We have seen the future, and it looks uncomfortable.

Over at Pasta Etc. on Sunset Plaza, three distinguished-looking men were holding their coffee cups and smoking their after-lunch cigars while seated on the restaurant's curb.

It seems that even though they were dining at the restaurant's outdoor tables, that wasn't good enough for their anti-secondhand-smoke neighbors.

What's next, the center divider?

*

A Tall, Hot One: What do people drink on one of the hottest, humidest, most wretched days of summer?

As we placed our order for a frosty iced nonfat half-caf latte at our local Starbucks, we were dumbfounded as customer after customer ordered hot coffees.

Why? we discretely asked a few of them.

"It stimulates me, cools me down. It's more psychological than anything. I used to work ona boat where it was real hot and we always drank coffee," said a burly man.

"You see, if you drink hot coffee, your body temperature goes up and you don't react to how hot it is outside," pontificated another.

"For 20 years I lived in Central Utah where it's bitter cold. I'd rather sweat than freeze any day," said a customer going back for a refill.

*

Highway Horseplay: Slogging back home on the 405 from our monthly trek to the Rose Bowl flea market -- where we happily haggled over a matching pair of Fiesta nut dishes -- we spotted a girl, passing us on the left, who was wearing a bikini top that matched her metallic-lavender Mustang convertible. Her hair clip was lavender too.

Then our savvy flea-market friends started pointing out more young, carefree types cruising around in Mustang convertibles. We thought off-road vehicles were trendy, we mentioned.

" Everybody rents Mustangs in Hawaii," we were told, feeling slightly out of it.

Summer may be nearing its end, but the days of a ripping good read under a beach umbrella aren't over yet, especially now that Blanche d'Alpuget has written "White Eye."

From the creepy prologue to the gut-punching last page, her plot roars along like a Land Rover on a bumpy trail in the outback. Murders pile up, along with animal rights abuses, industrial sabotage, even a plan to annihilate humanity.

It all begins when a beautiful corpse turns up near an isolated Australian research lab and an eagle is shot out of the sky as it prepares to swoop down on the warm flesh. By the time the body's cold, the story has spread out in so many directions, the murder seems almost a red herring. But in this tale of psycho-scientists, eco-warriers and blood-thirsty birds of prey, everything comes together in the end. Love, death, animals, humans and deadly gene-spliced viruses are all part of the fabric that binds the contemporary world together, for better or worse.

If this sounds like a standard sci-tech thriller, it's not. D'Alpuget, a master of fine-tuned characterization, has loaded her stage with some of the most distinctive rogues, battered idealists and nut cases in current fiction. There isn't a throwaway or walk-on part in the pack. This population of desperate critters -- many just beasts in human form and most related to one other through a complex web of small-town intermarriage and adultery -- lift the enterprise from a plot-driven chase to an offbeat meditation on humanity and its future.

Take John Parker, the twisted, sloppily groomed man of science who is moved to tears over virulent bacteria, plots to quash worldwide population growth single-handedly and believes that, "To be a complete human . . . one must be a complete animal first." His wife Sonja, a simpering ninny who adores him, turns out to be equally savage and unbalanced, a revelation that finally wins her man's respect, though not his loyalty. Then there's Diana Pemberton, the novel's heroine, a gutsy yet emotionally damaged environmentalist who has learned what determination is during her years of training great wild hunting birds. It's a safe assumption that Diana, once she gets wind of evil doings at "the Research," won't rest till she knows what's happening there, even if she has to risk her own life.

Surrounding Diana are hordes of secondary players: a financially strapped pilot who transports chimpanzees illegally to be guinea pigs for Parker's madness; the head of the lab's security, a lonely widower for whom bliss is a cozy chat with his cop daughter about a murder case; a pair of goofy adolescents whose nighttime rambles in search of fun lead them straight to the scientific snake pit.

One of the novel's themes, in fact, is that none of us are very far removed from the creeping, crawling heart of darkness. But human savagery -- often deliberately cruel and chaotic -- outdoes anything found in nature, where cruelty is more dispassionate, more routine. Worse, humans control the world's technology, which is moving faster than we can decide what to do with it. There's a constant danger that the wrong people -- wolves in men's clothing -- may be gaining power over the destiny of all: humans, animals, life itself.

D'Alpuget, award-winning Australian author of three previous novels and two biographies, has done extensive research to make this point ring true, and to render such scientific complexities as gene splicing comprehensible to the lay reader. She has also written a poetic book that brings the natural and human-made world alive in stunning imagery -- in the "split-apple shape" of an owl's face; in a flock of cockatoos, "broad-shouldered, yellow crests erect, yelling at each other like drunks in party hats;" in a small town "laid out like the vascular system of a narrow leaf."

Such writing -- together with the hurtling story line -- does a lot to compensate for a few flaws in her design. These include the almost offhand and not totally convincing revelation of the murderer. And later on, amid a sequence of vengeful bad-guy killings, one good guy is spared for no clear reason other than to match him up with another character in a truly cinematic scene of romantic rescue. (Two will-be lovers, knocked around, bloodied, fall on each other in a weedy field as the villains fly off in a Cessna.)

In fact, it's hard not to see "White Eye" -- also the nickname of the virus that causes victims' eyes to ooze horribly before they die -- as a movie, and even a sequel, since the book closes with the suggestion of more adventures to come. But most enjoyably, "White Eye," the novel, offers a ride through territory both literary and entertaining.

If it comes as a bit of a shock to self-proclaimed bombshell Erica Jong to walk into a room and suddenly find that she is no longer the "youngest" or the "cutest" there, she certainly has our sympathy. Yes, these things can happen, to the blessed, the talented, even to the thinking person. Then again, superstars have always found ways to cope with the dismaying process known as aging. For the desperate, there is always cosmetic surgery, the spa, an athletic trainer, a special diet; others, alas, like Marilyn Monroe, may resort to an even more radical solution.

Jong's current title harks back to her first, fearless smash in 1973, "Fear of Flying," in which she coined an unquotable phrase about a "zipless" form of pleasuring she designated as the "symbol of my generation's hunger for female freedom through sexual freedom." As for her latest, "Fear of Fifty," she has appended to it the subtitle, "A Midlife Memoir," thus protecting the book from the rather specific rules governing autobiography; namely, that one must begin at the beginning, "I was born in . . . ," and progress from there. That explains why, from the outset, one is met by Jong's faux-naive reaction to the closing of her fifth decade of life -- her discovery of gradual decay in the carnal self. It would seem, Mr. De Mille, that she does not exactly relish her next close-up.

Though she willingly admits she "will never be Madonna or Tina Brown or Julia Roberts," she regrets much more that by the time this book comes out she will no longer even be considered for "the flavor of the month."

Apparently the statistics get her down: "Every year another crop of beauties assaults me on the streets of New York. With thinner waists and blonder hair and straighter teeth, with more energy to compete (and less cynicism about the world), the class of 1994, or 1984, 1974, is inexorably replacing my class Barnard '63 -- yikes!"

So her real trouble is that her attitude to turning 50 resembles the ingenue stance of her salad days. For about 20 years now, since her first novel, the feisty, competitive, foulmouthed, confessional shtick has worked admirably for this writer; it carried her to fame and fortune. Why not shoot into midlife on the same wave?

The trick might just have worked too, at least as fiction -- a midlife heroine's outrageous romp around (gulp!) the clock. But, when it comes to autobiography ( good autobiography at least), there are, unfortunately, some essential requisites. First off, autobiography needs more from a confessor than her simply being "famous for being famous," as the historian, Daniel Boorstin has phrased it. Then again, the genre inevitably invites comparisons with superior minds. We need to know, for example, why the detailed, intimate recitation of a certain woman's life might engage? And why at this time? Will it reveal insights into her special genius, her achievement in the literary art?

One is reminded of the late Anthony Burgess' story of his early life, "Big Wilson and Little God," or Mary McCarthy's "Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood," two memorable voices, both for their evocation of their artistic careers and their honesty about their own petty failings. Jong's tale clearly does not avoid the latter. Indeed, hers is a remarkable candor; nor can she be faulted for not telling all. The question is: Does she exhibit more than we really care to see?

With Burgess or McCarthy, we welcome the revelation of gaping faults behind their brilliant constructs and imaginative creations because they teach us what their humanity is like. But Jong's confessionals, on the contrary, appear more like a preemptive strike against oblivion.

Not that there aren't some lively reminiscences to be found in "Fear of Fifty." Several of Jong's takes -- for example, her tender recollections of her Bohemian Jewish family, her relationships with her sisters and grandparents, her indulged Manhattan childhood, her delicate first loves -- are touching, and seem true to her notion of herself.

In such chapters as "The Mad Lesbian in the Attic," about her old aunt's desertion by her lover of 30 years as she succumbed to dementia and Alzheimer's, and "Baby, Baby, Baby," about the birth of her beloved daughter, she sounds genuine in her emotions.

Most affecting, perhaps, is her reprise of her affair with her latest husband, who seems literally and symbolically to have cured her of her long-held fear of flying. A passionate pilot who is transfigured each time he is airborne, and is eager to open such experience up to the fearful Jong, he clearly becomes the perfect hero for Jong at 50, with herself so eager to be "free of her body."

And there's her interview with her father, in which she challenges him with, "You'd still like me to be a doctor, wouldn't you?" and he answers with compliments about how fine a writer she really is, and how her only problem is bad PR: "Look at Madonna. She's got no talent, but great PR. Why don't you call that Della Femina guy. He'll advise you." This is delightful too.

What follows, however, is an editorial commentary she repeats after most of the charming narratives in the book, and it reads like a "making it" whine:

"How can I explain to him that the vicissitudes of my career cannot be undone by mere 'PR.' I have broken rules that are invisible to him because he is a man: written openly about sex, appropriated male picaresque adventures for women, poked fun at the sacred cows of our society. I have lived as I chose, married, divorced, remarried, divorced, remarried again -- and still worse dared to write about my ex-husbands!"

And with this comes her self-exculpatory conclusion that hers is "the fate of rebellious women. They used to stone us in the marketplace. In a way, they still do." It begins to seem as if this is the pathetic refrain of her life.

