Mythic Imagination Today

Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This publication brings alive our collective need for story to guide the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life. Whereas mythology is born primarily of perception and imagination, science emerges from systematic observation and experimentation. Both disciplines arise from endless curiosity about the workings of the Universe combined with creative urges to transform inner and outer worlds. Both disciplines are located within open neural wiring that gives rise to uniquely human capacities for learning, memory, and metaphor. Explored are the origins of story within the social brain; mythmakers and myths from multiple cultures; and how contemporary sciences of chaos and complexity theories and fractal geometry dovetail with ancient wisdom. The ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros is unpacked in detail—origins of the very concepts of ‘psyche’ and ‘psychology’.

The Sign of the Joker

The Joker both fascinates and repels us. From his origin in Detective Comics in 1940, the Joker has committed obscene crimes, some of the worst the Batman universe has ever known. Conversely fans have made him the topic of erotic and pornographic “fan fiction.” Speculation about the Joker abounds; some fans have even claimed that the Joker is “queer coded.” This work explores various popular claims about the Joker, and delves into the history of comic books and of other popular media from a semiotic viewpoint to understand “The Clown Prince of Crime” in the contexts in which he existed to understand his evolution. From his roots as a “typical hoodlum,” The Joker even starred in his own eponymous comic book series and he was recently featured in a non-canonical movie. This work examines what it is about the Joker which fascinates us.

Shopper’s Paradise

This book deals with an important aspect of everyday life and popular culture in which everyone engages, often more than once a week, which involves shopping in retail stores of one kind or another. We need to eat and continually replenish our supply of food, so we shop at supermarkets and farmers markets and we need to have clothes to wear and many other things, so we shop in department stores, big-box stores like Costco and Walmart, and various other kinds of stores. Much of our shopping is done online, on sites such as Amazon.com, the most important online retailer in America. Its popularity has challenged traditional brick and mortar stores, most of which now have an internet presence and many of which are going out of business—a phenomenon sometimes called “the retail apocalypse.” This term, let me point out, has religious implications. The subtext of Shopper’s Paradise involves the notion, only dimly perceived by most people, there is a paradisical element to shopping and that in curious ways, shopping represents an unrecognized attempt to return to the Garden of Eden, where all our wants were taken care of by God. We have replaced the talking snake in the Garden with advertising agencies and marketing experts. Now, depending on our incomes, we rely on stores ranging from Neiman Marcus to Dollar stores to help us take care of our needs. Shopper’s Paradise demonstrates how ubiquitous and varied retail stores, explains how they function, and suggests, by their very presence, that they play an important role in our lives.

Memes and the Future of Pop Culture

Pop culture, as a distinct form of culture with its own historical, artistic and textual categories, crystallized in the first decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the restrictive social traditions of colonial America. It spread quickly and broadly throughout the bustling urban centers of the 1920s—an era when it formed a partnership with technology and the business world. This coalition gave pop culture its identity, allowing it to thrive and form alliances with artistic and literary movements. But pop culture may have run its course with the rise of meme culture—a culture that has evolved on the Internet. This essay revisits the social, psychic, and aesthetic roots of pop culture, suggesting that meme culture has fragmented its historical flow, thus threatening to bring about its demise.