The Odyssey final

The Odyssey is a classic tale of journey and redemption. It was one that set the bar for adventure stories and inspired many future authors. This is a well known fact, but why am I here thinking that it set the bar so low? In my opinion, the Odyssey would get horrifically slammed if it released today, but why do I think that way?

Let’s first begin with the characters. This is where I find the book to be most disinteresting.
Telemachus is one of the first characters we are introduced to and he is by far the most interesting. He laments the fact that he pales in comparison to his father and lacks the strength or conviction to kick the suitors out. He must soon become the “man of the house” and take charge of his inheritance, something he fears he cannot do. This could have been made into an interesting plot line where he must become the man he needs to be and find some strength within himself. Possibly dealing with feelings of inadequacy and suffering some loss along his journey, and in the end he could learn to endure the hardest of times through grit and a merry demeanor. He could not only be an interesting character that way, but he could also speak to the hardships of men today and show that everyone has the capacity to overcome their insecurities. He could be an icon of strength, keeping a pure smile in hardship and dealing with his issues proactively rather. Instead, we got a journey and a proclamation of “you’re a man now” that had about the same impact as the seaweed mustache “now that we’re men” scene from the Spongebob movie.
Odysseus is not much better. He has no bad qualities to speak of and is always the best at everything. Essentially a textbook “Mary Sue” character. He is never matched in strength, cunning or intelligence unless the person he is contending with is literally a god’s son, sometimes even besting them, too. He always took the moral high ground and never did anything wrong. He is to amazing that Godesses want to get with him like this is some middle schooler’s fan fiction. Overall, an extremely boring character without quirks or flaws.
The antagonistic characters, such as Polyphemus, Eurymachus, Antinous, and Melanthius, are also rather bland. They all serve to embody all the bad characteristics of man and to be “evil and stuff”. None of them really showed any depth at all, rather, they were shallower than a roadside ditch. All of them only served to give us characters to hate and to paste Odysseus in a better light.

The pacing and structure of the book, while terrible, is not as glaringly awful as the characters are. Many times I found that new and important details of the plot were showing up randomly and then proceeded to break the pacing by explaining it. The scar on Odysseus’ leg is by far the worst example, introducing itself and requiring a page of backstory before returning to the event at hand. The drug “moly” is another example. It shows up out of the blue, gives some backstory, and turns out to be some wonder drug that Odysseus needs right now. Instead of, say, having an old man give it to him as a reward for some deed or having a crew member inexplicably find some on the ground and try to make a buck off of it in the mainland. It would still be incomprehensibly stupid to have some miracle substance solve all their problems, but it could have been handled far better. In addition to not establishing any important items or events beforehand, Chekhov's gun is not used at all. Chekhov’s gun states that if there is a rifle on the wall in act 1, it should go off in act 3. Essentially, do not introduce anything that is not meaningful to the story. Unfortunately, a vast majority of this book is exposition, talking about major events that took place or the achievements of people that just go on and on and on about stuff that is not conducive to the plot at all. The most annoying thing to me, however, was the SUBTLE FORESHADOWING in the book. By “SUBTLE FORESHADOWING”, I of course mean that it was not at all subtle. There were mentions of The Odyssey’s end by the first few books and as it went on, prophecies foretold of the ending and the narrator even outright tells you how the book ends at some points when he speaks of the arrows in the quiver after the competition. Overall, the book hinted at its ending very subtly https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RVAhW4ToLFI .

In conclusion, I was expecting a literary masterpiece out of The Odyssey, but I was extremely disappointed.

The Odyssey blog 3

The Odyssey has three important animal herders: Eumaeus, Melanthius, and Philoetius. Eumaeus the swineherd is a benevolent father figure to Telemachus and is loyal to Odysseus. He always offers the kindest hospitality to anyone he can and he says no unkind words of his friends and acquaintances. Melanthius the goatherd, on the other hand, is someone I would call a stain on humanity. He is rude and seems to enjoy feeling better than others. He offers no hospitality to guests of his master’s home. Philoetius the cowherd does not have a particularly big role in the story, but he is loyal to Odysseus and has an apparent distaste for the suitors. Because of their loyalty and good hospitality, Eumaeus and Philoetius will go on and live happy lives. I would assume that they would be held in a high regard by Odysseus due to their unwavering loyalty, possibly earning a reward not only from their master, but also from the gods due to their graciousness and faithfulness. Melanthius will likely meet some terrible fate. His horrible hospitality and awful demeanor have probably earned him a special place in Hades. I cannot see any good ending for the goatherd unless he repents and gains some degree of good character, which is unfortunately far less common in Greek myths than someone getting their comeuppance, usually through death.

IHSS HMNS visit

We went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to view an exhibit on tribal life in the Amazon rainforest. It was definitely an interesting experience, as I knew next to nothing about it. I was extremely tired during the exhibit, so I had not retained much, but what I did remember was extremely interesting. It was mainly interesting to see an artistic style so very different from our own.
Here are some of the artifacts I saw:

 We had talked quite a bit about their diet, which consisted of mostly normal things for hunter-gatherer societies, but what I found interesting was they they were able to prepare a poisonous relative of the yucca so that it would be safe for consumption. These kinds of things always interest me because I have no idea how they managed to find out precisely what made it poisonous and devise a strategy to remove the toxin. It is similar to the awe I feel whenever edible pufferfish is mentioned because you really have to wonder how they had enough know-how to do this without an intimate knowledge of toxicology and chemistry.

