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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Books and Authors' CategoryKafka becomes meJune 1st, 2003
A verbatim transcription of an online “conversation”: VillageBoy: I like your Manhunt profile, and you have a pretty intriguing handle, Waxkafka. How’d you come up with that? Waxkafka: Well, I thought it had a better ring to it than Waxheidegger. VillageBoy: I see. Seems like you have an affinity for German literature. Waxkafka: Das ist wahr. Actually, this is from a series of mantras I created in college after reading Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis for a compulsory freshman comp class. They were esoteric expressions of an inner struggle between the forces of Classicism and Romanticism, self-deception and self-realization, stultification and transcendence. VillageBoy: All of this from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, huh? There’s nothing in your profile that suggests you’ve undergone an insectile transformation.
Posted by: The Editors The making of meJune 1st, 2003 BY LAURIE WIMMER WHELAN Staring at a text of Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, my friend pronounced, “Anyone with Zbigniew Brzezinski on her bookshelf is an official political geek.”
It all began in the second-most-recent era of miniskirts and platform shoes. My own green velvet mini and brown and lavender neck-breakers are all that I recall of sartorial experimentation, but my memories of political adventure are, some twenty-eight years later, vivid. I owe it all to my brother, Kenny. Inexplicably, his 1975 Christmas gift to me was a copy of All the President’s Men. One might imagine that a high-schooler’s consciousness would be too tender for riveting accounts of beltway skullduggery. Not so, as it turned out. Now a professional political junkie, I see that this book was the catalyst of my career.
Posted by: The Editors Sam and JaneJune 1st, 2003 BY EMILY EMERSON Book memories: a few stand out. The Little Engine that Could, for one, that morality tale for the pre-school set. You remember: “I think I can, I think I can,” (chugga chugga), “I think I can, I think I can,” (chugga chugga chugga chugga), “I KNOW I can!” (CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGGAAAAAA!). Moral: Or the Heidi books, which left me longing to live in a chilly chalet in the Alps, far from civilization, that smelled of dust, hay and wildflowers, with a silent old geezer who fed me bread and goat’s milk. Who knows? Maybe that’s one reason I’m living where I’m living now, in a chilly old house smelling of dust, hay and wildflowers, far from civilization in a part of the world where the bread is really good and the only cheese is chèvre. And then there’s Charlotte’s Web, thanks to which I’ve spent a lot of time saving spiders trapped in bathtubs. These books took me to other worlds, but the book that made me see my own world most clearly, that made me see me and my own life most clearly, is Beckett’s Malone Dies, especially this bit: A man is lying partially paralyzed in a bed alone in a room somewhere, able to express himself only by writing with his pencil. Then, one day, as he’s writing, he drops the pencil: “It is the soul that must be veiled, that soul denied in vain, vigilant, anxious, turning in its cage as in a lantern, in the night without heaven or craft or matter or understanding. Ah yes I have my little pastimes and they What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours (see above) of intermittent efforts.” How could there ever be a truer account of life, and writing, than that? But I admit that the book I’ve turned to most, the one I’ve reread more than any other, is Sense and Sensibility.
Posted by: The Editors Remarkable flutesJune 1st, 2003
“What are we going to do about this?” Steve was an old family friend, sick of driving a cab around New York, and rarin’ to go. I’d loaned him a copy of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men and he was referring to its last chapter: “The Material Question.” What to do in late 1969? In the midst of the Vietnam War, the wake of the civil rights agitation… and a sometimes chemically tinged New Age.
Posted by: The Editors Civil WarJune 1st, 2003 BY ANDREW DARREL In the late Eighties and for much of the Nineties I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia (KSA). Life there was for the most part pleasanter and easier for westerners than we are usually prepared to admit, but it was not entirely without hardships. Two of the books that came my way in that period were Veronica Wedgwood’s The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1959), her account of the Civil War (the civil war of the 1640s), a period of history that I had passed over fairly rapidly and negligently at school and had not seen anything in to draw me back later.
Posted by: The Editors Poet and modelJune 1st, 2003 BY JEREMY DRISCOLL, O.S.B. Czeslaw Milosz. I have long admired this Polish poet and essayist, and so I was greatly pleased when in 2001 a splendid selection of his essays was published under the title To Begin Where I Am. The same year also saw his New and Collected Poems (1931—2001). Born in 1911 in Szetejnie and raised in Wilno in present-day Lithuania, he was there in 1939 when the Soviets invaded, while Hitler simultaneously invaded Poland. He lived through the horrors of the war in Poland.
Posted by: The Editors The artist as a young pigJune 1st, 2003
In just a few days I’ll have finally finished a quest I began forty-five years ago. A package from amazon.com will arrive bearing The Collected Poems of Freddy the Pig, and a couple of hours later I will have finally read every single volume in Walter R. Brooks’ classic children’s series of Freddy books. The majority of the twenty-six titles in the series listed on the back of Freddy and Mr. Camphor, a birthday gift from my grandmother, and the first volume in the series I actually owned, have check marks next to them made by the same ballpoint pen, ticked off within a year of that book’s arrival, when I attempted to tally which volumes in the series I had managed find and read. There are a few more checks added later, in a busy time of tracking down titles, but a few still remain blank: The Collected Poems and a handful of others I have purchased during the last two years. One of them, The Story of Freginald, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, was the very last of the Freddy stories (collected poems are in a different category) that had evaded my attention. The splendid reissue of the series by Overlook Press, which has been proceeding slowly but steadily with several releases each year, is at last on the verge of completion.
Posted by: The Editors God in an awful moodJune 1st, 2003 BY GENE RYDER I’d like a head count of how many people get slaughtered in the Old Testament. It has to be in the millions, or gazillions, maybe even infinity plus one. It’s really a murder fest, and if you go there searching for comfort, as I did here recently in a time of need, then what you’re liable to find is a lot of locusts, leprosy, Sodomites, stories like the heartbreaking binding of Isaac, God just seems to be in an awful mood in the Old Testament, and I’m not sure that I blame Him. I mean, He’s given everybody the great gift of life, and love, and this beautiful blue ball of a world, and yet look what they were doing at the time with that gift.
Posted by: The Editors Trash and meJune 1st, 2003 BY REBECCA OWEN In junior high I knew what I was supposed enjoy reading. I knew it depended on perspective and so I read it all and liked nearly everything that I read for one reason or another. I read the short books assigned at school, the longer and stranger things suggested by helpful teachers, the fun and unexpected things suggested by our odd collection of neighbors, the books we had to read because they were so great, according to friends, the great lit one sister foisted on me and the trash from under the bed of another. On my own I read my parents’ library, which was a mix of Book of the Month Club, military history, nature writing, and travelogues, with an occasional serious work slipped in. I read cookbooks and Gourmet from the time I was in grade school. This describes what I read today, more or less, although the trash I like now is more in the line of murder mystery than the Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susan stuff favored by my sister. And the Book of the Month club has been replaced by the award lists.
Posted by: The Editors A turn for the verseJune 1st, 2003 BY GILLIAN WILCE I have been doing anything rather than write this piece. The task of writing about an influential book ought to be a delight. And yet I have done the ironing, I have read a crime novel (by Ian Rankin — very enjoyable, but not a candidate), I can’t think of a single book that changed my life in an obvious way (except perhaps a psychology textbook, which led me to Jung, which led me to psychoanalysis, which led me to … – but that is another story, one which would probably have unfurled anyway from some beginning or other). On the other hand, I can’t imagine what a life without books would have been like. They are part of my fabric, just as they are of the fabric of this city.
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