As the Moon Climbs

I have yet to complete a novel.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve started four novels, and I haven’t finished a single one. I don’t even know where three of them are, and I’d be hard pressed to explain what they were about. The fourth one, at over 50,000 words, is perhaps half finished in terms of plot and could probably stand to be cut by half anyway. So my track record is by no means unblemished.

And yet every year, I roll that boulder up the hill again. What hill, you ask? National Novel Writing Month, of course. In case you haven’t heard of it, it involves writing a 50,000-word novel in November. That’s about 1,667 words per day, 70 words per hour, a bit over 1 word per minute. Assuming you don’t sleep, of course.

But it can be done, and do it I will. I’ve already taken my first tentative steps toward creating characters and outlining, but starting tomorrow I’ll be moving more quickly and purposefully. This time I will have a full plan, with a beginning, middle AND end as opposed to a vague mumble and some plot points. And I’m going to write it all down instead of keeping it in my head and then completely forgetting it in the stress-induced hysteria that tends to arrive around the middle of the month. This time will be different.

No really! It will! Stop laughing. Oh, fine. I’ll show you.

I return home after a lovely cruise and my first order of business is to write a paper on, well, homecomings in The Odyssey. I have a feeling that the page limit has been mightily exceeded and I will have to trim liberally but, in a way, that tends to be easier than using what my boss calls “the gluteus maximus extraction method” to pad an otherwise flimsy essay. I remember back in high school and the early days of college when it seemed so difficult to find enough to say about anything to fill one page, let alone three or four. How the times have changed.

And with that ironically brief note, I’m off to cook some dinner. I’m not sure whether tomorrow will bring more perusal of The Voyage of Argo or the beginning of our exploration of Virgil’s Aeneid, but either way I am likely to remain in ancient lands.

Epic. It’s what’s for breakfast.

As much as I would love to dive into some discourse on Jason and his illustrious comrades, I am about to set sail on a journey of my own. So for that one person who reads my journal, take heart! I will return at the end of the week, hopefully with exciting (to me anyway) new insights to share.

Ciao for now!

Be brief, be original, be intelligent, be polished. “Cultivate a slender muse” and “tread an unworn path.” Sounds like the kind of advice you’d get in a creative writing class today, right? Amazing, then, that this was written around the third century BCE by a poet named Callimachus. He lived in a city that was home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but which could be considered to have had two if you count the thing that it is really remembered for today.

Alexandria in the Hellenistic period bears a striking resemblance to our modern world in some ways, primarily in the intellectual sphere. It was a cosmopolitan place, a melting pot that contained ingredients from numerous Middle Eastern, Asian and African societies. But don’t be fooled: the Greeks were still snobs and emphasized Greek culture, to the point that written works in other languages had to be translated to Greek before they would be housed in the library.

Ah, the library. It may be small by today’s standards, but at the time it was a huge deal. Everything had to be written by hand, so it wasn’t as if you could walk into your local bibliothekai and grab the latest copy of Apollonius’ Argonautica. And yet at its height, the library had over 700,000 works, mostly scrolls if memory serves. The library at my college just celebrated its 3 millionth acquisition, but we’re talking over two thousand extra years’ worth of writing to get to that point. Amazing.

Speaking of writing and amazement, listening to my professor talk about the intellectual scene at the time was almost eerie. To put it bluntly, writers were eager to show off how educated they were with fancy wordplay and allusions and satire. The fine art of literary criticism was apparently alive and well, and already there was an establishment of certain writers as the intelligentsia. Sure, Homer was still the paragon of Greek literature, but people like Callimachus were ready to move on and do their own thing. The elitism! The cliquishness! The fragile egos! Sound familiar?

Most incredible is the thought that even back then–again, we’re talking two thousand years and change–people were concerned about originality. They only had a few centuries of detritus accumulated, and it was already a problem. Reputations were already exerting their gravitational forces on other works and writers. And yet those writers persevered and managed to break new ground themselves.

There’s some hope for me yet!

Things have reputations. Books, being things, are not excluded from this fact. The older a book gets, the more likely it is to either fade away due to a relative lack of reputation, or acquire a nigh-mythical status due to continuous accumulation of reputation. The Odyssey, having been in circulation for longer than almost every other book in existence, is positively ponderous with reputation. Katamari-like, it has been rolled around the planet, its girth increasing with each pass. Its reputation is so massive, if we launched it into orbit, the tides would be affected.

Not surprisingly, people can be intimidated by this enormous bulk. It makes the book difficult to lift, let alone open and peruse. What if I don’t understand it? What if I don’t like it? When a novel arrives on the shelves of the local bookstore unencumbered by reputation, these two questions are nonexistent, and I am free to form my own opinions without worrying about collective judgment. But when the tome in question has already been analyzed ad infinitum and judged worthy of acclaim, it becomes almost impossible to approach the work without a veritable crowd of critics standing behind me. A mob. A network, like Verizon. “Can you hear me now? Good.”

Many people–at least, the ones who read for pleasure rather than school–simply avoid reading these books because they don’t want to go to the trouble of shouldering the burden, and they lack the will or ability to ignore it. But I say to you people, do not be discouraged! Do not think that you’ll have to read an accompanying encyclopedia’s worth of history and philosophy and criticism to understand and appreciate The Odyssey. One of the reasons that such works persist and gain reputation is that they are, believe it or not, accessible and relevant and enjoyable. They were not written for some elite class of super-intelligent aristocrats living in ivory towers; they were written for the common folk, who needed distraction and entertainment after spending all day working the fields or baking or making horseshoes. Even Shakespeare’s works, which are practically synonymous with snobbery at this point, were performed in a part of town that was considered uncouth, to say the least. There weren’t nobles in fancy dresses hanging around, there was booze and hookers! Think of it, my friends: see a play, then get drunk and get laid! This is not high culture we are talking about here, and yet it has gained that reputation.

And so, as I read the Odyssey, I like to think of Homer sitting in front of a roaring fire, maybe in the middle of some rustic hamlet with thatched-roof cottages. The farmers have come in from the fields, excited because there’s going to be an awesome party and a great story. Cows and sheep are killed as a sacrifice to the gods, roasted on spits, and then the delicious crispy meat gets passed around among the villagers along with sweet wine and bread and cheese. People chat about the weather, the crops, the animals, who’s marrying whom, who’s having kids, who went off to Athens or Sparta or some other big city. When everyone is settled, Homer takes a swig of wine, clears his throat, and starts chanting, “Sing to me, Muse…” And everyone is entranced by this story about a good guy from a small town making it in the big world, then losing it all, then finally making it home and living happily ever after.

That’s the kind of reputation a girl can sink her teeth into. Like tasty, tasty lamb.