The Advocate

If the Advocate were but an echo, only an echo of the wealth of talent it has to draw from. Only an echo of scatology and weepy sentiment, of hours spent in thinking obscene thoughts and insipid stories. Advocate Short Story Contest. Pointless obscenity. Why?

Component parts: A story Spades attempting to be brutal-real, filth-drenched, nothing. The factory, the city; depravity, warped and twisted. Not talent but words fitted into disgusting thoughts, and then moulded into repelling images. First Prize. "Armed with the morning paper rolled in his pocket, he heads for the purchasing of smoke, the disguiser of perplexity and the medium of delight." And after jointless words; again pointless obscenities. A true picture filtered on a canvas through a sewer.

But Diaspora is refreshing after nothing. There is a point here, a trace of something that does not stink, a sort of negative odor that puts it above Spades." There are people who love a country, and they find it stricken, and there is a girl whose love is wider than a country. It is good that the authoress loves the country of which she writes, but there is a vapid, too-plaintive air that distracts the sympathy of the reader. "If you were born in Israel, you were a sabra, tough and tan on the outside, sweating in the sun, your heart and lungs and everything crying out as you kissed the dust and the salty dirt and asked for a little food." Diaspora won second prize.

What is better in the Advocate does not balance what is worse. A dream-like story with a nightmare ending, Nowhere Special, takes first place by default in the short story class. In The Great Rake, Allen Grossman manipulates six words, cities, turn threat, casement, grass, world, into a poetic whole which is the best piece of creative work in the issue. As for the other poetry, two pieces by Walter Kaiser, from the Garrison Prize Poems, reveal a fine sense of imagery and a fluid style. Winifred Hare has written a sonnet.

The finest piece of craftsmanship in the June Advocate is a translation by John Wilson from Euripides' Bacchae. Classics. Homer. Euripides. Bronson Potter. Not the Same.