R A L P H The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities Number 108 Mid-Winter 2003-2004 |
REVIEWS
The Outlaw Sea
Great Reviews of the Past
BRIEF REVIEWS
LETTERS ARTICLE
READINGS
POETRY
THE OFFICIAL RALPH
GENERAL INDEX
A PITHY SAMPLE
SUBSCRIBE
Popular Music from Vittula
"It's episodic, just like our childhoods.
And like our childhoods, it is filled with
unreasoning terror and bursts of sunlight and laughter,
people direct from Gargantua and Pantagruel
with monstrous appetites
doing monstrous deeds: drinking and eating and
beating each other until all are senseless." Frank Lloyd Wright's Giant Pumpkin
"Not all the structures
remind one of cactuses or mushrooms.
Others are reminiscent of the peyote button,
the horsetail, the elephant weed, goose barnacles,
larval copepods, and at least one
is a dead ringer for bread-mold."
"There is a vast portion of the globe
that is never calm and containable
even when it seems so. That is the ocean,
that incomprehensible vastness
that encompasses so much of the world."
The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
"All of us from those
footloose years who had a visit from
the Boogieman may remember
The Face, which was either your own,
melting off your skull into the bathroom sink
like a vanilla pop-pie, or, as often, one
piped in at us from outer space."
Russian History and Pre-History,
The Poetry of Yvor Winters, and
Crossing America by Car in 1909
Anorexia,
Ethics in Public Relations, and
Another Possible Irritated
Lawsuit Against RALPH
The World Trade Center
Part I
"Ada Louise Huxtable,
former architecture critic for
The New York Times, described their style
as 'General Motors Gothic.'
Her successor, Paul Goldberger,
called them 'boring, so utterly banal
as to be unworthy of the headquarters
of a bank in Omaha.'"
Part II
"He was horrified by
his instinctive response to films
of the skyline after the fall of
the World Trade Center.
He found beauty and harmony
restored by the towers' absence."
Popular Music from Vittula
Part I
"With precise timing
to maximize the shock effect,
he whipped out his deformed hand.
We gasped with horror.
He turned his hand around,
and we noticed that from a certain angle
his thumb and hairy knuckles looked like
a male sexual organ."
Part II
"My father,
your grandad that is,
was a real stallion when he was a young man.
That's why I have two half sisters.
They're my age, and have children of their own.
That means that around here,
in the Pajala area,
you have five first cousins
you didn't know about."
Two from "Eyes to See Otherwise"
"She was my night
my rain
my first shoe
she was my flower that bloomed all year
she was my fire
my milk..."
Two More from "Eyes to See Otherwise"
"I was born on the corner
of Poverty and Injustice
my parents were Dignity
and Maybe-Tomorrow
always at the palace gates
of Madame Rectitude
ever since I was very young
I learned to eat air..."
Paradox-of-the-Month
A complete list of all books reviewed in RALPH,
arranged by title, including author, subject, and publisher,
plus a listing of all readings, articles and poems
that have appeared since 1994.
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"
Help perpetuate honest, noisy, pesky book reviews.
With your $25 subscription, you get
a free copy of one or more of the titles from
Mho & Mho Works
Submitting Books The best way to get books to RALPH for review. Submitting Reviews Suggestions for would-be reviewers --- and payment schedule. History RALPH didn't spring full-blown from the brows of the gods: We've been around (in different guises) for over thirty years. The Fessenden Fund Describing the good works of RALPH's official godparent |
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