Great Reads From the Ancient World This blog is supposed to be about great reads for a quarter, and I keep cluttering it up with stuff about my life, which has actually become rather interesting lately, but I have to come up with a bunch of really great reads that you can find at almost any flea market or tag sale.

That's easy: three Greek tragedians -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. With these three guys you can't go wrong, if they are rendered well, or even if they are rendered half decently.

Remember, when a character starts talking in a "hick" kind of dialect, the translator uses some "hick" dialect from his own time, and that might not be our time. If you get bogged down with some Victorian blatherskite, or a modern scholar who believes she or he can fashion a brilliant poem in English -- don't waste your time.

If it's written in plain English, but it sounds kind of awkward... Bingo! You've got your entree into the ancient world. Languages are different. They should sound awkward in translation.

It's no coincidence that Freud named the Oedipal Complex after a character in a Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy encompasses the entire human psyche.

We read these three great tragedians as if they were typical of the plays presented at the Bacchanalian festivals, but they weren't. They were the greatest of hundreds, even thousands of plays. These three authors were masters of their art and they are great fun to read once you're able to "see through" your translation.

Here's a tip: get two or three different translations of the same play; you'll find out a lot about the play and about the process of translation. And I always read the introductions. They give you a lot of information that's helpful in understanding the play, and they give you the editor's approach to the work's presentation.

So why read Greek tragedy? Let me give just one example, The Bacchae by Euripides. The dictator Pentheus is investigating this new cult of Dionysus or Bacchus (god of wine) and witnesses some rituals he's not supposed to see, against the advice of the seer Tiresias.

He actually arrests Dionysus, who has taken human form, and questions him. This passage is lifted word for word from the New Testament interview between Jesus and Pontius Pilate (a neat trick in 400 B.C.). Pentheus asks Dionysus if he is the son of a god and Dionysus replies, "It is you who says this." ("Thou sayest it.")

So what happens to Pentheus? Well I'll tell you. He is torn limb from limb by his female relatives who, in a Bacchanalian frenzy, believe him to be a lion that they have slain. His grandmother marches through the main street of the city holding his head on a stick. How cool is that?

Then she wakes up and, looking at the head, does a classic double take.

Don't you hate it when that happens? You go off on your women-only Bacchic spiritual retreat, you're having a great time, the hunting is fantastic, and you wake up on the main street of town with your grandson's head on a stick.

People have such bad luck when they drink.

And that's just a sample. The Greek tragedians were committed to putting on a good show, and that translates into a great read. Just find a translator who respects the original and doesn't purport to be a great poet.

The heirs of Sophocles once decided he was senile and they wanted their inheritance and they took him to court. Sophocles read a few choruses from a play he was working on, "Oedipus at Colonus," and the jurymen drove the heirs from the courtroom with thumps and blows.

Literary talent was worth something in those days.  ¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments

  Bob Cilman, You Rock I had a great blog planned about Euripides, but that can keep. The big news is about the Young At Heart Chorus, directed by Bob Cilman, which is famous in Europe because of their tours there, but not as famous in the US... yet!

Turns out the Birtish-made documentary about the group is just being released in the US. I predict it will be very successful, but don't take my word for it.

"Break out the tissues for this superb documentary, " says The Times of London, "a film of incredible humour and pathos about the sobering realities of life and death."

All this is a well-deserved tribute to Bob Cilman, the director of the Young At Heart Chorus, and I know him. He arranged the stage debut of me and my daughter Sarah and her singing dog Shucks. We performed in something called "The Really Big Show," put on by the Northampton (Massachusetts) Council for the Arts, which was a send-up of the old Ed Sullivan Show, which they put on every year, with some very talented local performers taking Ed's role.

Ed Sullivan used to have animal acts, and Bob Cilman heard about Sarah's dog Shucks, who sang beautifully (our buddy Joe O'Rourke had a hand in this) and he called us up and we were all set to go. The rehearsals went great, but then in the actual performance, the Young At Heart Chorus popped all these balloons that were part of their bowling number and Shucks got freaked out and I had to take her outside to pee.

