Street Folklore in Miami

[batyatoon]

Gacked from bigscary: The Folklore of Homeless Children.

I am ... stunned. And horrified. And fascinated. And disturbed. And strangely exalted. And deeply moved.

Go. Read.

Comments

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

For a while I was playing in a table-top roleplaying game strongly influenced by those myths and stories. I think it may even have been started by the same article and some other research into La Llarona.

And, in the end, I think that was the reaction most of us had to it as well. It's compelling and heartbreaking all at once. It speaks to the worst and best of the world at the same time.

[adamselzer.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting that article; it was one of the most fascinating, disturbing articles I've ever read. Made me afraid of Bloody Mary again, which is something I got over in 2nd grade. I didn't realize how much that puzzled folklorists, but the fact that it did freaks me out.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I can't remember where I first came across that article, but I went back and read it many times over the course of a month or so.

It makes me wonder: where are the myths spun by comfortable people?

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

• Anyone can be President


• Institutional racism is dead


• There's a good chance anyone can end up upper-class


• The rich pay too much in taxes


• Tooth Fairy


• Modern incarnation of Santa Claus

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I dunno: those are stories without *power*

[braider.livejournal.com]

That's .... really horrifying. It would make a great novel (or series). It resonates. It's real. But then, that's why folklore works.

[the-red-baron.livejournal.com]

A friend and I have actually been bouncing around ideas for an urban fantasy novel loosely based on that article for a month or two now.

[batyatoon]

That occurred to me. That or an RPG.

And in a way it seems almost cannibalistic, picking over these stories to find something we could use ... but on the other hand, don't we do that with everybody's primal stories? Is it somehow more disrespectful, more opportunistic, just because these are stories told by contemporary homeless children in our own country instead of long-dead foreign cultures?
(Or does it just feel more disrespectful? And if so, is that why?)


(and just by the bye? I love your icon so much.)

Completely unrelated to your post...

[kimpire.livejournal.com]

At the mad scientist LARP a few weeks ago (this is Daniel, aka H. G. Wells, btw) you sang for a bit a kind of filk-ish song I've Got a Hunch based on "Now is the winter of our discontent" etc. from shakespeare. This is weeks later (this is how my thought processes work, lol, it's a little bizarre but things randomly pop up in my head weeks or months later with complete explanations attached to them) but I suddenly realized where I'd heard that before. It was sung by Professor Peter Schikele, the guy that invented/discovered the infamous nonexistent classical musician P.D.Q. Bach. I knew I vaguely recognized that song...there were other songs in the medley too, one very very hilarious one based on "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him" -- unfortunately it was years ago so I don't remember them all.

Oh, and also this was an excuse to give you my LJ name.

Daniel

Re: Completely unrelated to your post...

[batyatoon]

No, no, different song entirely. The one I sang was written by Jordan Mann, a.k.a. mannoftalent.(Though Schikele may be where Jordan got the idea ...)

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

It changes nothing, of course, but the song the Blue Lady sang that one of the girls reported? That's Glinda's song from The Wiz. And in the movie, she was played by Lena Horne, who, IIRC, was wearing blue, and she was a star in the sky.

[djonn]

Coming in very late indeed:

A friend and I have actually been bouncing around ideas for an urban fantasy novel loosely based on that article for a month or two now.

It's been done: Mad Maudlin, by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, takes just this material, transplants it to NYC, and ties it into Lackey's contemporary elf-universe. (And particularly with Edghill involved, the results are pretty good.)

Which is not to say that it couldn't be done again or elsewise, but one would want to be sure that there wasn't too close a resemblance.