WHAT have you finished reading recently? After Christendom, Michael Warren Davis
WHAT are you reading now? Listening to Troy, prepared and read by Stephen Fry.
WHAT are you reading next? Probably The True Flag by Stephen Kinzer, focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain as opposing voices on the question of imperialism. And by “probably”, I mean “I’ve read a quarter of it already”. I say probably because I’ve had an idea for this year’s Blast from the Past, my annual warp back to my younger self’s reading.
(1) Dutton Ranch. (TV) I came for Morgan Wade. I don’t see any Morgan Wade. Someone give me timestamps, life is too short to watch an hour of a show just to spot her playing bartender in the background. Here’s some immediate MW gratification for the curious; her new release, “Love’s Insane”.
(2) Cobra Kai. (TV) Just got distracted. Planning on returning to it. Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!
(3) Star Trek Strange New Worlds, season 3: (TV) Paramount Plus does not like my browser extensions that cripple information-harvesting, so it usually takes 4-5 tries to get it to start streaming. Also, season 3 is a little…odd. I will return.
(4) Rick Riordan’s Norse series. (YA books) At some point I went “Eh, I’m tired of reading about a trio of kids who are told to take a road trip to save Earth from a chaos monster before the Solstice/Equinox in three weeks”.
(5) Rick Riordan’s Roman series. (YA books) I literally just missed everything after The Mark of Athena. So, all of them. (Last read in 2012, oofdah.)
(6) Shrinking. An AppleTV series with Marshall from How I Met Your Mother and Harrison Ford from Witness, in which Marshall plays a therapist whose patients’ problems give him an emotional blue screen of death. I watched the first few episodes and enjoyed it, but I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched an entire series through. Okay, it was late spring, when I re-watched 11.22.63. And before that it was Chernobyl. But except for those, I honestly can’t tell you.
(7) Star Trek Picard (season 3). The less said about season 1 and 2, the better. I liked season three, except for the weird smoking alien, but after they killed off my favorite surly Bajoran (no offense, Colonel Kira), I meh’d right out.
(8) Star Trek Discovery (season 2). I have started watching this 3-4 times. I must persevere, if only for Anson Mount and Ethan Peck. But man. Maybe the next time I’m hospitalized or something.
(9) Clan of the Cave Bear (the last novel). I read all but the last of the Jean M. Auel Cro-Magnon novels in which Ayla invents everything from equestrianism to sewing. Auel did a crazy amount of research, but the books got progressively more like a soap opera, and I just didn’t care enough to tackle the huge one.
(10) History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill. I enjoyed the ones my library had, but we didn’t have all of them. So, I technically haven’t finished it..
I can’t believe I almost missed this. Ray Bradbury’s story, “And There Will Come Soft Rains”, was thecreepiest bit of short fiction I ever read in middle or high school. Images of it have haunted me since. The best way to experience it, of course, is reading it without knowing a single thing about the story – only the general tension of the Cold War. But is that possible today? Well, if you don’t know about it, read it. And then you can listen to this adaptive audio drama which ruins the twist but has its own merits. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an inexplicable interest to play Fallout 4.
Apologies if you are on the list and received a blank email earlier: WordPress ate my words. Fortunately I always draft off-platform.
Many presidents have a defining moment – a call to arms in a speech, a decisive action, a public stumble. That is not quite the case with the Eisenhower administration, which was so undramatic that its opponents sneered at Eisenhower as a do-nothing, a mere custodian of the office pending the arrival of a real president. William I. Hitchcock reviews more recent scholarship and dismisses that caricature of the Eisenhower years, and here offers a more measured look at a very measured man. Going into this volume, I didn’t know much at all about the Eisenhower administration save for Sputnik and the Iran coup, so this was a fun deep dive that meshed nicely with The Hidden Coalition as well as Ike and Dick.
Although Eisenhower was encouraged to run for office the moment D-Day was over, he demurred: he had no interest in that sort of thing, he said. So high was his flag that even President Truman urged him to run in 1948 – the same year that Truman would run for election in his own name, and narrowly beat Dewey. Eisenhower took a Washingtonian approach to seeking high office: he would not seek it. However, soldier that he was, he would serve if he was called and it was necessary. The fact that both parties courted Eisenhower is a testament to both his established leadership during the war, and his general affability: one reporter commented that something about being around Ike just made people feel good. He was like a grandpa with a pocket full of peppermints and a readiness to listen to every detail about how your day had gone.
