Myths over Miami

I'm pretty sure what stories have grown up around the spirits and the gods have very little to do with literature.

This article, Myths over Miami by Lynda Edwards, is the closest example I have found to what a literal update of mythology and religion would look like in our culture, between cracks of pale light on the shadowy side of the post-millennium. These childish tales, from brightly chewed up wads of numerous indigenous belief systems indiscreetly and promiscuously borrowed from, mashed together with a child's happy lack of inhibition, combined with a sophisticated take on capitalism as the murder or suicide (murder-suicide) of god are by turns breathtaking, heartbreaking and harrowing.

There is no god but the explanation is theological. And extremely sad. The belief system is also living. Poly-genesis is, here, the result of a secret compact between naive belief systems, folk culture, the heroic (demonic) culture of gangbanging, a repressive system of immigration, a punitive system of homeless shelters and the anti-master dialectic of Judeo-Christianity. These are exactly the sort of stories that achieve genesis by successions of children whispering in rooms (children whispering in rooms being the origins of all magic). Different from various fundamentalisms, the universe these myths describe is recognizably ours, if wretched. Evil is assigned a symbolism of strictly literal and materialistic objects. Transcendence, overcoming is deferred.

The woman who collected these stories is a poet.

c/f How a 1997 New Times Feature on Homeless Kids' Folklore Exploded the Internet