Word: mosaical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nature of things that the great bulk of student writing in literary magazines should fall below professional standards, and yet it is very important that editors have the courage to print the work of promising, but as yet unpolished, authors. However, the reader of the winter Mosaic ought to humble himself before the rampant audacity of the editorial board that has chosen to print Jonathan Shay's I'm Here, Are You There? The editors deserve blame because they, as men in some command over their intellects, have allowed a person with none over his to expose his inadequacy...
...relief to find that the other two articles in in this issue did not follow Mr. Shay's pattern of insobriety. But here the relief ended. Charles Vernoff's Defense of Neo-Hasidism answers Judith Kegan's diatribe against halfway-Hasids, which appeared in Mosaic last spring. Miss Kegan, says Vernoff, overstates her case when she debunks students who are only superficially enchanted with traditional Jewish mysticism. He argues instead that these spiritual dabblers ought to be encouraged, since they may eventually find true faith. Writing from palpable ignorance on this subject. I am unable to say whether Vernoff speaks...
Buried away in this welter of polemics, a beautiful and well-modulated voice cries out for your attention. Stephen Sandy has written two new poems. The first, The Castor Bean Garden, is easily the most worthwhile item in this Mosaic, and also the most competent, well-pruned poem I have read in a Harvard publication. Sandy's intricate patterns of internal rhyme and his lush, but controlled alliteration give his poem just the the right form to complement his subject matter, which is the opposition of careful symmetry and undisciplined luxuriance. His second piece, Shoppers' World, struck me as slightly...
...example of that 20th century phenomenon, the great novelist who does not write novels. The Fox in the Attic, his first novel in 24 years, is the first installment of a grand design, The Human Predicament, intended as a fictional study of the demonic forces that shattered the ancient mosaic of European civilization...
...started working in a mosaic style which, though still abstract, was tightly disciplined. But the mosaics did not satisfy him either. "Abstraction is no longer enough for me," he said. "So I'm returning to the image. The image gives one a wider sense of communication...