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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. |
Peaceable kingdomGot my goats & I wouldn't have it any other wayMay 1st, 2016 BY ELIZABETH FOURNIER Before my goat friends arrived I had prepared them a lovely deep straw bed, a bucket of water, and some goat fusion. On their first night they ate all of their bed, but that is life with a goat, and I soon solved the problem by providing them with as much hay as they could eat. And weed I could pull. And every scrap provided by my neighbors.
In looking for a culture that treats goats as pets, I found out that the Greeks take excellent care of their goats and allow them to wander around villages nibbling here and there. Children play with the young kids, sometimes even dressing them as they would a doll. And then, Easter comes around and they eat the goat. The same seems to hold true in Africa, where people love their goats and then eat them. At first, this eating of pets horrified me, but I then came to the conclusion that the modern American view towards what animals are okay to eat is perhaps more horrific. But I don’t plan to eat my cuddly baby dolls. They have names, I brush them daily, and I kiss them. Their lips are velvet soft.
Posted by: The Editors The lessons of CleoAll I want for my birthday is a horseMay 1st, 2016 BY SUSAN BENNETT Is it true that every girl wants a horse? The ongoing popularity of National Velvet, My Friend Flicka, and a myriad of other books, movies, and television programs would certainly indicate so. Psychologists and parents like to speculate on the deeper meanings of this attraction. “Horses give young girls a feeling of freedom; the ability to control a large animal gives girls feelings of power.” “Give a girl a horse, and she will stay away from boys.”
The closest I ever got to owning a loyal steed was when I purchased with my birthday money, at age ten, a turquoise and chrome Huffy bicycle. I named him Fury after the horse in the library book I was currently reading. Fury and I kept the secret of his identity from even my best friends. But I spent the next two years careening around my neighborhood on Fury until I reached junior high school and Fury went the way of Puff the Magic Dragon and other childhood fantasies.
Posted by: The Editors Small wondersThe pleasures of owning budgerigarsMay 1st, 2016 BY KARLA POWELL Just don’t call him “Tweety,” the pet store’s bird keeper teased as she handed off my charge, who was scrambling timorously inside his cardboard carrier. I hesitated to tell her this was precisely the name given both parakeets I’d had as a girl. Sequentially, that is, since Tweety the First had an untimely demise when one of my siblings charged through the heavy swinging door that divided kitchen from dining area in our circa 1864 house, slamming the poor guy against a wall.
Posted by: The Editors My epiphanySometimes I could take hatchet to myselfMay 1st, 2016 BY ROSEMARY MCLEISH When my brother died unexpectedly from a stroke, I was living in a cottage on a farm in the Trossachs. It was famous for several things in the neighborhood and for one thing in the wider world, which was that a nineteenth-century classic novel had been written there in an ancient barn. I don’t believe that myth for a moment, but what I do believe, because I saw them, was the thick ropes of ancient spiders’ webs which festooned the inside of the barn. The farm was locally famous for the farmer’s wife: for her beauty, for riding around the lanes on her stallion, for her abduction from boarding school at the age of fourteen, and for her scandalous adultery. She bred rare and heritage sheep and goats and used to sing arias to their offspring at seven o’clock in the morning right outside my windows, where the nursery pen was. She had a beautiful voice. She was half middle-class farmer’s wife and half crazy gypsy, with a pack of dogs as her familiars. At the time I lived there, she had eight sheepdogs, who followed her everywhere. (The last I heard, she had twenty-three, which doesn’t surprise me one bit.) At that time only two of the eight were “rescue” dogs; she hadn’t become as famous (or notorious) as she is now. One of these couldn’t inhibit his barking due to some trauma in his previous existence. She warned me (after I moved in) not to worry if I heard the dogs barking in the middle of the night, that the one with no inhibitions set the others off, and as she suffered from insomnia, she used to walk about the farm in the middle of the night. The other rescue dog had an even nastier habit. He liked to swing on the horses’ tails, and this idiotic woman used to stand and watch him doing it, driving her favorite horse demented, and complain all the while that he was pulling the hair out in clumps and the poor horse hated it. “Why don’t you stop him then?” I asked. “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she replied. “He’s had too much telling off in his life.”
Posted by: The Editors The lookDenial in old ageMay 1st, 2016 BY JOHN M. DANIEL Susan’s mother, Barbara, was in Santa Barbara visiting us in late June 1990 when all hell broke loose up in the pass northeast of us, and what became known as the Painted Cave Fire roared down the mountainside, incinerating homes in its path and threatening to consume part or perhaps most of our city. Our neighborhood, Hidden Valley, was expected to take a direct hit, which I learned on our car radio out in the driveway, because all power was shut off and so were our phones. The radio ordered all residents of Hidden Valley to evacuate immediately. I brought the news into the house and told Susan and Barbara by candlelight that we had to leave right away. We didn’t even have time to gather together the things we could not bear to lose. I filled a gallon plastic jug with drinking water, put two flashlights in the glove compartment, and urged Susan and Barbara to grab their toothbrushes, a change of underwear, and whatever else they needed for an overnight in whatever motel still had room for us. Barbara didn’t move. She sat on the couch, petting Jessie, her yellow lab. Barbara looked up at me and gave me a look I’ve never forgotten, even though I saw it only by candlelight. It was the first time I’d seen that look of hers. That kill-the-messenger look. That was the first time, but I came to know that look well over the next decade.
