#calypso in general is such a good parallel and for what???

[smiley-miley]

“Not Sorry for Loving You” from EPIC: the Musical is the perfect Nessarose Thropp song, in this essay I will—

[koruga]

I agree with parts of this, but I also disagree with a lot of it. I do think the mark of a great character is the fact that we can debate about his morality three millennia after the fact, and I do respect your interpretations. That being said, while I did study the Iliad and the Odyssey in university, I also dropped out of university, so I may not know everything.

Alright though, I'd like to take this point by point! Under a read-more because it might get long. (editor's note: it did)

The only canon Odysseus is the one in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Okay, this is debatable. However, I am going to have to disagree with you on this for several reasons. The Iliad and the Odyssey were both epic poems, and we don't know a lot about when they were first put together or collated. It's likely that the stories told in the Iliad and the Odyssey existed for centuries before they were collated into what we would know them as today, though there was general consensus among all the stories. By around the time of Classical Greece (~500 BCE) there was a standard version.

However, and this is a point I really want to make clear because a lot of the rest of your post seemingly acknowledges this, the Iliad and the Odyssey aren't the complete history of the Trojan War. The Epic Cycle neither begins nor ends with these books -- it begins with the Cypria, and ends, sadly, with the Telegony. None of the rest of these stories are attributed to Homer, but many of them do involve Odysseus -- the Telegony is about his son with Circe, and his death.

The reason I want to bring this up is because not only are you basing a lot of your arguments off of how you've read the Odyssey, you're also basing it off of things that aren't in the Odyssey. A lot of what we have of Greek mythology can be contradictory, and Odysseus is no exception. Some of what you're saying is true in certain stories, and some of it isn't. I am an eternal Odysseus apologist, but I find that it's often unhelpful to make excuses for him. He can do that perfectly well on his own.

Also, just a minor quibble, but you refer to them as book series, when they're really not. While I understand the confusion, the 'books' in the Iliad and the Odyssey function more like chapters, or, if performed orally, like singular episodes of a television series.

Odysseus was one of the few men in greek mythology who was 100% loyal and faithful to his wife till the very end and beyond.

I understand why this is popular. I love this version of the tale, not only because narratively it's compelling (Penelope and Odysseus mirroring each other, taking on roles that were never expected of them) but because it feels good to a modern reader. We want to say that Odysseus was faithful, because if he wasn't, that would make him a bad person, right? He would never cheat on the woman he loved, so he didn't cheat!

Now, while I agree that his relationships with Calypso and Circe were less than consensual, not everyone does. He stayed a year with her -- a year before he was shipwrecked, before he had lost his entire crew. It can be argued that she convinced him, that she manipulated him into staying, but if you want to insist on using the Odyssey as the only source for your information, this is never stated, nor even implied. Odysseus was seemingly perfectly happy on that island until he was convinced by his men to finally leave -- and note there, he had to be convinced. He might have stayed even longer if he wasn't made to go.

Calypso, I'll grant you. Even in the Odyssey, while he 'willingly' sleeps with her at night, Odysseus spends his days miserable on the beach. Even if he consented at the beginning, it's very easy to draw a parallel between him on Ogygia and Helen at Troy.

I would like to bring up here, though, the same double standard that Calypso does. I disagree with her fundamental point that she should have been allowed to keep Odysseus, but what she's doing is not dissimilar to what men of the time did constantly, both divine and mortal. Again, as Odysseus was kept from his wife, so too was Helen kept from her husband. So too was Io raped and impregnated and forced to wander for seven years, and yet Zeus is not vilified by the public at large the way Calypso is to readers of the Odyssey.

We're going to come back to this point a lot, because when you read ancient Greek texts, it's kind of impossible not to. Gods are not held to mortal standards. It's practically impossible to hold them to mortal standards if you want to read any of them as benevolent -- each god in the pantheon, from Zeus to Apollo to even, miraculously, Hestia, has done things that we could consider abhorrent. Vilifying Calypso for this is as useful as vilifying Apollo for his pursuit of Daphne -- terrible for the mortal being used and abused, but difficult to properly condemn the god for.

Which dovetails into my next point well: Odysseus had slaves. I'm not going to break out one of my copies of the Iliad to word-hunt for the exact lines that explicitly state that he had xyz slaves, but it was not weird to own a slave back then, and especially if you had a female slave, using them for sex was kind of the norm. In Euripides's Hecuba, the eponymous queen is one of his slaves.

Do we want to trade in the myth that Odysseus was such a magically good guy that he didn't have sex with any of his slaves in the ten years he was away from home? Maybe that's true. Maybe he didn't. But, as Epic states so eloquently, he's just a man. He likely wouldn't have seen anything wrong with sleeping with his slaves, wouldn't have considered it cheating even though Penelope sleeping with any of her slaves would have been grounds for a bloody divorce.

Ancient Greece was not kind to women. Odysseus shows no signs of being particularly kinder than the norm -- he convinced Agamemnon to sacrifice his oldest daughter Iphigenia in the Cypria (in Iphigenia at Aulis, this role goes to Menelaus), and in Hecuba again, he seems unaffected in his role of sending Polyxena to her own sacrifice. We can, in the modern day, interpret Odysseus and kinder to women, and affectionate only with his own wife. But we can't claim it to be the only truth.

If you're interested in the role of women in the Odyssey, and especially Odysseus's role as a man in ancient Greece, I would recommend Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, which comes with an incredible introduction that goes through a lot of this and more. It's beyond my purview, but genuinely some of the best parts of reading Odyssey translations is reading the notes before the book begins.

The truth of the matter is that is just how war is.

A running theme in the Iliad is that war is kind of hell. It's important and pointless in equal measures, and it brings out some very dirty sides of soldiers. You mention later on that "Odysseus killed one of the kings on the Trojan side of war and took his horses but he did that because he knew one of the only ways they could stand a chance in the war is getting those horses", and what I'm assuming you're talking about is Book 10 of the Iliad. Interestingly enough, this book is often considered to be a post-Homeric addition, because of the jarring difference in tone and style.

While not my main point, I think the fact that this was a later addition to the story, or at least a non-Homeric one, proves how inconsequential the raid really was. Yes, it was important in the moment, and yes, it was good for the Achaeans, but the war would not have been lost if they didn't have those horses. They weren't divine horses or anything -- the Thracians didn't have those.

Book 10, to me, honestly reads a lot more like a celebration of the meanest parts of war. It's subterfuge and spying and killing a soldier who promised to surrender if he was taken alive. Odysseus and Diomedes are deeply unheroic in Book 10, performing a night raid that serves no narrative purpose except to show how good they are at sneaking around and killing.

