The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 14

AA-6-1 SUN Augutt 34, 1910 (coosiuiinnieirDSinni aimo inisgiirEini roiPhnader Grocery price surveys help curb food cost hikes 3 Nader is the organizer of various consumer-oriented research groups. four newspapers pulled out of the project before the conclusions of the 18-week study period, even though prices fell in three of the test cities compared to the non-surveyed cities. Once the price comparisons stopped appearing, Uhl said, the relative prices ent back up in all four cities. As they do in Bloomington, college students can assemble such surveys. As part of their economics or marketing classes, they can publish them in their school newspapers all over the country.

With such widespread impact, perhaps the grocery chains will find it futile to pressure regular newspapers to drop a valuable information service for readers. While there are reasons other than price to patronize a store, and while these price surveys, though accurate, do not pretend to include the many non-staple products on the shelves, they provide more information than consumers individually ever could provide for themselves. And that assistance stimulates competition and helps fight inflation. ton, consumers would have saved $47.7 million over one year in that state's largest city. Many grocery chains refuse to admit that the price surveys affect their pricing decisions.

A Kroger's spokesman said his company "pretty much ignores" them. This asserted indifference does not square ith the virulent reaction by food chains to a 12-week study supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A Purdue Agricultural economist, Joseph N. Uhl, initiated a project where newspapers published comparative grocery prices weekly in four cities and the results were compared with four control cities where no such surveys were available to consumers.

According to Professor Uhl, the response ranges from nothing by stores in South Bend, to a price-cutting war in Springfield, Mo. The supermarkets in the four surveyed cities, Uhl asserted, brought pressure on Purdue, on the state government and on the local newspapers reporting the survey. Three of the HONOLULU, Hawaii Do comparative grocery price surveys help keep food prices down? Here in Hawaii's largest city where food prices are hiRher than in any other city in the United States except Anchorage, Alaska, the local newspaper, Honolulu Advertiser, has been printing for several years what a list of staple foods costs consumers at specific supermarkets. The survey is conducted by the state Department of Agriculture and printed weekly. It has not been an entirely smooth reader service.

Some supermarket chains disliked having their prices compared with their competitors and one chain Foodland once temporarily pulled their ads in protest, according to one newspaper source. The Advertiser's managing editor, Mike Mid-dlesworth, says the surveys are well-read and appear to have a moderating effect on food prices. That is to say the prices would be even higher without this weekly consumer information. While there has not been a systematic study of the effect of Honolulu's grocery surveys, two analyses of these surveys in the Midwest have concluded prices do go down. Indiana University economics professor Samuel M.

Loescher had his graduate students study price surveys of 150 different food items in seven Bloom-ington, stores printed each month for the past eight years in the large college newspaper. "The result," he said, "is that Bloomington's prices are lower than prices in any of the other communities around here. The stores know someone. is looking over their shoulders, so the prices stay down." Bloomington's grocery prices were lower than Indianapolis prices by 5.7 percent in the past year. If Indianapolis prices were equal to those in Blooming- The Thirties' lacks craftsmanlike tension "The Twenties." On occasion, in brackets, the old Wilson interrupts the young Wilson to be crusty, and we get some idea of what might have been.

He interrupts, for example, to tell us that on a visit to Washington in 1934, "My infected nose became worse, and I had to go to the hospital. There I added to my discomfort by reading Hegel's 'Philosophy of Later, after a long journal entry reporting on what he calls a "sordid period," he interrupts By JOHN LEONARD Y. Times News Service THE THIRTIES. By Edmund Wilson. Edited with an introduction by Leon Edel.

7S3 pages. Farrar Straus Giroux. $17.50. Edmund Wilson died before whipping "The Thirties" into shape. It lacks the play and the tension between the young Wilson, keeping his journal, and the old Wilson, annotating and emendating, that characterized ors and textures of clothes and furniture, what a squid looks like and a breast and Chicago.

The ear and the eye are at war. There are doldrums. Not all of Wilson's friends and acquaintances are as interesting as John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Louise Bogan, and F.

Scott Fitzgerald. There are too many cocktails, restaurants, bathing suits and one-night stands. His sexism is pervasive; even the Volga River must be "enormous, passive; wide-open and smooth, a female river," whereas the steeples of churches are invariably phallic. account of the revolutionary im-puse in modern politics, "To the Finland Station." He begins wanting to be a poet and a playwright; he ends up, after an uneasy flirtation with communism, a social critic with a literary bias, just as interested in Flaubert, Dickens, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw as he is in Vico, Michelat, Marx and Lenin. One wonders whether he also wanted to be a painter.

