Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Glen Hansard was also fond of these Bohemian gems:
“It's funny when I came here first I'd been to New York before I was here. I could never put my finger on what I loved about New York, and when I came here I could put my finger on it. What New York is, it's the capital of Europe, and the Eastern European influence in New York was what I liked most about it, and when I came here I got a purer taste of the same thing. I can't explain it, I can't put it into words – it's a taste."
New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”
When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.
Yep. He’s the mob boss president — everything is about favors, taking his cut, deals, tough guy-ness, bending the world to his will, power, and white male supremacy
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”
All I can say is that Oddyssey was the movie we needed. Nolan gave us space to mourn our fallen state and with it the desecration of kindness and honor, allowing us to recognize the monsters we've become. Now, back into our disguises …
Is the movie as good as the book? The question always arises when a filmmaker adapts one of our favourite texts. Not many book-based movies turn out better than the works that inspired them.JawsandThe Godfatherspring to mind as rare examples. But most of the time we find ourselves lamenting the movie’s failure to reproduce all the marvellous mental pictures we imagined when reading the book.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is a remarkable piece of old-school epic filmmaking – vast, visceral, and visually breathtaking. But does it do justice to the book?
Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.MELINDA SUE GORDON
To answer that question, we’d first better establish exactly which “book” we’re talking about. Few of us are equipped to read Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek. Unless we are, the book we measure Nolan’s film against will have to be a translation. And whichever translation we read, it too will be a kind of adaptation, marred by its own compromises and trade-offs and deviations from the original text.
In Homer’s case, the “original text” is a slippery concept anyway. Homer’s two-verse epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were products of a pre-literate culture. They weren’t written for publication on paper, or even papyrus. They were composed to be memorised and sung by travelling bards, whose role in Greek culture was analogous to the role that touring entertainers play in ours
The earliest surviving written fragments ofThe Odysseydate from around 300 BCE — that is, about five centuries after the poem began circulating orally. Today’s standard Greek text, reconstructed from the various ancient fragments and medieval manuscripts that have come down to us, represents the scholars’ best stab at what the original work might have looked like.
But since those sources date from so long after the poem’s inception, it’s fanciful to believe that they constitute an exact record of Homer’s original words. In the course of being orally transmitted from one generation to the next, his poem inevitably would have been reshaped – even, perhaps, improved.
The character of Sinon, played by Elliot Page, has a small but vital role in Nolan’s story, but Sinon doesn’t appear in Homer at all.
Indeed, some scholars doubt that Homer existed at all. Ancient Greek tradition had it that he was a blind bard from Ionia, possibly descended from one of the Muses. Modern scholars tend to believe he was a mythical figure, invented in retrospect to serve as the lone author of works that were, in truth, communal creations.
Even if Homer existed, he didn’t invent the stories told in his poems. He recycled tales that were already staples of Greek tradition. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, which may or may not have been a real historical conflict. The Odyssey recounts the long journey home from that war of the Greek warrior Odysseus.
Whoever wrote them, the genius of Homer’s epics lay in the language they used to tell those stories – a language so powerful that the poems became the foundation stones of Western literature, and are still reverberating through our culture three millennia later.
Ninety-odd years ago, Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay about the trickiness of reading The Odyssey called “The Homeric Versions.” Because he couldn’t read it in the original Greek, Borges found that The Odyssey was, for him, less “a uniform monument” than “an international bookstore of works in prose and verse.”
Homer’s influence on Western culture runs so deep that we often allude to him without even knowing it.
The bookstore evoked by Borges didn’t just contain a multitude of translations, “all of them sincere, genuine, and divergent.” It also contained an endless array of other books and poems and plays inspired by Homer’s work. Other artists have been freely adapting and tinkering with Homer’s stuff for centuries: not out of disrespect for it, but because its simple human power makes it eternally relevant.
When the ancient Romans reworked Homer’s tales, they gave Odysseus a new name, Ulysses. They also renamed most of the gods who feature in Homer. Zeus became Jupiter, Poseidon became Neptune. The only Greek god whose name the Romans didn’t change was Apollo.
A few decades before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Virgil retooled Homer’s works for Latin readers in his Aeneid. He compressed the stories of Troy and the Odyssey into a single epic poem, and invented new characters to bridge the gap between Homer’s narratives.
Nolan takes similar liberties in his movie. The character of Sinon, played by Elliot Page, has a small but vital role in Nolan’s story, but Sinon doesn’t appear in Homer at all. He’s an invention of Virgil’s, whom Nolan appropriates and puts to eloquent use of his own.
Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan and Anne Hathaway at the premiere of The Odyssey in New York.AP
Homer’s influence on Western culture runs so deep that we often allude to him without even knowing it. When we use the word “siren,” or worry about Trojan-horse malware, we’re borrowing from Homer.
We do the same when we refer to any arduous journey as an “odyssey.” This word didn’t predate Homer; Odysseus wasn’t called that because he went on an odyssey. His name comes from the Greek word for pain or vexation. The English word “odyssey” was coined centuries later, in conscious homage to Homer
Indeed, Homer’s poem isn’t called The Odyssey in Greek. Its Greek title is Odysseia – meaning the story or song of Odysseus. Early English translations echoed this usage. George Chapman’s 1614 translation was called Homer’s Odysses. Thomas Hobbes used the same title for his 1673 translation.