And that's kind of a theme with Odysseus. His greatest moments of heroism, his spotlights in the Iliad and in most myths, aren't of him slaughtering a path throughout the battlefield like Diomedes or Agamemnon. They're specifically him tricking people or screwing them over -- sneaking into Troy to steal the Palladium, leaving Philoctetes stranded on Lemnos, recruiting Achilles, the entirety of the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan Horse specifically is a sticking point, because it's such a beautiful encapsulation of Odysseus's methods. He had the army build a giant fuck-off horse to hide soldiers inside, and then he left out a single man to explain it to the Trojans. Variously, it's either under the guise of a gift for the Trojans or as a sacrifice to Athena for swift winds home. This is a deeply unheroic thing to do, and it's acknowledged, especially in the Aeneid, how fucked up this is.

The idea that he's trying to save more lives than he might lose is also rather tempered by the fact that, once the Achaeans are inside the city, they slaughter just about everyone there, and enslave those they don't. If he wanted to save lives, Odysseus could have simply planned for a single person to go in and take Helen back, before returning home, or even just followed through on what the Trojan Horse was claimed to be for. He wanted to destroy the city, though, and he wanted to sack more cities afterwards, because that's what heroes did back then. Mercy was not a quality that was necessarily adored in those days.

Odysseus was given a vision that the baby would grow older and kill a bunch of innocent people, so he had to make the choice whether he should kill the baby or not.

This is just wrong. Like, as far as I'm aware, there is no classical source where Odysseus is specifically given a vision that if he does not kill Astyanax, the boy will grow up to slaughter more innocent people. Hell, even in Epic, that's not the case -- Zeus is telling Odysseus that Astyanax will take revenge on Odysseus specifically if he's not killed, not that Astyanax will kill just a bunch of innocent people.

But in Classical and pre-Classical Greece? The closest thing we have to this is Seneca's Trojan Women, where Calchas says that Astyanax needs to be sacrificed for the Achaean fleets to have favourable winds on their journey home. In most other versions of the tale, the murder is either precautionary (a similar reasoning to your vision explanation, but without divine intervention), or done in passion, because again, during the Sack of Troy, the Achaeans were killing basically everyone.

I think here is a good point to mention that Odysseus doesn't always kill Astyanax. Even within the Epic Cycle, there's two different versions -- in Iloupersis, Odysseus is indeed the one to throw Astyanax onto the rocks, but in the Little Iliad, Achilles's son Neoptolemus (also known as Pyrrhus), is the one to do it. In fact, in the possibly funniest version of the story, once Astyanax is dead, Neoptolemus uses the baby's body as a club with which to kill Priam.

This point here, I think, is just one of the many ways in which you can't declare a clear canon for the characters of the Trojan Saga. Even what we would consider the original stories don't always line up with one another.

He was young, bold, confident, and although said to be one of the wisest men there was (which is true) he too had to grow and mature out of his own hubris.

This is wild to me, especially the idea that Odysseus is 'young.' The Trojan War lasted a decade, and Odysseus can be pretty reasonably be assumed to have been an adult when the war began. He was old enough to be a reasonable suitor for Penelope, to whom he was betrothed around the same time as Menelaus was betrothed to Helen. Contrast this to Achilles, who was not one of Helen's suitors, presumably because he was too young.

Now, this isn't a perfect metric by which to judge age. Antilochus appears to be reasonably young in the Iliad, and both he and Patroclus were noted by multiple sources to have been suitors of Helen. However, it does give us a general age, at least insofar as any Greek hero can be said to have an understandable age and timeline.

When Odysseus goaded Polyphemus, he was likely well into his thirties, if not his forties. He stole Polyphemus's sheep and drugged his wine, and after the fact portrayed the Cyclops, who had no reason to even know what xenia was (he's described as barbaric, which implies foreignness to Greek culture), as a monster for refusing xenia and attacking someone who was basically a thief. He blinded and tricked Polyphemus, and then bragged about it despite his crew begging him not to, and despite his speech literally cluing Polyphemus in to where he was so he could throw rocks at him. It was a moment of weakness, to be sure, but this moment of weakness isn't atypical for him. The only thing unique about Polyphemus's story is that it was the first time somebody was able to punish him for his actions.

And now, a lighting round.

Odysseus's friend Ajax the greater killed himself after Odysseus defeated him for the armor of Achilles

Ajax the Greater was Achilles's cousin, and therefore had a stronger claim to the armour than Odysseus did. I haven't read Ajax yet (utter shame since that's my cat's name), but from what I recall, the main issue here was one of pride, and Odysseus's seeming lack of care for Ajax's personal honour.

Odysseus didn't take that well and he cleverly placed a forged letter and gold in Palamedes tent and got him framed for treason, and Palamedes was stoned to death

Odysseus was trying to get out of a blood oath that he called for. His trying to get out of the Trojan War is very funny but it is a problem that he was responsible for.

He was kind respectful to his people, he didn't care what status you were or where you came from

He beat Thersites with a club for speaking out of turn. Thersites was an asshole, but the way Odysseus is written in the Iliad is pretty similarly to the rest of the men, and in the Odyssey he has been stuck at sea for a decade and is rarely in the position of power.

And with happened to Ithaca when he left it, it also showed how much the world did not deserve that kindness, but it certainly needed it.

I would argue that a lot of the societal problems inherent to Ithaca in the Odyssey are probably related to the fact that the Trojan War more or less killed an entire generation of Ithacan men. None of the suitors of Penelope can be reasonably believed to be over maybe 35, or else they would have gone to war with Odysseus. Part of the reason everyone in Ithaca is pissed off at Odysseus by the end of the Odyssey is because he killed off an entire generation of noblemen, and that's kind of going to make people wary of you, even when you are the rightful king!

In Summary:

I love Odysseus. He's been one of my favourite literary characters for...god, over a decade at this point, ever since I first read the Odyssey in school. He is a shining testament of humanity and its willingness to survive, but I do not believe that the core of his personality is his kind heart.

The core of Odysseus is his will to survive. He is a man of twists, a complicated man -- polytropos. There is a school of thought that posits that his stories in Books 9-12 of the Odyssey are all him lying, and he just fucked up on his own measure. There is a school of thought that paints him as an irredeemable villain. (That school is called the Romans.)

Odysseus has never been simple, and he never will be simple, and I think it's a huge disservice to his character to reduce him to simply being kind. He's not. He's complicated and violent, a king and a pauper and everything in between. He is a man of contradictions, and how you view him and how I view him are, at the end of the day, equally valid readings of one of the most well-known characters in the entirety of Western literature. And that's not a bad thing.

