Ward Farnsworth is an old favorite around here; see my reviews of his Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (LH, The Millions) and Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor (LH). He has now sent me a copy of his latest magnum opus, The Latin Tamer: Mastering the Language of Rome (cowritten with Sarah van der Pas), which looks ideal for the kind of learner it is aimed at. To quote the Preface (which is available, along with a good many other parts of the book, on the associated website):
The book is distinctive in a few ways. It seeks to spell out the workings of Latin with an extra measure of clarity and patience. It illustrates every point, large and small, with short examples. The examples are mostly from ancient writings and they’re all explained on the spot. That’s the premise of the book: to let you learn Latin by reading and understanding lots of short specimens of the real thing.
This book, and the website that goes with it (along with a lot of practice), will enable you to master Latin if that’s your aim. It can also teach you to understand and appreciate Latin if you don’t have years to spend on it. Since all the illustrations are fully explained, you can (if you wish) wander at will among them and study the grammatical rules when and how you like. The format allows for free-range learning.
This book is especially written to help learners of Latin who like the ideas of the Stoics (another treat for the mind). Many of its examples are drawn from Seneca the Younger and from Cicero, the Roman writers who discussed those ideas the most. You’ll be able to learn Latin by studying samples that especially interest you. And cutting your teeth on authors you want to read later will make it easier when that time comes.
One thing I like about it is the use of actual chunks of Latin (what he calls “illustrations”) to exemplify the grammatical lessons:
Each section of the book explains one type of Latin word—verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, participles, and then some residual topics. Within those sections, each chapter talks about one family of endings that such a word can have. So there are chapters about each of the tenses in which a verb can appear. There’s a chapter about each kind of adjective, each kind of participle, and so on. The chapters start by explaining how the words work, then come illustrations. The illustrations are a central feature of the book and differ from those found elsewhere in a few respects.
First, the examples here are more numerous than is typical and also more systematic. They usually show every ending at issue in the chapter; collectively they illustrate every single way a Latin word can end, or nearly so.
Second, the illustrations are from ancient authors, verbatim and unabridged, with minor exceptions (there are a few legal maxims and other old expressions that aren’t from Rome, and some quotes have been excerpted from longer sentences in a way that simplifies the grammar a bit). This feature is meant to appeal to a specific sort of reader: the type for whom the appeal of Latin is bound up with reading the real (old) thing, even when it’s mundane. And reading ancient examples has another advantage. If you give up on learning Latin before you get as far as you wished, the time you spent won’t have been lost. You’ll have read some actual Latin the Romans wrote, which was probably your goal from the start. You won’t have spent hours preparing to do something you never did.
Third, the illustrations are translated on the spot. The first translation is typically from a published source—usually editions from the Loeb library or the University of Chicago Press. A more literal translation sometimes follows. The translations are there to clarify the Latin, of course; but once you’ve worked through a line yourself, you can also think about how the English version compares to it and what’s lost or gained between the literal meaning of a line and how it’s conventionally been rendered in English.
Then every word of the illustration is explained. In the beginning you won’t understand all the notes, but you’ll get the hang of them as you go. The summary in Chapter 2 will help in the meantime. Explaining all the words in every illustration, even in late chapters, might seem like overkill, but it’s a crucial feature of the book. It frees you to read chapters out of order or wander among illustrations found in any of them and still make sense out of what you see. You can get off the tour bus and explore the language on foot if that’s the way you like to learn.
This makes the book quite heavy (I didn’t use “magnum opus” at random), but again, it’s great for a certain type of learner. I myself love seeing complete analyses of sample texts in languages I’m trying to learn, or even am merely interested in tasting, and I imagine I’m not alone. Check out the website (which includes a pdf of the chapter on the gerundive, so you can see the book in action) and decide whether it’s something you or an affiliated person might like.
And since we’re on the topic of the classics, I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this morning (as it happened, I was the only one in the theater, so I could stand up and walk around if I needed to stretch my limbs), and I’m here to tell you it’s a damn good movie. Yes, it’s too long, and some of the scenes are too long (notably the final battle with the suitors), and the dialogue is often lame, but never mind: the movie stuff (cinematography, montage, big-screen spectacle) is so great you forgive the rest. There are scenes that are as permanently lodged in my visual memory as anything in, say, Lawrence of Arabia. Complaints about its not being Homer are stupid — of course it’s not Homer, it’s a movie. If you appreciate Kurosawa’s Shakespeare, you should appreciate Nolan’s Homer; if you don’t, you’re a literature fan, not a movie fan. I don’t often go to the trouble and expense of seeing movies in a theater any more, but I’m glad I did with this. It’s true I’m not a classicist (and I haven’t actually read Homer in years, I’m ashamed to say); if you want to get the take of someone who is, read Sententiae Antiquae’s review. Spoiler: it’s a rave.
I agree that it’s a great movie. Being faithful to an almost 3000 year old story seems like a weird idea anyway. Good on Nowlan for making something new out of the material. Brad Mehldau doesn’t play Oleo the way Sonny Rollins wrote it, and people don’t bitch about that (or maybe some people do). I get that some people are unhappy that Nolan’s Odysseus is really Aeneas in disguise (and there is a lot of the Aeneid smuggled into this movie) but it works for the story Nolan wants to tell. We already have a great trickster Ulysses on screen anyway, played by George Clooney.
of course it’s not Homer, it’s a movie
It has been pointed out that the original was an audiobook.
The format was abandoned because squeezing the rhapsodes into CD players was too messy.
Too bad the Phaiakians are gone. They drive an important point home.
Two clicks away: Zendaya’s Earrings Are Part of a Much Bigger Problem – the looting of archeological sites and the lack of any idea of history other than “ooh, it’s old!” in the art market.
One click away: everything.
When’s Farnsworth gonna turn his talents to making it easier for Anglophones to learn Welsh?
For those who read Russian, here’s another rave by a classicist (in this case Gasan Guseinov). Fave quote:
Clearly арихинал is a joke on оригинал, but what is it? Just олбански?
