Another Opening, Another Show

You would think that I had stopped this blog for good in disgust and despair if you had read my last entry.  But never think to count a confirmed narcissist out of the game.  I like writing out my thoughts, and what is more reading them over from time to time.  If I may sink more deeply into the squalor of self revelation, I will confess to keeping a file box next to my desk in which I have stored in the calendar order of their publication all my published papers, and looming somewhat adjacent and above this box is a shelf with that various books I have written plus copies of the translations into foreign tongue (one being Korean, of all things, with beautiful illustrations).  Vanity knows no limits.  And in this season where the leaf of inspiration lies sere on the brittle branch (my, that was rather elegant if I do say so!), one needs recourse to old papers and old thoughts, since new ones are not exactly popping up like spring flowers.  For several years now I have imagined trying yet again to compose a successful lecture course on Homer's Odyssey, and nothing develops.  I am, however, about to offer eight lectures (1 hr 20 min) every Thursday starting January.  This is for the senior citizens down here, learning lite, we might call it, no prerequisites, no assignments, no grades, no attendance takers, subjects from dense to frivolous, mostly discussions sometimes lectures from the more pompous or pretentious (guess where that puts me!)  So far I've done one on Greek tragedy, another on the Iliad.  The enrollees as you might have imagined are predominately women.  The American male (at least the heterosexuals, in my experience) have a hard time thinking about human relations which certainly is the foundation of tragic drama, and they don't necessarily like to return again and again to things that are unpleasant, which in the case of the Iliad means confronting his own death over and over.  That is why science fiction and other terrestrial action pieces are so popular; men can have the simulacrum of destruction and mayhem without the attendant human agony or implications of human mortality that, let's say, one finds in Shakespearean drama.  In any case, (you see my teaching style--nattering on and on farther and farther off subject until a brisk "in any case" gets us back on track), I am very much looking forward to the Odyssey lectures.  So many things that resonate through the ages and all began with this text: a boy sets out to find his absent father, his mother beset by sex mad males who want to despoil her of her house and home and take over and get rid of the son, glimpses of the lives of the rich and famous (Menelaos and Helen, Arete and Alkinoos), a fantastic voyage with giants and other scary scenes, a glamorous witch keeping the hero in sexual bondage until the gods release him, a witty scene where the hero meets up with a glamorous girl and, since he is naked, he tries to hide his erection as he kneels in supplication before her, and on and on and on and finally tears, homecoming, dad and mom reunited, the aging lovers having a night of love in their bed guaranteed to get a rise out of the students who are more or less coevals