Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Writing "In Praise of Dissent" in the New York Times Book Review, ex-Librarian of Congress Archibald Mac-Leish, now a Harvard professor of literature, tipped his mortarboard--with reservations--to Fascist-embracing Poet Ezra Pound and his eleven latest Cantos, composed in the Washington hospital where Pound has spent eleven years as a mental patient, adjudged unfit to be tried for treason in 1945. MacLeish freely admits: "Some of his dissents have been merely strident: his raging at Roosevelt throughout the Cantos sounds as though it had been composed by Fulton Lewis Jr., and his attacks on Churchill and Leon Blum are in the vocabulary of the Nazi radio." To Poet MacLeish, however, the redeeming grace of Poet Pound is: "Not the fact that these cantos came out of imprisonment and misery . . . but the fact that the poetry is hale and whole and speaks in a man's voice of a man's things."

The January issue of Fisherman magazine gaffed none other than Harry S. Truman. Fisherman's contention: though Truman was photographed, while President, in various Izaak Walton poses with grouper, bonitos, barracuda and king salmon, "there is no concrete evidence that he actually caught any of them." Said Harry, a weekend fisherman who likes to fish, as long as his companions are folksy: "No

comment."

At a country club near Miami Beach, under the approving eye of a local pro, Manhattan Lawyer Thomas E. Dewey, 54, wearing Bermuda shorts in balmy 80DEG weather, practiced some shots with his irons, thus gave golf another boost toward seeming the modern politician's favorite game. A middling golfer keeping fit, Republican Dewey usually tours 18 holes in the high 80s.

Ill lay: normally spry (at 82) Massachusetts Politico James M. Curley, in Boston after breaking both shoulders in two falls within thrfee days; luscious Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, 24, in Manhattan after an emergency operation for a crushed spinal disk; Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, 70, discharged after a brief visit to Bethesda Naval Hospital after recovering from a mild urinary tract infection; Wrest Virginia's aged (82) Democratic Senator Matthew Neely, whose fifth term runs until 1961, bedding in a hospital near Washington (for an estimated three more months) with a cracked hip; peppery Tennistar (and 1950 U.S. singles champion) Art Larsen, 31, in Castro Valley, Calif., partially paralyzed and blind in one eye after a motor scooter accident last month. (Larsen's tennis colleagues announced last week that a Manhattan benefit tournament will be staged next month to help Larsen meet his $100-a-day medical bills.) Meanwhile, another tennistar, World Champion Pro Poncho Gonzales, 28, visiting in Australia, took his ailing right hand to a Sydney doctor, learned that he has a small tumor requiring immediate surgery that may end his career.

Flipflopping about the stage of the Paris Opera, flabby Ballet Dancer Serge (the "Great Torso") Lifar, 51, in his lithe, bygone prime (see cut) the selfproclaimed successor to the great Nijinsky, was a parody of his younger self in his "farewell" performance in Giselle. A theater full of balletomanes paid tribute to Lifar more out of nostalgia than immediate appreciation. But retirement would come hard to Russian-born Serge Lifar. ,"If the occasion presents itself to dance Afternoon of a Faun," growled he, "I'll dance Afternoon of a Faun!"

Resplendent in grey chiffon and diamonds, H.R.H. Marina, Duchess of Kent, a handsome woman at 50, posed in Kensington Palace for a birthday portrait by Britain's most chic photographer, willowy Cecil Beaton. For the occasion, she bedecked herself with a spectacular array of decorations, including the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order.

Speaking in the Vatican palace to the Italian League Against Excessive Noise, Pope Pius XII pleased his listeners by roundly condemning needless decibels. Said His Holiness: "Silence is beneficial not only to sanity, nervous equilibrium and intellectual labor but also helps man to live a life that reaches to the depths and the heights ... It definitely helps an effort toward an interior life, and it is in silence that God's mysterious voice is best heard."

Gossipist Walter Winchell, explaining away the deficiencies of his soon-unspon-sored TV variety show (TIME, Dec. 3) in terms of his virtues as a "news com mentator," announced his readiness to crush every last one of his many enemies: "All those columnists rapping me," he wrote in TV Guide, "where do you think they get their material? They go through my wastebasket ... I want to get back at a lot of people. If I drop dead before I get to the Zs in the alphabet, you'll know how I hated to go."

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