"The Thirties" delights in slang, jargon and cliches, the stuff of speech. But it is full, as well, of sunsets and architecture, "turtle paws," of col and Leningrad and Moscow. Anybody with the slightest interest in literary history will want to read "The Thirties" to find out where such books as "The American Earthquake" and "Red, Black, Blond and Olive" and "To the Finland Station" came from, what sort of mind was on the wing and why it perched in which sad cornice. Finally, "The Thirties" is a drama. It begins with a Wilson busy proofing the pages of his classic account of modern literature, "Axel's Castle," and ends as he is wrapping up his equally classic Droll offerings from Trow again to observe: "It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive." Because we have just been reading about a wire hairbrush and holding "her foot," we are forced to agree.

What, then, does "The Thirties" amount to? Surprisingly, it is prodigal, except on the subject of Mary McCarthy, whom he married in February 1938. By the time we arrived at Miss McCarthy, after so many discriptions of so much sex in the sand dunes and so many other unlikely places, he is reticent. About his second marriage, however, he is moving and guilt-ridden. Margaret Canby Wilson died of a skull fracture two years after that marriage. In a long monologue obviously borrowed from the James Joyce he had been writing about in "Axel's Castle," he accuses himself of everything from laziness to penny-pinching to sadism.

And throughout these notebooks on a decade, he is haunted by dreams of her, by mistaken identities and squandered chances: "after she was dead, I loved her." And: "it wouldn't do any good to go to a doctor I know what I'm all about." "The Thirties" also contains his notes on travel in the "other" America and the outside world. To be sure, we spend far too much time with him in New York, Washington, Red Bank and Princeton, N.J., and Provincetown, but we go as well to Detroit and Harlan County, and Fall River, Story collection examines the 'hows, but not the of subjects' lives By JOHN E. McINTYRE Gannett News Service "Bullies," by George W.S. Trow, (Boston: Little, Brown, $8.95.) Nearly everything printed in 'The New Yorker" sees light a second time within the covers of a book. George W.S.

Trow's stories, which have been appearing in the magazine for several years, have now been collected in a book that is both droll and unsettling. Trow has a rare gift for assembling stories out of small, precise details of speech or setting to create surreal and occasionally disturbing effects. The title story evokes a city sunk into pollution and decay, in which two modern entrepreneurs, the Margineaux brothers, have been acquiring the businesses (meatpacking plants) and status symbols (yacht clubs) of an earlier generation. The brothers abandon the boats and transfer the yacht clubs, with oars and trophies, to high-rise office buildings where they give parties. Things just go wrong.

At one party, the elevator stalls, trapping screaming guests inside for hours. The circus animals brought for the evening's entertainment, unable to leave, wander among the guests. One of the Margineaux brothers, dirty and disheveled, stands cradling a small silver bowl and weeping. The jacket copy for "Bullies" explains that Trow was for a time a sonarman for the Coast Guard a suggestive detail. In these stories tiny, clear echoes bounce back at the reader, who reconstructs from them the outlines of large objects.

By KATHERINE GUCKENBERGER Gannett News Service "Short Lives," by Katinka Matson, (New York: William Morrow and Company, $9.95.) What do Sylvia Plath, Modigliani and Judy Garland have in common? how about Thomas Chat-terton and Janis Joplin? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley? Katinka Matson has thrown sketches of these artists and others 31 in all together in her new book, "Short Lives," subtitled "Portraits in Creativity and Self-Destruction." And the result of the subjects' character to make up for her superficiality in fact. The sketches are just that. They give the barest outline. Nothing survives the people but what any newspaper might have printed during their lifetime.

To understand the inner meaning of these quick flights through existence, one must turn to the creative source that burnt them out the poems, the paintings, the performances. Matson's attitude, though veiled in objectivity, is ambivalent. She is awed by the accomplishments of her portrait subjects; at the same time she insults their memory. The last life Matson does is of a personal friend and former which explains some of the am-; bivalence: Thomas Tyler Bootman. He was untrue to her in the usual sense in life, and then in an unusual sense by dying young, the final betrayal.

It is no wonder she hides her feelings behind an objectivity bordering on disdain. One needs shielding before 31 portraits of people who through their extraordinary talents give great pleasure, and then turn their backs on us and die. book is confusion. Some of the lives are suspiciously long for such a collection; one begrudges Antonin Artaud his 52 years. Chatterton, of course, who took arsenic at 17, is the hero.

Asmittedlt, as we plod onward, alphabetically, through the 31, a pattern emerges. Doting mothers, alcoholism, egoism, drugs, fame and madness run through the lives like hidden springs. But instead of enlightenment, when the springs finally snap, we are treated to an overdose of depression. The spitting of blood, the rope, the gas. Everyone knows how most of these people died.

What we need and long to know is why. Steven Crane, Hart Crane, Rimbaud, Russian poet Esenin, are most interesting because least familiar. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Elvis do not fare as well, since Matson has done her research in the library of common knowledge. Her piece on Plath could have been written by anyone familiar with her book, "Letters Home." Matson offers no insight into her Fine tales, but not fantasy humorous vein. Ray Bradbury's "Gotcha!" is a psychological horror tale that will scare you silly, and J.A.

