Word: mosaic
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This exotically self-styled chef d'oeuvre has been shaken well, with generous borrowings from Auden and Dylan Thomas in style and imagery, sprinkled liberally with French and German phrases, and overgarnished with italics in all the most hortatory places. The result is intended to serve as "a mosaic of insights, a constellation of enlightening moments" as the two brothers tour prewar Europe, from Bonn and its dueling societies to Paris and the Café des Espions...
Where, these days, are the undergraduates of Harvard and Radcliffe writing non-fiction? Cambridge 38 is gone, at least for this year. Comment disappeared months ago. If its last issue is any indication, the Harvard Review has decided firmly against student writing. And now Mosaic, published this month for the first time in a year, arrives on the newsstands with only one of its thirteen contributors a Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduate...
...degree, the decline of the magazines can be traced to a shrinking advertising market in the Square. But this is only a partial explanation. Mosaic doesn't depend on advertising, and the CRIMSON still flourishes financially; yet neither is besieged by contributors seeking a forum...
...Mosaic now publishes in a vacuum, and this issue in particular seems little more than a chance collection of stories, poems tracts, reviews, and articles. No single viewpoint or intent infuses all the contributions. True, the magazine is a "Jewish Student Journal" and most of the writers are Jewish, but this is not enough. Commentary is also "Jewish, but much more significantly, it is aimed at a sector of the liberal intelligentsia that considers itself highly aware and concerned, both politically and culturally. Mosaic certainly doesn't need an ideology. Nor should it pick a "theme" for each issue...
...Epps has not yet approached success. His writings on the Negro revolution mix, in a very mechanical way, the jargon of Sociology and the rhetoric of moral imprecation. There is no fusion of technique and sensibility. This piece in Mosaic seems to me no less mechanical synthesis of literary allusion and Profound Truth...