LETTERS
Samuel Beckett,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Gay's Mother's Boobs, and
RALPH and
Books about Sex

ARTICLES
The Department of
Motor Vehicles' War Against Geezers
Part I
"Ms. Medusa looked at me
with that chill stare brought to perfection
by bureaucrats who know that all of us are liars
and have been so since the day we were born.
She said nothing more, dismissed me
with a wave of the hand."
Part II
"I am now going to tell you
something hard for you (and me) to believe.
The Safety Branch of the DMV may be
staffed by guards on loan from Guantanamo Bay,
but, on occasion, HMO's
can show heart."

READINGS
Breast vs. Bottle
Part I
"The bottle-fed infant receives
none of the protective substances in mother's milk.
In seven villages in the Punjab studied in the 1950s,
mortality among infants bottle-fed from birth
was fully 95 percent during the first eleven months,
compared with 12 percent among infants
breast-fed from birth."
Part II
"In 1999 a Chicago newspaper
found a local four-year-old preschooler
with his own computer
who scandalized guests at a parental party
by taking such a milk break,
raising his fists Muhammad Ali-style,
and declaring, That was sooooo good."

POETRY
McPoem
"I must confess that I, too, like it:
the poem that's filed up flat and fast with condiments
on a sesame seed bun. Steamy, grease-spattered,
and juicy, fluent with salt, piping hot
from the grid, glazed with bubbling oil."
The Bad Sonnet
"It stayed up late, refused to go to bed,
and when it did it sang loud songs instead
of sleeping, disturbing its siblings --- couplets, quatrains
in their small rooms, began caterwauling ---
and soon the whole neighborhood was awake."

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