The 1997 three-hour series 'The Odyssey' (it came on TV and my parents recorded it) with Armand Assante cemented the story, the gods, and the homeward journey in my mind for all time.
I love visiting all this through your eyes, Jason. The heft of the great stories isn’t some perennially fading mimeograph, but a volcanic ah-ha bubbling up from the ocean floor, breaking the surface into new atolls.
I’ve only seen Nolan’s film once, but I couldn’t quite silence the literary criticism training from grad school and beyond. I kept thinking about his prescient retelling of the returning soldier: the great wars revealed not as uncomplicated heroism but as hubris, the dismantling of hospitality, and the terror of discovering that we are the very people of the sea we fear.
Then there’s his apocryphal recasting of Calypso as a midwife of remembering and forgetting—a kind of proto–trauma-informed grace in which healing isn’t simply regurgitating or bypassing, but moving through the rhythm of remember > forget > reimagine… perhaps even repent. Sometimes coming ashore to responsibility, regret, and consent takes years.
And I loved your ode to the librarian. It reminded me of a friend who handed me a box set of Leonard Cohen CDs thirty years ago. Sometimes a librarian—or a friend—doesn’t just recommend a book or an album; they quietly change the shape of a life.
I notice O Brother, Where Art Thou? is nowhere in this list.
My daughter pointed out the exact thing at dinner. I will be correcting that!
Love it.
The 1997 three-hour series 'The Odyssey' (it came on TV and my parents recorded it) with Armand Assante cemented the story, the gods, and the homeward journey in my mind for all time.
I love visiting all this through your eyes, Jason. The heft of the great stories isn’t some perennially fading mimeograph, but a volcanic ah-ha bubbling up from the ocean floor, breaking the surface into new atolls.
I’ve only seen Nolan’s film once, but I couldn’t quite silence the literary criticism training from grad school and beyond. I kept thinking about his prescient retelling of the returning soldier: the great wars revealed not as uncomplicated heroism but as hubris, the dismantling of hospitality, and the terror of discovering that we are the very people of the sea we fear.
Then there’s his apocryphal recasting of Calypso as a midwife of remembering and forgetting—a kind of proto–trauma-informed grace in which healing isn’t simply regurgitating or bypassing, but moving through the rhythm of remember > forget > reimagine… perhaps even repent. Sometimes coming ashore to responsibility, regret, and consent takes years.
And I loved your ode to the librarian. It reminded me of a friend who handed me a box set of Leonard Cohen CDs thirty years ago. Sometimes a librarian—or a friend—doesn’t just recommend a book or an album; they quietly change the shape of a life.