Alexander Pope, who rendered the poem into heroic couplets in 1725, was the first English translator to call it The Odyssey of Homer. But Pope still didn’t mean “odyssey” in our modern sense. He meant it as an English equivalent for “story of Odysseus.” It wasn’t until the next century that “odyssey” was first used as a generic word for journey.
English poets have been riffing on Homer for centuries. I first encountered Homer when my Year 7 English class studied John Keats’s sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer — that staple of the high school syllabus, in which Keats describes having his mind blown by Chapman’s translation.
William Shakespeare was inspired by Chapman’s Homer too. After Chapman published a partial translation of The Iliad in 1598, Shakespeare wrote his strange and rarely performed play Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare’s take on the Homeric material was subversive — his scurrilous clown Thersites dismisses the entire Trojan War as a falling-out between “a cuckold and a whore.”
James Joyce made similarly ironic use of Homer in his Ulysses. That novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom, spends a day wandering the streets of Dublin. To give Bloom’s journey shape and resonance, Joyce turned it into a modern parody of the Odyssey. In Homer, Odysseus must defeat Polyphemus, the fearsome one-eyed giant. In Ulysses, Bloom tangles with a metaphorically one-eyed Irish bigot called The Citizen. In Homer, Odysseus is tempted by the song of the sirens. Joyce’s Bloom is tempted by a couple of barmaids in a pub.
Compared with Shakespeare and Joyce, Christopher Nolan plays the Homeric material straight. Is his movie as good as the book? The question has two meanings, when you think about it. It doesn’t just mean, “Does the movie measure up to the book?” It can also mean, “Is the movie as good a movie as the book is a book?”
If you can arrange to see Nolan’s film on as big a screen as possible — preferably an IMAX one — you may feel that the answer is yes. Like Homer, Nolan catches the sweaty and brutal spirit of the Greek myths by pushing the resources of his art to strenuous extremes. Homer immortalised those myths by using the most potent medium available to him — language, pushed to its lyrical and heroic limit.
Nolan, to make his Odyssey, has hauled massive IMAX cameras to some of the most forbidding locations on earth, and captured some of the most stunning landscape shots in cinema’s history. Watching his tiny and fragile human characters move across wind-pummelled cliffs and beaches, and contend with roiling oceans, you viscerally understand why the ancients thought the elements were controlled by angry gods.
Be sound.
Keep fit.
Act silly.
Enjoy nature.
Read books.
Love freely.
Find purpose.
Hate Everton
Travel often.
Cook passionately
Feel content.
Antagonise dickheads.
Ignore anxieties.
Value mates.
Celebrate life
Be you.
I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.
Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it) and The Song of Achilles.
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.
I suspect like many of you, I saw The Odyssey this weekend. I really liked it and the more I read & think about the film, the more it grows in my esteem. This thread by Mmina Maclang-Tamayo (spoilers!) is pretty much how I interpreted what Nolan was trying to convey.
As it turns out, it was 10,000% important that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was delivered in American accents, beyond just the Emily Wilson linguistics of it all.
It’s because it was about America.
I didn’t think it’d be possible to spoil a 3000 year-old epic, but here’s a 🧵
The emphasis on what’s happening back in Ithaca, with the royal courts and suitors to Penelope reflect upon the internal politics of taking the anxieties of the people about external invaders to attempt to seize power.
Then, Odysseus returns with the revelation: the feared invaders, “The Sea People”, were them all along.
Zeus’ Law has an uncanny resemblance to Christian teaching. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me”. (Matthew 25:40)
That America proudly keeps envoking the Abrahamic God in its identity as a nation, and its government attempting to justify their actions in the name of such a God, yet turn around and gravely mistreat the immigrants on their doorstep, and antagonize their own allies, is a betrayal of its identity.
20. The point: Nothing is sacred in war, and we have lost all respect for basic decency and hospitality. We’re all the violators; we are all the suitors, we are all the cyclops. Consequently, all the towers and temples burn (“the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead”). It’s Odysseus’ guilt about his foreign wars manifesting again and he’s spent years avoiding the truth.
21. That’s why he’s unconsciously avoided home for twenty years: he simply cannot face what he has become, nor does he wish to show his shame to his wife and son.
Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy offers a path to meaning through creative action, even in a world shaped by frustration
I’ve only watched bits and pieces of these videos so far (the Nolan one is 71 minutes long), but when ILM’s Todd Vaziri sayssomething film-related is good, it’s good
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce.
What you’re seeing here, these are not paintings. They’re prints of engravings from Blake’s illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn’t really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful.
Drawing on intimate, unseen archive and powerful first-hand testimony, this landmark 4-part series tells the human stories behind our quest to explore space, offering a unique perspective on our changing world and where we are headed.
Word nerd Rob Watts explains where the names of all the European countries come from.
Which country is the “land of the rabbits”? Why does Germany have so many different names? Where do the Dutch actually live? What links Croatians and neckties?