That was the image. As a president working with Congress, Eisenhower was unpracticed and clumsy – but as a politician, he had a certain dark cunning that Nixon commented on in private. Eisenhower was no Roosevelt, running into the action with a saber in hand yelling “Bully!”: he preferred to work behind the scenes, managing a strong team. He was largely aided by his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who shared his vision for the world. Eisenhower won the Republican domination against Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, who was a conservative of the old school who did not believe the world was America’s to manage: Eisenhower, by contrast, was very internationalist. Part of this owed to the disaster of World War 2, but the Cold War also fed his desire for the United States to be pro-active in building international institutions to govern the affairs of men in a more peaceful fashion. Specifically, he was looking at the third world and the need to win its hearts and minds to the American rather than Soviet way. This was why during the Suez crisis, in which the British, French, and Israelis had invaded Egypt to keep its new dictator from pushing the western powers out of the canal they’d created, Eisenhower astonishingly withheld his support. He could not woo the third world by supporting old colonial powers. (At any rate, the Soviets were then invading Hungary: so much for the 1950s being boring!). Eisenhower’s desire for the United States to be regarded as the friend of liberty was also why he made what little progress in CIvil Rights that he did: he shared the prejudices of his time, and he was extremely cautious about expanding DC’s power over State power – but at the same time, he felt America needed to live up to its creed if it expected to be taken seriously by non-aligned nations like India and those who were emerging as European colonialism began withdrawing. There were, of course, limits to that; Ike was an adamant cold warrior who began constructing the permanent military-industrial complex he later warned against, and he had no qualms overthrowing sovereign governments if they looked like they were going to flip to the Soviets.
This was a wonderfully deep history of the period. LBJ is far more antagonistic in this than The Hidden Coalition led me to expect; he in fact so adulterated Eisenhower’s Civil Rights bill that he makes his 1965 self look like nothing but an opportunistic hypocrite. I had no idea how volatile the international scene was during the Eisenhower years, and the domestic front was no picnic. Either. Hitchcock’s appraisal of Eisenhower is generally fair and grounded in facts, though he’s much too quick to dismiss men like Taft as extremists for merely maintaining a position that was normal before the war (not managing other nations’ business). At any rate, the volume was well-written and I sailed through despite its girth.
Quotations
It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.
Six days later Allen Dulles and Eisenhower stared at photographs of the Soviet Union taken from space. “This one satellite mission,” said the secret CIA history of the program, “yielded photo coverage of a greater area than the total produced by all of the U-2 missions over the Soviet Union.”
What explains this decisive rebuke from the voters? Eisenhower blamed “the seeming desire of the people of our country to depend more and more upon government—they do not seem to understand that more governmental assistance inevitably means more governmental control.”
Khrushchev plied his British guests with caviar, salmon, excellent vodka, Russian brandy, ballet performances, and long late-night suppers. But then Macmillan discovered what all the other Westerners who engaged with Khrushchev learned: there were two Nikitas. The first was a rational statesman, ready to talk about peace, arms control, and coexistence. The other was the communist zealot, the prosecutor, the brawler who threw angry punches in every direction.
Ike had the most sought-after and yet rarest of qualities in politics: “He makes people happy. No cavalcade I have followed in the entourage of any other political figure in this country has ever left so many smiling, glowing people behind as an Eisenhower tour.”
In the fall of 1960, Moos and his assistant, Capt. Ralph E. Williams, sketched out some ideas about the place of militarism in American life. The United States, for the first time in its history, possessed a “permanent war-based industry” and a “war-based industrial complex” that inevitably shaped governmental decisions. “This creates a danger,” Williams wrote, “that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be very careful to ensure that the merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy.”
During the month of March, Kennedy became, as even his loyal and devoted chronicler Arthur Schlesinger Jr. admitted, “a prisoner of events.” The invasion plan had a momentum of its own, and the bureaucratic forces pushing for it would have been hard to resist. Kennedy drew as his chief lesson from the Bay of Pigs affair never to trust the experts, especially the generals and the CIA planners who had all but promised success. But this lesson he could have learned by heeding Ike’s warning, proffered just weeks before, that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Kennedy had mocked “the old asshole” then; he was not laughing now. “No one knows how tough this job is until he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy sighed. Ike could not resist a small moment of triumph: “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
Today’s TTT is a “Book Cover Related Freebie”. I was going to do “My Favorite Covers for 2026 (So Far)”, but honesty my reading has not been great-cover heavy. So, I’m going to …paste an image of my Amazon browsing history which shows a bunch of books I’ve been looking at recently. Some call that laziness, I call it efficiency. But first, Tuesday Teases!
“It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.” THE OF EISENHOWER
Odysseus openly laughed. ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve never seen such a rocky, scrubby, barren, unforgiving spot,’ he said. ‘It’s all our farmers can do to grow weeds there, let alone cereals and fruit. We have the sourest wine, the raggediest sheep, the scrawniest cattle of any island in the wide Ionian Sea. Trees and houses are blown down every year in the gales. Some years, the rain never comes, and the earth turns to sand. Other years, the whole island slops with mud. Believe me, Ithaca is no Ogygia. But it’s something else … it’s …’ His eyes now filled with tears and the word came out hoarsely, ‘… home.’