Mistake not. Jong's problem is not in having written about her (mis)adventures but in presenting them as though they were the vital news, the real poop, and right for everywoman, instead of mere cliches formulating what Jong defines as the sexy, the liberated, the feminist life of courage.

A sample of some of her profundities:

"Married men are, of course the best lovers, unless you happen to be married to them."

"Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony -- a ritual scarring."

"Dead mothers are rather easier for teenage girls to honor than live ones."

"Conversation. It fills a lot of life's little gaps."

And perhaps the deepest, most Jongian, of all: "You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you."

No kidding!

The aggrieved 48-year union of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy, whose own way of unhappiness remains singularly compelling even in an era of instantaneously disseminated scandal, has provided an inexhaustible mine of psychological speculation, literary analysis and plain gossip for more than a century.

"Love and Hatred," by the late journalist and historian William L. Shirer, is the most recent -- though it surely will not be the last -- exploration of the marriage between the Russian literary giant and his tormented (and tormenting) muse-amanuensis-wife. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, when Tolstoy insisted that the 18-year-old Sonya read his diary detailing extensive premarital sexual adventures, to the end in a rural railroad stationmaster's house where the 82-year-old genius died after fleeing home and wife.

Shirer, the author of 15 other books -- "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" remains his best-known work -- completed his account of the Tolstoy marriage in 1993, shortly before his death at age 89. As the author notes in his forward, he began the book "as an inquiry into why Leo Tolstoy's long and productive life ended as it did: strangely, irrationally, and in tragedy."

In a purely factual sense, there would seem to be little need for such an inquiry. The profound emotional and philosophical fissures in Tolstoy's character, reinforcing and reinforced by the struggle that was his marriage, afford an explanation for his end that is not only sufficient but also overdetermined. In his magnificent "Lectures on Russian Literature" (1988), Vladimir Nabokov offers a brief sketch that casts more light on Tolstoy's contradictions than all of the bloated biographies of the great man:

"His appetites constantly led him astray from the quiet country road that the ascetic in him craved to follow as passionately as the rake in him craved for the city pleasures of the flesh. . . . (B)eginning in the late seventies, when he was over forty, his conscience triumphed: the ethical overcame both the aesthetic and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his wife's happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty literary career to what he considered a moral necessity: living according to the principles of rational Christian morality -- the simple and stern life of generalized humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual art."

In an imaginative sense, Tolstoy's latter years and his final flight -- far more tragic for the rejected Sonya than for her husband -- offer considerable material for reflection on the part of anyone who is interested, as Shirer obviously was, in the passions of old age.

Several reviewers have criticized Shirer for focusing on the period after the publication of "Anna Karenina" in 1877, when Tolstoy, then approaching 50, steadily became more of a preacher than an artist -- and when the split between his sensual nature and his moral disgust at the act of sex grew even more pronounced. (Tolstoy's shame did not, however, prevent him from continuing to have sex with his wife, whom he impregnated 16 times.)

It is understandable that contemporary readers should prefer the younger Tolstoy, the author of "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Without the art, after all, Tolstoy becomes just another bearded Russian prophet -- one whose misogyny turned life at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, into a genuine hell for the woman who was expected to serve his genius. However, Shirer does an admirable job of demonstrating that Tolstoy was all of a piece.

Throughout most of their lives, Leo and Sonya read each other's diaries by mutual consent. Two highly intelligent people, both aware that Sonya had been traumatized by the revelations in Leo's premarital diaries, they continued to torture each other with intimate disclosures that would be likely to destroy any marriage in any era.

As Shirer points out, the Russian publication of the definitive edition of Sonya's diaries in 1978, followed by an English translation in 1985, has substantially altered what was once the prevailing view of the Tolstoy marriage. In scrutinizing the marriage of a male genius, pre-feminist scholars were basically uninterested in the woman's side of the story. Shirer does not make that error.

Drawing on diaries that have been extensively cited in recent years by other biographers (of both Tolstoys), Shirer nevertheless selects excerpts that illuminate the particular nature of the mismatch.

In 1985, the Tolstoy's youngest child, Vanya, died at age 7. On Feb. 23, Sonya recorded that her "darling little Vanechka died this evening at 11 o'clock. . . . My God, and I am still alive!" Sonya did not write in her diary again for more than two years, when she observed that she had closed both her diary and "my life, my heart, my feelings, my joy."

Tolstoy expressed a very different view after Vanya's death. "The death of Vanechka was for me . . . a manifestation of God, drawing me towards Him." A few weeks later, the concerned husband criticized his wife on the ground that she had "invested all her spiritual energies in animal love for her little one." Predictably, Sonya was enraged when she read the passage. Tolstoy, that Job's Comforter, continued to offer moral lectures instead of compassion.

After this failure of empathy, it is not such a long distance to the railroad station at Astapovo, where a photographer snapped a pathetic picture of Sonya (reprinted in the book), barred from the bedroom of her dying husband, with her face pressed against the window.

By the end of this account, one can only conclude that the "irrational" circumstances of Tolstoy's death were no more irrational, or tragic, than the preceding marriage.

Shirer offers no elegy of his own. Instead he quotes the Tolstoys' daughter, Tanya, who described her parents as "intimately close to one another and infinitely far apart. . . . And who will take it upon himself to call one of them guilty?"

Joe McGinniss' gravest crime against literature was not "The Last Brother," the author's recent and ridiculous faux-biography of Ted Kennedy. Rather, McGinniss' worst felony was rushing Bret Easton Ellis, his fiction-writing student at Bennington College, to publish "Less Than Zero" at age 21.

Ironically, the 1985 first novel was an excellent beginning for an obviously talented writer; "Less Than Zero" provided a provocative snapshot of a time when the anomic ditherings of idle, rich, drug-addled, white-bread Los Angeles young adults was considered fresh material. Bearing a canny journalist's eye for detail and dialogue, Ellis' storytelling already carried the complete lack of sentiment and empathy of a seasoned nihilistic novelist.

Ellis became a famous, best-selling young writer and was touted as the voice of a generation. But like a rookie phenom pitcher without a second pitch, Ellis immediately ran out of what ballplayers call stuff .

Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer earned their material and early anomie through actual life experience; both had been to war by the time they were famous writers in their early 20s. Bret Easton Ellis, however, had only been, apparently, to Bennington. Walled in by his own youth and too early fame from any adult life experience, he refused to learn any new pitch beyond the Reagan-era ditherings of idle, rich, drug addled young Los Angeles adults.

Sadly and predictably, during the years Ellis should have been apprenticing his skills and honing his chops, he wrote the same novel over, calling the 1987 volume "The Rules of Attraction." This time, however, the insights were rarer, the humor almost absent, the prose as flat as a day-old latke . His characters, meantime, had degenerated into half-dimensional Barbie and Ken dolls.

Ellis was writing worse and acting stupid. In time, his Manhattan nightclub shenanigans, constantly and mockingly detailed by Spy magazine, provided a much more tragic story than anything he was typing.

By the time "American Psycho," his last novel, was published in 1991, Ellis was largely a joke among the young cognoscenti who'd once made him famous. That book, filled with the excruciating, affectless murderings of a serial killer, became a cause cele bre when it was boycotted by feminists as misogynistic pornography. The book was indeed a horror; by now Ellis had seemed to give up even the pretense of writing, and was content to simply transcribe lists of tony clothing manufacturers from the back pages of GQ.

Sadly, the publication of "The Informers," Ellis' newest book, is not a case of a literary comeback of a written-off one-hit wonder, but a further slide down for an author who long ago had it. Ostensibly a novel, the book is a plotless collage of short stories alternately narrated by a rogues' gallery of human monsters whose characters are developed with technical dexterity.

There is, for example, the club-hopping vampire who drains his bimbo pickups' blood dry; the dazed-on-downers studio wife who sleeps with her kids' friends; the rock star who makes underage prostitutes eat Kleenex; the young man who unashamedly rifles his just-dead friend's pockets for salvageable marijuana seconds after a hideous car accident. For a point, one must turn to the novel's publicity write-up, where we learn that the characters are "all suffering, whether they admit it or not, from no disease other than the death of the soul."

Unfortunately, Ellis' publicist is a more interesting writer than Ellis, whose anti-heroes swim in swamps duller than bongwater. His notorious sex passages are often detailed with the kind of plodding, leering, badly described scenes published in Penthouse Forum: "The girl is pretty, blond, dark tan, large wide blue eyes, Californian, a T-shirt with my name on it, faded tight cutoff jeans. Her lips are red, shiny, and she puts the magazine down as I slowly move toward her, almost tripping over a used dildo that Roger calls the Enabler."

When Ellis isn't writing about brutal sex or casual murder -- which isn't often -- his scenes can sound like the product of an introductory fiction-writing workshop where students are told to record exactly a banal, everyday scene. "The Librium I took at dawn has worn off and my mouth feels thick and dry and I am thirsty," Ellis writes. "I get up, slowly, and walk into the bathroom and as I turn on the faucet I look into the mirror for a long time until I am forced to notice the new lines beginning around the eyes. I avert my gaze and concentrate on the cold water rushing out of the faucet and filling the cup my hands have made."

And then there are the sex-and-slice passages so nauseating that it doesn't matter if a joke is intended. At one point, the vampire relates in a relatively mild scene in "The Informers" how "I begin to lick and chew at the skin on her neck, panting, slavering, finding the jugular vein with my tongue, and I start bleeding her and she's laughing and moaning . . . and blood is spurting into my mouth, splashing the roof, and then something weird starts to happen. . . ."

There is a rancid phoniness to Ellis's delivery of his chosen demimonde. Again, one suspects the author's early suffocation by fame. While William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski spent anonymous decades on the fringes living the perverse material they turned into art, Ellis had spent the better part of his waning youth playing the buffoon at Nell's.

Los Angeles, meantime, is rendered in just the kind of soggy cliches that Ellis dissected so neatly in "Less Than Zero." It's not just that he's hopelessly mired all of his novels in the pre-riots, pre-O.J. 1980s. After all, decades after they were published, Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust" and Alison Lurie's "The Nowhere City" still capture the city's unique brand of status-driven dread with the timeliness of a new episode of "Entertainment Tonight."

