Late in 1969, after five years as a daily newspaper columnist in Atlanta and the reward of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, I was summoned to New York to see if I wanted to take my act to the mother of cities. Jimmy Breslin of the Herald-Tribune and Pete Hamill of the Post had been distant models for me -- hard driving, hard drinking, macho street poets from the Hemingway School -- and now I was being offered a chance to compete with them from Newsday out on Long Island.

As a part of my tour, I was taken into the city by my friend Mike McGrady, a fellow Nieman and a Newsday columnist of some note. "Maybe we'll run into the Hammer," he said, speaking of Hamill, as we entered the raucous valley of an artist-and-writers bar in Greenwich Village called the Lion's Head. Now for the big leagues , I remember thinking; and, lo and behold, there was Hamill himself alone at the bar.

"Pete," said McGrady, tapping Hamill on the shoulder.

Startled, as drunk as any man I had ever seen, Hamill flailed at his attacker. Soon he was hand-walking along the back wall, trying to make it to the cigarette machine, spilling quarters as he went. "Not a good time to meet the Hammer," said McGrady.

For reasons unrelated to the spectacle of seeing one of my heroes wasted in a New York bar, I rejected the offer from Newsday -- what I really wanted, at 33, was to start writing books -- but that image stayed with me even as I descended into alcoholism myself.

Like Hamill, I was the son of a blue-collar drinker, the self-taught boy who had found my place as a proletarian prophet in an era when drinking and posturing were as much a part of that life as interviewing and typing. We had bought into the Hemingway legend without acknowledging that it had destroyed Papa before his time.

Now comes the rest of the story, the grim tale of what led Hamill to that night at the Lion's Head 25 years ago, and I'm inclined to ask where "A Drinking Life" was when I needed it. "I didn't know it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life," Hamill writes of dropping out of high school at the age of 16 and taking a job at the Brooklyn Navy yard. "Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easy entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true." Yes. Precisely.

In straightforward candor, with the unflinching staccato hammering that lent him his nickname, Hamill shows us that his fate was sealed from the moment of his birth in 1935. He was the oldest of six children sired by an immigrant from Belfast who spent his days at menial labor and his nights in the bars of Brooklyn Irish neighborhoods. It was a classic urban childhood in many ways -- playing stickball in the streets, trading comic books, baiting the nuns at Holy Name of Jesus elementary school, craning to glimpse the triumphant Dodgers parading down Flatbush Avenue, delivering the Brooklyn Eagle -- but it promised little future. The routine was to drop out of school, marry a girl from the Neighborhood, follow your father into the factories and the saloons, have kids, get old and die.

Somewhere in young Pete Hamill, though, there was a rebel wanting to break the mold. Thanks, in part, to a mother who read to him as a child, he became a regular at the public library and saw there was a larger world beyond Brooklyn. Oddly, his ticket out would be a fascination with art that had begun with his boyhood attempts to copy illustrations from the pages of Tarzan and Captain Marvel. By the time he was 17 he was working days at the Navy yard and spending nights at an art school in Manhattan -- one foot in each of two desperate worlds -- and he was hearing imaginary voices from the Neighborhood. Who the hell do you think you are?

He was even juggling two women: a libidinous model in Manhattan and a nice Catholic girl in Brooklyn. "I tried to sort out all the different strands of my story: art school, the Navy yard, the Neighborhood, my father, my brothers and sisters, my friends, drinking, Maureen and Laura. I couldn't do it. . . ."

The hitch in the Navy during the Korean War was a start, for it was at a base library in Florida that he discovered Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The remainder of the 1950s would be filled with more drunken meanderings -- most notably a nightmarish sojourn at an art school in Mexico City under the GI Bill -- but toward the end of the decade he had begun secretly teaching himself to write. In those charged political times, with the death of McCarthyism and the appearance of young Jack Kennedy, he began to devour the city's seven newspapers, especially the liberal tabloid Post. In 1960, at 25, he was hired as a night rewrite man there, with the direct result of an impassioned letter to the editor, Jimmy Wechsler, challenging the notion that people without formal education didn't belong in newspapering. The Hammer was on his way.

Reading much of "A Drinking Life" is like gawking at a wreck on the highway. Working off and on for the Post, supplementing his income with magazine pieces and screenplays, Hamill was forever searching for "the GGP (Great Good Place)." Married now, with two daughters, he tried Spain, Ireland, Rome, San Juan, Mexico City and countless other stops, until he was summoned back to the Post as a columnist in 1965.

In retrospect, he never became a great New York columnist. Unlike Jimmy Breslin, who was and sometimes still is, Hamill was weighted with too much booze and too little true self-confidence; too often the column was vitriolic, angry, stewing with rhetoric, stuck on one note. He was, in many ways (especially throughout his long public affair with the actress Shirley MacLaine), his own best story.

Understanding this and sensing "odd little signs of deterioration," Hamill quit drinking, cold turkey, on New Year's Eve of 1972. Positive results came almost immediately when he wrote "in one miraculous burst" a celebrated novella, "The Gift," "full of drinking and love for my father." He has pointed out to interviewers that he produced one novel while drinking, and seven since. He would go by the Lion's Head, to test himself: "The sensation of performance ebbed. . . I started hearing stories I'd heard many times before . . . I was polite. I listened. I laughed at the punch lines. But I didn't drink."

The story ends in the mid-70s, with a ceremonial visit to the old Neighborhood in Brooklyn, indicating that the door might be open for a sequel. In recent years the sober Pete Hamill has been writing better than ever in places like Esquire and New York and the Village Voice -- impassioned pieces with an old-fashion liberal attitude about everything from AIDS to rap music -- and he truly roared back into the city's consciousness last year when he strode heroically into the newsroom of the embattled Post to take over as editor of every liberal's favorite tabloid. Under the glare of television lights, to a standing ovation from colleagues too young to remember pint bottles in the bottom desk drawer, a relic of newspapers as we once knew them had returned. Hello, sweetheart, give me Rewrite.

Did author Diane K. Shah see the same film I did ("Steven Spielberg, Seriously," Dec. 19)? "Schindler's List"was one of the most indulgently sentimental movies I have ever seen, ending as it does with a historically inaccurate and anachronistic group hug, followed shortly thereafter by a coda -- with real Schindler survivors and the actors who played them -- that is one of the most manipulative, exploitative and embarrassing set of moments ever recorded on film.

As far as offensive sentimentality goes, Disney and Capra have nothing on Spielberg.

RICK SANDFORD

Los Angeles

*

To hell with the critics! I can make up my own mind when it comes to either going to a movie or making a decision on how entertaining it is. "Hook" was fantastic, and I can hardly wait to see "Schindler's List."

ED CAMPOS

Ordway, Colo.

*

Why is Spielberg not recognized by his peers for his magnificent work? He is a major talent who has a keen insight into people's lives and can treat a wide variety of subjects with an awesome level of sensitivity.

DON MORRIS

San Clemente

*

Spielberg chose to film a story about the disenfranchised of a generation past, but the real story is about the present-day dispossessed, the poor. We saw evidence of their story during the April, 1992, rioting, not in black and white but in black, white, brown and yellow. It was magnificent in its scope and sickening in its content, but it was real and it was America. Ironically, Spielberg's film about the past generation's experience cannot be seen by many of today's disenfranchised generation because they can't afford the price of admission.

DR. ROLAND S. JEFFERSON

PSYCHIATRIST AND GRIEF THERAPIST

Los Angeles

Thank you for the grim but all-too-accurate portrayal of the West L.A. welfare office ("Just Another Day in Paradise," by Michael J. Goodman, Dec. 19). The writer's next assignment should be to try to get through to a worker by telephone. You may only call your worker during a two-hour period each day, during which time the lines are constantly busy. Answering machines, where they exist, may not allow you to leave a message, may answer only in English and may not list your worker at that phone number, even if it is, in fact, your worker's number.

For applications for health-care coverage (Medi-Cal only), there is an alternative. Families in which there is a pregnant woman or in which there is a child born after Sept. 1, 1983, may apply at certain community for-profit and free clinics in California -- if they go there for health care. It is a program that is underutilized in Los Angeles.

For a list of such clinics in Los Angeles County, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Children's Advocacy Institute, 1010 S. Flower St., No. 500, Los Angeles 90015

LYNN KERSEY, DIRECTOR

MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH ADVOCACY PROGRAM

Los Angeles

*

I was on welfare for almost three years and observed Officer David Gatlin once every month. I now have a job, for which I'm thankful. To people who behave properly, Gatlin is one of the kindest guys you'd ever meet. But big Dave knows how to quickly encourage those who act up to return to normality. This is a man who respects all who walk into that office -- provided that they respect themselves. He's one of the best.

D. BOOKER

Los Angeles

*

Did Goodman have to give step-by-step instructions on how to cheat and lie and get on welfare? I just hope no would-be cheaters read the magazine.

PAM BARBER

Whittier

*

Where has our society taken us that we must lie and cheat at the welfare office to keep living at a substandard level of existence?

ARLENE BERNHOLTZ

West Hills

*

The tragic flaw in redistributing tax dollars is that it enervates welfare clients and mugs taxpayers. It's time to replace food stamps with food and to substitute vouchers for housing allowances.

JIM SKEESE

San Diego

Not the least astonishing thing about these two beautifully produced and edited books is how well they stand the test of time. Few writing markets have expanded so dramatically as that of the travel guide. There are books in the hundreds ready to tell you where to eat, shop, sleep and be seen; I defy you to name any which will provide better company than these two have given me for the last fortnight. And yet the last piece was written in 1912 and the first in the 1860s.

