Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Poet Randall Jarrell tossed his beard in vexation and said: "To most of us, verse, any verse, is so uncongenial, so exhaustingly artificial, that I have often thought that a man could make his fortune by entirely eliminating from our culture verse of any kind. Take for example:

Early to bed, early to rise

Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

"Why say it like a rocking horse? Why make it jingle so? And wise--who wants to be wise?

Which sibling is the well-adjusted

sibling?

The one that gets its sleep.

"That is the way the modern Mother Goose would put it. I don't expect the modern Mother Goose to be especially popular with little children who have not yet learned not to like poetry. But it is the parent who buys the book."

To Omaha newsmen Grandpa Harry Truman confided that he dasn't lug around a picture of little Clifton Truman Daniel, 4 months. Reason: "The boss [Bess] won't let me. She's afraid I'd bore everyone." At week's end Harry and Bess dropped in at a Southern California kiddies' mecca, Disneyland, which their grandson is too young to enjoy yet. Among the diversions enjoyed by the young-in-heart Trumans: a ride on a Mark Twain riverboat, a rocket trip to the moon.

Shortly before a Russian dog became the highest form of animal life (see SCIENCE), Sherpa Guide Tensing Norkay, co-conqueror of Mount Everest, trotted out one of a Tibetan breed that formerly contended for the altitude mark. Raised in the high Himalayas, Tensing's homebred personal pet, a Lhasa Apso, was a notable attraction at a London kennel club show.

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a library founded by Herbert Hoover at Stanford University in 1919, held a fund-raising banquet in Los Angeles, got a message from the ex-President saluting its archives as "the records of the highest idealism yet expressed by man . . . the minutes of every important effort of men to make peace." Asked by a Manhattan reporter for his views on another matter--the health of the U.S. economy--Hoover disclosed that economic crystal gazing is no longer for him: "I'm through with that sort of thing. I'm busy writing books." Current project: a volume on his friend and World War I White House predecessor, Woodrow Wilson.

Two old oracles--Poet Carl Sandburg, 77, and cantankerous Architectitan Frank Lloyd Wright, 87--played ring-around-the-microphone in what was billed as "the world's first educational TV spectacular" on Chicago's knowledge-spraying station WTTW. They wrangled cordially about skyscrapers and cities, commuters and sovereign individuals, modern cars and ferry boats (the same thing, cried Wright), the human spirit v. science. In a typical exchange. Iconoclast Wright rumbled: "Americans cannot claim a culture of their own!" Replied American Culturist Sandburg: "What about Walt Whitman?" Wright snorted: "Oh, Walt. You're talking about the English influences that our ancestors came over with--their lace at their wrists and buckles on their shoes." When their amiable debate ended, a microphone by accident was left open and TV listeners heard a final word from Harsh Realist Wright: "We'd better get out of here, Carl, before somebody starts telling the truth!"

Happy-landers in London, after a flight from the Middle East: Army Major General John F. R. (for Francis Regis) Seitz, chief of the U.S. military mission to Iran, and his wife, Actress Jessie Royce Landis. Occasion for congratulations: Jessie, no bird lady, had flown their four-engine Skymaster for a brief period during the air journey. Said she: "After a while my husband said he'd had enough roller-coaster flying and made me hand over the controls."

A seven-year hassle over possession of a heap of pornography was won by the Institute for Sex Research, brainchild of Indiana University's late Sexpert Alfred C. Kinsey. A federal judge ordered U.S. customs agents to hand over the smut collection, long impounded since its arrival from Europe and the Far East, to Kinsey's surviving sexologists. There is no indication that the sex researchers take a "prurient interest" in the material, ruled the court, so "the work of serious scholars need find no impediment" in customs barriers. While the government planned an appeal, the locks were soon to come off some items that will be barred from public scrutiny. Among the sprung Kinseyana: a Japanese scroll and some Chinese paintings that would seem indecent in a casbah bordello, some French lithographs not by Toulouse-Lautrec, assorted quotations (none in Bartlett's) gathered from "lavatory wall inscriptions," a clutch of phallic symbols from China, a book penned in 1790 by "The Keeper of the Temple" and tantalizingly titled The Lascivious Hypocrite, or The Triumphs of Vice.

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