OKAY I WAS NOT EXPECTING PEOPLE TO LIKE MY RESPONSE TO THE REPOST AND I APPRECIATE IT A LOT 😭😭

Now onto what I want to say, it's about what I stated earlier. There is something I would like to address that I noticed a bit after spending some time in the greek mythology whirlpool of wonderful chaos. Although there really aren't that many, I still want to address how there are people out there who seem to get very confused about Odysseus's character and what's what, and then accidentally say things that never actually happened with his character and then it leaves everyone upset and embarrassed which sucks because it's not really anyone's fault, and not many people are actually explaining it all, so that's what I'm going to do here to hopefully save some people from having to go through everything. I hope this doesn't get buried in the Tumblr algorithm as I'm honestly not doing this for likes or praise or any of that, I really just want this to get out there and help others get a better grasp of it all so everyone can enjoy their greek mythology fun in peace and maybe even help others get into the fun as well! ^^

First off I have to state this:

The only canon Odysseus is in Homer's Odyssey and Homer's Iliad, he was the creator of the character and all the characters within both book series. If the one you are reading isn't authored by Homer then it is an iteration therefore it is not canon to the actual story.

Now with that being said, and before I go any further, this doesn't mean you shouldn't read the different iterations or modern takes on the character, I mean why else do you think aus and fanfiction are a thing as well? (And ones created for this story as well because this fanbase is LIVELY) That's basically exactly what this all is except it's about an ancient story. People create different versions, spread different information which is either not what happened in the canon story or completely taken out of context. And these things happen, it's a story all the way back in ancient times, games like telephone are bound to happen and that's okay, no one should be at eachother's throats about it as it's out of people's control and happens with many and I mean many modern shows and stories as well.

But what I do suggest is just applying basic principles to it like we do now, such as:

*If you read an iteration of the story and you mention something from it, make sure you state it's from an iteration so that way people won't get confused with the actual story

*You don't have to read all books of Homer's Odyssey and the Iliad, but when you hear something from it you should do a quick look up about it to make sure you have all the context and that it was from Homer's story and not an iteration.

*Don't assume anything and make a comment about it immediately. I am sure every single person here did the same about something regarding Homer's Odyssey and Iliad at some point, I can almost guarantee it. If not then great for them ^^. But the point is, if you jump to assumptions and misinterpret something then make a claim about it, unfortunately the results don't turn out in your favor. So it's best to do your own research on it first before taking what is said as fact.

Basically just do your own research first before jumping to any conclusions, besides learning more about something can you discover something you may really enjoy that you haven't thought about before! :D

Now, onto the real elephant in the room, which is Odysseus's character. And we are going to be talking about Odysseus's character in Homer's Odyssey and Homer's Iliad and hopefully this helps to clear some things up for those that both aren't looking to get into the whole story and for those who are, so here we go! ^^

"Odysseus cheated on his wife! He committed Adultery!" : This is the biggest one that I have heard, and it is in fact false. Odysseus is unfortunately a major victim of SA both from Circe and Calypso, and while Circe's was more subtle, Calypso's wasn't as she kept him there for seven years. Odysseus was one of the few men in greek mythology who was 100% loyal and faithful to his wife till the very end and beyond. He didn't want any other woman, he wanted Penelope. He fought for Penelope, he loved Penelope and no one else.

"Odysseus committed mass murder and killed a bunch of people!": If you are talking about what happened with the Trojan horse then yes, you are correct, however this is often taken out of context. The truth of the matter is that is just how war is. During the fight they already lost Achilles (basically their version of a superhero) in battle, and Odysseus being the advisor had to weigh out the options between the two which is either continue as is and risk losing more lives or create the horse and not risk as many lives. It was a desperation move, and all of it was thrown onto Odysseus to take charge, but the situation needed to be done or no one would make it back home alive.

"Didn't he literally throw and kill a baby? What's up with that?": Yes but again, taken out of context, Odysseus was given a vision that the baby would grow older and kill a bunch of innocent people, so he had to make the choice whether he should kill the baby or not. Zeus was standing there like "Yeet the baby, Odysseus, yeet the child." And Odysseus, not wanting anyone he cared for to die, killed the child. It was a tough choice that he was faced with, as it would be for anyone in his shoes.

"Wasn't he overconfident and got in trouble a lot? Didn't his pride cause him to reveal his name to the Cyclops? He really must not be a good person." : Yes for the first part but no for the second part, he was overconfident and that would sometimes get him into trouble, like with the Cyclops. He was young, bold, confident, and although said to be one of the wisest men there was (which is true) he too had to grow and mature out of his own hubris. He wasn't perfect, and neither are we, he made mistakes but nothing outlandish that made him bad, it just showed that he was human and had done his own mistakes in life, just like we have.

There are many other things as well, Odysseus killed one of the kings on the Trojan side of war and took his horses but he did that because he knew one of the only ways they could stand a chance in the war is getting those horses. Odysseus's friend Ajax the greater killed himself after Odysseus defeated him for the armor of Achilles, however what happened after that was none of Odysseus's fault, as Athena decided to be the one to drive Ajax the greater mad and it caused him to kill the sheep and then himself afterwards out of shame. Odysseus's even tried pleading for forgiveness from him in the underworld (even though none of it was his fault) but Ajax the greater refused to acknowledge him and walked off. Then you have Palamedes, in Homer's Odyssey he was sent to bring Odysseus to war, so he decided to put Odysseus's infant son in front of his plow which caused Odysseus to swerve out of the way, and Odysseus was then forced to go to war to protect his son which then later caused all of these things to happen throughout both stories. Odysseus didn't take that well and he cleverly placed a forged letter and gold in Palamedes tent and got him framed for treason, and Palamedes was stoned to death (and honestly he had that coming)

Now, does any of this mean I want you to go and do what Odysseus did? No, please for the love of god please don't. What all of this does mean though, is that Odysseus was not a bad person, but instead a good guy put in some of the worse positions and situations possible surrounded by people who spoke with their fists rather than their heart. In fact, despite his "I'm so balling right now" personality causing him to get into trouble, he was one of the kindest, wisest, loyal and empathetic people you could meet back then which was incredibly rare back in those times. He went to literal hell and back for 20 years just to get to his family again, he stuck by his men despite them screwing things up multiple times over, same situation was with Agamemnon and Achilles as well, so he kind up to a fault. He was kind respectful to his people, he didn't care what status you were or where you came from, you were treated with respect and kindness all the same, and that inspired one of his workers to be the same when he invited a certain beggar in his home, and that act of kindness spread through the heart of Ithaca as a whole, but when he left it was all gone. To have that much of an impact on people because of kindness just shows how good of a person he really was. And with happened to Ithaca when he left it, it also showed how much the world did not deserve that kindness, but it certainly needed it.

So in conclusion, yes Odysseus made mistakes, and he was by no means perfect, but he shouldn't be seen as perfect or expected to be perfect. He is a really good guy dealing with getting screwed over by literally everyone around him. He made mistakes, he broke down, he fell at times, but he got back up, never lost his kind heart or his true self, and in the end made it back to his family and got a happy ending. Odysseus was and always will be the embodiment of what it truly means to be a human being going throw the troubles of life, what if feels like to go through it and how it affects certain actions you take, and to stay true to your heart no matter what, and overall to never give up. And I hope those who are out there who hate his character due to misinformation are able to see his character for what he is rather than what others make him out to be.

