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edibriol jpafito
Free University
Registration for Nebraska Free University-which,
incidentally, no longer Is freebegins next Monday It is
hoped that the University community as well as
Lincotnites not connected with UNL take advantage of
it.
Called an alternative to the present educational
system. Free University this year is "striving for greater
community involvement." With a list of courses
seemingly limited only by the imaginations of persons
volunteering to teach them, Free U can not be called
short on attractiveness.
Literature, music and other traditional courses will be
taught, though probably not on a traditional format.
More unorthodox subjects include alternate life styles,
human liberation for men and women, bridge and
bartending. Practical courses re offered in such areas as
sewing, arts and crafts and offset printing. According to
the person who taught offset printing, the students who
completed his course "got so good that they could
complete every step of the offset process."
Free University has been around for about four years.
Most of its former chairpersons agree that both the idea
of a free university itself and most of the courses
offered have been good. However, the success of the
program has been retarded by a discouraging number of
dropouts and class cutters. Generally, an encouraging
number of persons enroll in the classes, but often more
than two-thirds drop out.
It's difficult to understand why more persons do not
take advantage of Free U. After all, where else can you
get a relatively complete course in bartending-or nearly
anything else-lor onty $1.
Mary Voboril
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A lonely president playing the piano late in the night.
to (SlO) dofr
differ
Dear editor.
After five semesters at the University, the
visitation issue is getting a bit old. At least once a
year, some students get stirred up and attempt to
change a repressive system of rules governing coed
visitation in the dormitories. They write letters, hold
meetings, sign petitions, take polls, file law suits and
use whatever other proper procedures available to
change the system. Every year the result is the
same-little or not change.'
One would suspect that after awhile students
'would get? the message. Proper channelDVor
appropriate j proceedings through the system simp'
do not work. That ought to be clear from our
experience and at least from the experiences of other
universities. Appropriate procedures only g?ve the
authorities, the regents in this case, the opportunity
to again properly deny us the changes we request.
Each time they take advantage of that opportunity.
Thus we are where we were three years ago.
I regret that this is true. Nonetheless it seems dear
that only extralegal procedures such as mass
violations, sit-ins and other peaceful or possibly
non peaceful-protest can have any effect toward
changing repressive rules. Creighton University
students flooded out two floors of one of its
dormitories before they received visitation privileges.
That was after Appropriate procedures had failed. In
our own case, the one minor change we did get was
because of a threat of mass violation. Yet we still
hav
to keep our doors pert! -;
f forts at change PcNwr-the "System
are
admirable but simply dont work.l wish those writing
letters to the regents the best ot luck, but I fe3t they
will run into the same brick wall as before. The
regents do not want open dormitories and won't let
them occur as long as it can be avoided. Only chan'j
. outside the system can have any effect. As I said, it is
regretabfe but, I fear, unavoidable.
Though I continue to live in a dormitory, I am not
sure I care very much if visitation is extended. At one
time I would have. But I am graduating in May and
my girlfriend lives off campus. Still, I would hope
that those students who wiil remain here for some
time will stop beating their heads against the wall of
change through the system and recognize that it is
about time for some other means of change to be
used.
Chip Troen
Greed, lust, sex mark comic
book
!
What is commonly called the Golden Age of
Comics reaches into the early adolescence of most of
us at UNL Comics fell into pretty dull period
during the 1960s, but they're back now, and they
may be better than ever. Two of the most promising
current titles are Conan tha Barbarian and the
old-new Wonder Woman.
The comic book format is a writer's dream, for it
allows him to create a fully detailed world cs
h!ifvahJ m fh real on witfinut Irion (VinrH4ilr
descriptions. If the storyteller wants to use a magic,
sword In his tale, he can. And if It's Important the
magic sword have rubies on its hilt, It will.
Illustrations save a lot of words.
The world of the writer's mind is explored
masterfully In Conan tha Barbarian. Conan is a
monarch of Cimmeria. a land -locked country
southwest of Hyboria. Because of Hyboria'i military
and commercial Importance, Conan's era (around
10,000 BJC) is called the Hyborian Age.
Conan it a remarkably resilient figure in the world
of fantasy. Originally a pulp novel figure In a ser'cs by
Robert E. Howard, Conan already has survived nearly
40 issues by Marvel Comics. He may be one of the
most unpleasant as well as one of the most popular
comic book heroes.
The Barbarian is pretty much an unabashed
savage. His motivations are greed, lust and the need to
assert himself; his assets art brute force and a
conspicuous lack of doubt in the riitness of his
cause. Yet he pursues his ends with a singleness of
purpose charming in its simplicity. Every man has
wanted to be Conan at cue time or another.
Not the least of Conan's attractions Is the sexual.
He spends an inordinate amount of time dealing with
scantily-clad princesses, killing the bad ones and
raping the good ones as if expected to. Perhaps there
is something sensual in his dark, bare-chested naivite;
Conan seems to have a lot of female followers among
comic book fans.
It is sexuality -or the urge to deny it that led
Frederic Wcrtham to write Seduction of the innocent
in 1954, and that book prodded the comics industry
eith hndgren
ft
to formulate the Comics Code shortly afterward. The
underground comics found in shops like Dirt Cheap
are partly a reaction against the limitations on
creativity in the Comics Code.
But no one, fortunately, can ever remove the
implied sexuality of figures as old as literatura StssJf.
Batman and Robin are., rightly or wrongly, aeeuted of
homosexuality. Superman, we assume, is as good a
lover as he is a fighter; we assume the same of J;on,
Hercules, Thor and the other mythiatf superstars. The
comic books, like the legends, don't tall, us any 'of
that. They don't have to.
comeback
One of the oldest stories in literature, end
prominent in modern comic books, is that of the
Amazons. To suggest that the Amazon has no sexual
importance is simply to evade the issue. Her existence
since the days of Theseus owes more to the idea of a
superwoman than to any primeval need to do good.
Radical feminists saw the importance of the
Amazon to their own cause, and DC Com-cs
responded to their interest by returning Wondsr
(Alnanaa. l I. - -
.w w ttua vtigilicM IIUl'M KM I I OIOUIC likldllU. iMI
had been a fairly straight, crime-fighting, multi-lingual
boutique owner for several years before late 1972,
traveling with a blind Chinese karate expert named I
Ching. I, or Ching, met his death at the hands of a
sniper in Issue 204 during an adventure that returned
Wonder Woman to the island and the right hand of
her mother, Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons.
It seems to have been a happy step backward. She
has a job at the United Nations as a tour guide in her
secret disguise of Diana Prince (command of a dozen
or so languages has its advantages). But she spends
most of her time In the strange vicinity of Paradise
Island, fighting super -villains with her magic lariat and
hw plexiglass plena. A recently released 100 -page
anthology of older stories reveals she is better looking
than site's tmr been.
Most of us read comics voraciously for a while,
then lost interest when they staled. And while some
of the titles never recovered (war comics among
them), many others are alive and well, Wonder
Woman, with her tiara and without I Ching, h in
excellent health. And Conan, with his suggestion of
primitive virtue and violent death, seems made for
1974.
pass 4
daily nebraskan
Wednesday, february G, 1 974
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