Comment by Roger Angell. Letter from a man we know who says the news of the Gulf war came in a telephone call from his son who was visiting friends in Calif. He'd just been watching a CNN news program that included the voice of 3 reporters in a Baghdad hotel describing the sights...

Comment by William Finnegan. For those of us rivetted to our televisions in the U.S. the war in the Persian Gulf for the first day or so had an eerie, remote-control quality. At time, it seemed we were watching a war about technology. The enemy suffered our massive first attack passively, as if...

The Talk of the Town Restoration by David Owen. Talk story about the elaborate restoration of an apartment in the Dakota. Writer visits the basement of the Dakota and sees rows and rows of old doors placed there after previous restorations tore them out. There are pieces of baseboard, lengths of cornice molding and parts of mantels, All these...

The Talk of the Town In Motion by Melissa Weiner. Talk story, about Cindy Marvell, a juggler who recites poetry when she juggles. "Coleridge is one of my favorite poets, but I've had a hard time finding jugglability in his poems," she said, when writer phoned her recently at her place on Riverside Drive. She added that she had worked...

The Talk of the Town The Battlefield by Caroline Fraser. Talk story about visiting Gettysburg battlefield. After writer's brother watched all 11 hours or the PBS documentary, he discovered that a math professor is credited with saving the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union & he & his wife & writer had to go and look. Tells about the tourism...

Fiction Nowhere to Run by Veronica Geng. The piece is headed by a quotation from "The Times": "DOCTOR CALLING IT QUITS TO RUN COIN LAUNDRY. He said insurance rates drove him out of his 20-year practice." The story is in the form of a letter from the narrator to this doctor; she tells him of her...

Journals II-FROM THE SIXTIES by John Cheever. JOURNALS detailing the writer's struggle with alcoholism; his conflicting feelings about his homosexuality; and his unhappy marriage. He writes at length about the composition of his novel Bullet Park, and sketches out ideas for stories. He undergoes psychoanalysis, and meditates about his family background. He records his feelings about his...

Profiles THE COMPLETE ACTOR by Mel Gussow. PROFILE of English actor Michael Gambon. He has built his reputation principally in plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Gray, and Harold Pinter. During his years as head of Britain's National Theatre, Peter Hall always wanted to present a revival of Brecht's "The Life of Galileo". He chose Gambon to play...

The Current Cinema FULL STOP by Terrence Rafferty.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

Reflections ISLAM AND THE WEST by William Pfaff. REFLECTIONS about Islam, both historically & in the present. The instability of the Middle East occurs at a fault line dividing two histories, two pasts. Trouble arises along this line where real nations abut a zone of historical non-nationhood. In the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean the zone...

Books by Naomi Bliven.

Poetry "Everywhere I Go, There I Am" by Robert Pinsky. Hot days of errands and badges, paper, shrill rage...

Poetry Blue Spruce by Stephen Perry. My grandfather worked in a barbershop...