I’m mostly on board with Joel’s review, but I did blink a bit at this: “What really struck me was Nolan’s daring decision to use an episode that doesn’t even appear in the Odyssey.” This makes it sound like Nolan boldly scoured the text, picked up on this obscure episode, and saw its potential for expansion. But it’s probably the single most famous episode in the Odyssey, and while Nolan does have a creative take on it, putting it so centrally is also just a smart film-making decision, giving audiences a recognizable hook to hold on to.
Just олбански?
I think so.
But it’s probably the single most famous episode in the Odyssey, and while Nolan does have a creative take on it, putting it so centrally is also just a smart film-making decision, giving audiences a recognizable hook to hold on to.
I agree, and I blinked a bit too. But hey, it’s a blog post!
арихинала
This is GGs take on akshually, an eye-dialect mocking of under-educated people daring to pompously present their opinion.
Thom Hartmann made a polytropos use of the word both: “Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) , etc.”
if you don’t, you’re a literature fan, not a movie fan.
Errm I’m both. And I’m feeling conflicted about whether I should see the movie.
Case in point: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was a great book. It might have been a great movie if I hadn’t already read the book. As it was, seeing the movie ruined both.
With the Nolan, I’m afraid the trailers have been putting me off. Rich Charlton-Heston style voiceovers give me indigestion.(Yes I know that’s irrational: we’ve no idea how Greek classic dramatic voice might have sounded.) I’m not sure I can separate Matt Damon from his shoot-em-up roles. I’m sooo over Epicness/could barely stomach the first LotR movie, didn’t go to any others.
Does anybody remember the Jason and the Argonauts movie from the 60’s? Those skeleton warriors gave me nightmares.
Odyssey translator Emily Wilson attacks Nolan blockbuster
sounds like a literature fan.
[The Grauniad is reporting on Wilson’s review in LRB, which is linked. Wilson is scathing. LotR gets a mention. Multiple spoilers alert].
Errm I’m both. And I’m feeling conflicted about whether I should see the movie.
With respect, if you’re not sure whether you should see the movie because of anything connected with the book, you’re more a book fan than a movie fan. I mean, if you were reluctant to try a Japanese restaurant because you were afraid it would spoil your memories of Japan, that would say something about how much you really cared about food.
I’m afraid the trailers have been putting me off.
They put everyone off. They’re terrible trailers. But basically all trailers are terrible and should be ignored; I thought everyone knew that.
“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Yes, translator of Homer cares more about Homer than movies. What a surprise!
Again, I don’t understand why anyone who loves Throne of Blood and/or Ran would have a problem with this. (I’m not saying it’s at the level of those great movies, obviously; Nolan is not Kurosawa. I’m just talking about the book/movie issue.) I don’t think people who hate this movie for Homer-based reasons are fools, I just don’t take them seriously. “That Picasso is terrible — you can’t even read the newspaper he shows!”
all trailers are terrible and should be ignored
You’re talking ерунда, je crois.
“I don’t think people who hate this movie for Homer-based reasons are fools, I just don’t take them seriously.”
I did read Wilson’s review, and I think that’s mostly it. But she didn’t even seem to understand the very blatant things Nolan was doing with the movie, and that annoyed me a bit. It shouldn’t have, but I think I was expecting Wilson to at least be more perceptive than she came across as. Oh well.
You’re talking ерунда, je crois.
Heh. OK, Not All Trailers!
A friend of mine who is in the same book club as Wilson writes:
It’s still a smug, blinkered review.
That explains a lot.
I kind of feel the same way about the intro to her Iliad, which I’ve just finished (the intro, I mean; about to start the translation). I remember her Odyssey intro being pretty good. This time, it was like she felt she needed to have one of comparable length and breadth, but was struggling to actually find anything to fill it up with. The result is about three good paragraphs, the rest feeling very phoned in.
The perils of success! It’s part of the same phenomenon that causes biographies of famous people to get boring as soon as the subjects get famous. From riveting tales of desperate struggles to keep their head above water and get somewhere, they turn to “and then more dinners with famous people, followed by more awards.”
In the stock-plot Celebrity Bio the narrator can alleviate the boredom of more dinners, more awards by then introducing the Messy Divorce, followed by the Downward Spiral and the Stint in Rehab. I wish Prof. Wilson all the best in remaining a sufficiently minor celebrity that she is not compelled to follow that cliched plotline.
That’s what I was wondering!
Heh.
It’s frankly too short to be a review.
And “the food looks horrible” is probably just realistic!
I can’t say that I remember a lot of sex being in the original Odyssey. It seems a rather odd complaint against Nolan’s film that he’s left it all out.
Perhaps (as a Brit) I’m just too depraved to recognise sex scenes as actually being erotic. Alternatively, too innocent to pick up on the innuendo …
Perhaps (as a Brit) I’m just too depraved to recognise sex scenes as actually being erotic.
I lost it recently at something erotic that I had never thought about before, despite being certifiably depraved (well, having been …)
I’m following an “AI cinematic” thing on Patreon by “Alex Cole”. It’s a naughty story about a young guy and a young tattooed “gangster” who fall in love. They kiss passionately 24/7 but even this doesn’t interest me. Actual sex is only intimated, not shown. The plot is driven by Alex the sweet boy wondering “what does my Raf the gangster actually do?” and “how can he be so gentle as well?”
It’s chaste and over-the-top melodramatic at the same time (now that I think about it, that’s typical of many pre-50s Hollywood productions. OMG I’m such a common person.)
Anyway Raf decides to Tell All to Alex – that he tortures and sometimes kills people who have betrayed his boss. (We, but not Alex, have already seen this in gory AI detail.)
Raf sends Alex off to think about whether he still wants Raf. Alex comes over a day or so later and says: I don’t want to lose you. So I’m staying. And you’ll keep loving me. And you’ll keep kissing me …
So far so corny. Then he says
#
And I’ll keep smelling like you. And we’ll keep sharing everything
#
That is so fucking hot, and sweet, and totally unexpected. It’s also funny (vide bathos).
