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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 'Roberts' CategoryA decent manBetrayal in WisconsinJuly 1st, 2010 BY GREG ROBERTS I like reading books that no one has heard of. The 1950 memoirs of Valentin R. Garfias, Garf From Mexico, was limited to 2,000 copies, one of which was discarded by Cal State University, Hayward, ending up at the Salvation Army store. An excellent read — and if you do read it, you are in the dozens, like Spix macaws.
Is it an important work? Very important. Obscurity means nothing. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat languished for more than a century before it was rediscovered. And what about Moby-Dick? So there. Isaac Stephenson’s remarkable life conveys a clear message to us: people living in the mid-1800s were amazingly resourceful, resilient, and self-reliant, and we need to be more like them. We are malnourished slugs, slaves to larger machines, and mentally torpid as well, the light bulb in our brain flickering like a feeble firefly.
Posted by: The Editors Slave children at dawnIf you're Superman, you just might make the minimum wage.May 1st, 2007 BY GREG ROBERTS Thank you, Mr. Dickens, for having alerted us to the appalling scourge of child labor. Your good work helped end the abomination of children picking rags and bones from the banks of the Thames, or walking the filthy streets with a bucket, collecting feces for the tanneries. What’s that, I spoke too soon? You say the slavery continues? Quite so, governor —thousands of children are slouching through the snow and rain, hard-pressed and sleep-deprived, scrounging for coolie wages. They are newsboys. They ride their bicycles through the dark streets at four a.m., when the methamphetamine addict is still tacking out at 3,000 rpms, when the angry drunk is pulling the tab on his fourteenth beer, when vicious dogs are at the peak of paranoia.
Posted by: The Editors It’s all trueApril 1st, 2007
Everything you’ve ever heard about marriage is true — the wonderful and the grotesque. The wedding itself is always a perfectly joyful event. As a violin player in my mothy tuxedo, a bottle of Argyle chardonnay pulsing through my fingertips, I’ve witnessed countless weddings, and each was a creation of beauty and goodness.
Posted by: The Editors Wal-Mart to the rescueMarching gratefully, and greenly, into the futureMarch 1st, 2007 BY GREG ROBERTS Under a spreading chesnut tree the village smithy stood. Thank goodness the unproductive lout is now gone, or we’d all be in the poorhouse.
Posted by: The Editors Unhand that bottle!November 1st, 2006 BY GREG ROBERTS
True, drunks pull guns and drive cars that kill peope, but remember this: if it weren’t for alcohol, there wouldn’t be a country to pull a gun or drive a car in.
Posted by: The Editors Golden age reduxMarch 1st, 2006 BY GREG ROBERTS What’s that you say — you don’t have TV? You think it’s a waste of time? Well, I can go you one better. I haven’t been in a goddamn library in six years. They are an even bigger waste. The time spent walking around the Sydney Sheldon novels, Deepak Chopra mind rot, and the ten-year-old Lonely Planet guides to Big Sur and Nepal can now be spent watching television and bettering oneself. But you have to do TV right. The person who wastes every night watching bad movies is no better than the reader who burns through a hundred Perry Mason mysteries. They should both be sterilized before they spawn more of their ilk. To do TV the right way you have to sign up for the big package: a hundred or more channels, including foreign languages, panel discussions, college lectures, string quartets, and nature shows about turtles nesting on the beaches of Costa Rica. The cost is ridiculously low, about seventy dollars a month. How many new books could you buy with that much money, two?
Posted by: The Editors Keep Christmas like Cratchit or die!December 1st, 2004
We sat in the airport lounge and ordered two seven-dollar draft beers. “I’ll be glad when this whole Christmas thing is over,” Dick said. “So senseless. I’m drained by all the fuss.” “But Nat King Cole ways ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year,’” I told him. “Don’t fight it. Enjoy the celebration.” “No, I can’t. I hate being forced to buy someone a goddamn electric fruit leather maker because it’s the only thing they don’t have.” “You poor bastard, you’re doomed to live in a rich country where you’re overwhelmed with goodies. Instead of the fruit leather machine, maybe you should buy lobsters or a bottle of Armagnac. Nobody has Armagnac.”
Posted by: The Editors A global embarrassmentSeptember 1st, 2003 BY GREG ROBERTS The film industry has been a global embarrassment for such a long time, it leaves me with one wish: I hope it gets even worse, until it reaches the final degree of worthlessness, at which stage I can forget about it completely, the way I’ve dismissed popular music.
The cardboard characters, the lousy scripts, the moralizing that is so heavy-handed you feel like a stockyard calf getting hit straight between the eyes with a sledge hammer, and the perpetrators — people such as Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte — not only get rich, they get respect for their shameless dreck.
Posted by: The Editors The man who couldn’t think straightJune 1st, 2003
Thoreau messed me up pretty bad. I read Walden at seventeen, and it turned me into a non-materialist for most of my life. As a result, I endangered my family by driving them around in a hundred-dollar Peugeot 504 with bald tires that were ready to blow any second. I thought I was saving the planet. I’m better now. We have a thousand-dollar Toyota van with new tires. I’ve lost some respect for Thoreau. He’s a wonderfully clever writer, but he couldn’t think straight. The imprisonment at the pond, in a hell-hole of a cabin, slaving over a goddamn bean patch, would have driven anyone to suicide, except for one thing — he was writing the book. With the inspiration of his art, it didn’t matter where he was. Same for Beethoven. His drive to compose music made him oblivious to his filthy room with the many unemptied piss pots. Anyone without a major artistic project had better stay away from a Walden situation. Better to exist in a studio apartment with a part-time job at Burger King and a basic cable package.
Posted by: The Editors Author profileDecember 1st, 2002 Greg Roberts grew up in Hiles, Wisc. (pop. 132) and has held dozens of jobs, been fired from most of them, and is left with fond reminiscenses of being a restaurant violinist, stand-up comic, and consultant to a Guatemalan fly-tying factory. He has worked as a magazine editor and, over the last forty-five years, has contributed to dozens of publications, many of which have disappeared from the face of the earth. Roberts owns and helps operate Equator Coffee Company in Eugene, Ore. He has had a three-toed sloth as a pet, caught billfish on fly tackle, and still subscribes to three philatelic journals. His Black Lamb column is called Blunderbuss Dilettante.
Posted by: The Editors
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