Henry James was not, in the usual meaning of the word, an adventurous traveler. Enthralled by Pierre Loti's accounts of Morocco, he would no more have gone there himself than to the moon. James, like his characters, was willing to absorb all that America and Britain could expose to his inquisitive stare but, even in westernized Europe, he drew the line sharply after Italy and France. Intensely social, he saw no point in going to a country where he could not communicate with confidence. His French and Italian were excellent. He had no other languages, which explains why there is nothing here to assist the visitor to Spain, Greece or Scandinavia. But do not, if you are contemplating a visit to Rome or the Adriatic, deprive yourself of the pleasure of being accompanied by such an observant, good humored and, unexpectedly, witty companion.

Many of the earlier pieces were written as part of commissioned series for American magazines. The intention, James declared, was only to offer a series of impressions, "immediate, easy and consciously limited." What gives them their singular charm is the character of the observer, as presented in his own gently self-mocking prose. In Britain, we see him scrambling stoutly up the wind-lashed side of a Welsh mountain, "very much in the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar," or rejoicing at having escaped the obligatory tour of Windsor Castle in a party envisaged as "shuffling in dull, gregarious fashion over the miles of polished floor." Who else would have seen gregarious as just the word for the ceaseless mumble of tour parties? The sober observer looks on, fascinated, in another, marvelously funny, account of a carriage of cockney revelers at the races, in which "opulent young men" and "exhilarated" girls with "gilded" hair (for which, in less diplomatic language read drunk and bleached), derive loud and unending pleasure from the plight of one of their friends, "a pretty young man so drunk that nobody can lift him off the ground." Who, James asks in a more serious vein, "shall resolve into its component parts any impression of this richly complex English world, where the present is always seen, as it were, in profile, and the past presents a full face?"

James is magnificent on England and connoisseurs of his work will enjoy identifying the scenery and characters of some of his best-known works. But anyone who imagines that the novelist spent most of his free time dispensing witty badinage in the drawing-rooms of the grandest families will be astonished to find out how much of the travel writing is devoted to life at a less exotic level. There are accounts of derelict country houses abandoned by ruined owners, of overworked porters and sad receptionists in dingy hotels, of the black procession of grime-soaked warehouses along the Thames. Less zealously public-spirited than, say, Dickens, in his response to poverty, James only attempts to romanticize it on one occasion, when he grieves that the picturesque country tramps cannot be tethered to the turf on which they sleep so colorfully. Even here, it is probable that the writer is gently mocking his own insouciance.

I would be sorry for anyone to miss the passage in which a sodden Henry James confronts the Palais des Papes from under his umbrella and roundly abuses it for being "a very dull monument." James on France, however, is no more illuminating than a packet of matches when set beside the brilliant fireworks display of images, responses and perceptions that he bestows on Italy. Earlier Americans had been unable to set foot in Rome without being overwhelmed by their horror of the Catholic faith, an aversion which had a dismal effect on their prose. But James, having poked fun at those of his compatriots who had been in the habit of remarking that the Colosseum "will be a very handsome building when it is finished" then dares to suggest that there is a lot more fun to be had at a Roman carnival than in praying for the sinful masqueraders. Demurely eyeing "a handsome, opulent-looking nun" as she listens to the choir in a particularly sumptuous church, he wonders if her thoughts are not more occupied by the mellifluous baritone than by God. Seated at the opera, he declares himself amazed that the audience should applaud when Othello shows his anguish "by seizing Iago's head and whacking it half-a-dozen times on the floor, and flinging him 20 yards away." Can this, he wonders, be what they consider a great performance?

Closest of the travel writing to James' fiction is the ravishing collection of pieces on Venice, some of them written at the Palazzo Barbaro, where "The Wings of the Dove" was composed. Venice is the city in which James seems most serenely at his ease, evoking and representing every aspect of the city in prose, which shimmers like sunlit water. Here, most clearly, we see the novelist himself, admiring the majestic chastity of his favorite churches, shaking his head over Ruskin's lamentations for a lost city, climbing into a closed gondola to be taken out for tea with a venerable relic of aristocratic society. James in Venice is a man radiant with pleasure.

"The American Scene" has its admirers, and it is properly included here. I wish it was not. Published in 1907 after James's last visit to his own country, it seems to me only to show the failure of the writer's convoluted late style. All the freshness, the intelligence and life of the earlier travel writing has been replaced by a groping procession of tortuous sentences in which everything is sacrificed to nebulous sensation. Confronted and not attracted by modern culture, James stumbled in his search for an adequate response. New York was first a series of "extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted" and then a semi-toothless hair comb. Neither image had the panache that the city deserved and business was not successfully apostrophized as a "great black ebony god."

The failure was, perhaps, one of discomfort; it is not an easy assignment to view your own land with the untutored eyes of a tourist. It was in Europe that James felt familiar by 1907; in America, he was almost a stranger.

The gospel according to Jose Saramago begins with the author contemplating a painting of the Crucifixion and, in a kind of mock gravity, subverting its iconography. Which of the figures is Mary Magdalene? Surely, the one with the plunging neckline; on the other hand, one woman is blond. There is, after all "the popular belief that women with blond hair, whether it be natural or dyed, are the most effective instruments of sin."

Then there are the two thieves. Why should one be called "the good thief," simply because he repented? Surely the honest thief is the one "who did not pretend to believe that sudden repentance suffices to redeem a whole life of evil." Most important, there is the receding figure of a man looking back over his shoulder, and carrying a bucket and a sponge. Through two millennia he has been reviled for offering vinegar to a thirsting Jesus. But in those days, vinegar and water was a recognized thirst quencher, Saramago insists, and he continues:

"The man walks away, does not wait for the end, he did all he could to relive the mortal thirst of the three condemned men, making no distinction between Jesus and the thieves, because these are things of this earth, which will persist on this earth, and from them will be written the only possible history."

Thus the tone that launches Saramago's New Testament reworking. It is a special blend of irony and innocence, of playfulness and melancholy; a disputatiousness that mocks not only received doctrine but its own mockery as well. It marks Saramago, Portugal's most distinguished living writer, as it marked his literary predecessors, Eca de Queiroz and Machado de Assis. It sounds a note as rooted in Portugal's character as Hemingway's clipped bark or Whitman's unclipped yawp were rooted in America's.

It is the voice of a country whose long-departed imperial unboundedness left it bound in a misty veil that has kept it oddly out of modern history. No dialectical confrontations for Portugal; no French or Russian Revolution nor even a Spanish-style civil war. At most the oddly pleasant Revolution of Carnations in the early '70s that slipped away the remains of the Salazar dictatorship much as a sleeper half-awakens to shrug off an unneeded blanket. When Germany, Italy and Spain were tyrannized by uniformed dictators, Portugal was tyrannized by a professor of economics. Imagine John Kenneth Galbraith ruling the United States for 40 years with the aid of a ubiquitous, dark-suited or -- more likely -- tweedy secret police.

"The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" is likewise oddly out of its time. It is a skeptical, paradox-laden fiction about the meaning of Christ's incarnation, of God and the Devil, of good and evil, and of the grounds and purposes of human destiny. Following the bewildered wanderings of St. Joseph -- around whom God and Satan buzz like invisible gnats -- and the even more bewildered wanderings of a highly irritated Jesus, it has its grand climax in a boat on the Sea of Galilee where God, Satan and Jesus sit for 40 days in the fog and argue.

It is the kind of bravura cascade of philosophical quizzicality and ingenious reversals that were featured a century or so ago in such varied writings as the Grand Inquisitor scene in "The Brothers Karamazov," Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" and Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell." It is not much practiced nowadays -- C. S. Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" was 50 years ago -- but perhaps that is a Portuguese writer's privilege. Saramago is fully conscious of his national voice; at one point, referring to 2,000 Jews crucified by the Romans after a rebellion, he observes that, if placed a mile apart, the crosses could circle Portugal, "which is not large."

The Nativity part of the story is told with a lovely, displaced tenderness that focuses on Joseph rather than Mary. The young carpenter awakes in their hut -- "an oil lamp is burning, but its flickering flame, like a small, luminous almond, barely impinges on the darkness" -- goes outdoors to urinate, sees the sky blaze oddly, is aroused and returns to make love to his wife. In Saramago's "Gospel," which caused considerable scandal in Portugal, not only is Mary not a virgin but the conception of Jesus is a commingling of her husband's seed with God's. Saramago's Jesus is fully sexual; later he will become, in effect, Mary Magdalene's husband.

Furthermore, this Jesus bears his own version of Original Sin. Joseph, hearing of Herod's plan to kill the first-born male babies, is too intent on saving his son to warn others. From that time until he redeems himself by a supreme act of charity that will get him crucified at the age of 33 -- another displacement -- he will dream that he is leading soldiers to kill Jesus. Jesus will dream that his father is coming to kill him. It foreshadows the climactic argument in the boat when God, his other father, tells him of his mission.

Satan appears early, as an angel attending the nativity. Later, as a mysterious shepherd, he will employ Jesus for four wilderness years, discharging him only when the young man sacrifices one of the sheep to God, who appears as a column of smoke. Satan, unlike his rival, is strictly anti-violence. Jesus's story skips along. He settles down with Mary Magdalene, goes out with the Galilee fishermen, begins to perform miracles. They are awkward and comic; he has no idea what they are for or what he is supposed to be doing.

The Galilee fog-summit -- one more of Saramago's nicely implanted ironies -- will clarify matters. God tells Jesus that He is tired of being worshiped only by the Jews. He has created a Son to be a divine victim whose death will vastly enlarge the numbers of the faithful. Satan sits sardonically silent; his presence is required since whenever God's kingdom is enlarged, so is the devil's. Jesus objects vigorously but he has no choice. He does get God to list all the agony that will ensue from his own sacrifice. We read a three-page list of martyrs, followed by mentions of religious wars and the Inquisition. "One has to be God to countenance so much bloodshed," Satan mutters, and offers to repent, give up his power and become an angel again. Evil will end and sacrifices will not be needed. God refuses "because the good I represent cannot exist without the evil you represent, if you were to end, so would I. . . ."

