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May. 2nd, 2020 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Jupiter Came Like a Wrecking Ball and Paved the Way for Earth
2. You can now download over 200 Art Books from the Guggenheim for Free
3. Department of Defense Isn't Admitting that Aliens Exist but They Apparently Don't Mind that You Check Out Their Sweet Rides
Personally I agree with Mark Hamil on Twitter, it looks like a Tie Fighter or an old Atari version of taking out Tie Fighters.
Also this information was already released, the fact that it's official...is kind of irrelevant at the moment. But good try Federal Government in attempting to distract the news media from the Coronavirus.
4. The Rise of Valkaries - why were the heroes who chose a warriors fate female?
5. Debunking Campbell and Jung's The Hero's Journey or Hero of a Thousand Faces
* Eight Reasons Why the Heroes Journey Sucks
* Why I Seldom Teach The Hero's Journey
* Is the Monomyth a Myth
The most recent Star Wars movie has revived discussion about the franchise’s supposed mythological-legendary structures, particularly regarding George Lucas’s reliance on the idea of the “monomyth” as popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I must admit that I have never found Campbell to be a very impressive intellectual. Ancient myth has long fascinated me, but the Jungian appropriation of these stories always felt like a cheap way of legitimizing that particular philosophy of the human mind. At its best, the monomyth feels like a curious theory of comparative religion; at its worst, it may be an excuse Dr. Campbell concocted to justify his apostasy from the Catholic Faith. Or maybe it’s just academic fraud.
Let’s begin!
Campbell, like so many Freudians, Jungians, and comparative religionists before him, reduces religion to a set of taboos concocted via the irrational movements of the unconscious interacting with waking society. Similarly, he believes that “myth” is an outworking of individual dreams as shared between dreamers and elaborated upon over time. The “monomyth” is Campbell’s attempt at tossing all heroic stories together to find their common core.
This supposed common core is surprisingly complicated. Mircea Eliade’s description of the heroic trope is much simpler and comprehensible, comparing it to the solar cycle: “Like the sun, he fights darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges victorious” (The Sacred and the Profane, 157-8). Campbell is not content with something so clean, and provides an elaborate, seventeen-step framework that can supposedly be found in heroic myths throughout the world:
Departure (i. The Call to Adventure, ii. Refusal of the Call, iii. Supernatural Aid, iv. Crossing the Threshold, v. Belly of the Whale)
Initiation (vi. The Road of Trials, vii. The Meeting with the Goddess, viii. Woman as Temptress, ix. Atonement with the Father, x. Apotheosis, xi. The Ultimate Boon)
Return (xii. Refusal of the Return, xiii. The Magic Flight, xiv. Rescue from Without, xv. The Crossing of the Return Threshold, xvi. Master of Two Worlds, xvii. Freedom to Live)
(From “Action Philosophers”)
The problem with this 17-Step Program to Heroic Success is that it cannot really be found in any heroic myths in its fullness before Campbell’s book. Examples from specific steps can be found in stories throughout the world, but even Campbell seems unable to provide even one example of a heroic story that uses this entire framework. Many of the stories Campbell references are merely useful for one or two steps, and it’s only by referencing larger mythological libraries (like the total mythic tradition of the Greeks) that he can find enough material to fill in the gaps.
In other words, Campbell invented the seventeen-step framework and selectively picked fragments from many myths and legends to fit into his preconceived model. He does come close to admitting this deficiency a few times, for instance:
Many tales isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two of the typical elements of the full cycle (test motif, flight motif, abduction of the bride), others string a number of independent cycles into a single series (as in the Odyssey). Differing characters or episodes can become fused, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear under many changes. (Hero, 212)
That fact is that myths, even heroic myths, are far less neat and structured than the monomyth theory would lead one to believe. The search for the monomyth is something like the physicist’s search for the Grand Unified Theory, and just as successful. Describing the “hero’s journey” in any but the broadest terms is bound to lead to pedantry and logical fallacies, carts before horses and tails wagging dogs.
* Trouble in Mythland - Campbell and Moyers
I actually agree with all of the above. I remember getting really annoyed that whenever I looked into how to write a synopsis of a book that I was working on - I'd get an outline of the heroes journey from some third rate English Lit Professor amateur mythologist - as if my plot synopsis had to automatically fall within that frame work and if it didn't there was something wrong. (It never did. Not all stories fall within that story-framework. The only ones that do are rather simplistic stories. The more interesting and complex tales did not.)
