Shopping Around: Tu. Th. (S.)

The Kama Sutra (Hindu Art of Love) is to ancient India as Courses of Instruction for Harvard and Radcliffe is to modern Cambridge. With ecstasy on Tuesday and Thursday (and Saturday) in mind, the CRIMSON omphaloskeptic undertakes to reveal the secrets of the second 190 pages of the 1963-64 manual of truth and beauty.

9:00

The early bird gets the history and literature of Europe in copious quantities. Comp. List. 157 savors "German Drama from Kleist to the Expressionists in Its European Context" for those who read German, while the philosophers Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard take a going over from Dr.--(Phil. 131), who seems to be teaching a lot of courses this year. Down south, Italy, Renaissance and modern, gets treatment in History 152b, in the latter case by H. S. Hughes.

While Math. 11 struggles with fluxions and currents, the real fluxes and currents across membranes undergo study in Biophysics 203a. The aristocrat of nine o'clock classes is, however, Anthro. 117a: Oliver's "Oceania: Archeology and Ethnology" is a thinly disguised study of Harvard Square after a long rain.

10:00

While the Departments of Government and History deluge the student with extraordinarily generous offerings at ten, eleven, and twelve, the other departments quietly wend their scholarly way. German lyric poetry (Germ. 195), Old French language and literature (French 101a), and twentieth century Italian literature are subsumed in a way, under Linguistics 120, "Introduction to Comparative and Historical Linguistics," open without prerequisites to non-concentrators.

El Forbes rides again with Music 2 ("Inside Music"), a friendly music course in which it is permissible to listen to the music as well as analyze it. In "Hyper-Diapers" (Soc. Rel. 150), you find out why the music was written by a five-year-old Mozart, and at the same time you can understand the urge to stop the music in Soc. Rel. 184 ("Cops and Robbers").

If none of these appeals, there remains a choice between "Groups Theory with Application to Statistical Mechanics" (Physics 264) and Louis Hartz' strangely timed course on nineteenth century political thought (Gov. 203). If absolutely nothing lures you, then await the gentlemanly hour of eleven to arise.

11:00

Not given last year, but certainly welcome this year, is Gov. 121, "Bureaucracy," an understanding of the contents of which is prerequisite for success in anything. On the necklace of history courses at eleven, the brooch is History 184a, which emphasizes Chinese thought from the Han dynasty to the Ch'ing dynasties. For diversion there are introductions to Czech and Polish (Slavic Ca and Da) and Hittite (Linguistics 225). The last presumes no previous knowledge of cuneiform and should just round out you Gen Ed program.

Music 1 and Music 124 run roughly parallel courses over the history of music at slightly different levels of rigor. The activities of Music 253 ("Tubby and Tuba") stand explained in Anthro. 103a, "Primate Social Behavior." And for those weary of this animal hedonism, there are the ascetic pleasures of Math. 272a, discussing "CW complexes, homology, cohomology, homotopy."

12:00

Aside from la, the star government course is Shklar's "Legal Theory" (Gov. 108), a subject singularly relevant to the crisis in the relations between law and action in the South. Crane Brinton's "Intellectual History of Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries" examines the spread of many of the ideas, embalmed in law, which are now being tested by actin. Another approach to the same complex of problems is H. D. Aiken's Phil. 75, "The Conflict of Ideals in Modern Civilization."

All these problems of the merely real become trivial from the vantage point of metaphysics (Phil. 155), but one need not withdraw so utterly to escape: Spanish 10 surveys Spanish literature for those who can read it, and Soc. Rel. 106 examines the social structure of China and Japan.

P.M.

The spoor of Esoterica hangs over the afternoon courses. Math. 224, for example, dallies over "Topics in the Theory of Compact Riemann Surfaces"; while Portuguese 200 elucidates Portuguese linguistics, and includes a survey of Portuguese literature up to 1500. At hours to be arranged Akkadian 230 will dwell on elementary Akkadian. Indian Studies 122a will exhume elementary classical Tibetan.

Not all P.M. courses suffer the same fate of constriction. Gov. 213a looks at "Social Theory from Marx through Freud" with the vision of Barrington Moore. An all-star cast of Raiffa, Schlaifer, and Pratt will discuss decision theory in Stat. 288. And in response to the first commandment, "Let there be light," we have Via. Stud. 145, "The Flics," courtesy of R. G. Gardner. Harvard students are lucky to have such a pious faculty.