illuminating thread by scholar whose #Odyssey translation was used for the new film adaptation; here's the cover art discussed — which, uncommonly, includes no boat or sea. "Odyssey is about complex interactions between people… Most of the poem doesn't take place at sea." bsky.app/profile/emil...

EMILY WILSON@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 2w ago

Now that many people are buying my 2017 metrical verse translation of the Odyssey in great numbers (thank you, Mr Nolan!), or at least, gazing at it and wondering whether to buy it, I thought I should share some thoughts on the cover design.

"The poetic power is the organizing power par excellence—a capacity to bring the disparate elements of our experience into a powerful whole that is at once beautiful (an object of contemplation) and orienting (an object of praxis)." James D. Reid, paraphrasing #Novalis, in 2024 OUP compilation.

"Friends, the soil is poor, we must richly scatter/ Seeds for even a modest harvest." — epigraph to Pollen (1798), first published collection of aphorisms and fragments by #Novalis, (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) a pioneer of #LiteraryFragment form.

"You'll certainly fancy…that I am very fond of books…But you'd be quite mistaken. I am a machine, condemned to devour them and, then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history." — #Marx, letter to daughter honeymooning in Paris, requesting book catalogues archive.org/details/in.e...

#DailyTableau … sorting through journey gleanings, bookmarks, stickers, recent books, at a lovely coffeehouse perch, with attending spirit #WilliamSBurroughs. #InterzoneWest Tableau album: photos.app.goo.gl/Fcj4xRSWDjMG...

epigraph to #JamesJoyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): "Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes." ["He applied his thought to new arts [inventions]…[and altered the natural order of things]"]. — #Ovid, #Metamorphoses VIII 188: on Daedalus, mythic maze, wing, etc maker. #Bildungsroman

"The #CommonReader is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole…some rickety and ramshackle fabric…to allow of affection, laughter, argument…serve[s] his purpose and round[s] his structure" #VirginiaWoolf archive.org/details/comm...

reading Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts), 1826 iconic Romantic, lyrical, #wanderlust novella by Joseph von #Eichendorff. Tipped from Wim Wenders film Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung, 1975) in which Wilhelm's mother gives him a copy as he sets out travelling. #Taugenichts

"where have you been, my darling young one?" — #BobDylan "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" 1963 m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5al.... Sung by Wilhelm in #WimWenders, Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung),1975, in Road trilogy; written by #PeterHandke based on #Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. #Bildungsroman

Reading (space) as a service: "Still Life with a Book" monthly event at Sidney Art Gallery and Museum, in #PortOrchard, WA, near current stay, offers "casual, quiet time to read in a creative and historical space, exchange…recommendations or discuss your literary endeavors." sidneymuseumandarts.com

"The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." — Marshall #McLuhan. Understanding Media, 1964: Ch.1, "The Medium is the Message." #MediaEcology archive.org/details/unde...

"ideology has a hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home…Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one's own reason, conscience, and responsibility… [via their] consignment to a higher authority." — #VáclavHavel 1978

landmark essay on totalitarian/authoritarian social patterns and how individuals can counteract: #VáclavHavel "The Power of the Powerless" 1978. Iconically analyzes case of grocer fed up with it, taking down the expected "Workers of the world, unite" sign in his window. hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/t...

"Authorship before print was in a large degree the building of a mosaic": for practical and cultural reasons, mostly gathering, copying, assembling, and preserving manuscripts — done variously, anonymously, by monks, scribes, bookbinders, librarians, owners. — Goldschmidt, 1943, via McLuhan, 1962

Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) was renowned not only for caring for all animals, but for reading any scrap of writing he came across—as noted also of #Cervantes; explaining, "I do this because they have the letters which make the glorious name of the Lord God." noted in #McLuhan #TheGutenbergGalaxy

elegiac note in #McDonalds wifi login screen: shows the 2018-demolished #1 Store Museum, which recreated Ray Kroc's first franchised McD's, #DesPlaines, Illinois. Actually was 9th McDonald's; vs the unacknowledged pre-Kroc original locations, which I visited in Jan, along former #Route66 in AZ & CA

did glance at phone right at 4:20pm on 4/20, in time to get a screenshot! See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_%28.... There by the way is my lock screen and home screen, examples of a topic I'm writing about: #HomescreenDesign considering such interfaces as key places of habitation and #Homescape

delightful, astounding, cornucopian gathering of book cover designs that themselves incorporate books, older book covers, or book motifs. from Dan Wagstaff @danwagstaff.bsky.social on the excellent Casual Optimist book culture blog, 2014 www.casualoptimist.com/blog/2014/07... #BookCulture #booksky

"What could be more practical for a man caught…between literary culture and post-literate technology…to make himself a raft of ad copy? [as Joyce’s Bloom, an ad salesman, or Homer's Odysseus, the resourceful ('polymetis')]…to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures?"

“Gold teeth, and a curse for this town/ Were all in my mouth/ Only I don't know how, they got out, dear./ Turn me back into the pet/ I was when we met/ I was happier then, with no mindset…" — The Shins, "New Slang" 2001, overheard today. From a " #SaturnReturn" time m.youtube.com/watch?v=zYwC...

"The first thing to say about #FinnegansWake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. In order to pay it the attention it…demands, the reader must forego most of the conventions about reading and about language that constitute him/her as a reader." Seamus Deane introduction, bit joykill imo

here's what seems to be the part at start of #JamesJoyce #FinnegansWake described by #McLuhan as "making a mosaic, an Achilles shield…of all the themes and modes of human speech and communication." Imo analogy to #AchillesShield, iconic #ekphrasis passage of #Illiad, is apt & intriguing. #booksky

“On the 2nd page of [ #FinnegansWake], #JamesJoyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield…of all the themes and modes of human speech and communication…[he saw no] advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle… [vs] living simultaneously in all modes while quite conscious." — #McLuhan

"Hey, let him follow you down/ Way underground, win[e?]d and he's bound/ Bound to follow you down… But his coat is torn and frayed/ It's seen much better days/ Just as long as the guitar plays/ Let it steal your heart away…" — #RollingStones, "Torn and Frayed" (1972) m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z-U...

new strand on the #BooksConsideredHarmful topic exploration: considering how and why *songs*, comparatively slight things, can often have such power, personally and culturally, eg in protest and revolutionary activity; and so offer a distinct counter-model to books as cultural form. #SongAsModel

“Though the WWW was invented 30 years after #TheGutenbergGalaxy was published [1962], #McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge." #MediaEcology

“ #McLuhan [compared] the alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter 17thC with the modern concern for the "end of the book."…"There can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."” re. #TheGutenbergGalaxy