Nolan’s Odyssey

Have I seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ? No, not yet, though I expect that I’ll end up seeing it. But I’m in no rush.

So much of what I’ve seen of  the movie is a matter of special effects and spectacle. But almost everything of the supernatural wonderland of Odysseus’s wanderings — monsters and goddesses and ghosts, killers and seducers and the war dead — is present in the poem only in a long night of storytelling (books nine through twelve), as Odysseus performs for his Phaeacian hosts in his role as a man of constant sorrow. Monsters and goddesses and ghosts are, really, the least typical elements in the poem.

The Odyssey is much more about, in a phrase that I’ll borrow out of context from the poet Kenneth Koch, “the pleasures of peace”: storytelling, hospitality, food and drink, baths, a family reunion, lovemaking, and taking what Homer calls “the gift of sleep” in one‘s own bed. Henry Fielding aptly called the Odyssey “that eating poem,” and the eating poem is barely underway before Telemachus welcomes the incognito Athena into his oikos with food and wine.

Food and wine and the forms of hospitality: those are the poem’s real special effects. So I can wait.

See also “My dad is coming home.”

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All OCA Odyssey posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

“You can’t cancel three times. You can’t cancel three times. You can’t cancel three times.”

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The Stagg Street Shadow

[493 Stagg Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

It’s industrial Brooklyn. The tax records say 501, but the door (of sorts) says 493. Who knows what it’s all about? The Stagg Street Shadow knows.

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Rafael Musa, is relatively easy. Also delightful: clever, tricky, oblique, nearly factoid-free.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, three letters, “Woman in Arabian Nights.” Somehow this kind of clue seems to sport an ID tag.

23-D, eleven letters, “Satisfies.” I would like to know how far back the answer goes. Now I do.

26-D, eight letters, “‘Steep, strain, serve’ product.” My first thought was LOOSETEA.

27-A, eight letters, “Dressing option.” Yes, please.

35-D, three letters, “Sound from a shaker.” For a moment I thought of the doo-wop syllable SHA.

46-A, six letters, “Introductory explanation.” I know the answer in a different way, and I was never happy about it.

51-A, four letters, “Reporter to take among the earliest flash photos (1880s).” Having read his writing and looked at his photographs, I don’t mind this factoid.

54-A, ten letters, “Child’s catchphrase.” Brilliant. A more typical answer might be AMNOT or ARETOO.

59-A, ten letters, “Having caught bugs.” SICKINBED doesn’t fit. SICKASADOG does but doesn’t.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, seven letters, “Specimen, for example.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Proustian Zippy

[“Catty Remarks.” Zippy, July 17, 2026.]

In today’s strip, Zippy and Zerbina attempt to refresh their marital memories. Clam juice = madeleine.

Venn reading
All OCA Proust posts : Proust and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A man of common sense

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Cheerful, kindhearted, gloriously eccentric (he carries around an enormous kite on which he is writing, or attempting to write, a “Memorial,” its words going up into the sky): Mr Dick must be a distant relative of Tristam Shandy’s my uncle Toby.

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[As in Laurence Sterne’s novel, it’s “my uncle Toby,” not “uncle Toby.”]

A sidewalk compliment

“Beautiful couple! Beautiful couple!”

For some reason we hear this kind of thing only when we’re walking in a city. Thank you, fellow pedestrian.

Picturing

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

I love how David’s development into a novelist is something that he says so little about. “I pictured to myself” is an early sign of an imagination at play. By chapter forty-six, David is, in the words of another character, “beginning to be famous,” yet he’s said hardly anything about his writing. In chapter forty-eight, he tells us that “It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions.”

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Self-Erasure

From Geo-B: Self-Erasure.

That’s gotta hurt.

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T and X

A sentence from The Guardian :

The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X.

I shudder to think what kind of performance will be required of these, uh, service members. Moving the words “in a video posted to X” to the front of the sentence makes for a less startling though still loony-tunes statement. Perhaps someone at The Guardian slipped in a deliberate touch of the loony.

As The Guardian notes, “[Pete} Hegseth’s announcement did not address the more than 231,000 women who serve as active duty service members in the US military.”

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[This post is no. 135 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. The New York Times reports that women in the military will also be tested.]