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Monday, August 04, 2003 |
Ten Basic Stories
Robert Heinlein used to say something to the effect that there were only four or five basic stories. Here's a piece in the Guardian that discusses this and says that there are only 10 basic stories. It's fun read.
One thing that I don't quite agree with in the piece is this:
Our first source for archetypal stories must be the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, whose greatest writers were, so to speak, at the cutting edge of dramatic narrative, exploring the raw material of human experience with an urgency and immediacy we cannot share. The creative windscreens of Aeschylus, Euripides and Seneca were free of debris. Aristotle, whose Poetics is the handbook to Western narrative, was born shortly after Euripides's death; imagine going to school and being brought up on the Trojan women, the Bacchae and Andromache.
I don't think it's that the classics are the source of these archetypal stories. Intead, these stories survived because they are such great examples of stories that mean so much to us. It's easy to go overboard into a Jungian point of view here, but it's seems important to me to make the distinction.
In a somewhat related area, I just started Dan Simmons' new book, Ilium last night. It's an huge sf worked dealing with the Iliad. So far, it's lots of fun; these are great characters, great stories.
7:57:31 PM Permalink
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Why Secrets Are Scary. Virginia Postrel makes some bracing comments about Jacob Sullum's latest column on secret detentions. An excerpt: In my mind, the single most important guide to security policy is that the government must never have the right to hold individuals within the United States, particularly (but not exclusively) citizens, secretly or incommunicado. That power inevitably turns first into the power to torture, and eventually into the power to detain and torture people whose danger to the general population is far less than their danger to the decision-making officials. [Hit & Run]
5:26:47 PM Permalink
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Times They Are Surreal in Bob Dylan Tale. As a movie, Masked & Anonymous is a mess. As a Bob Dylan artifact, it is endlessly, perhaps morbidly, fascinating. By A. O. Scott. [New York Times: Movies]
I saw the thing again the other night with my pal Mike. On second viewing I enjoyed it more than I did before. But the fascination fades quickly, and this time I enjoyed some of the scenes, whereas the "story" is a mess. Still, you get the feeling that it was possible for a good movie to have been made from this material, and even if they didn't make it, if you grade them on the curve and compare to some of the cynical, exploitive junk that appears these days, it's almost a worty entertainment. How's that for ambivalent?
5:24:50 PM Permalink
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GOP goes from irony to intimidation. Leaning on media outlets not to carry Democratic-sponsored ad on the WMD deception: "Apparently the Bushites think that 'Irony' is the name of a far off planet, for they never seem able to see it in their own work.
Irony is George W standing adamantly against affirmative action, oblivious to the obvioius fact that he's the privileged poster-child of America's aggressive affirmative action program for the rich.
But one of the latest actions by the Bushites proves that they couldn't find irony if we let them use the Hubble Telescope. It came in the form of a threatening letter sent to Wisconsin TV stations by the Republican Party's top lawyer, Caroline Hunter. It seems that these stations were airing an ad produced by the Democratic Party, that calls for a bipartisan independent investigation of the false information used by Bush and the White House to mislead the American people about the supposed 'imminent threat' posed by weapons of mass destruction they claimed were in Iraq.
The lawyer's letter to the TV stations demanded that they not air this ad because – get this – she blithely says that stations have 'no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.'" — Jim Hightower
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5:09:59 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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