You’re gearing up to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but you haven’t read the Homeric work. Or you read it so long ago that it feels like you’ve never read it at all. No worries. Above, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the hosts of The Rest Is History podcast, take you through the major plot lines of the Odyssey, unpacking the literary and historical meaning of the epic’s different tales. It’s a good primer—just what you need to get ready for one of the bigger cinema releases this year. Enjoy!
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Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to generation after generation of filmmakers. Part of the appeal is, of course, the work’s age, which obviates the need for potentially frustrating rights negotiations. But what really captures a director’s imagination about retelling the story of Odysseus’ long journey back to Ithaca must have a great deal to do with the host of monsters he encounters along the way. The giant cannibal Laestrygonians; the sirens, whose call forces Odysseus to lash himself to the mast of his ship; Scylla and Charybdis, guardians of the Strait of Messina; and perhaps most memorably of all, the towering cyclops Polyphemus.
Many or most of these fearsome characters are familiar to us even if we’ve never read the Odyssey, or indeed seen any of its adaptations. In everyday speech, we invoke the sirens’ call when describing an irresistible temptation, or Scylla and Charybdis when describing any set of equal and opposite pitfalls. And it would be a rare man, woman, or even sufficiently educated child who can’t identify the defining feature of a cyclops.
But long before all of these could enter the modern lexicon, they had to be invented in antiquity. In the new Hochelaga video above, host Tommie Trelawny investigates their origins, going over theories that suggest that some or all of these monsters had already made fairly long cultural journeys of their own before Homer put them in Odysseus’ path.
The myth of the cyclops could have been inspired by elephant skulls with large central nasal cavities, or perhaps by a brutish inversion of eyes as a signal of intelligence. It could have been a series of colossal Bronze Age stone statues on the island of Sardinia that constituted the basis for the Laestrygonians. As for the sirens, which we imagine as beautiful women, the pre-Christian ancient Greeks envisioned them as strange winged creatures making promises of knowledge. Scylla and Charybdis, representations of the destructive forces of nature, were a way of reifying the Strait of Messina’s inherent perils. Whatever their origins, all these challengers to Odysseus’ homecoming still fire up the imaginations of filmmakers, especially filmmakers inclined to high-tech spectacle: Christopher Nolan, for instance, the theatrical release of whose Odyssey begins tomorrow. We all know that the hero gets home in the end, but we’ll buy tickets for the monsters.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Public and commercial spaces around the world are now lined with imagery of a vertebra-studded battle helmet and statues surrounded by flame. It’s all part of the promotional campaign for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, which will begin opening in theaters later this month. Much has been said and written about how the project represents the next phase of Nolan’s ever-grander cinematic ambitions, but banking on the spectacle value of Homer has a long history in filmmaking. When the Italian silent adaptation L’Odissea came out in 1911, for example, it was uncertain even whether audiences would tolerate the 44 minutes it took to depict Odysseus’ arduous journey home.
Though it was released in the fall of 1911 in Italy and the following winter in the U.S., L’Odissea now looks like a summer blockbuster avant la lettre, or ante litteram — or then again, given the material, πρὶν ὀνομασθῆναι, though most of us are still waiting to see just how ancient Nolan and his collaborators have allowed themselves to get.
By the standards of their day, the makers of L’Odissea appear to have spared no expense on sets, costumes, and even visual effects, most notably in its portrayal of the cyclops Polyphemus. Technically, none of it may measure up to what Nolan and company have in store, but the theatrical gestures, shifting color tints, and occasionally battered textures do their part to conjure up a reality of their own.
L’Odisseawas actually the second major literary adaptation of that year for its directors, the trio of Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, all working at the studio Milano Films. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured their first, L’Inferno, which dramatizes the first and most famous part of Dante’s Divine Comedy at a length of 73 minutes. That runtime qualified it as the first feature-length film ever produced in Italy, by comparison to which L’Odissea may have actually felt like a more familiar viewing experience to contemporary viewers accustomed to shorts. Now that humanity has been re-acclimated to watching things a few minutes at a time here in the twenty-twenties, Nolan’s nearly three-hour Odyssey looks like a bold move indeed. But then, an epic poem demands an epic interpretation.