WOW THAT WAS A LOT OF WORDS, I was not expecting to type that much but I really needed to get this out there. I hope all you greek geeks have a lovely day and night and I'll see you next time! ^^

I gotta take a nap after all of that ^^"

[dykeseinfeld]

u asked someone to remind you to post about your pjo dual protagonist thalia/bianca au and i am SO intrigued by this idea please say more

anon asked: hey queen hope your homework went good yesterday 🌸…now what were you saying about thalia and bianca 😳 ?

ok y’all i’m here...the moment almost none of y’all have been waiting for....bianca/thalia protagonists with alternating pov’s au

warning it’s kind of super long and may or may not read like a 2nd grader’s semi-coherent game of pretend so under the cut it goes!

so the main things you need to know about this au are 1. thalia survives and 2. annabeth’s + luke’s ages are a lil diff bc canon is my sandbox 3. i can’t decide if percy exists in this au or not (maybe y’all can help me decide?)

so the first book:

would start a few months after grover brought thalia (12), luke (13), and annabeth (10, not 7)  to camp half blood. they were chased by monsters sent by hades on the way, and thalia almost didn’t survive, but ultimately she got lucky and managed to send a bolt of lightning through her spear for the first time and they made it into camp

it’s been some time so annabeth is happy as a clam in the athena cabin doing her 10-year-old-with-severe-mommy-issues thing and luke is actually pretty popular with the hermes cabin bc he actually Met Their Dad Holy Shit and also he’s getting pretty good with a sword

at the same time, thalia is alone in the zeus cabin. everyone has been freaking out bc they all saw the huge bolt of lightning that incinerated a couple hellhounds as they made their grand entrance and What The Fuck Child Of The Big Three???

she’s also further isolated because chiron will take her for private training sessions sometimes, since she is clearly really powerful already and also Hades Himself was trying to kill her (chiron told her the reason was the big three’s pledge not to have kids, and maybe about the great prophecy? if he tells her that then she’s sworn to secrecy)

once grover leaves on another protector assignment, thalia mostly hangs out with luke, and annabeth. luke + annabeth both will try to eat meals with her at the zeus table but annabeth doesn’t want to get in trouble and luke is genuinely making friends in the hermes cabin so thalia will feel bad sometimes and send him back

kronos, seeing this bitter isolated child of the big three’s dreams: it’s free real estate

MEANWHILE

hades is Pissed that thalia survived and zeus got to break their oath And get the glory of a prophecy child

so he sends someone to take bianca (12) and nico (10) out of the lotus hotel and casino a little early.

grover is still their protector, but since the Stirring hasn’t begun in earnest yet and hades is lowkey determined to keep them safe, they make it back to camp half blood with no escort/incident

bianca + nico are put into the hermes cabin, and luke kinda takes them under his wing bc while he’s not bitter he still needs therapy bc this 14 year old has never met a pre-teen he couldn’t try to parent

luke introduces nico and annabeth since they’re the same age and they become really good friends!! she Loves mythomagic and he thinks her dagger is super cool and they’re both just really excited about camp <3

bianca is more reserved and resistant to the whole thing, and she wanders around alone exploring and runs into thalia in the zeus cabin

at this first meeting they get into a bit of a fight bc bianca is still in shock/denial about the gods being real, but thalia at this point has zero patience for this

anyway after that and maybe another scuffle during capture the flag or something they hit it off and become best friends in the way girls can, especially bonding over how they’ve both had to take on raising annabeth and nico basically on their own at the age of 12

~QUEST TIME~

thalia is given a quest for [unspecific reason] and chooses bianca and luke, they go off leaving annabeth and nico frustrated at home

quest hijinks etc, bianca is trying to figure out her parentage + her weird mysterious powers? and thalia is arguing with luke because he’s settling into camp/hero life really well actually but she’s getting progressively angrier with the gods for trying to kill her and also keeps getting dreams from kronos and doesn’t get why he doesn’t seem to remember all of the shit that the gods have put him through

bianca + thalia have las-vegas-style-heart-to-hearts where thalia shares her tragic backstory about her mother and her brother and how hades tried to kill her and even about the great prophecy and how she’s trying on this quest bc of that and her dad but at the same time these dreams are making her suspicious that he might’ve been responsible for her mom’s death.

bianca then shares her own stuff, about how terrified she was being on her own with nico having to protect him but also not remembering most of her childhood and not remembering her parents or how she ended up in the care of this lawyer and just the absolute mindfuckery that her memories/past are

luke is asleep in those scenes i guess lol 🧍‍♂️

anyway eventually they finish their quest in this massive climactic battle where bianca discovers her powers in a huge-showy-”i’m the ghost prince”-way and is formally claimed by hades which thalia sees as this Massive Betrayal obviously and bianca is horrified too because she knows what hades did to thalia but at the same time she’s just so happy to finally understand at least part of her past

thalia just reaches a breaking point though because everyone around her just doesn’t understand her anger and just when she thought she had found another sympathetic person who understood what she was going through she joins hades??? no. no fucking way. kronos reveals that he’s the one who has been sending her dreams, prob by sending some messenger who he possesses or smthing and when he offers thalia the chance to join him? she does (dun dun dun)

main beats of the rest of the series:

thalia and bianca on opposite sides of the war training to be the prophecy child, they come together a Lot and have like melodramatic fight scenes where they talk out their anger and try to get the other to join them bc they don’t want to kill each other

luke is extremely conflicted/betrayed and there’s a titan’s curse moment prob towards the end of the third book where they’re fighting and thalia is trying to get her to go with him but here he actually does go to join her (gasp!!) and is evil for at least one book but his heart’s not in it and he goes back to the good side eventually

by the point of luke’s betrayal, annabeth and nico are growing and developing and old enough to go on quests w bianca and by the last book they’re a main trio of sorts and their hypothetical character development is already making me emotional

there’s just a lot of general sexiness with foils and inner conflicts and bianca doesn’t even want to be the prophecy child but she needs to for the fate of the world and bianca is so angry at thalia bc thalia is a daughter of zeus and could control her powers and is perfect and just meant to be the prophecy kid, not some daughter of hades who they didn’t even have a cabin for before

hm maybe by either the last or second-to-last book thalia + bianca are close to reconciling or at least their interests are aligned for the moment and they read the text of the prophecy together and things go Wild bc they both think “single choice shall end his days” either is about luke or nico and it turns up the gas to their fighting both of them care about both of them and yeah

and then i can’t decide if there’s romantic arcs at all but if there were it would go like this:

just a dash of thaluke where at first it was luke having a one-sided crush but thalia misses him a Lot after she goes to kronos and wonders if it’s that she misses him or if it’s something More until to get him to defect there’s like a melodramatic moment in the fight where thalia kisses him and they go off to be Evil Together but it ends bc luke doesn’t believe in the cause and only joined her in hopes of getting thalia back to his side

once luke leaves/is kicked out thalia realizes that she didn’t love luke she just wanted a family and also in the second half of the series she realizes she’s a lesbian as a parallel to her redemption arc

bianca meanwhile is unconcerned w romance until she has her botl-hoe-moment where within one book she 1. runs into the hunters on a quest and has a thing with zoe nightshade who tries to get her to join plus tells her about that time she met thalia, 2. she goes to calypso’s island and falls in love w her in the moonlight or w/e and has her what-if moment, and 3. when they meet up that book thalia somehow knew abt zoe + calypso and seems almost angrier abt them  than the war?? weird bc bianca knows that thalia is Totally Straight right??

