Literature The Advocate

EVERY YEAR a Dunster House chemistry tutor sits down to dinner and finds a group of seniors waxing eloquent about revitalizing the Harvard Advocate. This year, upon discovering the annual Advocate pep rally, the tutor said, "Boys and girls, if the Advocate were smart, you'd print that mag on soft paper, and we'd make it functional as toilet paper." Everyone laughed, and someone suggested that it would be worthwhile to get the tutor to use toilet paper, and a timid voice in the corner said, "But Fred, isn't the Gazette enough?" and there was more laughter. But then, because everyone at the table was embarrassed at being linked with the Advocate, the subject was changed.

This week it was the Advocate that changed. The January issue, printed on S.D. Warren's Lustro Offset Enamel Glo 70 pound stock paper, was planned, and is guaranteed, to cut up any tutor's rump. But hopefully, your tutor and you will read it before you flush it. To incite you, the Advocate now offers provocative visual and psychic stimulation-prose, poetry, drawings and photographs from within Harvard. The Advocate 's new layout and design format was introduced to bring readers some pleasure and to attract writers to submit their work and publish in the next issue, in April. Can you really, in good conscience, turn down this offer? You shit on the Advocate now, soon you'll want to spit on a Candy Striper. And for what? -last night I saw Fred walking stiff-legged down Bow Street toward Dunster House. He said that he had fallen on the ice and bruised his buttocks on a parking meter. He was wearing his slide rule strapped to his belt as usual, but he was carrying a camera, and a sketchbook, and under his arm he had a manuscript. "Fuck," said Fred, "I've been considering my future. I've had a thought or two about Norman Mailer. I too would choose to write for Life at a million bucks than have to job hunt in Seattle as an aeronautical engineer."

BUT WHY slice your flanks before you're convinced? Accept on good faith that the Advocate dispelled its grandiose illusions when T.S. Eliot kicked the bucket. New in the name of 104 years of literary pretensions, the Advocate appeals to you to make it a vehicle for publishing Harvard writing. Fred did, and at 21 South Street in the Advocate officers, a host of "dead boys and girls" are happy that he did.