Posts Tagged ‘Homer’
It takes one to know one…
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare….
– George Bernard Shaw
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
– Noel Coward
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
– William Faulkner, on Mark Twain
The gifted can be so… ungenerous to each other: from Examiner.com, “The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time.”
As we consider that this may in any case be better than log-rolling, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that a member of the Hollywood nobility– two-time Oscar-winning actress, model, and anti-war activist Jane Fonda– released her first exercise tape.
Building on the success of her workout book, published the prior year, the tape helped Fonda popularize workouts for women, workouts in groups, workout videos, and indeed aerobics in general (a family of trends on which Richard Simmons, Judi “Jazzercise” Missett and many others have ridden). Fonda invested the proceeds of what became a fitness empire into the Campaign for Economic Democracy, an advocacy group founded by her then-husband Tom Hayden (of Chicago Eight renown). Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1989, and Fonda retired from the spotlight (though, of course, she has returned to the movie screen in the last few years).
Butchering sacred cows…
While for the most part, one tends to act on positive recommendations– to see films with good reviews, to catch acts about which one’s friends are enthusiastic– it can be useful to be warned off as well…
“A programmer named Chris” at Cynical-C has stepped up to oblige. In “You Can’t Please Everyone,” he’s collected one-star reviews of classics, posted on Amazon…
Consider for example, this pithy reaction to Homer’s Odyssey:
This book sucks. I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long. I could tell this story in about 10 pages. Homer taking all long to say stupid stuff. Teens if you are reading this all I have to say is CLIFF NOTES CLIFF NOTES you will pass the test, unless you are in AP classes. The teachers expect kids to read cliff notes trust me my moms a teacher. P.S this book SUCKS.
…Or this reaction to Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in Robert Wise’s film of Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music:
This movie should be called the Sound of Mucus. The only redeeming quality is that the family has to run from nazis.
For more (much more) of this kind of corrective to the conventional wisdom, see here.
As we reconsider the classics, we might feel compelled to “Whistle a Happy Tune” or ask “Shall We Dance?”, because it was on this date in 1949 that Siam changed it’s name to Thailand (five years after Margaret Landon’s novel, Anna and The King of Siam; three years after John Cromwell’s film adaptation of that book, but two years before Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s musical, The King and I)…
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