Thinking about Joseph Campbell…

…which always makes me think about my father. My father was a historian, an Egyptologist, and one of greatest men I have known in this lifetime, coming in a close tie with my maternal grandfather for that title. Yeah, I miss them. For some reason, this year I miss my family a lot.

I was thinking about all the lectures my father gave me about cultural anthropology over the years as I started to reread “Thou That Art”, which got me thinking about Homer Smith’s “Man and His Gods”. I put down Campbell and yanked out my battered, shitty old copy of Smith’s book [its origin in our household is a very amusing anecdote in itself] and started rereading that instead.

Odd. My copy of that book is really the only thing that I have to remember my dad by.

If you ever get the chance to get your hands on a copy of it, you must read it. To me, it is the single greatest book on cultural and religious anthropology that has ever been written.

Which brings me to something else. Have any of you read “Neil Gaiman’s the Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth” by Stephen Rauch?

I’m making myself sad again. Time to get back to reading and watching ‘the Godfather’. The mafia always cheers me up.