This one's for the Greek mythology girlies, all grown up

I decided that it would be a nice summer read to finally get around to that Emily Wilson translation of Homer’s The Odyssey that came out a couple of years ago, and borrowed it from my mom. I began reading it on the beach (don’t worry, I was there with an expert in beach) (it was my mom; my mom does have a real job but she is also an expert in beach), which was the correct place to begin reading it. Tragically I read the rest of it, like, at home, because it’s dangerous for me to beach too often.

Anyway, I read the Robert Fagles translation in high school, and also watched the 1997 TV miniseries version and the 1995 episode of Wishbone back in the ‘90s when I was wee, so I was reasonably familiar with the story. Images of key plot points like Odysseus (the human or the dog) shooting his bow through twelve battle-axes are burned deep into my brain.

Wilson’s translation is much less goofy than ‘90s TV, fortunately, but also easier to read than the older translations I’ve peeked at (I remember having not too much trouble with Fagles but it’s definitely a little pompous-sounding). Even with the meandering, flashback-ridden structure of ancient Greek epics, it flows along briskly and strongly. It feels action-packed even though it’s like 50% people crying and 50% people telling stories at dinner and there’s only a 10% left over for real action because there’s a good deal of overlap where people are both crying and telling stories at dinner simultaneously. Morality consists almost entirely of sucking up to the gods with a side of host/guest customs; outside of that, murder, intrigue, lying, and trickery are the order of the day. Dual-classing as a rogue/fighter is overpowered in Pathfinder 2e and also in this poem.

One of the best things about this particular edition is that it’s robustly contextualized–the text of the poem itself starts about a hundred pages into the book, preceded by a lengthy and fascinating 80-page introduction, a nerdily delightful ten-page translator’s note, and several maps. The back matter features a pronunciation guide, which was also fun, but the front matter was really key in understanding what to expect and why to expect it, and generally setting me up for success as a reader.

I’m also really pleased to find that Wilson has a translation of The Iliad coming out in September, so if anybody needs me in the last week of that month I will most likely be sitting somewhere atmospheric with my mind in ancient Greece!

How to do stuff with plants

The brief late-spring flush of glory that was “my spiderwort and day lilies actually blooming” has passed and I have instead lately been going around town enviously eyeing everyone else’s day lilies that are still somehow in full bloom (I’m sure the “somehow” is “their soil is less depleted than mine”). After a tragic weed-whacking incident with the Virginia creeper I’d established by the garden shed (it’s not dead, it’s just not creeping again yet), I decided it was time to get more serious about learning what the hell to do to prep the garden for fall and try to de-upfuck as much as I could with what’s left of the summer. Some of this involved having Dad and Melissa come down from Maine to help me figure out a lawn-mowing solution and give some expert (or at least actually-experienced-hobbyist) advice on what to move around and how to maintain stuff, which resulted in me becoming the proud owner of a shiny new battery-operated string trimmer (the gas mower got picked up yesterday. So long, enormous fussy machine that’s nearly a quarter of the size of the lawn anyway!). I also decided to read An Actual Book that wasn’t just a plant directory, so, on the recommendation of a website with a bunch of gardening articles that looked decent (thanks, gardendesign.com!) I requested a library copy of Daryl Beyers’ The New Gardener’s Handbook: Grow a Beautiful & Bountiful Garden. It’s not a native planting guide, which is fine, although it does contain a decent amount of advice on the benefits of native planting. Some of this stuff is clearly way out of my league for right now, either in terms of skill or in terms of the space involved (I don’t have anywhere indoors to keep seed trays, unless I like, set up shop in the creepy basement or something?), but it also contains a lot of key Gardening for Dummies information that I really needed, like diagrams of how to dig up a plant and move it somewhere else, and an explainer on what the whole deal is with mulch. It is obviously too soon to say how successful I will be at applying this information, and how it will pan out when I do, but I feel much more prepared to take on this weekend’s gardening tasks and maybe even ones further out.

Dreams, drugs, and demons

Several years ago at Readercon I picked up a copy of Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, which, like many Readercon purchases, has sat on my shelf for quite a while. This Readercon, I attended a talk by Downum called “Ask a Necromancer,” which was mainly about all the fun and possibly-useful-to-writers stuff that she’s learned since her recent career change to mortician and embalmer. It was a fun talk and reminded me that I still had this book sitting around.