my main point is that bianca/thalia is our friends-to-enemies-to-lovers endgame thank you i will take my pulitzer now

[yenafmd]

sweet like...  — a nam yena playlist

a combination of sexy and fun songs that i think would fit absolutely amazing into calypso’s discography, elevating their already flawless discography to the next tier. the general trend with these songs is just, 2nd gen ggs doing hot girl shit, the girlies these days don’t do it anymore though there is a layer of less out-there fun songs for the girls to party to in this summer too. i just think yena would absolutely eat all of these songs and in some very far parallel universe she would make them her bitch.

i. love dive - ive // ii. poison - secret // iii. joker - dalshabet // iv. no more - uni.t // v. apple pie - fiestar // vi. dr. feel goed - rania // vii. crying - stellar // viii. chewy - d.holic // ix. i (knew it) - sonamoo // x. heart attack - aoa

love dive - ive

this one is probably the biggest deviation from the general tone of the playlist but since the very first second i heard this song... nam yena core. i just think that like some variation of the world yena would be wonyoung levels of 4th gen it girl you know? they just have the exact same levels of iconic. i don’t know love dive is glamour and fun and youthful and i think it fits yena’s vibe and sound really well and if calypso’s was less... calypso (and had debuted more than a decade later) i think this would be a really good direction for them to go in.

poison - secret

the retro song vibe is nothing something i necesarily associate with yena. she just doesn’t suit old glamour very well. she kinda has that face that could never be cast in a period drama cuz this is the face of a woman that knows what an iphone looks like ya know? and also idk yena spends so rejecting tradition and old school things. but poison? she would look so good in that, ugh, she’d just sell the whole concept so well and i think she’d have a lot of fun with it. we all know yena sells that vixen vibe.

joker - dalshabet

a song that’s literally a dick joke? oh come on now! this is made for yena! once in a very far history this was actually part of calypso-adjacent’s discography (rest in piece gal.actic, never forgotten). but yeah this is just raw sex appeal in a way that calypso has dabbled in ocassionally and i think this would be so fun to lean into that and yena would really be feeling her hottest and her sexiest.

no more - uni.t

these girlies... they deserved better, so so so so much better. and i think no more would blend in super well with calypso’s discography? combining their sexier aspects and their (future) summer queens reputation. just something for the girls to party with during the summer time. an underrated banger too, which is also perfectly suitable for calypso. i also can’t stop thinking ab that fancam of uni.t running for their lives behind that camera to get in position, i would love to see yena do that hgdkjfg.

apple pie - fiestar

i think this is the perfect blend of like... quirky and sexy to perhaps suit the more melody day-style of calypso that isn’t appreciated enough but god damn it will i make sure that is appreciated. could yena bake an apple pie without blowing up a kitchen? no dear lord of course not but she would still look hot pretending to do it and isn’t that what really matters? yes it is! i just think she would look hot in a lil apron being an icon!

dr. feel good - rania

this one, she’s one for the history books. ngl this one is largely just for how damn iconic it would be. we love shamelessly sexy song and hot girls in latex fits. i think most of yena‘s enjoyment would genuinely come from the shock factor of the song and i think that is valid. truly, yena’s fun factor is just a scale of how likely that something she will do will give her mom an aneurysm. and oh boy will this song take care of that.

crying - stellar

no but like, forget rollin’, this is the best summer song ever made, no one else is ever topping this. where is her chart reversal? WHERE IS IT? no yeah i think this would be so cute and fun for calypso, just on a more wholesome note than most of their releases? i just have this mental image of how fun this mv would be for all of calypso to film together and have fun playing around with. ...someone bring me calypso members ok please.

chewy - d.holic

the five dollars and a dream music video of this playlist. very much just pure sexual innuendo fun, shameless women embracing their sexuality and feeling good about that i think they honestly deserve. i don’t know i love the concept of yena getting to embrace feeling hot while having fun doing it? i think that’s super important to her. let! yena! have! fun! and! shake! her! ass! while! doing! it!

i (knew it) - sonamoo 

another curveball on this playlist. not very summer-y nor very sexy but idk it has like, a vibe. i think yena sells dramatic heartbreak anthem vibes very well (when after we ride drops, something will shift in the universe, i can feel it). i don’t know this song is more of... it’s an odd one out? but it would be a very nice, fresh take to see calypso take? something like that is sound and vibe wise something i’d like to see yena try, i think she’d enjoy something more lowkey.

heart attack - aoa

no but the original bimbo anthem. yena playing sports gotta be one of my favorit genre’s. i want to see her butcher lacrosse and then do her silly little dance and point at her boobs! the world would be a better place. i love yena being fun and actually showing that on stage and i don’t get to have that very much as yena tends to be very yes queen give us nothing. with this song i can genuinely see her enjoy herself.

[wizardysseus]

bored, bored, bored to tears of how any post about odysseus and penelope draws every chucklefuck who vaguely remembers high school english class out of the woodwork to scream that odysseus cheated on his wife and penelope deserves so much better

it’s easy to criticize odysseus! almost anything he’s done is on the table, including but not limited to ritual human sacrifice, sacking a city, throwing a child off a wall, ordering the deaths of slave women, keeping secrets from his crew and getting them killed accidentally, straight-up murder, and generally lying and swindling everywhere he goes. i happen to like him, which i expect backlash for, because i’ve been in english classes ever. and the most common talking point is........ not any of these; it’s that he cheated. even by people who should know better. anyone with a classics degree could spot the parallels between odysseus in book 5 of the odyssey and the captive trojan women in the iliad, but madeline miller can just call him a cheater and even i'm like “well. she's not the only one,” because it's so normalized.