Shrunken heads, while a staple in pop culture when speaking of uncontacted tribes, is actually extremely rare, only being practiced in about four to five tribes out of many hundreds. These tribes have also not practiced the collection and creation of shrunken heads for a long time, cutting back on it significantly after contact with Europe. The practice is almost entirely dead as of today. These tribes might have gotten the heads through battles or by murder. There were tales of some tribesmen a long time ago being attacked and beheaded for this practice. The process consists of removal of the skull and various organs in the head, including salivary glands and tonsils. The process continued with the removal of muscle and fat tissue and ending with a long soak in a solution. The reason they did this was because a person’s spirit and power was believed to be in his head and this power would help a warrior in battle. A warrior with two shrunken heads was considered nigh invincible.

This was a strange thing to focus on in the exhibit, but I was intrigued by the exhibit’s italicization on the tribe’s names. Mainly, I found their use of umlauts rather strange. An umlaut increases stress on a vowel and is indicated by two dots above a letter. This accent mark is common in many Germanic languages that aren't English and Uralic languages that use the Latin alphabet like Finnish or Hungarian. It is used to indicate a different, more stressed pronunciation from another vowel form. For instance, the “a” in “hat” is the same letter as the “a” in “almost” in English, but with proper use of umlauts, “hat” becomes “hät”. An umlaut is usually seen over an a, o, or u (an umlauted u in Finnish is replaced with a standard y, the sound for y in English is indicated by a j in Finnish). The exhibit had the pronunciations for the tribes’ names in standard form, with some accent marks, but their use of umlauts was strange, as when the tribes’ names were stated, there was not a need for the umlaut in the position as the vowels with umlauts were the standard forms of the vowel.

The Odyssey blog 2

On his journey, Telemachus received hospitality from Menelaus, the red haired King. His hospitality was nothing short of grand. They were bathed, clothed and given a grand feast by the king, despite the fact that there was a wedding party beforehand. The king obviously wasted no time in providing the best for his guests, even when short on supplies. If we use Menelaus’ hospitality for comparison, the hospitality of Nausicaa and Alcinous completely blew Menelaus out of the water. Odysseus was bathed clothed, given multiple feasts, had a divine bard sing at his meals, was given quarters, an opportunity to witness a sports tournament and the Phaeacian king even offered his daughter’s hand in marriage. Menelaus was extremely kind, he allowed the travelers to eat and stay at his home despite not knowing who they were, but  Nausicaa and Alcinous, having more power than Menelaus, had more to offer.

The Odyssey 1

The first sentence already makes it extremely obvious what the book will discuss. “The cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.” immediately allows the reader, provided that they are somewhat well versed in Greek mythology, to grasp who the “cunning hero” is. Odysseus, after “plundering Troy’s sacred heights”, was taken off course multiple times. First, he landed on the island of the cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon’s son, and after some trickery and planning, made it off the island and left behind a very angry cyclops. Poseidon, in an act of revenge, caused Odysseus’ ship to once again land far away from Ithaca. Next, when the proem speaks about the fact that his men didn’t make it back, it is referring to the men who were eaten or turned into swine that Odysseus could not help. The longer that it goes on, the more it is apparent that it speaks of Odysseus. Also the title is the “Odyssey” so there’s that piece of evidence, too.

Frederick Douglass final

Frederick Douglass, upon becoming a free, married man, decided to heed warnings about America from his peers and left to Ireland. While there, he noticed that he was never judged as a person, he felt like an individual, like a human. This is no different from how it is now in Europe. With the exception of some extreme racists, personal character and appearance are not as analyzed or characterized as they are in the states. At least with my experience, Europe has allowed people to be themselves and the people there don’t seem to look through a social lens. Here, assumptions and preemptive personality checks are rather common. One thing always seems to lead to another, for example something that has annoyed me a lot would be this chain of assumptions: long hair means he’s effeminate which means he is submissive and therefore he likes other men. Despite the fact all of this chain is untrue bar the physical trait exhibited, this train of thought through various untruths and miniscule amounts of correlation is unfortunately more common than expected. My experience in Europe has been quite the opposite, allowing me to not be judged and to be simply a unique individual.

Frederick Douglass 3

If a person was to not be educated in any way for most of their life, there would be many ways to infringe upon their freedoms. They would be more gullible, more accepting and more reactionary. Anything one would do to a truly uneducated person could become justified to them. They haven’t had the opportunity to create a worldview for themselves, everything that could be done to them would seem normal. It is important to educate people, especially about how other’s live, so there wouldn’t be a way to justify wrongdoing. The masters reaped many benefits due to this. It likely reduced riots and probably assisted the slaveowners in teaching them the insulting idea that they were supposed to be slaves.