Walter Fox

Poem by Bruce Johnson

Black bird struttin’ by the road,
your wing’s draggin’.
you’re still proud.
what now black bird?
you still know the sentinel calls.
no use.
will you strut your heart stopt?
will the black bird that animates you
whip off?
away?
marry a chink in the sky?
will your bird folk render a moonless night
palpable:
say all the black
words
name the corn,
the carrion,
the black berries that enjoyed your
stomach,
the
what
it
was
that
lived
for
you?

Let's imagine that the war is over!

I'd like to write a stream-of-consciousness passage but have no impetus to do so, no jazz up my sleeve, no will that needs to be bent along the river lines of interior thought & language, language that doesn't belong there: what of it? "legally": My mind is blank. I feel idiocized by our country's leadership. I have been reasoning all day and all during a week of pitiful anxiety -- anxiety over anxiousness itself, nervous itch to be a body -- reading in Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours about women as domesticated animals -- that the end of the war will come as a relief to us. This is the 200th entry at Ana Verse.

Literary criticism at weblogs

There is an article by Sven Birkerts about various things business and internet, including remarks by Cynthia Ozick, at boston.com called "Lost in the Blogosphere: Why literary blogging won't save our literary culture." He writes, "So far it's clear that the blogosphere is in vital ways still predatory on print, that the daisy-chain needs the pretext of some original daisy; its genius, its essence, is manifestly supplementary."

"The controversy has to do with the fact that people in various quarters, literary bloggers prominently among them, are proposing that old-style print reviewing -- the word-count-driven evaluation of select titles by credentialed reviewers -- is outmoded, and that the deficit will be more than made up by the now-flourishing blog commentary."

Long before the internet, I worked at a regional upstate New York newspaper in the 1980s. I edited wire. There was little in the way of book reviewing at that paper, and the books that came in for review -- in case there were someone to review them -- were of little significance. They were chunks of thinly sliced lumber. In defending print culture and credentials, Birkerts doesn't mention books like that or newspapers that already lacked arts coverage. The newspaper's readers were "ordinary folks" who presumably didn't read many books.

Most of us in the literary blogosphere read both print and on the internet and are saddened at the loss of traditional business at newspapers that Birkerts regrets. Birkerts seems to imagine a flourishing blogosphere of talkers who tend not to read books, but who "review" books. It is my impression that many of us in the literary blogosphere are in print, and many are trained. The issue he doesn't mention is pay: how to do it? I have thought that a genius for our time will be someone who invents a way.

According to Birkerts, Ozick has commented in Harper's that she would like to see the literary culture become a culture of criticism.

"What is needed," Ozick writes, "is a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics, of the kind of criticism that can define, or prompt, or inspire, or at least intuit, what is happening in a culture in a given time frame. . . . In this there is something almost ceremonial, or ceremoniously slow: unhurried thinking, the ripened long (or sidewise) view, the gradualism of nuance."

Blogs have been a forgotten art form from the beginning, but they are serving a crucial role in keeping inquiry afloat. I anticipate a big wave of literary print elite writers who are coming to the internet, who will be agented there, who will not have created the internet, who are not technically-oriented, and who will, in effect, take over with their more prodigious talents and their headshots, whose publishing sponsors will charge. Shall we become their literary critics? Shall we gossip about them?

Or be our own sponsors & enjoy a lighter life.

Wisdom of Dr. Abraham Low

"Whether you are right or wrong is immaterial. Temper is a matter of breeding, not of right and wrong."

"With us in Recovery it is an axiom that while a nervous ailment is not necessarily caused by distorted beliefs, nevertheless, if it persists beyond a reasonable time, its continuance, stubbornness and 'resistance' are produced by continuing, stubborn and 'resisting' beliefs."

"Humans have never been known to endorse themselves as they should."

"With reference to his symptoms a nervous patient must be genuine in feeling and sincere in thought."

"I can't tell you not to feel provoked. I may tell you that I have a great capacity for feeling provoked about every few minutes, but I hope I have an equally great capacity, and perhaps a trifling greater capacity, to hold down the feeling of being provoked."

"Patients who suffer from a depression think that whatever they do is wrong. They think whatever they have done in the past is wrong, and they recount past misdemeanors and so-called delinquencies, which have perhaps some basis in fact but are monstrously exaggerated. And you understand that such patients categorically deny that there is anything right in their thinking."

"A sense of humor is the sovereign means for curing nervous conditions."

"My purpose in life is to make myself and those people that are close to me -- let me say the members of my family, my friends, my neighbors, and so forth, my co-workers -- make them feel good and to make myself feel good."

"Nervous patients tend to be extremists with regard to their symptoms when they are still sick and with regard to the practice of rules after they have improved."

Selections from Dr. Low's Works
© 1997 By Phyllis Low Berning and Marilyn Low Schmitt
The Wisdom of Dr. Low is compiled by Cliff Brown and edited by Marilyn Low Schmitt.

Ornamental Pepper