While the painting is currently identified in the Museum as “The Birth of Venus” (based on the identification by the man who was the spy), the argument is that it is actually the marriage of Poseidon (left) and Amphitrite (center). And the symbolic significance of depicting this:
“The marriage and journey of Neptune and Amphitrite across the sea,” writes art historian Troy Thomas, “symbolize the transition from this life to the next.” Poussin painted a celebration of marriage that also expresses, he continues, the “fragility of human existence and, with death, immortality and eternal joy.”
New Frescoes have been unearthed in Pompeii that are gorgeous and well-preserved. They depict myths centering around the Trojan War. You can read about them in the NYTimes and The Guardian (each with different photos. I liked this observation shared in The Guardian:
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, said the mythological figures had the explicit function of entertaining guests and providing talking points during feasts.
“The mythological couples provided ideas for conversations about the past, and life, only seemingly of a merely romantic nature,” he said. “In reality, they refer to the relationship between the individual and fate: Cassandra who can see the future but no one believes her, Apollo who sides with the Trojans against the Greek invaders, but being a god, cannot ensure victory, Helen and Paris who, despite their politically incorrect love affair, are the cause of the war, or perhaps merely a pretext.”
He added: “People would meet to dine after sunset; the flickering light of the lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.”
Ooh… a new one for my reading list. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter retold with Demeter as the head of an agri-NGO, Hades as the CEO of a Pharma company, Persephone as a listless teen lured to his island, and the pomegranate seeds the Pharma company’s top opioid. And a great cover:
There is a great book review in the NYTimes. I love the description of the Hades character when he first meets the Persephone character:
In a span of minutes the older man displays a United Nations’ worth of flags, all of them red.
I was grading a bunch of quizzes on Ovid’s telling of the Icarus and Daedalus myth. One line that came up often in the discussion portion was puer Icarus… ignarus sua se tractare pericla “The boy Icarus, naively handling his own doom…” Just as I finished, “Superman” by Five for Fighting came on:
The opening lyrics just resonated with Icarus:
I can’t stand to fly I’m not that naive
I could see the spirit of Icarus singing this lament. As the song went on, the singer declares
I wish that I could cry Fall upon my knees Find a way to lie ‘Bout a home I’ll never see
Poor Icarus (and his father) were in exile, trying to escape back home when they tried their luck to the fatal (to Icarus) wings. Icarus had, like Superman, been too young to remember his homeland and would never get to return to it. The lament fits Icarus well.
I, of course, can’t leave Icarus without pointing out Bruegel’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus based on Ovid’s account. See if you have spot Icarus.
You can just see his legs poking out of the water below the ship in the bottom right corner. In Ovid, all the figures in this painting were entranced by Icarus’ flight and fall, wondering if he were a god (but of course, he’s “only a man in a silly” pair of wax-adhered wings). In Bruegel, they couldn’t care less. As W.H. Auden captured it in Musee des Beaux Arts:
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The NYTimes occasionally posts thematic books-to-read lists. This time it was YA Greek myth retellings. This is only adding to my reading list. The fifth one on the list, Threads that bind, I started but got side-tracked with other readings. I should get back to it. I enjoyed it as far as I got.
Some things on my mind have me thinking about authorial voice. So I’m going to do a few posts on various related topics. Authorial intent vs. reader response will come up later this week, but today I want to talk about authorial voice vs. a character’s voice.
Often times when I am teaching, this distinction is one that students struggle with. I think of the character Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax. I actually used to have a pair of cats named Tecmessa and Ajax.
Tecmessa (Grey and White Tabby) and Ajax (Black Cat)
When I read it with students, they often think the play is sexist because of how Ajax treats Tecmessa (a sort of “shut up, woman” attitude). But I encourage them to note that there is a difference between a character’s voice and an author’s voice. To look beyond that one voice to see how she fits in the play as a whole. Ajax himself is dead halfway through the play, due to his rigid attitudes towards relationships and inability to adapt. Meanwhile, the definition of nobility Tecmessa asserted to Ajax (recognizing common humanity and the responsibilities we have to one another in community) is where Odysseus and Teucer (the two main positive characters) end up at the end of the play. Just because Ajax is sexist doesn’t make the play necessarily sexist. The authorial attitude towards Tecmessa is different than a single character.
