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EDUCATION
rary politics and economics. At the University of Michigan center, less than a dozen of 180 courses touch on contemporary conditions in any way. According to Maan Z. Medina, a Syrian professor of Arabic studies at Columbia, "there is no single study of Arab nationalism here. Arabic literature as such especially in the modern period, is virgin territory." 
Another frequent accusation is that Western scholarship tends to scrutinize Arabs as if they were some primitive tribe and ignores their view of their own culture. Mahmud A. Ghul, a visiting Palestinian professor at Harvard, says, "Western scholarship still treats the whole of Islamic civilization as a pale shadow of Western Christian thought. This is the academic version is the missionary or colonialist approach."
The fact is that in the U.S., the Near Eastern field is dominated by Jews. Some Arab students tend to dismiss them all as "Zionists," but others acknowledge that in the classroom their Jewish professors are objective. 
Faculty members note that they are introducing their Jewish students to the Arab point of view for the first time. Still the recent war caused tension even among professors. "It was never discussed," says Malcolm Kerr of U.C.L.A., "During the fighting you'd see Jewish faculty seated at lunch with their friends, Arab faculty with theirs. Emotions are just too high. Arguments over this could rip us apart."
The Arkitects
    The rains were light in Northern California when the creative writing class of Willis High School selected its group projects. Nevertheless, it decided to recreate Noah's ark complete with animals. The students exercised their writing abilities in letters soliciting help for their project. (All were signed Noah Lamechson, Noah being, of course, the son of Lamech.) Eventually they put together a 21-page booklet recounting their experiences. Entitled You Can't Build an Ark in Mendocino County, it shows that the class learned at least one lesson: if Nah were around today, chances are he would drown in red tape. 
    Among the students' frustrations:
    The Bank of America refused "Mr. Lamechson" a $500,000 loan to build the boat and acquire the necessary animals, saying that "there does not appear to be enough of one kind of animal to provide an economic unit."
    The post office informed Lamechson that he could not legally ship any animals except baby chickens. 
    Several trucking companies refused to move elephants--even a firm that advertised, "No job too big for us." 
    Despite the setbacks, the students have not given up. Going by the biblical statement that the flood began "in the second month, the seventeenth day," the class at Willis High has about three months to prove that you can build an ark in Mendocino County.

ART

Out of the Shade
    Lee Krasner has been a painter for 40 years -- not a woman meant to live in the shadow of anybody else. But by the accident of love, she fell into such a shade when she married a great artist, Jackson Pollock.
    Krasner accepted the traditional burdens of a genius' wife, supporting, protecting and at times nursing. At the time her own work seemed to her "irrelevant." That she maintained the germ of independence as a painter is only now becoming apparent some 17 years after Pollock's death. In recognition of her separate stature, Manhattan's Whitney Museum this week has mounted a show of her largest and latest work. 
    The long subjugation to Pollock's spirit began in 1940. Manhattan's McMillan Gallery was putting on a show of Picasso Matisse, and Braque and proposed to have three unknown Americans exhibited with them. One was William de Kooning, another was Jackson Pollock the third was Lee Krasner. At the time, Krasner was 32 and totally absorbed in the bohemian life.
    She knew De Kooning, but had not heard of Pollock. She looked up his address, found he was living only a block away. "Being of an impulsive nature," she recalls, "I lunged right over. I walked up five floors, knocked, and I realized that I had met this man four years earlier at a party -- he was a lousy dancer." Then she looked at his paintings. "I almost died," she remembers.
    Deadly Cycle 
    Instead she moved in. They lived together at the Greenwich Village apartment until 1945, when they married and bought an old farmhouse in Springs, Long Island. 
    It was in many ways a curious partnership. Pollock was the son of a Nevada rancher who moved on to California. Lee's father was a Jewish emigrant from Poland who owned a food store in Brooklyn. Pollock sweated out lonely struggles with himself. Krasner was more suggestible. Sometimes her work echoed Mark Tobey, other times Mondrian, most often DeKooning.
    Success began to come to Pollock; and the deadly cycle that can afflict famous artists started. Pollock fell into drinking bouts and took up with girls; Krasner began to commute to Manhattan to see a psychiatrist.
    On an August night in 2956, with two girls in his car. Only 44, he was killed instantly. So was one of the girls. The other, Ruth Kligman, has written a pathetic, petty account of the tragedy in a recent issue of New York magazine.
    For months Lee was rigid with despair. Then in a a sudden blossoming -- or release -- she began painting a gain. She also became the art world's most formidable "art widow." As heir to all of Pollock's work, she doled out paintings at a careful pace, consulted endlessly with lawyers and galleries. Critic Harold Rosenberg once credited her with "almost singlehandedly forcing up the prices for contemporary American art."
    She lives comfortable now on Manhattan's East Side, but beyond a weakness for fur coats, she takes little interest in her latter-day wealth. What occupies her is the determination to reassert her artistic individuality. True, she went through a spell of working in Pollock's manner, and even a adopted a variant of his famous drip technigue (a quick flip of the wrist that produces a delicate staccato of paint). More recently, she has struck loose not only in color but in shape. Pollination (1968) derives from childhood memories and the vacant lot
[[Image]]
KRASNER & POLLOCK (1950)
Emphatic as a subway ad

she used to walk across to school, bright with dandelions and buttercups.
    Her latest work is totally free of Pollock's tortured line. Peacock (1973) is as emphatic as a subway ad, authoritative as a Matisse chasuble. The splintered fan, the quizzical black beak have nothing to do with peacocks-- Krasner's titles are afterthoughts -- but they have an irresistible gaiety.
    Essentially, Lee Krasner at 65 is a woman in search of (and finding) a self that she gave away for a time for her husband's sake -- a sacrifice she does not regret. These days she likes to quote from T.S. Eliot's Quarters:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
A.T. Bober
Time, November 19, 1973