The notion is hardly new. Saramago spins his web around what is by now a venerable paradox. The results are not always good; quite apart, of course, from the fact that he is playing exclusive left field in a wider literary-philosophical stadium where the devil has some of the best lines but not all of them. Sometimes Saramago's disputations seem forced. His narrative can be original and resplendent -- Joseph is a rare and luminous creation -- but it too can seem forced. We may realize, in fact, what remarkable story-tellers Matthew, Mark and Luke were. Over the centuries, their stories have allowed all kinds of illuminating variations. And despite its sporadic creaks, Saramago's contrarian version, beautifully translated by Giovanni Pontiero, is illuminated by ferocious wit, gentle passion and poetry.

I wish more people today would attempt books like this one, novels that take on the big questions, the eternal verities, and, without pretense and a whole lot of claptrap, address the difficulty of finding meaning and significance in life. For this is the stuff of which classics are made and what literature, certainly, is all about. That John Gregory Brown had the nerve to square off before such issues in his first novel is by itself laudable. The fact that he wrote a fine story with believable, memorable characters in the process is reason for applause.

Brown, not yet 40, writes out of the Southern tradition in fiction, and is midway, in terms of depth and accessibility, between Faulkner and Walker Percy, (sort of a Lite-Faulkner or a Percy au jus.) Race, family, heritage, faith, good and evil are the obsessions in question, and the plot turns on critical choices having to do with one's understanding of the difference between virtuous behavior and cowardice, and one's courage to do the right thing. More readable than Faulkner, less comedic than Percy, Brown is nonetheless in their direct line of descent, their natural heir, without any obvious imitation.

"Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery" concerns the Eagen family of New Orleans and its immediate vicinity, Irish Catholics whose lineage is made more colorful, if not more difficult, by containing within it a black matriarch who mysteriously, in midlife, disappears, leaving her husband and small son to continue their lives without her. The legacy of this racial intermarriage and the mystery of Molly Moore Eagen's disappearance -- unsolved until the book's final pages -- haunt and twist the lives of three generations of Eagens.

Though the central narrator is Lowell Henry Eagen's granddaughter Meredith, the story is told through the three alternating voices of Meredith, her step-mother Catherine, and Eagen's black servant of 40 years, the elderly Murphy Warrington, all of whom come at the same sequence of events from different angles and interpretations.

Patriarch Eagen, a devoutly religious Irish immigrant, had set things in motion by choosing as a wife a woman of mixed blood, the comely spirited and very light-skinned Molly Moore, and bringing her to his new home in the deep South, Mandeville, La. Grandfather Eagen was a good and saintly man who maintained the difference between black and white "was not an issue." In practice, of course, it was, and his more worldly descendants were left to grapple with the fact that they carried black blood in their veins while for all intents and purposes they lived the privileged life of whites.

A quiet unprepossessing man who made garden statuary of the saints and Christ for a living, Eagen bequeathed to subsequent generations not only an impossible model of behavior, but also a cursed constitutional sensitivity to moral questions, including an extreme sense of responsibility and a penchant for soul-searching. Eagen's son, Dr. Thomas Eagen, orthopedist, shapes this legacy into a professional life of caring for the poor and destitute and a private life of trying to reconcile his father's surreal goodness with his mother's apparently heartless abandonment so many years ago. Meredith and her twin brother Lowell inherit this thorny situation through their father who, as inexplicably as his own mother had left him, decamps on his second wife Catherine, the only mother Meredith and Lowell have ever known, taking the kids with him. As Meredith says early in the story, "It's complicated."

But it's also very real and credible just because it is so messy.

The story is rife with miscues and misunderstandings, and an almost consistent misreading by the narrators of the prima facie evidence concerning everyone else's decisions and motives, and in this regard the choice of multiple points of view in relating the events is both inspired and apt. None of the voices is completely reliable, given everyone's prejudices and predilections, and for most of the book all three have only partial information on which to base their decisions and judgments. Ultimately it is Meredith's understanding of things, and what she does with it, in which we are interested, for she is the contemporary representative of the Eagen line.

The story is a very moving one, and sorrowful because so ordinary and so familiar. It's about the search for something to believe in, a lifelong effort, if I read this writer aright, and what we inherit from our forebears and what we are to make of it. The characters are tormented by garden-variety suspicion, deceit, betrayal, adultery, shame and guilt, and know fleeting moments of faith, hope and love. The struggle that ensues is not glorified as heroic or apocalyptic; it is rendered in a quiet heartfelt way that lends it universality.

The refreshing thing about the book, in addition to the timelessness of the situation the characters find themselves in, is that implicit in their struggle is the assumption that all the effort is worth it, that there are such absolutes as right and wrong, and that locating oneself in this common grid of guilt and forgiveness is incumbent, part and parcel, of finding out who you are. In a word, redemption.

Producing the newly syndicated sci-fi series "Babylon 5" has practically been a sci-fi adventure in itself.

"We are on the cusp of being completely revolutionized," says producer John Copeland. The elaborate special effects are created by desktop computers. The series' Hollywood-based composer conducts his European-based orchestra on an interactive video feed. And the entire show is shot in a huge warehouse in the San Fernando Valley, far from any studio's watchful eye.

Most of the action in the one-hour adventure show, set in the year 2258, is on a vast United Nations-like space station, Babylon 5, which serves as neutral territory for humans and aliens alike. The series premieres Wednesday on PTEN (the Prime Time Entertainment Network), a consortium of 177 stations covering 93% of the country. It will be carried in Los Angeles on KCOP. PTEN series, which also include "Time Trax" and "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues," are supplied by Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution.

Sci-fi fans got their first taste of "Bab 5" almost a year ago as a two-hour TV movie. The ratings were good enough for Warner Bros. to give it the go-ahead for the weekly series.

Having several months from the completion of the movie to starting up the series gave the creative team an opportunity "to do a soul-searching postmortem on the movie," says Copeland.

"We all made a pact that we would do everything we could to make the series better than the movie and to make every episode better than the previous one," Copeland says.

They did a bit of recasting and fleshed out the cast. Tamlyn Tamito ("'The Joy Luck Club") played the station's Lt. Commander in the pilot movie. 'She didn't come off as a commanding presence," Copeland acknowledges. "So we recast that role with a different character played by Claudia Christian. We added Richard Biggs as a new doctor, and each one of our ambassadors has a diplomatic attache."

Also discarded were the puppet-type alien creatures. "We felt they were more like very surreal-looking Muppets," Copeland says. "We wanted to move away from that. We wanted to have aliens who were performers. We also wanted to have a larger representation of (aliens). We broadened the kind of United Nations aspect of the station."

Co-executive producer Doug Netter, creator and co-executive producer J. Michael Straczynski and Copeland began working on the series six years ago. "We almost had (a deal) together with Warners, United Television, a Japanese group and a German group," Netter recalls. "It was about to either happen or not happen when along came the Prime Time Network."

Producers who are taking advantage of current technology say it costs them less to produce "Bab 5" than the Paramount syndicated sci-fi series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine," which are in the per-episode range of $1 million to $1.5 million. Netter says the production saves money by not shooting at Warners.

"We built these stages in nine weeks," Netter says. "We speak to one creative person, one lawyer and one business affairs person. We don't have many people coming over here."

From the very outset, "Bab 5" has been designed for the TV screen. "We haven't let that be a limitation," Copeland says. "We don't have to approach things -- like the way we do our effects -- how they do it in movies. We can look at doing them different ways."

For example, composer Christopher Franke of Tangerine Dream writes the original music in his studio in the Hollywood Hills. "His orchestra is in Berlin," Copeland explains. "He creates a score, faxes that over to Berlin and he conducts the orchestra on an interactive video feed. They're sitting on a recording stage in Berlin and the music is coming back to him on fiber-optic cable. This stuff is pretty much immune to power shortage."

Foundation Imaging, the company that received an Emmy for visual effects on the "Babylon 5" pilot, consists of just seven people. "Our effects' animator, the guy who does all of our guns blasts, works on a Macintosh," Copeland says.

"Babylon 5" premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. and repeats Sunday at midnight on KCOP.

When I was a kid, I had to go to bed before it came on, but I could hear the theme song to "Car 54, Where Are You?" jangling from the television in the living room:

"There's a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn's broken out in fights, there's a traffic jam in Harlem that's backed up to Jackson Heights, there's a Scout troop short a child, Khrushchev's due at Idyllwild . .. Car 54, where are you?"

But I'm not in New York, and it isn't 1963. L.A.'s police scanner sings less innocently of killers and kidnapers. Its thin blue line is spread like peanut butter before payday. And 911 will have to start charging $3.99 a minute, same as the Psychic Friends Network.

And what about us, the thin news line? The LAPD numbers about 7,400; the LAPC -- Los Angeles press corps -- is just over half that. The urban journalist's predicament is akin to the urban cop's: only so much time and only so many bodies to get the job done.

Assembling a day's newspaper is no formula; it's a painterly rendering of a few scenes culled from many. Contenders pour in by fax, phone, mail and wire service. Speeches. Seminars. City Council meetings. Hollywood premieres. Like caged puppies at the pound, PR people clamor to catch the editor's eye.

Women in a self-defense course will be "mugged" to raise money so poor and abused women can also get the training . .. Paleontologist-to-the-stars Robert Bakker leads a staged dig for dinosaur bone replicas to promote the Rose Parade float theme . .. Burbank police have surrounded an apartment building where neighbors have complained about a woman who hasn't committed a crime but who won't come out of her apartment .

Enough real and contrived news for 10 cities. Too much of any of it -- like too much red or blue on a canvas -- and the day's paper can tip out of scale. Take crime. For all the public mutterings about too many crime stories, we report only a fraction of all that happens. To load every page with crime sagas would benumb readers. To underplay them would be to lie.

