Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.

The Suitors, cont.

I remain a little freaked out by Ben Ehrenreich. The Suitors definitely didn't get any less strange as I finished it. Which is not to say that it isn't really good and intriguing and all that - because it is! - but dude, it's a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

Suffice it to say that not only is every character flawed, but they are deeply, deeply so. Drunk with lust, gluttony, avarice - all of the deadly sins, in fact. And while the motley crew that form Penny's kingdom (formerly Payne's army) love one another, they will betray that love in a moment to get closer to Penny, and will blame anyone - including Penny herself - who pierces through her defenses.

I wish Ehrenreich had written more about Bobby, Penny's son, a preternaturally solemn child growing up in a sea of anarchy. And he eventually takes to the sea. He reminded me of Gunter Grass's Oskar, in The Tin Drum, carrying more meaning than his little body could possibly hold.

Anyway, what this all makes me realize is that I should read (or re-read - have I read it before?) The Odyssey.

The Suitors, or Acid Trips with Homer

(No, not Homer Simpson, although that would be interesting too.) I want some of whatever Ben Ehrenreich was smoking when he wrote The Suitors, a modern retelling of The Odyssey. It's a timeless, placeless setting, in which there are sidewalks and cars and televisions, but sometimes there are no phones and people run around naked. Oh, and creating a moat and filling it with sewage when you can't find crocodiles makes sense. And there are chamber pots. And a band of free spirits (although that's too high-minded a phrase) who spend their days loving and gamboling and huffing paint thinner. Until our modern Odysseus Payne comes along and conscripts them into his dream.

What is his dream? Well (and it sounds a little something like some presidents we know):

...the everlasting glory of a nation founded on the vital principles of freedom and opportunity, of the responsibilities that accompany good fortune, the sacred obligation to boast of one's virtues and display one's wealth for all to see, and thereby, he said, spread freedom to the farthest corners of the globe [...] A free people always wins.

And now he gets them started on his arsenal. And then the looting and the wars. And coming up, the War.

And you wonder, what binds Payne and Penny together? And why are you willing to continue to spiral downward with them?