Twenty-five years ago, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell filmed a groundbreaking series that opened the world of myth, story, and folklore to a large audience. The Power of Myth series was completed in 1987, shortly before Campbell died at the age of 83. It aired the following year on PBS, and you still sometimes find it replayed during pledge drives. The companion DVD set and book are still in print.
If you’ve never seen this series – or even if you have – grab some popcorn and fire it up on your largest monitor. This wonderful introduction to key stories from around the world was filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. Lucas was a serious student of Campbell, who structured the first Starwars trilogy around the hero myth.
Almost anything I have to say about myth and folklore is influenced by Campbell. In these final interviews, he distills a lifetime of study into a clear but powerful series of tales and observations that forever changes one’s view of the great stories of humankind.
I’m in the middle of a compelling book I know I’ll discuss when I finish, Andrew Bacevich’s 2008, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. I don’t read all that fast, and there is so much to consider here that it will be a few days, but tonight I took a break to cruise around a bit, and I found a fun and interesting music poll on NPR.
It’s old news, really – it was posted a week ago, but there’s no clear time limit on this one. Questions of taste and why certain pieces of music move us were posed in a recent article in The Guardian by Oxford professor and musicologist, Eric Clarke. The Guardian has launched a website, “Six Songs of Me,” to map as many personal playlists as possible. You can access the NPR story and the Guardian site here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/08/08/158442642/you-are-what-you-hear-what-your-favorite-music-says-about-you
A followup piece on NPR today covered some of the thousands of responses received, which range from serious to funny. For instance, in the category of “What would you want played at your funeral?” one person answered, “Stayin Alive,” and another, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”
Here is the poll along with my answers. Please feel free to list your songs in comments here as well as on the website. Music is such an important and personal thing to so many, but it’s also fun to share.
What was the first song you ever bought?
El Paso by Marty Robbins
What song always gets you dancing?
Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits
What song takes you back to your childhood?
Medicine Wheel by Kate Wolf
What is your perfect love song?
Wedding Song by Bob Dylan
What song would you want at your funeral?
Barricades of Heaven by Jackson Browne
Time for an encore. One last song that makes you, you.
Box of Rain by the Grateful Dead
Meanwhile, this whole exercise brought to mind an exceptional clip of my choice for category two. This may be my favorite YouTube clip of all time – Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton doing Sultans of Swing at the 1988 celebration of Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday. You absolutely cannot sit still when you hear this. Enjoy!
Half the storefronts are empty in Chambers, Ohio. Abandoned steel mills stand as silent monuments to a past that will never return. Two brothers, Kent and Adam Austin, work in two of the biggest industries that remain in the town – high school football and bail bonds. Their careers, like most everything else in their lives, were defined the night someone kidnapped and murdered their sister when the three of them were in high school.
The brothers have hardly spoken during the 22 years since their sister was taken. Kent is a local hero, a winning football coach and a man of faith, who talks of God and family to murderers in his prison ministry. Adam drinks too much, aches for revenge, and lives so close to the Chambers criminal element that differences often blur.
A man who calls himself “the prophet” slips into town. His passion is murder and something more: “Bring him the hopeful and he will leave them hopeless. Bring him the strong and he will leave them broken. Bring him the full and he will leave them empty.” When a 17 year old girl is murdered, one whose faith Kent had tried to nurture, both brothers understand that that the killing is personal. Someone has come to town to rip the old wound open and threaten them with new ones.
Michael Koryta (pronounced koo-ree-ta) decided he wanted to be a crime novelist at the age of 16. While still in high school he interned with a private detective. His first novel, Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004) won the St. Martin’s Press/PWA Best First Novel prize before he was 21. He had four more crime novels under his belt when he took a stunning turn by injecting supernatural elements into his thriller, So Cold the River (2010), which I reviewed here http://wp.me/pYql4-8W. He followed this up with two more books in the same vein, The Cypress Househttp://wp.me/pYql4-xF and The Ridge in 2011.
