Underappreciated masterpiece. I read it so many times growing up. And each time, in the first chapter, I would be seized by the river I knew I was headed into. No other book so captivated me. It’s maybe why Nabokov said a book cannot be read, it can only be reread. I would dive in, be swallowed, and be swept along.
I hadn't considered John Ford, but that's a great thought. I'm one of those people who thinks the answer is Bob Dylan (who's really an extension of Whitman, so is it just Whitman, then?).
James Fenimore Cooper. The Leatherstocking Tales have the sweep and touch on enduring themes that would define American identity, plus he originated the spy and seafaring adventure novels in American letters.
If you're asking what I think you're asking, I don't know that I agree that Star Wars isn't about America. It's told within an American genre (the western) and it's about the resistance to tyranny and rule from afar that the American story is also about. It's America in a galaxy far, far away, and somehow, doing that imaginative transplant also seems deeply American to me, too. Like most people of taste and discernment, I don't really hold with anything other than Episodes IV, V, or VI as canonical (Paglia is more forgiving on that point than I am) but I suppose there's even a case for the prequels as another part of the American story (how things declined in the first place, and why what followed was necessary). It's kind of like a dramatization of the Declaration's grievances section, with the same Roman overtones, by way of Gibbon, that inflected the original authoring of that document. Paglia's argument is interesting, although briefer than I'd like to be, and it appears at the end of Glittering Images. She talks about Lucas as the figure who combines the storytelling chops with the visual and technological imagination to bring that story to life, which sounds about right to me, and very Homeric. And after all, the Iliad wasn't set in Greece, either.
If you’re picking a Hollywood director (which I think you should, since the 20th century was America’s century and cinema was the great art form of the 20th century) it has to be Kubrick. No one else is really even in the conversation. Can’t be Ford and Wayne as they only did westerns. I love Chaplin, but he somehow isn’t serious enough, same with Keaton. Coppola maybe comes closest but he’s just not as good as Kubrick. Hitchcock, while great, I don’t feel he has an essentially American outlook the way Kubrick does, he feels more English than Kubrick, like there’s almost too much Shakespeare in Hitchcock for him to really be the quintessential American artist. Even Kubrick’s non-American films still feel American to me. Like Barry Lyndon just is an American, and Spartacus is too.
I just looked it up and realized that Hitchcock actually is English (I always thought he was from New England, not sure why), which would explain why his films feel very English.
Apparently you can disagree with me, because none of the participants in the symposium came up with my answer!
"The Golden Age of Hollywood" is fine, although in this vein I would probably lean towards "the Great American Songbook." In either case, even a century on you have to have questions about their staying power. Your list of directors, though (and even more specifically your not rejecting Hitchcock and Chaplin for being English and Wilder for being an Austrian Jew—and relatedly, I suppose, Tocqueville for being French), gets at a certain autochthonous question (implicit in such choices as "Walt Whitman" and "Robert Frost") being complicated by America as nation of immigrants. Maybe it takes an Englishman to see it. (Maybe this is the argument for one Tocq over the line.)
And if I may reinterpret rejecting Hitchcock for not having "the necessary scale," the actual charge is not intending to make movies about the meaning of America, as the likes of Capra and Coppola certainly did. But did Homer intend to make art about the meaning of Archaic Greece? (Does "the meaning of Archaic Greece" even have any value as a phrase? Is thinking in terms of "the meaning of America" a sign that the worms have already hit your brain?)
We risk taking this too seriously(!), but I think the nationality question is indeed beside the point, yes, because we are talking about America, and in the case of the directors because they are so embedded within Hollywood. Whatever Homer, or Hitchcock, may have intended, also seems to me not to be a necessary condition: whatever Homer intended, he held a certain position, like Milton and Shakespeare.
Buddy you're in my country now, and we founded this place with and on taking things way too seriously
I think Milton held a certain position; Shakespeare at his best, like Homer—at least the Homer of the Iliad—is flying the negative capability plane until it runs out of gas and crash-landing wherever that happens (to push an image)
Oh see this is a theory I have had for some time and have never sufficiently refined, that there are Iliad people and Odyssey people (and despite my great interest in and affection for the Odyssey people of modernism I am the former), and, relatedly, that there are Genesis people and the rest of the Pentateuch people, and, finally, that the Odyssey people are the Genesis people &c
The ultimate answer has to be songbook or film. Both uniquely American forms.
Is a plausible root of American Homer-ocity Owen Wister’s the Virginian?
Such a good question, but I suspect nothing cam answer in a modern-day sense, because there’s too much of a cultural split. Westerns in the 50s and 60s? Everyone agreed on the same general canon. Various films and TV shows informing and inspiring each other as an oral tradition might?
I think this is a flawed comparison. One is about "an angry man" in war, and the other is about a man headed home to family and peace. All the epic conventions of warfare make "The Iliad" less accessible than the "Odyssey." Surely one need not have to choose between the two.