I don't give much credence to media-conspiracy theories. The truer failing is the frustration that comes from riding the hamster-wheel that is the nature of the news beast: This is a newspaper, not a census, and we can't write about everybody every day. So we may end up writing about one homeless woman, one unemployed aerospace worker or one plucky store owner -- as being emblematic of many. One day's story about one suffering family may bring the TV cameras, the checks and the jobs, while the equally deserving family next door gets nothing.

Last year, every time a child younger than 15 was killed in Chicago, the Tribune wrote a major story about it. Did people get angry or bored? I'm afraid if we covered everything, stories would cease to mean anything. Look, here's another story about a promising kid killed by a gang on the steps of the public library -- which was closed from budget cuts -- as he waited with his little sister for their unemployed but undaunted father to pick them up to take them to their grandmother's 90th birthday party. Why can't the news media give it a rest? Pass me some more French toast .

That's another thing: It has pained me to watch the city's tolerances, like its defenses, ratcheting upward over the years. What used to be shocking is now commonplace -- and that fact, too, is newsworthy. Ten years ago, a teen killed in gang cross-fire was a story. Now it takes a girl carried off from a slumber party in her own bedroom to get seen and heard and read above all the other mayhem that has become ordinary.

And being new is a relentless part of being news . Like cops at a crime scene, when the phone rings or the alarm summons, we may be sent off to another story, sometimes before every question can be answered about the last one.

The next day, we build from zero again, stirring the doings of the powerful, the criminal, the unfortunate, the brave, the humble and the quirky into the mix. One day's newspaper is layered atop the previous day's, and over time, we hope that it begins to look, sound and read not like some court docket or movie script or video game, but like a city, the one we live in.

"Shadowlands," a film about a late-blooming romance that is being touted as an Oscar contender, sports three characters who are bookies, not just readers of books, but writers of books. Clive Staples Lewis, lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later at Magdalene College, Cambridge, had 50 books to his credit, some published posthumously. Warren Lewis, his brother, a retired Army officer, did five books. Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis, the woman who walked into C. S. Lewis' life, had four books published.

So bookish were the three that in December, 1957, some months after Joy had moved into the Lewis household, Jack, as Clive was called by his friends, was thinking of having a plate installed on the front door reading "Lewis, Lewis, and Lewis, Inc., Book Factory."

The film is so rich in reference to these books that anyone captivated by the film might long for a "Shadowlands" library to browse in. An annotated bibliography for such a collection follows.

Words and sentiments taken from Lewis' "The Problem of Pain" (originally published in 1940; available today in Macmillan paperback, $4.95), in which he tackled "the intellectual problem raised by suffering," seem to frame the film's argument. By film's end, after his new wife has succumbed to bone-eating cancer, Lewis' proud intellect has been brought to its knees.

So much for the agony of "Shadowlands," now for the ecstasy. In his "The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition" (1936; out of print now, but a ground-breaking study when it first appeared), the 38-year-old scholar wrote about "the birth of the romantic conception of love and the long struggle between its earlier form (the romance of adultery) and its later form (the romance of marriage)." Courtly love was a sort of French literary confection, Lewis argued, but in his own life, as least with Joy, love was no allegory; he was as antsy as any courtier.

The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's books published from 1950-1956, are featured prominently in the screenplay. Magdalen faculty member Christopher Riley (a fictional character mouthing Tolkien's oft-expressed view that any book written faster than his own books couldn't possibly be good -- and Tolkien wrote slowly, very slowly; he never did finish the dictionary of Icelandic he promised for decades to Oxford University Press) rails against what he felt was the superficiality of the Narnia books (boxed set available from Macmillan, $22.95).

If a distraction to Riley, then the first Narnia books were a positive attraction to Joy's son Douglas, who had read the first one before visiting England; at their first meeting, he asks Lewis to autograph his copy of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." In real life, Lewis dedicated the fifth book of the Chronicles to Douglas and also to his brother David, who does not appear as a character in the film.

The prospect of meeting Joy worried Jack, for he had legions of American admirers of his literary and spiritual works. His brother Warnie, however, thought she was a good risk; after all, she was a poet. Indeed in one of their first meetings, Jack asks Joy to recite a poem of hers. She picks "Snow in Madrid," which appeared in "Letters to a Comrade" (Yale Series of Younger Poets No. 37; reprint of 1938 edition, $18, AMS Press).

At a Magdalen Christmas party, Jack introduces Joy around. When asked by a faculty member what she's doing in England, she replies that she's looking for a publisher. Her manuscript, "Smoke on the Mountain," which was an interpretation of the Ten Commandments, was indeed published in 1954 in both England and the U.S. (Westminster, paperback, $11.99); it was dedicated "to C.S. Lewis."

"The Four Loves" (published in 1960; available in a Harcourt paperback, $6.95) is another of Lewis' books made use of by screenwriter William Nicholson. The relationship with Joy began, wrote Jack to a correspondent, "in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became pity, and only after that Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successively undergone the sweet humiliations of an incarnation." Such distinctions appear also in talks Jack recorded for the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation in Atlanta (1958); these talks make up the text of "The Four Loves." The book, by the way, was copyrighted in the name of Joy Lewis.

As Joy's cancerous agony and Jack's spiritual darkness increased, he turned to prayer, much of which in the film takes place in the chapel at Magdalen College, where the massive reredos is a dovecote whose niches are filled, not with birds, but with saints -- saints seemingly deaf to Jack's petitionary prayer. "I pray because I can't help myself," he admits in the film. "I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God -- it changes me." Much of Jack's real-life theorizing about prayer, the fruit of many decades of practice, appears in a work published just after his death in 1963, "Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer," which is as fine a treatise on prayer as ever written (1964; available as a Harcourt paperback, $6.95). Like "The Screwtape Letters," it is an instructional work in the form of an epistolary novel.

In the dark night of the soul after his wife's cremation, Jack penned in a journal that God also had disappeared, and so did Christ; the whole Christian house of cards came tumbling down. The work was eventually published as "A Grief Observed" (1961; available as a Bantam paperback, $4.50). He put on the title page the pseudonym N.W. Clerk; the wife in the journal he referred to only as "H."; Joy's first name was Helen.

Near the film's end, mourning in the attic in front of the wardrobe that appears on the first pages of the Chronicles of Narnia, young Douglas says he doesn't believe in heaven anymore. Jack has to agree. They both bawl. At this juncture, Jack might have said something contained in Letters to Malcolm: "Joy is the serious business of Heaven."

As for "Showdow-Lands," as Lewis wrote the word, it appears at the end of "The Last Battle," seventh and last of the Chronicles of Narnia. The three children -- Peter, Edmund, and Lucy -- after having died in a railway accident, leave behind their earthly lives in the Shadow-Lands and begin their new life in sunlit Narnia. "The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

"And as (Aslan) spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

When all is said and done in the film there lingers a finely wrought sentiment, first uttered by a student of Lewis' at Magdalen, and later assented to by the master himself:

"We read to know we're not alone."

It's the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind, a decade after the Earth/Minbari war that nearly destroyed humanity. The Babylon Project was created to establish peace among earthlings and aliens.The first three Babylon stations were sabotaged and destroyed. The fourth one disappeared without a trace. Babylon 5, which is under the jurisdiction of the Earth Alliance, has survived for two years.

Who are its architects, commanders and foes?

Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare): The reluctant hero of the Earth Alliance must maintain peace among the once-warring interstellar governments.

Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson): A telepath who uses her powers to negotiate business deals.

Ambassador G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas): The calculating, reptilian-appearing leader of the aggressive Narn Regime.

Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik): The rather excessive representative of the once- powerful Centauri Republic.

Lt. Col. Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian): Sinclair's newly appointed second-in-command. Ambitious and no-nonsense, Ivanova oversees the space station controls.

Dr. Steven Franklin (Richard Biggs): The ship's chief medical officer who tends to the needs of the multitude of life forms inhabiting the station.

Ambassador Deleen (Mira Furlan): The stoic representative of the Minbari Federation. Once a homogenous culture, the federation is in the midst of political and social upheaval.

Security Chief Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle): Sinclair's trusted protector of the ship. Garibaldi, though, has a troubled past.

J. Michael Straczynski had a personal agenda when he created the syndicated science-fiction series "Babylon 5."

"When you first watch the pilot you think, 'This is the good guy and this is the bad guy.' Then what we do in the series is a gradual move-around of the chairs. No one is what they appear. I don't believe in one-dimensional characters."

Prime-time sci-fi series that have failed ("Space Rangers" and "V"), Straczynski says, have made the mistake of stressing razzle-dazzle special effects over characters. Sci-fi fans "tune in to watch characters. You have to give your characters and your actors multidimensionality."

The other reason the co-executive producer created the series is more nebulous. "People of my generation," says the baby boomer, "often have the sense they have gotten off the merry-go-round somewhere. Whether it was Kennedy, Vietnam, King, or Watergate. Something went wrong.

"We have lost that infatuation with the future and got bogged down with what is happening now," Straczynski says. "We have forgotten that we are part of the grand parade that's building the future everyday."

Part of his mission with "Bab 5" is to instill a sense of wonder about the future and remind people "we are building something. There will be a future. You can't tell me in 2million years of evolution that the culmination is Beavis and Butt-head. There must be something grander going on here."

Straczynski says he believes what distinguishes "Bab 5" is that members of the creative team are fans of the sci-fi genre.

Growing up on such black-and-white horror flicks of the '50s as "Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman," Straczynski also voraciously read sci-fi literature. "The first books I read of the genre was Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles' and 'The Shrinking Man' by Richard Matheson. I sold short stories and novels in the dark fantasy, science-fiction genre."

What Straczynski hopes to achieve with "Bab 5" is to take what he learned from that literature and apply it to the series, "particularly the epics like 'Dune,' 'Martian Chronicles" and Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings.' They are large sagas. They have a beginning, a middle and an end."

