The Iliad Goes Gymming

“…for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men…. Once the experience of war makes vivible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moent, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.”

-       Simone Weil,  Essay “The Iliad – or the poem of force” in War and the Iliad, by Simone Vwil and Rachel Bespaloff.

Lady on the treadmill next to me: I see you’re reading the Iliad. Achilles is such a superhero isn’t he?

Me: You mean, like he won the war, or that he was half god?

Woman: He killed the Trojans, right? Greece won?

Me: Wow, spoiler alert! Achilles won?

WISIMH: There apparently isn’t anything you don’t know about the Iliad. Your argument is sound. You know, because it made a sound when you said it. I agree with you in a very broad way. I couldn’t agree more broadly. 

Achilles isn’t the hero of the Iliad, you shallow pretentious obviously retired sixth grade teacher with dementia. Achilles is a beautiful mindless personification of ‘roid rage; a tool of vengeful capricious gods entertained by bloody wars. Hector is the hero. First of all, he was all man, not a watered-down god. He had a loving wife and son, a bunch of deadbeat brothers, a father to defend, a city to save from invaders. Achilles' problems included a dead boyfriend, a briefly misplaced whore, a helicopter mother and suit of shiny armor. While they both knew they were fated to die, they both faced it and they both died. Achilles mad with the lust of power, Hector reduced to a doomed lamb about to be slaughtered by a berserker. Hector died with honor. Achilled killed with disrespect.

Demented Retired Teacher on Adjacent Treadmill: Then again, the victors write the history books, right? Homer was Greek.

Me:  Heh. Nailed it.

WISIMH: Like a dustapan of hair to the wall without the dustpan. The Iliad – more myth than history - is universally recognized by scholars to be the most even-handed war story ever told. Both enemies are treated the same – neither glorified nor vilified - either by the writer or by each other. That’s one of about a million reasons you should read this book once a year. No to mention Christopher Logue’s War Music and All Day Permanent Red profound transliterations of the battle scenes that every REMF should read every year.

WISIMH:  Holy crap! I have hyperlinks inside my head? Does that make me a cyborg?

DRTAT: What’s your favorite part?

Me: The last sentence: "And thus they buried Hector, tamer of horses." It wipes out the heroics and erases the majesty of force in one gentle stroke of humanity, and describes the hero on the scale of his contribution to the world of man.  

WISIMH:  I suppose your favorite part is the horse. Which is not in the Iliad. Also, the Iliad ends just before Troy falls, so it doesn’t say Greece won. However, Achilles dies too, in the actual Iliad and thus before Greece wins. Loser.

Is That You?

Downtown searching for 'er, looking all around

Saw her getting in a yellow cab heading up town

I caught a loaded taxi, paid up everybody's tab

Flipped a twenty dollar bill, told him 'catch that yellow cab.

Nadine, honey is that you?

Oh, Nadine

Honey, is that you?

Seems like every time I catch up with you

You are up to something new/

 - Chuck Berry, Nadine

Among my many stubborn sisters is one who not only refuses to embrace social media, she is such a Luddite she sees absolutely no socially redeeming value in the magic of the internets. I tried to get her to join Pinterest and you’d have thought I was trying to get her to a Scientology audit.

She contends – can this possibly be right? - that real life differs in some important way from virtual life. I know, right? She’s even worse than another stubborn sister who thinks I should get out more. Like she is trying to get me to drink and drive, right?

Then, there’s my sister who I dreamed called to ask me to remind her what was the name of the playing card between six and eight. You have to think about that for a minute: it was very vivid. But was it Go Fish? When I told her, she said it was a portent of how we are losing our minds. Such a worrier. She thinks a zombie looking for brains would pass right by us. For somebody like me lately so preoccupied with the coming zombie apocalypse this is such glass half empty thinking of her.

I could go on. But I was on a mission.

I had determined I’d spend my afternoon at the keyboard, drinking nothing but water and mediating on a topic that I can sink my mental teeth into. I mean metaphorical teeth. The idea is to tackle something, anything, existentially important as an example of how consulting the internets is better than consulting a Tibetan monk in Lhasa while suffering the effects of hypoxia. Better wisdom-O2 ratio at my keyboard. It’s not a complete waste of time and I wanted to prove that the internets can often be used to enrich one’s life when its power is used for good.

So, I was listening to Chuck Berry while thinking of a suitable topic, and obviously realized Nadine would be a perfect subject. I’m trying to show my sister how wise and all-knowing the internets can be, and plus entertaining.

If you google image Nadine, you get pictures of dark long brunettes looking over their shoulders in chiropractically questionable positions and equally uncomfortable/minimal clothing. And all young and thin and come-hithering and shit. Probably the kind of woman Chuck was trying to catch up with.

