Issue 177 | The Sun Magazine

August 1990

Readers Write

Visitors

Sharing C rations, picking up where you left off, stealing forbidden knowledge

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Hell is made up of yearnings. The wicked don’t roast on beds of nails; they sit on comfortable chairs and are tortured with yearnings.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Sun Interview

Defending What You Love

An Interview With Edward Abbey

But still, when all other means fail, we are morally justified — not merely justified, but morally obligated — to defend that which we love by whatever means are available. If my family, my life, my children were attacked, I wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to defend them. By the same principle, if land I love is being violated, raped, plundered, murdered, and all political means to save it have failed, I feel that sabotage is morally justifiable.

By Jack Loeffler
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Myth Of Sexual Liberation

Woman’s current advance in society is not a voyage from myth to truth but from myth to new myth. The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant archetypal realities. In its argument with male society, feminism must suppress the monthly evidence of woman’s domination by chthonian nature. Menstruation and childbirth are an affront to beauty and form. In aesthetic terms, they are spectacles of frightful squalor.

By Camille Paglia
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Eating Head

“Gringo watching,” I call it. I’ve been living in Mexico on and off for twenty years, and slowly I’m developing this prejudice, this terrible prejudice, against Americans. “They’re so pale and wan — in such a hurry,” I think, trying to forget I’m one of them.

By Lorenzo W. Milam
Fiction

All The Panamas In The World And Herb’s

Carol had on a pink blouse. Her bra straps made these small ridges in the cloth. Every time she bent to reach for another glass, a small crescent of purple poked from beneath the pink. It looked like the edge of a real whopper.

By T.L. Toma
Fiction

From The Holy Mother Of Jobs

(Formerly The Goddess Of Labor): A Report On A Poor Supplicant

Understanding comes like a delayed explosion in her head. Lightning has hit the fireworks stand and here she is thinking about it! Instead of being dead! Instead of flying through the sky with a fountain of fireworks a mile high!

Pat Little Dog
Fiction

Separate From Love

Women hold gloved hands over your face, protect you from what really happens in the world, then laugh at your awkwardness.

By Deborah Shouse
Fiction

Kusadasi

In summer, cruise ships bring exultant droves of westerners to the town, who, along with extensive drug trafficking, have transformed the region into a wealthy, peaceful appendage to the otherwise bellicose, indigent body of Turkey. Like the thin layer of crude oil on the Mediterranean, affluence stratifies.

By David Koteen