Spoilt for choice today (or should that be spoiled?). Birthdays of A.E. Housman (died 30 April 1936), Robert Frost (died 29 January 1963), Joseph Campbell (see below), Tennessee Williams (died 25 February 1983), Pierre Boulez (died 5 January 2016), Patrick Süskind, [William Hague] - some of my favourite people - emphasis on some, given that square bracket with its decidedly grey content - and what a party it would make if I could get them all together for a cup of tea and iced fruit cake (alright TW, booze as well, but only in moderation). It wouldn't be all celebration though. The poets among us will be mourning Walt Whitman's death today in 1892, Beethoven's (1827), Sarah Bernhardt's in 1923, and Noel Coward's in 1973; and the square bracket, if he's invited (he does look rather like a square bracket, now I come to think about it, and as to his life and outook, what better description?) will be made to raise a glass in honour of the late Lloyd George, who died today in 1945, though I imagine he would prefer to make the toast, sin marmalade, to Cecil Rhodes (died today in 1902), rather than slug it out with Davey Moore, for whom see my piece on Feb 6.
Despite his already being present in my piece about Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake", on February 16, I feel the need to pay a debt, of homage...
My four volumes of Joseph Campbell's "The Masks Of God" are hand-dated January 1985, a first non-Chanukah present from my wife after I came back from Israel to marry her. They constitute some of my most closely annotated of books, though I was never quite comfortable with some of the conclusions drawn in volume 4. From Campbell to Robert Graves, and thence "The Book of Origins" (now "TheBibleNet") which fed "City Of Peace", which in turn fed "The Land Beside The Sea" and several others - so the debt I owe Campbell is truly enormous.
Legend has it that the young Steven Spielberg, and his college-friend George Lucas, both read Campbell's shorter "The Hero With A Thousand Faces", and took on board with absolute devotion his conviction that all the world's great sagas resume the same hero-cycle: "ET" and the first "Star Wars" film model this precisely; other, later movies by the same pair anagram it.
Campbell was born today in 1904. His CV includes the study of Sanskrit and a translation of the "Upanishads"; much research into psychology, including a book on Jung; the study of anthropology, specialising in the North American Indians; a heroic attempt to make sense of James Joyce's utterly incomprehensible "Finnegans Wake"; and friendships with the novelist John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts. Yet, today, very few biographical dictionaries even mention him; and no encyclopaedia of any merit. Yet I am confident that he will eventually be placed alongside Frazer and Graves as the third patriarch of the study of mythology.
Legend has it that the young Steven Spielberg, and his college-friend George Lucas, both read Campbell's shorter "The Hero With A Thousand Faces", and took on board with absolute devotion his conviction that all the world's great sagas resume the same hero-cycle: "ET" and the first "Star Wars" film model this precisely; other, later movies by the same pair anagram it.
Campbell was born today in 1904. His CV includes the study of Sanskrit and a translation of the "Upanishads"; much research into psychology, including a book on Jung; the study of anthropology, specialising in the North American Indians; a heroic attempt to make sense of James Joyce's utterly incomprehensible "Finnegans Wake"; and friendships with the novelist John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts. Yet, today, very few biographical dictionaries even mention him; and no encyclopaedia of any merit. Yet I am confident that he will eventually be placed alongside Frazer and Graves as the third patriarch of the study of mythology.
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