so, so. i don’t really expect anyone to read this, mainly because the people who would be interested have already heard everything i’m about to say via various private messages, but i wanted to write about the odyssey, and how odysseus has sex with two women who aren’t his wife, circe and calypso. (as well as flirting delicately with nausicaa, which, god, isn’t in the same category at all. i did once read a post accusing odysseus of “marrying a princess,” but it also said he did cannibalism, so.)

i’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about cheating in a modern context vs an ancient one, because i’m not a professional classicist. my impression from reading homer and other greek-myth-based literature like the oresteia is that there wasn’t an expectation in ancient/mythological greece for men to be faithful to their wives (see: how almost every king in the iliad has a concubine). this is just a context clue; another is that odysseus tells penelope about both circe and calypso when they reunite, which ought to indicate that however you read what was going on, they didn’t view it as a dealbreaker. 

but i do have my own read on what’s going on --- i wrote a post about calypso and book 5 here (tw for rape), and the long and short of it is that odysseus does not want to be there, and that this is obvious not only from the bent of the story (which all hangs together on the fact that odysseus is trying to get home) but also from the text. so when calypso keeps him there, “unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing,” that’s rape. like... there are other myths i imagine people get their ideas from, but i just don’t think that part of the odyssey has enough ambiguity to lend much support to the cheating interpretation.

consent with the circe encounter is more complicated, on multiple levels. he sleeps with her primarily because hermes tells him not to refuse her if he wants to see his crew again. at that point, it’s a kind of contractual arrangement: he sleeps with circe and his men are returned to him. sex is an act primarily to keep himself and his men safe. on the other hand, staying with her for a year afterward is apparently willing --- in contrast to calypso, who only swears an oath not to harm him when she's about to set him free, circe swears one from the start. his men are the ones who prompt him to get moving again. i don’t particularly like the term dubcon, but if it ever applies, i would say it’s here.

more than anything, what makes it hard (for me, at least) to assume good faith when people come at odysseus/penelope with the cheating argument is that they’re never just talking about circe. (see, again, madeline miller’s “at least twice” comment), and they refuse to consider that in neither encounter is odysseus in the position of power. 

like, you know, penelope is also not in a position of power with respect to the suitors.

people tend to read odysseus' faithfulness vs penelope's as if that is the central contrast between them. and yes, penelope’s virtue is a huge source of anxiety in the odyssey, and yes, there are double standards, and yes, productive scholarship can come from examining that. i get it. but it isn’t the only or necessarily most interesting way to read the odyssey.

the odyssey is about a lot of things. definitely some of those things are marital fidelity and patriarchy. but one of the other things, for example, is hospitality, and what it means to be a bad host or a bad guest. penelope is at the mercy of bad, powerful guests. odysseus is at the mercy of bad, powerful hosts.

which brings me to what penelope “deserves.” because before you can make that argument, you have to be able to establish her character and what their relationship is based on. and the odyssey draws more attention to the likenesses between them than the differences. they share the epithet “wise.” they’re both full of tricks and lies. when penelope tells the suitors that she’ll pick whoever gives her the most gifts, odysseus hears and laughs to himself about her cleverness (book 18). penelope is the only person besides athena to successfully lie to him (book 23). they react with the same distrust and outward coldness while they test one another. they cry about the same things. they know each other through the same signs.

why is the question what penelope deserves? rooting for penelope isn’t rooting against odysseus; they’re very similar and well-matched people. @whatshouldwecallhomer has a couple of great posts (more concise than mine) on this subject, and particularly about odysseus and penelope’s likemindedness, here and here. ultimately, “deserves” isn’t the point. what penelope wants and values is the point.

but even if you disagree about any or all of this, please consider: you are not the first person ever to realize that odysseus had sex with other women. you’re not gonna be the one to break the news to an odysseus/penelope fan that he’s a bad person. we know. also, don’t be fucking rude on other people’s posts and artwork. “this is nice! if only i didn’t hate odysseus!” is not the compliment you think it is.

[katerinaaqu]

It is! Oftentimes.

-Yeah... Perhps that is true but I am not sur eanymore. I know he deleated the songs on Ismarus slaughter but yeah

-Yes perhaps it is unfair of me to take it out on you. It is just that I have answered this question more times than what I can count. I take that back. I am annoyed in general by this but yes it is unfair to take that out on you. Hahahaha fair enough true true. Like I said I take that back.

-To be fair I understand why and the example is quite blunt I understand but this is literally the level of Iconic scenes like Sirens or Circe are. Remove the sirens experience and you have a story where the shoe of Cinderella is no longer a thing and Cinderellla is recognized by something else instead.

-Clearly, I suppose. To me "retelling" is exactly what the word says "re tell a story". The story is there. The adittions to the story would be either fill in the gaps or add some piece of information that is part of the research. At least this is how I usually work on my retellings as well. I actually posted a small analysis as an example on how I usually do the stories

I am not saying if my work is a bad or good retelling (that is in the eye of the beholder). I am just saying that in my mind a retelling is not something that aims to change everything; is something that retells the story in the present potentially making some changes to make it easier to the target audience but all in all the basic plot is respected and followed, otherwise like I said is not retelling to me, just a "loosely based on" idea. I definitely agree to that I am not sure either what better word one can use at that case! Hahaha

-I did hear that from fans as well. Like I said there is nothing wrong with liking it especially since you are clearly also aware of the differences. It just doesn't vibe with me

-I agree to the first one. Yes if a story is said to be a retelling or an adaptation I myself expect it to be accurate. But at the same time I also get annoyed becase these stories had more than enough of unfaithful adaptations as well which again makes me a bit sad as well Generally I dslike this "fanom logic". On one hand it is great that people get dedicated and like something, on the other it becomes so hard to control these things and find truth from lie and imagination from fact sometimes. Indeed they are. I found most of them very nice. One or two again didn't vibe with me like "Suffering" but they were personal preferences (plus again linked to that iconic moment that got twisted hahaha)

-Oh yes I do find very good converstions on the matter for sure. Well call me crazy but again I think the OG Odyssey has as much video game logic as it can't be more. Like Odysseus slaughters Ismarus but saves Maron, Maron gives him the godly wine, Odysseus uses that godly wine to get Polyphemus drunk. The bag of winds needs not to be opened it is opened so the people move from one place to another. To defeat the witch you have to pay the price and sell yourself to her. You go to the underworld with stuff that she gives you and slay a sheep and not let others go to drink till Tiresias arrives. Tiresias gives a prophecy. To go through Skylla you try to fight but ultimatey you pay the price. To save yourself from Charybdis you need to grab on the tree the witch told you about etc. Not all video games have boss fights every five meters and I could absolutely see Odyssey as an open world video game already from the OG material. But maybe that is just me.

-Absolutely that is a positive outcome from it if more people get to read the original.

New Epic saga and it's horrible... to give you an idea, Odysseus fought Poseidon, stole his trident and made him beg for mercy

hmmm a god begging a mortal for mercy is not exactly on par with Greek religion and stories. How did that scene made it into the final version?