ODYSSEY, Stephen Fry.
And now, book covers!
Most of these I looked at for personal reasons, but a couple were shopping for the library, and one (Living Hell) was for a friend who distrusts the internet and has me buy books for him. Fortunately he’s a Civil War enthusiast so his interests don’t skew my recommendations a whit. I’ve actually read Fall and Rise before, but I didn’t realize until I checked the blog archives.
(Click to embiggen.)
As you can see, the Greek myths are now attempting a daring attack against my year-long presidential entrenchments. Will Zeus the Cloud-Gatherer and grey-eyed Athena effect a coup, or will LBJ’s Treatment hold the line and send them reeling back into the Aegean?
Restaurant Clerk in Drivethrough: Now this plate will still be warm on the bottom, so be careful — Me: Thank you so much! Stephen Fry, reading The Odyssey: AND THEY THREW THE INFANT FROM THE WALLS OF THE CITY ONTO THE ROCKS BELOW Me: …have a good day! (speeds away)
A couple of years ago I read Stephen Fry’s Mythos, his attempt to bring together some of the primordial Greek mythological characters into one narrative; he followed it with Heroes, Troy, and finally Odyssey. The recent release of an Odyssey movie put the old story into my head, and I found myself listening to it through much of July. Stephen Fry’s collection is not simply a modern retelling of The Odyssey itself; following Fry’s previous syntheses, it brings together other Greek stories that are set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War. The King of Ithaca, in fact, does not arrive until halfway through. Fry’s collection, however, expands rather than diminishes the contents; and given his delivery and digressions, created an excellent product altogether
One would think that The Odyssey is about cunning Oydyse — (“Why do they always use that word? Why not imaginative, or creative?”) — is about imaginative and creative Odysseus’ journey home from Troy. This is a journey made a lot longer than it needed to be for the same reason the Hebrews spent 40 years walking around in the desert on a trip that should have taken them two weeks: contempt of the gods. Man’s relationship with the gods is a major plot engine here, beginning with the sack of a temple in Troy and escalating rapidly after Odysseus, unable to restrain his pride, tells the dread Cyclops Polyphemus who it is who blinded him: ODYSSEUS, KING OF ITHACA! The God of the Sea Poseidon doesn’t care that his boy was guilty of holding humans hostage and eating them; no, he only cares that Odysseus blinded his progeny and exposed the giant’s idiocy. (“No man has injured me! No man has tortured me!”) Similarly, Helios doesn’t care a whit if Odysseus’ men were trapped on his island for weeks at a time and ate through their stores; they did a little beach BBQ with his cows after being threatened with starvation, and that is enough to kill everyone except for Odysseus who was too busy working on the ship to eat. It is only after Odysseus learns humility — literally disguising himself as a beggar with grey-eyed Athena’s help — that he can finally come home.
While Odysseus does show up halfway through, though, Fry maintains his approach of aggregating different Greek stories and telling them together along shared narrative lines; so here, we get stories based on the aftermath of the Trojan war, like Agamemnon’s awkward family situation (“awkward” being a word which here means “Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, so now his wife and other daughter are going to throw a net around him and stab him to death in the tub”), as well as Pious Aeneas’s journey to Carthage and ensuing drama that eventually leads him to conquering Italy and all that. Amusingly, Fry shifts to Roman names for the gods during his Aeneadic sojourn, and here employs one of the digressions that make his narratives especially interesting. Fry loves to take sidebars to point out how words emerged from the gods, for instance, or to explore just what exactly the lotus flowers might’ve been that so encumbered Odysseus and his men– in the Aeneas chapter, he compares the Greek and Roman gods. The different names are not merely names: Athena falls from a place of preeminence in Greek myths to barely holding her own as a minor goddess as Minerva. Ares, however, rises so much under the Roman reign that he gets his own month — March, when the winter thaw allows armies to go to war once again.
I will admit that my appreciation of this was doubled because I was watching films and listening to podcasts based on the Odyssey at the same time, so Fry’s information supported my interpretation of them and gained value at the same time. I have not read Homer’s original Odyssey in ages — perhaps not since I read it and The Illiad to prove to a girl who praised a romantic rival as ‘sophisticated’ that I was moreso — so I can’t judge with too much accuracy how close Fry’s interpretation of the original is. I was surprised by his Odysseus being haunted by his mistakes which cost so many lives; the new Oydessy as well as The Return lean heavily into his grief, so it’s interesting that it might not be as novel an approach as I thought. At any rate, the teenage girl I pursued when I, too, was a teenager had something else in mind other than reading world literature when she said sophisticated. (It meant wearing stylish clothes and being smug/charming, I have concluded in retrospect.) Fry’s renditions of the stories were compelling, as he leaned into his excellent ability with diverse voices, and I especially enjoyed the digressions.
