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ABOUTNow in its 14th year of publication, this magazine was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Black Lamb Review is a literate rather than a literary publication. Regular columns by writers in a variety of geographic locations and vocations are supplemented by features, reviews, articles on books and authors, and a selection of “departments,” including an acerbic advice column and a lamb recipe. SUBMISSIONSBlack Lamb welcomes submissions from new writers. Email us. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Starbuck' CategoryPractice wifeApril 1st, 2007 BY STEPHEN STARBUCK “Sit down so you can enjoy that!†That’s probably the last thing I’ll remember from my first marriage, my practice wife erupting, harping on my favored practice of eating a kitchen sink salad I’d just thrown together, scarfing it up actually at the kitchen sink, standing, on my feet, imagine that. A couple of kinds of lettuce, daikon (I’d say Japanese radish — thick and sweet, that grows like a giant white carrot — except when you’re living in Japan, you don’t say that), shaved carrots, olives, chunks of tomatoes, sharp cheddar, raw nuts, sprouts, and whatever else the fridge was hiding, drenched in olive oil and balsamic and minced garlic and cracked pepper… eaten directly from the stainless steel bowl I mixed it in, a pure pleasure.
Posted by: The Editors I saw the cutest thing…March 1st, 2007
I was nearing our apartment in Brooklyn on a bright brisk day, and near a neighbor’s stoop saw a little sparrow standing sentinel over the mangled body of its compatriot: neck torn, thoroughly flattened ruffles, supine. Birds aren’t supposed to do supine. Must’ve been a cat done that, I thought. And that little sparrow sentinel was as puffed up and erect as an honor guard, motionless, a picture of stoic mourning and regard. Trying to assume a portion of his mantle of respect, I shuffled quietly past, not two feet past, and looked back at the maudlin, heart-tugging scene… and the little sparrow was pecking chunks of flesh out of that torn neck, avidly.
Posted by: The Editors Perpetuum mobileMarch 1st, 2006 BY STEPHEN STARBUCK It can’t be true. But we seem to be the only family that, when the baby arrived, instead of killing the television, went out and corralled a wide screen behemoth instead. A massive rectangular box enclosing a 42-inch (measured on the diagonal) screen hunches ponderously on its new built-in cabinet, with its own accent lighting above it in its very own freshly remodeled alcove or, should I say, grotto. See, we These things happen when an obscure relation mentions you in passing, in their will. I suppose the tidy lump of inheritance could’ve been the bedrock of a college trust for imminent Ada Rae, but, well, you know. We like TV. Like Winston Smith liked you-know-whom at the end. I have since vowed to help her develop, as soon as practicable, a cross-over dribble or killer spike or acey serve, something worthy of a scholarship. I mean, a parent’s job includes keeping the future in focus and all.
Posted by: The Editors Jive turkeyDecember 1st, 2004 BY STEPHEN STARBUCK I was mortally offended. Driving back in the dark down a long black scar of a byway through the black Central Valley night squeezed in the back of my aunt’s station wagon with my then wife and sister and a couple of slivers off the family tree, the bobbing of twin headlights hypnotically approaching then zip-flashing past to plunge us into further darkness, I realized: no leftovers. I had left my other uncle’s house without a bag of fixings for the long stretch of lunches ahead.
Posted by: The Editors Illiberal aliensSeptember 1st, 2003
Dripping. There was a lot of dripping in Alien. Some oozing, some corrosive bloodletting, too, but mostly it was the drip drip drip — that time-keeping water torture as we waited for our hapless heroes, spelunking down the obscure dank corridors of that interstellar rustbucket, to get it one by one. Classic. What were they thinking? I normally hate movies that arbitrarily divvy up some juicy but dim gang for their serial disposal — dismemberment, engorgement, disemboweling — as if the scriptwriting crew were just emptying out some dictionary of violent death, Thesaurus Rex on a measured rampage. But Alien had something more compelling than mere fluency with the vocabulary of filmic suspense.
Posted by: The Editors Nineteen years laterJune 1st, 2003 BY STEPHEN STARBUCK For well more than a decade, I lived without bookshelves. There was a time in the hazy past before that when I lined my room with them. At one point, though, I boxed up my college books and put them in liberating storage, in the sweet fecund It worked with records, too. You know the routine. You enter someone’s apartment for the first time, and in the interstitial moments when left half-alone while the screwtop wine is decanted, you peruse the spines and inform yourself of the breadth and depth of your host. You read, in the quirks and fixations, personality.
Posted by: The Editors Author profileDecember 1st, 2002 Stephen Starbuck, doting father of brilliant, willful Ada, muses occasionally on parenthood and nostalgic bits as he hurtles precipitously into a precocious dotage. And, despite his assertions to the contrary, he apparently did move 3,000 miles to live in Brooklyn. His Black Lamb column Just Visiting morphed into Dada-ism with the birth of his first child.
Posted by: The Editors
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