Posted by: The Editors MoonbeamRearranging your lifeMay 1st, 2016 BY SUSAN BENNETT On the internet, rivaling heart-warming pictures of puppies, kittens, and ponies, are videos of young goats leaping in the air, tumbling down hillsides, and gamboling across fields of wild flowers. These kids’s antics can bring smiles to the most cynical of Facebook trollers. However, viewers usually overlook that these enthusiastic acrobats are most likely destined for someone’s grill. Such was the case of Moonbeam, nicknamed Beamer, who was born on a ranch in the Napa Valley that was also home to a herd of Black Angus, a few wool sheep, a handful of milk goats, several ranch horses, and an array of barn cats, chickens, and dogs. Every creature on the ranch had a purpose — and young male goats were sold as food. Rarely were baby animals named; it’s much harder to send “Buddy” to the slaughterhouse.
Posted by: The Editors Honorary Black LambsMay 1st, 2016 BY BLACK LAMB April’s auspicious aspect is affirmed by the greatest of all literary birthday boys, William Shakespeare, who, legend has it, died on his fifty-second birthday on April 23, 1616. And one of the towering geniuses of the On April Fool’s Day in 1868, the popularizer of seventeenth-century poet Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, was born. His play based on the early poet has found its way past literature into folklore, as have (almost) the exploits of Flashman, the creation of George MacDonald Fraser, born on the 2nd in 1925. George Herbert, born on the 3rd in 1593, lived to be only forty, but he wrote a great deal of memorable verse and would be counted among poetry’s immortals if he had not confined himself entirely to devotional themes. William Wordsworth, born on the 7th in 1770, suffered no such limitation and is therefore often put in that august company.
Posted by: The Editors Ask MilliePetsMay 1st, 2016 Dear Reader, I’ve written so often, and so well, about pets, that I take the liberty of reprinting two of my replies to letters on the subject of this special issue. Dear Millicent, What’s the best thing to do if you notice someone mistreating his pets? Three characters in our neighborhood fall into this loathesome category. One regularly whips his two dogs; their anguished yelps can be heard all down the street. Another refuses to have his many cats neutered, doesn’t feed them adequately, never has them vaccinated, and allows the kittens to die. The third insists on buying wild animals (a raccoon, a mink, an ocelot, among others) and caging them in his backyard, where his kids gape at the poor creatures until the animals eventually die of despair and loneliness. Walter in Winnemucca Dear Walter, In recent years, new laws have been gradually enacted to protect innocent animals from cruel treatment at the hands of their “owners.” To my mind, these laws are not drastic enough. Rather than fines, abusers of animals should do real time in prison, where they can learn the true meaning of abuse. Furthermore, the trafficking in wild animals should be outlawed. It’s one thing to adopt a cat or dog or rabbit or hamster for a pet; these are domesticated animals that do better in homes than they would in the wild. But caging wild creatures is cruel and unnecessary. As for your sorry situation, I would report neighbors one and two to the local animal authorities or the SPCA. As for the third, you and your neighbors should visit him en masse and point out to him the immorality of his habit of sequestering wild animals for his amusement. If this doesn’t work, sneak into his yard as often as necessary and uncage the critters. Millie
Posted by: The Editors Black Lamb RecipeMay 1st, 2016 BY BLACK LAMB First, roast a big old leg of lamb, and have it for dinner. Then, after a day or two, to fix yourself (and five loved ones) a mess of Southern baked ham and lamb hash, round up these ingredients: 2 cups diced leftover roast lamb Put the lamb, ham, onion, green pepper and parsley through the coarse disk of a food grinder. Set the mixture aside. In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter over low heat until it is bubbly. Using a wooden spoon, stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is light gold in color. Still stirring, slowly incorporate the milk. Stir until the mixture forms a thick, smooth sauce. Season to taste with salt, pepper and Tabasco. Remove the sauce from the heat, add the ground meat mixture, and blend well. Pour into a well-greased, deep, ovenproof casserole, sprinkle the bread crumbs on top, and pour melted butter over the surface. Bake in a preheated 375° F. oven for 30 minutes. From The Soul Food Cookbook, by Bob Jeffries. We invite our readers to send us their favorite lamb recipes. If your recipe works out in our state-of-the-art test kitchen, we’ll print it and give you credit. • From the first issue of Black Lamb, January 2003
Posted by: The Editors The Thirteenth Anniversary IssueVolume 14, Number 1 — January 2016January 1st, 2016 BY TERRY ROSS When I began publishing Black Lamb back in January of 2003, I had no fixed idea of how long it would go on. Then, as the years accumulated, and as writers stayed and/or left, I found myself printing thirteen years of monthly issues, incorporating more than But we are now in 2016, and print journalism is, if not dead, at least limited to those with major bucks (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harper’s, etc.), and we small fry have to face the muzak: go online or go paperless. So we’re going paperless. It’s a hell of lot cheaper. Henceforward, Black Lamb will exist only online. We begin our internet manifestation with the first issue of our fourteenth year, incorporating some recently written articles as well as a number of superb specimens from our copious archives. Wish us long life! •
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