The Odyssey - A Dramatic Retelling of Homer's Epic by Simon Armitage

I'm teaching a new course this fall - Western Humanities I - and there is a set of required texts from which we can choose to build our course.  We must, naturally, include one of Homer's epic poems, The Iliad or The Odyssey.  Not being much for battle play-by-plays, I prefer The Odyssey, so I started there.  As one of the oldest extant texts available, The Odyssey is a fitting opportunity to "start at the very beginning - a very good place to start" as we attempt to lay a foundation of textual relevance to our students.  However, most of these students will not be English majors, they will not be readers, they will not be accustomed to or interested in dactylic hexamater or anything having to do with the original Greek.  With that in mind, I have decided to take the risky step of NOT asking my students to read an original text translation in its entirety; instead, I ordered Simon Armitage's translation, commissioned by BBC Radio for a dramatic radio performance and later published in book form.  I want them to experience the energy of the oral tradition - as it was originally intended.

This translation stays remarkably true to the original text, and the dramatic dialogue makes the story come to life.  It is strong and thoughtful, and I believe it will captivate students much more than the original text.  Don't worry, though, I will introduce them to fragments of a respected translation.  I will make sure they understand the roots of epic poetry as poetry, but I'm excited for how this version promises to enliven the class from the very beginning.  It is a beautiful but accessible version of this most classic of texts, and I highly recommend it.  Accessible though it is, it doesn't try to be something it's not.   As the introduction by the author reads:

It is not set in a housing estate in Salford.  It does not depict the Achaeans as veterans of the Gulf War or asylum-seekers, though of course we should not be surprised if the Odyssey rings with echoes and resonances of our contemporary world. Such is the power and purpose of myth. (vi)

It is these echoes and resonances that I intend to explore in the course.  I'm going to use The Odyssey as the bedrock not just of Western literature but quite specifically of the course.  Everything we do will serve to further plumb the Odyssey's themes of journey, home, family, disguise, and the importance of story.  We will also read Plato, Ovid, Dante, and Shakespeare, but we will track the influence of Odysseus through each of these and into our contemporary Western culture.  We will read a little Big Fish and watch a little O Brother and finish the class with Atwood's The Penelopiad.  What do you think?

Raising Readers!

Yesterday, I got an unexpected phone call from a friend.  She has an acquaintance that works at the local PBS station, and they were hosting a tour that afternoon and wanted kids in their educational program room during the tour.  My friend's kids are still in school, so she asked me, and we hopped right to it.  Nothing like an impromptu field trip!

Now, my kids don't watch TV.  They have watched a few PBS programs at their great-grandmother's house and at the dentist, but they call them videos.  They don't seem to know (haha!) that televisions have "videos" available at any hour of the day; however, many PBS shows are built around book characters they know, and hey, we like learning stuff!

The station is a fun, visually appealing place with a cool, open-air design.  Their educational room has a small library and posters and art pieces created by local schoolchildren.  Can you name the characters shown above?

The program that day had just three kids - my two and one more cutie, and I loved the smallness of it.  Mrs. Debbie (Debbie Thompson, Director of Education & Community Engagement) lead them through a series of activities involving letters, sounds, drawing pictures, making pinwheels, identifying opposites, and of course, READING.

Their program is called Raising Readers, and Mrs. Thompson explained that while many kids don't have access to books on a daily basis, almost every kid in America has daily access to a TV.  PBS is attempting to get kids reading through programming that connects to books, hoping kids will read once they are invested in those familiar characters.

WTCI (wtciTV.org) hosts these educational programs for school groups, homeschoolers, and families.  They also have an annual Family Day where the TV characters come out to play.  It is held on the first Sunday of November and involves face painting, free books, and lots of other fun activities for kids.  If you are in the Chattanooga area and are interested in a tour of the station or an educational program for a small group of kids, contact Debbie Thompson at dthompson@wtciTV.org.  They want to give every kid the power of words.

Oh, and there are goodie bags.  JOY!

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Do y'all remember my utter fan-girl situation with Jess Walter?  Here's a reminder if not, and here's the amazing interview he so graciously did where he first intrigued me about Beautiful Ruins.  I was fortunate to receive an ARC of this novel, which goes on sale June 12th, and despite my busy-ness and distraction and all, I have devoured it.

Beautiful Ruins tells the story of Dee Moray, an up-and-coming actress in the 1960s, who gets a part in Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and whose life gets changed dramatically by her trip to Italy for the filming.  It is also the story of Claire Silver, assistant to legendary producer Michael Deane, who got his big break working on Cleopatra and is now nearly washed up.  It is also the story of Pasquale Tursi, the young Italian trying to run his father's hotel in Porto Vergogna, Italy, where Dee Moray stays briefly in 1962.  It is also so many more stories and the story of all humanity:

Every love is the same love, and it is overpowering - the wrenching grace of what it is to be human.  We love.  We try.  We die alone. (129-130)

If this quote makes the book sound dark, that's because, well, it is.  At parts, at least.  Walter can be fantastically funny, but even at his most lighthearted, he colors everything with the appropriate tenor of reality, which is often not much funny at all.  In Beautiful Ruins, Alvis Bender is a failed writer who only completes one chapter of his great book.  That chapter is included in the text, and it is a masterpiece.  In it, a character (based on Bender himself) has the following exchange with a woman he has just met and told he is writing a book about the war.

She became somber.  Writing a book was an important thing to do, she said, not a joke.

"Oh, no," I said, "I don't mean to joke about it.  I don't mean that sort of funny."

She asked what other kind of funny there was and I didn't know what to say.  We were within sight of her village, a cluster of gray shadows that sat like a cap on the dark hill in front of us.

"The sort of funny that makes you sad, too," I said. (86)

The sort of funny that makes you sad, too.  That's Jess Walter's writing in a nutshell.  This great chapter also includes some of my favorite lines:

Such a horrible formality, the end of a war. (73)

God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. (88)

and

Years passed, and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, like all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living. (88)

This book is totally different from The Zero, which I loved.  It is completely different from The Financial Lives of Poets, which is hilarious and wonderful.  It is less caustic, more romantic, perhaps more traditional than both.  But it is not weaker.  In fact, the vast distance between these three books demonstrates Walter's amazing range, his gifted voice, and his incredible talent for creating memorable, fully realized characters. He is a marvel, and if you aren't reading him yet, you should be.  You can start on June 12th.

One last notable line to lighten the mood a bit:

but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.  There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant - sail for Asia and stumble on America - and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along. (284) 

The Submission by Amy Waldman

I checked this book out in preparation for the Read-a-Thon last month, and I started it in the days following that insanity.  That means I have been reading this book for-evah, y'all.  Almost a month.  Ages.

You might presume it was slow, dense, or otherwise unappealing, but it wasn't at all.  I've just been distracted (still am) by the upcoming move and the ongoing renovation.  It's hard to devote much time to reading when you're fielding phone calls from HVAC and flooring guys and getting the gas turned on (Georgia is ca-razy with its natural gas deregulation business) and having to buy a new water heater and removing the stair treads from your staircase yourself (yes, I did, thank you very much) and painting trim and finding that you can't use a caulk gun properly (how is this possible?) and . . . wait, what was I supposed to be talking about?

Oh, yeah, Amy Waldman's terrific post-9/11 novel The Submission.  It really was wonderful, and my review is not going to do it justice (see the aforementioned distracted-ness), but let me reassure you that Waldman handles a difficult subject with grace and provides much food for thought.  The novel tracks the process of choosing a design (and thus, an architect) for the 9/11 memorial to be constructed in New York on the attack site.  There is a jury made up of artists, political representatives, and Claire, the lone surviving family member chosen to serve on the jury.  There are other families of victims represented, ranging from the brother of a firefighter killed in the collapse to the wife of a Bangladeshi janitor working in the towers at the time of the attack.  And then, there is Mo, the architect whose design is chosen in chapter one.  The only problem is that Mo is Mohammad Khan, a Muslim-American who happens to also be a wildly talented architect with a rich and meaningful design.  The backlash, chaos, and upheaval that follows is where the book takes you, and it is a difficult but honest portrayal.  Waldman's book does not flinch, it does not make any of the decisions easy, and it leaves you feeling about as unresolved as you started.  But it is a worthy read, a layered and varied perspective on America in the years following 9/11.

Love and Loss: Maurice Sendak

I have previously and exuberantly expressed my abiding love of Maurice Sendak's work.  His Where the Wild Things Are breaks all barriers for me, and I rank it among the best books ever.  I call it one of the world's perfect books.

Just as when Eudora Welty died several years ago, the news of Sendak's death today has sent me quietly searching for more of him.  I am pragmatic about life, about death, about aging.  I have no desire to unnaturally prolong life and hope to "go" before I lose connection with who I am in this world.  That said, when we lose a iconic, important figure like Sendak, it makes me pause.

I'm so thankful for the life of Maurice Sendak.