Word: heros
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Near the conclusion of Gore Vidal's "Washington, D.C." (1967), a political thriller spanning the years 1937-52, the novel's hero, Peter Sanford, expresses irritable despair at the human condition as he has observed it in his treacherous hometown: "There was never a golden age. There will never be a golden age and it is sheer romance to think we can ever be other than what we are now." Now, 33 years later, Sanford pops up again as the protagonist of another Vidal novel, set in the same place and roughly the same time, and readers familiar with...
...obsessed are they with sports that even today Australians claim the No. 1 national hero in their country's entire history is Don Bradman. Don who? No, Bradman didn't lead Australia to political independence (in fact, Aussies still bow to Britain's Queen Elizabeth) or fight off the Japanese during World War II. Rather he was a spectacular cricket player in the 1930s and '40s. It's rather like comparing Babe Ruth with George Washington...
...Eric Clapton and B.B. King/"Riding With the King" It took making an album with his hero to shed the slick pop that has made him millions (and put fans of his guitar playing to sleep), but Eric Clapton rose to the difficult occasion of making a decent blues studio album (although the picture of the two jamming in the '60s - a Hendrix-permed Clapton, B.B. with a processed 'do - would have been worth the price of the CD by itself). There's too much going on in the background (why bring in two more guitar players?) but the song...
...surprising degree of overlap. Of those surveyed, 78% agreed that "people can enjoy the arts in the same way that they enjoy sport." While followers of Shakespeare or Shirvington might beg to differ, both arenas offer audiences a primal ritual, says Costantoura: "It's the vicarious struggle of the hero. Will they succeed or will they fail...
Around the turn of the last century, Friedrich Nietzsche killed God and replaced him with the Ubermensch, or superman. In the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon; 380 pages; $27.50), Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware goes Nietzsche one better. He replaces God with Superman, the caped hero, who becomes a God/father metaphor to the emotionally crippled title character. Then Ware kills Superman too--or at least a man in a Superman suit, who, in a single bound, leaps to his death from a tall building in a scene, witnessed by Jimmy, that sets the tale's poignant...