Issue 20 | The Sun Magazine

September 1976

Readers Write

Tabula Rasa

Writer’s craft, education, politics

By Our Readers
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Taking The Worm

Jimmy Carter For President

There’s a bony finger pointed at me, and another, and another. Old spirits, dead but never gone, our living history, the crust we call our past — Dallas, Selma, Chicago, the other meat on the rack — their voices all stink and ridicule, over the chains and the fire: DON’T TRUST THEM, NOT AGAIN.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Break! Break! CB And The — Mercy Sakes Alive! — Communications Revolution

Citizen’s Band radio is the biggest thing to hit the market since television. It is also the biggest revolution in communications since the telephone. There are two main facets to this phenomenon — fad and function.

By David Searls
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

For Want Of

The mss. following, For Want Of originated in my desire to make a simple statement about animals: our egotistical, destructive “categorical separation” of Life, our overtly cruel treatment of animals for often pointless or, at best, ambiguous studies.

By L.
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Cats And Dogs

After a lifetime of trying to deny it I am finally willing to concede that there are forces beyond human control at work in each of our lives.

By William Gaither
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Egg Demon

I am of the Circus. I introduce you to Eggplant, Elastic, and Menstrual Smell so that I may introduce you to Me, of the Thousand Female Poses, once a man and now the True Imitation.

By Rob Brezsny
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Smokey The Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies . . . a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

By Gary Snyder
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Channel One

Depressions are usually characterized by loss of energy, lack of enthusiasm and good feelings, and lowered self-acceptance. Depressed people often feel unwanted, unloved, and unworthy.

By Leaf Diamant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Stamping Ground

Book Review

This is a book praising freedom. If you are released (by will or by grace) from one illusion and do not fly immediately into the long arms of another, where are you?

By Dale Matthews
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Milky Way Poems

Book Review

Milky Way Poems, Mike Rigsby’s newest is an extraordinary free flight, a rough riding, plain-spoken, sky-glider of a voyage through the strangest and often most terrifying of all universes we know — the human mind itself.

By Virginia L. Rudder (Virginia Love Long)
Fiction

Mandrake’s Root

My academic career was in ruins. I had just been expelled from McDonald’s University having been caught in lewd acts with Ronald McDonald, that depraved clown.

By Karl Grossman
Photography

Drawings By L.S. Gilliam

Most Chapel Hill acquaintances have known only my student work (’64-’68) and the past year’s oil paintings of the University campus. I hope these drawings demonstrate a wider range of interests than that indicated by a limited knowledge of my work.

By L.S. Gilliam