The Bluestocking, vol 66: Pinkerton, Penelope and Jar-Jar the Pooh
Happy Friday!
This week, I've been doing my homework for Saturday Review (7.15pm, Radio 4), which included reading a new English translation of the Odyssey - the first by a woman! well done, intervening several thousand years! - and watching an Agatha Christie adaptation so hammy it will cause dogs all over Britain to yelp at the screen.
I'll be fascinated to hear what my fellow reviewers made of The Twilight Zone at the Almeida, which had one of the year's most savage and acute reflections on contemporary America's racial grievances, inexplicably nestled inside a campy romp about big-headed aliens and dancing Freudian babies.
Nice set, too.
A Translator Reckons with The Odyssey
It is comforting to subscribe to the notion—as Daniel Mendelsohn does in his recently published memoir, “An Odyssey,” and as Robert Fagles does, in his translation of the poem—that the marriage between Odysseus and Penelope is a partnership of intellectual equals, based on true love and a shared outlook on life. Odysseus speaks, in Homer’s poem, of the ideal of like-mindedness (homophrosyne) in marriage. It is not usually mentioned that he brings it up only when talking to an impressionable teen-age girl, Nausicaa, whom he avoids telling that he’s married, and whom he has a strong ulterior motive for buttering up, since his life depends on her help. (We should know by now that powerful older men do not always tell young women the truth.) Moreover, the sentimentalized reading of Penelope erases some facts about her social position that the original poem makes very clear. Whereas Odysseus has many choices, many identities, many places to go and people to be and to see, Penelope has only one choice, and it is defined exclusively by her marital status: she can wait for Odysseus, or marry someone else—and even this very limited choice is not open forever, since the abusive suitors can eventually force her hand.
This piece by Emily Wilson does a good job of setting out why I liked her translation so much. It's about scraping away the layers of gunk and trying to see the full strangeness of the underlying text - while also not imposing a newer set of anachronistic meanings on it.
Two of the most important choices: using the word "slave" instead of the euphemistic "maid", and not prettifying the shocking act at the end of the narrative, where Odysseus orders the killing of 12 of the slaves because they have had sex with Penelope's suitors (as if they had true agency to choose). He orders Telemachus to hack them to death, but Telemachus has other ideas:
“I refuse to grant these girls
a clean death, since they poured down shame on me
and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.”
At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope
round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar,
stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground.
As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly
home to their nests, but someone sets a trap —
they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;
just so the girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony. They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.
Source: this NYT profile of Wilson.
Nine Boxes
Here's Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed on the company's future. What he's skating round saying is that he made a big, venture capital-backed bet on the distribution of news and entertainment through social media, which involved placing a great deal of trust in the idea that the tech giants are your friends.
And guess what? They are not. They are behemoths with their own commercial imperatives. This week Facebook announced it would stop paying publishers to make Facebook-only videos. A giant tap of revenue has been turned firmly off.
The nine boxes above are Peretti's answer to this trend. (Also his answer, but not mentioned here: cutting the UK news operation by at least a third, and maybe more.) I have huge respect for what Buzzfeed has done over the last few years, but it is tempered with a certain sense of I-told-you-so about the idea of essentially handing over your distribution to Facebook etc. Like the old print unions, whoever controls distribution wields a huge and largely invisible measure of power over the media.
On a similar note, the Disney purchase of Fox feels like a very bad sign for the future of TV/movies. There's already a "platform war", similar to what happened with journalism and social media, where a couple of giants are slogging it out to be Prime Owner of Your Eyeballs. (I'm thinking Netflix, Apple, Amazon etc). They're using their giant cash reserves to do this, so it's currently a great time for content creators. But will that commitment to commissioning last when it's all shaken out and the herd has thinned? Hmm.
PS. Anyone who can tell me if "UK News Russian Assassination Movie" is one item or two, please get in touch.
"Jar-Jar Binks will soon be as loved as Winnie-the-Pooh"
"Yet The Phantom Menace is probably one of the most deliriously inventive films to have appeared in years: it displays all of George Lucas's uncommon magic, a wide-eyed genius for adventure narrative that is beyond any ordinary capacity for wonder, and in many respects the latest episode proves itself to be a more finished movie than any of the others. It is daring and beautiful, terrifying and pompous – and that's just the title sequence.
...
Jar-Jar Binks is the new star. A wise-cracking, pony-headed, flarey-nostrilled, slack-mouthed beast with giant feet and hands like shovels, he comes into our lives as someone who knows the ways of the universe a little better than the rest of us.
He raps like a Jamaican gangster and walks like one of the Kids from Fame: he is already limbering up, in his computer-generated way, to be a long-serving Jedi chum in the manner of the howling, hairy Chewbacca. Jar-Jar is pretty useless as a mate: he can't fix stuff, and he's always getting into bother, but he lends a load of schlepping good humour to the average task of the young Jedi. He will soon be as loved as Winnie-the-Pooh."
Talking of predictions that didn't come off, here's Andrew O'Hagan's rave review of the first Star Wars prequel. I particularly enjoyed hearing about how our heroes could be found "beating off a legion of rogues in the customary fashion", but then I am a child.
Clickhole's Oral History of Pinkerton
Rivers Cuomo: "As isolated as I was, there was also a lot of drama in my personal life. I fell in love with a girl who turned out to be a reflection of a duck that I saw in a warped classroom window. I had really convinced myself that things were going to work out with her, so when they didn’t, it was crushing. The same thing happened with a girl who turned out to be a tall dining hall chair, a girl who turned out to be the floor of my room, and later on, a girl who turned out to be the concept of determinism, which I was learning about in my “intro to philosophy” class. Those failed relationships inspired a lot of Pinkerton. I was getting rejected thousands of times a day, and every time I did, I would write down all my feelings. I wrote until I had 700 songs, and then I pared those down to the 10 loudest ones."
The second Weezer album is so gloriously unlike its predecessor (and its successor) that I'm still boggled by it. I love it. Anyway, this Clickhole explanation of how it came about made me honk like a Canada goose.
Quick links:
No idea why watching Alpha Zero beating other, punier AIs at chess is so interesting, but it is.
I try to keep gender beef out of the newsletter, but honestly - who can watch Anne Ruzylo and tell me with a straight face that radical feminists are social conservatives? Being a butch lesbian is one of the most marginalised gender identities there is. Radical feminists are all about gender non-conformity. (Background to the story here.)
The Daily Stormer's style guide is boggling, particularly in its directive to use """""irony""""" to disguise its racism and anti-semitism. "Dehumanisation is extremely important, but it must be done within the confines of lulz."
If you haven't read about Donald Trump's insane daily regime of cable news and Diet Cokes, treat yourself.
Guest gif: OK, Rivers, it's a deal:
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