The Prophet has no overt ghosts, though people are haunted, and Adam regularly talks with his dead sister. The prophet is flesh and blood, but his menace lurks in every shadow. The “un-natural” and the “super-natural” are so “natural” in Michael Koryta’s novels that his evil terrifies more than it does in most horror stories. We never know much about the killer, but we do see, in his memory, his methodical method of stalking and killing a bird when he was 11. That’s enough to make him more chilling than Count Dracula.
In crossing genre boundaries at will, Koryta’s new book delves deeper into the 21st century human condition than mystery and horror novels usually do. A chill wind blows through this rust belt town, under gray and threatening skies, as well meaning men and women find redemption and renewal elusive – and yet, heroism, loyalty, faith, and family all matter. As the high school football players learn, you get back on your feet and back into the line because there is nothing else you can do.
There are very, very few authors whose books I will buy they day they come out. There are few books these days that I find I cannot put down. Once again, Michael Koryta did not disappoint. I downloaded The Prophet the morning it came on line and put everything else on hold until I had finished. You may well find yourself doing the same.
Here is a recent interview in which the author discusses The Prophet:
Since Adam found and followed this list, I thought I’d let him introduce the results with his take on them. As he did, I thought the final selections made a lot of sense – more than I had initially expected. Enjoy!
So a while ago I had this post where I first talked about NPR’s summer poll where they were looking for the top 100 Teen Novels. Well, they’ve finished tallying up all the votes and their final list is up. Here’s a link to the list, and here are my thoughts about it. (I’m not going to talk about every book, just some of them. I’m also going to include links to those books that I have reviews for if you’re interested and haven’t read them. For a series the link will be to the review of the first book unless otherwise noted.)
Lets start at the top. Not surprisingly, The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling took the number one place on the list. And I couldn’t agree more, I’ve said before that I think this is one of the most important series of books to come out…
It’s so easy to get caught up in negativity. Sometimes all it takes is a quick scan of the paper or a click on a topical websites to make the world seem full of scallawags and scoundrels. This summer, however, I was privileged to meet a towering figure of moral courage.
His Eminence Choden Rinpoche was born in eastern Tibet in 1933. At the age of three, he was recognized as the reincarnation of a previous master, and he took novice ordination vows at seven. He chose not to flee Tibet after the Chinese takeover, and beginning in 1965, during the cultural revolution, Rinpoche spent 19 years in seclusion, living in a windowless basement room at a cousin’s house in Lhasa.
During the cultural revolution, thousands of monasteries were destroyed and more than a million people, especially lamas, monks, and nuns were imprisoned. When the Chinese burst into his room unannounced at various times of the day or night, they never found any incriminating evidence of religious activity – no texts or even prayer beads. He was able to hide in plain sight because they thought him an invalid.
Like other spiritual giants – Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King – Choden Rinpoche used his time in what amounted to a cell to deepen his practice. From memory and imagination, he recited texts and performed rituals he had learned, internalizing Buddhist philosophy.
“From the point of view of spiritual practice, there was great accomplishment in living as I did…If I had gone with the Chinese, I would have received a house, a car and high rank, but I would have had to harm people and cause much suffering…I didn’t have to experience any of this. These were the advantages of living as I did.” – from a pamphlet published by Ananda Dharma Center, San Jose, CA, 2012.
In 1985, Rinpoche was able to leave for India, and he has been teaching around the world since then. I was a beneficiary this summer and attended a very special series of teachings he gave at his US home, the Ananda Dharma Center in San Jose. http://anandadharma.org
On July 28, I went to the final event of the summer, a long-life puja for Rinpoche. It’s a beautiful ceremony in which students, friends, and other lamas essentially ask him to stick around in his present incarnation as long as possible. Choden Rinpoche is a Tulku, a word for those believed to be able to chose the time and place of their next birth. For the rest of us, the puja is a way of saying, “Hang on – don’t leave yet!”
