Twelve Hits
Every month, our server
delivers a soul-searching verdict
of our artistry (and our worth):
an accounting of the numbers of hits
that our many on-line reviews,
articles, readings, letters and poems
have garnered as of this month.

NEW REVIEWS
An Anatomy of Addiction
"A year after he fled
Nazi-dominated Austria for London,
a cancer-riddled Freud
asked his physician Max Schur
for a fatal dose of morphine
to end his life."

Bernard Maybeck
"The Palace of Fine Arts,
is a Beaux-Arts fraud with its
lurid Corinthian columns
and Roman entablature ---
a mish-mash of Greek and Roman styles
all out of proportion. With pink columns, even."

Dog Days
"The book is filled with
the jokes you would expect
from a horny twenty-something-year-old
who seems to have little success
with the ladies."

As If We Were Prey
"Evidently it's illegal
to fatten fresh-water bass
in your bathtub in Michigan,
and Lutz apparently
worked for the federal/state
fish felony fuzz."

New Stories from the Midwest
"Of the twenty here,
at least half are worth it.
My thought is that
if you get a collection
of short stories with
a 50% batting average,
you're in luck."

My Dyslexia
"He dutifully took
their words to heart
and spent the final years
of his long life
fulminating against
communists, liberals,
and other ne'er-do-wells like me."

Call Me When You Land
"'Why are your eyes so red?'
he asks. 'Allergies,' she says,
rubbing her nose.
'Maybe you can go downstairs
and get me a Claritin.'
'More like Visine,' he mumbles."

Kafka's Leopards
"He complains about
the obscurity, and Kafka
gets lost in his own thoughts.
'Obscurity,' he said at last.
'Some think it's the problem.
For me it's the solution.'"

Great Reviews of the Past
The Somme
"These woodlands of the Somme
represented the apotheosis of Mars.
There lay the miscellaneous débris of war ---
men living, dying and dead,
friend and foe broken and shattered
beyond imagination,
rifle, clothing, cartridges,
fragments of men, photographs
of Amy and Gretchen,
letters, rations, and
the last parcel from home."

LETTERS
The Somme
The Coward
Hugh Cecil

MORE LETTERS
Heathen and the Bible

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Letter from Timothy F. Geithner
PET stretch blow moulding

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
I have just two days to leave

ARTICLE
High Halloween
"Sometimes we ate
bacon for breakfast,
but my parents enjoined me never,
ever to mention the word 'bacon'
in the presence of
my father's mother,
a rabbi's widow who
was orthodox and strictly kosher."

READINGS
Field Rations
"Confronting the bad guys
is a fine way to relieve
stress and anxiety.
And it's a helluva lot cheaper
and more fun than
seeing a shrink."

POETRY
Lizzie Borden
"Oh, you can't chop your papa up in Massachusetts
And then get dressed and go out for a walk
No, you can't chop your papa up in Massachusetts
Massachusetts is a far cry from New York."

Great Poems from the Past
Shiva Goes Surfing off Newfoundland
"That was to be the end of love,
One that swayed the years of me, mom;
Trees you conjured out of the night, mom:
The absurd memory of you and me aground
On the cold wet sands
Of cold Newfoundland."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

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