Then we went on together, Sarah and Shucks and I, and I tried the two fiddle tunes I had rehearsed with Shucks, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "As Time Goes By" and got only a sympathetic look from Shucks, shared with the audience, as if to say, "Why are we listening to this guy playing the fiddle? He sucks!"

But we had a keyboard for Sarah, and she struck up Amazing Grace, which was Shucks' party piece, and she came through beautifully, as only that sweet dog could. It can't be just yowling. It has to be tuneful. And Shucks was at her best, not just tuneful, but sweet and soulful, very hard to achieve in a concert setting, but something Sarah and I were used to all the time at home.

Well then they had a "Best of the Really Big Show," and Bob Cilman called me up and said we were the very first people he was calling. How cool is that? So we went on again and this time we performed with Kurt Vonnegut, who was rapping Chaucer with his grandson's band.

We sat around in the Green Room with him for a while, and I finally said to Sarah, "I have to ask for his autograph." And she said, "Who?" I said, "That guy. He's Kurt Vonnegut."

Well, long before this I had given Sarah a copy of Slaughterhouse Five and told her that it was a very important work of literature, as I believe every parent ought to do. But she hadn't known who he was and had just struck up a conversation and they were old buddies by the time we went onstage.

And of couse, after embarassing me a bit, just for laughs, Shucks came across again - you always knew she would; she loved to sing. And we had just the number to get a standing O: The Star Spangled Banner. She always loved the rockets' red glare and she gave it her all.

And Kurt was a big hit too, and the drummer from Phish was there...

That was all thanks to Bob Cilman. Thanks Bob! All this adulation you're getting from all over the world? You deserve it.  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments

  Can You Tell Me Where I Live? The Satyricon of Petronius The best opening lines of any novel ever written? I would offer the opening lines of The Satytricon by Petronius, the only Roman novel that ever existed, of which we have only fragments. But we have the opening:

A drunkard who is reeling up and down the street decides to ask directions, so he walks up to an old woman and asks her, "Old woman, can you tell me where I live?"

She says, "No, but I can show you where you ought to live!" And she leads him to a brothel, where she no doubt gets a fee.

I think it's a joke that resonates through the ages. I mean, the same thing could happen in Philadelphia or Boston today. "Can you tell me where I live?"

There is a lot to be learned from the Satyricon, through textual analysis: for example, we hear of parties that simmer down so as not to alert "The Watch, " which must have been a regular patrol by soldiers, and we learn that the Romans had some sort of aphrodisiac that seems to have acted like "poppers" (amyl nitrate).

We also learn that the millionaires in Rome are the slaves who were the favorites of their masters. The grand banquet in the Satyricon is given by just such a fortunate former slave/millionaire, Trimalchio.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever regretted reading The Satyricon, what there is of it. There is nothing really conclusive there, but it is definitely a slice of life you can find nowhere else.

The irony is, Rome was ruled by slaves, who controlled everything under degenerate emperors, while Cathage and Gaul and other provinces developed articulate democracies, emblematic of the early Roman Republic, which existed no more and was a sham in its day anyhow. Yet the ideals resonated at the fringes of empire.

It would be like a young man or woman in the Philippines reading the Declaration of Independence in 1900 while the United States of America (your great-grandparents' tax dollars at work) waged war on that country and killed more than 100,000 of its inhabitants to prevent them from enjoying the benefits of freedom.

The ideals would resonate at the fringes of empire when they were known no more at the core.  ¶ 9:00 PM 0 comments

  Luxury Liner: Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band









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  Welcome Feedback Blogging is great fun when you're "on" and not as much fun when you're "off."

One thing that gets me back "on" when I'm "off" is reader feedback. At my high school reunion I was talking to a very close buddy whom I hardly ever see, and I usually don't do this but I mentioned I was writing a blog. Don't you hate people who are always carping about their blogs?

Anyway, he said, "I love your blog. I read it with my sons all the time." That put me on Cloud Nine for weeks. Thanks, Philip!