So does the series. "It covers five years of storytime and with luck, we will run five years. Then that's the end of the story. The way it's structured is that each episode stands alone, but the more you watch, the more you will see a larger story."

Straczynski wanted to avoid the problem that he said David Lynch's cult series "Twin Peaks" had. "I loved that show dearly, but if you missed one show, you were lost.

Of the 22 first-season episodes of "Babylon 5," Straczynski has written 12. "It is constructed like a novel, so that every episode for about five years has been blocked out."

A copy of the series' bible is in his computer and another is in a safety deposit box. "This thing means a lot to me," Straczynski acknowledges. "This is what I have been working for all my life. Once I've done this, I will have said all I wanted to say in television." SUSAN KING

THRESHOLD OF FIRE: A Novel of Fifth-Century Rome by Hella Haasse (Academy Chicago: $19; 246 pp.)Those eager for parallels between the fall of the Roman Empire and the imminent demise of our own will be disappointed.Hella Haasse's Rome of 380-412 AD is indeed in its death throes. There is an ongoing Cold War with the East (we won ours); there are barbarians at the gates (not pertinent, unless you want to count rock and rap); the West's capitol has been relocated to swamp Ravenna (Foggy Bottom doesn't count), where the regent for a weak emperor is a Vandal general soon to be assassinated (Constantinople's regent is a eunuch). Haasse's real villain, though, is Christianity, Christianity of a hypocrisy and rigidity hard to duplicate this side of the auto-da-fe.

The gifted hands of Haasse, grande dame of Dutch letters, rescue the era from the flaking pages of history texts. Plausible people, by turns flawed and worthy, stand in for opposing views. Representing the new Establishment is Hadrian, the city's top magistrate, who was born an Egyptian heathen and thus is more Roman and Christian than Caesar's wife. On trial before Hadrian is Claudius, avatar of enlightened paganism (historically, Claudian, last of the great Latin poets). Linking the two is Eliezar -- Hadrian's mentor and Claudius' illegitimate grandfather -- whose example makes a compelling argument for Judaism.

It is a trial of ideas, and ideals, one made more poignant by hindsight: These are "twilight men in a twilight time."

Oscar- and Tony-winner Walter Matthau returns as the rumpled but savvy lawyer Harmon Cobb in Sunday's CBS movie "Incident in a Small Town." Matthau introduced the character four years ago in the Emmy Award-winning "The Incident," in which Cobb defended a German POW in a murder trial during World War II. The second in the series, "Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore," aired two years ago.

Veteran character actor Harry Morgan, best known as Col. Sherman Potter on "MASH" and officer Bill Gannon on "Dragnet," reprises his role as Cobb's friend and partner, Judge Stoddard Bell.

In person, Matthau, 73, and Morgan, 78, were anything but "grumpy old men." They seemed to genuinely enjoy each other's company over a recent lunch at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Though Morgan seemed a lot like Sherman Potter in civvies, Matthau loved to shock his unsuspecting luncheon guest with his ribald sense of humor. He concluded the lunch by unbuttoning his shirt and showing off a scar from recent pacemaker surgery.

Times Staff Writer Susan King, who blushed a bit more than normal during an interview, talked with the two about their friendship, "Incident in a Small Town," canned salmon and homemade ice cream.

Did you two ever work together before doing "The Incident"?

Harry Morgan: No, but we used to meet at Dick Widmark's Christmas party.

Walter Matthau: We used to sit near him because you could hear his voice. It was very soothing.

You have a great rapport.

WM: That word is not rapport. It is rappaport. We have a great rappaport together.

HM: The last picture was just fantastic, I thought. Everything was great.

What made it great?

HM: The location. We worked out on a farm for a couple of weeks. It was just delightful.

WM: We passed a place where we got homemade ice cream every day.

HM: It was about an hour outside of Toronto.

WM: Magnificent countryside. You can just taste that cherry vanilla.

HM: That's right, but they had other flavors. We just had a great time.

WM: (As lunch arrives, Matthau looks at his guest.) Aren't you going to eat anything?

No. I'm fine.

WM: We are going to eat and you are not eating. You can't eat this marvelous can of salmon? I love it. (Matthau breaks up the salmon the waiter gave him with his fork and puts it into his salad.)

HM: I love it, too, but I don't eat it very often. I like it better than fresh salmon.

WM: It's delicious. My mother used to give me 16 cents to get a can of salmon. Bumblebee. I'd go downstairs (to the grocery store) because I was afraid to walk three blocks to get it. It wasn't safe. So, I would have a few pennies, and I would put in my own penny so I wouldn't have to walk three blocks. It was 17 cents downstairs. (Matthau glances over). Are you married?

No.

WM: Why don't you start eating? You'll get married if you start eating.

Hmmmm. Going back to the movie, "Incident in a Small Town" takes place in 1953, six years after "Against Her Will."

HM: We seem to be very amicable when this thing starts. We have a good relationship and this time I have a problem. So I want to set out to solve it, and Walter insists on coming along with me to help out. And we go from there.

It sounds like an old-fashioned mystery.

HM: It's more of a whodunit. Walter figures it out. It gets very complicated.

WM: Why do they say whodunit? Shouldn't it be, whodidit?

HM: Yeah. It should be.

WM: But whodunit is better. But it do not sound good to me.

What drew you both to the first "Incident" movie?

HM: It was a terrific story.

WM: I liked the author's perception that most Germans were no good and that some were OK. That interested me. Usually, people try to palm off on you that Germans didn't want the Nazi regime. They embraced it -- 88% of them. Well, we need that escape hatch. You can't blame your lack of happiness on the majority, you have to blame it on some tiny minority like the Jew.

Walter, what makes Harry such a great actor? Harry, what makes Walter so special?

WM: I kept thinking he's Jack Lemmon. And then I look up and he's Harry Morgan.

HM: And he's Jack Webb. (laughs). No, I don't really think that. Walter's just a delight. He's a wonderful actor and a passable human being.

WM: I love not only working with Harry, I can't wait to go to dinner with him.

HM: We just have a great time. Often it's unspoken. Correct? And we both love Italian food. We had to up in Toronto.

WM: There are 500,000 Italians there and a million and a half restaurants it seems.

Both of you have done comedy and drama. Do you have a preference?

WM: My preference is non-comedic roles. They are so easy. Comedy is tough. Very hard. You notice I don't say serious roles.

HM: I didn't notice that.

WM: I will point it out to you.

HM: I've played everything you can think of. I used to do a lot of heavies, which I always enjoyed.

Do you think the quality of TV and features have gotten better or worse over the years?

HM: I think things have gotten worse. Much worse.

WM: Technically, it's better. But the story. They had stories. Stories about relationships between people. They didn't have "The Terminator 4." I saw that "Terminator" the other day. I couldn't believe that I was watching it. (Matthau looks over at his guest ) . Do you want a cookie?

"Incident in a Small Town" airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.

NOAH'S GARDEN: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yard by Sara Stein (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 294 pp.) Workers of the 'burbs, unite! Lay down your leaf rakes.Muzzle your mowers. Kick back and pick up "Noah's Garden" by Sara Stein, a feisty, iconoclastic self-described "non-gardener" with the soul of Thoreau and the pen of a poet. Stein proposes to do for the back yard what the EPA cannot begin to accomplish nationally. Let things be, she says. Nature is a helluva lot smarter than we are. Leaves left on the ground break down into sustenance for shrubs and trees, which in turn feed and house bees and birds and beasties, which return the favor by spreading the seeds and pollen of the shrubs and trees, which . . . As for lawns, they're anachronisms, leftovers from the large estates whose vast, manicured greenswards simply declared: I'm rich enough to hire an army of gardeners. Meanwhile, all the critters that fueled the engines wouldn't be seen dead on a lawn -- which they would be, exposed to predators. And we, in our wisdom, break our backs and our banks on pesticides, sprinklers, mulches, aerators, "whereas before, (nature) managed all these things itself" -- and for free. Stein is no anarchist, encouraging us to let things go to pot. She loves flowers and grasses and butterflies. What she suggests is that we have "unplugged the connections" among our local flora and fauna, and that we hook them up again to the greater glory of the planet, no matter how small our holdings. "Fling wide the garden gate," she says, "loosen the land's aesthetic corset, let it be more blowsy and fecund, allow it to bed promiscuously with beasts and creatures of all sorts."

LIFE INTO ART: Isadora Duncan and Her World edited by Doree Duncan, Carol Pratl and Cynthia Splatt, text by Cynthia Splatt (W. W. Norton: $40; 199 pp). As one of the most fascinating woman artists of this century, Isadora Duncan danced life with equal measures of strength and courage as well as impetuousness and foolishness in her bare feet and Greek togas.She is the figurehead for the birth of modern dance (as opposed to pointed shoes and tutus) as well as an exemplary feminist who pursued her dreams and ideals regardless of social condemnation or approval. There have been any number of books written about Duncan (as well as her flamboyant autobiography "My Life") but this particular work has the added advantage of dozens of photos never seen before from the Duncan family archives. And the text, wonderful in its obvious warmth toward its subject as well as its wealth of research, also focuses on the work and influence the other Duncan siblings had on Isadora and each other. (She had two brothers Augustin and Raymond and a sister Elizabeth). Ah, but it is Isadora's image: zephyr, bacchante, earth mother and tragedian that permeates the book. Born in San Francisco, she is the ultimate example of free spirit, from a city that became famous for them. Sue Martin

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL by John Berendt (Random House: $23; 390 pp.) Smart people, the Savannahians. When Sherman's Civil War scorched-earth march fetched up on their doorstep, they immediately surrendered on condition that the general spare their city.He did, and Savannah never looked back -- or forward. Sherman spared what the French, among other connoisseurs, call the most beautiful city in America. Also, John Berendt relates, America's most insular, inbred, eccentric, estranged, albeit enchanting city, resisting any change, spurning all suitors, asking only to be left alone. City of cotillions and chilled martinis, where a rare stranger is not asked what he does or where he's from but what he wants to drink. And a city of secrets as well. "You mustn't be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias," Jim Williams tells Berendt. "Things can get murky." Not least murky is Williams himself. In his opulent, lovingly restored mansion one fragrant May night, Williams shoots to death Danny Hansford, 21, his sexy, violent, volatile "assistant." Berendt, who seems congenitally unable to write a dull paragraph, spins out Williams' lengthy murder trial with exquisite suspense, but his real subject is Savannah: its rhythms, its mores, its foibles, its gentilities.

