It ill behooves one senior to take another to task for writing badly on the eve of our departure into the big, bad world which no doubt will be all too ready to berate us for ever writing at all. Fortunately, the Commencement issue of the Advocate is a good one, so kindness need not temper honesty.

Sallie Bingham has struck a parting blow for crafts-manship, contributing a readable story about a girl's attempt to escape from her mother by living with a photographer in Paris. The only serious objection to her facile story is that she appears to use a narrative trick to conceal the difficulty of achieving a real resolution at the end.

Jonathan Kozol has added another chapter to his saga of mental pathology. Insights and images accumulated while crawling through the sewers of the mind are tied together in a bitter-sweet package of sickness titled "The Ritual." If this sample is typical of the novel from which it is taken, it is hard to see how the full dosage can be made digestible.

Robert Fichter is a freshman who shares the universal interest in sex. Unlike Kozol, however, he regards it as but one of many expressions available to his characters. While the whole of his story, "The Sign of the Mermaid," focusses on a well-staged orgy (similar to Kozol's in featuring a middle-aged woman's lust for a youthful male), still the orgy is seen in a perspective this side of madness.

Undergraduate poetry is a touchy subject, and Robert Johnston's two poems are therefore better left to speak for themselves. Arthur Freeman's work is easier to discuss, for it is much better. His humorous poems are truly funny rather than merely ingenious, the kind of humor at which we laugh without thinking first. His more serious offering, "Storm in Equinox," is one of the best things to come out of South Street of late. Gabrielle Ladd, a Wellesley senior, is the third poet, although her relationship to the Advocate is elusive.

The already distended covers of the Advocate are further separated by three reviews of books by former English J students. Professor Guerard also contributes a discussion of these former proteges. The cover itself is less obstreperous than usual, an attractive product by Willard Midgette.

If one were to find fault, it would be with the layout. It is hard to see why a 32-page magazine needs to continue every story in the back of the issue when there is so little advertising that the back pages are potentially attractive enough to begin a story.