Ellis, however, is unable to transcend his chosen decade, to make his relentless name-dropping of mediocre 1980s rock groups somehow bring his story alive for the latest generation of disaffected youth for whom Duran Duran is of no more cultural relevance than Mario Lanza.

Ellis, at 31, is still young enough to be the voice of Generation X, and it is a mantle he still seems to covet. But he long ago lost that race -- and to a rock singer no less. The late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana wrote the poetry that will be remembered as the "Howl" of the twentysomething slacker army; his words, " Here we are now / entertain us ," long ago swamped Ellis's entry -- the once famous opening line to "Less Than Zero": "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."

Yet even after his precipitous fall from the ranks of America's most promising young writers, Ellis apparently has not learned the lesson of empathy, either on the page or in life. In the August issue of Vanity Fair, Ellis commented on the real voice of his generation: "The thing that struck me about Kurt Cobain's suicide is not that I was sad but that it wasn't Kathie Lee Gifford."

Like Ellis' late oeuvre , the statement was opaque and bitter, devoid of both humanity and meaning. One hopes he will spend the coming years working on the craft he abandoned after "Less Than Zero."

Killing someone is a serious matter -- or so, in a civilized society, it is usually believed. Murder, say defenders of the death penalty, is a uniquely terrible crime, which can aptly be requited only by a uniquely terrible punishment. By the same token, however, the existence of that penalty places a uniquely heavy burden on those involved in the process of its exaction -- on judges, on juries and not least on the lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense.

In February, 1986, Polly Nelson, recently qualified as a lawyer and with no previous experience of criminal matters, was asked by her law firm to apply for a stay of execution on behalf of Theodore Bundy, convicted and sentenced to death in Florida six years before for a series of brutal murders. Though an appeal was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court against conviction and sentence, the state of Florida had fixed an execution date; if no stay were granted, he would die in 10 days' time. She agreed to make the application -- what else could she do?

"Defending the Devil" is Nelson's account of her experiences over the following three years, during which almost the whole of her time and energy was devoted to attempts to save Bundy's life. After three stays of execution, he was finally executed on Jan. 24, 1989, amid chilling scenes of triumphant public rejoicing.

This is not a book about Ted Bundy, or about his crimes: though the author does not seek to conceal or extenuate their horrific nature, she dwells no longer than necessary on the details. It is a book about being a lawyer; about trying to do one's duty as a lawyer; about going on trying to do it even when the legal system and the client himself seem to be conspiring together to prevent one doing it.

Ted Bundy killed women totally unknown to him, for no other reason than his desire to kill. It would be curious and disquieting if we did not think that prima facie there is at least some doubt about the sanity of such a man. But the insanity defense was never effectively put forward at his trial, because Bundy himself did not wish it to be.

Bundy did not want to be thought mad; he wanted to be thought brilliant. The dearest ambition, it seems, of the failed law student was to star as advocate in his own defense in a case attracting maximum publicity; and perhaps, since he believed in the fantasy of his own brilliance, he did not understand that it would cost him his life. When his counsel at the original trial in 1979 moved for a declaration that he was not competent to assist in his own defense, Bundy successfully applied for the appointment of special counsel to argue on his behalf that he was. The prosecution not surprisingly agreed, and the court decided that he was competent without hearing either evidence or argument to the contrary.

Was it through extreme cynicism or extreme naivete that the judges before whom Bundy appeared colluded in his fantasy? They used such expressions as "the most competent serial killer in the country" and "a diabolical genius," then passed or upheld the death sentence -- not the usual result of brilliant advocacy or even of efficient criminality.

A catastrophic overconfidence in one's own abilities is not, of course, a characteristic exclusive to the insane; but Bundy's "brilliance" is equally inconclusive of the issue. True, in the 17th Century the insanity defense was available only to a person having less intelligence than a normal 14-year-old child. Since then, however, the law had been thought to have progressed. By the middle of the 19th Century, when Daniel M'Naghten gave his name to the rules that form the basis for the modern law on criminal insanity, it was known by doctors and accepted by lawyers that many forms of severe mental illness are consistent with a high degree of intellectual ability. We begin, like the author, to suspect that neither the judges nor the state of Florida cared much whether Bundy was sane or insane, or indeed whether there were any other legitimate grounds for an appeal. They simply wanted to kill him.

The story takes on the quality of a macabre farce as again and again Nelson shows how the time limits imposed, by executive action or judicial order, made it almost impossible for the defense case to be properly prepared or presented. The politicians, dealing with a case attracting extreme public odium, wanted to demonstrate their toughness; the judges wanted to stop their court lists being "clogged up" with "technical" applications that would not have been made in a non-capital case.

But killing someone is a serious matter -- or so, in a civilized society, it is usually believed. If it is to be done in pursuance of a judicial decision, then that decision should be reached, above all others, after careful reflection, rather than in instant response to public outcry; above all others, in accordance with the "technical" rules of evidence and procedure established by the law to avoid miscarriages of justice. Otherwise what then occurs is not properly called an execution -- it is called a lynching.

In the context of such a system as she describes, it is understandable that Nelson should have begun to feel that it was she who was behaving unprofessionally, perhaps even neurotically, in making so much of the affair. She gives the impression of believing -- other people perhaps have told her -- that to commit herself so entirely to her work on the Bundy case showed a lack of proper detachment and objectivity. I think she is wrong about this. She had no illusions about Bundy's merits as a person, felt no less revulsion than others for the things he had done; she devoted her time and energy to trying to save his life for the simple, honorable reason that she was a lawyer and he was her client.

* BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from "Defending the Devil," see the Opinion section.

Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the creators and executive producers of the yuppie favorite "thirtysomething," had long wanted to do a show exploring the trials and tribulations of adolescence.

"It has been a subject of concern for us," says Zwick. "It was an idea before 'thirtysomething,' " Herskovitz adds.

ABC's "The Wonder Years" and even "Doogie Howser, M.D.," received acclaim for their portrayal of teen-agers, but Herskovitz and Zwick have not been thrilled with the way teen life generally has been depicted on the small screen. They hope to change all that in their new ABC series, "My So-Called Life," which examines teen life from a female point of view.

"I think our feeling had been that most depictions of adolescence had been exploitative in the sense that they exploited those aspects of teen-age years that are titillating or stimulating," explains Herskovitz, who is executive producer with Zwick. "The sexuality of it. The violence of it. What we objected to in the portrayal of teen-agers was they were portrayed by older people. They did not capture the essence of change and youth that only a child of that age can give you."

The hour drama, premiering Thursday, revolves around the everyday existence of Angela Chase, a bright, introspective 15-year-old, played by newcomer Claire Danes. Angela arrives at a crossroads: She has grown away from her best girlfriend and begun to hang out with the class wild girl; she quits the yearbook and dyed her brown hair flaming red. She even falls for a boy who has repeated the same grade. She's not the only one going through an identity crisis; her parents, Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin, are approaching their 40s with midlife crisis written all over them.

Winnie Holzman, a former "thirtysomething" writer, created the series and is co-executive producer. What makes the series unique, Holzman says, is its female perspective.

"I don't want to say it is all brand new, because nothing is brand new, but I don't think that is done as much as it is with boys. I think it's always a wonderful feeling to do something maybe people didn't expect or maybe a little different than what they are used to."

The series, Herskovitz explains, is about "everything and nothing. I think our point about adolescence is how intense and overamped every moment seems to be whether it's an issue with a teacher or an issue with a friend. The plots, such as they are, are merely the ways to give voice to the other agendas."

Holzman acknowledges there are stylistic and thematic similarities between "My So-Called Life" and "thirtysomething."

"I think one of the similarities is these shows are about people's emotions, maybe a little more than other shows," Holzman explains. "That's the thing that kind of makes it like life. The emotions don't always have to be about big huge events, because in our lives very tiny things can trigger very big emotions. That's what I find interesting to write about. There's a level where we are all interested in the small details of life."

Before creating the series, Holzman recalls, she read an article in a fashion magazine about the hormonal changes that happen to women approaching menopause and the fact that they're similar to what happens when a girl hits adolescence.

"It has similar effects because you are hormonally imbalanced at the time," Holzman says. "That (fact) captures the whole show for me because, for me, that's what it's about. The mom and the daughter are facing a lot of similar identity crises and actually the dad, too. It seems as though they are in completely different places in their lives, but when you scrape away from the surface and get down to it, it's similar."

Middle age, she says, is a natural time of questioning and "reassessing the path they took in life. The parents are going through, to some extent, a midlife crisis while their daughter is going through the crisis of identity which is adolescence. They have more in common than they realize. I find that so touching."

Angela's school friends also are struggling. "That's the singular link for the whole show," Holzman says. "Everyone in the show is engaged in that struggle. Hopefully, sometimes comically."

Ideally, Holzman would like families to watch the series together so they can "laugh about the same things and cry about the same things. I think that everybody's point of view is fairly represented. The parents are not made out as buffoons and the kids are not made out to be irresponsible, although they may do irresponsible things. The parents may make mistakes, but basically there's a respect for all the characters. I think people are all struggling and trying to do their best. "

"My So-Called Life" premieres Thursday at 8 p.m. on ABC.

The 1964 baseball season didn't happen just so David Halberstam could come along and write about it, but it certainly seems that way, especially 30 years later.

At the time, the 1964 baseball season, which culminated in a memorable seven-game series between the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, was considered a good one, but over the years the series and the season have taken on greater stature. Some World Series may have featured more great players -- though two Cardinals and three Yankees from the '64 teams eventually made it into the Hall of Fame -- but not one has featured a more fascinating collection of vivid personalities, individualists who left lasting imprints on the game and who go right on being an important part of it today.