THE ERA, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn (Ticknor & Fields: $22.95; 372 pp.) I was there, and he has it just right. New York was the capital of the universe, "a cosmic town." Its kings were Willie, Mickey and the Duke, "speed, power and grace," monarchs of all they surveyed from deepest center field. Jackie introduced the era, leading the league in everything but hotel reservations. Walter O'Malley -- "an ingratiating hustler," "venal and mendacious" -- ended it, ripping the guts out of the city and burying them in a nicey-nicey plastic plot called Chavez.

You didn't need last names then, or even first names. Everybody knew who they were. Snuffy, Superchief, Skoonj, Schoolboy. The Barber, the Cricket and the Man. The Splendid Splinter, the Hondo Hurricane, the Naugatuck Nugget. Even stately Joe DiMaggio. whose devoted teammates called him Daig, which you couldn't get away with now. Nor were the owners -- a drunk, a dilettante and a genius -- immune; they were the Roarin' Redhead, the Mahatma and Big Oom.

Nobody does baseball like Roger Kahn, he of the immortal "The Boys of Summer." Nobody better tells you stuff you already knew and makes it fun again. (Pee Wee was named for his prowess at marbles, not his 5-10 height.) Nobody better unearths new nuggets. (Alistair Cooke reported on the World Series for the Manchester Guardian.) Nobody better re-creates the transcendent (the moment after the Staten Island Scot hit the homer in 1951, when the cosmos thundered and the unbaptized thought war had been declared), better resuscitates the bon mot (DiMag's first wife: "Spring training for Marilyn Monroe"). It's all there, the racism and the venality along with the power and the glory; the apotheosis of all that is sacred and profane. You could look it up.

Once, taking a train into Chicago

from the west, I saw a message

scrawled on a wall in the railway yard --

Tommy, call home, we need you --

and for years I have worried, imagining

the worst scenarios. Beneath the message

was a number written in red chalk,

although at eighteen who was I to call

and at forty-six who is left to listen?

But Tommy, I think of him still traveling

out in the country, riding freight car

after freight car, just squeaking by

in pursuit of some private quest.

That's the problem, isn't it?

Coming into the world and imagining

some destination for oneself,

some place to make all the rest

all tight, as we cast aside those

who love us, as they cast aside others

in their turn, and all of us

wandering, wandering in a direction

which only our vanity claims to be forward,

while the messages fall away like pathetic cries --

come back, call home, we need you.

From "Velocities" by Stephen Dobyns. (Penguin: $14.95) 1994 Reprinted by permission.

LETTERS OF A LOVE-HUNGRY FARMER by John B. Keane (St. Martin's: $10.95; 88 pp.) Meet John Bosco McLane, Irish farmer, 52, named for a soon-to-be saint. Unmarried. Very unmarried. "An innocent sort of a man," they say in the hill country between Kerry and Cork. A chastitute. That's what Father Kennerley calls him. "The whole countryside is reeking of chastitution," snorts the parish priest. "There isn't the making of a dacent sin in the entire doings of the lot o' you."

Meet John B. Keane, if you haven't already (your loss). Novelist; playwright; publican; sage; bard of the bittersweet and the bawdy. A man who knows. It's taken 20 years for "Letters" to reach these benighted shores, and it's been worth the wait. Not for John Bosco, though. "He is without a wife, mistress or regular copulatory companion." He needs a woman. Now. A friend advises him to dig deeper for the local potatoes. Another suggestion: observe the greasy city Lotharios in action: "That's how Dempsey became world champion, watching others when he was a gorsoon. And there's the local matchmmaker, a many-splendored fellow named Dicky Mick Dicky O'Connor, who signs his correspondence "Courtesy and Civility assured at all times."

John Bosco's luck remains rotten. One prospective companion, having divorced an impotent cawboge , demands a photo of Bosco in the buff, to assure that "your natural belongings are intact." Another, this one with all her teeth, turns out to be pregnant, by her brother, who also fancies hens. A third, finding the farmer too timid, delivers the Gaelic equivalent of Dear John, to wit: "Shag you from a height." Will John Bosco find a woman? Is the Pope Italian? More important, will St. Martin's release some more Keane? Please?

THE BOOK OF THE PEARL: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems by George Frederick Kunz & Charles Hugh Stevenson (Dover: $17.95; 548 pp., illustrated). Although shifts in fashion and the rise of the cultured pearl industry have rendered some sections outdated, this erudite treatise, originally published in 1908, still provides a good deal of valuable information. The illustrations include a portrait of an uncomfortable Duchess of Marlborough weighted down with strands of pearls and a multi-row "dog collar," and Empress Eugenie's fabulous pearl necklace, which looks like Ali Baba's jump rope.

It's long been a cliche to gripe about "car chase" movies -- when it's actually been a long time since anyone really attempted one. Seventies revivalists will be happy that the genre's commercial apex, Smokey and the Bandit (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 8 p.m.), is back for another wheelie. Wistfully relive those days when CB radios -- not E-mail -- were America's trendiest semi-personal communication, and when Burt Reynolds -- not Ice-T -- represented state-of-the-art law-defiance.

That spotty 1977 comedy spawned two awful official sequels. Get ready for a third with the brand-new Bandit: Must Be Country (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m.), from Hal Needham, the stuntman-turned-director responsible for the first couple of "Smokey" movies. It's Burt-less, of course; Brian Bloom steps in as the new trucker who can't drive 55.

Run (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a 1990 vehicle for Patrick Dempsey to be on the sprint, but from mobsters, not the law, after he accidentally kills the son of a local gang lord. Forgettable, but fast enough to cover a multitude of sins, it's MTV meets "The Wrong Man." Kelly Preston provides the complementary good looks.

The 1986 Tough Guys (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) gets by as a rousing tribute to Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, cast as a pair of veteran bank robbers, but isn't quite tough enough for non-sentimentalists to chew on.

Don't be fooled by the title: Titicut Follies (KCET Friday at 11 p.m.) is a harrowing documentary, briefly seen in 1967 and then suppressed for a quarter-century before getting a hailed theatrical re-release. Frederick Wiseman's black-and-white visit to a Massachusetts mental hospital unveiled abuse and negligence so shocking a judge ordered all negatives and prints destroyed on the basis of privacy violation. Fortunately, cooler heads, and, one presumes, better institutional conditions -- have since prevailed.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil (ABC Saturday at 8 p.m.) wasn't the last film comedy Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder would team up for. There was one more after this 1989 effort, but this was the last funny one and having Arthur Hiller (who first matched the duo in "Silver Streak" at the helm helped. A few disability-related activist groups objected to the high jinx of Pryor's blind and Wilder's deaf heroes as they lean on each other's senses to solve the murder they're accused of, but the humor is far more sweet than demeaning.

The Wind (KCET Saturday at 10:30 p.m.) is a spectacular way to wind up the week, albeit pre-sound-era spectacle. Lillian Gish stars in this landmark 1928 silent film as a virtuous young woman stranded without means in a Dust Bowl town. She has plenty of trouble with men and, of course, the elements. Repression and volatility prevail: There's rape, murder and a climactic dust storm that couldn't be better if it were in Surround Sound.

FRANKLY, MY DEAR: More than 650 of the Funniest, Smartest, Gutsiest, Nastiest, Sexiest, and Simply Greatest Quotes in Celebration of Women in the Movies compiled and edited by Jeff Bloch (Citadel Press: $9.95; 180 pp., illustrated, paperback original). This anthology contains some classic lines: "As long as I know how to get what I want, that's all I wanna know," (Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday," 1950); "I need him like the ax needs the turkey," (Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve," 1941). But Bloch omits all mention of the men and women who wrote those lines; Mae West's, "Beulah, peel me a grape," is probably the only ad-lib in the book.

BONE by Fae Myenne Ng (HarperPerennial: $11; 194 pp.). Ng's gracefully written first novel examines the conflict between two generations in the restricted world of San Francisco's Chinatown.Leila Leong narrates the unhappy saga of her mismatched parents and her sisters. Ona, the middle sister, committed suicide for unknown reasons; Nina, the youngest, has abandoned her family obligations for the freedom of New York. Left to herself, Leila slowly pieces together her family's struggle to preserve their traditional beliefs while taking advantage of the opportunities America offers. Ng deftly sketches a moving portrait of a family as unit and as a collection of individuals, united by affection, toil and blighted hope.

FINDERS, KEEPERS: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History: Collectors From Peter the Great to Louis Agassiz by Rosamond Wolff Purcell & Stephen Jay Gould (Norton: $24.95; 160 pp.) . Gould traces the evolution of natural history collections from princely Kunstkammers, or chambers of curiosities, to modern museums. Peter the Great had agents gather objects throughout his empire for his personal horde, which included teeth the Tsar had extracted himself; the gentle Lord Walter Rothschild used his vast fortune to assemble an unparalleled collections of exotic birds of paradise. Purcell's dramatic photographs provide a striking counterpoint to Gould's engaging text.

