Following the death of actor Kirk Douglas at age 103 last week, a slew of news stories appeared summarizing his life and achievements in the movie industry. I actually didn’t know very much about Mr. Douglas, but he does earn a place on this blog for his portrayal of Ulysses in the 1954 film of that name directed by Mario Camerini. It was my first introduction to Homer on film, and while in many ways it may have been less faithful to the spirit of the Greeks than other adaptations I’ve seen, it was, at the same time, one of the most entertaining versions of “The Odyssey” on record.
I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t have some familiarity with the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. I read “The Iliad” when I was a teenager and followed it up immediately with “The Odyssey” but wouldn’t be truthful if I said I got a lot out of it. I remember having a book in junior high school with retellings of the stories of Greek and/or Roman mythology that was more accessible than Homer, Ovid, or Virgil in their original forms if also somewhat simplistic—but even at that stage I was already familiar with the stories. In the same way I absorbed fairy tales, seemingly without effort and from a variety of sources, I came to know ancient mythology without being able to say how it happened.
Even in junior high school, though, I was struck by the fatalism evident in many of myths, which—unlike fairy tales—sometimes ended unhappily. Why did Persephone have to keep going back to the Underworld just because she’d eaten some seeds, I wondered. Why did Daphne have to change her very being just because Apollo wouldn’t leave her in peace? Why couldn’t Icarus have listened to his father and flown a little further from the sun? There didn’t seem to be any answers to these questions except “that’s the way it was,” a sobering fatalism mixed up with all those wonderfully inventive characters and stories.
It wasn’t until I read some of the Greek tragedies that I realized that Odysseus was not always portrayed as the sympathetic, godlike hero I first knew who wandered for many years, enduring many hardships, only to return in triumph at last to his beloved home and family. The Odysseus who was instrumental in sacrificing Iphigenia at Aulis bears little relation to the hale and hearty Ulysses Mr. Douglas portrayed on screen in the 1950s, and to be honest, the big-screen Ulysses is the way I preferred him. He was glorious on screen, fearlessly brawling and maneuvering his way from one adventure to another, maintaining a sense of humor, courage, and elan no matter what happened, and looking good while doing it.
The versions of the myths I heard as a child emphasized the heroic qualities of the characters, while the “adult” versions revealed cruelty, ruthlessness, misogyny, and more. When you see Mr. Douglas’s Ulysses up on the screen, you know that he is truly a hero, that he deserves to defeat his enemies, and that his homecoming is a just reward. Well, who wouldn’t prefer to see him in that light? In Euripides, one finds it difficult to drum up any enthusiasm for the Greek cause because you know the human cost of purchasing the winds favorable to their venture. The Trojan War seems cursed from the outset, and the Greek leaders, including Odysseus, come across as a pack of savages.
While the “adult” versions of the myths make us extremely thoughtful about such things as war, peace, family psychodrama, and expediency, the more playful versions give us heroes and adventures we can follow by proxy. I’m not sure that one type is really that much more superior to the other—there’s plenty of room for multiple retellings of these stories, and there are many different ways to approach mythology. I have to thank Mr. Douglas for giving me my first and most visceral image of Ulysses, even if it is somewhat larger than life, since that is the one I will probably always cherish. I will admit to preferring my heroes to be heroic, even if it doesn’t always happen that way.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Sending Love to Iowa
I logged onto my iPad yesterday morning wondering how the Iowa caucuses had gone and spent a lively couple of hours reading news articles about how it all went down. I, along with most people, I guess, was expecting to see results first thing, and when I read about the app problem that prevented results from getting through, I figured it would be sometime in the afternoon, at the longest, before we heard anything. Election glitches are nothing new.
In the meantime, I read the news while trying to steer as clear as I could of pundits talking about “what’s broken” and “what a big mess everything is.” Admittedly, I was impatient to find out who had won, but I had the advantage of not having been tuned in the evening before when the caucuses were actually taking place, so I didn’t experience the anxiety and confusion that had unfolded in Iowa in real time. Apparently, nerves were worn to a frazzle (and no wonder) all around as people had to rely on trying to call in their results the old-fashioned way, only to be met with long wait times and hang-ups.
I read words like “debacle” and “disaster” and saw opinions expressed about how we were seeing the beginning of the end of the caucus process in Iowa, and I have to admit: my feelings were rather different. Granted, I was at a remove from it all in time and space, but as I looked at the photos and watched the videos of Iowans taking part in one of our country’s most important participatory processes, that of choosing the person who may be our next president, I was, more than anything, moved.
