332

IT'S usually a toss-up from year to year whether the writing in the Yearbook is more abysmal than the pictures. This time there's no doubt. It's the writing.

Not that the pictures are any better than usual. A Yearbook picture is normally worth about four of your average words, and 332 has all of the standard blurs, graininess, and inscrutable shadows.

I suppose a yearbook feels perpetually obligated to show the same dreary archways, people asleep in libraries, and sunsets-or-are-they-sunrises. But sit-ins, student power rallies, draft-card burnings, black activism, and New Hampshire were just a tad out of the ordinary this year, and one might almost expect a competent job of photojournalism. Forget it.

Take the march on the Pentagon, which the Yearbook felt--no doubt correctly--had a profound effect on a lot of people around here. Remember the anger and frustration, the hippies stuffing flowers down the gun barrels that were pointed at them? The Yearbook brings it all back with some of the worst photos I have seen of the march. The only one that reveals some vague perception of the mood is an action shot that is unintelligibly blurred.

And so it goes. There are the stock pictures of crowds andaudiences, jocks at rest and play--much that is self-consciously arty, and appallingly little fine photography.

The prose is everywhere murkier than usual this year, though one idea for a piece was remarkably sensible: the chronology of the year was scrapped in favor of an essay on the war and Harvard. But the traditional collection of undergraduate writing succumbed to a deathly five-essay section on why-I'm-a-work (-jock,-do-gooder, -singer, and -black militant, respectively).

A decent editor might have been able to hack free some interesting thoughts from yards of Year-bok-style verbiage. ("The situation I have seen that probably best exemplifies this conflict of criteria is the plight of the high school super-athlete at Harvard," writes the jock.) On the other hand, nothing good could come from the idiotic little statistical "analysis" of the senior class taken from the blurbs accompanying seniors' pictures.

It's simply amazing that the Yearbook could turn out neither readable nor thoughtful pieces this year. Why not a review of mixed-media productions here instead of that sorry shopping list of the props for Prince Erie? Why not something by a senior whose mind is blown on the draft instead of Neal Katz's duller recollections?

The captions towards the front of the book make by far the best reading. They consist of short quotes from students, professors, and deans, and they give more of a feeling than anything else in 332 of what this year was about.

That is something to which Yearbook editors seem to have devoted precious little thought. Politics invading the academy? Revulsion towards the Establishment? The euphoria of McCarthy's "Kiddie Corps"? It's buried in there somewhere, if you read between the lines (which incidentally is made easier, and in some cases necessary, by sloppy proofreading and make-up).

But it's pretty soporific going. The Yearbook mistakes leaden prose for weighty thought. Sample insight: "The exigencies of the moment make-speculation about the future seem superfluous." Yeah, guys, it's been exigent.