Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine
As he touches her breast, the doctor asks, "How's your legal battles?"
As he touches her vulva, another question:
"Still riding your horse?"
And as he inserts his hand into her vagina,
"When were you in South Africa?"

Seeing Like a State
"His Hall of Fame of 'high modernist' figures are those
who are the universally accepted villains of ruination and statism including
Le Corbusier, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Vladimir I. Lenin,
David Lilienthal, Walter Rathenau, and Julius Nyerere."

The Lost Tomb
"With your permit, you have to take along an official,the often sleepy
Egyptian Government bureaucrat who will certify your operations;
you have handle testy, often ill-paid workers;you have to deal with
German and American tourists asking stupid questions..."

The Word on the Street
"Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French
and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare
to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that
unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. "

Brief Reviews
The Antarctic and South Georgia Island,
Paul Bowles and North Africa, and
Lord Byron's Last Days in Greece.

More Brief Reviews
The American Civil War and Robert E. Lee,
Perfect Storms, American Poetry and Karl Shapiro, and
The Destruction of the American West.

Memoirs of a Man Who Lost His Memory
"The knot-holes in the walls of the house began to speak to me.
Captain Marvel flew out the window. An army of marching Chinese
came through the living room, shuffling through,
on their way out the door, into eternity
(for all I know, they are still there, shuffling through)."

Some Thoughts on Internet 'zines
"When our hits soar above 50,000 a month, the bill from our local
server goes up. The word is 'megabytes.' It puts one in mind of a very hungry duck.
When we achieve the success of a million hits a month,
we'll be literally nibbled to death by bytes."

The Return of the Duck
"T. S. Eliot said that we measure out our days
in coffee-spoons. Me? In the last few years
I've been measuring out my life in Fruti jars."

The Poet in India
"Kali had three eyes, she stood on Siva, who lies supine on the
thousand-petaled silver lotus.
He would write a poem about it. Kali was the saint's darling.
'If you compare that Mother with the Christian Mother of God,'
the poet said to his companion, 'you can see that the Indians have more imagination.'"

The Birth of a Poem
"Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil,
and at the same instant a car (New York license plate)
passes along the road,
a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch,
an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of
cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus..."

Gin
"First the bottle had to be
emptied, and then the three boys
had to empty themselves of all
they had so painfully taken in
and by means even more painful..."

Five Men
"What did the five talk of the night before the execution
of prophetic dreams of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts of a sea voyage..."

Letters
On Anorexia

Index #R

Dean Acheson
"What emerges is a picture of a man with tremendous energy,
tremendous integrity, and a tremendous belief in
not only his own ability, but the truth
and rightness of American foreign policy."

Nature Studies
"It's a riot of name-dropping and
literary and classical references thrown in everywhere
to let you know that the author has read everything,
and has a tendency to upchuck it, before us, before lunch,
like the puppy's breakfast."

The Ogre
"We, too, become experts on such unlikely subjects as
homing pigeons, the antlers of stags, animal scat, Prussian mythology,
the origin of the concept of phoric (to bear), St. Christopher, twins,
Abel and Cain, and, finally, Nazism
and the Hitler Youth."

The Lawless Roads
"What gives value to travel is fear...
At that moment we are feverish but also porous,
so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being.
We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity.
This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure..."

Brief Reviews
"Writing isn't a decision, it's a curse:
one that worms its wicked way into the weakened soul,
gobbling up everything in its path, and vomiting it up
in what they have the gall to call fiction."

Letter from the Southernmost Part of the Northern Hemisphere
Part I
"'Sometimes,' she said, looking at herself, not moving,
'Sometimes I want to take my fingernails and just claw my face to ribbons.'
Then she put on her blouse, unlocked the door, and went out to the living room.
'Damn,' I said. I had thought this was going to be our night."
Part II
"'If you drink a copita de orina every morning,' he says,
'You'll soon be walking. I am sure that Jesus did it.
Drank his own urine every day.
That's how he was able to walk on water.'"

Hindoo Holiday
"It was, somehow, very like Abdul himself, this room of his:
very like his mind, small, mean, tidy, uncomfortable, and full of rubbishy things.
There was a smell of mould.
Your tree looks dead, I said.
Yes, said Abdul, it is dead."

Ben, Sam, Dan and Ned
"My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar ---
Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned.
There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts ---
Who is Ben? He is Dan. Sam is in bed, and so on."

archy and mehitabel
"mehitabel would sell her soul for/ a plate of fish any day i told her i thought
you were going to say you were/ the favorite wife of the emperor
valerian he was some cat nip eh/ mehitabel but she did not get me"

A Poem Leading Up To A Haiku
On the Results of a Secret Investigation
At the Vatican Concerning Alleged Violations...

The Flies
"You land on my bread/my tostadas, my books/that await your arrival.
O, Miss Fly,/they tell me that you could/bring terrible harm
but I don't believe them,/and wherever I wander/I'll run into you/again..."

Letters
On Anorexia (yet again).
And a letter of love
from Tomsk State University

Choice Books
In response to a columnist's question in Booklist,
we hereby offer up a list of what we consider
to be the five most important books of the last fifty years.