by beatriceotto | Jun 21, 2018 | a quote to note
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene’s requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their petty place, even gorgeous goddesses, allowing the god of gods to just hang out on Olympus undisturbed. ‘Child, I am God, Please do...
by beatriceotto | Jun 21, 2018 | a quote to note
‘Leadership’ litters newspapers and networks such as LinkedIn, with people claiming to embody it, or vaunting the leadership of others. It’s perhaps one of the most over-hyped terms of our time, and rarely less convincingly than when combined with...
by beatriceotto | Jun 8, 2018 | poetry mojo, readers & reading
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a hard core of ‘Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers’. I don’t know if I qualify, since the UAGR could refer only to...
by beatriceotto | Jun 11, 2017 | put in a good word
Normally referring to the moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery, perhaps understanding the real situation for the first time. I liked Nicolson’s use of it in describing Keats’ discovery of Homer: ‘Keats had read and stared in...
by beatriceotto | May 19, 2017 | places & spaces, poetry mojo
What makes a city great? What makes a civilization? How about a bright, quiet, dazzling new building in the heart of a town, housing 30,000 volumes of poetry? A place where you can step off the street into poetry through a single glass door. Before going to Chicago,...
by beatriceotto | Apr 4, 2017 | triologisms
Odysseus grappled with Poseidon’s fury and his storm-driven seas. Its unrelenting onslaught is one of the most terrifying aspects Homer conveyed graphically. ‘A storm-driven sea appears to acquire a vitality and viciousness, a desire to do damage, which...
by beatriceotto | Apr 4, 2017 | triologisms
The prelude to the monstrous-destructive obstacles Odysseus has to overcome, or bypass, to reach home. ‘After the monstrous-beautiful Sirens, Odysseus comes to the limb-consuming Scylla and her friend the body-gulping Charybdis. Scylla is a six-headed,...
by beatriceotto | Apr 4, 2017 | triologisms
I appreciated Nicolson’s summing up the twin terrors as two aspects of the female threat. ‘After the monstrous-beautiful Sirens, Odysseus comes to the limb-consuming Scylla and her friend the body-gulping Charybdis. Scylla is a six-headed, rock-bound,...
by beatriceotto | Apr 4, 2017 | triologisms
Nicolson’s writing helped cure me of any ‘flat-footed view’ I may have had of the Bronze Age, spinning its warriors from text-book two-dimensionality to full-blooded 3-D. ‘It is what comes next that re-orientates any flat-footed view of Bronze...