Perhaps a book on the players who shared the '64 season was inevitable considering how many books the players themselves wrote. Jim Bouton, the iconoclastic Yankees' right-hander, went on to write "Ball Four," perhaps the most influential baseball book of the modern era; Curt Flood, the Cardinals' center fielder, wrote an autobiography that detailed his heroic and doomed assault on the "reserve clause," which bound players to one team for life; and even Mickey Mantle, who didn't seem to have even one book in him back when he expressed himself by slamming bats into water coolers, has nearly a dozen volumes with his name on them. The Yankees' Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra and the Cardinals' Bob Gibson and Lou Brock have all produced books; even Bob Uecker, St. Louis' second-string catcher, was able to parlay the season into two books (and a movie career). These two teams may have written more books than any other two teams have read.

This is the big advantage Halberstam has here over his previous baseball book, "Summer of '49." Virtually all the principals are so articulate that "October 1964" requires little explanation from the author about their importance: Bouton, Flood and Cards' first baseman Bill White (the first black president of a major league) are all very well aware of their place in baseball history. Indeed, many of them seemed to be aware of it while they were making it.

What were they putting in the water in 1964 to produce players of this kind? Halberstam answers the question with what was in the air: questions of race in the wake of civil rights victories, the anxiety following the death of J.F.K., the increased liberalism of American society, the escalating war in Vietnam. Halberstam doesn't belabor any of these points but shows how the changes in baseball reflected changes in America.

For this there is no better symbol than the fact that 1964 marking the last pennant won under the old Yankee regime of Del Webb and George Weiss. In the 1950s and early '60s it was common to hear people say that "rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel," but by 1964 the famous Yankee farm system had dried up, the scouts had been released, and the minor-league franchises sold of or dismantled. The team was sold to CBS, which presaged the coming dominance of the TV tail that would wag the baseball dog.

What Halberstam brings into focus, however, is that the Yankee decline really set in when the ultraconservative front office found reasons to avoid signing the great young black prospects who poured in the National League after the demise of the Negro Leagues. Nothing points up the contrast between the fading dynasty of the Yankees and the upstart Cardinals (who were to win three pennants from 1964 to 1968) better than this: The Cards, generally regarded in the Enos Slaughter postwar era as the worst team a black player could wind up on, was, by 1964, powered by Bill White, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Curt Flood at a time when the only black Yankee regular was catcher Elston Howard, the first black player the Yankees signed.

"October 1964" is the best example of a new kind of baseball book -- Mark Ribowsky's recent "Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball" and Roger Kahn's 1993 effort, "The Era," are others -- that covers familiar territory but makes it new by including the essential information left out the first time around. In Halberstam's narrative, Branch Rickey, the executive who broke the color barrier in baseball by signing Jackie Robinson, is slightly less heroic than he's usually painted. For instance, in response to criticisms that the white major leagues were destroying Negro League ball, Rickey replied that black ball was "a booking agent's paradise . . . they are not leagues, and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them." Casey Stengel, possibly the most popular manager in baseball history, is a little less like the wise, funny old elf he appeared to be in the press: "The writers worshiped him, but the players came to look upon him as a rather cold-blooded albeit wealthy grandfather who still controlled the family will." It would be unfair to label Halberstam's point of view "revisionist"; it was the saintly picture of men like Rickey and Stengel in the '50s that was the revision.

As a historian, Halberstam has the delightful quality of writing like a fan, but sometimes as a baseball writer he sounds too much like a historian. It's doubtful we'd be reading this book if we didn't know that George Steinbrenner was "the owner of the Yankees who went about furiously hiring and firing managers." We would know that the Waldorf in New York City is "both literally and figuratively a long way from (Clete Boyer's home of) Willard, Kansas" -- even if we had never heard of Clete Boyer. And Halberstam is mistaken if he thinks Sandy Koufax's 1963 season when he won 25 games for the Dodgers was a "career year"; Koufax won more games in 1965 and 1966.

But the overview afforded by "October 1964" is splendid. Given the cookie-cutter approach to marketing in modern sports, it's doubtful that anyone will be able to pick up a book in 30 years time and read about so many angry, intelligent, and interesting athletes as the ones who came together to play for the championship that fall.

"My So-Called Life" series rests on the very talented shoulders of 15-year-old Claire Danes, who was all of 13 when she shot the pilot. "She's from New York and started acting about eight months before we did the pilot," Herskovitz says. "She is one of those rare individuals who emerges completely full grown as an artist."

"What she knows can't be taught," adds Zwick.

Holzman believes Danes is one of the most "incredible actresses I have ever seen of any age. It's a wonderful feeling to know that what I write she can embody. I can write the most complex multi-layered stuff for her and she's just able to deliver it and more. She brings so much to the role."

Danes believes the series is an accurate depiction of teen life today -- "as honest as TV can be. I mean being a teen-ager is different for everyone. I think Angela is withdrawing from her parents and rebelling in her own way."

The actress says she's different from her small-screen alter ego. "Of course, there's a little bit of me (in her) because I need to relate to her in some way. It's very funny. In episodic TV, you see your character grow because every week she is doing something new. So I'm living my life and I'm living Angela's life."

Some episodes have been easier for Danes than others. "We did one called 'The Pimple," which was really easy to relate to because beauty and vanity are issues which have been in my life. There was another called 'The Substitute,' which was harder for me. It's about Angela being inspired by this man. You just have to wade through the ones that you don't quite get, because you probably won't get them."

Danes, a 10th grader, is very excited about doing the series. "It's everything I ever wanted and all of a sudden, it's here," she says. "It's a lot of stress, but I love it." SUSAN KING

Bess Armstrong had a panic attack when she read the pilot script for "My So-Called Life." "I went to my husband," she recalls, "and said: 'I don't relate to this at all.' My husband was very curious. He took it and scanned several scenes and said: 'Honey, this is you."'

In "My So-Called Life," Armstrong, who starred in the sitcoms "On Our Own" (in the '70s), "All Is Forgiven" and "Married People," plays Patty Chase, the mother of introspective 15-year-old Angela (Claire Danes). In real life, Armstrong, 40, is the mother of two boys, 6 and 2 1/2. For the last several years, she's put her career on the back burner so she could be with her children.

Prior to "My So-Called Life," Armstrong had been offered other hour series but turned them down because she felt she would never see her kids. She decided to do this series because she knew and respected executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick of "thirtysomething" fame, and her schedule would be flexible because it is an ensemble show.

Besides, she adds, "I've reached that age where there are diminishing numbers of great roles for an increasing numbers of women over 30. To get a chance to play something like this, I just looked at my kids and said, 'We are going to give this a try.' It has really worked out well."

Armstrong points out that both Patty and Angela are going through enormous changes in their lives. "I think they are both in search of a new identity at a moment of transition where they have been one person for a while, and suddenly, it doesn't work any more. They are both kind of trying to figure out who they are going to be in the next phase of their lives. There is one wonderful script where the same day Angela discovers a pimple, I discover that the lines don't go away while I stop smiling."

She and Claire have developed an interesting relationship. "Claire and I have gone to malls together," Armstrong says, smiling. "She has major mall stamina -- I thought I did!. It has been somewhere between friends and actually sort of having a kind of parent-child relationship. It's fascinating because I haven't experienced that. I enjoy it."

There's a lot of Armstrong's own mother in Patty. "As much as my mother drove me crazy at times when I was a teen-ager, I'm so grateful now that I have her voice in my head," she explains. "There are moments with my boys when I think, there are no rules, you can't read a book somewhere that says this is what you do in this situation. You just have to wing it, you have to take a deep breath and make a choice. That is when I hear her. I understand the position she was in, the difficult choices she had to make -- to be the hammer, to be the bad guy frequently when you know your kid is going to be angry at you. You don't want that, but you have to do that. I find that I can do that with great ease because I'm secure in the fact that (my siblings and I) have remained unbelievably close to my mother despite the fact we battled with her the whole time."

Doing the series, Armstrong says, has been enormously rewarding for her. "I feel like I'm coming alive. A lot of it's funny and it takes me in directions I've never been able to go before. I'm loving it. I don't think I could have ever been happy in a show where the characters took themselves seriously. I think my sense of humor would constantly be sabotaged."

Herskovitz and Zwick had approached her several years ago about doing "thirtysomething," but Armstrong had to turn them down.

"It was an impossible time in my life," Armstrong says quietly. "I had just had a child who was severely ill and didn't live. It was impossible timing. That's why I loved the timing of this. It was like my 'thirtysomething' experience changed overnight with that incident. I couldn't relate to most people's 'thirtysomething' experience. I couldn't do that show. So now I am doing 'fortysomething,' and we are in perfect sync." SUSAN KING

Cousins or no cousins, the kaiser hated the British. They diminished him. So he hatched this Grand Scheme. He would foster a jihad -- a holy war.The Germans would then lead millions of Muslims across the Ottoman Empire through Persia to Afghanistan, whence they would seize India, cutting Britain off at the roots, and knocking off Russia at the same time. Two could play at this empire game.

It was an end run around World War I, and it had its moments, and its men. Wilhelm Wassmuss, for example, "the German Lawrence" in flowing blond mane and Persian robes, Mauser pistol in his sash, who careered about the desert persuading the natives that the Germans really were Muslims. (The kaiser, he said, had converted, made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and was now called "Hajji Wilhelm Mohammed"; the entire nation had followed his example. As Punch put it: "Deutschland Uber Allah.") Author Peter Hopkirk, on a roll after "The Great Game," has written another epic of derring-do, played out from Egypt to Kirghizia and beyond. Exotic settings; uncommon bravery; endurance and deceit; alliances, intrigue, betrayal: these are the components of Hopkirk's history -- most often told through the adventures of impossibly intrepid individuals -- and they are stirring tales indeed. P.S. The kaiser lost.

What's the only thing more frightening than a pair of 5-foot-2 females with a chip on their shoulders?

That same pair in ice skates and stilettos, argues "National Lampoon's Attack of the 5 Ft. 2 Women," premiering Sunday on Showtime.

With apologies to Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos, the petite and positively peeved queens of this two-part parody are Tonya (sounds like Harding) Hardly and Lenora (don't call me Lorena) Babbitt (Bobbitt). Both stories were written by Julie Brown and Charlie Coffey, the same pair who in 1991 brought us the Showtime comedy mock-umentary "Medusa: Dare to Be Truthful," parodying another notorious (and notably short) woman, Madonna. Additionally, Brown -- whose credits also include the Fox comedy series "The Edge" -- directed the Tonya segment and stars in both parts.

