(More) Tales of Brave Ulysses
Looking for a leaner, meaner, classier "Odyssey"? "The Return," with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, awaits you on VOD. Plus, some thoughts on Emily Wilson (scorpion) and Christopher Nolan (frog).
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Re: my recent post on David Toop's "Two-Headed Doctor" and the complex legacy of Dr. John's 1968 cult album "Gris-Gris" – Mystery solved! The book was lent to me by my estimable and knowledgeable friend Mike (Hold the) Mayo. You'll have it back soon, Mike.
On VOD: “The Return” (2024, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, $4.99 rental on Amazon) – Since I was away on vacation last week, I didn’t get to weigh in on the culture war skirmish between Emily Wilson, translator of “The Odyssey” by Homer, and Christopher Nolan, writer-director of “The Odyssey” by Hollywood. Much of the media and online response has been glibly caustic and shocked at the translator's sin against capitalism: How dare she slag a movie that’s increased sales of her book by several orders of magnitude!
My own feeling is that Wilson has every right to speak her mind about a subject she knows better than well (classical literature and the ways its values do or don't filter into modern popular culture) but also that her expectations of what mainstream commercial cinema is capable of – or, more to the point, wants to be capable of – is, if not naïve, then overgenerous. Anyway, it would seem a little late in the day to comment on Wilson’s essay, “An Uncomplicated Man,” in The London Review of Books (which few people bothered to read in its 4,185-word entirety because why do that when you can just screen-grab the nasty bits?) if she hadn’t doubled down this week with an extremely long postscript in The Atlantic. I would call this a case of beating a Trojan horse if every copy editor worth his or her salt hadn’t gotten there first.