I was moved by the excitement I could see in people’s faces, by the conscientiousness with which they patiently navigated the ins and outs of the system, by the diversity of the Iowans themselves—including one precinct with largely Muslim constituents—and by the very public nature of the process itself. Nothing hidden or secret there, just people very openly and matter-of-factly sorting themselves into groups to support their preferred candidates. You could actually see democracy at work, right in front of your eyes. I don’t remember the last time I was so touched by anything having to do with politics, but I didn’t have a single sarcastic thought while I was watching the people of Iowa caucus. What I was really thinking was “This is what democracy is all about, and how wonderful for the people of Iowa to get to lead the way.”
From this you will see that I am sharply at odds with the people who keep moaning about what a disaster it all was. The only disaster I saw was in the app that didn’t work, and with the paper ballots completed by the participants, there seems to be no way the outcome will be in doubt once it’s known. I was actually wishing our state had a caucus, because to me there was something fundamentally satisfying about watching people show up with their friends and neighbors and then publicly sort themselves, declaring their candidate preference in front of one and all. There was something sort of New England town hall-ish about it all, democracy with a small d, right down there at the grass roots level. I was (if you don’t mind if I express an old-fashioned thought) just plain proud.
I think it’s wise for the officials in Iowa to take their time about checking the results to make sure that it’s all done properly. While it’s frustrating, it will not prevent everyone from moving on to the next contest. If anything good can be said to come out of it, it is perhaps the fact that the problem with the app was discovered in time to prevent another state, possibly without the easy visibility of the caucus system, from finding itself in similar circumstances with inadequate backup.
Personally, I think it would be a shame if Iowa gave up its caucuses over a piece of software. You guys just keep on keepin’ on, no matter what the experts say. There’s too much genuine joy and excitement in the system you’ve got, and if you can get Wordplay (as cynical as I am sometimes) to say so, you must be doing something really special.
In the meantime, I read the news while trying to steer as clear as I could of pundits talking about “what’s broken” and “what a big mess everything is.” Admittedly, I was impatient to find out who had won, but I had the advantage of not having been tuned in the evening before when the caucuses were actually taking place, so I didn’t experience the anxiety and confusion that had unfolded in Iowa in real time. Apparently, nerves were worn to a frazzle (and no wonder) all around as people had to rely on trying to call in their results the old-fashioned way, only to be met with long wait times and hang-ups.
I read words like “debacle” and “disaster” and saw opinions expressed about how we were seeing the beginning of the end of the caucus process in Iowa, and I have to admit: my feelings were rather different. Granted, I was at a remove from it all in time and space, but as I looked at the photos and watched the videos of Iowans taking part in one of our country’s most important participatory processes, that of choosing the person who may be our next president, I was, more than anything, moved.
I was moved by the excitement I could see in people’s faces, by the conscientiousness with which they patiently navigated the ins and outs of the system, by the diversity of the Iowans themselves—including one precinct with largely Muslim constituents—and by the very public nature of the process itself. Nothing hidden or secret there, just people very openly and matter-of-factly sorting themselves into groups to support their preferred candidates. You could actually see democracy at work, right in front of your eyes. I don’t remember the last time I was so touched by anything having to do with politics, but I didn’t have a single sarcastic thought while I was watching the people of Iowa caucus. What I was really thinking was “This is what democracy is all about, and how wonderful for the people of Iowa to get to lead the way.”
From this you will see that I am sharply at odds with the people who keep moaning about what a disaster it all was. The only disaster I saw was in the app that didn’t work, and with the paper ballots completed by the participants, there seems to be no way the outcome will be in doubt once it’s known. I was actually wishing our state had a caucus, because to me there was something fundamentally satisfying about watching people show up with their friends and neighbors and then publicly sort themselves, declaring their candidate preference in front of one and all. There was something sort of New England town hall-ish about it all, democracy with a small d, right down there at the grass roots level. I was (if you don’t mind if I express an old-fashioned thought) just plain proud.
I think it’s wise for the officials in Iowa to take their time about checking the results to make sure that it’s all done properly. While it’s frustrating, it will not prevent everyone from moving on to the next contest. If anything good can be said to come out of it, it is perhaps the fact that the problem with the app was discovered in time to prevent another state, possibly without the easy visibility of the caucus system, from finding itself in similar circumstances with inadequate backup.
