Corn Rustle
Sir:
"From Illinois to Arkansas, the cornfields nodded in silky tassel" [TIME, Aug. 23].
The above sentence is beautiful English, but very poor botany.
Corn silks are not borne on the tassel. They are the stigmas and styles of the pistillate flowers, borne in the form of a spike called the ear on a branch about midway down the side of the stalk or stem. When the silks are first projected from the tip of the ear, en masse, they are pendant, and flexible enough to be swayed by the gentlest breeze.
The staminate flowers are borne on the tassel, which stands rigidly erect at the top of the stalk, and would nod or sway only if the wind were blowing strongly enough to bend the whole corn plant.
ARTHUR S. LYNESS
Instructor in Botany
Central State Teachers College
Stevens Point, Wis.
P:TIME'S Corn Editor is bending in the breeze.--ED.
Mortality Revised
Sir:
The report on the case of the child with exstrophy of the bladder [TIME, Aug. 23] ... should be corrected to prevent adding unnecessary anguish to the parents of other such congenitally malformed children now living and yet to be born--estimated to be 2,000 per annum in America. The outlook is not as bad as painted, with or without operation. Authorities reckon the mortality to be 50% by the tenth year, and 66% do not reach their 20th year ... ,
The danger of the operation derives not from the removal of the bladder but from the transplanting of the ureters to the bowel, and the mortality for the series of operations necessary has been below 20% (80% survive) in hundreds of cases . . . Furthermore, the majority of the deaths occur in the older age groups (over 50 years) in whom this type of operation is done for cancer of the (normally situated) bladder. The operative survival rate for exstrophy is better than the entire group quoted above, because of their younger age and the absence of tumor.
ROBERT A. BURNS, M.D. Woodland, Calif.
P: In the general excitement of a story about a sick child, TIME--along with some doctors, some lawyers, and most of the press--swallowed some wild statistics, thanks Reader Burns for correcting the record.--ED.
Love, Latin & Miss Geweke
Sir:
Someone with a rudimentary critical sense should explain to Miss Lenore Geweke that no student of hers, or (di melius) anyone else's, is at all likely to think the Aeneid "contains an exciting love affair" [TIME, Aug. 16]. The amores of a feeble lay figure like Aeneas, whose only sign of life is his bursting into tears every few hundred lines, are neither exciting nor amores. Does Miss Geweke expect mass swooning in classrooms when Vergil himself dithered away from his major bedroom scene with three words like ulularunt vertice Nymphae?
It may be N.E.A. classroom salesmanship to ballyhoo Vergil for something he handled with such singular incompetence; but if you purvey nonsense to your students on one topic, they will assume the rest of your material is nonsense too . . .
There was no need of Miss Geweke's assembling special vocabularies or syntax counts or her "three scholars" for work which every scholar knows has been done and gathering dust for years. All that was wanted was a head slightly less muddled than most of her fellow classicists' . . . and enough imagination to suspect three reasons why Latin is called dead:
a) conservative professors and their publishers.
b) the idiotic purveying as literature of anything that happened to be written in Latin,
c) the equally idiotic refusal to teach. Latin as a language rather than as a moldy acrostic.
I fail to see why a useful language like Latin should be held up to further ridicule merely because Miss Geweke is publicizing a new type of mold.
W. M. SPACKMAN
Acting Assistant Professor of Classics
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colo.
Snake Act
Sir:
My left eyebrow came up about three notches at your straight-faced reporting of the Turkish snake item.*
[Another] version of this kahvehane nargile dream/- had the incident taking place at Kirsehir, with the snake doing its act in a woman's gullet. The version I liked best, however, had no surgeons on the scene. Peasant vineyard workers knew a better way of removing the snake. They lured it out with the odor of fresh milk, from a cup held before the patient's open mouth. This version stirred vague nostalgic memories of yarns I heard on the Oklahoma plains as a kid . .
All of which brings to mind the old stock advice supposedly given every reporter upon his first assignment in the Orient: "Don't believe a single thing unless you see it with your own eyes, and believe only half of what you see." Was TIME'S reporter sleeping . . . ?
MENNO DUERKSEN
Istanbul, Turkey
P: No comment (anyway, he had his mouth closed).--ED.