This afternoon I have been meditating/internetting whether Nadine is a high class whore name. Or whether it’s just me and google image that thinks that. Maybe some of the women pictured are famous. They have this Eastwick blank sameness (the equivalent of the Victorian Interchangeable Emma). A sort of 21^st century Raquel Welch wannabe but less edgy than Raquel. Less authentic than even Madonna who tried too hard to make it look easy. Then again, the Nadine images could be of the same two or three women.

To be sure, some of the edginess to Nadine is that there’s something more sexy about brunettes. It could be they’re just malnourished Russians or broke Eurotrash, but I think it may be that hint of brains. Not enough to be scary for sure, but maybe would get your jokes, you know? 

But not the one about how Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings. They don’t know shit about Wings, and that too may be a good thing. Because sadly blonds too often still do. The blonds, for consideration on some future day, will be mono-named but with invented sharp sounding names. Kyriaka, Zulynn, Mijanou. And Bunny.

Yahooo Answers wouldn’t even entertain the question about whether Nadine is a slut name. Using a different browser (Firefox is a fucking prude) I found out why. One word. Porn.

Now, part of spending the afternoon on the internet is learning how to follow forks in the information superhighway. Since Yahoo crashed Messenger rather than address the issue of Nadine’s sluttishness, I wondered if it was Yahoo in general, or just Nadine. A scientific test was in order.

Turns out, Yahoo is more responsive when you ask: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Oddly, many replies include white refrigerators. This will remain a mystery meme. Wait, let me ask google for images of this. Technical difficulties and distractions ensure.

I began a google search with “please don’t take…”  I think even my most stubborn sister knows how google loves to play the Let Me Guess What You’re Asking game. The third suggested answer is “…the baby to the liquor store”. Drops mike. Walks away.

Then I got more water and came back. Having come to no conclusion and tabled the Nadine/slut name issue for a future session, I determined to get me some serious internet wisdom. I read the latest issue of International Socialism which let’s just say really harshed my Nadine-instigated mellow. So I had to visit Kate Heidel at  Wear Your Cape to cheer the fuck back up.      

So, while it’s not all fun and games on the internet, there’s some stuff out there that keeps me interested in life. Too bad when I try to listen to Spotify and practice zen googling my computer keeps crashing.

Which got me thinking. Life is counter intuitive. Glitter has a surprisingly heavy carbon footprint. It takes more water to make a tiny packet of glitter than it takes to make a bottle of bottled water.

When I was Your Age

“Now do you believe dead rats float, Lisa?”

 - Homer Simpson

We had to do homework over the summer. We had to read a bunch of books. We had to show up in September at Catholic school, probably circa 6^th grade, circa 1959, with a book report on, among other forgotten gems, Kon Tiki. It was a story by an anthropologist who wanted to test his theory about how people might have migrated from the old world to the new world. It was mind-numbingly uninteresting to someone who had the intellectual imagination to theorize about how a snail felt when you put salt on it to watch it dissolve.

Notwithstanding that I hated the pathetic young under-educated nuns whose “calling” was more important than their teaching abilities, the book was rubbish. Homework over summer vacation has been outlawed by Article XXIV of the Human Rights Convention. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the number of the last book of the Iliad. Or is it??

I remember my report said that floating across an ocean on a homemade raft was probably slightly more exciting than reading a book about floating across an ocean on a homemade raft because at least the raft had a mast tall enough to hang myself and probably enough rope to get the job done. All I had that summer was a salt shaker to punish snails who squished between my bare toes when we played hide and seek after dinner. When I was your age, snails didn’t even have shells. (I think I mean slugs, don’t I?)

In my book report deliberately misspelled the author’s name multiple times, which I will boldly spell here without the help of the google because we didn’t have spell check or google back in those homework-laden summers of yesteryear and because I want to make a point about how stupid this book was. I think it was Thor Hyerdhal. Or Tor Hayrideall. Or Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Sister Alice Maureen didn’t have spellcheck or even, apparently, a copy of the book. She certainly never read the book reports. I think the idea was to just count the number of reports turned in and then laugh over communal supper at the suckers who actually bothered. It’s a wonder I’m not bitter.

Anyway, in my report, I said the part I enjoyed the most was when the sailor/author befriended a stowaway rat with whom (late at night over brandy and cigars) he discussed whether to include a chapter - or at least a paragraph - about masturbating to the soft porn magazines the author had brought along “just in case”. That didn’t happen, at least in the book. At least as I recall. Spoiler alert: in my (as yet unpublished) book report, the rat was lost at sea.

Perhaps it’s worth another read now that I’m a grown up. Although my intellectual development has advanced beyond questioning the inner lives of snails, I did once shoot a man just to watch him die. It was Whore Higherdoll, just after he announced he was writing a sequel about his return trip across the ocean in the cargo hold of an overbooked Jet Blue flight.

Picture credit: http://rosamirabooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/rat-ahoy.html

Loyalty

As rare as a cat disregarding a mouse.