Choose your own Odyssey

10 things worth sharing this week

The first poem in Newspaper Blackout (2010)

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey the way I love to see a movie: unplanned, on a whim, tickets purchased a few minutes before showtime, a bucket of popcorn and a smuggled bag of Reese’s Pieces between me and my best friend, sitting in the center of the third row. I loved Samantha Morton as Circe, dug Agamemnon’s getup and the Trojan Horse as heist movie (Michael Mann’s Heat is a key influence on Nolan), thought a lot about Julie Taymor’s Titus watching the Hades scene, laughed thinking about how Nolan called it “the ultimate dog story,” and could’ve sworn they used Bjork’s “The Anchor Song” during the homecoming scene. (It was composer Ludwig Göransson’s piece ”Odysseus,” which sounds like saxophones to me but might be an aulos?) I love seeing a big release when it comes out without reading any reviews and then just spending days listening and reading to what everybody thinks about it.
   
   

2. “We’ve reached a point where we get so few extravagant, ambitious studio movies that we’re expected to collapse with gratitude whenever we’re presented with one.” Hard to pick a favorite line from my favorite review of The Odyssey by my favorite film critic, Stephanie Zacharek, but I’ll go with this one: “Every once in a while, the goddess Athena (Zendaya) will appear at Odysseus’ side to judge his actions, mostly by offering a scowl of disapproval, the sort of face a wife makes when her husband loads the dishwasher wrong.” (Another funny line, from another review: “Homer’s Calypso is a great part. Nolan’s is some woman who runs a beach bar and is thinking of pivoting to psychotherapy.”)
   
   

3. “Before Zendaya played Athena, I did!” I enjoyed this conversation about the movie between translator Emily Wilson and writer Sarah Ruhl, especially when Wilson gets up and recites the poem in ancient Greek and English. Wilson discusses why you should read the “Sea Peoples” Wikipedia page before you see the movie, Claire Danes’ audiobook, her next book Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, and why she put a “Misogynist Trolling” button on her contact page.
   
   

4. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the modernist novel most obviously inspired by The Odyssey, but I’ve already read Ulysses, so I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her introduction to the beautiful annotated edition, Merve Emre points out that Woolf thought of “the writer and the reader as two strangers getting to know one another.” In Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she writes, “Both in life and in literature, it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other.”
   
   

5. Xenia (hospitality) is a key theme in Homer’s poem, and Emily Wilson emphasizes the distinction between xenophobia (fear of strangers) and the lesser-known xenophilia (love of strangers.) I love the last paragraph of her translator’s note for The Odyssey:

   

6. You never know what gods might show up in what disguises. In Greek mythology, a little owl traditionally accompanies or represents Athena. Y’all know I’m a little owl crazy and I love Penny Lane’s movies, so I’m extra excited for her upcoming documentary about Flaco The Owl, Wild Inside. (See her recent post about it, “What is it like to be an owl?”) The movie is showing in cities all over including here in Austin, TX on Sunday, August 9th at Austin Film Society. (They’ve got some good merch for the film — I ordered a poster!)
   
   

7. “Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises,” writes John Berger in About Looking. (Soon to be reissued by NYRB.) Much like in the days of Flaco, my whole family and the entire internet seems to be obsessed with Seattle legend Jimothy the Raccoon and watching an unlikely survivor thrive in the urban wild. Eurymachus, suitor of Penelope, may have scoffed, “Many birds go flying / in sunlight, and not all are meaningful,” but Jimothy seems to me an omen of some kind…

   

   A bit of outgoing mail

8. We solved another Magic Puzzle over the weekend, partly while listening to the Robert Fagles translation as read by Ian McKellen. (I’d like to hire Matt Berry to take a whack at the poem, especially any scene between Calypso and Odysseus.)
   
   

9. Pizza night blockbusters: Turns out there’s more sex and nudity in the movie Airplane! than in the entirety of Nolan’s Odyssey. (Tweens loved it, of course.) We’re also on a good Hitchcock streak: We’ve now watched The Birds, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest, which looks absolutely glorious in 4K.
   
   

10. Will every single item on this week’s list refer, somehow, to The Odyssey? Yes, my friends, even my most recent typewriter interview with author and illustrator Mark Haddon, who said it was the most enjoyable interview he’s ever done and bestowed upon me my new title, “Prince of Analogue.”  

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. For better or worse, there are no references to The Odyssey in Don’t Call It Art. (There is, however, a reference to Odysseus in chapter one of Keep Going!)