Personally, I think it would be a shame if Iowa gave up its caucuses over a piece of software. You guys just keep on keepin’ on, no matter what the experts say. There’s too much genuine joy and excitement in the system you’ve got, and if you can get Wordplay (as cynical as I am sometimes) to say so, you must be doing something really special.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
To Celebrate 10 Years of Wordplay, I’m Giving Out the Best Advice You’ll Ever Get
With all the activities that come with the New Year—gathering tax documents, renewing car registration, planning for retirement (more on that in a minute), I frankly forgot to mention an important milestone: Wordplay—Writing & Life’s 10-year anniversary, which occurred at the beginning of the year. Yes, it really has been that long. Though in some ways it’s difficult to believe, since I clearly remember the day I sat down and wrote the first post, in other ways it feels like every bit of 10 years and more—the longest 10 years of my life, in fact.
I was feeling very hopeful when I started this blog. I was about to embark on the great unknown of writing a dissertation, and I was also hopeful of possibly seeing other changes in my life. Successfully completing a three-year course of graduate school while working full-time had given me the confidence that I might be able to do other things I’d never done before, including, but not limited to, moving and getting a new job. I didn’t want the job I was in then to be the job I retired from, and I knew that with a library degree I was probably employable just about anywhere. I wasn’t unhappy to be in Lexington, but the idea of moving had been in my mind for so long that I figured it would probably happen sooner rather than later.
Before I started the myth studies program, I was a writer in search of a subject matter and a spark that I hoped would set something alight in my mind—and that is exactly what happened, though not in the way I thought it would. If you had asked me then what I imagined myself doing 10 years on, I probably would have said: I will be living in California, or at least dividing my time between Kentucky and California. I would have said I will be working in a creative field, publishing books, perhaps teaching part-time, and maybe even exploring my newly formed interest in working with images and film. At that point, I viewed my library career as something I was likely to transition out of. But first things first: there was the dissertation to write.
Although the end of 2009 had ushered in some unexplained and unsettling events, as I have said before, it was really more of a Dada phase in my life, not the full-on Surrealistic Nightmare that was shortly to ensue. At the beginning of 2010, I still felt that I could steer my life in the direction I wanted it to go, and in fact, that’s what I was doing. The main anxiety I had was the pressure of the dissertation, and, while daunting, this was largely a good pressure, one I had chosen for myself.
When I look back, I’m thankful that I had my dissertation to think about once all hell broke loose, because it gave me a focus, an intellectual activity that required me to gather myself together and give it my all. If I hadn’t had it to work on at the end of 2010 and during the latter part of 2011, I don’t know what I would have done. But there I was, doing the things I had always done best, gathering sources, reading, and distilling all of that into writing. In a way, completing the dissertation was like one long writing meditation, although I suppose most people wouldn’t think of an analytical process like scholarly writing as a meditation. In effect, though, it centered me and helped me keep my feet on the ground during an extremely bewildering time.
In Jungian terms, I was in dialogue with the Self throughout it all. In some strange way, despite having been semi-agnostic for long stretches of my life, I felt at that time as if I could sense a divine presence hovering at the edges of things, quietly willing me to succeed. It wasn’t just “succeeding at the dissertation.” It was succeeding at surviving. If you’re an atheist, this will probably make no sense to you, but I was a believer in the goodness of God at that time like I had never been before in my life.
Needless to say, most of the things I had hoped for 10 years ago did not come true. Once I successfully completed my dissertation, it was as if I was at a dead standstill. My ability to land on my feet upon leaving one job, which had never failed me before, had suddenly deserted me. There I was, a newly-minted PhD, with—I felt—more to offer than ever before, unable to get any kind of a job. No matter that I was more focused, more skilled, more valuable as a worker than ever before—none of that availed me. I felt stymied at every turn, even when I applied for jobs I would rather not have had. My 10-year plan certainly didn’t include using up my retirement savings just to live, and yet that is exactly what happened. In my wildest dreams I never imagined ending up homeless, and yet that happened, too.
There has, however, been at least one great good thing to come out of it all, which possibly wouldn’t have happened if none of the above had taken place, and that was that I was forced into myself and my own resources and ended up finding a way to turn my frustration and pain into writing. I had always wanted to write fiction and suddenly found that when I turned my hand to it, instead of hesitation over every word and sentence, the words came tumbling out as fast as I could write them. I was pleased with what I was doing fiction-wise for the first time, and that, friends, is no inconsiderable thing.