Also, a bit of honesty here? I couldn't get through Campbell's books. I tried, but I disagreed with a lot of his analysis and found a lot of it to be generalization - not helped by the fact that various folks on the Buffy Boards, who were of scholary persuasion and from other countries, hated him with a blind passion. I bought all of them while I was analyzing Buffy in the 90s, and recalled why I didn't use them at all in my undergrad minor - Epic Myth and Folklore. The reason was simple, it wasn't supported by actual mythologists, anthropologists and folklorists.
But I tried. Then I think I got rid of all of the books. Can't remember.
6. Umbert Eco's Antilibrary - why unread books are more valuable to our lives than read ones?
Reassuring if you are like me and have published a largely unread book.
It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge — our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge — like we cling to life itself.
And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable. The great E.F. Schumacher captured this strange dynamic in the concept of adaequatio — the notion that “the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.” But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable?
That’s what Lebanese-American scholar, statistician, and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (public library) — an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.
7. Okay, I keep ignoring it, but it keeps appearing on my feed and I just can't avoid any longer... Inside the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Nightmare Voyage - does validate my reasons for not taking cruises.
I have a feeling that cruises may be a thing of the past? And travel may become either ridiculously expensive or very cheap.
They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess—a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.
The Four Amigos, as a pair of American couples called themselves, skipped the champagne waterfall, which happens on almost every Princess Cruises excursion. The 60-something traveling companions had seen it before on their annual cruises together. They were happy to turn in early for the evening, thankful for this two-week break from their busy lives. Carl and Jeri Goldman run a mom-and-pop radio station that broadcasts local news and high school sports to a suburb of Los Angeles. Mark and Jerri Jorgensen oversee a rehabilitation center that specializes in pornography addiction in the red rocks of St. George, Utah. This year especially they needed the respite of the cruise. Recently, Jeri Goldman’s father had died; Carl had struggled with his health. None of them had been paying much attention to the news as they flew to Japan to board the ship. When they landed in Tokyo, Carl noticed an abnormal number of people wearing face masks, but he thought little of it.
Indeed, for the first four days, there seemed to be nothing amiss as the 18-story ocean liner powered south through the East China Sea. As it did, the ship’s 2,666 guests luxuriated in a dozen or so different restaurants, a multitude of bars and nightclubs, four pools, a spa, a casino, and more. All the while, an army of more than a thousand crew members stood ready to gratify their every whim.
Five days into the voyage, the ship docked in Hong Kong, and as the Four Amigos disembarked, health officials scanned their foreheads for fever with thermometer guns. Apparently, a mysterious virus was scything through mainland China. At first the People’s Republic had attempted to cover up the flu-like disease, but things had gotten so bad that in the industrial city of Wuhan, nearly 600 miles north, some 11 million people were being quarantined and local hospitals were bursting with casualties. In Hong Kong, so far, the response was modest. Foreigners were being screened at the ports, schools were suspended, and several Lunar New Year events had been canceled. But as the Four Amigos toured the city and watched a light show dazzle the city’s skyline, the throngs weren’t noticeably diminished. After all, you couldn’t halt life.
For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first third of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with the coronavirus.
When the ship was two days away from returning home to Yokohama, a typo-riddled email from a Hong Kong port agent arrived in the inboxes of cruise line personnel, alerting them to the danger that had been found: “Would kindly inform the ship related parties and do the necessary disinfection in needed. Many thanks!”
Officials at Princess Cruises say the company had learned of the infected passenger hours earlier, when they were tipped off by a news report. Before long, they received another, clearer warning, this one sent by an epidemiologist from the government of Hong Kong. But seemingly nothing was done aboard the ship that aroused the concern of most passengers, including the Four Amigos. Cruise line officials maintain that the day after the ship received the first warning, its crew began sanitizing public areas more frequently, put out extra hand sanitizer, and switched buffet utensils more often.
