I Always Liked His Stories for Boys

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!
-Rudyard Kipling, “If”

Via Herr Strauss

Dana Gioia in a recent Hudson Review

“The most significant fact about the new popular poetry is that it is predominantly oral. The poet and audience usually communicate without the mediation of a text. Rap is performed aloud to an elaborate, sampled rhythm track. Cowboy poetry is traditionally recited from memory. Poetry slams consist of live performance — sometimes from a text, more often from memory. To literary people whose notion of poetry has been shaped by print culture, this oral mode of transmission probably seems both strikingly primitive and alarmingly contemporary. It hearkens back to poetry’s origins as an oral art form in preliterate cultures, and it suggests how television, telephones, recordings, and radio have brought most Americans — consciously or unconsciously — into a new form of oral culture.”

me talking: I think this is perhaps one of the most significant unstated problems that I have had with relating to pop culture - the contrast between print culture and oral culture.

How do I build this up to anything better than it already is? clickety-click

I discover Antithesis

Even though I have been seeing a link to it for months, I only just visited the site Antithesis today. It appears to have good articles and discussions, but what hooked me was the community section. I first poked my nose into the gallery, where I found the Communique. This is a digital literary and arts journal, and I find it to be much better than my usual Atlanta reading, Erato. I found in Communique a sampling of the works of G. Carol Bomer. I saw Mrs. Bomer’s works in a gallery at Christ Church Presbyterian, Atlanta. Mrs. Bomer’s central work that night was Be Lifted Up O Sacred Doors. I find her work to be very interesting and thought-provoking, though I’m not wholly reconciled to her mediums. She does seem to have a solid doctrine of Christian art, and I should like to try to see her lecture in Athens this fall - Oct. 19 in the Sanctuary at the Portico. We’ll see.

My mind races. I think: a bomb? A knife? A balloon filled with narcotics? But no. I don’t own any of those things. “Sunglasses,” I say. “Maybe my cell phone?”