Despite the YA X-of-Y-and-Z structure of the title, this is not a YA book! In tone and subject it is definitely a book for adults, albeit a rather short one. It’s got too much drugs and sex and art galleries to be a YA book. The main character, Liz, is actually asexual, but this seems to mostly mean that she spends most of her time moping over her best friend, whereas everybody else spends most of their time moping over their romantic partners, and Liz’ boyfriend splits his time between moping over Liz and moping over somebody else’s girlfriend.

I’ll admit I didn’t like this book quite as much as I wanted to. The elaborate language just felt overwritten instead of evocative of the various wonders and horrors plaguing our dramatis personae. The blurb copy said it was supposed to be Lovecraftian but it didn’t feel Lovecraftian, it just felt… starving-artist-chic, basically. Every character has that sort of hapless quietist vibe that is why I don’t read a lot of modern literary fiction, where everybody has a PhD and everybody has read every book ever written and nobody spends any time reading or writing or doing any kind of work during the course of the story. The characters spend enough time being put physically through the wringer–continually ending up wet, underdressed, injured, sleepless, and/or drunk in the bitter midwinter in Vancouver–that they have no energy left to protag and it starts to push against my suspension of disbelief that Blake is the only one in a coma. It’s hard for me to pin down precisely what didn’t work for me–I’ve enjoyed plenty of books where the characters are pretty quiet and all the “action” is like, talking and feeling, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of books where the story takes place in dreams or otherwise in people’s minds or some other inscrutable other dimension. I don’t know if it’s because enough of the story is about GUNS and DRUGS and ATTEMPTED MURDER and MONSTERS FROM REALMS BEYOND that the poor little meow meow wet sock persona of basically everybody just didn’t do enough to carry it. Idunno, I liked a lot of the kinds of stuff in it but somehow this book just never quite got around to gelling, for me. (Maybe the fact that I don’t like books about quiet do-nothing academics overrode a lot of it. All the PhD’s I know–and I know a lot, because I live in the most overeducated metro area in the U.S.–both had to do a shit-ton of work in grad school/their PhD programs *and* manage to do, like, socialist organizing and shit.) I feel bad criticizing this book in such a vague way because frankly the things I don’t like about it also seem like failure modes I would fall into in my own writing if I ever got around to finishing something, which I have not, and Downum at least finished a book and got it published. But there were definitely a few moments where I had the feeling of “this reads like something I would write” and not in my halfway decent nonfiction writing way, either.

Overall it was basically a fine beach read, but it felt like it ought to have been the type thing I’d be absolutely captivated by, so that’s awkward.

Do I dare to read a Modernist?

Help, how do I review poetry? I’m not nearly enough of a poetry person to do this.

I’m proud of myself that I actually read a poetry despite not even being ill! Usually I only read poetry when I am sick and putting myself in full invalid mode, with tea and moping and everything. But last weekend I had the impulse to move my college copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems from the TBR/incomplete shelf to the top shelf of the read nonfiction bookcase where I squirrel away poetry and mythology and childhood favorites. I’m pretty sure it was just so it would stop sitting on the TBR shelf haunting me, but giving it away felt like losing. I haven’t historically done well with the modernists, and I’ve admitted defeat and given away enough other modernist lit and poetry (Wallace Stevens whumped my ass and there is no use pretending he didn’t), but I vaguely remembered almost sort of liking Eliot enough, and he has enough of a reputation, that I simply wasn’t willing to admit defeat again. It’s such a small book. The poems in it are so important that some of their lines have moved into popular culture. I can handle The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock again, can’t I?

Anyway, one thing I’ve sort of come to terms with is that poetry isn’t necessarily for understanding the same way prose is for understanding; it’s more like music, in that it’s for rolling around in. With that in hand, I think I was able to get more out of it this time around than I did when I was desperately trying to Get It. A lot of the poems included here are bleak and plaintive, which makes sense because some of it is basically World War One poetry, and I do have a soft spot for World War One poetry. The rest of it is just sort of plaintively British, and I enjoy a certain amount of plaintive Britishness.

Also, the line about “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” hits a lot harder now that I’m a weird old adult and own a coffee spoon. Measuring out your life in free French Vanilla-flavored Keurig pods at the office doesn’t have the same ring to it, although someone talented enough probably could write a poem about my 20s with it.