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Christopher Nolan, one of my favorite living directors, is now working on a movie of the Odyssey, to be released next summer. Frankly, everything I am hearing about it fills me with dread, especially the cast full of Africans. I may just skip reviewing it. I may skip it altogether. But just in case, I have been preparing by rereading the Odyssey and surveying other adaptations. (more…)
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Have you ever thought, right, but you don’t know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fucking life and all you have left to look forward to is fucking sickness and purgatory? — Johnnie, Naked
Of all creatures that move and breathe upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man. — Homer, the Odyssey
I saw Mike Leigh’s 1993 movie Naked the week of its release, and during a rare English heatwave. (more…)
Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)
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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Dante’s Inferno
Dante Alighieri’s conceptual map of Hell also lay at the intersection where biblical and classical ideas about the afterlife crossed. Virgil, fellow Italian poet and ancient Roman author of the Æneid, accompanied him during much of his journey, for Virgil was someone who had imagined his own hero Aeneas successfully navigating the underworld. (more…)
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“And there was the Odyssey, whose vigorously sonorous, measured numbers gave an intimation of a vanished, clearly articulated and joyous life.” – Hermann Hesse[1]
“An easily forgotten fact of cultural history [is] the radical, white-to-black, up-and-then-down variations in the periodic estimates of men and works. . . . To the Renaissance, Cicero was the supreme man of letters; today he has been banished even from the classroom.“ — Jacques Barzun[2] (more…)
Detail, Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus boasting to Polyphemus, 1896.
Detail, Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus boasting to Polyphemus, 1896.
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Anyone with a decent education knows that the Iliad and Odyssey concern the fall of Troy and the struggle of Odysseus against a series of eldritch terrors on his voyage homeward. The timeless appeal is clear; the style is quite gripping, which especially comes out if one has a good translation or happens to know Greek. (more…)