The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities |
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The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities.
ARCHIVES
REVIEWS
This will lead you back through
a dozen or so previous issues of RALPH
(at least as far back as Winter, 1994 - 1995.)
The Windsor Style
"Nancy Mitford was one of many not amused by their antics:
He looks like a balloon, she like the skeleton
of some tiny bird, hopping in her hobble skirt."
and suggested that massive fortifications should be built at
Albany, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Vicksburg and Houston."
GREAT REVIEWERS OF THE PAST
Bordertown
H. L. Mencken on Public Education
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all;
it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible
to the same safe level, to breed and train
a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality."
"If we didn't know better,
we would suspect the author of being a male chauvinist pig,
but his words about Mexican men suggests that his chauvinism
bears no sexual restrictions whatsoever..."
BRIEF REVIEWS
Rube Goldberg, and Warren Beatty
MORE BRIEF REVIEWS
Hollywood, ALS, Gertrude Stein,
and Mary Todd Lincoln, Mad
It was rarely that one reached one's destination.
As a matter of fact, only the incurable optimist ever tried to."
moves in, bag and baggage, bringing along all of its progeny.
The only way we know that we are playing host
to the original man-who-came-to-dinner
is that the skin erupts in ways that drive one totally up the wall."
exchanging bugs with my honey, is simply beyond their ken.
Geezers like me --- especially disabled geezers ---
just don't have sex."
though they have trouble understanding what's missing ---
which explains their nostalgia for the earlier model.
Their dissatisfaction is literally a dis-ease."
READINGS Two Hundred Horse-Power Cheeses
Pictures Speaking of Love
God Must Be Female
POETRY LETTERS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Two by Jerome K. Jerome
Eating Duck
"We did break the thing up at length, with the aid of a chisel;
but it was perfectly impossible to eat it, and we had to make a dinner off the vegetables and an apple tart."
"At the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest,
and rose up without another word and went out.
And then a stout lady got up, and said it was
disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be
harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag
and eight parcels and went."
"Greed is easy to explain, easy to trace, I think.
But fear --- fear is more complex.
And love: why it's the most complex of them all."
"Ginny was afraid of nothing. She was young and old.
Her brown arms and legs swinging in wild optimism,
beautiful in all their parts. She danced on the long hood
of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her,
I thought that God must be female."
Five from The Space Between Our Footsteps
"I hear a nine-month-old/has also lost an eye,
I wonder if my soldier/shot her too --- a soldier
looking for little girls who/look him in the eye ---
I'm old enough, almost four,/I've seen enough of life,
but she's just a baby/who didn't know any better."
"I asked the good Dr. Feelgood/
If he could make two of me,
One with all the pain/
(Knees grinding like stones,
Heart full of tremors, eyes/
Watering endlessly, failing peter,
Liver turned to hard black bread)."
"Here's your paycheck, here's your rent.
Money is nature's fifth element.
Welcome to every cent."
Re: Lip Service
"I have a pretty tough skin so I don't care when someone
doesn't like Lip
Service, but it really pisses me off when someone reviews it without reading
it."
Re: RALPH
"The Romans had a word for it. They called it 'puerile.'
It means 'juvenile,' 'childish,' 'silly.'
Get my drift?"
NEW LISTINGS
Books that have been sent to us within the last fortnight or so.
Titles, authors, and publishers
of all books reviewed in RALPH ---
arranged chronologically.
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PARADOX-OF-THE-MONTH