{"id":143199149,"date":"2024-04-03T12:31:01","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T12:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=143199149"},"modified":"2024-04-03T12:31:01","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T12:31:01","slug":"what-is-it-about-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=143199149","title":{"rendered":"What Is It About Myths?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Rage\u2014Goddess, sing the rage…” – Homer, ‘The Iliad’<\/h2>

Nazis unwelcome: here\u2019s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon<\/a>. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie<\/a>. I might forget\/get bored and stop. Not today though!<\/em><\/p>

Cotton Xenomorph\u2019s \u201cCryptids and Climate Change\u201d issue continues, with \u201cFlesh and Blood\u201d by Manaly Talukdar<\/a> dragging our literary <\/em>Nostromo to the underworld<\/em>.<\/p>

Rage doesn\u2019t actually play much into why I like myths. How completely metal <\/em>that opening line is\u2014the opening line of one of the OG Epic Poems, something you imagine sweater-vested private schoolers hemming and hawing over, virginally\u2014it\u2019s unnecessarily Black Sabbath-esque, and that\u2019s<\/em> something I like about myths. <\/p>

This blog is reading The Iliad<\/em> and The Odyssey<\/em> for National Poetry Month. Obviously, I read Beowulf<\/em> and the updated-hybrid myth Autobiography Of Red<\/em> last week<\/a>. This is, like everything I do for this blog, both something my weirdo brain thought would fun and in service of a writing project. What is it about these ancient epics that gets me so excited? It\u2019s a little hard to explain, neatly anyway. <\/p>

Up front: Homer\u2019s epics, Beowulf<\/em>, Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2014I read these the way some people read Jrrrrrr Tolkien or Grrrrrr Martin. These are both serious and unserious texts for me. Emblematic of my inability to take life completely seriously? Possibly. But there\u2019s a remove from these texts\u2014temporal, continental, cultural\u2014that makes the war and death and heaviness unreal to me. These texts enter a sort of super-metaphor state, where it\u2019s less \u201cwow Achilles is being a whiny bitch about Agamemnon taking his sex slave away\u201d and more \u201cwhat is the right way to treat a man who has fought in a war for you?\u201d or even \u201ccan there be anything<\/em> redeemable about a society where women can be wrenched from their homes (where they are enslaved) and thrown into another one (where they are enslaved) and they technically haven\u2019t even switched sides in the war?\u201d<\/p>

This means I\u2019m doing incredibly<\/em> NON-authoritative Reader Response criticism here. I\u2019m not trying to teach these books, I\u2019m not trying to go around thumping my Smart Boy chest because I\u2019m a reader of the Homeric tomes. Whether or not these were real people, \u201cGuy Thinking About The Roman Empire\u201d-style political interpretations for contemporary society, and pedantic thoughts about the intricacies of the pantheon? You\u2019re not going to catch me doing much of that. What I enjoy about these vaunted, well-studied Muse-revelations of old is selfish extraction: what can these poems show me about my own writing, and do I get hype reading them? <\/p>

The Language<\/strong><\/p>

\"File:MuseBristol<\/figure>

The first time1<\/a> I read The Odyssey <\/em>was I think junior year of college, in a class called \u201cLiterature From The Writer\u2019s Perspective.\u201d It was a class required for creative writing concentrations, the fiction prof and poetry prof traded off years, and the only syllabus guideline was the course name. Joshua Marie Wilkinson taught the class I took, and you know a poet\u2019s gonna design a whole class around what language is doing<\/em>. We spent some time with The Odyssey<\/em>\u2014the Robert Fagles translation\u2014and I was never made to feel lesser than for not remembering that Ares was the Greek one not the Roman one or not knowing how to pronounce Hesesuesocles. We read Autobiography Of Red<\/em> in that class, too, and Emily Dickinson (this class gave me my Billy Collins hatred), Paul Celan, Lolita<\/em>, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories<\/em>, and probably something else cool that I\u2019m spacing on. Yes: all books that foreground the fact that stories are made of language. \u201cWords bounce,\u201d Anne Carson says in the introduction to Autobiography Of Red<\/em>. \u201cWords, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.\u201d No \u201cinvisible prose\u201d or whatever the hell the sci-fi children are always going on about. <\/p>

No, my 300-course-level Homeric reading was all about the visceral, blood-soaked intensity of (Fagles\u2019s translation of) the OG novel-in-verse. Every line of these epics reminds you that you are reading a poem, yet it tells a pretty seamless narrative. There\u2019s a richness here, and an unpretentious richness at that\u2014or at least, the highfalutin courtliness you might expect if you only know Homeric epics as \u201cthose things old people in private schools read.\u201d Don\u2019t even get me started on the adjectives! I\u2019m going to get to the adjectives at the end. <\/p>

Reaching Back In Time<\/strong><\/p>

\"File:Beowulf<\/figure>

Every line of these epics reminds you that you are reading a poem, yet you are constantly thinking about how these are stories told around campfires, when you\u2019re certain the lions are asleep. There\u2019s something powerful about these being stories that have survived across centuries and empires\u2014and yes, I realize a lot of that power is white supremacy and imperialism, but still. In order for the neo-Nazi dorks to piss and moan about fallen Western Civilization, there had to be art that was 1) surviving and 2) very good in the first place. <\/p>

As I said, though, I am not the most serious Classics scholar. What Anne Carson or Maria Dahvana Headley did is much more interesting to me. So while I honor and respect ancient texts, I absolutely recognize this is my time<\/em>, and my work won\u2019t be ostrich-facing to the world around it. I also have no am I worthy <\/em>hang-ups, because\u2026<\/p>

The Thrill Of Learning These Don\u2019t Have To Be Stuffy<\/strong><\/p>

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