Incorrigible heteros may at this point mentally substitute some female for Alex. I don’t know whether Zendaya or Taylor Swift would be a suitable choice, but that’s yall’s look-out.
I don’t know whether Zendaya or Taylor Swift would be a suitable choice
Lupita Nyong’o, obvs.
That I can see, in fact ! By quantum transgender tunneling.
There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible
I think, she’s trolling. I will use this trope going forward exchanging food and sex if it’s better fits what’s on the screen.
On the “main” theme of this post, I’ve finally had a chance to look at the sample chapter, and I think this is a book I could have really used about 15 years ago. I’m still tempted to order a copy, though my wife might take legal action if I bring another 700 page tome into the house without a *really* good justification.
I think this is a book I could have really used about 15 years ago.
Yeah, I regret I didn’t have it back when I was making an attempt to learn the language (beyond my derisory high-school-detritus knowledge).
a *really* good justification
The kid’s got to start Latin sometime, right?
Yeah. The chapter on the gerundive is exactly what I was taught in school, plus the archaic -und- beside -end- in the i and the mixed conjugation and the postclassical use as an actual future passive participle.
Is that praise or “meh”?
It’s affirmation of “the kid’s got to start Latin sometime” – it looks like the book does what it promises: teach Latin well.
Gotcha!
I can’t say that I remember a lot of sex being in the original Odyssey. …
Perhaps (as a Brit) I’m just too depraved to recognise sex scenes as actually being erotic. Alternatively, too innocent to pick up on the innuendo …
I first read the Odyssey for ‘O’ Level, taught by the Latin/Classics Master, who was at least old enough to have fought at Ilium. He took great delight in pointing out all the sex scenes and double-entendres to us hormone-drenched teenagers. There is a LOT of sex. Odysseus will shag almost anything. Why do you think he had to be tied to the mast going past the Sirens?
Perhaps you were reading the bowdlerised version?
Well, I was reading it in Greek*. Possibly I missed some, er, nuances …
(Though I had picked up a lot of relevant vocabulary from Aristophanes.)
Mere suggestion does not a sex scene make.
* Particularly deeply unimpressed by Synthetic de Pfeffel’s party trick of declaiming the first fifty lines or so in Greek from memory, having been able to do that myself from a tender age. As my relatives will confirm, with much wincing and signs of ancient unhealed trauma. I can vouch for it being a poor guide as to whether one would make a competent Prime Minister.
On the plus side, this ability got me quite a few free drinks when I visited Greece as a stripling, as Greeks all had to learn it at school (at least, in those days), and tagged me as either a kindred spirit or a fellow-sufferer.
Bad example – the idea is that the sirens can seduce anyone, so everyone else on the ship got their ears plugged; Ody(s)seus*, ever the scientist, didn’t want to miss the experience of hearing The Most Beautiful Singing Ever, so he got himself tied to the mast instead. And screamed to be untied, in vain, because he had designed the earplugs well.
* I’m particularly impressed by the quote from book 23 of the Iliad halfway down this page: ᾿Οδυσσεύς in the fifth line, ᾿Οδυσῆϊ (dative?) in the tenth – and the meter requires the σσ in the fifth and the σ in the tenth. Notably, the tenth line is archaic enough that its -αι scans as -a.j-.
dative?
Yup.
“Hegemon the Parodist” sounds made-up. Like many real things …
Zoilus was … unenthusiastic … about Homer. My dictionary has “Zoilist”: “a captious and malignant critic.” Something to aspire to … literary equivalent of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus
maybe. (Well, it worked …)
On the plus side, this ability got me quite a few free drinks when I visited Greece
I got free drinks for reciting Cavafy in a bar. (Went out, very drunk, and wandered into an anarchist march. Good times!)
This angry review of Wilson’s review pretty much says so – while making good points about other things.
And this review, crucially including its 108 comments, makes me think maybe the Phaiakians are redundant enough that the point still comes across gravely enough. (Warning: heap’s of apostrophe’s in plural’s; and for “Americans” in the title read “Elon and the Muskovites”.)
i’m quite amazed how eager people are to put other people into some conveniently labelled box based solely on their reaction to this movie
myself, i appreciated wilson’s combination of trolling and seriously addressing the question “what is the basic relationship* between this movie and its source material?”. and i appreciated the second all the more for it being entwined with the former – which i think is true for most critics worth reading, though people do love to act like what the trillings, kaels, et al (not to speak of the sontags and saids) do is Far Too Serious to be demeaned by the term.
Mere suggestion does not a sex scene make
it doesn’t invariably, for sure. but the choices someone adapting a textual work to a visual medium makes about such scenes are particularly revealing, in particular when their choices are (as wilson describes) to consistently cleanse the scenes of suggestion (which i’d be more inclined to describe as elliptical narration – at least in the translations i’ve read, a lot of it certainly isn’t direct description, but isn’t particularly ambiguous).
.
* meaning the matching or divergence in their depictions of plot and action, of personnel, of core characterization and central description – the lightest level of interpretation.
SMBC’s take.
The review of the review has a rather different view than I did: “Wilson knows this because she’s brilliant. She chooses to portray the truth otherwise because this isn’t about facts for her.”
I don’t think she knew. I think she just didn’t grasp the most blatant themes and narrative points of the movie because she didn’t really care, and didn’t devote even the small amount of mental energy it would have taken to follow what Nolan was trying to do. I kind of wonder if she was on her phone half the time. That, or day dreaming about the poem, which is understandable for someone in her position.
I also don’t think Nolan was “playing 18-dimensional chess” either, though his approach is thoughtful enough to be fairly satisfying. It’s actually precisely because Nolan was being so relatively unsubtle and straightforward, at least with his central themes, that I find Wilson’s failure to even see what he was doing so disappointing. I didn’t expect her to like it (ETA: I mean, I had no expectations at all about her reaction any which way), but I did expect a higher standard of basic literary criticism from her.