This came to mind as I was reading reviews of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Confession: I haven’t seen it yet. School is so crazy, I’m probably going to wait until spring break to resubscribe to Netflix and binge the dickens out of it. And the reviews don’t leave me in a hurry to watch it. I’ve already noted the discussions of Aang’s character being flattened out. The treatment of Sokka also seems flatter. Specifically, his character arc with his growth in his attitude towards women and traditional gender roles has been eliminated. As The Mary Sue notes in comparison to the Netflix One Piece live action treatment,
Taz Skylar’s Sanji was able to embrace the less-savory aspects of his character, so why was the choice to make Ian Ousley’s Sokka less sexist so prominent?Why introduce a character to develop if there is no character to develop? Much like Sanji, Sokka’s attitude toward women is a key trait that is necessary to include, in order to show growth. If the One Piece writers could navigate how to adjust Sanji to fit their series while reflecting his in-anime character, surely those writing Avatar: The Last Airbender could have done the same with Sokka.
“I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was. I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”
🤦🏻♀️ Having a sexist character isn’t iffy -it’s how the world around the character reacts that makes it iffy or not. And Sokka’s sexism was (as I recall) shown to be in error and occasions for learning. The Mary Sue provides good specific examples and how they are handled. And note how it relates the larger issues of the social norms of the Water Tribe (that were challenged and changed in later books) as well as the war trauma Sokka had suffered as a young boy. And if you want to fight sexism, eliminating it from your narrative doesn’t accomplish anything. Including it in a character who grows from it might lead readers to see themselves and grow along with the character.
I’ll highlight how it is handled in the opening episode, as Rambler Kai notes and provides the video for on Twitter:
ironic as it is, you IMMEDIATELY make Sokka a less interesting character to watch by stripping away the sexism, its an intentional character flaw that the show acknowledges
I’m sad to think about the character as made less interesting and just more flat, but also see that mistake I’ve often seen in my students – mistaking a character’s voice for the authorial voice. I’ll repeat what I said about: watch how the world around the character reacts when weighing how the author might be leading you to respond to that character’s point of view.
Shortly before the Pandemic, Madeline Miller announced her Circe book was going to be made into a HBO-Max series. Then of course the world took a big pause and that seems to have been the death knell for the series. Given (HBO-)Max’s tendency to scrap even completed movies, it is perhaps unsurprising. But it is sad. While I love the middle grade and young adult retakes on myth, Miller’s books are adult retellings (and excellent). And given how well HBO handled Game of Thrones, I was excited to see what they did with Circe. And I hold out hope that someone will adapt it someday, even if Max has decided to pass on it.
8 short episodes later, we’ve reached the end of the line for the first season of Percy Jackson on Disney+. While I loved it, both how it faithfully rendered the books but also evolved them in great ways, I do agree with El Kuiper on The Mary Sue that it demonstrates how limiting current streaming-season lengths are:
Disney+’s Percy Jackson series boasts a fantastic cast, impressive special effects, and an undeniably gripping emotional narrative. As a long-time fan of Riordan’s books, this series has been a dream come true.
And yet, the finale made it abundantly clear that Percy Jackson, like so many of its peers, has been restricted by its meager episode count. Eight episodes of varying length may seem like a lot to tell this story, but as is so succinctly pointed out in the Percy Jackson making-of documentary that is now available on Disney+, the narrative takes this heroic trio from one end of the U.S. to the other, including a trip down to the Underworld and a brief sojourn to the top of the Empire State building. There is a lot of ground to cover.
Let’s start with the confusing as that’s how the episode opened. Apparently the pearls don’t just return them to the Pacific Ocean off Los Angeles (where they’d entered the Underworld), but to the Atlantic off Montauk beach, where Percy and his mother had stayed in a cabin in the opening episode. They return to the cabin where they heard all flights are grounded. This is a big change from the books, where Percy & Co. actually dare to take a flight home from LA. I guess the audience is supposed to get it from recognizing the cabin from the first episode, but it took me (an adult, observant viewer) quite a bit of time to get it. At first, I just thought they’d glossed over the flights home. I was confused. Then it clicked when later in the episode when he returned to the cabin to look for his mother. But if they were going to do this to help with the compacting of the series, some verbal utterings by the heroes would have helped. Like having Percy say, when he spotted the cabin, “Hey, that’s the cabin Mom and I stayed at. We’re back on Montauk/in NY.” He does hear a mysterious whispering, seemingly from his mother, that draws him to the cabin and calls for her when he enters, but really, it was just confusing at the time.