[michaelyew]

In an adaptation/rewrite of tlo I have some changes I'd like to make. Aside from the obvious. And I really like this book, it's my favourite from the main series, but it needs some updating!

**********

Firstly in order to fix The Last Olympian we need to fix some things in The Battle of The Labyrinth.

I want Beckendorf to have a bigger role in this book. He was introduced in the second book, but here is where he could really shine as a son of Hephaestus This whole quest is about his dad! He should be able to get more screen time in this story so that we can care about him on his own merits instead of as one of Percy's friends or the tragic love interest. For that, I think he should be a part of the questing trio. 

"But what about Grover!"

What about Grover? He has his own reasons for going into the labyrinth, he doesn't need permission from Chiron to look for Pan. He's a smart boy with some brains, he can see the maze as a lead and go in after them on his own. This also creates the same conundrum of Threes that came up in the book before, which we'll come back to later. Percy can intrust Tyson's care to one of the other demigods set up to be his friend in TLO: Michael Yew to establish their friendship and trust, Lee Fletcher to give him some purpose besides dying, the Stolls to once again affirm that the Hermes cabin takes on responsibility for other campers, ect. When Tyson later sneaks off into the Labyrinth after Percy, this sets up a later conflict that establishes whatever choice more. This also fixes something else that's always bothered me, which is that it kind of felt that Percy only truly accepted Tyson once he showed how useful he was. Plus he always seemed to feel responsible for him. By having Percy take the time to make sure Tyson is being taken care of outside of his talents, that establishes more concretely how much Percy cares about him as a brother without painting him as a burden.  

So Charlie goes on this quest and sticks it through to the forges. Grover in this version still goes off with Tyson for that sweet sweet character development, but the questing party stays at three. It's here that the parallels set in, because in being burned alive by the volcano and being yeeted to Calypso, Percy is not only saving Annabeth but also Charlie. Saving him from certain death by explosion and flame. It does have the unfortunate side effect of there being TWO incidents of Percabeth having emotional kisses in front of their friends, but we can fix this by having Charlie fight a Telkinhein or something it's fine. Beckendorf drops out of the main story from here to make way for Rachel but he still has one good scene of protecting camp at the end. Plus, I want him to be present when Amnabeth tells Hera she only cares about perfect families and I want him there to defend his dad. 

So for those counting that makes three counts of narrative consistency stacked against Charlie's life (which makes a lot more sense than just killing him off because you needed a martyr). With this we go into The Last Olympian. 

I wouldn't change much about the plot line from here on out. We have the setup of Charlie returning the favour to Percy by saving his life, we get some sweet last scenes of him being a demigod and a hero, the setup to TLO is bomb and it's fine. I'd like more scenes with Michael because if you're gonna set a character up to be front and center then kill him off you could at least give him more than 35 lines.

What I do want to make a point of here though is that Percy lives in BoTL. What happens to Beckendorf specifically from that moment doesn't actually matter so long as it makes a big enough impact on Selina to drive her to reach the conclusions that she does. He could live or die or be yeeted to Calypso, lose a limb or two, it doesn't matter so long as he's put down for the count for the rest of the book. Percy lived, and the rule of threes doesn't actually make an impact again outside of Bianca's death (because if it did someone should have died in Sea of Monsters but they didn't). So I like to think he lives, but I'd be more ok with him dying in this scenario than I was in canon.

However on to Selina, who still needs to die. And it's at this point that I will make people angry by saying that I think Charlie's impact on her is much more meaningful if they were best friends instead of dating. I want a scene in the earlier books where this is established so that we know that they are close. And I want them to be friends because the point of Silena's ark should be that she hurt her friends and she feels awful about putting them in danger and got them killed, not that she's changing herself for a man (or dying for one that's possibly still alive). I just think this would be much more powerful if romance wasn't the main emotion involved. 

That being said I want her to be 50% gayer for Clarisse because we were given Patroclus and Achilles parallels with girls and by GD they will be gay. I will stand for nothing less. I want them to have a relationship that's established at the end of BoTL in the background and I want it officiated in TLO because if you're going to compare them to one of the great mythic queer relationships of antiquity then they WILL BE QUEER. 

Again it would be neat if Michael lived because the alternative is that Percy killed his friend and then never talked about it again and it's never brought up again and it just exists as a thing everyone quietly knows until he snaps in Tartarus. Which I'm not saying that having that conversation instead wouldn't be cool, but the ending kiss is very iconic and I don't think that strong of a tone shift could work. 

Now I want Ethan to live not because I'm bitter and not because almost every person of colour dies in the main series but for one very important reason. Through the entire series, every time we see him, Ethan never actually did anything wrong. He was forced to fight in the arena by Luke, he didn't directly hurt or kill anyone, in fact he's never actually aggressive in any of his later appearances. Yeah he joined Khronos, sure, but it's not like he had any other options. That was his tragedy. Ethan was a son of a minor goddess, a goddess usually seen as evil by other demigods to boot, who was neglected and mistreated by the place that was meant to keep him safe. He had to join Luke because the alternative was being killed or recruited anyway. And he didn't deserve to die for it, the price of his redemption was never that steep. It makes much more sense for Ethan to return to camp and have a hand in rebuilding it with his own hands and making amends for the minor gods with his own power. His fatal flaw was the desire for justice at any means, him being killed when he's so close to freedom and respect doesn't jive with that.  

Additional notes: 

- The romantic subplot between Annabeth and Luke was creepy and we didn't need it. He was a big brother figure to her, that's enough betrayal drama on its own. 

- In general we need more canon ethnicities. In a TV adaptation this is easier obviously, but honestly we shouldn't have to assume things based on names or how little they're described. We should just get to know. 

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

Katabasis Patterns in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Or, in which I make use of my official Classics minor (and my unofficial film nerd minor) while ignoring my French major altogether.

Howdy, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of Extremely On My Bullshit!  Today we’re going to talk at length about how the trip to Davy Jones’ Locker in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End borrows elements from various classical narratives containing a katabasis, or a trip to the Underworld.  This will be a slightly Tumblr-ified version of an actual paper I wrote for my Classical Antiquity On Screen final.

Shoutout to this post by @charlesdances, which allowed me to infodump about Hades/Persephone parallels in Barbossa and Elizabeth’s relationship across the trilogy, and to @aye-tortuga for requesting this longer post, which I teased at the end of the aforementioned meta.

Right then, let’s get started!  Under a cut to spare your dashes from long post made longer still by screencaps and works cited (yep, it’s that kind of meta).  For the purposes of this meta, only the first three Pirates films will be considered canon as the later sequels contradicted elements of the established lore.