I’m not going to make it easy on anyone else by saying that the writing has made the last 10 years all worthwhile; what I really feel is that I succeeded in what I was doing in spite of the last 10 years. I chose to finally shed some of my innocence, to acknowledge the darkness I could not get free of, and finally, to triumph over it to some extent by bringing it to bear on my writing. I feel sure that few of the things that were happening to me were happening because of someone’s good intent—just the opposite—and yet the fight I found myself engrossed in eventually had the effect of giving me (and my writing) some much-needed edge. I would never have described my life prior to 2010 as “uneventful,” but in some ways I feel now that not enough had happened to me. I was still almost a child, comparatively speaking. One thing about fighting for your life is that it gives you heaps of fabulous material, if you choose to see it that way.
So now, the time has come to once again look to the future and answer the question of, “What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?” And I would say, very much the same things I was thinking I wanted to do 10 years ago, as long as I am in charge of making my own choices. I have never given up on my dreams and hopes and am no further from doing that than I was 10 years ago. I’m reaching retirement age this week and have chosen to apply for social security retirement for economic reasons. Living modestly on social security and wages from Home Depot was never part of my plan but is now my reality, so I intend to make the best of it. I make a small income from my writing business (I don’t make much, but, yes, I make enough that I have to report it to the IRS, so I have in effect been a working writer all this time). Perhaps some day I’ll make more than I do now.
Being a writer is what I am, at my core; I never realized that surviving would one day depend on my holding fast to this, but that’s turned out to be the case. I can do a lot of things, but there has never been anything else that I wanted to do as much. It’s as natural to me as breathing. I also want to add that the timing of Greta Gerwig’s film, Little Women, has been rather fortuitous, because that book, given to me by my aunt when I was seven years old, loomed very large in my imaginative life as a child. The fact that several of the March daughters had talents and aspirations, including—most notably—Jo, the writer, didn’t seem at all remarkable in the book and was simply presented as a given. Ms. Gerwig would have no way of knowing this, but my experience of seeing her film on Christmas Day brought me back to one of my foundational experiences as a reader and a writer, confirming for me that, at least where it really matters, I’m right where I need to be in my creative life. It was as if I had circled back to myself.
Whatever talent or passion you yourself are nurturing, openly or secretly, I encourage you never to let go of it. Pay attention to your soul’s requirements, and you’ll never find yourself agonizing over “what might have been.” Find a way to make it happen, and resist people and situations that pull you away from what you know to be your truest self. Stubbornness, often said to be a vice, is in fact a highly underrated virtue, and one I would advise anyone to cultivate, at least in the things that really matter. It will enable you to stand up for yourself. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate my stubbornness doesn’t need to be talking to me.
Thanks for reading my blog, and maybe we’ll have the same “taking stock” talk 10 years from now. Wordplay is not going anywhere.
I was feeling very hopeful when I started this blog. I was about to embark on the great unknown of writing a dissertation, and I was also hopeful of possibly seeing other changes in my life. Successfully completing a three-year course of graduate school while working full-time had given me the confidence that I might be able to do other things I’d never done before, including, but not limited to, moving and getting a new job. I didn’t want the job I was in then to be the job I retired from, and I knew that with a library degree I was probably employable just about anywhere. I wasn’t unhappy to be in Lexington, but the idea of moving had been in my mind for so long that I figured it would probably happen sooner rather than later.
Before I started the myth studies program, I was a writer in search of a subject matter and a spark that I hoped would set something alight in my mind—and that is exactly what happened, though not in the way I thought it would. If you had asked me then what I imagined myself doing 10 years on, I probably would have said: I will be living in California, or at least dividing my time between Kentucky and California. I would have said I will be working in a creative field, publishing books, perhaps teaching part-time, and maybe even exploring my newly formed interest in working with images and film. At that point, I viewed my library career as something I was likely to transition out of. But first things first: there was the dissertation to write.
Although the end of 2009 had ushered in some unexplained and unsettling events, as I have said before, it was really more of a Dada phase in my life, not the full-on Surrealistic Nightmare that was shortly to ensue. At the beginning of 2010, I still felt that I could steer my life in the direction I wanted it to go, and in fact, that’s what I was doing. The main anxiety I had was the pressure of the dissertation, and, while daunting, this was largely a good pressure, one I had chosen for myself.
When I look back, I’m thankful that I had my dissertation to think about once all hell broke loose, because it gave me a focus, an intellectual activity that required me to gather myself together and give it my all. If I hadn’t had it to work on at the end of 2010 and during the latter part of 2011, I don’t know what I would have done. But there I was, doing the things I had always done best, gathering sources, reading, and distilling all of that into writing. In a way, completing the dissertation was like one long writing meditation, although I suppose most people wouldn’t think of an analytical process like scholarly writing as a meditation. In effect, though, it centered me and helped me keep my feet on the ground during an extremely bewildering time.