MARTIN AND JOHN by Dale Peck (HarperPerennial: $11; 228 pp.). Peck's powerful first novel takes the form of a series of eerie fragments depicting disparate lives: loving families and abusive ones; wealth and poverty; sophistication and naivete.Only the names Martin and John link these diverse scenarios. In a dramatic coup de theatre, Peck melds his vignettes into a devastating portrait of a lonely man struggling to preserve love and hope in the era of AIDS. To exorcise the specter of that relentless killer, the unseen narrator declares, "I tell myself that by reinventing my life, my imagination imposes an order on things and makes them make sense."

ONE MAN'S OWL by Bernd Heinrich, abridged and revised by Alice Calaprice (Princeton Paperbacks: $12.95; 186 pp., illustrated). Heinrich didn't realize what he was getting himself into when he adopted an owlet orphaned by a winter storm. The endearing little ball of fluff grew into a majestic bird, and Heinrich found himself caught between his efforts to raise a self-sufficient wild creature and his desire to preserve the affectionate responses of a pet. His warm memoir offers pleasant reading, as well as information about the anatomy and behavior of the Great Horned Owl.

VENUS ENVY by Rita Mae Brown (Bantam: $5.99; 388 pp.). Brown's comic tale of love and honesty recalls her previous novel, "Bingo."When Mary Frazier Armstrong, a wealthy, bisexual art dealer, learns she is dying, she writes series of brutally frank letters to her family and friends -- only to discover she isn't really dying. Her efforts to cope with the aftermath of her honesty are often funny, but life is a little too easy for the rich and beautiful Frazier; unlike the feisty Bingo, she has no real stake in her small Virginia town. Brown doesn't seem to have known how to end her story: An incongruous coda, in which the Greek gods proclaim the beauty of ambisexual passion, falls flat.

LIFE, DEATH AND AID: The Medecins Sans Frontieres Report on World Crisis Intervention edited by Francois Jean, English version by Anne-Marie Huby & Alison Marschner (Routledge: $14.95; 160 pp., illustrated, paperback original). Founded in 1971 by a group of French doctors opposed to political restrictions on relief missions, Medecins Sans Frontieres ("Doctors Without Borders") bluntly condemns world leaders for paying lip service to human rights while routinely allowing those rights to be violated in Sudan, Cambodia and Tajikistan and seven other regional wars.The politicization of relief efforts in these struggles has exacerbated the plight of noncombatants. Nowhere are these conditions more evident than in the former Yugoslavia: Drawing on first-hand reports, the authors conclude, "The Bosnian disaster has not only done serious damage to the credibility of the United Nations and its law-enforcement and security instruments, it has also seriously eroded the principles of the Geneva Conventions. . . . It has flouted all the ideals on which the European democracies were founded in the aftermath of the Second World War."

Regarding "Tales of the City" (PBS): I certainly hope that the author and producers of this miniseries don't think that his view of the '70s was how it was for everyone. I lived through the '70s during my 20s and there wasn't anything portrayed in this series that was even remotely like my life.Certainly not everyone was smoking marijuana, sleeping with the same sex and splattering conversations with four-letter words.

Barbara George, Arcadia

What a laugh! With all the gore and mayhem and meanness on television, it has been decided to pixillate a view of a bare bottom so viewers can't see it on "Tales of the City."

Personally, I find the sight of a killer's bare chest infinitely more repugnant than a bare bottom on the beach.

Kurt Sipolski, Palm Desert No Salvation for Parade Rerun

I was disappointed with the 7:30 p.m. rebroadcast by KTLA of the Rose Parade. I thought it would be commercial-free just like the parade aired at 8 a.m. The station had one of its commercial breaks during the Salvation Army Band. Bad timing.

Margaret Ayers, Mission Hills

What if Robert Louis Stevenson had known in 1883, when he wrote "Treasure Island," that his book's treasure hunt would take place more than a hundred years later in a casino hotel in a desert resort town called Las Vegas?

He probably would have gambled, as NBC has, that it would attract an audience. The network's hourlong adaptation airs Tuesday with many of the swashbuckling chararacters intact.

Corey Carrier, who played Young Indy in ABC's "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," stars as 12-year-old Robbie (Jim Hawkins in the book) who, while on a vacation with his parents at the hotel, meets the legendary Long John Silver (Anthony Zerbe). After finding a magical treasure map, Robbie and Long John team up to find the loot before the bad pirates.

Because Treasure Island owner Steve Wynn is executive producer, some viewers may deem the adventure a long commercial for the elaborate resort. But producer-director Scot Garen, who previously directed Disney specials, including "Mickey's 60th Birthday," insists that Treasure Island was used "merely as a setting. We got to use literally $50 million worth of sets to convey our story."

Those "sets" include two full-scale 90-foot ships, the pirates' Hispaniola and the British frigate HMS Royal Brittania, both capable of ear-shattering cannon and musket volleys. The ships sail on Buccaneer Bay and Skull Point, which surround the hotel's 1 3/4-acre frontage. Last year's big-bang demolition of the Dunes Hotel -- another Wynn project -- is incorporated into the story line.

For Corey, 13, it was the lure of swordplay that drew him to the telefilm. It's also what he thinks will appeal to most to his peers.

"It's got pirates," he says enthusiastically, "And it's in Las Vegas, which is as bright as it looks on television. The whole theme, though, is that if you can dream it, it can come true. The adventure and the sword fighting are what kids are going to like."

In addition to the swordplay, the underlying story focuses on Robbie's relationship with his father, Garen says.

"Basically, the arc of the story is where Robbie learns that the real treasure lies in your imagination," he says. "The child's spirit in his father is released and the two of them experience a new relationship by the story's end."

"Treasure Island: The Adventure Begins . . . " airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on NBC. For ages 10 and up. MORE FAMILY SHOWS

The Higgins family discovers a piano in the basement of the roommates' apartment on Disney's live-action/puppet series Piano Lessons Under the Umbrella Tree (Sunday 11:30 a.m.-noon). Thinking it'll be easy to learn to play piano, Holly begins to take lessons with Jon Kimura Parker, a concert pianist who lives nearby. Meanwhile, Malcolm, a little mouse who lives in the piano, encourages Holly by telling her tales of her Higgins relatives who played the piano in the past. The roommates attend Parker's concert and his performance inspires Holly to continue practicing. For ages 2 to 8.

Nickelodeon presents the premiere of two new miniseries installments of The Tomorrow People (Saturdays 6-6:30 p.m.), which began last year as a five-part miniseries. The kiddie sci-fi-adventure show focuses on a group of telepathic kids who have the power to "teleport" -- use their minds to transport their bodies from one place to another -- and "mind merge," which is the ability to holographically re-create a moment in time. For ages 6 and up.

If anything, they bring out the worst in each other on "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung."

Chung, with her coquettish flair and once-upon-a-time way of reading her copy, seems all the more lightweight beside the hardy Rather.

And as for Rather, whose taut, white-knuckle style worked fine in his past life as a full-time correspondent but has never served him well as an anchor, Chung crowding his left elbow seems only to heighten his unease.

"The Dan and Connie Show" is distinguished by how it detracts from the process of reporting the news.

With a partner -- a woman partner, at that -- beside him at the anchor desk, Rather himself seems distracted. Should he be warm? Chivalrous?

Meanwhile, he has pushed to the limit the chief asset of any journalist: credibility. Despite an understandable desire to do more on-the-scene reporting after a dozen years solo in the anchor chair, his claim of being "a very happy and very excited Dan Rather" just didn't wash when the Rather-Chung team was announced last spring.

In second place behind ABC's "World News Tonight" when Chung came on board, "The CBS Evening News" quickly dipped to third place, where it currently resides.

But here a destroy-it-to-save-it sort of rationale takes over. Numbers suggest that since Chung arrived, the broadcast has shed older viewers (many welcomed by "The NBC Nightly News," now No. 2), while strengthening its audience in the 25-to-54 demographic many advertisers prefer to reach.

"That's the long-term news-viewing audience of the future," says David Poltrack, CBS' top research executive.

Maybe Chung is indeed the cure CBS is seeking.

Even so, it remains to be seen whether she will have a remedial effect on Rather's lapses into wackiness. She was off one night a few weeks ago for a particularly odd outbreak of what has come to be called "Dan Rather-isms."

Apparently feeling the urge for a little Catskills humor, Rather came out of a 3 1/2-minute report on attention deficit disorder with this crack: " 'CBS This Morning's' going to have a lot of good stuff tomorrow," he deadpanned, "but for the life of me I can't remember what it is."

But seriously, folks, Rather knows well the difference between glitz and solid journalism. And in a much-reported speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Assn. last September, he called both his colleagues and himself on the carpet for lapses into "fuzz and wuzz."

"We've all succumbed to the 'Hollywoodization' of the news," he said.

These were strong words, especially from a newsman who considers himself to be principally a reporter, yet who retains, even now, the high office, high salary and high profile of an anchor. Predictably, he was praised for raising his prominent voice -- and also criticized, for blasting the system that gave him prominence in the first place.

In giving the news a face and a voice, therefore, the anchor also makes news. And not only by making a speech but, sometimes, just by sitting there at the anchor desk.

That's the case, squared, on "The CBS Evening News." An anchor team with scant chemistry and minimal journalistic reason for being, "The Dan and Connie Show" makes news by distracting its viewers from the real thing.

"What is the secret of life?" the poet Donald Hall once asked the 80-year-old sculptor Henry Moore. "With anyone else," Hall commented, "the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh," but Henry Moore answered the question in straightforward, pragmatic terms:

"The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do!"

Now 15 years after that interview, Hall has attempted to answer his own impossible but provocative question. His engrossing new book, "Life Work," is difficult to classify but impossible to put down. Part essay, part autobiography, part family history, the volume straddles commercial genres.