Given the spoof's title, a visitor to the set might have reasonably expected to see a kind of Lilliputian version of "Godzilla" in the making -- hordes of Gidgets descending on innocent villagers from Lillehammer to Virginia, inflicting all manner of below-the-belt injuries and looting shoe stores of every available size 5 1/2 pump.

In short, this visitor was hoping for a room full of people just like me: 5 foot 2 (rounding off to the highest fraction of an inch) and eager to avenge the kind of lyric Randy Newman penned in "Short People": They got little baby legs/ They stand so low/ You got to pick em up/ Just to say hello.

Didn't happen.

Instead, the actors on the set of "Tonya: The Battle of Wounded Knee" were largely your regular-sized people. And the only person running amok for the camera was Brown, who -- though just shy of 5 feet 2 under normal circumstances -- was laced into figure skates for her role as Tonya, a comic costuming choice that actually made her about 5 foot 6 during the segment.

Likewise, Brown wears multiple-inch cha-cha heels for most of her scenes as Lenora (in "He Never Give Me Orgasm: The Lenora Babbitt Story"). Methinks the movie actually should have been called "Attack of the 5 Ft. 2 Women in Really Scary Footwear."

But, no matter. Shared height wasn't the only factor that compelled Brown to write and star in her tale of two larger-than-tabloids women. As the actress explains it, she and writing partner Coffey were at work on a "Medusa"-like parody of Michael Jackson when the singer was accused of child molestation, forcing them to scrap the project. ("Child abuse just isn't funny," explains Coffey with a sigh.)

Then, as luck would have it, skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee after a practice session, and people close to rival Olympic hopeful Tonya Harding were emerging as the bumbling culprits. Brown and Coffey had their substitute parody (with "Head of the Class" actress Khrystyne Haje as Nancy Cardigan), which turned into a two-part movie when they realized that the story of Lorena Bobbitt -- who admitted slicing off her sleeping husband's penis but was acquitted at trial -- paired nicely with the Harding tale.

"They're both these tiny, really violent women," explains Brown. "Even if Tonya was innocent, which I don't believe, she still goes after pickup trucks with a baseball bat."

And then there is the matter of fashion sense, or lack thereof. Brown spent so much of the 18-day shoot outfitted in garish, form-fitting fashions and damaged wigs that she says she started "looking at the crew people's clothes enviously."

"This whole piece is like a celebration of trashy taste," she says. And, accordingly, nothing in the script proved too tasteless to be included.

"If anything, it got more tasteless in execution," Coffey says with a laugh. "That's part of why (filming has) been so much fun."

Fun, yes. But for Brown, the project has proven grueling as well. First, there was the tight production schedule, then the physical demands of a role that required one 14-hour shoot in a 20-degree Culver City ice rink. To top it off, she's also playing her own role as mom. Her then-6-month old son visited the set on occasion, but when Brown couldn't bring him along, she says it was "like you left your arm at home."

Luckily, she had some help. Richard Wenk ("Vamp" and the upcoming "Scalpers") directed the Lenora segment. And Coffey, Brown's writing partner for 17 years, spent a lot of time on the set, offering on-the-spot rewrites and improvisations when necessary. During -- and even after -- the filming, news events of the day kept the cases churning, making the segments' wildly fictional conclusions the best solution in the end.

Still, all this along with the memory of the aborted Michael Jackson project, have made the writing team swear off satirizing nonfictional characters.

"We decided that we're never going to write about real people again," says Coffey emphatically. "You spend six months writing about somebody and then they go and strangle someone or shoot up a schoolyard."

Or become an actress.

"National Lampoon's Attack of the 5 Ft. 2 Women" airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime.

Janice Page, editor of OC Live! is 5 foot 2 on a good day.

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,

I had a vision once -- though you understand

It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints,

And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,

Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza

In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows

From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made

A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored

A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,

Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints

Were all on sale. The colors and noise

Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,

So that even the bargaining

Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.

And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,

And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved

And even the great Farnese Palace itself

Was gone, for all its marble; in its place

Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,

Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.

The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap

Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,

And the only sound for a while was the little click

Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,

But no other sign of life. And then I heard

What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;

At least I was not alone. But just after that

Came the soft and papery crash

Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence

That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored

To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week

I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.

All this happened about ten years ago,

And it hasn't troubled me since, but at least, today,

I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left

Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy

I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

*

From "The Golden Ecco Anthology: 100 Great Poems of the English Language" edited by Mark Strand. (The Ecco Press: $22; 192 pp.) 1994 Reprinted by permission.

How could Peter Nelson's "Treehouses" fail to please? Its subject is immediately attractive, with its implications of escape and fantasy. Through text and evocative color photographs by Paul Rocheleau, the book urges: Build a dwelling high in the air, surrounded by leafy nature.Design your arboreal haven according to the dictates of your whimsy, construct it with your own hands, then reward yourself by sitting contemplative in your shelter, "annihilating all that's made," as Andrew Marvell once proposed, "to a green Thought in a green Shade." Cannily, Nelson offers something for everyone: First there's a little historical background on this maverick subdivision of architecture. Then there's a substantial section on treehouses built by or for kids. A general how-to department segues into the real-life saga -- call it "Pete and Charlie Build a Treehouse" -- of how the author and a sidekick do it with considerable knowledge of carpentry and more than a little help from their friends. Oddly, a couple of the aeries Nelson features verge on the smug bourgeois comfort of banal grand houses. Most, though, are original and expressive, tailored to the available tree and fired by the individual -- often idiosyncratic -- imagination. They're emblems of independence, a significant part of America's mythic self-portrait. Aesthetically, the most memorable of the book's examples are a pair of irregular shacks attached to two gaunt, forked redwoods, created by a man mourning the death of his son by drowning. Pieced together from driftwood and other cast-off lumber, jagged, splintered and weathered gray, they have a wild, haunting beauty. Children still play in them, climbing their spiral staircases into the sky, nearly a quarter-century after the tragedy that fostered their creation. Tobi Tobias

It's an engaging, old-fashioned picture. A retired teacher putters among his beloved books. A lifelong collector -- beginning with Dowden's two-volume "Life of Shelley" in "sumptuous inlaid morocco by Rivier" that cost more than a month's salary -- Jack Hodges contemplates a personal encyclopedia, a "treasury" if you will.What goes with what? Who with whom? Which of the masters will be included among "the virtuosos who sounded the Latin chords, and struck the notes of Anglo-Saxon for simplicity and strength"? In the end, he makes the sort of selection of traits, habits and talents one would expect from a former English prep-school instructor for whom the giants of literature remain as tangible as today's breakfast kippers, a selection at once erudite, eclectic, elastic and off-center: Ruskin, who brought his mother along to college, and Byron, who brought his mistress, a boxing master and a pet bear. Ian MacKay, whose railroad-engineer father once sneezed his false teeth out of the train and into a lake, and who "died of a strange encounter with a haystack," and Thomas Chatterton, "the poor posthumous child of a dissipated Bristol choir-singer." DuMaurier worked in a garden shed, Shaw in railroad carriages, Thackeray in a tavern and Coleridge composed the haunting "Kubla Khan" after taking two grains of opium, reading from "Purchas His Pilgrimage" and sleeping deeply for three hours.

Ah, Dave Barry. A landscape strewn with the carcasses of cliches, where connections are tenuous and zits are big enough to cast their own shadows.Barry revisiting Arcola, Ill., to march in the Broom Corn Parade, "a wonderful small-town heartland event that features a tremendous outpouring of what can only be described as 'beer'." Barry responding to a reader who asks, "Please explain the expression 'This does not bode well,' ": "It means that something is not boding the way it should. It could be boding better." Barry in traffic court where "the tension was so palpable that you could feel it," successfully pleading "nolo contendere (Latin, meaning 'Can I pay by check?')" Barry surrendering to "the call of the sea. 'Hey, YOU!' are the sea's exact words." Mostly, though, there are Barry's everyday observations, original as sin and twice arrant: "When you see the Supreme Court justices, they always appear to be extremely solemn, if not actually deceased." "A snake should not be in your yard unless it has your written permission." And, following a reader poll, the world's worst lyrics: " 'There Ain't Enough Room in My Fruit of the Looms to Hold All My Love for You.' (This might not be a real song, but I don't care.)" Ah, Dave Barry.

The house nearly steals the show from Frannie Vaughan. It's a fine old farmhouse, strong and solid the way they used to build them, and it's a lot more.Built by a great-great-grandmother with the inheritance from a man who done her wrong, it has been passed, by will and deed, to the women of the family so they will "always have their own place regardless of what the men in their life did or didn't do. . . . This house would be there for them." Frannie wants to keep the house, needs to keep the house. Sister Natalie wants to sell. Engaged to balefully bourgeois Jake, Nat wants to move to the suburbs, assure "A secure future." Do the Right Thing. Frannie is engaged to no one except life itself. A precious, fleeting thing, a mayfly. Too large of heart, too short of common sense, she wouldn't know the Right Thing if it bit her on the bum. Frannie loves indiscriminately -- nature, animals and men, lots of them. "Good-hearted wantonness," author Lawrence Naumoff calls it. She's a wanton, moreover, of underlying sadness, wistful for old-fashioned morality. And she can drive you batty. Naumoff, author of "Taller Women," is savvy enough to delay Frannie's destiny to the end, to let us build up a rare affection for the young woman. And check those underwear packets. You never know.

In Barry Gifford's world, America gone swayback, orbited by eccentrics. Aberrations are the norm; morality is chancy; solutions are instant (Croesus Spackle, prison escapee, deciding to eradicate KKK: "Least we can do.We can't put some good in the world, might as well take out some bad"). No time to get close to Gifford's people, not that you'd want to. They'll be gone a few chapters up the road. Careen ahead with him then. Enjoy these single-minded, Bible-spouting, oddly lyrical curios as they streak by at the speed of spit. Ponder the resolve of Marble Lesson, icon of abused women, founder of the Mother of God Rape Crisis Center and Charm School: Kill all the dominant males. Collect their noses. Send those of married men to their wives. Toss the rest into the center's compost heap; "We grow the best squash." What's it all about? Search me. But one could do worse than heed the words of colporteur Get-Down Lucky on the meaning of life: "It ain't what you eat, it's the way how you chew it."