While I have no opinion in this case (and no feasible way to form one), it has been striking me over the last years how many people seem to have no other means of understanding other people than projecting themselves into them…
… it has been striking me over the last years how many people seem to have no other means of understanding other people than projecting themselves into them…
What other means do you know of and prefer to use ? Are you sure you’re not just projecting here ?
You’ve got yourself off the hook “in this case” by prefacing that with
While I have no opinion in this case (and no feasible way to form one) …
What’s special about this case ? Just a bunch of intellectuals biffing the ball of conversation.
I myself have noticed this year that it’s become more and more common (at any rate in insta skits) to say to other people that they’re “projecting”. I’m never quite sure I know what that means. It’s quite possible that I’m projecting my ignorance onto them. Or their ignorance onto myself.
In the 50s people said to other people that they were “repressing” things. We’re still in a big-ass Zeitalter des Verdachts for the long haul.
“The Golden Rule is not ‘do as you would be done by’; other people’s tastes may differ.”
(Sadly, I don’t know who to attribute this to. I suspect that it may have been independently reinvented several times.)
It’s a Freudian term. In other words, total bullshit. Interesting to find this increasing use at a time when (outside of France) nobody believes in psychoanalysis anymore.
In practice, it seems to be used to imply that egocentric and unprincipled people (quite genuinely) assume that altruism and decency in others are just some sort of con, and consequently interpret virtue in others in terms of what they can understand (play-acting, propaganda, concealment of real motives.)
It’s also used to describe the rhetorical move of accusing your opponents of the very crimes you yourself have committed, but one must deprecate such loose terminology, as no speculation on the interior mental landscape of the people involved need be involved in that case. Freud would not have approved.
We’re talking about what was once condemned as “moral relativism”, and is now touted as tolerance.
I recently hit on the idea that moralizing and generalization are themselves poisoning the well. Silent decency should suffice, and usually does when given a fair chance.
It’s hard to just be decent when all about you are grandstanding.
@DE: That version of the Golden Rule is at the beginning of Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionsts.
@JF: “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”
Sweet.
@JF:
Ah. Thanks. Shaw should have been an obvious choice (though I still hold by my hypothesis of multiple origins.)
Personally, I prefer Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which has the virtue of being so rarefied and abstract that all practical objections can be haughtily dismissed as mere failures to understand the principle properly.
In other words, Kant was a cunt. He fuelled the complacency of generations.
I just heard someone call somebody “buck cuckoo”. New one for me, although the components are familiar. Think of “buck nekkid”.
Or buck wild.
Just because nobody believes in psychoanalysis stricto sensu anymore doesn’t mean that certain parts of Western societies aren’t still influenced by various sorts of fifth-hand pop-Freudian notions, blended over the course of the mid-late 20th century with fifth-hand pop-Marxist notions and various other pop-Xist notions into a sort of Campbell’s Cream of Clever-Sounding Critique-of-Modernity soup.
Campbell’s Cream of Clever-Sounding Critique-of-Modernity soup.
I want to have your baby !!!
@ulr: [projection] It’s a Freudian term. In other words, total bullshit.
I don’t think so. I notice myself projecting, so I assume some other people do it. Freud must have thought the same way.
@DE: In practice, it seems to be used to imply that egocentric and unprincipled people (quite genuinely) assume that altruism and decency in others are just some sort of con, and consequently interpret virtue in others in terms of what they can understand (play-acting, propaganda, concealment of real motives.)
You don’t see it the other way, suggesting that decent people naively fail to realize how egocentric and unprincipled others are?
I remember an example of a different kind of projection that came when we were reading Huis Clos in high school French. Our family, or at least my mother and I, watched a TV show where Peggy Lee sang “Is That All There Is?” That prompted me to think that Huis Clos and Sartre’s ideas in general, as explained in the English-language introduction our class had read, would upset my mother, “so” I explained them to her at some length. Then I realized that I was the one who was upset. I still catch myself ascribing my thoughts or feelings to other people.
I notice myself projecting, so I assume some other people do it
Why do you assume such a thing ? If you noticed other people projecting, there would be no cause to “assume” they are projecting – since you would have noticed it. I’m still missing a motivation for all this assuming.
Freud must have thought the same way.
Why do you “assume” that ? Freud invented the whole shpiel after all.
Then I realized that I was the one who was upset
You might consider the possibility that both you and your mother were upset. You don’t have to choose one and then send the other back to the kitchen.
Maybe you didn’t notice at first that you yourself were upset because American/European men are taught not to think of themselves as upsettable. That’s a whole nother can of worms.
I don’t find Freudian and/or popular notions of “projection” particularly helpful.
Is there anything unsatisfactory about the biblical image of beams/motes in eyes ?
In German: Classical philologist says it’s a really happy surprise how close the film is to the poem; the most notable difference is that Calypso is “much more selfless” than in the original; that all the stuff about trauma is in the poem has been known “for 20 years”, so it shows Nolan has studied the poem and the research on it very closely; and of course the mention of trade routes, rather than Helen as the singular reason for the war, conforms to the current state of research.
When I see that projection doesn’t work – science. Pick a possible motivation, figure out what would follow from it, see if that agrees with the observed behavior.
In extreme cases, that’s the only thing that works. It turns out that single-track minds like Trump are actually easier to understand than normal people, not harder, unless you insist on projecting normal people into them.
I didn’t say anything was special. I just wanted to bring up the general point. The meta-reviewer insisted that Wilson must understand something “because she’s brilliant”, so when she acts otherwise, she must be lying, with trolling as an understandable motivation; but that’s not how brilliancy works or how anything works.
It means trying to understand people by wondering what you would do in their place, mutandis not necessarily mutatis.
And all objections to practice can be dismissed as performance as opposed to competence…
That too, of course.
I don’t find Freudian and/or popular notions of “projection” particularly helpful.
