"Never again to meddle in the affairs of cities and gods . . . "

From Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010):

Agamemnon had the sleeping Odysseus locked belowdecks. After sleeping, he searched the hold and, finding nothing, broke into Agamemnon's cabin (its lock was contemptible). Among weapons, wine cups and trophies of war he found a book called the Iliad. It was the tale of his war and the gist was right but the details were often wrong. In the introduction he read:

It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war--these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.

The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly, this has had no impact on the action or the outcome. Agamemnon is too obstinate to change his mind and anyway never believes what he reads. Achilles flips through the Iliad and shrugs. Priam makes sacrifices to the nonplussed gods and anyway thinks that he is above prophecy (recall Cassandra). Perhaps there were once characters who read the book with dawning apprehension and fled that very hour, finding refuge in the hills, never again to meddle in the affairs of cities and gods, but if ever there were they are long gone now.

Though I read it months ago, I haven't written at length about Mason's wonderfully inventive and coy The Lost Books of the Odyssey, and, beset by travel, I don't really have time to do so now. Suffice it to say that it is one of my favorite books of the year, offering one of those all-too-rare experiences when a reader opens a book and quickly begins to feel that it was written just for him, that in some sense he's been waiting for this book for years. A lover of Odysseus and a regular re-reader of Homer, I didn't know that I wanted a volume of tales of Odysseus filtered through a Calvino-esque sensibility, but now that I have it I'm so, so pleased.

My first thought on closing the book was that Ed Park would love it. He does. My second thought was that I should try to convince Ed that he and I should write something along similar lines about Atlantis, taking into account all the legends and variations over the centuries. Alas, when I raised the possibility, Ed informed me that Eliot Weinberger had already done so in his essay "Dreams from the Holothurians," found in his Outside Stories--and anyone who enjoys this sort of playing around in myth and legend and the shadowier corners of historical inquiry should seek it out.

A few selections to draw you in:

Lost! Plutarch claimed that Solon began an epic poem on Atlantis, and gave it up. Lost! Plato's account of the continent, Critias, ends suddenly in mid-sentence: "And when he had called them together, he spoke as follows:"

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Atlantis! Heinrich Schliemann's grandson Paul claims that he inherited a letter, an envelope, and an owl-headed vase of unknown provenance. The letter instructed that only a family member willing to devote his life to the material contained in the envelope and vase should open them. He pledged his life, and broke the vase. Inside were four square coins and a metal plaque inscribed in Phoenician, Issued in the Temple of Transparent Walls. He opened the envelope, and found his grandfather's secret notes from the excavation of Troy: the finding of a bronze urn full of coins marked From the King Cronos of Atlantis. Young Schliemann then set off for Tibet, where he discovered a Chaldean account of the destruction of the Land of the Seven Cities. Schliemann reports his findings to the New York American in 1912, promising to reveal much more in a forthcoming book.

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Lost! After his newspaper article, Paul Schliemann was never heard from again, his book never published, and the Schliemann family claimed they had no one named Paul.

You could do worse at the beach this summer than to carry The Lost Books of the Odyssey and "Dreams from the Holothurians." When the long ships draw up onto the beach, you'll be the only sunbather who's expecting them; you should be able to tell by the quantity of deepwater muck and seaweed adorning the prow whether the oarsmen are Achaeans or Atlanteans.

Is New York Here?, or, Weinberger v. White

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Though I enjoy E. B. White, especially his carefully crafted letters--which are entirely unrevealing but thoroughly charming nonetheless--I would never list him among my favorite writers, and I'm far from his biggest fan. Yet back in the spring I found myself defending him from what I saw as a misguided attack on his and William Strunk's The Elements of Style, and now I unexpectedly find myself called back into the lists again, this time by an essay in writer and translator Eliot Weinberger's excellent new collection Oranges and Peanuts for Sale (2009).

In "Where Was New York?", which was originally published as an afterword to a German translation of White's celebrated essay "Here Is New York" (1948), Weinberger excavates the essay itself from the decades of praise that have barnacled it, and in the process ruthlessly reveals it to be somewhat less than, as Russell Baker called it, "The finest portrait ever painted of the city at the height of its glory." Weinberger highlights the insularity and provincialism of White's New York, especially his lack of interest in (or even acknowledgment of) immigrants, minorities, and the outer boroughs. White, he points out, was writing as a man who had left New York behind; his account of 1948 New York is really a depiction of his nostalgia for the 1920s New York of his youth, and "To be nostalgic in New York means that one has stopped living as a New Yorker, that one is no longer thrilled by the new, that one's expert knowledge has become out of date."

Weinberger's essay is by turns sharply perceptive and tendentious; it is the sort of essay to which one can't help but respond, "Yes, but . . . " He is unquestionably right on nearly every point: White's New York is by no means everyone's New York--it wasn't then, and it isn't now, and like any vehicle for nostalgia it should be questioned relentlessly. But at the same time, title aside, White's essay doesn't really claim to be much more than it is: an impressionistic account of a middle-aged man's summer weekend revisiting the beloved city of his youth. If its ambit is circumscribed, the faces of the city it turns up are nonetheless real: White is no Joseph Mitchell, but then he also doesn't claim to be--he is "a transient, or vagrant, in from the country for a few days." So when he walks through the Lower East Side, he doesn't engage, but simply describes:

At the corner of Lewis, in the playground behind the wire fence, an open-air dance is going on-some sort of neighborhood affair, probably designed to combat delinquency. Women push baby carriages in and out among the dancers, as though to exhibit what dancing leads to at last. Overhead, like banners decorating a cotillion hall, stream the pants and bras from the pulley lines. The music stops, and a beautiful Italian girl takes a brush from her handbag and stands under the street lamp brushing her long blue-black hair till it shines. The cop in the patrol car watches sullenly.

For nearly every moment of regret or nostalgia in "Here Is New York," White offers a counterbalancing scene like that one, of life going on in New York even as he has opted out.

While Weinberger is correct to note that White doesn't explicitly engage with any of the vast numbers of immigrants that are so crucial to New York's continuing vitality (and it is hard to imagine him doing so comfortably--Weinberger's critique of the fundamental insularity of New Yorker culture is his strongest point), he ignores the fact that White does make a point of highlighting their importance to the city's conception of itself:

The collision and intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races, creeds, and nationalities make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry.

Moreover, White not only, as I noted above, acknowledges his own outsider status, but he openly argues that the arriviste New Yorker is the essence of the city:

There are roughly three New Yorks, there is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

White's New York may not be Weinberger's New York, but then again, it wasn't really White's, either, and he knew it; nostalgia can be toxic, but nostalgia inoculated by an open relinquishing of the ground of the past to the succeeding lives of the future is as close to harmless as you can get. "Here Is New York," in isolation, would be a lousy way to understand New York, but as a piece of the puzzle--a puzzle that should also include Weinberger's rebuttal--it still has a part to play.

{The White essay, by the way, is not the only reason to seek out Weinberger's collection: his blow-by-blow indictment of the Bush administration, the media, and the American public, "What I Heard about Iraq in 2005," alone would earn it a place on my bookshelves--but in addition he offers a brief, personal account of the life of poet George Oppen; an entertaining look at James Laughlin's wonderful sort-of autobiography, The Way It Wasn't; the cryptic and unsettling "Questions of Death" ("10. Is self-mutilation practiced by the mourners?"); and more.}