I am now listening to him read Troy, which again dives into backstories to dense that Fry admits at the beginning: if you have followed me, reader, then I am in awe of you. Considering how much time I’ve spent listening to Agamemnon’s genealogy, I understand.
Related: Well, my memory is rubbish. I read and reviewedThe Odyssey back in 2014. And The Illiadin 2011!
Young Washington, 2026. Watched on opening weekend with the ladyfriend, who indulged my historical asides (“That’s Thomas Gage, he’s going to be an antagonist in twenty years.”) and and the film’s violence. Young Washington is a penniless chap with a good family name and nothing else; he joins the Virginia Militia to prove his mettle and begin making a name for himself a gentleman, but runs into disaster almost immediately. You only lose if you quit, so Washington takes to the field again as the French & Indian War begins in earnest. I liked the emphasis the film put on the Virginia Militia being Virginians. Moderns really have no idea how strong state identification was in an era when you couldn’t just move on a whim.
1776, 1972. Here a Lee, and there a Lee, and everywhere a Lee, a Lee! A musical comedy about the founding of America, produced in advance for the Bicentennial. I love, love, this movie. Granted, I’m both a history nut and a lover of musicals, but it’s SO GREAT. The script is funny, sweet, dramatic…
“Fat George has declared us in rebellion! Why in bloody hell can’t [Congress]?!”
“‘Treason is a charge invented by winners for an excuse for hanging the losers.’” “I have more to do than to stand here listening to you quote yourself.” “Aw, but that was a new one.”
Mr. Hancock: The principles of independence have no greater advocate in Congress than its president. And that is why I must join those who vote for unanimity. Mr. Adams: Good God, John! What are you doing? You’ve sunk us! Mr. Hancock: Now, hear me out! Don’t you see that any colony who opposes independence will be forced to fight on the side of England? That we’ll be setting brother against brother. That our new nation will carry as its emblem the mark of Cain. I can see no other way. Either we all walk together, or together we must stay where we are.
Mr. Adams: Do you mean to say it is not yet FINISHED? Mr. Jefferson: No sir. I mean to say it has not yet begun. Mr. Adams: Good god! A whole week! The entire Earth was created in a week! Mr. Jefferson: Sometime, you must tell me how you did it.
ADAMS: Well, I’ll never appear in the history books anyway. Only you. Franklin did this, and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington – fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves. FRANKLIN: [pondering] I like it.
Adams: This is a REVOLUTION, dammit! We’re going to have to offend SOMEBODY!
Smokey and the Bandit, 1977. A charismatic wildcat trucker known as The Bandit is bet $80,000 (in 1977 money) that he can’t get a truck of Coors beer from Texarkana Tx to Atlanta within a certain time limit. Unable to resist a challenge, The Bandit hires his trucking buddy Jerry Reed (one of country music’s all-time best gee-tar pickers). Their idea is simple: The Bandit will steam along in a Trans-Am, attracting and losing police attention, while Jerry keeps moving the cargo unmolested. (said cargo is illegal: it’s Coors beer, and in 1977 that is bootlegging.) However, on the way The Bandit picks up a runaway bride, the adorable Sally Field, and her disgruntled almost-father-in-law Sheriff Buford T. Justice is determined to get her back. He therefore chases The Bandit from Texas to Georgia with great dialogue and property destruction along the way. As my trucker father told me one of the many times we watched this movie, “This movie sold many a Trans-Am.” I cannot tell you how many times this son and nephew of truckers has watched this movie, but it’s one of my all-time favorites – what a celebration of good-old fashioned entrepreneurship against government oppression! Not only is it outrageously entertaining in its own right, it introduced me to the music of Jerry Reed. One huge theme of the movie is that The Bandit is a folk-hero: people know his rig, they know his voice on the CB, and they actually help him on his way – not only telling him where cops are, but actively interfering in police operations. On an interesting note, this was filmed in ‘76 as I spied Bicentennial decor in a few of the small town filming locations.
Jerry Reed: What’s goin’ on up there? Come back, Bandit? Is she wearing….a wedding dress? Bandit, watching it fly out the open roof: She was. Jerry Reed: What’s she got on now, COME BACK?
(The Bandit, screaming along at 130 miles an hour) Sally Field: You know who I feel has really revolutionized the American theater? Stephen Sondheim.
“The fact that you are a county sheriff is not germane to the situation.” “The %@$))@ GERMANS GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!”
