The Theatre FUNNY PEOPLE, MOSTLY SAD by Brendan Gill.

Fiction The Wine Breath by John McGahern. A priest in Ireland suddenly begins to recall the day of Michael Bruen's funeral nearly 30 years before Ever since his mother's death, he'd found himself stumbling into these dead days. It was as if the world of the dead was as available to him as the world of the...

Fiction Orientation by John Mort. A parody of an Army orientation lecture. Technical Sergeant Stone gives a group of men a talk, with slides, about Telphinus 4, where they are headed on their tour of duty. They are going to be uranium miners. Tells about the things he calls to their attention...

The Race Track Seattle Slew Flew by G. F. T. Ryall. Seattle Slew, who won the Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah, runs in the colors of Mrs. Karen Taylor. Seattle Slew continues his unbeaten record over two seasons...

Musical Events Lulu and Helene and Alban and Alwa by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town The Unmanifest by Gerald Jonas. Talk story about Professor David Bakan, who gave a speech at a conference entitled, "The Roots of American Psychology," sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and attended by some six hundred psychiatrists and psychologists. Professor Bakan, who teaches psychology at York University, in Toronto, Canada, is well-known...

The Current Cinema WHAT IF? by Penelope Gilliatt.

Comment by Ved Mehta. What Indira Gandhi used to call her "New India" during the 21 months of Emergency rule now seems like her "Imaginary India", as if her "New India" were only a dream from which she was jolted awake by the unprecedented results of the elections that except as a somnambulist she...

Books The Kingdom of Appearances by George Steiner.

The Talk of the Town Rockaway by James Stevenson. Talk story about the Park End Tavern restaurant, 12 miles southeast of Manhattan in the middle of a bungalow colony called Roxbury, on Rockaway Point. At 9:30 one morning last week, Betty Moran, who is the wife of Park End's owner, and John Barile, a bartender, talked with the writer...

The Talk of the Town Bytes and Chips by Anthony Hiss. Talk story about the coming of personal computers, in kit form for less than $2,000. Writer visits Vern Crawford, an electronics man involved in assembling personal computers, who lives in Mountain View, California. It's in the Silicon Valley, known to geographers as the Santa Clara Valley. It's an area with...

Around City Hall Three if by Air by Andy Logan. The fourteen Concordes (the French have four and the British five, and five are unsold) have already cost the two governments three billion dollars, and the French operating losses alone were half a million dollars a week last year-a situation that the plane's backers are convinced can begin to...

The Talk of the Town Free-ee-ee by Jamaica Kincaid. Talk story about a visit backstage at the Felt Forum with black woman singer Deniece Williams, who was performing second in a concert there. She is from Gary, Indiana, sang backup for Stevie Wonder for 3 years, and now writes all the songs she sings, one of which is called...

Cartoon The Vigil by Anthony Taber. A story, without words, consisting of 12 illustrations. A woman lets her cat out of the house at night. He joins a group of other cats. They grow in size and appear huge, dwarfing a house they surround. As dawn comes they return to normal size. In the last picture...

Profiles GOODY by Mark Singer. PROFILE of Goodman Ace. In 1933, Frank Hummert, who ran the New York office of Blackette-Sample-Hummert, hired Goodman Ace and his wife Jane, for a radio show at $1,350 a week. Hummert and his wife, Anne Ashenhurst, became the most prolific and successful entrepreneurs in radio. During the...

Jazz New York Notes by Whitney Balliett.

A Reporter at Large AN ARGUMENT OVER SURVIVAL by Elizabeth Drew. REPORTER AT LARGE about arms control. After the end of World War II the U.S. was left with 2 great international issues: the proper way to confront international Communism, represented by Russia & what to do about the nuclear bomb we had developed & employed. The recent fight over Pres...

Poetry Edvard Munch by Charles Wright. We live in houses of ample weight...

Poetry This Choosing by Gary Miranda. Spirit, your answers lie...

Poetry First Dawn Light by Robert Penn Warren. By lines fainter gray than the faintest geometry...