Three Thirty Three

IT SHOULD BE no secret that the CRIMSON and the Yearbook have been engaged in something very close to civil war for the last month. The problem is the CRIMSON Photo Annual, a one-dollar paper-back released a couple of weeks ago, which the Yearbook people seem to see as an invasion of their turf. I'm a partisan in this fracas. If an inexpensive collection of pictures by CRIMSON photographers can substitute for the Yearbook's $11.95 package of nostalgia, then I am happy to see capitalism run its course. If the Yearbook really is an anachronism, cartels to save it make about as much sense as buying a ticket to Spring Weekend-even though you don't want to go-because such events are good for the college.

My confession, then, is that I didn't really expect to like Three Thirty Three. And as I difficulty read page after page, hoping to find reasons not to write an easily resented, condescending pan, I liked it less and less. Even the unbiased in the Lowell House Dining Hall whom I coyly asked, "Have you seen the Yearbook? How do you like it?" agreed with my own bigoted opinion: the book is not only bad, but the weakest product the men on Dunster Street have turned out in years.

This year the editors have included a good deal less of the much-vilified Yearbook writing than usual. What copy there is, though, primarily concerns some of the most tedious identity crises ever recorded. Apparently the book is out to capture what the Harvard experience feels like rather than what happened here last year, but the verbal talent to bring off such an enterprise is nowhere to be found in Three Thirty Three. The editors have consistently let slip past their red pencils verbosity ("the University has long been cognizant of the fact that the issues involved transcend the sphere of economics"), turgid metaphor ("Girls dot the large lecture halls like raisins in raisin bread"), and embarrassing gaffes in tone (Kenny McBain's "I have never lost a certain fondness for the ex").

The most dismal case of Three Thirty Three's skimpiness is the Sports section. It includes but two articles-a routine description of the football season and a confusing skiing story. There are two pages of fine crew pictures, two pages of dull wrestling pictures, two pages of out-of-focus winter track pictures. Nothing at all on the nation's best squash team and only a short paragraph on the Olympic crew.Whoever wrote cutlines for the four pages of hockey pictures couldn't spell Ron Mark's name and probably couldn't tell a fore-check from a slap shot.

THE YEARBOOK'S decision to let pictures tell the story would make more sense if the photos had been selected with a bit more care. The good ones (like the WHRB series or the girl combing her hair on page 117) are all the time undercut by self-conscious posed snapshots and full-page pictures of subjects like a Radcliffe bulletin board or a Harvard toilet. Graphically, the book seems reasonably inventive and handsome, though the moody two-page shot of an athlete running up the Soldier's Field steps with last year's sports scores illegibly super-imposed in matching type has to rate as a major debacle. It is also distributing that next to never do pictures and copy work together. A readable, if familiar, feature on the shift of Phillips Brooks House to community action is illustrated with two pictures of the program and seven of people lounging around the PBH corridors and the PBH steps.

For my money, the only bright spot of the book is the 24-page section the editors turned over to Harvard blacks. The eight articles do not avoid repitition, but unlike the rest of Three Thirty Three, they are written with some verve and contain some information. We learn that two-thirds of Harvard blacks are second-generation college students and that three-quarters went to predominantly white high schools, that former Afro president Jeff Howard thinks "Afro-American Studies is the manifestation of a few political realities just as much at fair Harvard as at San Francisco State,"and that whites are ill-advised to try instantly to pump black acquaintances for their views on the Problem. Harlon Dalton's introduction, provocatively addressed to those "for whom the Black experience is not a birthright," is terribly convincing: on the evidence of these pages, there is a great deal for whites to envy in the articulateness and heterogeneous but coherent community of Harvard blacks.

Unhappily, the Black section is an isolated stroke of political awareness. An execrable essay entitled "A Perspective of the Causes and Concerns of Student Activism at Harvard" begins with the sentence, "A profound questioning of the role of the University in society and a re-evaluation of what it means to be a student within the university have engendered an unprecendented surge of student activity at Harvard." And it gets no better.

Part of the Yearbook's problem with student radicalism may be attributed to the traditional dilemma of sending the book to the printers when the year is only two-thirds done. Spring 1969 was a particularly unfortunate Spring to miss, and Three Thirty Three has rallied with a sixteen-page supplement on the occupation, bust, and strike. But the insensitivity is still evident. The Yearbook photographers are sensationally good on the dismay of the early-morning spectators at University Hall and the excitement of the crowd and participants at the first mass meeting. But they tell almost nothing about what was happening inside University Hall and seem befuddled by radicals, who are caricatured with multiple shots of bullhorn harangues and a particularly clumsy shot of a bearded youth sitting with his feet on the desk in Dean Glimp's office.

UNTIL I FOUND a copy of Three Thirty sitting in the CRIMSON newsroom last week, I thought it might be only nostalgia or naivete that made me think that Harvard yearbooks were once much better-like in my freshman year. But there it was-dark red with black lettering on the cover just like this year's-an honest-to-God book worth saving, with more than a dozen Faculty profiles, good features on Harvard music and the Design School, and a long anthology of the best writing from undergraduate publications. Harvard would never buy the intensely orderly rah-rah spirit behind most high- school yearbooks, but the 1965-66 edition suggests that the substanceless artsiness of this year's number is not the only alternative.

Three Thirty Three says to me that Harvard is a place where students sit around a lot worrying about not meeting girls (or not meeting boys), pay no attention to the fascinating variety of people passing through and hanging on in Cambridge, regard Faculty only as performers who at their best can make a lecture seem like a seminar, and neither know nor much care what their fellow students are doing. If all this is true, these are bad times for Harvard, but it still seems to me more probable that these are merely the worst of times for the Yearbook.