8. My new discovery...Fiona Apple's new album and this song in particular..
Relay
2. You can now download over 200 Art Books from the Guggenheim for Free
3. Department of Defense Isn't Admitting that Aliens Exist but They Apparently Don't Mind that You Check Out Their Sweet Rides
Personally I agree with Mark Hamil on Twitter, it looks like a Tie Fighter or an old Atari version of taking out Tie Fighters.
Also this information was already released, the fact that it's official...is kind of irrelevant at the moment. But good try Federal Government in attempting to distract the news media from the Coronavirus.
4. The Rise of Valkaries - why were the heroes who chose a warriors fate female?
5. Debunking Campbell and Jung's The Hero's Journey or Hero of a Thousand Faces
* Eight Reasons Why the Heroes Journey Sucks
* Why I Seldom Teach The Hero's Journey
* Is the Monomyth a Myth
The most recent Star Wars movie has revived discussion about the franchise’s supposed mythological-legendary structures, particularly regarding George Lucas’s reliance on the idea of the “monomyth” as popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I must admit that I have never found Campbell to be a very impressive intellectual. Ancient myth has long fascinated me, but the Jungian appropriation of these stories always felt like a cheap way of legitimizing that particular philosophy of the human mind. At its best, the monomyth feels like a curious theory of comparative religion; at its worst, it may be an excuse Dr. Campbell concocted to justify his apostasy from the Catholic Faith. Or maybe it’s just academic fraud.
Let’s begin!
Campbell, like so many Freudians, Jungians, and comparative religionists before him, reduces religion to a set of taboos concocted via the irrational movements of the unconscious interacting with waking society. Similarly, he believes that “myth” is an outworking of individual dreams as shared between dreamers and elaborated upon over time. The “monomyth” is Campbell’s attempt at tossing all heroic stories together to find their common core.
This supposed common core is surprisingly complicated. Mircea Eliade’s description of the heroic trope is much simpler and comprehensible, comparing it to the solar cycle: “Like the sun, he fights darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges victorious” (The Sacred and the Profane, 157-8). Campbell is not content with something so clean, and provides an elaborate, seventeen-step framework that can supposedly be found in heroic myths throughout the world:
Departure (i. The Call to Adventure, ii. Refusal of the Call, iii. Supernatural Aid, iv. Crossing the Threshold, v. Belly of the Whale)
Initiation (vi. The Road of Trials, vii. The Meeting with the Goddess, viii. Woman as Temptress, ix. Atonement with the Father, x. Apotheosis, xi. The Ultimate Boon)
Return (xii. Refusal of the Return, xiii. The Magic Flight, xiv. Rescue from Without, xv. The Crossing of the Return Threshold, xvi. Master of Two Worlds, xvii. Freedom to Live)
(From “Action Philosophers”)
The problem with this 17-Step Program to Heroic Success is that it cannot really be found in any heroic myths in its fullness before Campbell’s book. Examples from specific steps can be found in stories throughout the world, but even Campbell seems unable to provide even one example of a heroic story that uses this entire framework. Many of the stories Campbell references are merely useful for one or two steps, and it’s only by referencing larger mythological libraries (like the total mythic tradition of the Greeks) that he can find enough material to fill in the gaps.
In other words, Campbell invented the seventeen-step framework and selectively picked fragments from many myths and legends to fit into his preconceived model. He does come close to admitting this deficiency a few times, for instance:
Many tales isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two of the typical elements of the full cycle (test motif, flight motif, abduction of the bride), others string a number of independent cycles into a single series (as in the Odyssey). Differing characters or episodes can become fused, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear under many changes. (Hero, 212)
That fact is that myths, even heroic myths, are far less neat and structured than the monomyth theory would lead one to believe. The search for the monomyth is something like the physicist’s search for the Grand Unified Theory, and just as successful. Describing the “hero’s journey” in any but the broadest terms is bound to lead to pedantry and logical fallacies, carts before horses and tails wagging dogs.
* Trouble in Mythland - Campbell and Moyers
I actually agree with all of the above. I remember getting really annoyed that whenever I looked into how to write a synopsis of a book that I was working on - I'd get an outline of the heroes journey from some third rate English Lit Professor amateur mythologist - as if my plot synopsis had to automatically fall within that frame work and if it didn't there was something wrong. (It never did. Not all stories fall within that story-framework. The only ones that do are rather simplistic stories. The more interesting and complex tales did not.)