Barbra Streisand and composer-conductor Marvin Hamlisch first made beautiful music together in 1973 when they collaborated on one of Streisand's best films, "The Way We Were." Hamlisch won one Oscar for his evocative score and another for the haunting title tune from the romantic drama, which also starred Robert Redford. The movie's title song became one of Streisand's biggest hits, and is one of the several standards she performs on "Barbra Streisand: The Concert" premiering Sunday on HBO.

Twenty-one years after "The Way We Were," Streisand chose Hamlisch to conduct the 64-piece orchestra on her recent acclaimed SRO concert tour.

Hamlisch, who also received an Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin's music for "The Sting," has won four Grammys, a Tony and three Golden Globes. He composed the scores for the Pulitzer-Prize winning Broadway musical, "A Chorus Line," as well as "They're Playing Our Song" and "The Goodbye Girl." This fall, Hamlisch will become the principal Pops conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops.

The gregarious Hamlisch talked about touring with Streisand over the phone from his Long Island home with Times Staff Writer Susan King.

When Streisand introduced you in concert she quipped you didn't need the job.

I didn't need the job, but I would never have said no to it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I wanted to be part of this. I just thought I was made to do this. I really wanted to do it very badly.

When this whole thing came about and I was asked to even think over this whole situation -- conducting for Barbra and working for her -- to me that was a privilege. We are talking about a great voice. By working with her I realized if she did not have this great voice, she still is a very great lady. What I loved about working with her and doing this is that it gave me a chance to not only get to know her and her to get to know me, but make a really good friend. My job was to make her as comfortable as possible so that she would start to enjoy that process.

How did you do that?

I think it was important that Barbra felt she could count on me -- that if I said an arrangement was going to be ready by a certain time, it would be. She knew if she didn't like an arrangement, we would have the time to change it. She also knew if she didn't like something, it wouldn't hurt my feelings to change it.

I think the evening turned out to be a very emotional evening for everybody. I tend to like to talk to people in the audience. I used to go out around 7:30 p.m. and speak to people. A woman told me a very interesting thing about how she felt about the concert. She said when the concert was finished, she felt it was a very empowering concert, meaning that she felt somehow at the end there were things in her life she could achieve. When you work with her, it's the same force. She tends to inspire you to rise to her expectations, thereby bringing out the very best in you. I think that's why people who have worked with her, particularly, who like her and enjoy that, can have a very meaningful working relationship with her.

Do you have a favorite moment or song in the concert?

I kind of modernized the arrangement on "Don't Rain on My Parade," and every time we got to that point, which is very early, having her do it brilliantly used to be one of my fabulous moments. Most of the ballads were just killers. Particularly, I love when she did "The Man That Got Away." I loved "Lazy Afternoon." Obviously, I had to pinch myself every time she sang "The Way We Were." I think one of the most memorable moments, which is probably one of the more quieter moments, is when she sang "Not While I'm Around."

I must say I loved certain nights. Barbra tends to sing certain things slightly differently night after night because she wants to try new things. Her choices, which are totally intuitive, are brilliant. She just does things. The little nuances would be enough to propel you to look forward to the next night.

Besides her improvisational ability, what makes her such a great and unique performer?

Well, first of all she has got this voice. You just go, "Oh, my God." She, being a very literate, a very smart person, understands what she is singing. Therefore, she understands what the hell she is saying as she is singing these songs. She really gets into lyrics and understands lyrics. She can hold notes and make them soar and make them really quiet.

The concert also demonstrates she has a good sense of humor.

I think people started to see a very human side of Barbra. I think she had a lot of fun with the audience. I think there was much more comedy. One of the things we kept talking about when this thing was being put together is that Barbra would tell me these stories and I would say, "Put it in the show." She has a wonderful way of putting the truth out there almost with a little bit of whimsy and that way you realize she is one of us. She is this person who has this great talent, but she is talking to us like she really cares. I think that was a very important thing about the concert to have her seen by her fans, who have been her fans for so long, as she is. She has a great sense of humor and she loves to laugh. I think the most fun I had was trying to make her laugh. If you make Barbra Streisand laugh, the reward is that you see the best smile in the world.

I found her to be very caring, very concerned about world politics, very concerned about her fellow man, very concerned about things she still wants to do. I am not sure she will ever know or recognize how much people really do love her and how much people have been her lifelong fans and care about her. There's something about the live experience -- the standing ovations and the people -- that's just exciting. There were nights she had a good time.

I think sometimes she could not believe the incredible ovations. The hardest thing I always had to do for the concert was trying to figure out when to start the first song because the ovation was so great.

"Barbra Streisand: The Concert" airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

As Ready or Not enters its third season, the show's creators and producers hope to answer a question that troubles many pre-pubescent girls: Am I normal ?

This season, best friends Amanda (Laura Bertram) and Busy (Lani Billard) experience a typical bevy of emotional and physical upheavals. Amanda, the "ready" of the two, and Busy, the "not" part of the duo, encounter familial separations and reconciliations, first love, jealousy, racism, deceit, identity issues and more.

"We're exploring classic dilemmas," says Alyse Rosenberg, creator and executive producer of the new season. "The three different areas we're looking at are family dynamics, relationships and sexuality."

Focus shifts between the girls' home, school and personal lives. Early on, the dynamics of the family are examined, as Busy begins to see a family therapist. "During the season, we'll see how Busy and her family really benefit from therapy, and grow closer together," Rosenberg says. "Later, as Busy's family is mending itself, Amanda starts to fall apart."

Amanda's anger about her parents' separation leads to an exploration of "all the issues within her family," Rosenberg says, including "what do you call your mother's boyfriend's daughter? What's your relationship with her?"

When Amanda's mother begins a serious new relationship, sexual issues come into play. "We look at what becomes the most upsetting, how distressing it is for kids and how they react," says Rosenberg.

Sexual themes -- and curiosity about them -- run throughout the season. There are several looks at feelings, what's normal and what's not.

An upcoming show, with both girls as its focus, explores the difference between what is consentual and what is not, Rosenberg says. "We look at sexual abuse in contrast to mutuality," she says. "It becomes about knowing that you're in control about choosing to kiss someone."

While Billard, 15, and Bertram, 16, are older than the 11-to-12-year-olds they play this season, Bertram says, "it hasn't presented any problems. We're believable in the roles."

Bertram can often relate to the show: "It's sort of like what I'm going through with my own family," she reflects. "We're at a rebellious phase and it gets tense between your family and you. (It depicts) how emotional things can be."

Bertram offers her own take on the preteen and teen years. "Teens don't mean to be self-absorbed, but they are! Everything is new and so much is happening. They don't know what's right, just what they think is important. Adults have a lot of different values and don't always see eye to eye with kids."

"It's been tempting," Rosenberg says, "to play out the entire circumstance we've set up, to write a solution for the issues brought up in each episode, but I made a rule, no more 'I'm sorry' episodes." Rosenberg adds that she wanted to make sure that the show's situations about real-life issues mirror real-life responses, which don't always produce the happiest of endings. "The world," she philosophizes, "is not just black and white."

Bertram offers, "The show is pretty realistic. It doesn't make fun of them (pre-pubescent girls), doesn't turn it into a joke. The topics are serious to kids and adolescents, from their perspectives so they know what to expect and know that they're not alone."

"Ready or Not" airs Sundays at 5 p.m. For ages 8 and up.

VOICES OF THE XILED: A Generation Speaks for Itself, edited by Michael Wexler & John Hulme (Main Street/Doubleday: $14.95; 318 pp., paperback original). The editors of this collection of short fiction by young writers complain: "This generation hasn't had a chance to say anything at all. We just sit back and watch various critics try their hands at explaining to us who we are and why." Ironically, very little distinguishes "Voices" from other anthologies. "Lovelock" by Fred G. Leebron and "Her Real Name" by Charles D'Ambrosio, two tales of drifters seeking an emotional connection, suggest the disconnectedness that supposedly marks Generation X. Neither the style nor the subject of most of these stories indicates that the authors are 20-something. "Babies," Abraham Rodriguez Jr.'s searing portrait of a teen-age heroin addict, eclipses the other works, but it could have been written 5, 10 or even 20 years ago. Perhaps critics have attempted to define Generation X because its members have failed to articulate an identity.

KANIKSU: Stories of the Northwest, by Thomas F. Lacy (Keokee: $11.95, 142 pp., illustrated, paperback original). In this informal memoir, Thomas Lacy recalls growing up near Priest Lake in northern Idaho during the early 20th Century. Lacy notes how the land shaped the lives of men and women who balanced the freedom a woodland cabin offered with the loneliness and hard work needed to survive. His accounts of fishing and hiking, work and play have an avuncular tone that suggest the yarns a kindly grandfather might recount by the fire on a winter night.

A CASE OF RAPE, by Chester Himes (Carroll & Graf: $8.95; 105 pp.). Written in 1956-57 by the African-American expatriate, "A Case of Rape" is as much a meditation on race and justice as it is a novel. When a white socialite dies under mysterious circumstances in a Paris hotel room with four African-American men, everyone assumes it's an open-and-shut case of rape and murder. Or is it? In the stark, staccato prose that marked his popular Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson mysteries, Himes explores the lives of his five characters, revealing just how deceiving appearances can be when the observer's vision is clouded by racist assumptions.

THE AYE-AYE AND I: A Rescue Mission in Madagascar, by Gerald Durrell (Touchstone: $11; 175 pp.). The Aye-aye is a weird-looking primate with long, bony middle fingers that it uses to remove boring grubs from trees. Durrell recounts his efforts to establish breeding colonies of aye-ayes, gentle lemurs and flat-tailed tortoises in his familiar, engaging blend of tongue-in-cheek humor and ecological concern. The droll anecdotes leaven Durrell's lament for the shortsighted destruction of the odd, intriguing fauna of Madagascar, and give his work an appeal other natural history books lack.

