Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Have you read The Odyssey? I've been meaning to read Ulysses for years, but keep telling myself I'll read The Odyssey first.

I read quite a lot of it, reading along with Ian McKellen's performance of Robert Fagles translation. (This was off the back of the success of reading Paradise Lost along with Anton Lesser's performance.)

It's hard to say whether due to Fagles's translation, McKellen's performance or the Odyssey itself - but I didn't much care for it. The best bits were those which most people are probably familiar with from adaptations - the Cyclops, the Sirens, etc.

A lot of the interest in it comes from how alien it is to modern sensibilities - there's none of the psychological interiority we expect, and it's full of these (to our mind) primitive religious rituals.

I suspect that McKellen put me off it a bit - he's a great actor but his narration really got on my tits after a while. Anton Lesser reading Paradise Lost was A1 though. Of course, Milton is an order of magnitude more of a poet than Fagles...
 

luka

Well-known member
Its just used as a structuring principle really and besides you know the outline of the story
 

luka

Well-known member
Ok let's read it the opening chapter right this instant. I can't work its raining. I have read the odyssey but it won't help me one little bit I promise. There's no prizes for finishing first so don't rush. I'll see you in a bit then corpse can explain it to us
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Yeah not having read the Odyssey isn't a barrier, or at least not any more than not having read the complete works of Aristotle/Thomas Aquinas, et al, not knowing french or german or italian or latin, not having a kaleidoscopic knowledge of Dublin circa 1900...

The bit up to "usurper" is easy going, though, it's 'Proteus' where things become two-thirds incomprehensible, then you're back to comprehensibility with Bloom, which is where I'm at ATM.
 

droid

Well-known member
I make it a point to pass Frœdman’s Chemist shop and 7 Eccles st on my commute. Bloomsday everyday, except with more phlegm.
 

luka

Well-known member
It won't. Just read it. Get on with it. Stop making excuses. Corpsey will help you. It's an old maids book club. I'll make a Victoria sponge.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I am mostly reading boring psychotherapy papers at the moment, though as part of this I've deviated into reading Nick Totton's Embodied Relating which is mind blowingly good if a bit of a specialist audience thing, like most counselling books. A big shame because it's really amazing - a super deep treatise on embodiment that incorporates all the latest research. Amazing life affirming stuff - for me anyway. Shame it's in the counselling ghetto. And I've nearly finished Ola Raknes' Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy, a Pelican paperback by Reich's longest standing European student. It is pretty great though perhaps a bit too much orgone for one sitting. I heard a quote yesterday which ran something like "only tell people one unbelievable thing at a time" and that'd be germane here. It's often like that when one strays into the further reaches of Reich's work.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
it's basically a take on relational counselling & psychotherapy - i.e. being very aware of the relationship as an area where therapeutic content might play out - but which factors in the body as part of this.

He has some great arguments that what's normally presented as simply transference or whatever is actually felt as embodied at first and then disowned in "normal" heady/talk therapy counselling.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The traditional Reichian model would be an expert therapist does something to a passive client which obviously has all sort of problems, much as I've benefitted from that type of work. Working like this excludes the relational dynamics (all the rage, sadness, dependency, guilt etc that both of you might feel working together). The model he's proposing is more of a two way street.
 

luka

Well-known member
There are plenty of ideas there but you would have to look them up as secondary reading as with pynchon. That's fun actually im not deriding it
 
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