The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities |
Books that have been sent to us
within the last fortnight or so, including:
The Four Immigrants Manga, Alice Miller,
and Derrida --- the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Man.
REVIEWS
Six Wars at a Time
GREAT REVIEWERS OF THE PAST: H. L. MENCKEN
The Sound and the Fury
Haiku
BRIEF REVIEWS
THE WEEKLY RALPH
ARTICLES
Oakalee-Oakalee
READINGS
Versailles and Cybernetics
Sin, Remorse, Loneliness, and Religious Submission
POETRY
That Bird!
On the Meeting of García-Lorca and Hart Crane
Ma's Pain
LETTERS
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ARCHIVES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ancient Mexico and the Maya
"Don't leave gorgeous books like this on the coffee table.
Eviscerate them, hang the wonderful photographs on the refrigerator,
in the bathroom, on the telephone pole down the block ---
let the world in on these rich and tasty scenes."
"After reading this all-too-detailed life of
Yet Another Pained and Tedious Artist, we are suprised
that they didn't inscribe these words on his gravestone:
I'm not dead.
It's just a rumor.
Spread by my enemies.
So they can steal my ideas from me."
Civilization
"The typical Oklahoman is as barbarous as an Albanian or a man of Inner Mongolia.
He lives and dies on a low plane, pursuing sordid and ridiculous objectives
and taking his reward in hoggish ways. His political behavior
is that of a barbarian and his religious notions are almost savage.
Of urbanity he has no more than a traffic cop."
"Now I can write. Now I can make myself
a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside
and wore the rim slowly away with kissing it."
"They spoke no word.
The visitor, the host,
And the white chrysanthemum."
The Upper Valley, The Water Trade, Japan,
The Bakelite Fortune, and George Frazier
"During the First World War, he expected an invasion by Germans,
and suggested that massive fortifications should be built at
Albany, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Vicksburg and Houston."
What Do You Do When Your PCA Steals From You
"I think you'd like Raul. He's neat and pleasant and well-spoken.
He's always on time, and doesn't shoot drugs.
He is as good a Personal Care Attendant you could ever ask for.
And he steals me blind."
"They shouldn't be here. Nothing living should. Methane's here.
Can't smell it. But it's here. You can see it bubble in the ponds.
Climbs up from the goddamn garbage. Inflammable.
Terrible for birds."
"When they say, We deregulated broadcasting back in the '80s...
I'm wondering if we are talking about the same broadcasting.
Perhaps he is talking about radio and television in Silesia,
or Ouagadougou."
A Home-Made Travelogue
"To show what degree of wanderlust the travelogue inspired,
not a single one of those who saw it on that occasion was available for a second showing.
They had all left town within forty-eight hours..."
"George Creel, a public relations man --- and I want you not to forget
that this man was a granddaddy of modern public relations ---
had an idea: the idea was that maybe the Germans would surrender
if we offered them soft armistice terms."
"I stopped being the observer
and began to accept their supernatural world,
and my journey was never the same. In that single moment
I grew much closer to my experiences."
"They looked at life as a chain of coincidences in which the only sure thing
was suffering. They threw the dice every morning to see whether
they should get up or stay in bed on their seaweed mattresses
and await the day's quota of pain."
Blackbird
"Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird."
"Here lies the blackbird
Here he lies.
The Lying Bird!"
"Let's not invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own house won't forget it."
"A circle of muscular light
over the hills in a boarded-up sky,
like an opening to let the pain leak out."
On the Treaty of Versailles, and "Betty."
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1995 1996 1997 1998
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