Described on its most literal level, "Life Work" is a sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. Written over a period of three months in 1992 (when its author was 63 years old), the book moves forward in undated daily entries. Hall discusses his life and work while constantly comparing his own activities and attitudes with those of his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Although the book unfolds like a writer's journal, it never feels like a private diary. Indeed the book so successfully creates a sense of Hall's inner life in all its intricate dailiness that "Life Work" reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist.

Hall deepens the novelistic effect by rooting his narrative in a real place, Eagle Pond Farm in Danbury, N.H. (The location will be familiar to readers of the author's popular memoirs such as "Season at Eagle Pond.") Inheriting the family farm from his grandparents, Hall moved there in 1975 with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Giving up the security of academic tenure, Hall took the opportunity to reinvent his life. Content in a small circle of friends and family, he centered his new existence on the labor he loved most -- writing.

Many men attempt to create new, more fulfilling lives in middle age -- usually with unimpressive results. In Hall's case, however, something marvelous happened. In New Hampshire his work deepened. Long an accomplished poet, he now became an irreplaceable one. By 50 most poets have their best work behind them. Hall's verse grew better with each volume, culminating in "The One Day" (1988), a book-length poem published on his 60th birthday, which ranks as one of the few unquestionable masterpieces in contemporary American poetry.

Hall's prose also developed. Always a smart and snappy stylist, he now seemed to slow down his narrative line slightly -- just enough to catch the often evanescent human sense of each situation. His incisive literary essays continued to be required reading for poets, but Hall's particular talents ultimately proved to be for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form. His best books, such as "Fathers Playing Catch With Sons" (1985), a celebration of baseball; "Seasons at Eagle Pond" (1987), a mixture of nature writing and autobiography, and "Their Ancient Glittering Eyes" a 1992 expansion of his 1978 collection of literary portraits, "Remembering Poets," are all surprisingly different. Hall broadened his range as well as achieved greater depth.

"Life Work" is not only the latest in this distinguished series of memoirs: it is also the book that shares the secrets of how Hall managed his midlife transition from minor to major artist. As the book's title suggests, part of his secret is hard work -- passionate, constant and uncomplaining. The other was the good fortune or good sense to plant his new life on his grandparent's farm where nature, memory and tradition nourished his imagination.

Hall's considerable literary skill is demonstrated in how appealing he makes his unabashedly workaholic life appear. He is by any standard a driven man. He rises at 4:30 a.m., and by 10:00 a.m. he has spent at least four hours writing. With occasional breaks and brief recreations, he spends the rest of the day reading, revising, proofing and writing. In the evening he watches baseball via satellite dish while dictating into a small tape recorder some of the 5,000 letters he writes every year. A life of extraordinary discipline? Definitely not, Hall insists. His life is one of happiness and self-indulgence. Early on he realized that "because I loved my work it was as if I did not work at all."

When genuine artists discuss their working lives, they often alternate between sublime speculation and practical specifics. Hall proves no exception. "Life Work" intermittently grapples with ideas about work's place in society at large. When Hall examines his native New England, he weaves his family history into a broader historical fabric. Occasionally, however, Hall unexpectedly lurches into ideological issues. A well-intentioned digression on feminism, Emile Durkehim and Karl Marx founders, overloaded with unassimilated data and windy generalizations.

More convincing is Hall's practical advice on how he manages to publish a yearly average of four books ("counting revised editions of old books," he adds mostly) plus numerous poems, essays, articles and book reviews, not to mention the 5,000 letters. Productivity is in itself no recommendation for a writer; most hacks are prolific. But Hall's ability to write splendidly as well as plenteously makes his candid advice worth noting.

"I love being a writer," the late novelist Peter DeVries once quipped, "what I can't stand is the paperwork." Hall would agree. Two secrets of his productivity are delegation and dictation. He delegates the inessential but time-consuming paperwork -- typing, fact checking and the like -- to free up more time for real writing. He dictates whatever possible and employs two to three typists at a time to transcribe it. All writers will find his remarks on dictation -- the technique by which both Stendhal and James created some of their best work -- particularly interesting.

Halfway through "Life Work" the high-spirited narrative takes a sudden turn. Hall discovers he has liver cancer. We share the agonizing tests and diagnosis. The book stops for 2 1/2 weeks while he recuperates from surgery. Faced with the news that his chances of living five more years are only one out of three, Hall's tone becomes more urgent. His meditations and memories darken.

And yet what one notices most vividly is how consistent Halls' ideas and attitudes are both before and after this death sentence. His commitment to work always came from a sense of his own mortality. The book's epigraph from the Gospel of John summarizes his theme, "We must work . . . ," Jesus said, because "night comes, when no man can work." "Life Work" is in prose, but the book reflects a lyric poet's sense that time and death are always a writer's real subjects.

Hall's stark confrontation with his own mortality, however, does not leave him self-absorbed. The prospect of his own extinction increases rather than contracts his humanity. His imagination and memory turn increasingly to other people, especially his 89-year-old mother, who defiantly keeps her own house despite multiple infirmities. On an earlier, happier visit, when Hall first described "Life Work" to her, she responded, "I think your book will be inspirational to people." Few will disagree.

Jean-Paul Gaultier's " shmata chic" might have made fashion-mag headlines last year, but Orthodox Jews who really live by the ancient rules of dress often have a hard time finding something kosher and contemporary. That's where Miss Irene comes in.

"There's nothing mysterious about how Orthodox Jewish women dress," says Miss Irene, owner of the eponymous West Los Angeles boutique that mainly serves an Orthodox clientele. "It's a matter of modesty." Which means keeping knees, elbows, collarbones and the head (if married) covered and no trousers, no revealing slits, sheer materials or tight-fitting apparel.

That might sound like a formula for fashion monotony, but for 22 years, Miss Irene's boutique -- which is really her converted garage -- has offered racks of stylish and colorful dresses, stacks of sweaters and hats. Nothing unusual, just carefully chosen garments that tow the Orthodox hemline.

To be sure, the same brands can be found at department stores, but, as Adair Klein, director of library and archival services at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, puts it: "I like shopping here because of Irene's warmth and her patience when I'm looking for an outfit. And the personal attention I get with her, no one gets that kind of care and concern anymore at the big department stores."

Miss Irene, who uses no last name, came to the United States from Hungary in 1956. She is a former Hebrew-school teacher who turned to the rag trade "so I could stay home and make money. It paid the tuition for my (three) children to go to Hebrew school," she says.

"Jewish women are not different from other women," Miss Irene stresses, as she shows how a few stitches can take the sin out of a slitted A-line dress. "They want a good buy and to look modern and stylish." Ivy Brown

Dave and Debbie Spafford's neighbors have gotten used to the noise and the laughter and even the occasional limo. They know that every Friday night, a corner of their quiet neighborhood becomes the center of the world -- well, the animation world.

For the past five years, the Spaffords' Friday night house party (or "animation roadhouse" in Debbie's words), has drawn animators from all over the city, with W.O.M. spreading as far as Europe and Australia. Recent guests have included "Nightmare Before Christmas" director Henry Selick, Ralph ("Fritz the Cat," "Cool World") Bakshi and John Kricfalusi, creator of "Ren & Stimpy."

A sign in the back yard reading "Pago Pago" offers a clue to the party's origins. "It used to hang outside this bar across from the Disney studios, in Burbank, where the old-time animators met and drank," says Dave Spafford, a Disney vet himself before forming Spaff Animation with Debbie in 1989. Among their credits: "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and Woody Woodpecker's Oscar presentation for Best Animated Short Film of 1990.

The idea for the parties came out of the Spaffords' experience in England, when they were working on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." (Dave drew the piano duel between Donald Duck and Daffy Duck.) There, animators socialized at a local pub after work, connecting with the film -- and each other.

Back home though, animation get-togethers didn't seem to work. "We tried sitting over margaritas at this Mexican restaurant, but it wasn't the same," Dave says. So the Spaffords decided to do it at home -- with its Alice-meets-Haight-Ashbury decor, a cartoon fantasy of weird fiberglass horses, spinning mirror disco balls, four pinball machines, a pool table and a '30s-era jukebox.

"This is no football bar," says Dave. "After a few beers, we put out grease pencils and draw on the table, so our whole bar ends up being one big cartoon! We're all freaks. Who else wants to do cartoons?" Judy Raphael

Waiters and waitresses (Waitpeople? Servers, maybe?) dish up a language all their own:

campers: n. diners who linger forever at a table. "I've got a pair of campers on table five.They must think this is a KOA."

Clampetts: n. customers who lack basic social skills. From "The Beverly Hillbillies."

dragging: v. to be missing -- and waiting for -- part of an order from the kitchen. "I'm dragging a dinner salad."

fazed: v. not scheduled to work a shift. "I'm fazed for lunch duty tomorrow."

in the weeds: extremely busy, to the point of breakdown from fatigue. "I've been in the weeds since 4 o'clock!"

red flag: n. a warning from a server to the manager to watch a customer who's had a lot to drink. "Red flag on table two."

Romper Room: n. a table that sports a brood of messy children.

slammed: v. when customers are seated at several tables in one server's area at the same time. "I got slammed by the manager even though Joanne only had one table!" Jeannie Nash

Here in Los Angeles talented resident poets are usually found presenting their work in quite modest circumstances, whereas poets who fly into LAX and rent a car may be seen at high-profile series in venues that feature comfortable chairs. Interestingly, the poetry series just begun at Arundal Antiquarian Books is committed to poets of both national and local reputation. Poet and series director Laurel Ann Bogen inaugurated the reading with familiar Los Angeles names and then, in a turn that has dazzled some, lined up Mark Strand, William Dickey and Philip Levine for February, March and April. "I want to present the most important voices in America," states Bogen emphatically, "whether they're from New York, L.A. or Fresno."

Phillip Bevis, owner of Arundal Antiquarian Books (8380 Beverly Blvd.), acknowledges that this combining of the famed with the under-recognized s