ISSUES | winter 1987
10.1 (Winter 1987)
Featuring the work of Don Bogen, Michelle Boisseau, Louis Budd, Jack Driscoll, Michel Englebert, Carol Frost, C.W. Gusewelle, Ehud Havazelet, Stephen Haven, Larry Kramer, Ellen Lesser, Lisa Lewis, Kathy Miller, Michael Pettit, James Ragan, Louis Simpson, Gerold Spath, Jack Stephens, Mark Twain, Michael Ullman, Jon Veinberg, Roger Weingarten, Gary Young, Barry Yourgrau…an interview with Charles Wright…and a feature by R.D. King.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
The Only Thing You've Got
There was this guy on the television one time, he’d written a book and had gotten used to seeing his picture in the papers. Donna and I had the color set in the bedroom then, and this guy had on a suit that looked borrowed. He held a pipe in his hand and pressed into the bowl with his thumb. He didn’t smoke, which was probably not allowed on the set, but he looked like he wanted to.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Shrimping; St. Francis, Hiding
The text of this poem is currently not available online.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Summer Comes to the Three Villages
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Larry Kramer
“Of A Sudden”
“Big Madge”
“Of Our Age”
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson
Thomas Furlong was a grizzled and sour bachelor of fifty who lived solitary and alone in a log house which stood remote and lonely in the middle of a great cornfield at the base of the rising spurs of the mountains. At two o’clock on a certain morning he came in out of a drizzling rain, lit his tallow dip, pulled down the cheap oiled shade of the single window, punched up his fire, took off his steaming coat, hung it before the fire to dry, sat down, spread his damp hands in front of the blaze, and said to himself–
“It’s a puzzle. I wonder what ever did become of her. Seven hours. Maybe she ain’t as much of a fool as people think.” He sat silently considering the puzzle for some moments, then added, with energy, “Damn her! Damn her whole tribe!”
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Roger Weingarten
“Florida”
“The Noonday Witch”
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
from The Hermit Journals
I do not advertise as a taxidermist, but each year I take a little work, mostly local. Occasionally, a downstater will get lucky and shoot a trophy white-tail on the opener, and for the right price I will mount the buck’s head, usually a ten-pointer or better. My reputation has spread these past few years, so I can choose and charge what I want.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Carol Frost
“All Summer Long”
“All I Cannot”
Interviews
Dec 01 1987
An Interview with Charles Wright
The text of this interview is currently not available online.
Nonfiction
Dec 01 1987
The Kid from Red Bank
By the time he died in April of 1984, Count Basie had led a big jazz band for almost fifty years. A dermined man with a shy, evasive smile, he epitomized swing, and every time he played he seemed to reiterate the importance of the blues.
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
A House and Its Neighbors: A Cautionary Tale
On the northern edge of the woods, just short of the municipal forest of S, a town whose citizens were, for the most part and by tradition, complacent and well-to-do, stood a nearly square little house on underpinnings of heavy oak beams. This house was built of spruce boards originally soaked in ox blood. Its south side, with a door and two tiny windows, faced the woods and was shaded by towering firs. There were two more windows on the north side, and one each in the smaller side walls. The whole thing was topped off by a nearly flat tile roof whose eaves extended not much more than a foot beyond the low walls all around. This little house had been built by a certain Egloff, who had done menial work in the big chemical plant in the town of R for over fifty years.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Cardinal Points
The text of this poem is currently not available online.
Nonfiction
Dec 01 1987
An End of Loving The Land
For as long as I have been acquianted there, more than half my life now, people of that country neighborhood have nurtured their idea of the panther.
No one I’ve ever known has actually seen the creature. But nearly everyone has a relative or friend who knows a man–nameless, perhaps, but not to be disbelieved–who only last week met the thing in the lights of his pickup truck on some night lane as it bounded across between two fingers of the woods
Nonfiction
Dec 01 1987
The Recomposition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ten years ago my title might have been catchy or at least puzzling. These days, anyone who keeps up with the trends in criticism assumes that I will somehow play upon the principle–most commonly associated with Stanley Fish–that the meaning of a text “has no effective existence outside of its realization in the mind of a reader,” that each reader creates the text during the process of absorbing the words that an author has strung together.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Birthing the Stillborn
The text of this poem is currently not available online.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Pinwheel
The text of this poem is currently not available online.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Silhouette
The text of this poem is currently not available online.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Jon Veinberg
“Winter Eclipse”
“Slicing Peaches”
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
Exiles
It is Saturday, a French legal day of rest, but Robert Thorley can feel a humming tension in the air. It is Lisette who is to blame. Poor Lisette! She is making an occasion, a major celebration out of what should be just a simple meal.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Gary Young
“Burning”
“Dawn at Los Gaviotas”
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Lisa Lewis
“The Poet, La Bourgeoisie”
“Revisions”
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Poetry Feature: Michel Englebert
“The Story That Haldemann Julius Told”
“Jack Ruby Believed”
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
Safari
My father and I are on safari. He wears a deluxe pith helmet with a decorative red strap and reinforced air holes. His sumptuous safari jacket is festooned with gussets, map pockets, zippered pouches, epaulettes, and a broad belt drawn with flair about his pot belly.
Art
Dec 01 1987
On the Plain of Smokes, Ornamental Horses, etc.
The text of this feature is currently not available online.
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
The Shoplifter's Apprentice
She rounded the corner into the aisle with the beer and chilled wine and almost crashed into a man holding open the flap of his parka, stuffing an inside pocket with what looked like a bottle of champagne. He was so thin and the jacket so big, that when he jerked it across his chest the bottle was swallowed up–except for a barely discernable curve of glass against nylon, invisible.
Poetry
Dec 01 1987
Literary
The full text of this poem is currently not available online.
Fiction
Dec 01 1987
The Boys from This School
He is one of the boys from this school so he wears a green military uniform and has a shaved head. He is a freshman and his name is James. He stands at the door of Kelly’s office to talk to her after class. As she looks up at him she runs her hand through her short blond hair; she always wonders if her students think she looks attractive or merely curious in the flight jacket, trousers, and jumpboots because she would rather look like them than like the few older female faculty in their skirts and pumps.