Rinpoche has had trouble with his knee. On Thursday, he flew to Taiwan where some of his students are doctors. Today he undergoes knee replacement surgery. Friends and students around the world are sending prayers and good wishes in his direction. With that in mind, I decided to write that post, knowing even as I did so, that I am really the one it benefits.
Like his friend, the Dalai Lama, Choden Rinpoche’s mind is always fixed on what’s beneficial. Some of the rest of us (meaning me) have to rely on the inspiration of people like this to bring unruly thoughts back to what really matters.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to see analogies between our current situation and ancient Rome. In a recent NPR interview, Anthony Everitt, who has written biographies of Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian, explains his fascination with that time period: “I love stories and I love characters. And the thing about the ancient world, it is crammed, it is packed with [the] most interesting and eccentric and brave and villainous characters of all kinds.”
In the interview, Everitt brings a 21st century sensibility to bear a past that has shaped us even more than we may know. Our founding fathers, for instance, poured over the constitution of the The Roman Republic. And here is what Everitt says about why the Republic failed, to be replaced with a military autocracy:
“The people who governed the world suddenly lost the ability to govern themselves. There was bloodshed. … This collapse of the constitution and an unwillingness of political opponents to talk with each other, to do deals, to come up with agreements, however messy and provisional, that loss was a catastrophe for Rome. And the Republic, in fact, went up in flames.”
‘Nuff said about the relevance of this book, I think…
Last time I posted a small list of my favorite English novels. Now, thanks to Adam, who blogs at Reviews and Ramblings http://blizzerd03.wordpress.com, I can send you to look at lists of 400 of NPR listeners’ favorite books.
Adam spotted this summer’s NPR poll, devoted to teen novels. Sadly I didn’t look at the date the voting closed, so it’s too late to put in your choices. Still, you can look at the 100 finalist titles (selected by a panel from 235 listener nominations). You can check back next week to see the rankings assigned by people who paid attention to the deadlines. And you can also check out the winners in the categories featured over the past three years:
The panel of three who whittled the list down from 235 to 100 for voting said their main criterion was selecting books “that teens themselves have claimed — whether they do, in fact, voluntarily read it.”
Umm – I’m not convinced in every instance, anymore than I think Anna Karenina belongs on the 2009 list of beach reads. Still, the good folks at NPR have pointed me toward several great novels. Look through the results of their polls. You may well find something great to read.
A tweet from Hannah-Elizabeth, who blogs at The Last Classichttp://sonnemann.wordpress.com inspired this post. She follows my book reviews and recently asked for a recommendation on something to read.
The other inspiration was the Olympics opening ceremony, which got me thinking of English novels and stories. My greatest literary pleasures, from the first read-alouds I heard as a child until now have come from England. The riverbank, the Shire, and Baker Street have become the landscapes of my soul.
There’s one key distinction to make: when I talk about favorite novels, I don’t mean breakout, thrilling, or dramatic novels – necessarily. I mean stories with characters and worlds I want to live with and visit again and again. When I started The DaVinci Code, for instance, I couldn’t put it down, but when I finished, I traded it in for credit at the local used bookstore. I can’t imagine reading it again.
So here is a list, probably not complete and not in order of preference, of some of the story treasures British authors have given me. To set the mood, let’s begin with this beautiful hymn that every diehard fan of Masterpiece Theater knows and loves. “Jerusalem” was inspired by William Blake’s poem, “And did those feet in ancient time,” which was based on the legend that as a youth, Jesus visited England and Glastonbury with his uncle, Joseph of Arimethia.
Favorite English books.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I reviewed it here: http://wp.me/pYql4-19a. Try to get the edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham, which really gives a feel for the rural England of rivers, forests, and fields that were so soon to disappear in the new century .
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – Here was a man who spent his life giving shape to our spiritual homeland – The Shire and Rivendell. His son said he suffered from bouts of depression all his life. Understandable when you reflect that the summer this gentle dreamer graduated from Oxford, he was thrown into the maelstrom of the Somme. There he saw the Shire, the rural England he loved, along with his college classmates, evaporate in the fires of Mordor, aka, the western front.