You seriously have never noticed the phenomenon of people thinking that other people think the way they themselves do? Is it your position that we are all born understanding the wide range of human thought and emotion? I’m having a hard time figuring out what you’re objecting to, unless it’s the words “projection” and “assume.” If so, reword to your satisfaction. The phenomenon is inarguable. (Yes, yes, I can just hear you say triumphantly “But I’m arguing with it, so it’s not inarguable.”)
@stu
You seem to have a bee in your bonnet re projecting, maybe leave the poor guy alone ☺️. I tend to think about projecting more in the sense of a younger friend A.
A: No one else will talk about this with me.
PP: Well, A, you have quite strong feelings about this, and you sort of project your emotions; I just register this as a fact, but other people might get caught up in the emotions.
I suspect I may have something in common with DM…
@Stu: It was partly an attempt at humor. My assumptions were examples of projection in the sense of “dictators and plutocrats assume everyone else is as evil as they are.” ETA: I assumed that some other people would think enough like me to notice that. Maybe not.
However, it would be very strange if my mind was the only one out of billions that worked a certain way, or that mine and Freud’s were the only two. So my assumption has some justification.
And I knew I was projecting in my Huis Clos example because I realized a bit late what my feelings really were. But I don’t know other people’s feelings, so I can’t be as sure as I was about myself.
Why do you assume that Freud invented it? I’d bet a nickel that it shows up in fiction before him.
[projecting] means trying to understand people by wondering what you would do in their place
Is there something undesirable about that ? You made it sound like you thought there was.
@JF: Why do you assume that Freud invented it? I’d bet a nickel that it shows up in fiction before him.
Because decades ago I read a lot by psychoanalysis people. I still have two different editions of the complete works of Freud gathering dust on a shelf. The only thing they have in common is that I have read only small portions of them.
Neither then nor since have I encountered a suggestion that word and idea Projektion originated elsewhere than with Freud.
Apart from the beam/mote analogy in the bible. It’s pretty obvious, but it only just now occurred to me. Hypocrisy, pettiness etc.
I call your nickel. This game ain’t over.
@Stu again: Me: Then I realized that I was the one who was upset
Stu: You might consider the possibility that both you and your mother were upset. You don’t have to choose one and then send the other back to the kitchen.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was upset and didn’t realize it, but I thought without evidence that it would upset her. That’s the point where I was projecting. Whether she became upset as I was telling her about (though I don’t remember noticing any such thing) is irrelevant to the projection that I had already done.
Maybe you didn’t notice at first that you yourself were upset because American/European men are taught not to think of themselves as upsettable. That’s a whole nother can of worms.
I’d say that’s very likely, but what I’m talking about is not why I didn’t notice but that I dealt with it by thinking my mother would be upset.
I don’t find Freudian and/or popular notions of “projection” particularly helpful.
I do, in regard to myself at least.
Is there anything unsatisfactory about the biblical image of beams/motes in eyes ?
It’s related but not the same thing. The mote in your brother’s eye may be perfectly real, and what Jesus is supposed to have said is that you shouldn’t judge him it for if there’s a beam in your own. But I had no reason to think that my mother was upset about the Peggy Lee song or would be upset about the Sartre play, and my unconscious reason for thinking and talking about it the way I did was not to judge or condemn her but to deal with the feelings that I wasn’t aware of.
As long as I’m fixing my italics, I’ll add that don’t I doubt your assertion that Freud invented the term. But when you said he invented the whole shpiel, I thought you meant he invented the concept as well.
Once again with emphasis:
I project myself into other people a lot, too. But sometimes I notice it isn’t working and try something else – and it seems to me that some people never consciously notice that projection isn’t working, so they just get more and more confused and desperate (and, often, angry) instead of trying something else.
it seems to me that some people never consciously notice that projection isn’t working, so they just get more and more confused and desperate (and, often, angry) instead of trying something else.
It sounds like your some people are much more interesting than those I have to deal with. Mine display what I would call passive and incurious behavior. They never act angry or desperate. Maybe they’re happy. Or confused. I’ve tried a lot of elses, to no effect.
Wilson:
Having achieved this level of recognition.
I see that Joyce Carol Oates has accused Emily Wilson of using “the crude language of MAGA folks” in her review of Nolan’s film. Given that Wilson’s criticisms do not include the tediously predictable MAGA racist, misogynistic and transphobic tropes, or MAGA drivel about “warriors” and what have you, that seems a bit over the top …
I have never understood why Oates has such a high reputation; nothing she’s written has impressed me.
Featuring Ciceronian Latin, Demosthenic Greek and Chaucerian English: check this out. I hope the term “Demosthenic windfall” catches on.
Awesome.
I’d bet a nickel that it shows up in fiction before him.
Freud indeed admitted, in his patronizingly magnanimous way, that novelists had “anticipated” various of his insights.
Didn’t Sulloway publish a book about how many of Freud’s alleged discoveries were made by 19th century philosophers before him. Michel Onfray in his book on Freud points out how Freud actively hid his dependence on other thinkers.
I’ve had no respect for Freud (meaning even less respect than I started with) ever since reading Frederick Crews’ demolition job.
I think the notion that people are not always actively aware of their own real motives long antedates Freud. (Video meliora, proboque: deteriora sequor.)
And the idea, that we attempt to understand others by mentally trying to put ourselves in their shoes, also strikes me as not altogether groundbreaking.
Though, to be fair, it seems to be not so much these virtual truisms that Freud was pushing, but a whole elaborate superstructure loosely founded on them. I dare say that he could reasonably claim credit for much of that.
(There’s a nice aside in Ancillary Justice, where Breq, a fairly terrifying cyborg whose conscious self is a military AI, says she doesn’t always understand why she does things. In context, it’s clear to the reader that in the particular case in question it’s because the impulses she’s acting on are coming from her human physical body, and/or, perhaps, her not-totally submerged human original personality. She’s integrated well enough as a person to be just as confused about this as a human being might be.)
But it’s probably the single most famous episode in the Odyssey
The Trojan Horse gets only a brief mention in The Odyssey. Virgil is the reason we care about that story today. The encounter with the Cyclops is the most famous episode in the Odyssey.
