Comment Comment, Pt. I by Mindy Aloff. Comment about writer walking her dog through her neighborhood, and the sights she saw. Writer sometimes took along questions for herself to think about. One day the question was: What qualifications, apart from those fixed by the Constitution, would writer set for a person seeking to be President of the...

Comment Comment, Pt. II by William McKibben. Comment about Paul Tsongas, who writer met when he was running for Congress for the first time. Writer grew up in the Fifth Congressional District of Massachusetts, which stretched from the affluent Boston suburbs on the edge of Route 128 to the shabby red brick mill towns of Lowell and...

The Talk of the Town Shirley's Worms by Mark Singer. Talk story about Shirley Irons' project of keeping a worm box in her loft on the edge of the garment district. She works in a medical facility and makes abstract paintings. She got the idea for the worm box--used to convert garbage into compost--from an article in the...

The Talk of the Town The Allbrook by Perry Van der Meer. Talk story about the sale at Christie's of a pair of urinal-like sculptures for $140,000. Writer spoke with Dr. Norman Stone and hiw wife, who bought the sculpture. "It was just love at first sight. I responded physically. The work is very sensual, and very sexy. It becomes magical...

Fiction The Rainy Season by Roz Chast. Color cartoon spread showing the pages of a picture book called "The Rainy Season" by Laura Haynib...

Fiction Authority Figures by Daniel Menaker. Jacob Singer is an English Teacher at Coventry, a private boys school in Manhattan. The story goes back and forth between the narrator's boyhood at a rough public school in Yonkers, and his present life where, in addition to teaching, he is in psychoanalysis with Dr. Ernesto Morales. In high...

Profiles JAZ by Cynthia Zarin. PROFILE of James Laughlin, who founded New Directions publishing company, and encouraged or published writers such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Henry Miller, Stevie Smith, Thomas Merton, Tennessee Williams and Dyland Thomas, among others. Tells about his home in Norfolk, Connecticut, and his voluminous correspondence with writers...

Letter from Moscow by David Remnick. Moscow's best-known newspaper editors are Len Karpinsky, editor-in-chief and a columnist of the weekly Moscow News; and Vitaly Tretyakov, a young defector from Moscow News, who started Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper), the closest thing Russia has ever had to a Western daily newspaper. Karpinsky came of age...

The Current Cinema NO MAN'S LAND by Terrence Rafferty.

Books by Mindy Aloff.

The Film File Memoirs of an Invisible Man by Michael Sragow. A new Invisible Man film rigged with up-to-date special effects from Industrial Light & Magic should be bright, transparent fun. And whenever Chevy Chase, as the faded hero, pulls off a nonchalant gag—such as offhandedly redressing a purse-snatching—the movie has a sly, casual appeal. But the director, John Carpenter, allows...

Poetry Off--Season At the Edge of the World by Debora Greger. We have crawled on our fins...

Poetry Wreckage At Lake Pontchartrain by Dave Smith. Baton Rouge to New Orleans, hauling I-10, the workweek...