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e’d Joatattie4 INSURANCE COMPANY P. 0. Box 8098 Houston, Texas Insurance In Force Over $110 Million BOW WILLIAMS Automobile and General Insurance Budget Payment Plan Strong Stook Companies GReenweed 145411 624 LAMAR, AUSTIN Let’s Abolish the Poll Taxi No Sweet Potato For Tyler’s Needy Shattuck on New Avante-Garde IT An out-of-work cab driver confessed in Fort Worth he strangled his wife in 1951 after she cursed him and told him she “had had another man.” The driver was charged with the murder but released for insufficient evidence in 1953. He said he had to clear his conscience of the deed; he strangled her with an electric extension cord. Five high school boys have been killed in Texas football this yearthe highest number on record. ir missioners approved continuing to finance groceries for impoverished county residents, but they are going to watch the program closer. Cmsr. Joe Weaver said he found some relief families had used their checks to buy soap powders, shortening, and, in the case of some farm families, sweet potatoes. “In my opinion,” Weaver said, “this money should be spent strictly for staples.” If Bicknell Eubanks, citing the Dallas and San Antonio opera companies, writes in the Christian Science Monitor that “opera does exist outside of New York ” Karl Shariro, poet, was to speak at The University of Texas Nov. 19 on critics…. Barbara Smith, the Negro voice major at U. T. on whose account a student opera was cancelled in 1957 rather than Wilson on Striking Sirs: This is to acknowledge receipt of yours of Oct. 30 in which you ask about the right to strike. A laborer’s right to strike is his principal bargaining weapon and is well established in law. Limitations on it are in the process fo being worked out slowly, but except in very limited areas of employment, the right to strike seems well established. Will Wilson, Attorney General, Austin 11. Author Responds Sirs: Tom Campbell’s review of the Indians \(Indians of the Southwest, back to ancient days of school rivalries when he and others new like me in the anthropological field were my classmates. Perhaps you would like for Pearce’s review of the first edition of the book \(there was a second edition in 1953, but there has never been at any time a the department of anthropology and was its chairman till he died. His review was written specially for the jacket of the first edition: “The writer of this book on the Texas Indians has taken practically all the courses offered in the anthropology department of the University of Texas, and doubtless her interest in Indians comes largely from her anthropological study. However, for years Mrs. Atkinson has done feature writing for newspapers and has acquired a vivid, picturesque, reportorial style. “For many months Mrs. Atkinson has ransacked the archives of of the University of Texas and other available courses for evidences of the early Texas tribes and their manner of life. She has ransacked, also, the works of THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page ‘7 Nov. 21, 1958 withstand legislative criticsm, gave a recital of her own at the University. IT Glenn McCarthy “personally recommends” Rich Oil for burns in an ad now appearing in the papers. “During, my days in the oil fields,” he is quoted saying, “I have suffered from many bad burns and I have seen men die from pain and shock. If Rich Oil, containing Salcolan, was available at that time, many lives would have been saved…” The Way of Life In Dallas, Dr. W. R. White of Baylor said at the Dallas Athletic Country Club that a community should have strong spiritual values, positive thinking, infectious enthusiasm, and a radiant spirit of congeniality. IT A Dallas woman, Jean Gilley, pleaded guilty to a sodomy charge in connection with an ob scene movie allegedly made in a Dallas motel in 1955 and was sentenced to five years in prison. Hunting season opened Sun day in Kerr County for deer and turkey, expected to be plenti ful because of the heavy rains, but also expected to be much better fed and much cagier about corn ing into blinds and feed pens. Lafitau, Du Pratz, Swanton and others on the Lower Mississippi Valley tribes for light on the manners and customs of the Mound Builders in order to get detailed information for interpreting the culture of the Caddoes and Asinai of East Texas who were the western fringe of the Mound Builder People. “As a consequence, her book is chockful of interesting and illuminating information upon all the Texas tribes, put together in a manner and written in a style that is always vivid and that should appeal to the average intelligent person interested in Man’s past but not too critical as to the technical interpretation of tedious detailed facts. “This is the only book to date devoted exclusively to Texas Indians and as a Centennial publication on the hundredth anniversary of Texas’ independence, it has unique value. “So well documented is this book that it may well serve as a guide to teachers and students who would like to go to sources for knowledge of the Comanches, Caddoes, Asinai, Karankawa, and other Texas tribes. No more interesting people existed anywhere in the world than the Texas Indians; Mrs. Atkinson, puts them before us in this -book in a vivid imaginative way not easily forgotten. I predict for it a wide popular sale.”…. M. Jordan Atkinson, 2616 Arbor, Houston. AUSTIN Roger Shattuck is a lean, taut, scholarly man who has something of the dedication of a New England school teacher. When last seen on the campus of the University of Texas he was wearing a slightly shocking full red mustache. He talks in clipped tones and gives the impression of being intensely busy but willing to work in an additioal project if it is useful or will be helpful to somebody. Of all the many people a person meets in the course of a year on a campus he seems one of the most disciplined and most directed. Shattuck was a bomber pilot in the Southwest Pacific. From ’47 to ’49 he worked as a reporter and information officer in the film section of UNESCO in Paris. At that time he studied music with Nadia Boulanger. A New Yorker and graduate of St. Paul’s School and Yale, he has been an editor in a New York publishing firm and has taught French at Harvard. He is at present on leave from the University of Texas \(where he is an assistant