I would have said the most famous episode was the visit to the dead, but maybe that’s just the one I think of first.
Vanya, I know. But it’s still (one of) the most widely known episode(s) to appear in the Odyssey (I never said it was famous *because* of it!). I guess Polyphemus could maybe give the horse a run for its money, but I don’t care too much which you put in spot 1 or 2 — doesn’t matter for the point I was making anyway. (The visit to the dead is probably not much known at all to anyone who hasn’t actually read the poem.)
Of major episodes in the Odyssey per se, the cyclops and the sirens are about equally famous. The land of the dead is much more obscure.
I venture to suggest that “Trojan Horse” is more famous than not only “Polyphemus” and “Sirens” but also “Zeus”, “Hades”, and “Odysseus”. Though not as well known as “Greece”, “voyage” or “home”.
Also, I put far too much emphasis on projecting ourselves – what gets projected is our whole experience, all the people we know (or think we know). The people who are completely outside this frame of reference get misunderstood or cause confusion.
What mollymooly said – I very dimly remember that episode at all and can’t tell you what’s in it (but haven’t read the poem).
That said, I’d also nominate Scylla & Charybdis for siren-level fame, and wasn’t sure if the Trojan Horse was in the Odyssey, the Iliad (shouldn’t it be at its end somewhere?), or both.
if the Trojan Horse was in the Odyssey, the Iliad (shouldn’t it be at its end somewhere?), or both.
It’s not mentioned in the Iliad at all, which makes sense since that episode takes place after the events in the Iliad. It’s also not really an episode in the Odyssey, Menelaus simply reminisces about it briefly to Helen and Telemachus without providing a lot of detail. It’s maybe 10 lines in the whole poem. When people think about the story of the Trojan Horse they are usually thinking about the much lengthier episode recounted in the Aeneid.
That said, the Siren episode may well be more famous than the Cyclops. The sirens actually got short shrift in the film.
The “Iliad” is misleadingly named. The poet obligingly tells you what it’s actually going to cover in the first line, though.
(This focus, is, of course, a major part of why the poem is great. No great poem could ever have been written about the whole tedious war.)
I’d also nominate Scylla & Charybdis for siren-level fame,
Seconded. I read the book as a seafarers’ tale, so the hazards to shipping made much more impact than all that landlubber stuff (apart from the Sex). Also I sailed through the Straits of Messina on the aforementioned sixth-form cruise during the aforementioned ‘O’ Level study of the book.
The sirens actually got short shrift in the film.
The reasons are stacking up for me not to see this film.
When people think of the Trojan horse, I don’t think they’re actually thinking of the Aeneid, mostly, though that’s of course the ultimate source for most of the narrative details. These things have really diffused way beyond their sources.
Scylla and Charybdis got, I think, the shortest shrift in the movie — just a slightly draggy scene with surprisingly bad CGI. At least the soundscape of the sirens was interesting, dampening when people put on their wax. Nolan doesn’t seem nearly as interested in either as in Polyphemus.
The reasons are stacking up for me not to see this film.
If what you’re looking for is a perfect representation of Homer, don’t bother — just go read Homer. Me, when I go to see a movie I’m looking for a good movie, which this is.
But as a sailor I’d think you’d enjoy the amazing scenes of travel by sea.
Maybe AntC would be put off by the scenes of rowers in full armour….
I did wonder about people wearing their helmets while rowing. Seemed a touch uncomfortable.
Yes, that was pretty silly.
I assume that like me, most people who know the Greek myths know them not from reading the original epics, but from modern retellings. I know them from Gustav Schwab’s Sagen des klassischen Altertums, one of the books you would find in any book-loving German household in my childhood. That retelling tells the stories more or less in chronological order, based on the different sources that contain parts of the myths. There also used to be a cartoon series about Greek myths in the 70s, which also re-told the story of the Trojan wars and Odysseus’s travels in chronological order. So I think that these kinds of retellings shape the ideas that people have about these myths more than the original epics.
Definitely. (And yes, I read a few of those, too – can’t remember if Schwab’s specifically.)
The Odyssey as Rap album.
Fun fact: apparently Marina Tsvetaeva got her knowledge of ancient myth from Schwab’s bowdlerized German collection. I find it hard to believe she never read the Odyssey in Zhukovsky’s version.
We watched the movie today and I must say it’s impressive. It keeps you attention and kept my interest even though I always knew what would happen next. I also wouldn’t say that they got anything egregiously wrong story-wise or omitted anything that was central to the narrative, except for the Phaiakians, who were probably left out because they would have muddled Nolan’s message that violating the basic laws of hospitality and trust destroys civilization.
That message and the insertion of the sea people are Nolan’s, but whether you agree with that or not, that’s interpretation of the given material, and that’s someting I would expect from an adaptation worth watching.
Yes, exactly. It’s very different from your average show-em-the-hits reduction of a well-known story.
Not if you actually identify them with the Trojans, but admittedly that’s not obvious in the original.
Not if you actually identify them with the Trojans
That doesn’t make sense to me at all….
Briefly discussed here previously, but I can’t find it. The idea is that it’s basically a time travel episode, and Odysseus cries when it sinks in how much more he could have gotten from the Trojans as their guest instead of by force.
But… that doesn’t make any sense. What does “gotten from the Trojans” mean? He wasn’t there to make a business deal, he was there to help the Achaeans win the war.
Maybe there’s a sensible explanation, but that seems like a truly bizarre idea. I can’t see how the plot of the poem would make sense, and thematically Scheria serves some rather clear purposes. I can see one making a literary contrast that it’s better to be a guest than a raider (though the Odyssey on the whole doesn’t exactly seem anti-piracy to me), but I can’t see how it would remotely work for the Phaeacians to be literal Trojans.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Odyssey
Ha!
Yeah, that.
I’d say the Circe episode is another that should rank higher than the visit to the dead, at least for those of us who haven’t read the poem.
