Samuel R. Delany's book is one of my absolute favorites. It was the first time I realized that you can create surrealism with words. A drifter with cracked and calloused hands comes to a strange city run by gangs who cloak themselves in holograms. He ends up running one of the gangs in order to have a relitavely safe life for himself and his lovers. In this city two moons can be seen at night, and in the day, a sun thousands of times larger than seen anywhere else.

This novel also has my favorite first line: to wound the autumnal city.

My father wrote this. It's really good, though. Poetry, don't you know. But nothing rhymes. Shut up, Steve. Why don't you leave. Now that's poetry! Sigh. The poetry runs from those he did as a bitter youth in the late fifties, through his look at how the world doesn't work through the sixties, his finding of faith in the seventies, and his life with his second family through the nineties. Some of it is startlingly beautiful, all of it intelligent, and I'm even mentioned in one.

Roads Home by Rowell Hoff

ETERNAL VERITIES

We like to ponder the eternal verities. The important questions. The questions that the philosophers are too timid to tackle, because they know that, if they do find the answers to these questions, life as we know it on the planet will no longer be the same. The following are but a few of the questions that keep us up at night. (Well, not Steve, but he's straight):

- 1) What is Martinizing and why does it only take an hour?
- 2) Do packages that say "Cheese Food" contain either? (If you came from Weeping Willow, go back now.)
- 3) What is an Olay and how do you extract oil from it?