Black Lamb

American dreamer

The secret life of Louis Roslafsky

August 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

I didn’t know my Grandpa Louie… really know him. My brothers and sister didn’t know him, either. I’m not sure his own son, my father, knew him.

Louis Ross (born Roslafsky) mingled in our lives as a kind of forgotten man, an old widower with broken English (despite fifty years in America) and a whistling hearing aid. A retired baker when he moved from Buffalo, N.Y. to be near us in northern California in 1961, he drove first a ’53 Buick my father found for him, a spiffy straight-eight which he used to ferry old ladies to shul, only the tops of their gray heads visible. When the Buick finally died, he drove a ’67 Chevy sedan; a 1972 registration card was among the sparse effects he left behind when he died, in 1974, aged eighty, in a nursing home.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross | Link to this Entry

A regrettable decision

April 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

A couple of years ago a close friend of mine, who was moving from one state to another, did a very strange thing. For reasons that I’ve never understood, he decided to get rid of most of his books, a library of around 1,700 volumes, almost entirely “literary” and carefully collected over a forty-year period. He said it would make the moving easier. In about a month, he parted with more than 1,200 books. He has regretted it ever since.

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Do inquiring minds want to know?

What one curious person discovered about global warming

February 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

When I was in my early teens I used to read — devour, really — the magazine Scientific American. There was no doubt in my mind that I would one day become a scientist. Along with four or five like-minded classmates, I even got to be on a TV panel show discussing science with a science teacher. No one saw the show except our families, because it was on the educational station, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

None of the kids who were on that show became scientists. Somewhere along the line I shifted my allegiance to the humanities and let science make its way without me, but over the past few years I’ve re-subscribed to Scientific American, and each month I dutifully try to plow through the articles. Cosmology always attracts me, even when I bump up against my mind’s inability to imagine, for example, a curved universe. I can follow some of the medical stuff, and I do my best with everything else.

This is all by way of prelude to my saying that if I’m not a scientist in any sense of the word, I am still interested in things scientific. Which has led me recently to the subject of global warming. I’ve done my best to read up on the subject, in hopes of discovering whether the predictions of virtually imminent catastrophe are something I should be worrying about, and I’ve made a few discoveries.

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California dreaming

Cultures clash in the land of plenty.

May 1st, 2007

BY TERRY ROSS

Even when you’ve made up your mind to relax and take your mind off the workaday world, when you want nothing more challenging than a nice view, good meals, and no alarm clock — in short, when you go on vacation — the world and its issues have a way of insinuating themselves.

The road trip to Los Angeles that Cervine and I made just after Christmas seemed like it would be about as weighty as an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. On our itinerary were stops at Hearst Castle, sightseeing in Santa Barbara and Ojai, meanderings in Hollywood, a visit to the Huntington complex in Pasadena with a tour of the (Procter &) Gamble house, as well as a detour south to see the Queen Mary and, finally, a ramble round J. Paul Getty’s villa in Malibu.

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The All Marriage Issue

Including a modest proposal

April 1st, 2007

BY TERRY ROSS

This issue of Black Lamb, among all the so-called “themed” issues that we’ve published — All Movies, All Mother, All Father, etc. — has inspired the most heartfelt reaction among this magazine’s writers. As editor, I expected the subject of marriage to give everyone, whether they had been married or not, something to write about. But I couldn’t have predicted the variety and depth of what came in.

When I sat down, however, to write something about marriage, a subject I’d never tackled before, I understood. To write about marriage, whatever one’s opinion of it as an institution, is to write about love. And to write about one’s own marriage(s), as many of the Black Lamb writers did, is to write about one’s own need for love, one’s ability to love, or one’s failure to understand love. It’s a damned touchy and perilous undertaking, which I suppose explains my own reluctance to have taken it on before I blithely declared it the topic for this month’s issue.

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The All-Smoking & Drinking Issue

Including a plea to remember the pleasure of our vices

November 1st, 2006

BY TERRY ROSS

Unlike Black Lamb contributor Dan Peterson (p. 5), I am not one of the least qualified people on the planet to talk about smoking and drinking. Nor am I as overqualified as Ed Goldberg (p. 3), who began smoking and drinking at a tender age, or as Dan Ferrandino (p. 6), whose drinking got the better of him until he gave it up.

By the same token, I am perhaps better qualified than some of the writers in this All-Smoking & Drinking Issue. Unlike, for example, Gillian Wilce (p. 4), I have smoked to excess, and although I gave up cigarettes some time ago, I still enjoy an occasional pipe or cigar. Unlike Cervine Kauffman (p. 11), I have in my time drunk to excess, and I look forward to occasionally doing so in the future.

