The Talk of the Town The Blues Abroad by Andrea Lee Fallows. Talk story about a B.B. King concert in Leningrad's Gorky Culture Palace. King had been touring the Soviet Union for 3 weeks. Russians know jazz, but are unfamiliar with the blues as King plays them. They listened in silence at first, as though they were at the symphony. Then B.B...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Comment by William Edgett Smith. Comment about the Senate's amendment to the defense-authorization bill, passed last week to force Pres. Carter to lift the existing economic sanctions against Rhodesia(now called Zimbabwe Rhodesia). Writing in the "Times," Safire accuses the President of trying to "destabilize" what Safire calls "the most freely elected government in...

Comment by Irena Gross. The Holy Father's visit to Poland became a happy family reunion. It was, no doubt about it, a profoundly religious occasion, but it was a surprisingly secular, political one too. The Pope addressed the crowds not only as their spiritual father but as a brother, as a friend of everyone...

The Theatre SELF-MADE VILLAIN by Brendan Gill.

Books by George Steiner.

The Current Cinema TWO POVERTIES by Brendan Gill.

Jazz by Whitney Balliett.

Comment by Jonathan Schell. Comment about the near-impossibility of predicting the effects of such man-made disasters as the one that occurred at Three Mile Island. Supporters of nuclear power have been quoted as saying that "The fact is that ..no one was killed, no one was injured, and no one lost any...

Fiction The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth. Part One - Maestro Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, was 23 years old and just publishing his first short stories when, in Dec. of 1956, he visited his idol, a Jewish writer named E. I. (Manny) Lonoff, at his house in the Berkshires. Zuckerman wants nothing less than to be E.I. Lonoff's...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town On the Thames by Mark Singer. Talk story about the 14th Yale-Harvard Regatta, the annual 8-man-crew 4-mile boat race on the Thames River starting from the U.S. Naval Submarine Base at New London, Conn. Writer, watches from Donald Espinosa's front yard in Quaker Hill, Conn., at the same latitude as the finish...

A Reporter at Large WHO CARES?...WE DO! by E. J. Kahn. A REPORTER AT LARGE about South-West Africa, which will be called Namibia once it attains independence. Tells about a tentative agreement between South Africa, which has administered South-West for 60 years, and the South-West Africa People's Organization, or SWAPO, its principal armed antagonist and the group proclaimed...

Poetry War Crimes by Carol Muske-Dukes. After a while...

Poetry The Guttural Muse by Seamus Heaney. Late summer, and at midnight...

Poetry The Turner by Alex Stevens. Roughness is pared...