Will digital outlast print? Is that the bet? Call me old fashioned, but all the flashing visuals and cacophonous audio over-stimulus, are all sound and fury. Only print interfaces with a mind directly enough to provoke meaningful integration and reflection that can be repeatedly as often as the eyes dare to revisit the page. Hamlet is a play, but do most see the play, and have the opportunity to contemplate it deeply, as often as we revisit the words, so often well quoted, for the effect of depth it can give, in so much sundry and divergent writing? There is something in written weaving of all traditional and emergent writing on the page, that simply cannot be matched by the ephemeral dopamine hits provided by that which by intent, is sheer overwhelm.
The Founding Fathers are America's Homer. The beauty of the US constitution (or Common Sense, or the Federalist Papers) is different to the Iliad's beauty, but so is Don Quixote's or the Divine Comedy's or Lear's.
I think Mark Twain captured America’s spirit, story, and identity. My second thought was Stan Lee and other comic book writers since the superheroes of the comics became America’s own mythology. My other choice is George Lucas - let’s face it, more of the population can tell the story and quote it versus Huckleberry Finn.
"more of the population can tell the story and quote it versus Huckleberry Finn." Yeah, this seems like the essential thing to me for the comparison. Homer was oral poetry, and it was first transmitted that way. Star Wars has that same quality of orality about it, the same depth and richness of the world.
Mark Twain
Homer J. Simpson.
“Maybe Gone with the Wind.”
Underappreciated masterpiece. I read it so many times growing up. And each time, in the first chapter, I would be seized by the river I knew I was headed into. No other book so captivated me. It’s maybe why Nabokov said a book cannot be read, it can only be reread. I would dive in, be swallowed, and be swept along.
Tracy Chapman would be nowhere on my list.
Yes !
Winslow Homer, the sea, war, labor, survival.
Ha! I wrote a similar thing. Ut pictura poesis ;]
I hadn't considered John Ford, but that's a great thought. I'm one of those people who thinks the answer is Bob Dylan (who's really an extension of Whitman, so is it just Whitman, then?).
James Fenimore Cooper. The Leatherstocking Tales have the sweep and touch on enduring themes that would define American identity, plus he originated the spy and seafaring adventure novels in American letters.
Camille Paglia makes a fairly convincing case for George Lucas, although she doesn't quite put it in these terms.
I nearly mentioned him but are the movies about America enough or is it too indirect?
If you're asking what I think you're asking, I don't know that I agree that Star Wars isn't about America. It's told within an American genre (the western) and it's about the resistance to tyranny and rule from afar that the American story is also about. It's America in a galaxy far, far away, and somehow, doing that imaginative transplant also seems deeply American to me, too. Like most people of taste and discernment, I don't really hold with anything other than Episodes IV, V, or VI as canonical (Paglia is more forgiving on that point than I am) but I suppose there's even a case for the prequels as another part of the American story (how things declined in the first place, and why what followed was necessary). It's kind of like a dramatization of the Declaration's grievances section, with the same Roman overtones, by way of Gibbon, that inflected the original authoring of that document. Paglia's argument is interesting, although briefer than I'd like to be, and it appears at the end of Glittering Images. She talks about Lucas as the figure who combines the storytelling chops with the visual and technological imagination to bring that story to life, which sounds about right to me, and very Homeric. And after all, the Iliad wasn't set in Greece, either.
yeah I think this is right
Have you watched the original Star Wars lately? It can kindly be described as tacky or junky. If Lucas is America's Homer, then God help America.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hellenism/comments/qtj4x5/homers_iliad_is_boring_and_overrated/
So much of what Lucas is, shot for shot, is taken from Ford. Ford still winning.
Whoa. Do you recall where? (I said the same: https://substack.com/@tavss/note/c-278572850?r=iedx&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web )
And you know, I completely forgot this, but someone actually did turn Star Wars into an epic poem. Before AI, too. https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/odyssey-of-star-wars_9781419756283/
I need this! Have you seen the Shakespearean Star Wars? It’s so well done. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/WSW/william-shakespeares-star-wars/
Ha, no! That's great. Thanks for sharing. I highly recommend the Homeric epic version. I love that people do things like this.
Yeah, it's the very last chapter of Glittering Images.
Thank you!
Frost! No one comes close to his universal appeal and recognizability.
I thought perhaps Tracy Chapman was a subtle nod to George Chapman, a renowned translator of Homer, immortalized in the verse of Keats
If you’re picking a Hollywood director (which I think you should, since the 20th century was America’s century and cinema was the great art form of the 20th century) it has to be Kubrick. No one else is really even in the conversation. Can’t be Ford and Wayne as they only did westerns. I love Chaplin, but he somehow isn’t serious enough, same with Keaton. Coppola maybe comes closest but he’s just not as good as Kubrick. Hitchcock, while great, I don’t feel he has an essentially American outlook the way Kubrick does, he feels more English than Kubrick, like there’s almost too much Shakespeare in Hitchcock for him to really be the quintessential American artist. Even Kubrick’s non-American films still feel American to me. Like Barry Lyndon just is an American, and Spartacus is too.
