CSotD: What a Day for a Humpday
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This is where I’ve landed on the Odyssey movie. I’ve heard it praised and I’ve heard it trashed and the outcome seems to be that it’s neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring and I know herring is a fish, but there’s your problem: The idiom is poetic and apparently we can’t have that.
Just as we can’t have gods running around interfering in the important matters of swords and sandals. Olympian gods are a challenge, certainly, but the real challenge is how do you make Homer into a movie with the same impact it had on its original audience?
You probably can’t, and not just because of the gods. When we were reading the Aeneid in seminar, one of our professors who was particularly versed in translation came in and read us a passage about a cavalry charge in the original text, to demonstrate Vergil’s mastery of rhythm and onomatopoeia. And I suppose to impress upon us how little of it we could get by reading it in English. And that was Latin; Greek poetry is reportedly even harder to translate effectively.
I think I’d rather watch Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger than see someone trying, and failing, to adapt Homer to a 21st century audience, perhaps with Clash of the Titans (the real one) as a compromise. Both movies were very entertaining and made no pretense of being “cinema.”
Joyce Carol Oates apparently agrees with me, though a fellow at the Guardian felt compelled to rebut her off-handed comment, thereby demonstrating how to take everything, and particularly yourself, way too seriously.
Now, here’s a contemporary take on Homer’s great epic. Note that most of the characters he encounters are every bit as realistic as Athena and the Sirens and Circe and Poseidon.
Also on the topic of Facebook: While we wait for genuine, practical add-ons to delete AI, I’d like one that automatically deletes food shots.
Email was so much easier. I had spam filters set for all sorts of annoying things I didn’t want to read.
We also had more control over who we heard from. Back then, hitting “Reply All” was often a ghastly, career-ending mistake. But with Facebook, it’s the default.
Speaking of our increasingly shameless culture, it was quite a jolt to hear my mother say the word “cornhole.” I’m sure she only knew it in terms of that game, but still.
I don’t have a problem with the game itself, but hauling around that big board is sure more of a pain than having two sections of pipe and half a dozen horseshoes in the trunk of your car. I’d also contend that horseshoes is a game than employs more skill than tossing beanbags, and that the chink! of a well-tossed shoe hitting the pipe is particularly satisfying, which seems the gist of Lola’s well-founded objection to Nerf horseshoes.
There was such a thing, but it’s apparently gone. However, Amazon has a collection of plastic horseshoe sets for those who want to play indoors. I think you have to drink sody pop rather than beer while you pitch plastic rather than genuine horseshoes.
Amazon also lists an outdoor set in which the shoes appear to have little cutouts to help you pitch them and have them hang onto the post.
They sell bicycles with training wheels, too, but you can take them off.
AI has its uses, mostly in things like coding that aren’t exactly mindless but that take up a lot of time better spent doing something else. When I was doing media education, I had an assistant who was tasked with entering orders, billing, making and collating handouts and so forth. But a computer handled spreadsheets and generated bills, and a photocopier made copies.
A far cry from the days of clerks perched on stools copying out financial records and suchlike. One of my assistants ran some newspapers up to a classroom in the mountains and I expected her back in an hour or so. When she didn’t return, I got a little worried, but she was back midafternoon, with the explanation, “I was teaching some classes.”
She was a lot more valuable than some poor wretch endlessly dipping a quill into an inkpot.
On the other hand, I don’t know whether to be more appalled that Rory thinks he’s producing art or that the people who buy his slop-caricatures think they’re getting some. There’s currently a brouhaha going on because Substack added a feature where you can tell if a blog was written by a person or by AI and bloggers are defending their use of AI because “it helps me gather my thoughts.”
I understand using AI if you’re in a job that requires memos and reports and you’re not a good writer, but having a blog is holding yourself out to be a writer. It’s a question of ethics.
“I run five miles every morning.”
“Really? Don’t you worry about shin splints?”
“No, I use a golf cart.”
Subscribing to a Substack that someone cranks out on ChatGPT is like paying Rory to generate an AI caricature.
The Big Book of Jokes is an excellent choice for a book report. I wish we’d heard the rest of Thandi’s report, because I suspect the problem is not her book selection or her delivery of a critique but, rather, her teacher’s rigid ideas of what a book report ought to be.
One of my challenges when I was editing a kid-written publication for the Denver Post was convincing the kids that they should write their own honest conclusions, not what they expected me to reward, because they’d learned in school that Pleasing Teacher was the goal of writing.
Which meant when they were reviewing a book — we got hoards of new books from publishers — they felt they needed to find a “message.” Maybe the Hunger Games contains a message, but Captain Underpants does not.
This alleged requirement for messages is why so many award-winning children’s books are such preachy crap.
What is Kyle Bravo’s message? Explain your answer in a way that will rob the cartoon of all wit and humor.
Freddy’s gone, but thank god we’ve got more Abigail Beechers today!
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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