BEEBE FINDS CURRENT NUMBER OF ADVOCATE LITTLE ABOVE MEDIOCRE

The following review of the current number of the Advocate was written for the Crimson by Luolus Beebe '27.

In consideration of the fact that the Advocate once printed a review of one of my opera which, were I a vain man, must have caused me grief (the notice was headed 'Printed Matter' and contained the statements that my contribution to the art of beautiful letters was only a record of "what the Well Dressed Man will--write") and considering also that the Advocate's offices immediately adjoin my own tenement and that nightly the uproar occasioned by their service of the muse (consisting mostly of sounds of breaking glass and a song about a certain William, a nautical man) ascend to interrupt my musings upon the good, the beautiful and the true, considering, as I say, these prejudical circumstances, it might be expected that I should lay down on the Christmas number of this edifying periodical a barrage of overripe metaphorical greengroceries and pop bottles.

Edmonds and Parker Shine

The burden of lifting the average of the present issue above the level of discreditable mediocrity falls entirely upon the efforts of Mr. Walter Edmonds and Mr. B. N. Parker Jr., who, with a short story and a poem respectively, redeem the sheets from the come-on-fellows-and-lets-get-together standard of prep school journalism. Certainly only the most desperate editorial crisis could induce the Vindex or Horae Scholasticae to print Mr. V. A. Brown's maudlin sentimentality or Mr. R. S. Minturn's epic of life-force agonies under any other head than that of humor. If your notions of story writing include the theme of the college bounder whose incredible extravagance leads him to the purchase of rosewood mounted radios and such bibelots with which to satisfy his sybaritic lusts and whose ultimate depravity is the selling of a pair of football tickets to a speculator, "the act, he knew, of a certain type of student designated by an obscene noun," if, I repeat you can believe our colleges are the scenes of such debauched revelry and licentious extravagance, you will have a hot half hour with "The Trun of the Tide."

"The Great Election Banquet," however, Mr. Edmond's contribution, is of another order entirely. The banquet of the Democrats of Oneida country, all fourteen of them with the addition of the stage driver who voted both Democrat and Federalist, a banquet which culminated with the practical destruction of the Baptist steeple and the absolute inundation of all the guests to the great discomfort of the Federalists who had to foot the bill and stay sober, is a pretty homeric tale. If (in the manner of Time's advertisements) you are curious to know who shouted 'Oysthersh' from under the table at frequent intervals, or who were the young bloods who voted Democratic because it seemed the sporting thing to do, we refer you to the leading article in the issue under discussion.

"The Three Season" by Mr. Parker is a prolonged lyric in decasyllabic rymed double quatrains, which, in spite of its occasional cliches and vaguely tenuous theme, is well sustained and successful.

For the rest of the issue, the editorial and paragraph leaders have about them a sort of musty Transcript atmosphere of polite futility and the advertisements are very nice.