Invisible Threads

Through the fifteenth century, the people of the Thrace used the phrase, "keeping Hosmer's contacts away" as an idiom meaning "good luck."

The quotation above comes from the impressive "A Paragraph About Eric Hosmer Written in the Style of The Golden Bough" at Royals Review, a stylistic exploration of the rituals that define the spiritual life of the typical Royals fan.

I once read the first sixty pages of The Golden Bough. While the work is entrancing, and sort of hypnotically cumulative in its effect, and as deft at building apparent spiritual lineages as Chuck Klosterman when he crafts his pop cultural hierarchies today, I was ultimately stymied by that very density--which read, at times, like a diabtribe from a Monster® energy drink-fueled caller to Coast to Coast AM--and the highly problematic debasement of entire groups of normal human beings to which Will, the author of the very clever and amusing post, alludes.

The appeal of The Golden Bough is its unapologetic conviction that there are threads that connect societies and cultures across time and geography, that there are traits that we share because we are the same. This conviction drives Pitchers & Poets, too, that these invisible threads a) exist and b) are worth stringing out as far as they will go.

[caption id="attachment_2658" align="aligncenter" width="481" caption="Eric Hosmer, The Golden Boy"][/caption]