Twenty hours with the great manbabies of legend 🔗

I might've gotten nothing at all out of listening to the Iliad if not for Emily Wilson’s introduction, which I found more captivating than the poem itself. Her concluding paragraph is haunting:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time. (pp. lix-lx)

That message is not what naturally jumps out at me from the poem. My natural takeaway would’ve been something more like: wow, ancient people sure were stupid and awful. Everyone seems deeply materialistic, egoistic, power-obsessed; the heroes are constantly indignant about offenses to themselves that are no different from the things they’re trying to do to others, and each of them seems to have no moral compass beyond his own conviction that he is inherently more entitled to honor and success than his opponents are. If you filmed the Iliad straight it would come across as a not-at-all-subtle parody of hypermasculinity.

So I’m glad I had Wilson’s introduction to guide me in interpreting Achilles’ character arc, such as it is:

The extraordinary wrath of Achilles entails an insistent, deadly refusal to accept any of the traditional forms of compensation for the various losses he experiences. (p. xiii)

It is only in the final two books, with the help of divine advice and human rituals of mourning, that Achilles begins to relent in his obstinate wrath. He recognizes at last that loss cannot be avoided or eliminated, and sometimes there is no possibility of adequate compensation. When we accept inadequate forms of compensation, knowing that they are not enough and that they are all there is, we can at least share in the universal experience of loss. (p. xiv)

By modern standards the poem is unfocused and meandering and its characters are unlikable and unrelatable. I might have struggled to get through a text version; Audra McDonald's excellent audio narration helped some. I love the pathos with which she wails one of Menelaus’s lines in book 3:

Father Zeus! No other god could be more cruel than you are! (p. 70, linebreak omitted)

Three tellings of the Odyssey 🔗

As with the Iliad, Wilson prefaces her translation of the Odyssey with a really illuminating introduction. I particularly appreciated the discussion of xenia:

Hospitality is important in all human cultures, ancient and modern; in this respect, there is nothing special about archaic Greece. What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in this culture is that elite men who have entered one another’s homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of “guest-friendship” (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. … The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia. (pp. 23-24)

It’s what the new movie is alluding to by the name “Zeus’s law”, though the film simplifies it to something more like the Golden Rule. That’s just one of many ways the film molds the story to be more palatable to modern morals: Nolan’s Odysseus does not knowingly have affairs; is more clearly driven by love than by honor and ego; is so protective of his men that he declares he'd defy the gods for them; treats his slave Eumaeus (I’m not sure the film even refers to anyone in the household as a slave?) with less condescension; and certainly doesn’t murder a bunch of slave girls for the crime of having been raped.

I’m glad for all these changes. If the movie were more faithful it would be both less fun and less likely to say anything meaningful to viewers. As it is, I love it, and it’s filled with memorable visuals: the understatedly horrific cyclops; the slow but inexorable Laestrygonians; Circe reshaping her victims' bodies with her hands; Agamemnon standing calmly in dark spotless armor as the gate of Troy opens. Keeping the magic and monsters but being ambiguous about the reality of the gods gives the world a feeling of wonder and mystery and cyclopean menace that any on-screen appearance of the petty, all-too-human Homeric gods would have compromised.

I listened to Wilson's version of the poem before watching the movie, and Robert Fagles's afterward. Because I was in a hurry to finish it in time, I spaced out a lot during Wilson's, so I'm hesitant to express a preference for the text of one translation or the other, but I will say I preferred Ian McKellen's narration of Fagles's translation over Claire Danes's narration of Wilson's.

Two frustrating fiction books 🔗

I really loved China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels (reviews: 1, 2, 3), and people say his novella This Census-Taker is secretly set in the same universe, but it doesn’t have much of what I enjoyed about those. What it also doesn’t have is any clarity about what, exactly, happens. It’s OK, but I’m just not a huge fan of this sort of entirely-open-to-interpretation fiction. One image from the book that may stick with me: the child protagonist is fascinated by a certain kind of curio, a bottle with an animal inside it that couldn’t possibly have fit through the opening. He learns eventually that the creatures are inserted as eggs or babies and spend their entire lives there. This of course invites a question raised explicitly at the end of the book: might someone treat a human this way?

It’s less of a surprise that I didn’t love Nnedi Okarafor’s Death of the Author. I didn’t necessarily dislike her previous books—there was definitely interesting stuff in Lagoon—but they didn’t connect with me enough that I would have read more by her of my own accord. But this one was a book club choice, so I pushed through it despite the first half continually putting me in a grumpy mood. Most of the characters are jerks. The protagonist Zelu is much less of a jerk than her emotionally abusive family, but I struggled to root for her after the scene where she openly mocks a student during a class she’s teaching and then acts like the victim when there’s blowback for it. She seems to feel everyone else is beneath her and that she carries a special spark of genius they lack—and the story seems contrived to validate those feelings. Zelu’s apparently so special that despite not even liking science fiction her very first sci-fi novel makes her an instant millionaire, with a movie deal before her book even hits the shelves. It’s the trope where if you just let your raw emotions guide you you’ll naturally produce a work of pure brilliance that the whole world will instantly recognize as such. Anyway, the second half was more enjoyable and I did like the dual interpretations it makes possible, where both Zelu’s story and the robots’ story have equal claim to be happening in the ‘real’ world in which the other is merely a story.

Two satisfying Switch games 🔗

There was a year or two when I was not-infrequently buying AAA games and immediately losing interest in them. I’ve been trying to take a second look at some of them lately, including Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It’s actually pretty good! Instead of using sword and bow to attack enemies as in other Zelda games, here you more often rely on copies—echoes—of enemies to fight on your behalf. Sometimes this is frustrating because the echoes are too slow or inept to complete a task that would be trivial if you were in direct control, but in general it’s a cool gameplay mechanic.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is another one that had been languishing unplayed in my library, which is a shame, because it's an excellent metroidvania; once I got into it, I was surprised by the high quality of the gameplay (though not of the plot). The combat and the puzzles and the platforming are all solid. The fights are challenging enough that I had to actually learn to parry instead of just button-mash, though it doesn't have the maddening degree of difficulty found in, say, Nine Sols.

Potentially promising pop science pertaining to persuasion 🔗

David McRaney’s How Minds Change was my EA book club’s pick for this month. It talks about four systems for trying to change people (all of which McRaney says are forms of “technique rebuttal”):

• Deep Canvassing
• Street Epistemology
• Motivational Interviewing
• Smart Politics (based on motivational interviewing)

A quote from the Smart Politics website perhaps sums up the key insight driving all these approaches: “The only one who can change a person’s mind is that person themselves.” The message running through McRaney’s book is that you can’t change minds by force of argument or weight of evidence, but you can often set the stage for change by making people feel safe and gently helping them inspect their own thinking.