Further Mention
Granite, a literary magazine founded in 1971 by a Dartmouth professor and enjoying in the interim the support of the most illustrious of Dartmouth poets, has published its last issue in these environs with the departure of one editor for other academic groves and the decision of the other to resign his editorship under press of professional responsibilities.
Like one of the fabled alternatives for the month just past, Granite departs like a lion, with a roar still reverberating through the cultural halls of New Hampshire and beyond. Its fiscal health has always been precarious, its early issues financed from the pocket of founder George M. Young, Assistant Professor of Russian, with later contributions from co-editor Anselm Parlatore, resident psychiatrist at Mary Hitchcock Hospital. Hence a 1974 grant of $750 from the National Endowment for the Arts, federal monies funneled through the state duly approved, as such must be, by the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts - was more than welcome.
The grant was approved last May by Governor Mddrim Thomson Jr., an ex officio Trustee of the College. Then His Excellency's attention was called to a 1972 Granite publication Northern Lights, devoted to the work of upper New England poets, which included a poem entitled "Castrating the Cat by Michael McMahon, a creative writing instructor at what was Colby Junior College His eye lighting on two four-letter words which he found personally offensive, the Governor pronounced the poem "an item of filth" and himself appalled by a "request for taxpayers; funds to subsidize the publication of obscenities.
Editor Young, defending Castrating the Cat" as "anything but obscene," protested to the Governor that it was a "serious, subtle, complex and profound" poem "about the excision of something natural and powerful that is considered too much of a nuisance to be tolerated." The New Hampshire Attorney General, while finding it not legally obscene, declared that the Governor and his council were within their rights in refusing the grant.
At this writing, a New-York based organization called Advocates for the Arts, has initiated litigation against the Governor for his censorship"; Granite is moving to Stony Brook, New York, with Dr. Parlatore; and New Hampshire's chief executive has had second thoughts about a similar revocation of a larger grant for poetry readings in the state. His staff, it seems, has reviewed the list of poets scheduled for readings and found some among them to be sufficiently wholesome for the ears of citizenry of the Granite State.
You love the sun, profess yourself a sun worshipper, and have lain, face up and back up, for countless hours on many beaches. You boast about your marvellous tans, and your pale-faced friends praise the splendid glow of your skin, facial, frontal, and dorsal. A new man after such vacations, you assure for yourself a prolonged life of euphoric health and happiness. Right? Ask your dermatologist. Or ask Roy Rowan '41, who thought like you. He tells his story in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly. For decades he was so warm-blooded that he never wore a topcoat, even in winter. Never did he suffer a headache crying out for aspirin. Mornings, he jogged three miles. And then the sun of decades beamed belatedly and maliciously. At the age of 54, his hands and feet cold, he was perpetually thirsty, suffered morning headaches, and lost weight.
Diabetes? Just below his right shoulder blade, doctors found a black spot, which, excised and checked, proved to be malignant melanoma, cancer with a vicious.propensity to spread. The Atlantic Monthly story is entitled "Cancer: Good News and Bad: A Personal Encounter." Surgery of course. Cut out a circular area about the diameter of a baseball with, for a patch, skin grafted from his thigh. If the melanoma had metastasized (jumped elsewhere, lungs, or liver),
Roy Rowan would be "in the big leagues." Asked for definite information about cancer causes, the surgeon ran true to form. Cautious, he was unsure what triggers melanoma, but he observed, "Some correlation has been observed between melanoma and exposure to the sun. Melanin is the pigment cell which makes you tan. When one of the melanocytes goes berserk, melanoma occurs." So your little black spot may spell not Prolonged Life but Early Death. Rowan's did not, but he was half scared to death. He recovered, a wiser man, who from now on may not lie, face up and back up, on the beaches of the world. The Atlantic Monthly article spells out at length what surgeons, operations, and hospitals can and cannot do for you. There is at least a faint chance that, reading it, you may wish to continue your celestial devotions under a cool moon preserving your gorgeous whiteness. Tanning is damning.
Hoyt S. Alverson, Dartmouth Associate Professor of Anthropology, is writing a book, hardly one simple enough to be researched and typed up in a Baker Library study. Among agrarian people in South Africa, he spent eight years of study and field work. A tentative title for the forthcoming volume is Mind in the Heartof Darkness: Value and Self Identity among theTswana.
The Alversons are a family with a difference. Marianne, the wife, and Keith and Brian, the two sons, lived with the father-researcher for nine months in a mud hut in a rural setting of Eastern Botswana and for four months in a traditional Tswana settlement area of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. Marianne started a bush school with 30 Tswana children aged 7 to 15, taught them how to count, do simple arithmetic, speak English, and write in their own language. The elder son trudged to an all-Tswana school four miles away. All Alversons became fluent in Setswana, the native language. The white family, not living like whites but like natives whose men must have a wife and children to become adult, enabled the white researcher to penetrate more fully not only into the daily lives of the blacks but also into their banter, humor, stories, poetry, and music. His main goal was to understand and to document what happens to many Tswanans when as many as 25 per cent of males, aged 15 to 45, leave their settlements to work in mines and factories and thus cause great challenges to themselves and change in their families and communities. In 1966 Alverson spent a year as a worker in a gold mine and five related industries of Johannesburg and the Orange Free State to work alongside the Tswanas and experience at first hand the earning capacities, dangers, fatigues, and exhaustions of mining and factory work. The question he set himself was: How do labor migrations to factories and mines affect different Tswana communities, urban, rural, and desert? To be spelled out in the forthcoming book, the answers will center on how the intrusion of industry creates a radically different kind of life with important changes in personality and social forces.
Larry Conover '53 and his family are in the news again. Their tragic story is told in two books about the Bermuda Triangle by AdiKent Thomas Jeffrey and Charles Berlitz. The latter in his best seller (March 2 New YorkTimes Book Review) attempts to explain the questionable and infamous legend.
Larry, his father — an experienced yachtsman who had thrice won the Miami-Nassau race — his mother, and an able crew were lost in early 1958 in the Bermuda Triangle, that area bordered by the West Indies, the southern U.S. coast, and Bermuda, where countless ships, men, and planes have disappeared mysteriously since the days of Columbus. Although planes combed 100,000 square miles of ocean, no trace of bodies, debris, or the 44-foot yawl "Revonoc," the Conovers' name spelled backward, was ever found; - only the "Revonoc Jr.," a 12-foot dingy, which later washed ashore 80 miles north of Miami.
Don Goss '53, Larry's roommate, has established an annual trophy for the Dartmouth Corinthian Yacht Club, in his honor.
Michael Moriarty '63, with Tony and EmmyAwards already to his credit, as he appears in Report to the Commissioner, which has openedto mixed reviews. Pocket Books has reissued theoriginal novel in paper.
