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...just the qualities Shepard exhibits. When he tips to one side, he's our best playwright and he has the ability to short circuit the intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger, as Tom McGuane says of "being trapped in a globe of his own hallucinatory despair." It's a precarious balancing act, and one which makes Shepard so much more a playwright than a writer of plays. Reading a Shepard script...
...Random House; 166 pages...
...recent ABC poll of 1,400 people chosen at random showed that only 13% supported a lobbying campaign to change TV content. Only about 2% said they would support a boycott to serve the coalition goals and had boycotted products in the past. Moreover, avowed members of the Moral Majority (6.6% of the sample) had the same program preferences as other Americans...
Look, for instance, at an issue from April of 1973, just one drawn at random. The "Short Takes" section is unceasingly left-political--Rennie Davis converts to eastern religion, FBI informant unmasked, grape strike update, "Vietnam-American Friendship Week starts Monday," "Supporters of striking Shell Oil workers are demonstrating Monday." Names mentioned include Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ngo Vinh Long, Gloria Emerson, Frances Fitzgerald, Ann Froines, Michael Ansara. The lead article was on a company that sold a how-to suicide package. The second story was by a reporter who was getting obscene phone calls. She talked to her harasser...
...cosmonauts could not hold their food down in the early days of a flight. Some had trouble getting to sleep, and were often awakened by the spacecraft's clattering and creaking. Others complained of fatigue and vertigo. In a revealing new book, Red Star in Orbit (Random House; $12.95), James Oberg offers some trenchant quotes from the flight diary of Salyut Cosmonaut Valeri Ryumin, who in three trips spent just short of a year in space. Writes Ryumin of his shaky introduction to space travel: "Looking into the mirror I fail to recognize myself. I feel dizzy, nauseous...