York

Upcoming Paper

I’m not usually in the practice of self-promotion on this blog, but I’ve decided to change that policy a little. Here’s a link to an announcement of my upcoming paper: “Materialism, Spritualism, Vitalism: Towards the ‘Soul’ of Nineteenth-Century Medicine,” which will be presented in a week at CHSTM at the University of Manchester. Then off to other adventures, to be featured in this virtual vista…

Stayed tuned…

Inner

“And to top it off, he looks like he’s from another planet…”

Weirdness is spreading these days. This BBC report sort of says it all.

Pop Culture Mythologies

A piece from the “ancient” archives, penned long ago…

Unlike the mythic stories and legends of Egypt and ancient Greece, which possess a certain immutable, ageless quality, our modern pop culture “legends” are malleable and, like so many unstable radioactive isotopes, tend to degrade over time.

When we are young, the “characters” in our pop culture myth have a certain reality. An imagined immanence. As we mature, become sophisticated, the real human actor, complete with all his or her faults, foibles and fanaticisms, percolates to the surface of our consciousness, marring the idealized image we once had. This sours us.

Cynicism, pessimism and a diminished faith in the general value of a symbolic or iconographic ideal follows.

What are the consequences of this fractured link to the true mythic past?