Friday Links: Funeral Games For Epic-Reading Chris Edition
“‘…True—but all lies in the lap of the great gods. / Weaker I am, but I still might take your life / with one hurl of a spear—my weapon can cut too…’/ Grim reminder—“ - Homer, 'The Iliad'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
wooooooooo I do NOT recommend trying to read The Iliad in two weeks! Did it tho.
I do recommend reading The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles. Have it on good authority the Emily Wilson translation is good, too.
If you must read only one? Definitely pick The Odyssey. I’m going to not take my own advice and try to read it in two weeks, too. Shall we get into it? Let’s get into it.
Just one last thing: if I should fall in battle, do not let the opposing forces plunder my corpse. Do not leave me for the dogs to eat. I have already said I would like to be thrown in the ocean and eaten by fish and crustaceans and various micro-organisms necessary for healthy ocean ecology.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately: I once heard that Anne Carson had three desks: one where she wrote poems, one where she translated Greek, and one where she wrote criticism. Am I sure that’s true? No. Has being unsure stopped me from repeating that tidbit to people for the last 15 years, including right here on this blog? Also no. Anyway, I broke up all the Trojan vs. Argives bloody, entrails-leaking warmongering and the stunning lack of humanity ancient Greeks afforded women by reading Anne Carson’s collection Short Talks. Carson’s a classicist, it seemed only right.
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles: I’m not reading this right. Take at least four weeks to read The Iliad. Deathless gods, this was a lot of war. Muse? Sing to me where to start with an epic of this size. First, it’s probably better to approach the poem not as the story of the Trojan War—don’t hold your breath for a horse—and more as the rage of Achilles. The godlike solider begins and ends the poem in a rage, for different reasons, and even though he is triumphant in battle, Achilles’ rage consumes him. Importantly, Achilles’ rage doesn’t make him immortal (take note, men of the United States).
The second most important thing to note is that this poem smells bad and needs to get food safety certification. Note to RETVRN guys: the past stank. This poem is rank. And there’s animal blood everywhere. Animals are being slaughtered and burned, but only after a bunch of sweaty soldiers slice meat portions off the carcass to roast. Achilles slits a goat’s throat basically mid-sentence while talking to Priam. Any time someone gets cut down in battle, they beg the person nearest to them to not let the dogs and birds eat their corpse. If they’re lucky, they just get completely stripped/robbed by the army that killed them, then burned. To say nothing of the bronze and tin and wood entering these Four Humors-believing-ass dudes’ bloodstreams all the time, and combat medicine is—you guessed it—slitting another goat’s throat and burning it in hopes that one of the gods quits being a whiny baby to another god and tends to your wounds.
It is important to bring up that in the last conversation Man-Killing Hector ever has with his parents, Priam is worried that when Argives sack Troy, dogs will eat his gray hair, gray beard, and mutilate his genitals. Hecuba—who I must again state is Hector’s mom—sees her son retreating from battle and then whips out a boob and tells Hector to go fight for it. Literally says if Hector ever liked nursing from his mother, he oughta go back out there and defend Troy until Achilles man-kills Man-Killing Hector dead. If this was the last conversation Mal and I ever had with our kid I would fight every god I could see.
The language things—deathless gods, you cannot believe the extended similes in this poem. “Like a bird of prey who sits patiently in the blazing summer sun wait for the moment to strike a serpent, then with precision of the ages swooped with full speed toward its meal and grasps it fast and bloody in its talons, so did Hector sweep through the Argives.” That’s made up, and frankly smaller than the best examples, but it gives you an idea. Eight-line stanzas dedicated to the most detailed similes you can imagine. Also, Book 18 ends with a like three-page ekphrasis on the design of a shield. I’m telling you, these epics are a poet’s playground, absolutely teeming with “oh, you can do that?” I’ll probably never read The Iliad cover-to-cover again, but I absolutely will read huge chunks of it when I get stuck on writing in the future. Trust me, it’s worth being familiar with The Iliad.
