Mad Dog and The Odyssey

 

This week's New Yorker carries an article by a critic, David Denby, which I started reading thinking it was a review of the new IMAX movie "The Odyssey," and although he begins with the movie, he quickly admits he hasn't seen it yet, and what the article is about is the whole "return home" story genre.

But my mind wandered off to The Iliad and the  Odyssey quickly and away from trying to place it in a canon of literature.

For me, the story is personal.

On my eleventh Christmas, I opened a long flat present last, knowing it was a book. I had got the presents I was hoping for--a new baseball mitt, other important eleven year old boy stuff, and here was a book. 

It was a big book, seventeen by fourteen inches, the Giant Golden book series, this one by Alan and Alice Provensen, illustrators. It was called "The Iliad and the Odyssey."  The illustration on the cover and those throughout the book struck me as strange and off putting. I was accustomed to illustrations from Marvel comics and Mad Magazine, but these were ethereal, different.

"What is this?" I asked my parents.

"Read it," my mother said, smiling.

"But what is it?"

"Read it and find out."

She seemed secretly amused, and that annoyed me, and she was atypically closed mouthed about this whole thing, so naturally, I set the book aside, but in the late afternoon of a quiet, boring Christmas day, I finally opened it up.

I had read Golden Book Bible Stories and Aesop's fables, and other stuff which seemed a little like this book, but there were no morals at the end of a page in this one.

There were gods and warriors which should have been enough for an eleven year old boy, but the art was so strange and the language so flat and neutral, as it described the rage which propelled the Iliad. 

And these people were killing each other, and it wasn't clear to me exactly where Helen stood in her own mind. She was some Greek's wife but she seemed pretty passive, standing behind and peering through the wall at Troy as the battles raged. 

My mother called me down for dinner that night, but by then I was completely hooked and did not answer. She came to the door and I looked up momentarily, and she closed the door behind her, but I could hear her tell my father I wouldn't be down for dinner.  

"He's reading," she told him.

I lugged that book with me to college in Providence, R.I.,  to medical school in New York City, to a farm in southern Rhode Island, to New Haven and back again to Washington, D.C. when I finally moved back "home."

I had been gone 16 years, got as far as 500 miles up the east coast, but in all the moves and packing and boxes, I made sure that book did not get lost.

I had fought some monsters and had some adventures in my travels, but nothing as magical as the Odyssey.

When I had sons of my own, I read it to them. When they were four and six, we had a bedtime routine: The older boy lay in his upper bunk and the younger one sat in my lap on a reading chair. As I read each page, I'd hold up the book so the older boy in his perch could see the illustrations.  

They absolutely loved that book. 

It had warriors and fighting, and gods doing magic in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey there were monsters and narrow escapes, the ultimate sci fi super hero stuff.

When my younger son read the Iliad in his freshman high school English class, the teacher, who thought he was something of a dolt, a dumb jock admitted to the private school because of his athletic ability, got a shock when she asked the class about Zeus's wife, Hera. 

"He's frightened of her," my younger son told her. "He might be king of the gods, but he's afraid of his wife."

The teacher was so stunned she mentioned it twice during our parent/teacher conference. 

"He reads with more insight than anyone in that class," she marveled. 
"It's a boy's book," I told her. "Among other things. Boys don't have to be explained what is going on during that war. How are the girls in the class liking it?"

"Odd you should mention that," she said. "They read it. But they do better with 'Pride and Prejudice.'"

When my older son went off to college, he took a freshman course called "Anger," and the first book they read was the Iliad.

"Good grief," I told him. "We thought Columbia was hidebound and ossified because they insisted every freshmen read 'the classics' beginning with the Iliad and here you are at freewheeling NYU, and you're reading the same damn thing. And this is a course about anger."

"Well," my son explained patiently, "There isn't very much in the Iliad but anger."

I still have the book. It's now nearly 70 years old and it's getting rebound this summer. 

I tried reading it to my seven year old grand daughter. 

She was polite, but not really taken. She's more into "Moana" and "Frozen." 

To her credit, she did like "Banshees of Inisherin," until her mother walked in during the finger cutting scene and rescued her from her incorrigible grandfather. 

Maybe she'll circle back and pick up the Iliad and the Odyssey later. 

But I do think it's a boy's book, politically incorrect as that statement might be.

I'll definitely go see the movie, but, for my money, I'll be very surprised if anything on screen can ever match the Provensen's and their Giant Golden Book.

The Widening Gyre: Jill Lepore Unleashes Her Inner Joan Didion

 

Jill Lepore has harbored an inner streak of Joan Didion for some years, but in this week's New Yorker (5/5/25) she goes full "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire Obadiah Youngblood

She starts off with a litany of complaints about his highness, the Trump, which would make Jefferson blush in envy for its conciseness, its scope and its sheer power.

King George III was doped slapped compared to what Lepore does to Trump.

But then she goes beyond Thomas of Monticello and sails into a truly courageous analysis of why Trump has been able to chop down the structures of government and liberal democracy so easily: the wood had been allowed to rot:

"They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as condition of employment and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left."

In her famous account of the fragmentation and degeneration of San Francisco in 1967, Didion showed where liberal, liberated thought had brought us. Her essays collected as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," took the title from W.H. Auden's poem, "The Second Coming," which contained the lines:

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

Which pretty well describes how writers at the New Yorker--Lepore, David Rankin, the whole lot feel right now, in a year which many have compared to 1968. 

Lepore's summation of Trump's offense is spot on, of course:

From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action—and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution— Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government’s commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

But it is her analysis of why he has been so successful which is telling: 

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge.

She has seen the problem and she knows a big part of it has been the failure of liberals to police their own house.