In an unprecedented emergency press conference this morning, Adam Newman, head of research at the Anthropological Publishers Experimental Society (APES), announced the startling new discovery of a genetic link between editors and Neanderthals which suggests the possibility that editors might indeed be somewhat human.

“It’s a major breakthrough,” said Newman, "that sheds light on the evolution of the publishing industry as a whole.”

According to scientists at APES, editors may have human ancestry despite the fact that they have been thought to be reptiles since the advent of the printing press.

“We have discovered a defective 'L'-gene ― the all-but-lethal 'literacy gene' ― in the chromosomes of virtually all extant and non-extant editors,” said Lucy Altamira, head of APES public relations department.

Altamira explained that the chromosomes from a random sample of wild editors were analyzed in a controlled study that has been ongoing (though top secret) for a decade.  During her discourse, however, a frenzied feral editor attacked from behind the bushes — muttering that “this experiment is nonsense promulgated by ignoramuses.”  The suspect was immediately subdued by APES security officers who couldn’t read or write so they had to draw the summons in pictographs.

Newman apologized for the interruption and, while Altamira was being treated for shock, illiteracy was firmly re-established in the kingdom.

Meanwhile a barbarous band of editorial assistants and staff-writers intent upon destroying all evidence of the Editor/Hominid study stormed APES archives so as to reinstate the popular notion that editors are snakes.

Later, revolting editors demanded an immediate retraction of what they called ‘pseudo-scientific rubbish' warning that all APES personnel would have to submit poetry in hieroglyphics to respected literary magazines only to receive rejection notices more than six months later.  The mandate further stipulated that submissions by those who didn’t follow the 'guidelines' would be immediately thrown into the recycle bin without being reviewed.

At this point the reporter (that’s me) must stop reporting; he is afraid he’ll be apprehended in the very act of writing (now banned as per martial law) by the quite-intoxicated rioting factions of the literary and less-than-literary communities who have altogether lost sensibility (and inhibition) and are jointly celebrating their rather questionable accomplishments at APES headquarters in the dark and dank tunnels beneath the Library at Lascaux.

At last report Newman and Altamira left the party early evidently to continue their research.

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Despite that alarming news all is well at Verse-Virtual.  I am pleased with the statistics; our site is getting more and more visitors from almost every part of the globe.  We are also making headway in turning THIS into more than just a literary journal.  People are beginning to communicate. Writers are writing to writers. I hope that readers will join the conversation. It's a way of opening doors.  Making friends even. Try it and discover one way that the Internet offers new dimension to the literary magazine model.

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It is interesting to note at this time of year the birthday of American poet Marianne Moore on November 15, 1887.   Perhaps Moore's most well-known line is, 'I, too, dislike it' ― about poetry ― from her famous poem, Poetry, which she composed in 1919 and revised many times during her life. Moore died on February 5, 1972.

Respectfully submitted,

Firestone Feinberg
November 2014