Like Father, Like Son, 2014. FINALLY, a return to Kore-Eda. I began watching his work at the beginning of the year and was soon distracted. I’ve been watching to go back to him. In this film, two Japanese couples are horrified to find that their sons are not their own; the boys were born on the same day, but swapped somehow in the maternity ward. This was only found out because of blood testing done as part of elementary school applications (?!), and now the families only have a few months to decide what to do. This is a very hard film, emotionally, because we witness two sets of people wrestling with the same question: what makes my son my son? What makes family, family? Adding to the tension is the fact that these are not interchangeable families: Ryota and his wife Midori are very materially successful, but their classy penthouse feels like a sterile apartment. Yudai and Yukari are working class (Yudai sells and works on home appliances), but have a very warm home life. Whereas little Keita is more or less being groomed to be a formal little salaryman like Ryota, little Ryusei is one child among several, and is used to his parents’ constant physical affection and horseplaying. The Y/Y home is very intimate – the family sleeping together – whereas R/M are more formal. That’s mostly because of Ryota, however, who we find had a father he disapproves of and who has patterned his life to rise above. This is not a case of “Malfoys bad, Weasleys good,” though, because Yudai is very materialistic in his way: as warm as he is with the kids, he’s constantly wondering how much they can sack the hospital for. When the families grudgingly try “exchanging the kids” – mostly because of Ryota – things get wrenching. One admirable thing about this is the kid-acting – acting in Kore-eda films is very quiet and understated, and even the children here radiate a lot of inner turmoil. Ultimately it ends well, but as usual with Kore-Eda you have to travel through the wringer first.
Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, 2008. Dany Boon. A French postmaster makes a judgement error and is consigned to Nord-pas-de-Calais, the boonies. He regards it with fear and trembling first, refusing to drag his wife into the frozen wastelands of the North, and when he arrives he expects to find the locals to be illiterate peasants. Although it takes him a while to adjust to their dialect, they’re marvelously friendly people and he soon finds himself much happier than in his previous big-city post – but, because his wife and friends back home expect him to be miserable, he always creates dramatic horror stories of his life up north to make it sound like he’s living in Siberia or something. As a Southerner, I found this film especially hilarious because of how moronic the urban French’s perceptions of Nord-pas-de-Calais were. I have literally been asked questions like, “So has anything changed around here since the sixties?” as if we’re still walking around in black and white. It’s definitely a comedy: in one scene, the boss goes on a route with one of his carriers to give him an example of how to say “non!” to residents who invite him in for a drink. The boss winds up very…lubricated. (“Did you see how I turned down that fifth beer, Antoine? Firm! Cordial, but firm!”) In another, the postmaster’s wife comes to visit him, and he confesses to his friends he’s been telling her stories of his living among barbarians and such, so the villagers decide to take stereotypes up to eleven. It’s hilarious, and that’s not counting the Americanesque love of gunfire.
“Why were you drunk on a bicycle?”
“Saying no to alcohol.”
Truman, 1995. Gary Sinese plays Harry Truman, a blunt haberdasher from Missoura who gits himself in politics and winds up president. I’ve been a fan of Sinese since watching Forrest Gump as a kid, so I enjoyed it. Sinese really leans into Truman’s accent. I understand this was based on David McCullough’s epic biography.
“Whenever the press quits abusing me, I know I’m in the wrong pew.”
“If Moses had waited on the polls, he’d still be in Egypt!”
“The hell kind of word is deniability? I’m just the man holding this office. If I dirty it, the dirt doesn’t leave with me, when I go, it stays and rubs off on whoever comes in after me from now on.”
I REALLY wanted to follow this up with a Sinese double feature in which he plays George C. Wallace: first in Wallace, and then again in Path to War where he plays Wallace in a film dominated by MICHAEL GAMBON AS LBJ. I have Wallace, but the first time I began watching it, I got angry over the pathetic way they portrayed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was not close; it was not close to close. A spider monkey on LSD could have come up with something closer. Anyway, now all my DVDs are in storage and I can’t find it on streaming.
Troy, 2004. All month I’ve been debating whether or not to watch The Odyssey. In the plus column: Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, who had me sold from the word go; stabbing; triremes, or in this case Viking longboats identifying as tritremes. In the minus column: extremely dodgy casting outside Matt and Anne; Viking longboats identifying as triremes; Odysseus reduced from an over-proud warrior to a dude with a case of the gloomies because he’s stabbed a lot of people. No gods, except for grey-eyed Athena who is apparently a hallucination. The Odyssey being in the news, however, I listened to a multi-part series from The Rest is History on it, and then I listened to Stephen Fry’s The Odyssey, and then I said “Well, Troy didn’t have gods and I loved it. Didn’t I?” I needed to find out. I knew, of course, that portions of this movie have seeped into my soul: Achilles and Hector’s tragic fight, Achilles “And that is why no one will remember your name,” etc. But I needed to see it. I needed to sail back into the past, when I watched this movie after my western civ professor had made me drunk with love of the great dramas of classical history – the duel between heroes here, the Greeks standing at the Gates of Fire, defying the Persians, Athens and Sparta standing back to back and then grappling like Cain and Abel in the mud. I was enthralled every moment. The part I hate about this movie is that the little worm Paris, both kills the Mighty Achilles, and lives. In the myths, of course, the wretched diaper dumpling is slain by the noble Philoctetes, but in this movie he gets off despite his unbridled lust and moral cowardice. As much as I love Eric Bana’s Hector, murdering Meleanus to save the worm’s life was poor bargain.