Police v. Striker & Vice Versa
Sir:
... I happened to be at the scene of the Univis strike disturbances several times, and I know what transpired there. Your photograph of three policemen arresting a struggling picket [TIME, Aug. 9] would give the uninformed the impression of brute force against women on the part of our police, but I can assure you that our police conducted themselves admirably and with what I consider remarkable restraint. The fact of the matter is that it takes three policemen to handle a fighting, militant person as in your picture, particularly if this person is a woman . . .
It seems to me you would have served the forces of law & order much better had you published a photograph such as that which was taken of a striker trying to choke an officer of the law .
HERBERT E. HARRIS
Dayton, Ohio
Neighborly Sentiments
Sir:
"Some U.S. air engineers . . . dread the thought that if the U.S. does not develop turboprops more quickly it might have to buy them from the British" [TIME, Aug. 9].
So long as a relatively liberal publication like TIME can echo sentiments like this without comment, it is no good Americans being sensitive about being called politically "immature." The sentence reveals a way of thinking which is as childish in its nationalism as it is economically illiberal.
The fact is that with its superiority in natural resources and its technical know-how, the U.S. can never fall far behind in the friendly competition which ought to exist between her air engineers and ours, and the second fact which wants emphasis is that non-American nations cannot buy from the U.S. more than she buys from them. Why therefore "dread" the need to buy engines from Britain? Surely it's better economics (and better Christianity) to say and believe that the more prosperous my neighbors are, the more prosperous I am myself.
RICHARD ROWE
Skegness, Lincolnshire, England
Architectural Uniformity
Sir:
... I would like to put in a few words of defense for our new library [TIME, Aug. 16].
Modern architecture seems to change almost as rapidly as women's fashions. Rather than risk being out of date every 25 years, as seems to be the case at Florida's University of Miami, Princeton has chosen a style of architecture that has looked good for centuries, and promises to look good for as many more . . .
As long as internal usefulness does not suffer, outside appearance is not a "mistaken loyalty" as Modern Architect William Lescaze suggests, and I am becoming more & more aware of this every time I look out of my north window and view one of our architectural nightmares of the pre-uniformity age. Every time the architecture changes, the existing buildings seem to turn into eyesores. I see no reason to add to the ones we already have . . .
ROBERT B. DODD
Princeton, N.J.
Therapeutic Newspapers
Sir:
In the Aug. 16 issue of TIME you have given your readers the impression that hospital newspapers are new, unique and superior to other forms of therapeutic occupation.
A paper called the Illuminator was written by the mental patients of the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1843. At the Utica State Hospital the Opal was written and press-printed by patients in 1851. Most of the good large mental hospitals in this country have had patient newspapers for many years.
If weaving is learning to live with rugs, then newspaper work is learning to live with ink and paper. Not wisecracks but evaluation of individual patient reaction determines the best prescription of patient activity. Experience has not proven that mental health among newspaper people is higher than among rug weavers.
SIDNEY LIGHT, M.D.
Cambridge, Mass.
Bizet's Beat
Sir:
". . . Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed up Bizet in Carmen Jones" [TIME, Aug. 23].
It has probably been a long time since your writer saw the really beautiful production that Billy gave Oscar Hammerstein's adaptation of the Bizet opera--or perhaps he never saw it! It may have been many things, but jazzed up it was not! . . .
If one cared ... to make comparisons, he would find that Oscar Hammerstein II's translation from the French to the American Negro idiom was in essence a sibling of the libretto of Meilhac and Halevy on which the score of Georges Bizet was based. The few liberties that were taken in the score by Robert Russell Bennett were done for choreographic purposes, and these were innovations in arrangement only . . .
MURIEL SMITH
New York City
P: Reader Smith--who was one of Billy Rose's two alternating Carmens, singing the role every other night--has a point. Carmen Jones jazzed up the dancing, sets and lyrics, but let Bizet have his own beat.--ED.
* "In Kemalpasa, Turkey, surgeons removed from Arsan Tekkanat's stomach a foot-long snake that had slipped in as he slept with his mouth open" [TIME, Aug. 16].
/- Coffee-house pipe dream.
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