PARTISAN REVIEW
129
"He liked to see the red light and hear the siren," [said the in–
vestigator].
(Oshkosh Daily Northwestern,
December 11, 1971.) Contributed by
Larry
Retzack, Saint Charles, Illinois.
ASK
THEM YOURSELF
FOR LANA WOOD, actress and sister of Natalie Wood
I
understand you're about to be married. Is it your first? How old are
you?-W. Smith,
Lansing, Mich.
• It's my fourth, and I'm 25. Most divorcees my age in Hollywood have
an anti-Establishment philosophy against marriage. Obviously, I don't.
Each
time I marry, it's a commitment for life.
(Family Weekly,
December 26, 1971.)
EARTH, AIR, FIRE
&
WATER: A COLLECTION OF OVER 125 POEMS.
Selected and edited
by
Frances Monson McCullough. Coward, Mc–
Cann
&
Geoghegan. 190 pp. $5.95.
Many of the contributors to this anthology of verse for the 20th century
are
established poets like Whitman, Pound, Levertov, Ginsberg, Lowell,
Yevtushenko, Swenson. As many are little known. They write on aspects
of
modern life; painful and angry poems of protest, candid explorations
of
personal freedom or despair, vivid impressions of a mod or a scene.
Ages
13
up.
(New York Post,
January 14, 1972.)
WASHINGTON,
Sept. 19-The climate of the times-antiwar senti–
ment, megaton bombs and youthful "go mod" fervor-has forced the
United States Army to sanitize one of its most storied and stylized means
of
dealing death: hand-to-hand combat with a bayonet.
No longer do panting recruits scream "Kill! Kill!" ... Instead, they
are encouraged to yell a less blood-thirsty "Yah! Yah!" and to thrust
and cut
in
a less exact, freestyle manner.
The Army's new training manuals discourage "shouting of indis–
creet slogans" and refer to "instinctive" stabs and jabs. Today's drill
sergeants tell recruits that the most important thing about the bayonet
is
that a vigorous shove with it, any vigorous shove, will do the job-in
the unlikely event a nuclear age enemy ever gets so close.
"We're trying to keep things modern and in good taste," says Col.
W.
C. Carter, an Army training specialist at Fort Monroe, Va.
(The New York Times,
September 20, 1971.) Contributed by Sarah
Jane Williams, Greencastle, Indiana.
IIllTORS' NOTE:
We'd like to remind our readers that they are invited to send
in
examples of nonsense. A free subscription to
PR
will be awarded for each
contribution used. In case of a tie, single copies
will
be
sent to the latecomers.
