Pennies crash down from the sky

[sovay]

I did not sleep at all last night. This is much less entertaining than it sounds. I am hoping not to repeat the trick tonight.

I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.

Comments

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

A fascinating insight about WATERSHIP DOWN (further confirmation of my suspicion that the Ancients first wrote all the stories we've simply been retelling - and reliving - ever since ...)

Have you had a chance to read Margaret Atwood's THE PENELOPIAD yet? I'd be interested in your reaction.

[sovay]

A fascinating insight about WATERSHIP DOWN (further confirmation of my suspicion that the Ancients first wrote all the stories we've simply been retelling - and reliving - ever since ...)

Either that, or everything's better with a classical education . . .

Have you had a chance to read Margaret Atwood's THE PENELOPIAD yet?

I have not. I own a copy, courtesy of strange_selkie and darthrami, but in the move from New Haven it vanished in a surfeit of boxes, like many of my books, and currently I have no idea where it is. This annoys me. Would you recommend it?

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

I actually would recommend THE PENELOPIAD. Margaret plays with Homer's mythic archetypes in charming and inventive ways. It's more BROTHER WHERE ART THOU than Konchalovsky's ODYSSEY (which ain't necessarily a bad thing) and, at just under 200 pages, constitutes a pleasant afternoon's reading.

Of course, I don't have to tell YOU there's a rich haul of possibility in exploring the women of the Classical world ... Margaret's Penelope is (in many respects) a typical Atwood heroine (shy but sarcastic, withdrawn but sensual). The writer's elaborations on the heroine's tale (drawn principally from Rieu's ODYSSEY and Graves' GREEK MYTHS) are clever and the observations about Odysseus she places in Penelope's mouth ("his clothes were rustic; he had the manners of a small-town big-shot, and had already expressed several complicated ideas that others considered peculiar") are unceasingly clever.