Absolutely. She’s been verbed in German: bezirzen “enchant ~ seduce with nefarious motives”.
Speaking of linguistic influences from the Odyssey, it may be old Hat to some that the noun mentor (in at least French and English) comes from the Homeric proper name Μέντωρ — a character who really is a mentor to Telemachus. (Well, some of that is just Athena taking on his appearance, but that’s not terribly relevant to the etymology.)
And on top of that, the etymology of the proper name is fitting (almost too on the nose), being cognate with Vedic mantár- “advisor” (though as far as I know, the Greek cognate isn’t attested as a common noun).
MENTOR is indeed old Hat, including the lesser-known fact that it became a noun in many languages not directly from the Odyssey but via a blockbuster French novel from 1699.
That’s a neat part of the story that is entirely new to me!
I owe my knowledge of the Odyssey to The Adventures Of Goofy: Ulysses Or The Odd At Sea*. Like the rest of the series, it’s a work of pure genius**.
* German link with disappointingly few images. The ‘Net is surprisingly silent.
** Disclaimer: I can only vouch for the ten-or-so albums that came out in Norwegian.
I was introduced to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner through Hunt Emerson’s cartoon version. Unabridged, but certainly not what the author had had in mind.
Another good review by a classicist: Michael Taylor’s Thoughts on Chistopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It begins:
And it ends with some interesting thoughts on “the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC), upon which Nolan centers the entire film.”
I can’t say that I remember a lot of sex being in the original Odyssey. …
I just don’t get what you could have been reading. It’s a bonkbuster!
The action (good grief it’s good [**]) has reached Kalypso. Despite Odysseus pining for Penelope on a daily basis, he’s required to ‘service’ the Nymph
Kalypso defends herself to Hermes (bringing instructions from Zeus that it’s ’bout time) by pointing to all the other Gods and their philandering — the males get off scot-free.
There follows an exquisite description of boatbuilding technique, and O’s voyage from Ogygia.
Did the boatbuilding make it into the movie? (I note from the trailer and the commentaries, most of the action uses an ahistorical Viking longship. That would piss me.)
I’m particularly enjoying that although there’s a vast dramatis personae [***], not to mention all the palaces, islands, coves and groves, each gets introduced with a particular adjective. I’ll remember that for the next peever who alleges they weaken prose.
[***] How on earth did the bards remember all those names?
The ship looks like that because Nolan chose to hire a real ship with its own experienced crew and film it really sailing.
Odysseus is briefly shown building the raft, but not with all the construction details as in the poem.
Thanks, but ‘described in stories’?? Did they not know that in Oslo there are four real-life Viking ships unearthed from burials? They’re exquisite! (I visited in 1974.)
There seem also to be replicas of various Greek ancient sailing vessels. With a Hollywood budget, couldn’t Nolan have organised a proper one?
Maybe they did. They didn’t write the press release.
I’m sure he looked into this and found there wasn’t one with a crew that could actually sail on the wine-dark sea.
“An amalgamation of many Viking vessels described in stories” is surely a misunderstanding on the part of the writer. Substitute somethiing like “an amalgamation of traits from several recovered Viking vessels, informed by traditional Norwegian boatbuilding techniques and the rare descriptions of actual ships in the sagas”. They couldn’t have built much after the latter alone.
It’s broadly a paraphrase from the ship’s own website, as linked in the article.
Draken Harald Hårfagre is not a replica of one known vessel. She is a full-scale reconstruction of what the Norse sagas describe as a great ship… Rather than copying a single archaeological find, the ship was developed as a reconstruction of the large ocean-going ships described in the Norse sagas.
(This is not the Viking ship I once met moored behind a distillery.)
I visited the Draken Harald just a couple weeks ago, when it was Oslo (not sure if it’s still here). One of the things they mentioned was that the ones from the burial mounds might not always have been the best specimens of viking ships. No idea if that’s a strong point or not. This was from one of the volunteer sailors.
The “based on sagas” thing is mostly, I gather, about the size, scaling up their source ships to match the number of benches described by Snorri. I’m not too fussed about choices like that, as long as the people involved are honest and clear about what they’ve done, but I’m also a thoroughly non-boat person. It was fun to visit anyway.
Immediately following:
That makes Draken both historically grounded and unusual: she is not simply a replica, but an attempt to understand what the most ambitious Viking-age ships may actually have been capable of.
The ship was conceived through a combination of archaeological material, saga literature, visual sources, and living Norwegian boatbuilding traditions. This approach helped shape a vessel with the size, character, and seaworthiness needed to test ideas about Viking-age ocean travel in practice.
I mean, my understanding is that the size of ships described in 13th-c. saga literature are at least suspected of being anachronistic for Haraldr Hárfagri’s day, and maybe even Ólafr Tryggvason’s. I tried to see if there was anything about this in the books on my shelf, and could only find this typically eloquent comment from Gwyn Jones’s now fairly old book, A History of the Vikings, p. 190:
“Nothing of these formidable monsters [like Orminn Langi, supposedly with 34 oars to a side; the Draken has 25 oars per side] (Knut, we are told, would build a longship of sixty benches), but in any case the point is incontestable: there is no record of them on voyages west or south-west, nor could they have survived the hazards of storm and rough water in the North Sea, to say nothing of the Atlantic Ocean. The same is true of such elegant vessels as that from Oseberg. Triumphantly beautiful, she would have been a deep-water man’s nightmare—and coffin.”
He goes on to focus on the Gokstad ship as “the perfect example of her kind of ship, where proportion, construction, purpose are fully harmonized. When the Viking Age was over far bigger ships would be built, and the distinction between warship and merchant-man would be sharpened, but these are developments which concern us less than directly.”
I own at least two more recent general history books on the vikings, but can’t find either right now. Judith Jesch’s (excellent) book about Ships and Men is a philological study in the first instance, and I couldn’t find any discussion of this particular issue on a quick skim using the index.
