U. S. Journal MAKING DEALS by Calvin Trillin. U.S. JOURNAL: NEW ORLEANS, about a convention of the International Council of Shopping Centers. At the convention, shopping-center people make deals. The deals are between developers, who offer tenants traffic, and tenants, who offer developers overage. The suburban shopping center, called in the trade a "regional mall" or a...

On the Street The Talk of the Town by Alastair Reid. Talk story about painting the original shoreline of Nieuw Amsterdam on the streets of Lower Manhattan. On the day of the summer solstice, line-layers provided by the Department of Transportation painted a double traffic line, the seaward line blue, the landward line green, along a route marked out by...

The Talk of the Town Clambake by Bobbie Ann Mason. Talk story about a clambake on a large farm southwest of the city. Tells what a true clambake is. The word did not apply in this case. The word survives inland because it makes a short, snappy headline. Seven or eight hundred people attended. Writer lists: subheads on some of...

Fiction Old Couples (Illus.) by Saul Steinberg. Twelve drawings of pairs of things. Some of them are: a knife and fork; a church steeple clock and a room wall clock; a nose and a pair of eyeglasses; a hammer and sickle; a nickel and a dime; the moon and a distant star...

The Talk of the Town Bear Bryant by Ian Frazier. Talk story about Paul (Bear) Bryant, coach of the University of Alabama football team since 1958. Bryant is on the verge of becoming the winningest college coach of all time. Describes his appearance and his clothing, and tells how he got his nickname "Bear." Writer spoke with him before Bryant...

Television That Dog Isn't Fifteen by Roy Blount. A dialogue between Irene and a visitor. Irene has a new television set and her visitor comments on its defects. Irene tells what happened to the old set they had. Her mother-in-law, who visited often, developed an affinity for the set and the set liked her-it seemed...

Onward and Upward with the Arts II-THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF CHACHAJI by Ved Mehta. ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about making a TV documentary about the writer's poor, elderly relative, Chachaji, who lived in Delhi. Diary entries begin Feb. 27, 1978 and end Jun. 15, 1978, the day of the film's broadcast. It received a prize: a duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in...

Books A Green and Pleasant Land by Naomi Bliven.

Comment by Jonathan Schell. At an apparently unified Republican Party gathered in Detroit last week to nominate Ronald Reagan as its Presidential candidate, two issues refused to yield to agreement: abortion; and ratification of the ERA. The platform banned abortion and failed to renew the Party's long-standing support for the ERA. One of...

Fiction Seven O'clock of a Strange Millenium and All's Well by Penelope Gilliatt. Jessie Corbridge and Douglas Bamburgh are both seventy-one years of age and are lovers. She, however, is married, and has been for many years. They are in a Northumberland pub, watching Bamburgh's infant grandson crawling on a rug in front of the pub's electric fire. They tease one another...

The Art World (The Art Galleries) Erasing the Line by Calvin Tomkins.

Poetry My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer by Mark Strand. When the moon appears...

Poetry The Fire Pond by Michael J. Rosen. We stock the fire pond with rainbows...

Poetry Middle Age: A Nocturne by Robert Phillips. The silver tea service...