More recently I've heard from several readers who picked up the books I was talking about and really enjoyed them. I get a kick out of that because it's a way of giving something back to the authors who have given me so much enjoyment, even if they are most of them dead and gone.

Here's a review of "Captain Blood: He's Not Mean, That's Just His Name" from Jean Goforth of Alabama:

"Based on your post, I purchased used copies of 'Captain Blood' and 'Scaramouche'. I sat them on my husband's reading table (because my book-reading time is limited). Upon examining them, he said he didn't think they were 'his thing'. But he's absorbed by 'Scaramouche', immersed in that world, needing repeated calls before coming out of it. And that makes a memorable book. Can't wait for my turn. Thanks for the recommendation."

Scaramouche really is a corker. It was made into a movie, too.

Jean's fascinating blog "Go Forth Alabama" was recently picked up by the Alabama megasite al.com (congratulations, Jean!), so you can find it in two places here and here.

Jean also liked "Intrepid Solo Women's Travel -- Isabella Bird."

"I got my hands on this book when I was in high school," she writes. "I tried several times to read it, but never got very far. You've inspired me to try again. Thanks!"

Thank you, Jean. Once you get to her romance with Mountain Jim, the book will gallop away with you.  ¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments

  Historians Can Be Incredibly Stupid William Dean Howells, Mark Twain's mentor and friend, once observed that to be a novelist or a poet requires a certain level of talent, but to be a historian reguires only leisure and means.

He's so right. It's great to read the works of historians, but remember, they're people and they make dumb mistakes. I've read a preeminent historian of the Roman Empire who suggested that perhaps the Christians did actually set fire to Rome, and another historian who suggested that Augustus Caesar's wife Livia did indeed poison him, but with his implicit consent.

There is a tablet from the Mycenaean era (1600-1400 BCE) that is preserved to us only because the palace it was in burned down. The Mycenaeans used clay tablets that they smoothed over and used again the next year. The only hardened clay tablets we have are from palaces that got burned down.

Anyway, this tablet reads, "The watchers are watching the coast." And then there is a symbol for a man and a woman and a bunch of other stuff. Some scholars believe this is a record of human sacrifice to ward what was obviously imminent doom. As I mentioned, this was from a palace that got burned down.

Another "scholar" said these other guys were morons, that the tablet was obviously the work of an apprentice scribe practicing his letters. Fine, except nowhere else in this palace or any other from the Mycenaean Era are there any other practice tablets of any kind. Practice tablets obviously did not make their way into palace archives. So this guy was not only stupid; he thought other people were morons because they didn't accept his stupid conclusions.

Then there's the preeminent Hitler scholar, perhaps the stupidest of all, who says the reports of Hitler's grandmother receiving child support payments from a Jewish family where she had worked as a domestic servant are not credible because no record of this family can be found.

Duh! Hitler sent his most trusted henchmen to expunge all mention of this family and clearly they succeeded, relying on the stupidity of future historians. If you want the true account, read Conrad Heiden's book Der Fuehrer, written before WWII. There is no doubt about it; Hitler would himself have been sent to a concentration camp for being one eighth Jewish.  ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments

  John Honeyman I don't go to bookstores much, and that is as it should be. I went to a bookstore the other day to find some challenging sudoku books and I wound up browsing through the history section and I came upon a book about the Battle of Trenton.

Naturally I looked in the index for John Honeyman, the unheralded hero of the Battle of Trenton, and I looked up the reference and I found that his heroic role has been discredited among egghed (butthead) types, and it pissed me off more than I can say.

Thankfully, I did not note the author, nor the name of the work, both of which deserve to be forgotten, and the sooner the better. This author was calling Miss Jane Honeyman a liar, in his or her savoir faire modern intellectual way, and let us have no more to do with him or her except to say, "You have earned the right to refer to yourself as a true butthead and contaminator of history."