I enjoyed it thoroughly. Um…don’t be surprised if I rewatch 300.
“Let Achilles fight for honor, let Agamemnon fight for power, and let the gods decide who to glorify.”
“Honor the gods, love your woman, defend your country. Troy is mother to us all – FIGHT FOR HER!
“Do you know what’s waiting for us, beyond that beach? IMMORTALITY! TAKE IT! IT’s YOURS!”
“The gods envy us because we are mortal. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”
Agamemnon: You’ll be a Trojan princess, scrubbing my floors. And at night – Briseus: (stab stab stab) Me: Hey, that’s his wife’s job! Let Clytemnestra do that!
The Odyssey, 1997.
I’ve watched this 2-3 times over the years and always enjoy it: it’s the classic cinematic portrayal of Odysseus’ story. I can’t watch this without some nostalgia, because it takes me back to 9th or 10th grade world lit where we were trying to memorize the Greek and Roman pantheons and the subtle differences between them. Rewatching this made me wonder if, in high school, our teacher only showed us selections, because the Calypso scenes are a bit risque for a teacher so circumspect she used swear words like “Oh, fudge”.
I’m here to shoot suitors and eat olives, and I’m all outta olives
The Return, 2024. Cunning but foolish Odysseus has washed up on the shore of his home kingdom, Ithaca. It has been many years since he reigned here; in his days of being storm toss’d by the gods (gods not included in this movie), men have descended like locusts on his realm to eat him out of house and home and seize his wife as their own. Odysseus is a broken man; he has lost his men, been long removed from the meaning of home, and now is haunted by a war whose cruelties he was a participant in – and in the case of the Fall of Troy, the Architect of. This is not an action movie, but rather an intense psychological study of a man trying to find home again – not physical home, because he arrives there, but a deeper home. Peace. The direction is wonderful, with long focuses on characters like Oydesseus and Penelope whose barely-twitching faces testify to a war within. Warned by the shade of Agamemnon (whose wife stabbed him in the bath) to exercise caution, Odysseus practices prudence for once. Enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’ acting as always; did not expect to see his…pilum.
“Troy could never be taken, only destroyed. We burned it to the ground, and….drowned the flames in blood.”
“We didn’t know the dead were the lucky ones. We survive, but there’s nothing…left inside…”
“You know who I am; tell him.” “I know who you were.”
What’s coming up? No idea. I am much closer to being willing to watch the new Odyssey, I think. One night when I fell asleep watching the 1990s one, Amazon decided to follow it with Jason and the Argonauts (1963) which I could see if this mythic Greek mood persists. I’ll definitely be watching The Brink of War on release. I don’t think Jeff Daniels will do Reagan any justice (Quaid knocked that one out of the park), but Jared Harris as Gorby and J.K. Simmons in anything? Sign me up.
Norfolk Southern’s LADY LIBERTY engine, at my local NS trainyard
While I’ll finish The Age of Eisenhower today and could wrap up Stephen Fry’s Odyssey tomorrow,, reviews for either before August are unlikely. So, let’s wrap up July in books! We travel ever deeper into the oppressive heatsink of July, where the lows fall in the mid-70s (~24 C) and the highs….the highs do not contemplate thinking about. A friend of mine who is being wooed by the University of Alabama as a professor traveled from Colorado to Alabama recently, and found that I did not exaggerate the Great Sticky Siege. “At least you’re seeing us at our worst,” I joked, lying. August will be worse. Professionally, I kicked off the month attending the annual Alabama Mosaic / Alabama Digital Preservation Network meeting in Montgomery. It’s always nice to spend the day with fellow archivists & techies. ADPN is something of a pioneer in their network structure, which is fitting: Alabama has the nation’s oldest government archives, and that includes the National Archives. People make their jokes about Alabama, but we always have our surprises.
Challenges…
America @ 250: Another strong month, as I took down Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Dwight Eisenhower. (Thirteen dead presidents remaining!) Complete failure on Classics Club, Science Survey, etc. I got into an unexpected Greek mood at the end of the month because of Odyssey. On a brighter spot, I did finally read a supplemental text for my Bible in a Year project.