professor of Romance Aix-en-Provence in France on Guggenheim and Fulbright grants. At 35, Shattuck has made an international name for himself with the publication of The Banquet Years, a book costing $8.59 \(Harcourt, Brace, ing with the origins of the avante-garde in France from 1885 to 1915. To depict the laying of the foundations of modern art, he has examined the works and lives of four significent men of the period: painter Henri Rousseau, composer Erik Satie, playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry, and poet Guillaume Appollinaire \(whose works Shattuck edited and translated at an . Mr. Shattuck was among those selected by a group of ladies in Austin to be honored at the tenth annual writers roundup, an event sponsored each year by Theta Sigma Phi. He could not attend, but he sent the following reply to a question posed him by Frank Wardlaw, emcee for the roundup. THE QUESTION was: Do you see any similarities between the avant-garde of the Banquet Years and the Angry Young Men or Beat Generation of today? If so, where do you think the center of this literary rejuvenation isEngland, the West Coast, New York? Mr. Shattuck replied: “…. Your second question… mercifully simplifies the first, for you ask: where is the center of the contemporary movement London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Rome? What gave form and staying power to the avant-garde at the turn of the century was its geographical and spiritual concentration in Paris, a properous and all-tolerant capital. Our generation of the moment is so dispersed in space and in purpose as to have little meaningful unity. Its obvious characteristics of musical taste, dress, lingo, and street-corner behavior have been spread by the movies as far as the stately Cours Mirabeau here in Aix. I never expected to run the risk of being taken for a square in the French provinces, but so goes the world today. “To my knowledge the only organ which has begun to articulate the feelings and the context of the so-called beat generation and to oblige its members to see themselves without indulgence is a little newspaper in New York, The Village Voice. In its informal interviews, heated letters from readers of all shapes and addictions, and unstereotyped literary and social criticism, one can begin to perceive what has happened. The total engagement in life which existentialism taught immediately after the last war has evolved mysteriously into the total disengagement of the cool cat who doesn’t lift a finger for anyone and lives skin deep. How it happened has yet to be explained coherently and sympathetically. A f ter n i n e months of running controversy on the generation kick, the Greenwich Village weekly printed a letter which answered all challengers. “Dear Sir: This hip routine is really getting infantile. Oh so young and oh so cool kiddies sneering at one another: ‘Me Dad, cooler than you, Dad.’ And what beat these beat babies? Why, being alive. It hurts to live and the more alive you are the more it can hurt. Besides, here are problems. So keep it cool, make it deadpan all the way through, lie down and play dead doggie. It’s easier and safer.. As for Diane Di Prima, your correspondent of last week, I submit: LUBBOCK, AUSTIN Texas Tech’s student newspaper, “Toreador,” reports that several Lubbock businesses have refused to serve “Mexicads” who were foreign students at the college. The paper said two Tech students were left waiting in their car at a drive-in and never served. The next night their orders were taken but no food brought. They went inside and the manager told them, “We don’t serve Mexicans here.” They said they were foreign students at Tech and were served. Last year the same thing happened twice at local movie houses, the paper reported. Editorially the newspaper said: “Only stupid, narrow-minded proprietors allow this type of thing to happen.” Foreign students and native Latin-Americans “are students at TEXAS TECH and should be regarded as such,” it continued. The case of an Arabian student who attended the University of Texas and was constantly called “Mexican” was cited: “After he got back to his homeland, he worked with the oil business, and soon he became in charge of the whole operation in Like, Diane, why the palaver? The coolest cat is a cadaver. Michael O’Connell For further comment I refer you to The Village Voice, which by last June had turned up a parodied interview with a sample of the next “generation generation.” \(“Well, how did it begin?” “We didn’t begin, man. We just are. I KNOW LITTLE ABOUT the English crop of rebels except that their writers are as uneven in performance as our ownand many of them equally lacking in intelligence. There has never been a great writer who was not intelligent, though many have carefully shown another face. The Paris avant-garde of half a century ago, driven by many of the same impulses as the present generation, enjoyed two advantages: a sense of being truly at the center of things where a few hundred men were laying out the future of the arts for a long time to come, and the opportunity to confront and combat itself daily in cafe discussions, well-edited literary reviews, and vast jungles of paintingthe new juryless art exhibits. The present generation, angry or cool or beat, does not have these advantages. Without a sense of direction and complaining of a cultural desert, it only too often flails the air. Nevertheless this generation which is my ownis bound to produce some major figures, though they may not be the ones the ‘trade’ has hand-picked for glory in the last twelve months. One of them. may one day even turn up in Texas tame enough to be scared into a writers’ roundup on the hoof.” WINSTON BODE Arabia. Do you think he is favorable toward the United States? No!” In Austin, the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas, revealed that a Negro U. T. student and his date were, the Negro said, moved by five policemen from their seats in the student section at Waco for the Baylor-UT game into a segregated end zone area. Baylor president W. T. White said “I regret it happened.” One unnamed Baylor offical said “it’s no real secret that our football crowds have always been segregated. But we’ve played teams with Negro players. and had no trouble whatever.” YOUR SAVINGS EARN MORE Accounts Insured To Current $10,000 Rate 4% Per Annum