Note: If you click “cc” on the YouTube video above, English subtitles will appear.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
One of the most heartfelt student-to-teacher tributes is that of Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Albert Camus to Louis Germain, a father substitute whose classroom was a welcome reprieve from the extreme poverty Camus experienced at home. Germain persuaded Camus’ widowed mother to allow Camus to compete for the scholarship that enabled him to attend high school.
As read aloud by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, above, at Letters Live, a “celebration of the enduring power of literary correspondence,” Camus’ 1957 message to Germain is an exercise in humility and simply stated gratitude:
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
If it were possible, I would squeeze the great boy whom you have become, and who will always remain for me “my little Camus.”
He complimented his little Camus on not letting fame go to his head, and urged him to continue making his family a priority. He shared some fond memories of Camus as a gentle, optimistic, intellectually curious little fellow, and praised his mother for doing her best in difficult circumstances.
Readers, please use the comments section to share with us the teachers deserving of your thanks.
You can find this letter, and many more, in the great Letters of Note book.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Most of us who know the work of Roald Dahl grew up with it, eventually coming to consider the man a master of imaginative, often grotesque tales for children. A bit later on, when we heard that he’d also written books for adults, with titles like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, some of us sought them out as a kind of forbidden literary fruit. What tends to escape notice is that he also wrote for teenagers — or, in any case, that certain of his stories were packaged for teenagers into the posthumous volume The Great Automatic Grammatizator, whose title story has gained a new relevance in our age of ChatGPT, as explained in the new Tibees video above.
First published in 1954, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” concerns an enormously complex, wholly analog machine that can generate page after page of text at a then-unimaginable clip. Its inventor, a beaten-down young corporate employee called Adolph Knipe, designs it based on the same principles he’d used to create an electric calculator that pleased his boss, Mr. Bohlen. A frustrated writer of fiction by night, Knipe conceives of the Grammatizator as a tool of revenge against the magazine industry that spurned him. With the company’s backing to build the thing, he tells Bohlen, they could dominate the market for short stories almost without effort — and make their own prestigious names as authors to boot.
“It stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar,” Dahl writes. “Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.” Though Bohlen accepts the technical proposition, he at first doubts the commercial one, at least until his employee informs him that magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal will pay for a story “anything up to twenty-five hundred dollars”: nearly $40,000 today.
Of course, 1954 was a different time. Today, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal have all gone, as has the prospect of earning even a meager living through short stories. And a computer of this kind, as Dahl describes it, would have been an enormous, noisy device laden with buttons, dials, pedals, and stops, each of which the “writer” would use to control such variables as theme, style, tension, humor, and passion. “The quality may be inferior,” an increasingly power-mad Knipe admits of the machine’s output, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts.” All of us now possess Grammatizators of our own, far faster, cheaper, more versatile, and easier to use than anything Roald Dahl could have imagined. Yet how many of us can hope to be read more than 70 years in the future?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops in London had grown scarcer and more humdrum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Italian espresso bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momentous event”:
London’s first proper coffee shop—one equipped with a Gaggia coffee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gather, and it is said by some that the introduction of this coffee bar prompted the youth culture explosion that soon changed social life in Britain forever.
“By 1972,” Watts writes, “coffee bars were everywhere and the teenage revolution was firmly established.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ideal place for countercultural maven William S. Burroughs—a London resident from the late sixties to early seventies—to hobnob with young dissidents and outsiders. Burroughs, who so approvingly refers to the possibly apocryphal anarchist pirate colony of Libertatia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appreciate the budding anarchism of British youth culture, which would flower into punk soon enough.
But rather than joining the coffee bar scene, the cantankerous Burroughs had taken to frequenting “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to mention the ‘Dilly Boys,’ young male prostitutes who hustled for clients outside the Regent Palace Hotel.”
And he had grown increasingly disillusioned with London, fuming, writes Ted Morgan in Burroughs’ biography Literary Outlaw, “at what he was paying for his hole-in-the-wall apartment with a closet for a kitchen” and at the rising price of utilities. “Burroughs,” Morgan tells us, “began to feel that he was in enemy territory.” And he thought the Moka coffee bar should pay the price for his indignities.