In Jungian terms, I was in dialogue with the Self throughout it all. In some strange way, despite having been semi-agnostic for long stretches of my life, I felt at that time as if I could sense a divine presence hovering at the edges of things, quietly willing me to succeed. It wasn’t just “succeeding at the dissertation.” It was succeeding at surviving. If you’re an atheist, this will probably make no sense to you, but I was a believer in the goodness of God at that time like I had never been before in my life.
Needless to say, most of the things I had hoped for 10 years ago did not come true. Once I successfully completed my dissertation, it was as if I was at a dead standstill. My ability to land on my feet upon leaving one job, which had never failed me before, had suddenly deserted me. There I was, a newly-minted PhD, with—I felt—more to offer than ever before, unable to get any kind of a job. No matter that I was more focused, more skilled, more valuable as a worker than ever before—none of that availed me. I felt stymied at every turn, even when I applied for jobs I would rather not have had. My 10-year plan certainly didn’t include using up my retirement savings just to live, and yet that is exactly what happened. In my wildest dreams I never imagined ending up homeless, and yet that happened, too.
There has, however, been at least one great good thing to come out of it all, which possibly wouldn’t have happened if none of the above had taken place, and that was that I was forced into myself and my own resources and ended up finding a way to turn my frustration and pain into writing. I had always wanted to write fiction and suddenly found that when I turned my hand to it, instead of hesitation over every word and sentence, the words came tumbling out as fast as I could write them. I was pleased with what I was doing fiction-wise for the first time, and that, friends, is no inconsiderable thing.
I’m not going to make it easy on anyone else by saying that the writing has made the last 10 years all worthwhile; what I really feel is that I succeeded in what I was doing in spite of the last 10 years. I chose to finally shed some of my innocence, to acknowledge the darkness I could not get free of, and finally, to triumph over it to some extent by bringing it to bear on my writing. I feel sure that few of the things that were happening to me were happening because of someone’s good intent—just the opposite—and yet the fight I found myself engrossed in eventually had the effect of giving me (and my writing) some much-needed edge. I would never have described my life prior to 2010 as “uneventful,” but in some ways I feel now that not enough had happened to me. I was still almost a child, comparatively speaking. One thing about fighting for your life is that it gives you heaps of fabulous material, if you choose to see it that way.
So now, the time has come to once again look to the future and answer the question of, “What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?” And I would say, very much the same things I was thinking I wanted to do 10 years ago, as long as I am in charge of making my own choices. I have never given up on my dreams and hopes and am no further from doing that than I was 10 years ago. I’m reaching retirement age this week and have chosen to apply for social security retirement for economic reasons. Living modestly on social security and wages from Home Depot was never part of my plan but is now my reality, so I intend to make the best of it. I make a small income from my writing business (I don’t make much, but, yes, I make enough that I have to report it to the IRS, so I have in effect been a working writer all this time). Perhaps some day I’ll make more than I do now.
Being a writer is what I am, at my core; I never realized that surviving would one day depend on my holding fast to this, but that’s turned out to be the case. I can do a lot of things, but there has never been anything else that I wanted to do as much. It’s as natural to me as breathing. I also want to add that the timing of Greta Gerwig’s film, Little Women, has been rather fortuitous, because that book, given to me by my aunt when I was seven years old, loomed very large in my imaginative life as a child. The fact that several of the March daughters had talents and aspirations, including—most notably—Jo, the writer, didn’t seem at all remarkable in the book and was simply presented as a given. Ms. Gerwig would have no way of knowing this, but my experience of seeing her film on Christmas Day brought me back to one of my foundational experiences as a reader and a writer, confirming for me that, at least where it really matters, I’m right where I need to be in my creative life. It was as if I had circled back to myself.
Whatever talent or passion you yourself are nurturing, openly or secretly, I encourage you never to let go of it. Pay attention to your soul’s requirements, and you’ll never find yourself agonizing over “what might have been.” Find a way to make it happen, and resist people and situations that pull you away from what you know to be your truest self. Stubbornness, often said to be a vice, is in fact a highly underrated virtue, and one I would advise anyone to cultivate, at least in the things that really matter. It will enable you to stand up for yourself. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate my stubbornness doesn’t need to be talking to me.
Thanks for reading my blog, and maybe we’ll have the same “taking stock” talk 10 years from now. Wordplay is not going anywhere.
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