The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I read these detective stories again and again, even though I know who done it. Who doesn’t sometimes dream of life on Baker Street, sharing a pipe with Holmes before the game is afoot again? I could argue that Holmes was an early superhero, using uncanny intellect and powers of observation to save the world from uber-villain, Moriarity.
The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix. Nix, a former editor, has written a number of middle grade Arthurian adventures for boys. In the Abhorsen tales, he gives us two fine female protagonists. In doing so, he inspired my first novel, whose main character, Emily, is a lot like Lirael, the heroine of the second and third books of the trilogy. Nix lives in Australia, but the map of his Old and New Kingdoms looks a lot like the Scottish border, and everyone acts quite British, sometimes to the vexation of the good guys.
T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909 – 1950 I’ve been reading this book since I took a class on Eliot as a college sophomore. “The first gate” into the world of imagination and dream is an image at the opening of Eliot’s “The Four Quartets,” my favorite poem of all time. Eliot was an American who spent his writing life in London.
Agatha Christie Mysteries. Few authors create two characters as compelling as Hercule Poirot, star of 33 novels, and Miss Marple, featured in 12. When Christie killed off Poirot in 1975, a year before her own death, the little Belgian detective became the only fictional character to receive an obituary in The New York Times. Books like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, will stand with any mysteries ever written. Here is free download, in all ebook formats, from Project Gutenberg, of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920, the first Poirot mystery. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/863
In the spirit of things. Yours truly at Avebury, 1991
The Narnia Tales by C.S. Lewis. Tolkien told Lewis not to publish the Narnia stories, saying Lewis would “embarrass himself.” Just goes to show the master of middle-earth didn’t know everything. Mysterious old wardrobes will always be objects of interest to fans of Lewis’ series.
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. A small patch of primeval forest, one of the last in England that dates from the last ice age, is actually a “mythogenic zone,” a region which manifests the creatures of the deep human psyche and racial memory. They deteriorate at any great distance from the wood, but near and in it they are very real – sometimes dangerously so. in 1946, when Stephen Huxley returns from the service, both he and his older brother Christian, strive to enter the wood with the aid of a mysterious journal (don’t you just love those!) left by their father. Both Stephen and Christian fall in love with Gweneth, who lives deep in the forest. When his brother begins to assume the attributes of the dreaded “Outsider,” you know Stephen’s journey will not be easy. Published in the US in 1986, this book had a profound effect on my outlook on fantasy literature.
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling. I don’t think this needs any explanation
The Mabinogian Anonymous. Welsh tales, full of strange and sometimes ominous magic, that were already ancient when they were written down in the middle ages. Joseph Campbell and Heinrich Zimmer discussed some of these stories. They are best approached with poetic imagination as Fleetwood Mac did with the goddess, Rhiannon, who figures in two of the tales.
Rhiannon riding in Arbeth. Illustration from “The Mabinogian” by Lady Charlotte Guest. Public domain in the US
The Amelia Peabody Mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. Here are some great British mysteries written by a yank. Ms. Peters, now 84, was born in Illinois and received her PHd in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. There’s the connection. Her protagonists – Amelia Peabody, Amelia’s husband Emerson, their brilliant but incorrigible son Ramses, and in later stories, Amelia’s daughter in law, Nefret, are unconventional British archeologists who excavate in places like the Valley of the Kings when they’re not solving murders. There are twenty books in the series, spanning the decades from 1895 through the first world war against the background of mystery and intrigue in the turn of the century middle east. These are among the best beach reads I’ve ever found. Check them out at Ameliapeabody.com. http://ameliapeabody.com/bookshelf.htm
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I hope this excursion through some of my favorite books leads you to something enjoyable to read. Lists are fun. This was a small list, so next time I’ll post some with hundreds of titles to choose from. Stay tuned!
The First Gates 