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Parenting
Small Press Review
The Fiction Of Curt Johnson
His heroes are frail — but also strong and unbreakable, because they cope with these realities, not blurring or distorting what is there, what they have done, or how they feel. And this rubs off on us, makes the reader braver about acknowledging the truth in his or her own guts.
February 1979The World According To Irving, Garp, Bensenhaver
Book Review
John Irving has laid his cards on the table. From what seemed to be the beginning of a long realistic chronicle, he has moved into a world of fantasy, symbol, and wild humor, and for the rest of the novel he settles into neither world, but shuttles back and forth between the two.
January 1979December 1978
Thanksgiving
Anchors raised, we were a free people journeying into our own living flesh, and consciousness striving to know itself: political freedom; economic freedom; sexual freedom; artistic freedom. The freedom to abuse freedom. To enslave, and to set free. To become President, and to bear arms: to lean a rifle on a window sill, take aim, squeeze the trigger, and hurl a tiny speck of our own dark heart into the tissue of another. All for the sake of freedom — the greatest burden, the greatest joy.
December 1978Angel At The Gate
In the year I was sixteen, on the first day of that new year, my father died, and since that time I have longed hopelessly for a paradise that will never return.
December 1978Five Poems
I want to love loneliness / the way I love you. I want / to enter it and twist up its / hair in my fist.
August 1978Sunbeams
March 1978The political campaign won’t tire me, for I have an advantage. I can be myself.
Nestles Vs. The Newborn
Death, Malnutrition, And The Infant Formula Boom
To the poor, uneducated mother, an obvious solution is stretching the formula by diluting it with more water than is specified on the package, the label of which she probably cannot read. A study conducted in Barbados in 1969 showed that 82% of the mothers were “stretching” the formula. They were making a 4-day can last between 5 days and 3 weeks.
February 1978Sara Elizabeth Safransky
Born Nov. 3, 1977, 1:45 A.M.
In the depth of my own understanding, I meet you in timeless wonder. I have no conscious memories of our “other lifetimes” together. It doesn’t matter. Your mother, reaching for you, drawing you back to her, reaches across the aeons.
November 1977Monstrosity And Beauty
Book Review
The October light in Vermont that gives the novel its title is variously seen. Lewis Hicks at one point sees it casting beauty over the landscape; James Page, in a moment of despair, believes it exposes all the world’s rottenness.
July 1977
