"Insight One"

Insight, a "magazine of contemporary expression," arrived on the Cambridge newsstands this summer boasting an attractive cover and a high price. But the content does not meet the expectation of the trappings, for hard work is required to find anything of value among the poems and prose of Insight.

The brief editorial uncannily reaches for the stars:

It () would not only like to be a social critic of the world; It aspires to be a source of new ideas, both fundamental and applied.

"New ideas" means, in the case of the first issue, poetic declamations against the Vietnamese War.

Sweet Saigon

send me no more news

or against authoritarians,

There are border guards pacing

maybe soon they will be chasing

elusive shadows with a banner

Joie et ma jolie.

The heart of the issue is a seven-page piece of "philosophy" titled "Thoughts at Departure" by Dr. Maximillian Herzberger, a mathematician recently retired from Kodak. Dr. Herzberger delivers a heavy-handed sermon to explain that materialism is a bad thing, that fame alone is a bad thing, and that the respect of other people is a good thing. Such thoughts hardly fit into a magazine of "contemporary expression." We might tend to agree with them all, but the modern mind requires more than vague homilies.

The one article of interest was curiously placed in the back of the magazine. James G. Hennessey's "Comments on Art in the Twentieth Century", despite its pretentious title, does raise some valuable questions. Couching his attack in quasi-socialist terms, Hennessey asks if the revolution of the past century can continue, now that the concept of revolution in art has become generally accepted. He merely asks, however, and does not answer. Hennessey also pinpoints the aura of democracy which is presently forming the artistic taste of much of he college generation:

For too long all mankind had been deprived its birthrights: a free delight to the pleasures of all the senses, a freedom to explore the imagination and to find and satisfaction in it in private or if attended with exceptional skill, public expressions.

Such article just begin to approach the idealism of the editorial. Struggling magazines can not change the world, but they can provide a forum for writers who are worthy, but unpublished. By lowering its sights and raising its standards, Insight could manage to stay.