E-Verse Radio

“The cynics are right nine times out of ten.” – Henry Louis Mencken

by Ernie on 18/09/06 at 9:58 am

“The injustice of it all. ‘I’ve seen the Stones many times,’ complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. ‘I don’t feel they play as good as we do. You’ve got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing.’ He could be speaking for members of Guns N’ Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree. Paul McCartney now looks like an old lady, Bob Dylan resembles one of those unfortunates who line up at the Scott Mission, and Mick Jagger looks like his face has not so much aged as congealed, yet they remain irreplaceable icons. What would you rather tell your friends – that you had lunch with Mick Jagger or Joey Kramer? Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s?”
- Philip Marchand

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Asking for My Younger Brother
Franz Wright
    Reno, Nevada

I never did find you.
I later heard how you’d wandered the streets
for weeks, washing dishes before you got fired;
taking occasional meals at the Salvation Army
with the other diagnosed. How on one particular night
you won four hundred dollars at cards:
how some men followed you and beat you up,
leaving you unconscious in an alley
where you were wakened by police
and arrested for vagrancy, for being tired
of getting beaten up at home.
I’d dreamed you were dead,
and started to cry.
I couldn’t exactly phone Dad.
I bought a pint of bourbon
and asked for you all afternoon in a blizzard.
In Hell
Dante had words with the dead,
although
they had no bodies
and he could not touch them, nor they him.
A man behind the ticket counter
in the Greyhound terminal
pointed to one of the empty seats, where
someone who looked like me sometimes sat down
among the people waiting to depart.
I don’t know why I write this.
With it comes the irrepressible desire
to write nothing, to remember nothing;
there is even the desire
to walk out in some field and bury it
along with all my other so-called
poems, which help no one—
where each word will blur
into earth finally,
where the mind that voiced them
and the hand that took them down will.
So what. I left
the bus fare back
to Sacramento with this man,
and asked him
to give it to you.

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A single reader sends in “top five things you can learn about your blind date by taking him/her to an ice cream parlor”:

1. If they order vanilla: boring
2. If they order triple chocolate brownie with extra chocolate sauce: will never be satisfied
3. If they order rum raisin: totally on the edge!
4. If they order okra ice cream: proceed with caution
5. If they spend 20 minutes licking their cone: take them home with you. Now.

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Unbelievable But Real Film Title of the Week:
Mod, Mod Miniskirt, The (1969)

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Check out the new issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review. It includes my interview with poet Franz Wright:

For those who did not know, I became the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review on January 1st of this year. Here are some of my recent quarterly editorials:

http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial1.htm

http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial2.htm

http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial3.htm

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Invaluable Fact of the Week:
Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon with his left foot.

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This week’s town you really have to visit:
Chicken, Alaska

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An E-Verser announces his new novel:
My first novel to see the light of day, Existential Exodus, has been released. You can either go to your favorite bookstore to order it, or order it on line from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com. In case you need it, the ISBN # is 1-4137-9246-4. In addition, many bookstores carry it, including Montclair Book Center, Watchung Booksellers (Montclair), Book World (West Caldwell) and St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of NYC.
Press release: PublishAmerica is proud to present Existential Exodus by Verona, New Jersey’s Paul Grenert. Existential Exodus is the story of Henry, a drug addict who flees New York in order to break his addiction. He arrives in Jamaica where he falls in love with Iris and together they launch a search for a better life. This brings them to the Rastafarian hills, the Amish country, an Indian reservation, Spain, and finally Italy, where they settle happily, enamored of the more laid-back lifestyle, the warm people and the great art. There they pursue their respective arts, no longer hoping for an alien spaceship to take them away. Paul Grenert has written short stories and poetry that has appeared in several magazines. He has also written screenplays. Existential Exodus is his first novel to be published. Grenert graduated from NYU, and has lived in London, New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife Manuela and two cats, Lulu and Lux.

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E-Verse collective noun of the week:
A wolf pack of submarines

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Cool site allows you to paint like Jackson Pollock (highly recommended time-waster):
http://jacksonpollock.org/

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E-Verse Radio tries hard not to be cynical. 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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