Lafferty has contributed a totally unclassif iable piece that begins with the title "Selennium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" and gets weirder as it goes along. Even the two weakest stories in the collection Michael Bishop's "Within Walls of Tyre" and Harlen Ellion's "The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge" have splendidly imaginative concepts. Unfortunately, Bishops's concept is drowned in writing, that strains to be trendy, and Ellion's ruined by an overdose of the kind of Hollwood (or maybe "Live from New York camp evident in the title. In "The Year's Finest Fantasies," Terry Carr has assembled an anthology of stories that are, mainly, indeed fine, even if are not quite fantasies. the word game dorothy rubin Medical inflation (Continued from AA-1) patient, nor the physician, nor the hospital has any incentive to keep an eye on costs.

Let's say you go to the doctor with some minor illness. He knows your insurance is going to pick up the tab and so he has no incentive to avoid prescribing the most expensive tests and treatments available, even if they are only minimally superior to far less costly car. And if he wishes to retain you as his patient he will send you to the most luxurious, expensive, and over-equipped hospital he can find regardless of cost. Hospitals, in turn, must provide the latest and most sophisticated they can, or their beds will remain empty. So, throughout the entire health industry, the tax incentives lead to a situation where everyone will choose the most expensive, wastefull alternative available.

There is no reason to economize. It is true that costly treatments will lead to higher group premiums in the end, but for any individual his own treatment costs will have only an infinitesimal effect on his premium. Last year Congress tried to "solve" this problem by enacting controls on hospital charges. This would be like holding the lid firmly on a boiling pot while you turned up the heat eventually it blows. That move not unpredictably failed.

Fortunately, sanity seems to have broken out on the Hill this year. Senators David Durenberger (R-Minn.) and Richard Schweiker (R-PA.) and Congressman Al Ullman (D-Ore.) have introduced bills that would deal effectively with both unbalanced coverage and hospital inflation. These bills would put a limit on the tax-free contribution an employer could make to a health plan, and require companies to offer low cost plans with deductible and co-payments as an option. In addition, the measures would give employees a tax advantage for choosing a low-cost plan, and they would require all plans to include catastrophic protection. If such an approach is adopted, it would mean that patients would normally make at least some direct contribution towards costs, and thereby create a needed incentive within the medical industry to economize and complete.

Futhermore, tests and detailed cost estimates have shown that the resultant reduction in hospital costs would be so great that it would exceed the cost of providing mandatory private catastrophic protection. So you would get better coverage at lower cost. And a final bonus the idea would save tax dollars, not spend them. By GAIL REGIER Gannett News Service "The Year's Finest Fantasy," Vol. 2, edited by Terry Carr; (New York: Berkley Publishing 277 pages, $12.50) This the second volume of an anthology series is apparently intended as a sort of companion to the Best Science also edited by Terry Carr.

Nine stories, ranging from eight to 50 pages, originally published in magazines or "original-fantasy anthology magazines" in 1978. But the title is misleading. While there is no story without a touch of strange, there are perhaps five which can hardly be fitted into the fantasy category. Certainly, Charles Sheffield's "The Treasure of Odirex" and Stephen King "The Gunslinger" are plain science fiction, or maybe just plain fiction fiction. The strength of this anthology is the originality and artistic integrity of the stories Carr has selected.

There is no formula writing allowed here, neither the mindless sword-and-sorcery so beloved of the war-games crowd or the Tolkien clones preferred by their less bloodthirsty brethren. (Not that all sword-and-sorcery, or all tales of the world of fay, are mindless: for example, Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Lady in included in this collection is a powerful treatment of themes from both genres.) Several of the stories, such as Teylin Moore's delightful and subt-. ly satirical "A Certain Slant of Light" and Avran Davidson's witty "Sleep Well of Nights," are in a The goal of today's game is to replace the blank in each sentence with a word that makes sense and fits the clue in the parentheses. Intermediate-grade level children and up can play.

1. Don't let her out of doing the job. (an animal) 2. I'm trying to out all the things that I don't need in order to make my load lighter, (a plant) 3. That list needs a(n) (part of a body) ben wicks 4.

Please don't shed those tears, (a reptile) 5. When we couldn't find Frank, we decided to him. (part of a book) 6. They are walking at such a(n) pace that it will take them weeks to get to their destination, (a mollusk) Answers: 1. weasel; 2.

weed; 3. colon; 4. crocodile; 5. page; 6. snail.

FUN WITH WORDS Below are six clues for six words. Each new word adds one letter and uses all the letters of the word preceding it. To form the new word, you may rearrange the letters in any way you wish. 1. A poetic exclamation 2.

A preposition 3. An indefinite long periocj of time 4. Something you write that is short 5. Frequently 6. To weaken the strength or resistance of Answers: 1.

2. on; 3. eon; 4. note; 5. often; 6.

soften. "It says here that ue're going into a recession. What does one near for such a function?".