TWENTY GREAT POEMS
Since our inception
we have posted
almost 600 poems at RALPH.
Here we offer twenty of the best
from our first twenty issues.

NEW TITLES
Whatever you Do, Don't Run
"There is fun and
laughter and drinking,
but there is also AIDS ---
now infecting a third of
the male population of Botswana.
There are also people who
come to go on safari,
and just don't get it."

The Making of a Tropical Disease
"Man is too prone
to look upon all nature
through his egocentric eyes.
To the louse, we are
the dreaded emissaries of death.
His host sickens,
and the only world
he has ever known becomes
pestilential and deadly."

America's Child
"Most of these are funded,
directly or indirectly,
by federal and state governments.
Thus we have the exquisite picture
of a life-long anti-establishment
radical who is now feeding,
and apparently feeding well,
at the golden trough
she has been kicking
so viciously and
for so long."

The Big Switch
"Since most computers
have microphones, and
since many of us leave
our computers on all the time
profile seekers can listen in on us
nagging the kids,
ordering pizza on the telephone,
fighting with our wives,
whispering to our lovers,
or throwing up."

A Curious Earth
"Woodward could have
killed off the old fool
somewhere around page 250,
given him a final blow ---
the author is quite good
with senile dementia ---
and a quick passing. But no.
He has to do a job,
I should say a Job on him.
The biblical Job."

The Slave Ship
"Some slave ships and their cargoes
were worth as much as £10,000 to £12,000,
which would be roughly
$1.6 to $2 million in today's currency.
The captain's power depended
first and foremost on a connection
to capitalists."

Great Reviews of the Past
Radical Compassion
"In his day-to-day,
Smith puts up with alkies,
people with the screaming-meemies,
dope-heads, pimps, aggressive
schizophrenics, babblers, and those
who want to kill him.
He works out of the
St. Vincent dePaul Center
in the poorest part of Portland, Oregon."

BRIEF REVIEWS
Ernest Rutherford
The Homestead Strike
In Search of the Blues

LETTERS
Neither/Nor
Reginald A. Fessenden and
Deluged Civilizations

MORE LETTERS
Synanon
Andrew Harvey

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Azerbijan
Pakistan

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
H. L. Mencken
The Aedii Eechii

ARTICLES
Deargrandmother and the Cake of Coins
"Deargrandmother was everything
a grandmother should be.
She drove a 1936 Dodge
that had a silver grille
just like a smile,
just like her smile,
as a matter of fact."

Great Articles from the Past
Sometimes I Feel Like Stephen Hawking
Must Feel After A Bad Night
"Camus wrote that
every day we choose to live ---
but we choose only once to die.
When we do finally
make the choice to keep on,
he said, we should opt
to live life to the hilt.
Pull out all the stops."

READINGS
The Computer and Centralized Power
"Programming, after all,
is nothing if not
a method of control.
Even though
the Internet still has no center,
technically speaking,
control can now be wielded,
through software code,
from anywhere."

The Invention of the Wick
"As the older generations die,
they take with them
their knowledge of what was lost
when the new technology arrived,
and only the sense of what
was gained remains.
It's in this way that progress
covers its tracks,
perpetually refreshing
the illusion that where
we are is where we were meant to be.

POETRY
The Winter Palace
"Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints."

Great Poems from the Past
Midlife
"She's slim and seems distracted, the social worker
who visits my apartment, who wants to know
why my ten-year-old was alone New Year's Eve
when the cops came through the door."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

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

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