September 19, 1971

IN THE absence of any definitive indications so far as to the scope and nature of the post freeze domestic economic program and the ultimate outcome of international monetary negotiations, the financial markets continued to display a considerable amount anxiety last week.

V Canby humorous article on current trends in films, in style of mock int with film indus friend Stanley

David Levine and Bruce A North sketch bathers at Coney Island for incorporation into larger art works; Levine discusses his philosophy of art and inspiration provided by free movement of bathers; his and North's work illus

Briefly, before black ‘humor, there was among one kind of writer in America a preoccupation with blackness and darkness in general, the various hearts of darkness in Conrad, Melville, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, against which perfectly good writers like Lawrence and Forster looked a little fruity. The scrub writers of that moment could scarcely offer a fiction to the reader without a full complement of dwarfs and religious maniacs. The seats of Pullman cars itched cancerously; heroines had extraordinary moonlike faces; Arabs ran off with one's wife; and jockeys with small, vulpine heads and ancient racing silks scuttled through a landscape that was not quite of this world. It was an age of the grotesque when readers of Alfred Chester salivated for pus; when Norman Mailer was prominently between publishers; and when one read aloud from Djuna Barnes with a sense of historical mission. But there was a varsity too; and of that crew, John Hawkes wrote a fiction that was less doctrinaire “dark” than it was truly hallucinatory; and absolutely no one comes to mind who could so well arrest that perpetually terrified portion of the inner mind with unnerving images of things going to pieces.

Decline of old‐time candy stores, once popular neighborhood gathering places, in NYC discussed; street crime, which forces owners to close stores at sundown, cited as factor in decline; operation of Abe Coda's store, Forest Hills, described; illus