Short Talks by Anne Carson: once again, not totally sure I’m reading this right. But I had fun reading it! I first read pieces of Short Talks in the Anchor Book Of New American Short Stories, edited by Ben Marcus. There, it shares space with Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, and Joe Wenderoth (but also George Saunders, Wells Tower, Aimee Bender), which is a long way of saying this anthology embraces all types of “short story.” Knowing Carson’s body of work, no one would bat an eye if you called these poems. What they are is exactly what they advertise—short talks—and the book is best read if you focus less on “understanding exactly meaning” and pretend you are hanging out with the weird cool eccentric artist Joyce Carol Oates wishes she was.
Close your eyes, imagine yourself in a room with Anne Carson. Don’t freak out or mention The L Word. Now she says this:
Short Talk On Van Gogh
The reason I drink is to understand the yellow sky the great yellow sky, said Van Gogh. When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colours to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.
Cool, right? They get weirder! Read this book. The “Short Talk On Waterproofing” will really get you.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Seems like a good week for The Fall of Troy, whom you’ve heard if you played Guitar Hero III. Let’s do something special, though—here’s their singer/guitarist, Thomas Erak, playing with my favorite band, Chon. The cops get called on them! Just like my band in high school.
It’s National Poetry Month, and CreatureFector wrote a bunch of haiku about “God’s Ugliest Little Bugs.” It’s important to remember that in addition to being an excellent nature writer, Sabrina Imbler is also a poet. What is the poet’s job, but beautifying
the quotidianGod’s ugliest little bugs? A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “While the researchers found many mentions of species' habitats, color, and movements, very few haiku referenced an arthropod's reproduction or physiology…”The Caranga, Chicha, and Killaka peoples of Bolivia are arguing that the recovered artifacts from the shipwrecked San José—a Spanish galleon believed to have billions in gold, silver, and emeralds—should be the property of the people. Namely, the descendants of the Indigenous laborers who were worked to death mining all those precious stones. Luke Taylor and Guardian are calling this ‘the holy grail of shipwrecks.’ If you have to ask whether or not the Shipwrecked Sailor believes every single bit recovered from the San José should go to the Caranga, Chicha, and Killaka (and Qhara Qhara people, whom the Colombian government has invited to explore the remains as well), well? Spend some time in the archives.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has been banned from the Cheyenne River Reservation, just like she was banned from the Pine Ridge Reservation, with Martin Pengelly in Guardian reporting. There’s not much to say about this except that it’s rad as hell. Wherever you stand on the #LandBack movement, it’s clear that the Dakotas should definitely be given back to Indigenous people. If that can’t happen tomorrow, Kristi Noem can at least be drawn and quartered.
Let’s get back to poetry. The homie August Smith has a series of poems, “Shopping Complex,” out in Metatron. It’s fun as hell, puts me right back in high school, buying the NOFX The Decline shirt with Brendan in Hot Topic while wondering why Blink 182 would wear so many Pac Sun brands when I can’t afford them on a youth soccer ref’s wages.
How about we end with death? The Iliad reminds us over and over—like a lot, honestly, it’s mostly war, I can’t stress enough how much goddamn war there is in the epic poem about the Trojan War—that death is coming for all of us. So let’s go to The Deadlands and read “Mourning Person” by Anuja Mitra.
What’re you still doing here? It’s National Poetry Month, go read some poetry!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. I guarentee every shitty behavior from your customers this weekend was inspired by one of the Greek gods in The Iliad. Jesus Hephaestus Christ, these gods are bitchy. Whinging and whining and crying and fighting and playing around with humans’ lives simply because humans are mortal and gods are deathless—what are you doing? You can’t dump drinks on Table 13 just because they remind you of Zeus and Hera. Anyway, a Marxist’s reading of the Greek Pantheon would have those gods first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris