“When taking my fledgling steps toward literacy, I lived in a neighborhood with no library. Luckily, there was a bookmobile that came around every week. Each Tuesday night, I would borrow as many books as permitted, devour them and come back next week for more. I would also read any palatable materials my sisters brought home, excluding obviously unsuitable items like The Child’s Northanger Abbey or anything involving Trixie Belden. Like many children growing up in crummy neighborhoods, I honestly believed that if I read enough books, I would one day possess a gorgeous house with two cars, two children and a white picket fence. This is exactly what has come to pass.”

 

 – Joe Queenan

 

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Salvage
Amy Clampitt
    
Daily the cortege of crumpled
defunct cars
goes by by the lasagna—
layered flatbed
truckload: hardtop

 

reverting to tar smudge,
wax shine antiqued to crusted
winepress smear,
windshield battered to
intact ice-tint, a rarity

 

fresh from the Pleistocene.
I like it; privately
I find esthetic
satisfaction in these
ceremonial removals

 

from the category of
received ideas
to regions where pigeons’
svelte smoke-velvet
limousines, taxiing

 

in whirligigs, reclaim
a parking lot,
and the bag-laden
hermit woman, disencumbered
of a greater incubus,

 

the crush of unexamined
attitudes, stoutly
follows her routine,
mining the mountainsides
of our daily refuse

 

for artifacts: subversive
re-establishing
with each arcane
trash-basket dig
the pleasures of the ruined.

 

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A longtime E-Verser sends in “Top Five Explanations for the Mysterious Disappearance of E-Verse:“
 
1. Ernest Hilbert’s subterranean lair of evil was finally discovered by the NSA.
2. He’s too busy watching So NoTORIous in a continuous loop on his TIVO.
3. A slight plastic surgery accident. Details available after the autopsy. Let’s just say that botox should never be injected into one’s tongue, no matter how much it’s been flapping.
4. He’s run away to a secret love nest with Angelina Jolie.
5. He’s been too busy with his new job at OK! Magazine to keep up his E-verse obligations.

 

 

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Million Dollar Duck (1971)

 

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Invaluable Fact of the Week:

 

In 1895, the speed limit in New York City was 8 miles per hour.

 

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This week’s town you really have to visit:

 

Colon, North Carolina

 

 

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E-Verse collective noun of the week:

 

A stand of flamingo

 

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Panelists include Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker;Greil Marcus, pop music critic and author of Lipstick Traces and Mystery Train; Alex Ross, classical music critic for The New Yorker and author of the soon-to-be-published The Rest Is Noise; Mark Stevens, art critic for New York magazine and co-author of De Kooning, a biography which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and other honors. Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, will moderate the discussion.

 

Tuesday, September 19, 2006
7 PM
Lang Recital Hall
North Building, N424
This event is free and open to the public.

 

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E-Verse Radio is tan, rested, and ready to run for office. 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.