Episode Details

Y’know, I wasn’t going to start this. The plan wasn’t to record and put these on Substack; I was just going to share ‘em at in-person venues here and there. But three things have been nagging on me and got me to change my mind.

* It would be dishonest, in a way. These stories continue to take up a great deal of my time and attention. I can’t treat this here Substack as some kind of curated persona in which I only share what would scale well; I don’t have the energy for that. This is what I’m into, so this is what I’m sharing.

* The difficulty presented a problem. I pride myself on what I’ve been able to track down in terms of old and new recordings of these stories. I’m not half bad at finding pre-modern texts, either. But I was looking past the obvious here: recordings and older texts are hard to track down because there aren’t that many. That’s a bit of a tragedy. But it’s also one I can try to do something about.

* I keep thinking about a piece of advice from Gary Snyder, who in turn got his from old myths and fables: never be stingy.

So okay, let’s get into it then. Let’s dip our toes into the Fenian Cycle.

But let’s do it with some care and consideration, eh?

We can do better than CEOs, can’t we?

Unlike the fine fiction and historical writing here on Substack, it’s my opinion that these stories aren’t best suited as reading material. In the context of myth, I see books as temporal transports; a kind of train across the centuries. Sure, they’re quite handy for taking a story from the sixth century to our time and place, but it’d be ludicrous to expect them to live on the thing that brought them here.

So, oral storytelling it is, and while source material is paramount to what we’re going to be up to, this isn’t going to be recitation. We have some further work to do.

Oral storytelling is in a strange place today. There are few venues in which it’s still done, and I have to say, most aren’t too flattering. God bless the librarians who gather the kids around for Story Time at the library, but as important as that is, I think that’s a separate activity. Outside of folk festivals and story swaps, I can only think of a few places in which live, unscripted storytelling is likely to be experienced in our daily routines.

You’ll see it sometimes at weddings, but you’re also just as likely to watch the best man reading from note cards. Ever think about why he’s reading from note cards? Because he wants to do his buddy a solid, yet he’s terrified at screwing up. He’s terrified because like the rest of us, he hates what he’d refer to as “public speaking.” Like the rest of us, he doesn’t swap jokes or family stories around the dinner table anymore. He doesn’t shoot the breeze with the guys in the factory because there is no factory and just as likely today, there are no guys; phones and remote work have seen to that. Outside of that wedding, he may never speak in public again. It’s another tragedy that doesn’t have to happen. Everybody can participate in this.

On the other hand, there’s another group who practices this sort of thing all the time. They have no inhibitions whatsoever, despite being terrible at it. I’m talking of course about CEOs and, if you’ll allow me the double misnomer, “thought leaders.” They have the benefit of speaking to a captive audience in a literal sense. I once watched a CEO spend twenty minutes explain the plot of Frozen to a group of adults who, unlike the CEO, had kids of their own and could (and did) act out entire scenes of the movie during every morning carpool. He was using his patronizing summary as a metaphor for open and honest communication, and the need for employee feedback. Some of the folks who gave it were subsequently laid off. Management had to restructure, you know how it is.

Aside from weddings, retirement parties and CEO absurdist performance art, you also have icebreakers at workshop retreats, unplanned d