The Talk of the Town Mr. Personality by Mark Singer. Talk story about subway musician Paul Schimmel, who plays the clarinet during rush hour on the "F" train. When he does, he physically resembles Paul Schimmel, but his innerself has actually metamorphosed into Mr. Personality. The money that Mr. Personality collects from passengers in the subway, Schimmel uses in turn...

Dancing by Arlene Croce.

Annals of Law II-THE BETAMAX CASE by James Lardner. ANNALS OF LAW about whether home video recording from television is an infringement of copyright law. There were two court decisions in the case of Universal v. Sony (the Betamax case). The first said it was not an infringement & the second, on appeal, said it was. Hollywood felt that...

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Theatre by Edith Oliver.

Profiles THE PRESENT MOMENT by Suzannah Lessard. PROFILE of Hungarian-born ceramist Eva Zeisel, who says"All that matters is the present moment. Everything else is unreal." Tells about her childhood in a house outside Budapest. At 18, she went into the Academy of Fine Arts. She became an apprentice in a traditional potter's shop in a...

Comment by Lawrence Weschler. A comment about El Salvador, Nicaragua, and foreign aid to those countries. An American military adviser and at least 70 others died just recently in an early-morning raid by the rebels on the heavily secured military base at El Paraiso in El Salvador & briefly the war in that...

The Talk of the Town Palimpsests by Adam Gopnik. Talk story about going on a recent Sunday to the first of this year's walking tours sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York. It was the debut of Hope Cooke, the former Queen of Sikkim, as a tour guide. The tour was of the lower East Side...

Books by William Maxwell.

The Talk of the Town Pandas by E. J. Kahn. Talk story about Jerome Alan Cohen & his efforts to bring a pair of pandas to the Bronx Zoo from Beijing, China. When the writer bumped into Cohen, he said that he had been too busy with the panda situation to work on fund-raising for a planned international law...

Fiction Launching Day, 1962 by Joyce Johnson. Howard Stricker, a sculptor, gave up art and was building a 25-foot catamaran which he planned to launch in the East River and then sail by himself down to Key West. He offers his apartment to the writer and her artist boyfriend, Tom. They accept and live in the...

Fiction Plan 10 From Zone R-3 by Polly Frost. The narrator returns to her small town because her father is worried about her mother's strange behavior. Her mother is acting like a real-estage agent. She carries a filofax notebook and talks about buying land. It seems the whole town has become similarly obsessed. The narrator runs into her...

Poetry Kanaloa by W. S. Merwin. When he woke his mind was the west...

Poetry Move by Alicia Ostriker. Whether it's a turtle who drags herself...