Living in the Face of Death
"Other signs include
dreams of 'being a bridegroom
being led away by a musical troupe,'
of 'plucking red flowers
again and again,' or ---
my personal favorite ---
'jumping in a river and
being swallowed by
a fish or mud.'"

Headpots of Arkansas
"Pleas don't
Let any Drunken Irishman
gett a hold of this Letter
as I have had a
plenty of trouble already with
Such they are all
Snakes in the grass and
Bite every time your Eye
off of them."

Idle Thoughts on Jerome K. Jerome
"I never met
a dog who seemed
more contented ---
more easy in its mind.
It was floating dreamily
on its back, with its
four legs stuck up
straight into the air."

Beyond Forgetting
"Perhaps it would
have been more benign
to leave it with the name
senile dementia, which is
at once more gentle and
more poetic than the one taken
from the German physician
who identified it so long ago,
in the long forgotten past."

Harker's One-Room Schoolhouses
"She hated the world
that wouldn't let her brother
do what he needed as long
as it didn't hurt anyone."

Death by Leisure
"It was for non-fans
twenty-four hours of too much
newsprint and electronic hyperspace
spent on the death of one who
for some strange reason
was thought of as
an important figure of
American culture."

Paris Spleen
"The secret of Baudelaire is
neither head nor tails, but
a profound sense of the bleak,
the sullen, and the sordid ...
mixed with occasional whiffs
of sublime beauty."

Vanishing
"That Candida,
she's not fooled.
She observes and plans
on writing it down.
Her being here with us and
how we look,
all of it. But she'll never sell
a damn thing."

Great Reviews of the Past
Circumcision
"The pain of circumcision
has been proved to be
of such a nature that babies
who have gone through the process
show traumatic stress for days ---
sometimes months ---
after the operation."

UPCOMING CELEBRATION
Our Two-Hundredth Issue
is just around the corner.
In anticipation, we offer
this reprise of Issue #150.

LETTERS
Problems with
Cataract Operations

MORE LETTERS
H. G. Wells
The Time Machine

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
"My father was
a highly reputable
business magnet."

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Pets and
Melissa

ARTICLE
Great Articles of the Past
Such Interesting People
"It is a rich,
complex world for us
disabled people.
Our career
out in the world,
our private struggles,
our adventures and
our failures give us
a 'quality of life' that
the able-bodied can
only guess at."

READINGS
It's Going to Get Worse
"Hotel bathrooms
are highly fetishised,
with their rows of toiletries,
and the possibility of a sewing kit.
I love the showers and
have a faint, geological
interest in the tiling (so much marble!),
but I hate the toiletries,
most of which could strip paint."

Naked
"Without her clothes,
she is fully physical,
generously feminine.
Her grey hair falls sweetly
to her shoulders as
she slips into the blue gown."

POETRY
Confessions
of a teenage drama queen
I want to live. I want someone to eat cheese with
who am I this time? I am cuba. I am a sex addict
why was I born? why must I die? I could go on singing
I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Conversation with an Old Man
"This manner of walking that you see,
My eyes cast down at the road,
Is not in order to find
A needle that has been lost.
The jewels of my youth have fallen to earth,
And I walk in a daze,
Barely able to remember my own name."

The World Is Too Huge to Grasp
"I see how we are with each other.
I see how we act. It's not the world
with its ten-zillion things we should be grasping,
but the sincerity of penguins, the mess we made of the roses."

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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