The Idol, 1976

Not surprisingly, or at least not without a certain amount of reason, The Idol seems to occupy a rather hazy place in the minds of Union students. A couple of times a year a small magazine, filled with peculiar pieces of poetry, artwork and prose, mysteriously appears at strategic locations around campus. Since most of the copies eventually disappear, we assume that they are indeed taken back to the various student abodes and digested, like ant poison, therein. (How many students actually do more than glance at some of the artwork and take in the opening lines of a poem or two is another matter, but we digress). The practice of writing editorials (ahem) seems to have died out, perhaps significantly, in the late sixties. which adds a further anonymity to the magazine's origins. The magazine itself is not our only source of occupation. Readings by poets of varying degrees of obscurity take place from time to time, though the combination of a generally disinterested student body and our own chaotic attempts at publicity usually guarantees a pretty small audience ­which does not detract one bit from the fact that some of the readings have been fantastic. The student-run workshops have certainly had their high points as well as their low, but perhaps they wouldn't have petered out toward the end of the year as much as they did had we bothered to advertise our habit of engaging in stark-naked body massages while reciting beautiful poems of exquisite eroticism. We supply the peanut oil, too. But again we digress. The charge of elitism is often leveled against The Idol, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. It seems to us that a literary magazine run by students is bound to be perceived as elitist by the very nature of its existence-especially in this heyday of television and rampant functional illiteracy, and particularly at an educational edifice like Union which continues to relegate its handful of artists and writers to a small and dimly lit closet in the cellar. (On a positive note. however, the impending reinstatement of mandatory freshman composition should improve the general quality of writing around campus, and the long waiting lists for the creative writing courses indicate that the interest in writing at Union is far from dead).

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