Miss Jane Honeyman had two club feet and for ten years endured the abuse of her community. Her father was tried as a traitor twice and always seemed to get off on a technicality. Twice the family farm was supposed to be auctioned off, but it just never happpened.

When she was little, a patriot mob tried to burn her home, but her mother found an officer of Washington's among the mob and showed him a letter in Washington's hand that said, "The wife and children of the notorious tory spy, John Honeyman, are to be protected from harm."

Doesn't that sound a little unusual to you? The general of the Continental Army writing a letter to protect the family of a traitor? Well, he did, and we have sworn testimony that he did from one of his officers.

Judge for yourself: After the War of Independence was won, seven long years after the Battle of Trenton, Miss Jane Honeyman saw a strange cavalcade coming up the road to her home in Griggstown, New Jersey.

Front and center were a cavalry escort, and in between was a guy you would recognize, because he's on the money. Behind them were a host of curious townspeople.

On that occasion, I am happy to relate, George Washington knocked on the door and shook the hand of the supposed traitor John Honeyman, and thanked him for his services to the republic. The buttheads, try as they might, cannot repudiate this fact of history.

Ignore the crap you find in bookstores.  ¶ 8:32 PM 0 comments

  Dear Mike K, Thanks for the Ride Back in 1993 I was writing articles for a business magazine in Keene, New Hampshire, and I did one on the Yankee Candle Company in South Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Times were tough in the region back then, and we had a full-blown recession, but Mike Kittredge, founder of Yankee Candle, was right about then having to hire a second police officer to direct traffic at his factory / retail store / family fun center.

The store was attracting more than two million visitors a year, more than any single tourist attraction in the state, second only to the Freedom Trail in Boston.

I had been doing a series on local manufacturing companies and had met several people who had started businesses in their basements that had turned into million-dollar companies. That's cool, but Mike Kittredge started a business in his parents' basement which at the time of our interview was grossing around three hundred million dollars a year.

And yet he took the time to meet with me and we had a fascinating interview about the way he balanced wholesale and retail sales, about how he ran the company, and many other interesting subjects.

He told me about going to Newport, Rhode Island, and noticing that there were very many people walking around downtown carrying shopping bags, about how he opened a tiny store there that did $450,000 worth of business in its first year.

He talked about opening his own stores in cities where he had wholesale accounts, and the wholesale accounts actually sold more of his product because the Yankee stores were always so crowded.

Often his biggest problem was staffing enough checkout lines to register all the purchases that people wanted to make. He had dozens of registers, but always had long lines at the checkout. They say you pick your problems.

Among the many interesting observations he made was this: You have to make the shopping experience fun. Your store can't be dirty and fun. You can't have fun if the person at the checkout counter is talking on the phone while you're trying to buy $50 worth of candles.

He also enumerated the 80/20 rule: 20 percent of your customers give you 80 percent of your business. 20 percent of your customers give you 80 percent of your problems.

He observed that candles are pretty heavy and expensive to ship. Then he sat back with a big smile that illuminated his wonderful sense of irony. "But," he said, "they're consumable."

Mike made a science of bringing people back again and again.

Two years later, I went to work for his company, and I worked there for nine years running pallet jacks, reach trucks and fork lifts. There are about five or six hundred people out there who worked at Yankee Candle when Mike owned it and every last one of them will back me up when I say Mike Kittredge has always been a decent guy and working for him was an experience we'll never forget.

It wasn't just the quarterly breakfasts (on the clock, no less) where we all gathered in the giant employee fitness center and chowed down and watched while he performed with his band and then listened when he sat down and told us about where the company was going and then gave out cash and prizes and a half dozen trips to Barbados. Four times a year! On the clock!

It wasn't just the company banquet at the Delaney House in Springfield, one of the world's finest restaurants. It wasn't just the comprehensive family-friendly health benefits or the annual pay increases or even the paid vacation.

It was the policy of promoting exclusively in-house. Everyone in management had had wax on their shoes, so you could talk to them.

It was the respect that was given to every single employee. Every morning your supervisor (who had held your job or one like it) asked you how your equipment was working and how things were going with the departments you worked with. And when you told them, they knew what the bleep you were talking about! Mirabili dictu!

