UTOPIAN ESSAYS AND PRACTICAL PROPOSALS

A series of essays in which the author of Growing Up Absurd attacks the paralyzing polarization of attitudes which has divided our society into the content, oblivious engage and the discontent, hypersensitive disengage -- the squares and the beats. Goodman insists that one need be neither realistic nor resigned, that something indeed can be done to combat the ""fascism of the majority"" to which a once active breed has acquiesced by beating a path to the underground coffee-house. He explores the problem and offers a complete, practical plan for implementing his antithesis. His subject range is wide: making more effective pacifist films, reevaluating our pornography laws (""I'd rather have Lawrence condemned than defended by such reasoning.""), banning cars from Manhattan, functional architecture, normative language, advance-guard writing, post-Christian man. Goodman's admixture of lucid, practical straight-talk and rather scholarly esoterica causes something of a pacing problem; but it should go well on the campus.