“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.” – Ernest Hemingway

by Ernie on 25/09/06 at 7:21 pm


“Einstein’s great work was over well before he was 40. Photos from that time show him as a nattily dressed young professor, though we’re more familiar with the image of the old Einstein — the benign and unkempt sage of poster and T-shirt. But Einstein didn’t rest on his laurels in old age: he worked till his dying day seeking a unified theory of nature’s forces. At that time it was, we now realize, a premature quest which was doomed from the start. Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there’s something rather noble about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his grasp, in some respects the Einstein cult sends the wrong signal. It unduly exalts ‘armchair theory,’ which by itself would achieve little. We’re no wiser than Aristotle was, and the advance of science stems mainly from new technology and new instruments – in symbiosis, of course, with theory and insight.”
 
 - Martin Rees
 

San Sepolcro
Jorie Graham
 
In this blue light
     I can take you there,
snow having made me
     a world of bone
seen through to. This
     is my house,
my section of Etruscan
     wall, my neighbor’s
lemon trees, and, just below
     the lower church,
the airplane factory.
     A rooster
crows all day from mist
     outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
     ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
     the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
     by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
     her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
     to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
     It is before
the birth of god. No one
     has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
     line – bodies
and wings – to the open air
     market. This is
what the living do: go in.
     It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
     from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
     is a button
coming undone, something terribly
     nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.
 
 
E-Verse News:
 
The long-awaited E-Verse Radio website/blog is up and running at www.everseradio.com. You can read recent installments and make comments, which I can include in future e-mails. I will also be adding recommended books pages and other fun things in time. As with all else, patience.
 
 
A single reader sends in “Top Five Ways to Learn a Lot About Your Date Quickly”:
 
1. Synonym test (Homer, Simpson or the Greek poet; Lennon/Lenin, John or Vladimir?)
2. Stop in a book store
3. Stop in a record store
4. Order ice cream (do they only like vanilla? Do you have the same favorite? Are they bold and willing to take chances like ordering rum raisin)
5. Go to a bar and only order a glass of water and then wait to see what they order
 

Unbelievable But Real Film Title of the Week:
 
Pagan Gladiators, The (1982)
 
 
The Academy of American Poets offers their list of the “most popular contemporary poets”:
 
1. Maya Angelou
2. Donald Hall
3. Billy Collins
4. Louise Glück
5. Sharon Olds
6. Nikki Giovanni
7. Mary Oliver
8. Ted Kooser
9. Adrienne Rich
10. Richard Wilbur
 

And the hall of famers:
 
1. William Shakespeare
2. Langston Hughes
3. Maya Angelou
4. E. E. Cummings
5. Robert Frost
6. Emily Dickinson
7. W. H. Auden
8. Walt Whitman
9. Sylvia Plath
10. William Carlos Williams
11. Dylan Thomas
12. Donald Hall
13. Pablo Neruda
14. Robert Creeley
15. Czeslaw Milosz
16. Billy Collins
17. T. S. Eliot
18. Elizabeth Bishop
19. Louise Glück
20. Sharon Olds
 
 
Comments are welcome, as always. Now you can visit www.everseradio.com (once this e-mail is posted there) and opine to your heart’s content.
 
 
A reader sends in an office share available in downtown Manhattan, $500/month:

“We are a small non-profit dance company with a lovely office in the financial district a block from the intersection of Broadway and Nassau. The office has a high ceiling with lots of natural light, and is located right on top of the Broadway/Nassau/Fulton street stop on the 2/3/4/5/A/C/J/M/Z trains, and only a few blocks from the N/R, 6 and E trains. We are looking for another organization to share the space with us. We have enough space for one desk, with some storage space. We can provide a computer that is networked to a printer and the internet, or you can provide your own. Your rent would be $500/month. For more information, please contact Jen at 212-233-0330 or rjdinfo@verizon.net.“

 
Invaluable Fact of the Week:

The average speed of Heinz ketchup leaving the bottle is 25 miles per year.


Readers write in with more on albums named after states:

“Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens. Sure he’s a young guy, but this album is fantastic.”


Another:

“Come on man, at least something in the last 15 or 20 years! What about ‘Come on Feel the Illinoise!’ by Sufjan Stevens? It’s so good to have E-Verse again! Where else was I going to embarrass myself by pretending to know stuff?”


An Alaskan E-Verser (not the only one!) writes in on last week’s Town of the Week, Chicken Alaska:

“And if you keep driving through Chicken and over the pass, closed in winter, you come to Eagle, Alaska. If you are still hungry you can fly to King Salmon or Beaver . . . And we have a few others. For instance, you can drive through Cold Foot, AK on your way to Dead horse . . . And let’s not forget little Eek, AK!“

On the “fact of the week” about the pound sign:

It should have read: The pound sign # is called “an octothorpe” rather than “anoctothorpe”. Minor typo, and all apologies follow.


A reader sends in some fun author photos:

http://ilx.wh3rd..net/thread.php?msgid=5605023


Read three more of my sonnets in the new issue of Unpleasant Event Schedule:

http://unpleasanteventschedule.com/

And here is a sneak preview of one of my sonnets coming up in The New Republic, for those who don’t subscribe:
 
 
Calavera for a Friend
Ernest Hilbert

When your heart is scorched out, the unruly world
Will seal around you as a dark ocean
Behind a ship at dusk—the wake will fade
And spread wider, until fully unfurled.
Love reserved for you will slacken. Your portion
Of commerce ends with the last deal you made.
A stranger will take your job, buy your home,
Maybe wear your shirts and shoes, and the books
You cherished will be thumbed by new readers.
Young tourists will roam everywhere you roamed.
Some small items might remain, artifacts,
Footnotes, fingerprints, cuff links, little anchors,
Small burrs that cling: initials carved in a tree,
Your name inscribed where no one will see. 

This week’s town you really have to visit:

Chocolate Bayou, Texas


I was pleasantly surprised to find someone had used one of my phrases as an epigraph (I just wish it were a more interesting quote):
 


Check out the new issue of the cool online magazine Drunken Boat:

http://www.drunkenboat.com/

 
A reader writes in with a request:

“Does anyone have any amusing or inspiring anecdotes relating to stress and anxiety, particularly with reference to revision and examinations? I would be particularly interested in any stories about famous figures who suffered from great stress/anxiety and overcame it or turned it to their advantage.”


E-Verse collective noun of the week:

A wisp of snipe


E-Verse Radio ain’t getting in the ring with Tolstoy, either. It is a regular weekly column of literary, publishing, and arts information and opinion that has gone out since 1999. It is brought to you by ERNEST HILBERT and currently enjoys over 1,300 readers. If you wish to submit lists or other comments, please use the same capitalization, punctuation, and grammar you would for anything else intended for publication. Please send top five lists, bad movie titles, limericks, facts, comments, and new readers along whenever you like; simply click reply and I’ll get back to you.

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One Response to ““I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.” – Ernest Hemingway”

  1. John Bauccio

    Sep 26th, 2006

    Ernie,

    The site looks fantastic! Congratulations, seriously. It looks as though e-verse is back with a vengeance!

    Good Luck,

    John

    P.S. In an effort to establish inter-activity in the new site, there is a movie quote in my note. While it isn’t too obscure, I’d be impressed if any of my fellow e-versers can tell: a. what the quote is, and b. who said it in what movie.

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