New Acquisitions
After Christendom, Michael Warren Davis. I was going to wait for used copies of this to get cheaper, or for a Kindle sale, but then someone posted an excerpt of MWD writing about smartphones as an impediment to spiritual life, and of course I went after that like a dog after a steak.
Rome and Persia, Adrian Goldsworthy. This one has been on the interest list for a while, and I spotted it on sale.
Lost in Curiosity. Some hope for the science survey! This book, oddly enough, was a $2 preorder. I’ve never seen a Kindle sale for a book that’s yet to be released.
Odyssey, written and read by Stephen Fry. Almost done with it.
Coming up in August
Sweating. Suffering. Science? I’m pondering another visit to Pensacola, or at least the Gulf, in September (Morgan Wade is playing in Mobile!), but that’s a ways off.
Non-book Commonplace Entries
Once, in the confessional at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I got into an argument with the priest hearing my confession, telling him that such-and-such was a sin, according to the Catechism. You don’t expect to have to do that. My Catholic friend Kale Zelden likes to say, ironically, “We are all Protestants now.” What he means is that nearly everybody in the modern West — Catholics and otherwise — defers to individual conscience to determine right and wrong. Is he wrong? – Rod Dreher, “Authority, Modernity, and Church Disintegration“.
Traditionally, the answer [to the cause of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction] was believed to be war. […] But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence. Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived. – “The End of Reading is Here“, Rose Horowitch
We must live in this world, and honor the best of it, as Milton himself did, while not ascribing to it anything final or consummate. The world itself will no longer honor its own best; that work of piety devolves upon us. We must preserve our sanity, not easy to do when both the content and the delivery of the news are apt to unravel the brain and wither the soul. We ought to do those sweet earthly things that the world has forgotten or traduced: to sing good songs, to play music; to fall in love, to marry, to have children; to read good books; to visit our neighbors’ houses and invite them into ours; to learn again to celebrate holy days and even to dress accordingly; to recover lost prayers; to be human. – Anthony Esolen, “Pride & Incorrigibility”, Touchstone.
If St. Thomas Aquinas engaged with opposing views as many online Catholics do today, his Summa Theologica would be about 100 pages. It would consist of lines like, “Atheists reject God only because they can’t keep their pants on” and “Anyone who disobeys the pope is a prideful loser,” after which he’d move on to the next subject. Fortunately, instead the Angelic Doctor sought to understand as deeply as possible the actual point of view of those he was debating. He wanted to be able to explain those arguments as well as he could explain his own. Only then did he refute them in detail, and always without questioning the motives of those who held opposing views. This should be our model, but sadly it’s not. – “Arguing like St. Thomas Aquinas“, Eric Sammons. Crisis magazine.
Homer’s real insight, though, is that disorder in the soul never stays private. “From Ithaca to Paradise“, Gavin Ashenden
Jordan Peterson treats religion as a technology for transmitting wisdom across generations. This is the most sophisticated version of modernity’s error: we cannot imagine that religion might be true, only that it might be useful. – Laura London
The only three things I want to grow these days are children, plants, and personal holiness. To hell with the rest of it. – Dr. Alan Harrellson, The Pipe Cottage
[T]he writing of the novel upended a lot of things, and that story was one of them. I’ve said many times that this novel felt like it wrote itself through me, in a way nothing else ever quite has. The religious aspect of the tale was one element that seemed to grow without my watering it. – Paul Kingsnorth, “The Wake: Questions and Answers“.
All of this is an application of Adam Mastroianni’s deep insight that you cannot reach the brain through the ears. Being told something, reading something in a book, hearing a lecture, is nothing like what happens to our understanding when we experience it in our own lives. – Russ Roberts, “Will We Ever Learn?”
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “My life in photos or gifs”. I’m not going to share any personal photos, but will share ten of my rotating desktop wallpapers. But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finish reading recently? Recently? Er…The Lincoln Obsession, last week. I’m the middle of two huge books.
WHAT are you reading now? The Age of Eisenhower and Crusade in Europe. Both are big ol boys. Also listening to Odyssey by Stephen Fry. I’m halfway through it: Odysseus just showed up, because we’ve been listening to stories about Aeneas’ adventures and Agamemnon’s severe family drama. (We are the House Atreus! There is no generation we do not damn, there is no moral code we do not flagrantly break!)
WHAT are you reading next? Lord knows. Let’s see what Chatgpt guesses.
Just to spite it I’m going to read a baseball romance or something.
For the record, Claude guessed Truman by David McCullough, and Gemini picked Stephen Fry’s Troy or Heroes. And now, some photos! Most of these are recently pilfered/borrowed, but the night-time Chicago one is one I found nearly twenty years ago. It’s disappeared from the intertoobs, so I’m glad I’m a data hoarder. The only one of these that could be mine, I think, is the second baseball photo….it’s Riverwalk Stadium in Montgomery, during a Biscuits game. I normally sit on the third base line, though, so it’s very possible I just yoinked these from their facebook page. (Also, the game is crazy crowded, and as a rule I go on weeknights and sit on the visitors/third base line side because I don’t want people too close to me.)