The good: I really like how they handled Luke. Unlike in the book (where his anger is in part directed at Percy and he tries to kill him outright), he tries to recruit him to Kronos’ side. He declares his friendship. Thus the downplaying of the shoe-betrayal throughout the episodes makes more sense. And I like the more sympathetic Luke. Annabeth observes it all with her invisibility cap and when she reveals herself, we see Luke’s love for her (even if as a sister) which better sets up the much, much later (last book) turning to her as a last resort of fleeing Kronos and the gods.
Both Percy and Annabeth end up leaving camp early (which is weird – and no bead ceremony) and Grover heads off on his searcher’s quest, indicating he is off to the seas. Which brings us to the bad: the stupid plug for Walt Disney World. The series has decided to make the smartest human character in the book horribly naive about the world at large and especially pop-culture. Annabeth tells Percy that her father is taking her to Walt Disney World, which she says sounds like Water World only less determined to kill you. Percy laughs and Annabeth asks if she missed something and Percy tells her to just go be a kid, leaving me thinking “Thanks for the advertisement, Disney Channel.”
A few other notes:
The scenes of Percy reunited with his mom were great. The blue pancakes with blueberries were fun, as was Sally telling Percy not to refer to Kronos as granddad. But that brings us back to Stinky Gabe – or rather doesn’t in the episode. Gabe is saved for a mid-credits scene.
I get why they down play this subplot. Having Sally marry a man she despises to help Percy was always a bit uncomfortable. Having her suffer domestic violence was also uncomfortable, especially in a middle grade fiction book. Having her not only kill Gabe in the book, but also sell his petrified corpse as a statue to fund her return to school had its discomforts.
But in the Disney+ series, she is a woman who not only doesn’t need saving, but doesn’t even need to save herself. She is never the victim of Gabe. His obnoxious, but she can quickly put him in his place. I had wondered when they first changed their relationship what they’d do with the Medusa-head killing of him, but as the episode drew to a close, I felt like he didn’t even exist, like an oversight. Until the mid-credits scene, when Gabe kills himself by opening mail addressed to Percy (the Medusa head, returned to sender by the gods). No explanation of what’s done with his petrified corpse.
But this is problematic for the prophecy Percy got. He’s supposed to “fail to save what matters most in the end,” because he recognizes that Sally needs to make the choice to save herself. But there’s no saving of Sally because she doesn’t need to be saved. So what does that mean for the prophecy (explored more here at the Mary Sue)?
The other thing that doesn’t get any play is the great prophecy. Unlike the book, Percy & Co. missed the deadline for getting the bolt back to Zeus. This sets up a very different scene on Mt. Olympus and gives Poseidon an even better chance to play the good god protecting him (by surrendering to Zeus to end a war that was avoided in the books when they make it back by the deadline). But without the great prophecy mentioned, we lack the sense of why Zeus might want to kill a “forbidden child” of the Big Three.
I’ve got to pause here for a shout out. Lance Reddick was fabulous as Zeus. He brought great auctoritas to the role, a perfect King of the Gods (more than the character in the book, where Zeus at times has a bit of a buffoonish aspect). It’s heartbreaking that we won’t get to see more of this excellent actor’s work after his passing this past March. The whole episode is dedicated to his memory.💔
Back to the Great Prophecy and “Forbidden Children” of the Big Three: Hades, when we met him in the previous episode, had zero resentment over Percy being a forbidden child and both Zeus and Poseidon breaking their oaths after trying to kill his own already existing children (Bianca and Nico) and killing their beloved mother in the attempt. Hades even offers Percy sanctuary when he learns Kronos is back and decides to try and keep the master bolt.
The only hint of the Great Prophecy is when Kronos, in Percy’s final dream, says, “You are the key to my rise.” Sally asks Percy about his dream, but he changes the subject and then it’s just gone. They repressed that foreshadowing for the future books/episodes.
I certainly hope that we get more seasons/episodes of the other books. Overall, despite the compacting of material, it was very well done. But season 2 is not yet confirmed (that I’ve seen).
Ramblings 
