Secret Life of Books

We’re in another SLoB code red. Only months after Wuthering Heights smashed onto our screens, Christopher Nolan is here for the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon.

And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton - and the list goes on. Basically, if you’re an actor and NOT in this film, it’s like discovering you’re the only one in class not invited to a party.

If you’re feeling daunted by the scale and import of both this film and the source material - don’t worry. SLoB is here to help you. We’ve donned our scrubs once again. We’ve got our critical defibrillators, suction devices and valve masks and we’re going to deliver you to the cinema ready to take on Homer and Nolan’s Odyssey.

We’ve republished the episode we did early in SloB on the Odyssey with Mary Beard. In this episode, we’re going to look at how the Odyssey shaped English literature in a portmanteau episode that will encompass everyone from Shakespeare to Keats, Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood.

In coming episodes, we’re going to take deep dives into Tennyson’s Ulysses and review Nolan’s film. And then, as the dust settles, or the waters meet, we’re going to embark on arguably the greatest Odyssey re-write of all - James Joyce’s Ulysses - in a three part series that will take on each of the works in Joyce’s trilogy of Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses itself.

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To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist.
The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero?
Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye.
And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - not for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.

Further Reading:
Emily Wilson, trans, The Odyssey

Mary Beard books:
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013)
The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)

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It’s been called most influential document ever signed. And it’s been called tokenistic and compromising, a piece of writing written by a committee. The great political economist Jeremy Bentham called it “a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.”
The Declaration of Independence was drafted by the lawyer, philosopher and statesman Thomas Jefferson, and it made the United States of America an independent nation in 1776, throwing off British colonial rule. Its signing triggered waves of similar declarations around the world. By 1826 more than 20 similar declarations had issued forth from Europe, the Caribbean and Spanish America and hundreds of others would follow. It was not the first declaration of its kind at all, but it would become the most famous. This July, American independence turns 250, and it is under scrutiny all over the world as possibly the most complicated and contradictory exercise in nation-building in human history.
Join Sophie and Jonty for a deep dive into this landmark political document, which also became an instant literary classic.

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After the triumph of Prufrock and other Observations, TS Eliot almost steered the car into the ditch, poetically and personally. Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound - a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War - Eliot’s second collection of poems reveled in antisemitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wrote poems in French. Pretentious, moi?

In this episode, we show how just in the time - with the beret almost on his head - Eliot managed to cast it aside, regain control of the wheel, and steer the vehicle away from the boulevards of Paris into the waste land. As ever, our question is: how?

In the hyperbolic spirit of a Discovery channel documentary, we think it’s fair to say that The Waste Land, published in two magazines in1922, then by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press in 1923, changed the world FOREVER.

For readers at the time, Eliot captured the spiritual malaise of Europe after the first World War. Nobody could definitively explain the poem - although many had their theories - but it captured more than any realist novel the spirit of the age. It influenced many of the greatest books of the 20th Century, including The Great Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and many books of poetry. We ourselves are guilty of having written utter bollocks about this poem during our undergraduate years. In consequence of which, we tremble before our microphones for this week’s episode.

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T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is).
Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognize some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot’s lugubrious output. “April is the cruellest month,” “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” “do I dare eat a peach?”; “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” But thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets including WH Auden and Marianne Moore.
Today you’ll be hearing about Eliot’s penchant for amateur theatricals, Paris, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson; and his pivot from being a high-minded Philosophy PhD student at Harvard to a wanker-banker at Lloyds in London. Next week we’ll focus on his turbulent relationship with the unhappy and unstable Vivienne, his first wife, his complicated feelings about Victorian and Elizabethan literature, and his conversion to high Anglican Christianity, which caused his good pal Viriginia Woolf to announce, “Tom is dead to me.”
We claim whenever possible that all literary roads lead to the 1980s and Andrew Lloyd Webber. TS Eliot’s greatest poetic achievement is neither Prufrock nor The Waste Land, but Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the Cats! Songbook.
Genius as Mcavity the Mystery Cat and Rum-Tum Tugger are, TS Eliot’s immortality was truly sealed with the ubiquitous and appalling 80s soft rock ballad “Memory,” sung by Grizabella the once-beautiful feline who has fallen on hard times amid a load of oversized garbage bins. Memory is a mash-up of lines from Eliot’s early poems, and today we’ll find out exactly what it was that so attracted this young American to the burnt out ends of smoky days in early 20C London.


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