Comment Comment, Pt. II by Harold Brodkey. We received this letter from a local man enraptured with the seasons: This time of year I think of as marking the return of buttonholes. No more the lisp of easy summer fabric & the swift slide & snap of elastic, no more the lisp of the moister summer breezes...

The Theatre by Edith Oliver.

The Talk of the Town Asbury Park by Bobbie Ann Mason. Talk story about 3 ladies of our acquaintance who motored recently across Maryland and Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. They were on a pilgrammage. One of the ladies had left her husband for the weekend once and flown to Houston to see a Bruce Springsteen concert. Each one was...

The Talk of the Town Budapest by Andrea Lee. Talk story about a trip to Budapest for the first postwar Grand Prix race in an Eastern European country... The thing was that there was no big story, none of the entertaining anecdotes of cultural collision that there might have been in a less Westernized section of the Eastern bloc...

Fiction Boswell's Life of Don Johnson by Ian Frazier. Writer adopts style of Boswell to depict the events in the career of popular television actor, Don Johnson in a mock biography. He is the star of the show "Miami Vice." Writer declares that the task of writing the life of this eminent person is unfit for an honest man...

Fiction Studying with Miss Bishop by Dana Gioia. Writer recalls February of 1975, when he was in his last semester as a graduate student at Harvard, and chose to study with Elizabeth Bishop in her "Studies in Modern Poetry" class. One might have imagined it was impossible to get into her classes, but this was not the case...

Reflections OZ by William Pfaff. REFLECTIONS about the symbols & abstractions that have increasingly become motivating forces in American policy--a curious development for so practical & direct a people... Acts of considerable violence are justified by the general lessons they supposedly teach an observing world & are welcomed by Americans not because of what...

Books by Naomi Bliven.

The Art World Gods and Heroes by Calvin Tomkins. At the Queens Museum there is a permanent exhibition, which went on view last April, called "The Heroic Spirit: Classical Sculpture from Ancient Greece to Michelangelo". The works are plaster casts, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum - plaster casts of exceptionally good quality, taken directly from the originals more than...

Comment Comment, Pt. I by Lawrence Weschler. One of the main justifications for the huge budget allotments granted Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (known as Star Wars) was that there was a good chance that the Soviets would go bankrupt in attempting to match us, contraption for contraption. Over the last 3 years Star Wars has diverted some...

Fiction The Afterlife by John Updike. Carter and Jane Billings, so settled in their ways, found in their fifties that their friends were doing sudden, suprising things. Their very dearest friends, Frank and Lucy Eggleston, had upped and moved to England. Carter and Jane promised to visit, but letters were infrequent, and they waited 3 years...

Onward and Upward with the Arts AS GORGEOUS AS IT GETS by Kennedy Fraser. ONWARD & UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about Estee Lauder and the introduction, in Sept., 1985, of her new scent, Beautiful. Tells about the audacious pink packaging, how the name was chosen and all the promotional work...

Our Far-Flung Correspondents THE LAST BABYFOOT by Calvin Trillin. OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about "babyfoot" or "foosball" or "table soccer," a game played on a table, which is actually an open rectangular box, set like the horizonal part of a pinball machine... The floor of the box has the markings of a soccer field, and there's a goal at...

Poetry The Fence by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Think of it as a target's outer edge...

Poetry The Persimmons by Gary Snyder. In a cove reaching back between ridges...