIENCE about DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the stuff of which genes are made. Its molecular structure was discovered in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick. In 1968 Watson published his memoir "The Double Helix", about the discovery. Watson's field before his famous finding, had been genetics of bacteria...

Comment by Michael J. Arlen. Comment about the truth about Thanksgiving - that it is not a great holiday. After commenting on what the holiday weather is like in the north writer tells about things in the warm and loony southern part of the country, especially watching football on television...

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

The Talk of the Town Feeling Good by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about the recent second annual New York Hi Fi Stereo Music Show, which attracted 34,000 people to the Hotel Statler Hilton. Gives statistics about the visitors and their preferences. Nine and a half million of the eighty-five million households in the country now have hi-fi systems...

Poetry Many Senses: Mexico City by Howard Moss. No light. Think of living in a stone...

Poetry The Collector of the Sun by Dave Smith. Through the small door of a hut...

Poetry Of Boston, Georgia Two Memories of the Depression Years by Donald Justice. The tin roofs catch the slanting sunlight...

Poetry The Cat and the Wind by Thom Gunn. A small wind...