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The All-Television Issue

Was there (is there) a Golden Age for the Tube?

March 1st, 2006

BY TERRY ROSS

A few months ago, in late autumn, when I passed along to the Black Lamb contributors the subjects for the special themed issues of 2006, I received not a few queries, from both writers and subscribers, as to how these themes are chosen. The universal supposition seemed to be that I, as editor, selected the topics based entirely on my own interests. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the process of choosing the subject of, for example, this All-Television Issue, as well as all the other themed issues, is complex and communal. With a long list compiled from the suggestions of Black Lamb staff members and readers, a group of us sit around a table in the conference room at Black Lamb Towers, fortified by snacks and strong beverages, and thrash out the annual schedule of six subject-oriented issues. My own preferences play a small part in the decision-making, as do those of our Managing Editor, Owen Alexander, whose suggestions are often dismissed outright, for inscrutable reasons. Otherwise, Black Lamb readers could look forward to an All-Mineral Issue, an All-Insurance Issue, an All-Real Estate Issue, and an All-Socialism Issue. Similarly rejected, for several years running, although strongly espoused by contributors Greg Roberts and Bud Gardner, has been an All-Fly Fishing Issue. Interior Decorating, Vegetarianism, Social Work, The Stock Market, and Rock Music have met the same fate, despite their adherents. In the end, we come up with subjects that a majority of Black Lamb’s contributors might reasonably be expected to have something to say about.

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The All Christmas Issue

... including one Christmas at the railroad

December 1st, 2004

BY TERRY ROSS

For this special end-of-the-year issue, the Black Lamb writers were asked to write on the subject of Christmas, and they responded eagerly. Everyone, it seems, has a Christmas story to tell, even those who don’t celebrate it.

Not all the stories are happy ones, but taken together they give a pretty rounded (and vivid) picture of the meaning of this holiday. You’ll find Christmas in prison (Dean Seuss), Christmas in Norway (Lorentz Lossius), Christmas for Jews (Michele Gendelman, Ed Goldberg, and Joel Hess), Christmas in a monastery (Fr. Jeremy Driscoll), Christmas overseas in the military (Alan Albright), and many another nostaligic, hilarious, or woeful tale of Christmases past and present. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

My own Christmas story comes from an incident that occurred thirty-seven years ago:
Christmas Day, 1967.

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The All Movie Issue

I didn't lose it at the movies

September 1st, 2003

BY TERRY ROSS

In June, loyal readers will remember, I asked Black Lamb’s occasional contributors and regular columnists to write on a book that had influenced them. This month, I’ve asked them to do the same for a film. The result is the All-Movie Issue.

Thanks be to God, the writers didn’t repeat June’s prank. Back then, a mischievous subgroup of your favorite columnists played a nasty trick on their indulgent editor and sent in a passel of book articles on a single author, James Michener, a noted ransacker of libraries. I thought they’d all lost their minds simultaneously. Scared the hell out of me. This time, I feared an onslaught of articles praising the acting talent of Clint Eastwood or the films of Blake Edwards.

Mercifully, I was spared these indignities.

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The All Book Issue

... and the incredibly cruel All-Book Issue hoax

June 1st, 2003

BY TERRY ROSS

This month’s edition of Black Lamb — which I call the All-Book Issue — is a departure from the norm, because this magazine was created as a reincarnation of the old-fashioned literary Miscellany. Most months, that’s what it is, with the writers checking in from wherever they are — geographically, professionally, psychically — on whatever subjects or anecdotes they choose. It becomes a potpourri of different (and sometimes differing) voices and lives.

But for the June issue, the halfway point in our first year, I proposed that the writers choose a book and write about it in the context of their regular columns. Not book reviews, I said, but rather essays on how influential books had changed their lives. About a month before the copy deadline, I sent a mass email to most of the contributors (a few had already sent in their articles) to remind them of this assignment. That’s when the fun started.

Noting the copy deadline of April 1, one of the writers, Bud Gardner (his column's calledCountry Lawyer) copied the others’ email addresses from my message and wrote to them all, suggesting a prank. Country apparently called to country, for Emily Emerson (En Campagne) in west-central France immediately proposed that everyone write about the same book. Too hard, someone else said, we have no book in common. How about the same author, then, piped in Rebecca Owen from Pittsburgh, Pa. And thus came into being, at least conceptually, Black Lamb’s first, and certainly its last, All James Michener Issue.

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Category: Books and Authors, Ross, All Book Issue | Link to this Entry