Why do people continue to listen to and create new myths? What purpose do these stories serve? The ancient civilization made myths to explain the universe none of them could understand. That’s not to say they were stupid. These early civilizations laid the roots of our modern day culture and established the primary principals in law, math, science and medicine. We stand on the shoulders of their work. But advances in l...
My husband loves to read the comics. While I was raised to believe cartoons were simultaneously the lowest form of art and literature, they helped him learn how to read. Before the Internet, he read the comics page before he read anything else in the paper. Now he follows them online. One strip, Mom’s Cancer, has made such an impact on him that I got him the complete graphic novel but I wasn’t going r...
Certain literary academic types like to search for the roots of stories. Get a bunch of them together and pretty soon you’ll start hearing terms like “origin myth” and “archetype” being bandied about. (Well, that’s what you hear when you serve them tea and coffee. Serve booze and you may get something entirely different) That’s because these thinkers spend a lot of their lives trying to und...
My cat died yesterday. In a world where terrorists gleefully bomb capital cities and spree killers ruin communities with a single gun clip, this seems like such a small event, I almost hesitate to mention it. A cat’s death, what’s a cat’s death, occurring (as it did) on Good Friday? A large percentage of the earth was already mourning a man who changed much of civilization. So, from one point of...
According the calendar, it’s Springtime at last, although my thermometer begs to differ. Well, I don’t depend on the weather to foretell the seasons. I have television for that, or at least I used to. Once upon a time I reckoned summer by the return of Mad Men and knew fall was coming when Sleepy Hollow reappeared. I could count on spending the coldest weeks of winter with the Crawley family at ...