There, “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.” Burroughs “decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d earlier employed against the Church of Scientology, “turning up… every day,” writes Watts, “taking photographs and making sound recordings.” Then he would play them back a day or so later on the street outside the Moka. “The idea,” writes Morgan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position.”
Burroughs also connected the method to the Watergate recordings, the Garden of Eden, and the theories of Alfred Korzybski. The trigger for the magical operation was, in his words, “playback.” In a very strange essay called “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” from his collection Electronic Revolution, Burroughs described his operation in detail, a disruption, he wrote, of a “control system.”
Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is in pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is playback. Adam experiences shame when his discgraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot affect me.
The theory made perfect sense to Burroughs, who believed in a Magical Universe ruled by occult forces and who experimented heavily with Scientology, Crowley-an Magick, and the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Burroughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On October 30th, 1972 the establishment closed its doors—perhaps a consequence of those rising rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the location became the Queens Snack Bar.
The audio-visual cut-up technique Burroughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their experiments with written “cut-ups,” and Burroughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an interpretive “meditation” based on Burroughs’ use of audio/visual “magical weapons” and incorporating his recordings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Burroughs himself made in 1966 with cinematographer Antony Balch, a disorienting illustration of the cut up technique.
Not limited to attacking annoying London coffeehouse owners, Burroughs’ supposedly magical interventions in reality were in fact the fullest expression of his creativity. As Ted Morgan writes, “the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing.” Read much more about Burroughs’ theory and practice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” and hear the author himself discourse on the paranormal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lecture below from a writing class he gave in June, 1986.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s many literary achievements through these works include the creation and command of a kind of synthesized poetic Greek, combining qualities of regional Ionic and Aeolic dialects with various forms and expressions that were outdated even in the eighth century BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.
Needless to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the original, we get it all or mostly wrong, even if we’re familiar with modern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of classicists before hearing a more accurate recording than the one above, delivered by a YouTuber called Thomas Whichello.
On his channel, Whichello specializes in performing venerable literary texts with a pronunciation and cadence as close to period-accurate as possible, often in the original language, sometimes with his own musical accompaniment. He’s done readings of the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so popular as his rendition of the first book of the Iliad, accompanied by subtitles of Homer’s text and an English translation.
A Greek here in 2026 with no particular knowledge of the classical language may understand a quarter of the individual words Whichello uses, and maybe half of them in certain passages. Actually being able to follow the story, however, is another matter. Still, you can get a surprising amount out of the video even if you understand nothing at all, since Whichello is aiming not just for linguistic accuracy, but also emotional resonance in his delivery. Ignore his glasses, button-down shirt, microphone, and window frame, and you could almost be sitting around a campfire with him nearly 30 centuries ago. Note, also, that the commenters include genuine classicists who call his the best reading they’ve ever heard — as well as viewers, credentialed or otherwise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In 2011, we featured the video below of Vonnegut explaining his theory, “The Shapes of Stories.” We can add to the dry wit of his lesson the picto-infographic by graphic designer Maya Eilam above, which strikingly illustrates, with examples, the various story shapes Vonnegut described in his thesis. (Read a condensed version here.)
The presenter who introduces Vonnegut’s short lecture tells us that “his singular view of the world applies not just to his stories and characters but to some of his theories as well.” This I would affirm. When it comes to puzzling out the import of a story I’ve just read, the last person I usually turn to is the author. But when it comes to what fiction is and does in general, I want to hear it from writers of fiction. Some of the most enduring literary figures are expert writers on writing. Vonnegut, a master communicator, ranks very highly among them. Does it do him a disservice to condense his ideas into what look like high-res, low-readability workplace safety graphics? On the contrary, I think.
Though the design may be a little slick for Vonnegut’s unapologetically industrial approach, he’d have appreciated the slightly corny, slightly macabre boilerplate iconography. His work turns a suspicious eye on overcomplicated posturing and champions unsentimental, Midwestern directness. Vonnegut’s short, trade publication essay, “How to Write With Style,” is as succinct and practical a statement on the subject in existence. One will encounter no more ruthlessly efficient list than his “Eight Rules for Writing Fiction.” But it’s in his “Shapes of Stories” theory that I find the most insight into what fiction does, in brilliantly simple and funny ways that anyone can appreciate.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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