Transformations: A Dictionary of Contemporary Changes (review)

148 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW independent. FarreU collaborated with them energeticaUy in the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky which was formed in 1936 and which gave rise to John Dewey's Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials of the Old Bolsheviks. In 1941 FarreU was chairman of the defense committee for eighteen Socialist Workers Party and Minneapolis Teamster leaders convicted of advocating revolutionunder the Smith Act. UntU 1944 FarreU was the most loyal and valuable inteUectual sympathizer the organized Trotskyists possessed. When in 1944 FarreU wrote a criticism of articles in the Trotskyist press by Joseph Hansen and Harry Braverman which, he charged, were marked by "Gross sentimentality, unbending rigidity, unfair attacks on opponents," it was refused pubUcation. FarreU's criticism was deemed insulting to the Party. It was, thought James P. Cannon, the product of one of those "whose main interests and occupations Ue in other fields" than revolutionary politics. Thereafter FarreU moved away from the SWP and towards Max Shachtman's Workers Party. When he broke with Shachtman in 1948 over support to the MarshaU Plan, he anticipated by a generation the conclusion of the architects ofChina's foreign policy: he had come to regard Moscow as a greater enemy to socialism and the working<:lass then than Washington. FarreU's poUticaljourney through the thirties and forties is coherently narrated by WaId. David Herreshoff Robert Merideth, Transformations: A Dictionary ofContemporary Changes. Bolinas, CaL: Connections Press, 1979. 240pp. $6.00. The author is a professor of American Studies (University of California, Davis) and in this personal account of change and growth in the 70s, the impress of American cultural history is strongly felt. Merideth has absorbed the radical American tradition, screened it through his consciousness, and turned out a statement which is both private and pubUc. Remaking the Self and the nation are parts of the same whole. Significantly, Merideth has pubUshed the book himself, the first product of his Connections Press—descendent of the Connections and Connections IIjournals of the radical American Studies coUective. He has himself done much of the layout and printing in his Bolinas, California press, located along the splendid Marin County coast. Throughout, one feels the impact of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as weU as the influence of such different voices of contemporary radical consciousness as Ram Dass, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Gestalt psychology. Merideth acknowledges his strong aUegiance to the Gestalt movement which he says in his introduction he came to both out of his own "misery" and his research interests in Goodman, "one of its collateral founders." Out of these several inteUectual interests Merideth has written a new kind of book. It is both dictionary and diary, a personal narrative arranged not chronologicaUy but topicaUy and alphabetically. The entries run in length from single 149 REVIEWS paragraphs to essays of several pages. They range over a wide variety of matters (e.g., boredom, community, dreams, jealousy, money, property, responsibility) and can be read consecutively or selectively in any order. What they share is a grasping for alternatives to "Usonian" society and its "geo-strangulating realpoUtik ." The entries are, in Merideth's words, the tracing of "the maze of my consciousness in laying off culture in search of nature." Culture and nature, content and process, doing and being, work (responsibilities) imposed by others and by self, duty and desire, explaining and seeing: these are the dialectical pairings which recur, the one deriving from Usonia, the other from its alternative culture. Merideth is after a new language as a basis for a new society. Evoking Benjamin Whorf, R. D. Laing, and Goodman, he recognizes that cultural revolution must begin in and be accompanied by a new vocabulary and syntax. Transforming self, language, and society are stages in the same process. Language and being are inextricably connected; new "languaging" is a "culturecreating act" and, pedagogicaUy, "a high form of doing American Culture Studies." The book is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Few readers wiU agree with aU of it, but Merideth doesn't ask for fuU concurrence, only that we go along with him in sympathy, Usten and react. We bring our own selves "on this voyage together." He invites us to question and counter. The real value of the book is not in what it says of the author's Ufe, but in its potential for making us think about our own Uves. David Fine BOOKS RECEIVED These are books which, for one reason or another, haven't found reviewers. If we aren't able to get to them, we apologize to the authors. They deserve better. Margaret RandaU, We (New York: Smyrna Press, Box 841, Stuyvesant Sta., 10009, 1978). Prose poems. John Berger, Pig Earth (London: Writers and Readers PubUshing Cooperative, 9-19 Rupert St., Wl, 1979). Stories. Teresa de Jesús, De Repente: All ofa Sudden, tr. Maria A. Proser, Arlene ScuUy, James ScuUy (WiUimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., 06226, 1979). Poems. Elizabeth Barlett, Address in Time (Chester Springs, Pa., Dufour Editions, 1979). Poems. John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibbie (Manchester, Eng.: Carcanet Press Ltd., 330-32 Corn Exchange Buildings, M4 3BG, 1978). Poems. John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology ofAngloAmerican Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977). Literary Criticism. Emilio Diaz Valcárcel, Schemes in the Month ofMarch, tr. Nancy A. Sebastian! (New York: Bilingual Press, 1979). Novel. Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation ofHistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Bruce Weigl, A Romance (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). Poems. Stuart Dybek, Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). Poems. ...