Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...alternately fascinated and repelled by the work of the "trackers," human beasts of burden whose yoke is a bamboo rope, who haul the junk from precarious footholds, step by straining step. Chief of the trackers is a Chinese John Henry nicknamed Old Pebble. Old Pebble is a kind of mythic Nature Boy who can chant his weary men through a rough gorge or leap into the treacherous waters to unsnag the towline and break surface with it like a trout...
Allowing for much practical ellipsis and a few brazen disfigurations (it was Hector, not Paris, who killed Patroclus), the script by John Twist shows a commendable respect for the letter of the myth. It is the spirit that is Twisted. Homer's was a mythic drama in which gods and heroes, love and politics, war and religion moiled in the mortar of imagination. Helen of Troy is basically a story of hot pants in high places. The hero, accordingly, is not "godlike Hector" or "great Achilles" but "soft Paris," whom even Helen called a coward. As the part...