One of the reasons Emil Aners Lappen gave for refusing to join in the Viking Row at Norway’s World Cup matches was that real Vikings sailed across the Atlantic rather than rowing. Not all his arguments were such straw men.
My father once said that Snorri’s description of Ólafr Tryggvason and the building og Orminn Langi was meant to tell anyone familiar with shipbuilding that he was a clueless showoff. You just can’t make a good seagoing vessel by cutting a well-built ship in two halves and make it longer.
real Vikings sailed across the Atlantic rather than rowing.
True that Viking technology was better at beating against the wind than many up to that time. (Which is why it’s inauthentic for C8th BCE Greek.) Lateen rig excepted, but that has a limit on size of ship. OTOH, I’m sure the winds in the North Atlantic don’t reliably blow Westwards for your outward journey and Eastwards for your return. All those historic Viking longboats do have plenty of rowlocks.
cutting a well-built ship in two halves and make it longer.
The front falls off.
Bryan Dawe having some difficulty remaining deadpan there …
muddled Nolan’s message that violating the basic laws of hospitality and trust destroys civilization.
As [Emily] Wilson’s review points out, “the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war.” Because Paris seduced/kidnapped Helen from the arranged/promised husband Menelaus. (To suggest Helen had any say in the matter would be wildly ahistorical.)
So Odysseus is combatting treachery with treachery. Xenia does not apply. (Or at least, the Trojans were the first to violate Xenia.)
New Zealand’s own Charybdis is genuinely lethal
(The cgi in the movie just looks fake.)
Which is an irrelevant argument as the whole story is fiction, not history (“Die Ilias ist kein Geschichtsbuch”, as Franz Hampl entitled his famous essay).
And Greeks and Romans never treated their myths as untouchable holy scripture, anyway; the changed them and adapted them to the Zeitgeist all the time. So any later adaptor has the liberty to do the same. Any adaptation has to be judged on its own terms.
What ulr said. Also I am not sure that the ancients did not subscribe to the view that a real heroine escapes her would-be evil seducer (Daphne, some Roman vestal I can’t remember the name of), if necessary, by taking her own life, and one that fails to do so is, to some extent complicit.
What if the moral here is that two wrongs don’t make a right?
Definitely. There’s that story set at the beginning of the Roman republic where a woman kills herself in front of witnesses to avert the very appearance of blame from herself and her husband – blame for the theoretical possibility that she might have enjoyed it, which, BTW, she explicitly denies to the witnesses.
Livy:
.. in which we learn that the ethical traditionalists are meeting the challenge from modern moral philosophy by moving the responsibility to maintain traditions over to the victim. Far be it from me to say that a raped woman is to blame and must die. I just say that an honourable victim would kill herself.
A few years back I was in an art museum (the Clark, in Williamstown, Mass.) when another patron standing near a relevantly-themed painting confided to me his conspiracy theory that Lucretia Didn’t Kill Herself. Wake up, Sheeple!
All the witnesses to Lucretia’s supposed “suicide” were dead or banished from Rome within a year. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Okay people, you’ve convinced me. This movie has insufficient redeeming features. I won’t see it. (Also I’m enjoying the book enormously. So there’s that.)
I’d call it ‘myth’ rather than fiction. Lebensform, if you want to get German about it.
Which is an irrelevant argument as the whole story is fiction, not history
Exactly.
Okay people, you’ve convinced me. This movie has insufficient redeeming features. I won’t see it.
Is this some kind of obscure joke? No one here has dissed the movie but you, and you haven’t seen it. If you choose not to because of your own inflated sense of its alleged shortcomings, that’s on you, but you clearly care more about Emily Wilson’s parti pris than about movies.
I went to see Blue Moon, mostly on your recommendation (thank you again). And loved it. I have gone to see too many Hollywood-style big productions/Oscar winners because of the hype, and mostly hated them. My first inclination (before seeing Wilson’s review) was it was another such overblown fandango.
I was somewhat persuaded by your recommendation, but also noted your caveats. I’ve given ample evidence over the years how many movies I watch, and how I care about the art form. I regard Batman movies as of a different art form — that I don’t watch.
Fair enough!
Yes, Lucretia!
I don’t understand what “lifeform” is doing there.
Wittgenstein.
The myth comes with a whole culture of seafaring, guest-welcome, feasting where guests are expected to entertain, gift-giving of fine-crafted artefacts. Though I recognise this is elite culture, where slavery is so common-place it barely gets a mention.
And the story’s told mostly as direct speech from those who were there — which gives guileful Odysseus plenty of opportunity to deceive, and the gods (speaking through humans) to mis-direct. Then reviews saying there’s little dialogue/character development further put me off.
It’s sounds the complete antithesis of a Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala adaptation.
Yes, it is; it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to see a Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala adaptation of the Odyssey, but tastes differ.
They could probably manage the Nausicaa episode well enough. (Homer transcends our petty Merchant-Ivory/Nolan dichotomies. Perhaps even Michael Bay …)
[Not Disney, though.]
Hm. Directors whose version of the Odyssey I wouldn’t want to see:
Spielberg (top of the list)
Lucas (also top of the list)
Woody Allen (no need to overdo the misogyny)
Busby Berkeley (actually, perverse enough to be worth it.)
Tarantino, now, he would have plenty to work with.
Well, I definitely would like to see a David Lynch version. In fact, one could argue that the basic plot of The Return is distantly derived from the Odyssey.
Derek Jarman
Advantages:
Tilda Swinton as red-haired Helen
über camp battle scenes and war councils
Disadvantages
Extremely gay Achilles dominates film in flashbacks, where we learn he was Odysseus’ only true love.
Too many bare bottoms
Federico Fellini
Advantages:
Group masturbation scene
Fast paced
Disadvantages:
Donald Sutherland’s makeup and facial expressions in the title role
A bit of a mess (see Derek Jarman)
Jacques Demi
Advantages:
Catherine Deneuve as blond Helen and her sister as Clytemnestra
Enlivened by singing and colour
Disadvantages:
None, he should have done it