THE SEED AND THE VISION: On the Writing and Appreciation of Children's Books, by Eleanor Cameron (Plume: $14.95; 362 pp.). In this expanded version of "The Green and Burning Tree" (1969), the National Book Award-winning novelist and children's author argues that a good children's book is first and foremost a good book, with sound internal logic, credible characters and imaginative prose. Cameron's reflections on psychology and psychobabble seem less sure than her discussions of literary style, but her primary concern is that children become "literate in a way that means reading will affect their lives, will give them a view of the human condition they would never have without it, that will become a companion to them all the rest of their days."

THE SIERRA CLUB HANDBOOK OF WHALES AND DOLPHINS, by Stephen Leatherwood & Randall R. Reeves, paintings by Larry Foster (Sierra Club Books: $18; 302 pp., illustrated). The authors designed this guide to fill the gap between arcane scientific literature and the popular whale books that frequently contain factual errors. The concise text describes the natural history and current status of the major species of whales and dolphins, with notes on how to identify them. Anyone planning a trip to the Central Coast to enjoy the recent sightings of humpbacks should bring this handy guide.

BECOMING AMERICAN WOMEN: Clothing and the Jewish Immigrant Experience, 1880-1920, by Barbara A. Schreier (Chicago Historical Society: $19.95; 154 pp., paperback original). Of the 2 million Jews who came to the United States between 1880 and 1920, nearly half were women. The transition from the religiously segregated shtetls of Eastern Europe to an urban, secular society was not an easy one. Orthodox tradition decreed that married women dress modestly, covering their hair with wigs or kerchiefs; but wives who clung to the old styles were scorned as "greenhorns" by their friends and family: When a woman adopted modern fashions, her appearance became "both an expression and an extension of her painful adjustment to America." The catalogue for a traveling exhibition organized by the Chicago Historical Society, "Becoming" presents a moving account of a key episode in American social history.

CALIFORNIA'S NUDE BEACHES, by Dave Patrick (Bold Type Inc.: $15.95: 150 pp., illustrated). The 4th edition of this guide to places for all-over tanning includes sites in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. Patrick offers brief directions, a capsule description of each site and general notes on nude beach etiquette: gawking, littering and lusting after other sunbathers are considered faux pas. A useful reference for readers who want to increase the risk of skin cancer in places where it will be particularly unpleasant to have removed.

There's an MTA strike. Stranded people all over Los Angeles. Does Channel 7 even bother to mention it before their 4 o'clock newscast? The answer: NO! They mention O.J., then O.J. again, then O.J. again.Get the idea?

Thank you Channel 7 for keeping us so well-informed.

Angela Hernandez, Los Angeles

Mystery lovers can gorge on the true-life, two-part, four-hour 1991 And the Sea Will Tell (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m., concludes Tuesday at 9 p.m.), in which two couples, one middle-aged and rich (Diedre Hall, James Brolin), the other footloose post-hippies (Rachel Ward, Hart Bochner), fatally intersect in the summer of 1974 on the remote island of Palmyra, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii.

The 1993 TV movie Father & Son: Dangerous Relations (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), which has the parental theme of irresponsibility being handed down from generation to generation. Louis Gossett Jr., who is also the co-executive producer, stars as a black father who dumps his wife and 5-year-old son, then encounters his son (Blair Underwood) 20 years later in a prison yard where they're both doing time.

There's bad and there's laughably bad. The 1991 TV movie The Woman Who Sinned (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) is the second. As the plot twists pile up, this ludicrous Susan Lucci vehicle is an absolute howl. For openers, Lucci's art gallery owner has an extramarital affair because her husband (Tim Matheson) doesn't want kids.

In the suspenseful murder thriller Final Appeal (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), a 1993 TV movie, a hard-drinking, disbarred lawyer (Brian Dennehy) feels compelled to try to represent his younger sister (JoBeth Williams) after she guns down her husband and his mistress. As a loyal sibling, Dennehy offers an intriguing portrait of a guy who quietly, almost invisibly, tipples his way through the day.

Taffin (KABC Monday at 9 p.m.), a lackluster 1988 picture never released in major cities, stars Pierce Brosnan as a professional debt collector who undergoes a change of character when he finds himself up against an organization of corrupt businessmen and criminals intent on building a chemical plant in a small Irish community.

Nobody but the public seemed to like the 1983 Flashdance (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), a kind of full-length erotic aerobics class that stars Jennifer Beals, a Pittsburgh steel mill welder by day and a bar dancer by night who's intent on auditioning for a ballet troupe and having an affair with her impossibly rich, unattached boss (Michael Nouri).

Sam Peckinpah's brilliant, controversial 1969 commentary on violence, The Wild Bunch (KCOP Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) finds William Holden leading a bunch of border ruffians operating in South Texas and Mexico, circa 1913.

A lighthearted 1989 fable aimed at kids, except for the very young, Little Monsters (ABC Saturday at 8 p.m.) seems an incredible simulation of "Beetlejuice," so uncannily close is the manic energy of Howie Mandel's Maurice, the proverbial monster under the bed, to that of Michael Keaton's obnoxious-but-ya-gotta-love-him demon from hell. Fred Savage is its young hero, who manages to befriend Maurice, who belongs to a subterranean network of scaly gremlins who wreak havoc only at night.

Congratulations. You guys finally put something interesting on your cover -- an early studio photograph of Dana Andrews.

Keep it up!

John Bailey, Los Angeles

Madame Bovary (Bravo Monday at 8 p.m., again at 11 p.m.) Claude Chabrol's handsome, almost too reverent 1991 film starring a perfectly-cast Isabelle Huppert.

1900 (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) Restored to its original five-hours-plus running time, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 epic tracing the political history of Italy from the turn of the century to the end of World Wa II. Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu star.

"Susie Bright Tells All" (by Mark Ehrman, July 24) reveals more than perhaps the subject intended.This crusading sexpert (whatever that is) feels what is wrong with society can be laid at the doorstep of sexual hang-ups and social restrictions. Yet she had a child from an "on and off affair" with a gentleman who "had a fetish for impregnating women." Bright apparently had no other reason for bringing a child into the world other than that he "popped the question just as her biological alarm clock was ringing." There is something wrong with this picture, but I'm not sure that it has anything to do with sexual hang-ups and social restrictions.

KAY REIMERS

Los Angeles

Maureen Sajbel apparently doesn't offend liberal sensitivities in the slightest when she speaks of condoms on Christmas trees, Margaret Thatcher in drag or Jesse Helms reading Robert Mapplethorpe ("Window Dressing, 90210," Style, July 24).Such titillation at Christmastime is, as the writer sees it, a "wonderfully offbeat display." Shame on The Times for printing her vulgar tastes. Whatever happened to discretion?

JOHN JAEGER

Irvine

Can you tell us something about M. Giffin, the creator of the work of art that accompanied the fiction piece "Color Struck" (by Alyce Miller, July 17)? I cut it out to frame it. The image of the mother cradling her child is so arresting, I cannot take my eyes off it.

TERRY FISHER

Benicia

Editor's note: Matthew Giffin is an illustrator/artist who recently moved from New York City to Toronto. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and on book covers for Oxford University Press. "The thing that struck me about the story was how the issue of skin color is all-encompassing in the United States, and that this issue had filtered down to the black mother and her albino child was tragic," Giffin says. "I wanted to do a picture where the woman would have dignity in her blackness, at the same time she would be looking up at the sky and there would be a question of whether she was asking God to make it work no matter what, or asking God why it happened to her."

I've been a TV addict for as far back as I can remember -- long before Dicks York and Sargent played Darrin Stephens, long before Oliver dahling whisked Eva Gabor off to "Green Acres" and lovable "Have-I-got-a-swamp-deal-for-you" Mr. Haney.

"Mighty Mouse" kept me company mornings while dressing to face the nuns at St. Joseph's School.

"Popeye" entertained me during those bologna and Velveeta on Wonder bread and mayo lunches.

"Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" had me wondering if I did join the Navy (who cared if I was only 8 1/2?) would I be assigned to the same submarine as Capt. Lee Crane (David Hedison) and would he marry me?

Fast forward to present day: infomercials and "Seinfeld" and the news from my doctor that I would be home for about two months recovering from surgery.

"You can catch up on your reading," one friend offered.

"Oh, yes," I said. "I have been meaning to get back to 'Silas Marner' and oh, yes, Stephen Hawkings. And what a waste my life would be if during my time off I failed to reread all of Shakespeare and Dickens. Wasn't that Pip just a pip in 'Great Expectations?' ( Tee-hee-hee )."

Lie. Lie. Lie.

I engaged in the classics, all right: the "Gilligan's Island" episode where they almost get off the island, the "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy and Ethel get in hot water with Ricky and Fred, "The Beverly Hillbillies" episode where Granny makes possum stew, and the "Andy Griffith" show where Andy teaches Opie one of life's lessons.

I was awakened to "Today in L.A." and dozed off to "The Three Stooges" at 2 a.m. with "The O.J. Simpson Show" filling some afternoons.

It was a TV addict's dream come true. Imagine being a barbecue-ribs-a-holic and finding yourself locked overnight in a restaurant called Rib-o-rama.

When I tired of real life, I switched over to the soaps.

On "The Young and the Restless," Victor Newman had a new wife, but his old wife, Nicky, wanted him back after she lost her beau, Cole, to her daughter, Victoria, whose marriage to Cole was briefly in trouble when it looked like Cole might be Victoria's brother . . .

Things weren't much better on "The Bold and the Beautiful" for Sheila Forrester, who used to be on "The Young and the Restless" until she "died" in a fire after that whole ugly kidnaping mess, so she moved to L.A. and became the wife of the tres loaded Eric Forrester and fretted over her inclusion (or lack thereof) in his will, which presumably names his sons, but not little Bridget, who I'm convinced is Eric's daughter and not the daughter of Eric's son, Ridge, who has always loved Bridget's mother, Brooke, but has never married her, though now he's considering it because Brooke (whom Ridge calls "Logan") is about to marry James, the psychiatrist, who was in love with Ridge's late wife, Taylor, also a psychiatrist, who might not be dead after all . . .