I just looked it up and realized that Hitchcock actually is English (I always thought he was from New England, not sure why), which would explain why his films feel very English.
Stephen Spielberg
In the 21st century, Greta Gerwig. Just take a look at her portfolio.
Please let it not be any of the directors or actors you mentioned.
Apparently you can disagree with me, because none of the participants in the symposium came up with my answer!
"The Golden Age of Hollywood" is fine, although in this vein I would probably lean towards "the Great American Songbook." In either case, even a century on you have to have questions about their staying power. Your list of directors, though (and even more specifically your not rejecting Hitchcock and Chaplin for being English and Wilder for being an Austrian Jew—and relatedly, I suppose, Tocqueville for being French), gets at a certain autochthonous question (implicit in such choices as "Walt Whitman" and "Robert Frost") being complicated by America as nation of immigrants. Maybe it takes an Englishman to see it. (Maybe this is the argument for one Tocq over the line.)
And if I may reinterpret rejecting Hitchcock for not having "the necessary scale," the actual charge is not intending to make movies about the meaning of America, as the likes of Capra and Coppola certainly did. But did Homer intend to make art about the meaning of Archaic Greece? (Does "the meaning of Archaic Greece" even have any value as a phrase? Is thinking in terms of "the meaning of America" a sign that the worms have already hit your brain?)
We risk taking this too seriously(!), but I think the nationality question is indeed beside the point, yes, because we are talking about America, and in the case of the directors because they are so embedded within Hollywood. Whatever Homer, or Hitchcock, may have intended, also seems to me not to be a necessary condition: whatever Homer intended, he held a certain position, like Milton and Shakespeare.
Buddy you're in my country now, and we founded this place with and on taking things way too seriously
I think Milton held a certain position; Shakespeare at his best, like Homer—at least the Homer of the Iliad—is flying the negative capability plane until it runs out of gas and crash-landing wherever that happens (to push an image)
I am an Odyssey person and that is something I do take too seriously!
Oh see this is a theory I have had for some time and have never sufficiently refined, that there are Iliad people and Odyssey people (and despite my great interest in and affection for the Odyssey people of modernism I am the former), and, relatedly, that there are Genesis people and the rest of the Pentateuch people, and, finally, that the Odyssey people are the Genesis people &c
Yeah, I am a Genesis person too... it runs quite deep I think--Odyssey people are Northrop Frye people, I suspect, and so on
Finally, a new party game for annoying your friends and acquaintances
Is the superset Julian Jaynes people?
The ultimate answer has to be songbook or film. Both uniquely American forms.
Is a plausible root of American Homer-ocity Owen Wister’s the Virginian?
Such a good question, but I suspect nothing cam answer in a modern-day sense, because there’s too much of a cultural split. Westerns in the 50s and 60s? Everyone agreed on the same general canon. Various films and TV shows informing and inspiring each other as an oral tradition might?
I think this is a flawed comparison. One is about "an angry man" in war, and the other is about a man headed home to family and peace. All the epic conventions of warfare make "The Iliad" less accessible than the "Odyssey." Surely one need not have to choose between the two.
Will digital outlast print? Is that the bet? Call me old fashioned, but all the flashing visuals and cacophonous audio over-stimulus, are all sound and fury. Only print interfaces with a mind directly enough to provoke meaningful integration and reflection that can be repeatedly as often as the eyes dare to revisit the page. Hamlet is a play, but do most see the play, and have the opportunity to contemplate it deeply, as often as we revisit the words, so often well quoted, for the effect of depth it can give, in so much sundry and divergent writing? There is something in written weaving of all traditional and emergent writing on the page, that simply cannot be matched by the ephemeral dopamine hits provided by that which by intent, is sheer overwhelm.
The Founding Fathers are America's Homer. The beauty of the US constitution (or Common Sense, or the Federalist Papers) is different to the Iliad's beauty, but so is Don Quixote's or the Divine Comedy's or Lear's.
I think Mark Twain captured America’s spirit, story, and identity. My second thought was Stan Lee and other comic book writers since the superheroes of the comics became America’s own mythology. My other choice is George Lucas - let’s face it, more of the population can tell the story and quote it versus Huckleberry Finn.
"more of the population can tell the story and quote it versus Huckleberry Finn." Yeah, this seems like the essential thing to me for the comparison. Homer was oral poetry, and it was first transmitted that way. Star Wars has that same quality of orality about it, the same depth and richness of the world.