RALPH
&
"Geek Love"
&
Gray-Haired Pornographia

Subject: I want to be a porn star

To: carlosamantea@yahoo.com

Hi,

I am a young guy from Ghana and i have always dreamt of becoming a porn star. i HAVE been looking for someone to help me make my dream a reality. I got all the qualities that you might need.

I could also send you some pictures of naked babes so that you can use them for your magazines. But please help me achieve my aim

--- Fiifi Sey
pepsin9@yahoo.com

Hi, Fifi:

The thought of you or our editors (or anyone for that matter) offering pictures of what you so gamely call "naked babes" in RALPH does have us spinning --- if not in our graves, then certainly in our rocking chairs.

Thanks for the offer, though. It did quite make us feel sixty again.

By the way: guard these "qualities." Easy come easy go, and all that sort of thing.

And, needless to say, we wish you luck on what you call "your aim." Let us hope it never wavers nor declines.

--- Lolita Lark
Ed

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RALPH:
I was wondering if you have read any good fiction by female authors lately. My friends and I started a book club and we are always in need of new titles. I'm looking for something along the lines of "Geek Love." Any recommendations?

--- Jasmime
guttermth8@aol.com

Hi Jasmine:

The best female author novel that we have read in the last year or so is The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll (Plume).

A most interesting volume is The Scar of Visibility by Petra Kuppers from Minnesota University Press. It is a description of medical instruments and scars as art. This may or may not be what you refer to as "Geek Love" ... whatever the hell that may be.

In Pro- or Post-Feminist poetry, we have come to be quite fond of Post-Soviet History Unfolds by Eleanor Lerman (Sarabande Books) and Firekeeper: Selected Poems by Pattiann Rogers (Milkweed). There is the noble Monologue of a Dog by Wistiawa Szymborska (Harcourt). She won the Nobel Prize for her writings.

In the memoir department, we were smitten by When All the World Was Young, a Memoir of the 50s by Barbara Holland (Bloomsbury). The best non-fiction of this year by a woman is Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). And the best recent book about art --- although neither geek nor Greek nor by a woman --- is An Episode in The Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aria (New Directions).

--- Lolita Lark
Ed