Round and round it went. I was practically mainlining Visine in order to get maximum watchage out of my eyes. I applied Ben-Gay regularly to my "remote finger" to ease the pain associated with channel-surfing.

Then one morning after an estimated trillion hours of TV watching, it all started to blend. Sorta like a Vulcan mind meld.

I was watching "Regis & Kathy Lee" and I could swear Sheila Forrester was on saying that she discovered the bloodied glove at the Simpson estate.

It only worsened.

After being very diligent about keeping track of what was on Montel, Oprah, Rolanda, Bertice, Jerry, Sally Jessy, Geraldo and Donahue (just in case I wanted to order a written transcript of a show), I drew a blank when trying to recall to a friend what talk show host had "I Married My Brother's Sister's Cousin's Mother-in-law's Uncle's Cat."

I had hit the wall and hard.

With my brain now complete and absolute mush, I ran like the wind into the literary arms of Shakespeare. I skipped "Hamlet," though. I had caught "My Boyfriend Can't Make Up His Mind" on Ricki Lake.

Michelle Williams is deputy editor of Life & Style.

The title story of Benjamin Weissman's short fiction opens with a quote from advice columnist Ann Landers, in which she calls "morbid curiosity . . . one of the less attractive qualities of human nature." Though not essential, a good dose of morbid curiosity might not hurt those hiking through this harrowing collection of short stories, Weissman's first. This work firmly places Weissman alongside colleague Dennis Cooper in the ranks of L.A. writers who feel right at home in a homicidal maniac's head.

Although he shares with the author of "Try," "Closer" and "Frisk" a predilection for the flesh-carving antics of men who prey on boys, at heart, Weissman is an egalitarian. Rather than limit his gaze to the murderously homophobic, as Cooper does, he observes madness in varied walks of life.

In the glibly titled "Squash," when a mother's brutal attempt to discipline an unruly 9-year-old fails, 200 pounds of parent nestles itself on the child's chest in hopes of teaching the boy a lesson. Predictably, the worst occurs. Unexpected is the mother's obliviousness to the suffering and eventual death she causes. With the authorities on their way, her defiant daughter still clutching the phone, sobbing and her son's lungs collapsing like an accordion beneath her, the mother complains, "I've gotten so uncomfortable I can't rise off our birthday boy to slap the nonsense out of the brat."

Weissman is a master at tracing the web of rationalization that killers weave. The book is at its most horrific when the reader is jolted by the shock of recognition, as in "Ardmore." Here a backwoods woman triggers a murder by notifying her half-crazed landlord, Ardmore, about the film crew that just showed up on his property. Ardmore launches into a rage, shouting, "No one's going to treat honest country folk like pharmaceutical monkeys!" He starts firing, and one of the cameramen with "out-of-state plates" falls down dead. Afterwards the woman is stricken with guilt, not over the bloodshed but over "being the center of attention." "I liked being filmed," she confides, "and I desperately want to see what I look like." Hollywood obviously is not the only place where vanity flourishes, especially when it comes to places in the world where loss of life is not nearly as tragic as living a life of dismal poverty.

Weissman is at his most poignant in "The Future" and "The Present," which stand on their own but work best as companion pieces. In the former we meet an entrepreneurial Christian Scientist who is convinced that hog's blood will loosen death's grip on his wife's corpse. He says his son will help him in this endeavor but can't just yet for the son "can't think of anything except all the singing planets in the sky." In the latter story we meet another Christian Scientist who is unable to part with his dead wife, even though his son has already dug the hole in the back yard. The man gently bathes her corpse in Epsom salts and places it in bed beside him. He hugs and kisses the body and rolls on top of it. "Come on back," he whispers. "Here I am, wishing you were here, no place like home." Within these two stories Weissman finds briefly that uneasy balance between the absurd and the grotesque, which results in a heart-rending lyricism.

True, "Dear Dead Person" can read like a freak show but it's more than that. In "A German Moment," a Jewish narrator confesses to listening to German folk music on the radio, unable to enjoy it, yet dutifully turning to it every Saturday morning. "It's difficult," he says, "to get off the Holocaust channel because it's on the consciousness network twenty-four hours every day, forever. . . . (It) will always be popular because it's still so new, happened only yesterday and nothing is simpler or more confusing than exterminating people."

In language that could have come from the back of a cereal box, Weissman makes visible the driving forces of our culture (technology, advertising) that since Sputnik have accelerated our lives to a warped speed. Throughout the book, Weissman suggests that our civilization, still reeling from the atrocities of the last World War, has become a breeding ground for serial killers whose internal antennae pick up voices that coax them to create their own mini-apocalypses. Once you realize this, you realize that it'll take more than Dear Ann and her sensible advice to save you.

After seeing several of their peers charged with sexual malfeasance , getting sued for purportedly encouraging the recovery of false memories and just generally getting hauled into courts for any number of problems, real and imagined, many California psychotherapists are, well, paranoid.

And, perhaps, with good reason. There are 8,000 to 10,000 lawsuits against therapists pending in U.S. courts, according to the Philadelphia-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and at least 1,000 of them are in California. Orange County, says attorney O. Brandt Caudill, is the epicenter of recovered memory lawsuits.

"Maybe California has more of these lawsuits because we've got more touchy-feely therapists doing experimental things," suggests Newport Beach psychoanalyst Lawrence E. Hedges. "California has more therapists per capita than any other state, and many have limited training," he adds.

In an effort to educate the mental health community, Hedges, along with psychotherapists Robert Hilton and Virginia Wink Hilton, organized "Therapists at Risk," a seminar held earlier this year in Anaheim. More than 100 people came to learn about "the perils of the intimacy of the psychotherapy relationship in the current climate of accusation and litigation."

Plundering the past is a double-edged sword, says Wink Hilton. "Therapists should be very cautious about ever leading or directing a client into recovery of lost memories; at the same time, this brings about a reticence to explore the very issues the client might need to deal with."

This dilemma has resulted in several new support groups. The Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists and the Los Angeles-based Professional Advocacy Network have both recently established groups for therapists who have been accused of an ethical or legal breach. The validity of the accusations is not at issue; the forums exist solely to allow participants to air their feelings about the perils of the psychic territory they mine, as well as the litigious nature of contemporary America.

The network is already reporting up to 100 calls a month -- half from California. Ellen Alperstein

air brace: n. a passenger who is hesitant to dip his paddle into the water.

carnage: n. boating mishaps, including flipped boats, passengers overboard and lost gear."If we go over Lewis's Leap sideways, we're gonna have some serious carnage. "

hole: n. a depression in the river, caused by a reversal in current as water flows over a rock ledge or submerged boulder. "Don't get sucked into that hole at the bottom of Tunnel Chute."

hydraulics: n. waves and holes, typical of big water. "During spring runoff, we see some big hydraulics on this river."

lilydipper: n. a passenger who uses wimpy little paddle strokes. "I was stuck for two days with a boatload of lilydippers. "

Maytagged: v. to be held underwater and thrashed around by a strong current. "I got Maytagged bad on the Upper Kern."

surf: v. to paddle into a hole so that the reversal cancels out the downstream current, holding the raft in place for a short, bumpy ride. "We surfed nearly half a minute before the hole spit us out."

swimmer: n. a passenger who falls out of the boat.

teacup: v. to send a raft spinning downriver with all the passengers jammed into the stern so that the bow end lifts out of the water, simulating the Disneyland teacup ride. "We teacupped Hell's Kitchen on our last run."

toaster: v. to accidentally wedge a paddle into a narrow space between rocks, like slipping a slice of bread into a toaster.

wrap: v. to become stuck against a boulder in midcurrent, often requiring a long, tedious rescue. "If we start to wrap, everyone throw your weight to the high side." Jerry Dunn

In preparing this month's column, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was pulling a Tom Sawyer -- that I was tricking the other kids into painting the fence for me.

Seeking young volunteers to test-drive some activity books and do a mini-review, I enticed parents with the words "Make your kid a star!" and hammered respondents with the guilt-inducing phrase "Share some quality time!"

They fell for it. And a column was born. . . .

Jackie Sauceda-Rivera, age 9, offered to take Light Magic: And Other Science Activities About Energy, by Trudy Rising and Peter Williams and illustrated by Jane Kurisu (OWL -- Greey de Pencier Books, 56 The Esplanade, Ste. 302, Toronto, Ontario, MSE 1A7/416-971-5275: $9.95) for a whirl.

Jackie, a fourth-grader who has done science projects in school -- including the light board mentioned in the book -- says "Light Magic" is "a good book for kids learning about science. It teaches how to make light bulbs, water and lots of things with electricity.

"I did two projects from the book. One was to make a light bulb of your own (electric energy) and the other one was how to make a model hovercraft (energy of wind). The hovercraft, using a balloon, margarine lid and a used spool of thread in a pool of water, didn't work that good but it was a pretty good experiment anyway. It didn't work because every time it was set on water the air came out and (the craft) only moved a couple of inches.

"The light bulb experiment worked pretty good. I used steel wool, a 6-volt battery, a couple of nails, cork, wire and a bottle for this experiment (plus adult assistance). The light lasted a few seconds. I liked the light bulb experiment because I got to work with electricity."

Notes Jackie's mom, Catherine Sauceda: "I found the book to be easy for kids age 8 and up to understand the basics of wind, electric, water, heat energy. The experiments are precise in directions using household items. They are relatively easy and fun with some required adult supervision or assistance."

There is quite simply no way that I would attempt the project in Build Your Own Empire State Building by Alan Rose (Addison-Wesley: $14.95), even though it comes complete with radio antenna and King Kong. There are too many pieces to cut out, too many pieces to piece together -- all of which require to expert handling of scissors and glue, neither of which I mastered in the second grade. So it's a good thing I found three stouthearted lads to put it together: Steve Margulies, Robert Rostig and Mark Bagwell, all 14 and all used to spending most of their free time in outdoor activities.

The book said it would take 8 hours to put together; that was about right, even with the team approach.

A parent's (Steve's dad, Lee) observation: "The boys didn't like all the cutting out of pieces that had to be done but seemed to enjoy putting them together. Clearly, however, it's not an experience any of them is looking to repeat soon.