One of my favorite songs by Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen. I might call this science fiction pop music, something I think Fagen might do the best.
Tag Archives: odyssey
An Ancient Gesture
I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: Penelope did this too. And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day And undoing it all through the night; Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight; And along towards morning, when you think it will [...]
Journey
But whom does this bring peace? The classic war between a passion and responsibility is never finished, and has been the same to the sea-wanderer and the one on shore, now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from which the [...]
The Sea Call
When Odysseus met Tieresias in the underworld, the prophet told him that he would reach home, but would then take another journey to a land where people live who know nothing of the sea. In this excerpt from a modern sequel to the Odyssey by the twentieth-century Greek poet Nicos Kazantzakis, Odysseus has returned to [...]
The Return of Odysseus
Odysseus finally returns home in Book XIII of the Odyssey, but “could not tell what land it was / after so many years away … The landscape looked strange, unearthly strange / to the Lord Odysseus” (XIII. 238-39, 245-46). Odysseus spends the next seven books carefully making his way around Ithaka, making allegiances, and practicing his trademark dissembling and contending in order to insinuate himself into the presence of the suitors to make them eventually “atone in blood!” (XI.132).
The Odyssey, Book 11 Notes
Book XI of the Odyssey shows Odysseus’ symbolic death and rebirth: a journey into the psyche of Odysseus in which he learns both about his past and future and comes to terms with his responsibilities as a leader, a father, a husband, and a hero. Perhaps most importantly Odysseus learns from the shades of his past the wisdom he needs to return home safely — to defeat his own selfish desires and those of his enemies.
The Odyssey, Book 10 Notes
Several themes and scenes from book nine are paralleled in book ten. The theme of hospitality that began book nine also begins book ten on Aiolia Island, domain of the wind king who takes pity on Odysseus and gives him a bag of winds, perhaps an appropriate gift for the tactician.
