Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
You sit down at precisely the same time that your neighbor fires a gun off at 2 AM, and you wonder with panic whether the sound you just heard was you blowing out a knee.
DC Comics. McKean’s art illustrated the seminal 1989 graphic novel written by Grant Morrison (republished here five years ago in a deluxe edition). The modern video game, “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” is only loosely based on the book. It is easy to confuse the two because the original graphic novel is also alternately called “Batman: Arkham Asylum.”
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Evening, grave, immense, and clear,
Overlooks our ship whose wake
Lingers undistorted on
Sea and silence; I look back
For the last time as the sun
Sets behind that island where
All our loves were altered: yes,
My prediction came to pass,
Yet I am not justified,
And I weep but not with pride.
Not in me the credit for
Words I uttered long ago
Whose glad meaning I betrayed;
Truths to-day admitted, owe
Nothing to the councilor
In whose booming eloquence
Honesty became untrue.
Am I not Gonzalo who
By his self-reflection made
Consolation an offence?
There was nothing to explain:
Had I trusted the Absurd
And straightforward note by note
Sung exactly what I heard,
Such immediate delight
Would have taken there and then
Our common welkin by surprise,
All would have begun to dance
Jigs of self-deliverance.
It was I prevented this,
Jealous of my native ear,
Mine the art which made the song
Sound ridiculous and wrong,
I whose interference broke
The gallop into jog-trot prose
And by speculation froze
Vision into an idea,
Irony into a joke,
Till I stood convicted of
Doubt and insufficient love.
Farewell, dear island of our wreck:
All have been restored to health,
All have seen the Commonwealth,
There is nothing to forgive.
Since a storm’s decision gave
His subjective passion back
To a meditative man,
Even reminiscence can
Comfort ambient troubles like
Some ruined tower by the sea
Whence boyhoods growing and afraid
Learn a formula they need
In solving their mortality,
Even rusting flesh can be
A simple locus now, a bell
The Already There can lay
Hands on if at any time
It should feel inclined to say
To the lonely – “Here I am,”
To the anxious – “All is well.”
I was actually very surprised when I discovered this week that Carvel Ice Cream wasn’t a small, local chain that inhabited only my native Long Island. I hadn’t heard word one about Carvel since I was a kid; I always assumed that the strange, ubiquitous TV and radio ads for “Cookie Puss” and “Fudgie the Whale” were strictly a New York thing. But there were 865 stores throughout the United States in 1985; my friend in Texas even recognized the name.
I think my confusion is easy to understand, considering the weird ads that I mentioned above. The first thing that most people remember about Carvel usually isn’t the chain’s crude looking novelty ice cream cakes. The first thing they remember is founder Tom Carvel’s voice, which you can hear in the videos below. It … did not please the ear. Polite people almost always describe it as “gravelly;” the less charitable remember it with descriptors such as “phlegm-filled.”
The latter folks are not wrong. Seriously. I cringed when I heard it as a kid, no matter how much I loved the store’s wares. (And I did love it; it was an absolute treat when my parents took me there.) It sounded like a man dying of a chest cold was trying to sell me ice cream. I even remember my parents talking about it.
Carvel was a independent personality who insisted on recording the ads himself since 1955, and he recorded them unrehearsed — even going so far as to set up a production studio at his company’s headquarters, according to Wikipedia. Carvel Ice Cream was a true small-business success story, and many credit the brand’s popularity with Carvel’s extemporized, conversational voiceovers — even if they were awkward.
And that kind of makes sense. The commercials were memorable. Maybe the owner’s voice evoked images of Stephen King’s superflu in “The Stand,” but that didn’t dissuade you from visiting a store for its trademark soft-serve ice cream. (You figured he wasn’t actually working the counter, where he could cough into your dessert.)
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 