Three alternate endings to "The Odyssey":

1: Odysseus pops his head out from under the sheepskin seconds too early, to check for cyclopses. Squishing ensues.

2: After 10 years of plying the ocean, he takes a bath, and dies.

3: The ship runs out of food. Odysseus eats everyone, then gnaws his own leg off, before running aground. He starts a new kingdom where no man can have more than three limbs.

A little piece of what I'm working on

This is a little idea from my play (or possibly short story...? dunno yet)
let me know what y'all think if you get a chance to read it.
'A man in rags sits in a fucked up chair. On a table beside him, there’s a sheaf of papers and a dented, old, evil looking pistol next to a gnarly old box of bullets and a little battery powered lantern. A battered army cot sits next to the table. There’s a mirror, too. He takes the papers and shuffles them until he finds one in particular and puts it on top. He picks up the gun, weighing it. He puts it in his mouth, finds this uncomfortable, and moves it to his temple. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them after a moment, gets up, and goes to the mirror, putting the gun to his head again. He studies the angle. It’s not quite right. He adjusts it until he’s sure the angle’s perfect. He practices putting the gun up to this position until he’s sure he can get it without looking. Then he walks over to the lantern, turns it off and puts the gun to his head. He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He turns on the light with shaking fingers, put the gun back with the bullets, and lies down in the bed.
Can’t get a damn thing right in this world, he says.'

"Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero"

A hero is always the result of a challenge-- some overwhelming force to be fought and through great struggle, overcome, whereupon those left standing in some way transcend their old selves and walk newly baptized into a repleninshed world. I think anyone who's experienced them will agree that the teen years are full of such challenges...

The story of a pair of cousins who set out to create a new crop of superheroes in the time preceding and during World War 2.
Plenty of fun.

Metonymy

Couldn't help but think how the american flag stands in for so many concepts, both for proponents and opponents. Stand in front of it, and an entire dialog takes place behind it-- one of patriotism, heroism... and so forth. Burn it or stamp on it, and you say something else entirely.

social heroes

To follow up from before, maybe nowadays heroes/heroines are recognizable only as abstractions teased out from what in the past was so clear cut and simple. Perhaps this is a consequence of the current range of all types of story driven media and the cross cultural nature of today's intellectual zeitgeist?
Still, when you look at any given example, can't you still see the thread that Campbell talks about? Even is the stretch is a long one, you can still span the gap between the ancient and the modern without too much trouble.
And even though "heroic nature" has become obscured by relativism (not in the pejorative sense, simply the objective...err... subjective... sense), I still sense a great connection between all kinds of modern stories and this taproot that is ancient myth.
I think it's ironic is that we've come so far from the ancient world, in some ways, but that we still inhabit and imagine stories that mirror those that are thousands of years old.

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Bailout. Probably a worn topic. But what the hell.

I couldn't help but think about whether or not these lovely politicians of ours are in fact villains or heroes. I cannot pretend to be an economist, so I'll stop short of saying whether the decision was in fact wrong or right, but the whole thing smacks of posturing.

Blogging is new to me, luddite that I am

But I'll try to make it relatively interesting for those of you unfortunate enough to find yourselves here...
I read this graphic novel recently, on the recommendation of my local comic book store expert:
http://www.amazon.com/Punisher-MAX-Vol-8-Widowmaker/dp/0785124543
(you will want to cut and paste that)
really scary stuff, very much in the anti hero vein, as you would expect, but with a strange twist wherein the women of the story pretty much take over, both as protagonist (well, sort of) and antagonists.
It asks a lot of questions about the cyclical psychology of violence and revenge. Like Macbeth... with crack, machine guns, and blowjobs.
Disturbing, disgusting, and well...mindblowing.
If anyone has any interest I can bring it to class sometime.
Been thinking a lot about Campbell's book, and his view that every hero follows relatively the same path of journey, travail, return. Does any else get the feeling there's more to it than that nowadays? It may be too early for that question, but there it is.