And if we ever had friction with one another, well, we had a friend in common, Mike K, so we got over it. There was no "Now we take the garbage out and have a cigarette behind the dumpster." No one was about to gyp Mike K, because he never gypped anyone in his life. Instead there was friendly competition to see who could get the job done.

As the company got larger and larger, Mike Kittredge hired a buddy of his, Mike Parry, to be president because Mike P was more hard-nosed than Mike K and could do things like fire people. But Mike Parry also has always been a decent guy, though he might deny it, and he always did everything he could to make sure that Yankee Candle was a place where he himself might like to work.

He had a meeting every week where any employee could ask him anything they wanted. No one else in my department ever wanted to go, so at first I went a lot, but then I started urging new people to go and they went and they found out that they were part of something very unusual --a company of decent people for decent people.

When Mike K sold the company, which he had every right to do, the writing was on the wall. You remember the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where everything turns from black and white to color? Well this was the same thing in reverse.

When they had "Baked Potato Day," I realized that Mike K was not just gone, but WAY long gone.

Yet I find myself saying, "But YOU were there and YOU and YOU..."

If there are any old YCC hands out there who remember the way it was back in the day, email me and send me your memories of working for Mike K and Mike P. Wasn't that one swell ride? In today's America, no one else is going to believe us.

I go by Mike K's house all the time, whenever I bike to Puffer's Pond the hard way (over Teawaddle Hill) and when I go by, I say, "God Bless America." Of all those yachts lined up on Caribbean docks, at least one of them belongs to a guy who earned it through hard work and consideration for others.  ¶ 9:43 PM 1 comments

  Fifty Thousand Actual Dollars for an Imaginary Island? I am truly a creature of the last century. And I didn't even really fit into that century because so many of my literary and historical friends came from centuries before that. I loved to learn about my grandparents' generation and about the Middle Ages and the Ancient World.

I guess I'm kind of a backward-looking guy. But I'm always ready to greet the future. Hell, I'm glad to be around to do so.

When my brother Shady showed me YouTube, all I could do was gape -- and enjoy the Bob Wills videos like "Ida Red" and "Sitting on Top of the World" and "Three Miles South of Cash in Arkansas." Tell me Bob Wills doesn't rock. Tell me Carolina Cotton doesn't rock.

I discovered Bjork (turns out it rhymes with jerk) and Catherine Tate, and even saw Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz singing "Silent Night."

So you can see I'm easily amused.

Tonight I got a tour of SecondLife.com, a virtual world that doesn't exist. It's a world created in cyberspace by more than seven million creative people all over the world. Last week more than 485,000 people logged onto SecondLife.com for more than an hour.

In a way it's like Dungeons and Dragons but way way cooler because you create your own identity, shades and all. Then you can walk, fly or levitate around and visit all the amazing places that people have created. I saw just a few, enough to see why people are focusing their creative energies here. It's like Oz only more so.

You can also buy land there and create your own environment, but it will cost you. An island can cost you $2,000, but then you have to develop it, and there are maintenance costs. They have their own currency of Linden Dollars which people swap, but they also have transactions in US dollars. And we're talking serious dollars.

One popular island in this cyberworld recently sold for $50,000 real life cash on the barrelhead, son. This is the real deal, a vision of the future. Video gaming meets Economics 101.

My guide, Alexander, explained that soon the interactive characters will be able to talk with one another, either through voice simulation or an actual audio link.

"With people from all over the world," I said, "who will translate?"

"Oh people will develop their own translators."

Oh, right. This is the future. People develop translators just like that.

Who knows? Maybe we will see real-life applications from the situations we encounter in cyberspace as people from all over the world interact and visit one another's idealized universes.

But don't ask me. I'm just a slack-jawed spectator from the last century. I'm still getting used to using the word universes in the plural. And wait a minute, did he say fifty thousand actual bucks for an imaginary island?  ¶ 9:58 PM 1 comments