Modern Mythographer

Until I watched part of Ken Burns’ new documentary America’s Best Idea last night, I hadn’t given much thought to the “why” of national parks.  Which is odd, because as many loyal MM readers know, I grew up in and around Acadia National Park in Maine, then the 2nd-most-visited park in the country. But I [...]

The brilliant, devastating moments in “Aftermath”, the new play by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank just opened at the New York Theatre Workshop, don’t strike you all at once.  Rather, the details from the daily lives of Iraqi civilian-refugees since the beginning of the war that ravaged their country accumulate slowly and deftly, in words [...]

Recently the Mythographer received a tip about a more-than-usually-interesting letter to NPR’s All Things Considered. It was a response to ATC’s story about Jude Law’s insistence on using a real human skull for the famous “Yorick” soliloquy, in his current Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Hamlet,” for the sake of verisimilitude. As it turned out, [...]

To debunk, from the Oxford English Dictionary, transitive verb: To remove the ‘nonsense’ or false sentiment from; to expose false claims or pretensions; hence, to remove a person from his ‘pedestal’ or ‘pinnacle’. Also absolute. Hence debunker, one who debunks; or debunking.
As one W. E. Woodward apparently said in 1923, “De-bunking means simply taking the [...]

As one of MM’s elite loyal readers, you probably know that I’m obsessed with the Garden of Eden, and the people who think they can find it on earth. That’s the “ography” part of “mythography”: the quest to map an ethereal myth in an on-the-ground reality.  [Exhibit A: the 1914 map to the left showing [...]

Stay tuned to find out…

You know that story about how Indians traded Manhattan to the Dutch for a bunch of beads worth not much? The Mythographer has that one on long-term surveillance. This past weekend Inwood Hill Park–legendary site of the unfair trade–hosted “Drums Along the Hudson”, apparently the largest Native American pow wow in New York [...]

The Mythographer found herself in Philly recently, and it would have seemed downright rude not to visit the Liberty Bell. Now, the Mythographer went to public school, so I didn’t even really know what the Liberty Bell was, just that it had a crack in it.  But the whole experience got me thinking about the [...]

Though the swine flu itself is not spreading as fast as anyone feared, the epidem-mythology hasn’t slowed.  The misinformation has spread from pork manufacturers to subway riders to the entire nation of Mexico. It’s not just the Israeli government who would prefer to associate the H1N1 flu strain with the Mexicans than with swine.  China [...]

The sale of Manhattan for beads and trinkets has become a truism, memorialized in a painting by Alfred Fredericks .
The value of said trinkets, reportedly “60 guilders,” does have a verifiable source, though the exact materials assigned the value does not.  Meanwhile “60 guilders” has accrued an aura of shame and betrayal right up there [...]