Also, a bit of honesty here? I couldn't get through Campbell's books. I tried, but I disagreed with a lot of his analysis and found a lot of it to be generalization - not helped by the fact that various folks on the Buffy Boards, who were of scholary persuasion and from other countries, hated him with a blind passion. I bought all of them while I was analyzing Buffy in the 90s, and recalled why I didn't use them at all in my undergrad minor - Epic Myth and Folklore. The reason was simple, it wasn't supported by actual mythologists, anthropologists and folklorists.
But I tried. Then I think I got rid of all of the books. Can't remember.
6. Umbert Eco's Antilibrary - why unread books are more valuable to our lives than read ones?
Reassuring if you are like me and have published a largely unread book.
It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge — our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge — like we cling to life itself.
And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable. The great E.F. Schumacher captured this strange dynamic in the concept of adaequatio — the notion that “the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.” But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable?
That’s what Lebanese-American scholar, statistician, and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (public library) — an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.
7. Okay, I keep ignoring it, but it keeps appearing on my feed and I just can't avoid any longer... Inside the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Nightmare Voyage - does validate my reasons for not taking cruises.
I have a feeling that cruises may be a thing of the past? And travel may become either ridiculously expensive or very cheap.
They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess—a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.
The Four Amigos, as a pair of American couples called themselves, skipped the champagne waterfall, which happens on almost every Princess Cruises excursion. The 60-something traveling companions had seen it before on their annual cruises together. They were happy to turn in early for the evening, thankful for this two-week break from their busy lives. Carl and Jeri Goldman run a mom-and-pop radio station that broadcasts local news and high school sports to a suburb of Los Angeles. Mark and Jerri Jorgensen oversee a rehabilitation center that specializes in pornography addiction in the red rocks of St. George, Utah. This year especially they needed the respite of the cruise. Recently, Jeri Goldman’s father had died; Carl had struggled with his health. None of them had been paying much attention to the news as they flew to Japan to board the ship. When they landed in Tokyo, Carl noticed an abnormal number of people wearing face masks, but he thought little of it.
Indeed, for the first four days, there seemed to be nothing amiss as the 18-story ocean liner powered south through the East China Sea. As it did, the ship’s 2,666 guests luxuriated in a dozen or so different restaurants, a multitude of bars and nightclubs, four pools, a spa, a casino, and more. All the while, an army of more than a thousand crew members stood ready to gratify their every whim.
Five days into the voyage, the ship docked in Hong Kong, and as the Four Amigos disembarked, health officials scanned their foreheads for fever with thermometer guns. Apparently, a mysterious virus was scything through mainland China. At first the People’s Republic had attempted to cover up the flu-like disease, but things had gotten so bad that in the industrial city of Wuhan, nearly 600 miles north, some 11 million people were being quarantined and local hospitals were bursting with casualties. In Hong Kong, so far, the response was modest. Foreigners were being screened at the ports, schools were suspended, and several Lunar New Year events had been canceled. But as the Four Amigos toured the city and watched a light show dazzle the city’s skyline, the throngs weren’t noticeably diminished. After all, you couldn’t halt life.
For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first third of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with the coronavirus.
When the ship was two days away from returning home to Yokohama, a typo-riddled email from a Hong Kong port agent arrived in the inboxes of cruise line personnel, alerting them to the danger that had been found: “Would kindly inform the ship related parties and do the necessary disinfection in needed. Many thanks!”
Officials at Princess Cruises say the company had learned of the infected passenger hours earlier, when they were tipped off by a news report. Before long, they received another, clearer warning, this one sent by an epidemiologist from the government of Hong Kong. But seemingly nothing was done aboard the ship that aroused the concern of most passengers, including the Four Amigos. Cruise line officials maintain that the day after the ship received the first warning, its crew began sanitizing public areas more frequently, put out extra hand sanitizer, and switched buffet utensils more often.
8. My new discovery...Fiona Apple's new album and this song in particular..
Relay
no subject
Date: 2020-05-04 02:09 am (UTC)Very weird article.
If it weren't for the NY Governor's live broadcasts and his emails, I'd lose all hope in humanity. He has six states coordinating a game plan - the Northeast is collaborating on supplies to fend off the second wave. But the South Eastern US and Federal Government, I have major issues with.