to Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Magazine

06.02.05  1 Alligator  tzolkin 1 thursday  <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />12:25:53 p

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   This is a love letter, Mr. Lapham, there’s no way around that. Every month for some years, your diamond has arrived in the post, its faceted gleam returning me from despair in these obsidian-dark times.

   Harper’s Notebook – I tug my forelock, sir. I tell my friends, “Mr. Lapham can seriously sling a sentence.” It’s not just the Swift, Ambrose Bierce, Sam Johnson, Nabokov, Thoreau, Mencken in your DNA, it is your unique cogency that made me compelled, from afar, to become your love slave.

    If as Alphonse Karr suggests, we must be thankful that thorns have roses, in these dread and thorny years, Notebook is a monthly rose of such origamic unfurling that I simply bloody can go on.

   People speak of 9/11. I find 11/02, the horrible US election of 2004, a slo-motion disaster, a date of more and dreader consequence to our nation. I sometimes literally clutch the magazine to my wounded citizen’s breast to staunch the hemorrhaging.

    After that grisly election when theofascism slouched to Washington to rule & roar, my pulse was faint, my brave heart dimmed. So concussed was I that you may or may not have literally saved my life, I think you did, but I know you held my citizen’s soul from plummet. Notebook stirs my courage; I have all but torn the very pages into pieces and eaten them, raw and hot, like the liver of the bear, for bravery. There will never be enough said to speak either my devotion or my gratitude, Mr. Lapham, but I remain, sincerely,

Your obedient Servant,

pogblog

ps. So you know these are not only vapours, I even cajoled a friend to walked out around her small city some every day since October 2002 with her now very dog-eared, 2-sided ‘Teach Peace’ sign on a four-foot stick, in solitary witness against the blood-dimmed tide. She's a brave lass. I write trenchant Letters to Editors. The brandy, the distilled courage, of your words has sustained doggèd citizen action, not just warmed the literary cockles.

 ……………

If pogblog only subscribed to one magazine for info, insight, & courage, it would be Harper’s Magazine (14.97$ yr) (http://www.harpers.org)