EclecticLip

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago.  One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.

In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return.  The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.

Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men.  There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.

When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind.  But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles…  Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.

When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year.  Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:

• Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
• Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
• …and Harlequin NASCAR.  Yes, that’s not a typo.

Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae.  And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.

Denis Rancourt has been in the news a fair bit lately.  He’s even been made the editorials, being the subject of a scathing New York Times op-ed.

On the surface, it seems the U of Ottawa physics professor wanted to shake up the teaching methods by announcing at the start of a recent term, that everyone would get A+’s.  Peering more deeply, he seems fiercely determined to rouse students into activism against oppression — a positive thing, surely — but at the expense of teaching what he has been contracted to do.

He even called out Noam Chomsky (!) as a “non-activist intellectual” who “serves to deepen the pathological pacificism of neutralized mainstream movements“.  Mind you, Noam Chomsky never converted a linguistics course into “Introduction to Activism” as Professor Rancourt has apparently done.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

I was reading a book on the Crusades, that jihadist period of European Christendom, to learn more about the events that doomed Asian Christianity.

Basically, Christianity had more adherents across Asia and Africa than in Europe until about the time of the Crusades — meaning that the heretical Jacobites and Nestorians  outnumbered the followers of the orthodox Catholic and Orthodox churches.  Jenkins suggested that the fall of Asian Christianity was due to the emergence of hardline Muslim leaders across Asia who weren’t as tolerant of the other Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews) as prior leaders had been.  These leaders emerged at a time when the Islamic world was troubled by repeated Christian invasions from the West, and existentially threatened by Mongol invasions from the East.  It appears that when the Khans converted to Islam, they became the most intolerant rulers of all.

But back to the Crusades.  Professor Tyerman’s description of crusade recruiters made me think immediately of modern motivational speakers.  Only, instead of motivating their audiences to sign up for a follow-up course, they were trying to motivate them to pick up arms and travel for several months so that if they survived the trip, they could engage an enemy, on said enemy’s territory, surrounded by said enemy’s allies. 

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

On a Boston-bound business… trip.  (What’s a word that begins with “b” and is synonymous with trip?)

Cultural anthropology and other travel notes below:

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

…until at least the weekend.  Workday priorities and such.

Meanwhile, the following phrase from Christopher Tyerman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades struck me as postworthy:

Ironically, for all its political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods [?!?!] of the Inquisition.  (p68, hardcover edition)

The more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition?

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.

It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867.  The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.

A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia.  Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Infovore that I am, I love reading over the holidays.  More so than being acquainted with unfamiliar facts, I treasure being shown their context, and how they came to be.  To paraphrase from my Facebook, I like knowing what; I love knowing why.

I finished John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: telling truths about Canada a few days ago — a thickly-enriching read, as he always is.  Happily, it was an easier read than Reflections of a Siamese Twin, his previous tome on the Canadian identity.  This may be because he spent less time on the decades leading up to Confederation this time around (a grey area in my schooling), or he drew that historical arc more tautly, or it may even be that I’m more familiar with that period now.  :)

Saul’s goal (as evidenced by early references to the work as “three new myths about Canada”) is to re-envision Canada as:

1. a fundamentally Metis civlization, not a European one.
2. a nation built on peace, welfare, and good government   (instead of the more familiar “peace, order and good government”)
3. a country set to flourish once its elites internalize the first two points, and reject the learned helplessness that has characterized their behaviour, first with the British and now with the Americans.

He richly succeeds with the first two points; hopefully, he will be shown prescient on the third.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Continuing Casino Royale, I burst out laughing to read the following:

“…On the straight stretches the Amherst Villiers supercharger dug spurs into the Bentley’s twenty-five horses and the engine sent a high-pitched scream of pain into the night.”

James Bond’s first car was a twenty-five horsepower Bentley!  Suddenly, the 110 horses of my first (and thus far, only) car, doesn’t seem so shabby. 

While in school, I either wasn’t taught (or wasn’t paying attention) when the topic of black Nova Scotians was raised.  I only (re-)discovered their cause when reading John Ralston Saul’s latest, A Fair Country.

I’d known black loyalists fled north after the American Revolution, but didn’t realize that they mainly settled in Nova Scotia.  (All the more reason to visit there!)  And it was a shock to learn that in 1792, a thousand Black Nova Scotians sailed to Sierra Leone, in search of a better future. A year later, the parliament of Upper Canada became the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to pass legislation against slavery.
The anti-slavery legislation beats the US Thirteenth Amendment by seventy-two years.

And the Black Nova Scotians’ trip to Sierra Leone preceded by thirty years, the emigration to neighboring Liberia, of freed American slaves.