treyf 22's List: 02-Greece

We have more Gods than you can shake a stick at. Godchecker's Mythology Encyclopedia currently features over 2,850 deities. Browse the pantheons of the world, explore ancient myths, and discover Gods of everything from Fertility to Fluff with the fully searchable Holy Database Of All Known Gods.

And so, in the end, the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.    Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

"... understanding how real history underlies the epics makes us appreciate Homer's art more, not less. We can see Homer pioneering the artistic technique of taking a backbone of historical fact and fleshing it over with contemporary values and concerns ..."

By happenstance, on O-Force One I raised the matter of quests and Cyclops with the candidate. Having read that he had left the trail in early June to go back to Chicago and see his daughter Malia perform in “The Odyssey” for theater class, I wondered if that rang any bells on this trip? The hero on a foreign journey, battling through obstacles to get back home, where more trouble would wait?

At home, Jon Stewart was poking fun at the grandiosity of the “Obama Quest” and “the Obamanauts.” He showed film clips of “our hero” in chain mail fighting off dragons and a Cyclops in his crusade to come home and rule over Dreamerica.

This notion of the frontier seems important to understanding the occupation.... And it seems that exploiting the frontier mythology has been key to selling what you call the Shock Doctrine to the public – drawing on its whole aesthetic, so central to the American identity. Ideas of rugged individualism, tribal but not collective loyalties, the freedom archetype – the cowboy as symbolized byJohn Wayne ... He's a killer, a tamer of lands – principled and ruthless, but ultimately benevolent and kind. First and foremost, of course, he is a law unto himself. Which is exactly how the occupation has been sold ... And rugged cowboy idealism was the packaging for the whole murderous and lawless project.

Margaret Atwood has always had a flair for the epic. Not only does her hair verge on Medusa-like unruliness, but her best books weave timeless tales against vast landscapes, both real and imagined. In 2005, the celebrated Canadian scribe confirmed her mythological interests with the release of The Penelopiad, a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey.

It's a stormy day on the sea off the coast of Greece. The date is around 520 BC. Fighting for his life, a man is heaved over the side of a boat and dropped into the open water to die. His name is Hippasus of Metapontum. His crime? Telling the world a mathematical secret. The secret of the dangerous ratio.

“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”  ... In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

A new book recalls Socrates’ strangeness, his notorious ugliness, his supercilious and enraging manner