LETTERS
Gettysburg,
Bulemia and Anorexia,
Ulysses Grant, Shelby Foote, and
"Ravensbrück Love Poem"

ARTICLES
Jaroslav Hasek and
"The Party of Moderate Progress
Within the Bounds of the Law"
Part I
"One of the first precursors of our Party,
Mr. Galileo Galilei,
said as I do:
But, all the same, it goes round.
Miss Bozenka, please serve
one more round."
Part II
"Take for instance
the spa at Piestany,
and its mud.
Even the aristocracy wallows in it
for the good of their health,
yet it probably wouldn't occur to anyone
to call any aristocrat a pig.
Nor is Dr. Kucera,
who recommends this type of cure,
a swine."

READINGS
At Lolita's Café
Part I
"I take a bite of crunchy pineapple,
and look over, and Squirrel is
chowing down on the head of a crunchy 'hopper,
and I look away, at the huge American
sitting next to me telling me
about his life in Mexico."
Part II
"When they brought me into
the headmaster's study, that dark room,
filled with books, and the smell of pipe-smoke and
leather and solemnity, and said,
'Your father is dead,'
I put my head down on my hands,
closed my eyes --- and had this feeling
sweep over me,
this great feeling of relief."
Part III
"I awoke the next morning,
safely in bed, knowing that not only
did my kind van get me up the hill ---
it then got me into the room,
tucked me in bed, kissed me goodnight,
and locked the door
before tiptoeing away
to the hotel lot
for the night."

POETRY
The Blow-Job Soldiers
"The blow-job soldiers wallow in snow fields,
Spreading love through the mud-grey lilies;
Hired to fight the beasts who had attacked
Out of the bog, to steal our civilization,
Making hay in the dark with our women,
Bayoneting our babies in utero,
Ghosts of gods, fighting like gods,
Playing with the conscience of the ages."
Spam Poems
The Illicit Anastasia, Jejune Balls,
A Magenta Eardrum
"What we have done is to take the words
in the order in which they arrived in our box,
inserted a few prepositions and indefinite articles,
changed some nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns,
added punctuation and parsing,
and, voila! ---
out come ten poems."

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"

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