Today’s TTT is books we couldn’t wait to get and have not read. But first, The Tuesday Tease!
Odysseus openly laughed. ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve never seen such a rocky, scrubby, barren, unforgiving spot,’ he said. ‘It’s all our farmers can do to grow weeds there, let alone cereals and fruit. We have the sourest wine, the raggediest sheep, the scrawniest cattle of any island in the wide Ionian Sea. Trees and houses are blown down every year in the gales. Some years, the rain never comes, and the earth turns to sand. Other years, the whole island slops with mud. Believe me, Ithaca is no Ogygia. But it’s something else … it’s …’ His eyes now filled with tears and the word came out hoarsely, ‘… home.’ ODYSSEY, Stephen Fry.
In the last week I’ve listened to a 3-part podcast on the Odyssey by The Rest is History, as well as attached Troy and The Odyssey with Armand Assant.
So, Books I’ve Bought But Not Yet Read….
(1) GIRLS: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. The only reason I haven’t devoured this has been the presidential fixation and the fact that this is a book I really need to focus and sit with, unlike presidential biographies which are a lot more casual even when they’re thought-provoking.
(2) Lee in the Shadow of Washington, Richard McCaslin. A study of Robert E. Lee and George Washington, particularly how the life of Washington dominated Lee — both because he was married to a Washington relation, the Custis family, but because for Lee Washington was The Model Gentleman.
(3) Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa. I am reading this one. Slowly, but reading it.
(4) The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865. Ordered this at the start of the year for America @ 250 reading, but then Nixon and Kennedy took over.
(5) The Civil War: An Aerial Portrait. I could knock this out in an hour; it’s just photos of battlefields.
(6) Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Adrian Goldsworthy. I was REALLY in a Roman mood when I bought this. The mood exited stage left, pursued by a Praetorian.
(7) Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Huh, where did I put this?
(8) One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. I was reading this two weeks ago, where did I put it? It’s a big book, too, not easy to lose…
(9) Historic Pensacola (Colonial Towns and Cities of the Atlantic World). Hoping to go back to P-Cola in September; maybe I’ll read this then.
(10) The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. I bought this thinking it was kinda like Humans of New York, but it’s mostly pictures. I could knock it out in an hour, I just…haven’t.
James L. Swanson is something of a Lincoln obsessive. How obsessive? Well, he’s considered an authority for evaluating Lincoln-related artifacts and relics, and he has quite a collection himself — including a lock of Lincoln’s hair. (He can also name-drop Doris Kearns Goodwin!) Swanson was born on Lincoln’s birthday, and could visit several Lincoln-related sites in his childhood: he quickly became interested in history and was showered with Lincoln-related gifts on his birthday from toys to books. So personally attached to Lincoln is he that when he came into possession of a lock of Abe’s hair, he drove to the Petersen House in Washington D.C. and stood outside the locked doors so that he could let the history overwhelm him. This book is partially a memoir of how a man becomes intoxicated by history — by place, personalities, and stories — but also a reflection on how important material history is. Swanson emphasizes the importance of place and object to connect people to history: there is value from standing in the place where history happened, to touching a newspaper that 1860s Washingtonians clutched with disbelieving hands, that cannot be matched by computer displays and text on a page. This is why he frequently visits Ford’s Theater, the Petersen house, and other locales associated with Lincoln’s death and Booth’s attempted escape. While I was primed to enjoy this book — being a history obsessive myself, visiting sites to aid in my study of events, even so I found it a little odd for a book. One has to approach it from the fact that it’s intensely personal, at first, since it focuses on the author’s childhood and such, but then also tolerate the amount of time spent pondering Lincoln artifacts, especially “blood relics”. That was a fairly morbid section, but weirdly interesting in its own right: Swanson says that so many locks were cut from Lincoln’s head that the man was lucky to have not been buried bald, and evidently everything else connected to the death was also cut up or stolen. Sheets, pillows, women’s bloodstained dresses! As a history buff, I enjoyed listening to a fellow buff talk for 3+ hours on his pet subject, but it’s a hard book to recommend unless you also share his obsession, or at least his ability to become obsessed. As it is, now I have to read his book Manhunt, where he exhaustively traces the twelve days of Booth’s attempt to elude the Federals.
Also: Did you know JFK was buried without his brain? His brain is MISSING! (RFK probably hid it somwhere as best I can tell from going on a google brain-hunt.)
Um, I may have ordered another casual Lincoln book. But not to worry, Eisenhower is still in the driver’s seat, at least until I decide on what to read for LBJ.
Reading Freely 