R  A  L  P H
  The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities

Number 106

Late Fall 2003


NEW LISTINGS
The Poetry of Dylan Thomas,
The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead,
The Flight of the Garuda, and
Tobias Wolff's Old School


REVIEWS
The Art of Tattooing
"The sensuality of it:
we become part of her skin,
our pores infused with the ink,
the smell of the shop, the blood,
the vaseline used to soften and
hold the image."

Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed
"The photographs and the writing come together
in a spiral of images and words that
spin out hate and love and fear and hurt and
pain and delight and the sheer cruelty of it all,
being born of a powerful charming funny flirtatious woman,
one who could only really love men."

Churches of Minnesota
"The ugliest,
we are sorry to report,
is located in Collegeville.
The St. John's Abbey Church
was designed in 1954 by a refugee from
South Las Vegas named Marcel Breuer."

Great Reviews of the Past
The Lake of Dead Languages
"We made it to page 204
and the only reason we made it that far
was that we got stuck in the airport
without anything else to read except
The Lake of Dead Languages and USA Today.
It seemed as if our plane
would never get off the ground ---
just like this turkey."


BRIEF REVIEWS
Richard Avedon at Work,
Kipling's "Just So Stories," and
The Sea Around Us


LETTERS
Being a Good Catholic and
"Gracie on the Roof"

MORE LETTERS
Great Letters of the Past
"Terrorism works
by standing on its head the normal
military objective of
killing the maximum number of enemy soldiers
while taking minimal casualties oneself...
The terrorists assume a
100 per cent casualty rate among their own soldiers
and happily take their losses up front."


READINGS
Zionism and The Shoah
An Historical Perspective
"We had no idea
what dangers threatened the Jews.
Nobody had, or could have.
Even in the benighted pogrom-ridden corners
of Carpathian Europe and
the Polish-Ukrainian plains
from which the first-generation immigrants
came to Vienna, systematic genocide
was inconceivable."

Five for Lunch
"'You won't ask us to believe,' said Pierre Lyautey,
'that all that Malaparte relates in Kaputt
actually happened to him. Is it really possible
that everything happens to him?
Nothing ever happens to me!'"

A Glass Full of Girls
"There is something young about supposing,
supposing and a car and a glass full of girls.
A house where empty places
are clean and the full places
are borrowed and nothing blue.
A wristwatch lying looped around
a fountain pen and a dog
irritated by the night."


POETRY
Two by Dylan Thomas
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
"And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love
"My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?
The words of death are dryer than his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor."


THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month


GENERAL INDEX
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.


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


SUBSCRIBE
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

T H E  F A C T S
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

Lolita Lark, Editor-In-Chief
Post Office Box 16719
San Diego CA 92176

poo@cts.com


Visit our Previous Issue      Visit our Current Issue     Visit our Next Issue