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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 'Tompkins' CategoryBrief encountersMay 1st, 2010 BY TOBY TOMPKINS Anyone who’s survived for sixty-seven years and been even peripherally involved in the arts has met famous people, now defunct, from time to time. The trick, it seems to me, is to write about those meetings without sounding like a name-dropping show-off. Unless you’re My first notable encounter with a Notable involved Robert Penn Warren. He was the uncle of a Yale classmate and was teaching at the university at the time.
Posted by: The Editors PlagiarismMay 1st, 2007 BY TOBY TOMPKINS “plagiarize vt: to steal and pass off as one’s own (the ideas or words of another) ~ vi: to present as one’s own an idea or product derived from an existing source” The battered old dictionary was my wife’s when she was in high school, and I still consult it when I want quick definitions, rather than the windy ones in my Shorter OED. But its blunt, unequivocal definition of “plagiarize” certainly belongs to a simpler, perhaps more innocent era, before stealing became “attribution” and the lawyers began to fatten their wallets on copyright cases involving the Internet.
Posted by: The Editors Whom God hath joined…April 1st, 2007
It’s interesting that in the American states dominated by Bible-bangers, the divorce rates have been significantly higher over the past twenty years than in those whose populations prefer that God stay out of the State House and the bedroom. The Bible Belt keeps divorce lawyers richer than the northeastern states where the secular humanists rule (although in fairness, liberal California leads the nation in divorces per annum, but more about that below). I know a nice guy from Alabama, a professed Christian, though he doesn’t make a fuss about it, who made a tidy fortune as a divorce lawyer until his soul began to sicken. He was spending his weekdays thinking up nasty and devious ways to put asunder those whom God had joined together, and his Sundays praising the Joiner. Well, most divorce lawyers thank God for marriage, but my friend is no hustling shyster. He’s sincere, smart, and he was seriously troubled by the gap between his beliefs and his job. When I met him (with his second wife), he was on vacation wrestling with his moral quandary. “The trouble is,” he told me, “I don’t know if I can afford to quit my practice.” The religious American’s dilemma: God hates what I do for a living, but my God how the money rolls in.
Posted by: The Editors Stupid kid tricksMarch 1st, 2007
Hurricane Carol hit Cape Cod at the end of August, 1954, when I was twelve. It was a bad storm, but our family’s big shingle-style house in Quissett had been built in the 1880s by my great-grandfather, using local carpenters who doubled as boatwrights and took bad weather as the norm. And unlike the last big one in 1938, people had enough warning to get ready. The house had wooden shutters for most of the windows, a pantry icebox supplementing the kitchen fridge, and a gas stove. The iceman who stocked the holds of the local fishing boats had delivered a block a day or so before. And a dug well with a hand-pump behind the house backed up town water. The place had been wired for electric light only in the 1930s, and my grandfather never trusted it, so we had an array of kerosene lanterns and candles in tall hurricane glasses.
Posted by: The Editors Up in smokeNovember 1st, 2006 BY TOBY TOMPKINS
Posted by: The Editors I was a teenage killerMarch 1st, 2006
Television was not welcomed by my mother and stepfather in the mid-Fifties. They were radio people, used to the old dramas and comedies of the late Thirties and the war years. They believed that a family should sit down together each evening at the table for supper, no matter what demonic moths were nibbling on the family fabric, and as members of the “Greatest Generation,” they trusted lashings of booze during the cocktail hour before dinner, wine during it, and the soothing rhythms and harmonies of the big bands, playing quietly on my stepfather’s new and expensive hi-fi system, to establish a modicum of tranquility and permit what my mother, always half-sarcastically, referred to as “Gracious Living.”
Posted by: The Editors O Tannenbaum!December 1st, 2004 BY TOBY TOMPKINS
Posted by: The Editors Author profileDecember 1st, 2002 Toby Tompkins spent thirty-five years as a professional actor, working mostly on the stage. At present he is a writer and freelance editor who divides his time between New York City and Peterborough, N.H. His Black Lamb column is called Commonplaces.
Posted by: The Editors
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