Thirty-Three Hits from RALPH | The Most Popular Reviews, Readings, Poems Art, and Articles

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review

Rum,
Romanism,
& Rebellion
The Making of
A President, 1884
Mark Wahlgren Summers
(University of North Carolina)
It wasn't until we read Summers exhaustive discussion of the campaign of 1884 that we learn that one Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, addressing a gathering of the Religious Bureau of the Republican National Committee, a week before the general election, stated,
We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.

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Dorothea Lange
Photographs of
A Lifetime
Edited by
Michael E. Hoffman
(Aperture)
Lange knew what she was doing. Even without cropping and cutting she knew she had found a face, the haunting face of an anguished mother, a face that would tell the story of an entire generation of the lost and the poor.

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The Book of
The Grotesque
Sherwood Anderson
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time.

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reading

Ode to the Potato
Barbara Hamby
Mi corazón, mon coeur,
my core is not the heart but the stomach, tuber
of the body, its hollow stem the throat and esophagus,
leafing out to the nose and eyes and mouth. Hail
the conquering spud, all its names marvelous.
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poem
In the Shadow of Fame
A Memoir by the Daughter
of Erik H. Erikson
Sue Erikson Bloland
(Viking)
Bloland doesn't seem too impressed by her impressive father. Indeed, she dwells inordinately on the distance, the outbursts of temper, his apparent favoritism towards her older brothers. The god of the newest 1950s theories of family dynamics was, she is telling us, a lousy family man.
Big deal. As a friend of mine used to say, here's another person with a monkey on her back. Moreover, her gloomy style, and her passion for repeating herself does nothing to set the reader on fire.
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review
A Funny Thing
Happened On
My Way
To Old Age
Life Changes After 50
Stanley C. Baldwin
(IVP)
The author turns out to have another cross to bear. He's a practicing Christian. Despite his "walks with God" and his personal ship-of-state "under the command of the Lord Jesus Christ," there is a note of despair in his writing, even a touch of blame. Thus, when he finds himself in a pickle, who does he finger? Satan.
Fighting with Satan is not easy, he says. In fact, it's total war: "I can never retire from it [the battle], because Satan's minions won't let me. They are on the attack, and I have to be ready to fight back or I am at their mercy of which they have none."
You may ask what temptations do those of us who are so antediluvian have to battle. "Almost everything I face daily," he reports, "carries potential for victory or defeat."
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Daily Sex
365 Positions and Activities
For a Year of Great Sex!
Jane Seddon
(Warner)
This neo-soft fun-porn clambake left us musing on Judge Charles Woolsey. He's the one who wrote the decision opening the door for Ulysses to be distributed in this country, in 1932. It pretty much guaranteed books freedom from the feds (in those days, the force of comstockery lay with the U. S. Postal Service).
His decision kept the postal inspectors from rummaging through the mail and ferreting out "scandalous" literature. But sometimes this all-American go-for-it rough-and-tumble clambake sex makes us long for the good old days. It also might even send the good judge a-spinning in his grave. I looked around in this volume for a position labeled "A-Spinning in the Grave," but, alas, it was nowhere to be found.
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review

Hard Line:
Life and Death on
The U.S. - Mexico Border
Ken Ellingwood
(Pantheon)
Years ago, mothers, fathers, and children went easily back and forth through San Diego, Yuma, Ciudad Juárez, Brownsville. But since the declaration of war --- called, with a certain bitter irony, "Operation Gatekeeper" --- Mexicans have been driven to take on the mountains outside of San Diego, and on into the deserts of eastern California and Arizona.
Here they die, not like flies, but like beasts of burden: freezing to death in the mountains at night, in the snow and the cold; sometimes drowning in the deep irrigation canals of Southeaster California. Or, literally, cooked to death in the summer Sonoran desert, temperatures raging above 120°.
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review
Substitute
Teacher
Gary Gildner
Please
do not look at me
like I'm silly or sick
and most of all
please do not reject
my very first love
affair. If you do
not feel the same
as I do please
tell me how I can forget
your unforgettable voice
that reminds me
of Larry the Duke's pet
birds in the morning,
your blue eyes like the
Blessed Virgin's.
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poem

Lusitania
An Epic Tragedy
Diana Preston
(Walker)
By May 12, the world knew that the Germans were responsible through their coded cables, intercepted by the British, including one sent from naval high command headquarters in Germany to the U-20:
"My highest appreciation of commander and crew for success achieved of which the high seas fleet is proud and my congratulations on their return."
The German press "applauded the attack as an 'extraordinary success,'" but the English newspapers referred to "The Hun's Most Ghastly Crime."
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Family
Kaleidoscope
Images of Violence
And Healing
Salvador Minuchin
(Harvard University Press)
Minuchin sees his job as one of introducing a revision to the system --- one subtle enough and yet strong enough to move the family from being locked in nagging, self-blame, self-pity, and anorexia to one that is more creative, able to move and change:
"I have been with the Genottis for thirty minutes, immersed in their experience, absorbing their language, observing their transactions. With their help, I have begun to compose a therapeutic theme that will become the arena in which I'll challenge their reality. Replacing 'we are a normal family with an anorectic child and helpful parents,' the therapeutic exploration will follow the theme, 'You are a family that got stuck in your development and must grow up to adjust to the growth of your adolescent children.'
"The family and I will build this alternative with material carefully culled from their own language and transactions, so that they can feel they are still dealing with the familiar. As the session continues, the alternative will make it possible to challenge the rigidity of this family organization and to free Loretta from her role as family stabilizer."
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reading

The
Chocolate
Soldier
P. J. Mierly

Some call it "The Slim Disease" ---
Thrushes in the springtime,
Cat-scratch in the fall.
Meningitis by morning,
Lymphoma in the afternoon,
Salmonella at night.
And for our last winter together:
Candidiadis, Kaposi's, and...ah...
My brainless love...progressive dementia.
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poem

Dada
HAS DADA EVER SPOKEN TO YOU:
about Italy
about accordions
about women's pants
about the fatherland
about sardines
about Fiume
about Art (you exaggerate my friend)
about gentleness
about D'Annunzio
what a horror
about heroism
about mustaches
about lewdness
about sleeping with Verlaine
about the ideal (it's nice)
about Massachusetts
about the past
about odors
about salads
about genius, about genius, about genius
about the eight-hour day
about the Parma violets
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manifesto