I touched on this in the first paragraph, but I’ll begin by defining two words which will appear throughout this meta: katabasis and anabasis.  Katabasis and anabasis are Ancient Greek terms which refer to “that narrative . . . that portrays the hero’s descent into, and ascent from, the underworld—the journey to hell” (Holtsmark 25).  (If you want to get etymological about it, kata is down, ana is up, and baino comes from the verb meaning “to go [on foot].”)

This katabasis narrative takes place in the first act of At World’s End.  If you’ll recall, Dead Man’s Chest ended with Elizabeth chaining Jack to the Black Pearl’s mast: she knew the Kraken was only interested in Jack, so she sacrificed him to give herself and the others a chance to escape.  However, at the very end of the film, Elizabeth and the crew of the Pearl pledge to retrieve Jack from his resting place in Davy Jones’ Locker (the Underworld), and Tia Dalma offers both herself and Barbossa as guides to those “weird and haunted shores.”

So, after the cinematic fucking masterpiece that is the opening “Hoist the Colours” sequence (I also wrote a paper on that lol), we find ourselves in Singapore, where Elizabeth, Barbossa, and co. meet with the pirate lord Sao Feng in hopes of obtaining a map to the Locker.  The Singapore segment opens with Elizabeth piloting a lone craft along a murky river, evoking images of Charon with his ferryman’s pole:

As she poles the boat along, she sings a pirate tune with decidedly death-centric lyrics, tuning us in to the symbolism and themes at play: “Some men have died and some are alive / Others sail on the sea / With the keys to the cage and the Devil to pay / We lay to Fiddler’s Green.* / The bell has been raised from its watery grave / Hear its sepulchral tone . . .” (*A form of afterlife from maritime folklore)

At the end of this scene, we see something odd: Tia Dalma dressed as a blind organ grinder.

Plot-wise, this serves to divert the colonial soldiers’ attention from the pirates’ activity, but metaphorically, here she represents the blind seer Tiresias, whom Odysseus encounters when he first enters the realm of Hades (Odyssey 11.187-149).

When the pirates meet Sao Feng, the imagery starts to mix a little.  The filmmakers present Sao Feng in a somewhat Hades-esque (Hadean?) manner (steam, flames, and warm tones, with a skylight to imply subterranean depths):

However, while he is a powerful figure, he does not keep the Underworld itself (that duty falls to Jones); he merely keeps the knowledge of its entrance.  Barbossa attempts to gain this knowledge by presenting Sao Feng with a silver coin: a reminder of his duty as Pirate Lord as well as another Charon parallel.  Barbossa’s tactic does not work, but like in the previous scene, the imagery prepares viewers for the descent to come.

After getting Sao Feng’s navigational charts another way, the pirates’ journey to the underworld continues in earnest.  When Will expresses doubt about their path, Barbossa nearly quotes the Aeneid outright: “Trust me, young Master Turner: it’s not gettin’ to the Land of the Dead that’s the problem; it’s gettin’ back.”  This echoes the Cumaean Sibyl’s famous words to Aeneas: “Easy is the descent to [the Underworld]: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall one’s steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!” (Aeneid 6.126-129, tr. H.R. Fairclough).  Aeneas, guided by the Sibyl, passes through the mouth of a cave as part of his descent (“A deep cave there was, yawning wide and vast, of jagged rock” (Aeneid 6.237-238, cf. 6.262-263, tr. Fairclough)); likewise the pirates, guided by Barbossa and the charts, pass through a cave as they travel into stranger climes:

(Buuuut to be fair, this one is possibly just incidental or else more of a reference to Gustave Doré’s art for Rime of the Ancient Mariner rather than a reference to any specific classical text.  Doré’s artwork is used elsewhere in PotC, so it’s prolly just aesthetic.  Also caves are cool and the ultimate symbolic doorway.)

Next they come to a distant, shadowy realm with a misty sky and a sea tranquil enough to reflect starlight:

Again, this could also be incidental (and/or just a really cool homage to the sailing-to-the-moon scene in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)), but it does have a classical counterpart: “The ship took us to the deep, outermost Ocean / And the land of the Cimmerians, a people / Shrouded in mist.  The sun never shines there [...] Nor bathes them in the glow of its last golden rays; / Their wretched sky is always racked with night’s gloom” (Odyssey 11.14-19).

Both of these qualities—the cave and the darkness—fit Holtsmark’s observations on katabatic patterns: “The entryway to the other world is often conceived as lying in caves or grottoes or other openings in the earth’s crust into the nether regions, such as chasms or clefts. . . . The lower world is generally dank and dark, and the journey usually takes place at dusk or during the night” (Holtsmark 25).

At last, the pirates’ ship goes over the edge of an enormous waterfall and the screen fades to black.  Voices from the original Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride echo over the dark screen, ending with the ominous phrase “Dead men tell no tales.”  However, we shall soon see this proved very wrong, for the pirates encounter several souls with tales to tell.  As for these nameless voices, they may represent multitudes of “bloodless shades” (Metamorphoses 10.42) left to languish in other parts of the Locker/Underworld.

At this point, the narrative cuts from the pirate band to Jack in Davy Jones’ Locker.  Jack warrants special punishment from Jones for disobeying the rules of a bargain they’d once struck (*yells forever about the good parts of The Price of Freedom and the crimes wrought by the DMTNT retcons*).  Jack’s own special hell, recalling the punishments of Tantalus and Sisyphus (Odyssey 11.611-629), does include his beloved Black Pearl (explicitly stated, by Jack himself, to be a symbol of personal freedom), but now it rests completely beached upon an endless, windless salt flat.  Jack is utterly alone in this wasteland, save for a crew of his own imaginary doppelgängers.

(I’m gonna be real with y’all: I don’t care for this scene at all and it brings the narrative to a screeching halt, so let’s just take a moment to angstily reflect on how profoundly this affects Jack-the-character’s psyche/mental state for the rest of the film and move on to better things.  God bless RPers and fic writers who deal with this scene and its effects in a deliciously Watsonian way.)

Tia Dalma/Calypso’s crabs eventually come to bear both captain and ship back to the sea.  This could be seen as classical-type divine aid/favoritism (a semi-literal deus ex machina) or as awkward, oh-no-what-do-we-do-now screenwriting, take your pick.  The crabs take Jack and the Pearl directly to the rest of the pirates, who have washed up on the Locker’s desolate shore.  In a twist on the classical formula, Jack initially thinks his rescuers the dead ones as they recount their past experiences.  Additionally, Jack represents a sort of Eurydice figure as the dead-in-need-of-rescuing, while his Orpheus, Elizabeth, is ironically the one who “killed” him in the first place.  All the pirates (Jack included) finally set sail in the freed Black Pearl and attempt to escape this Underworld: the anabasis has begun.

On their way out, when the sky grows dark, the crew encounter scores upon scores of shades floating aimlessly upon the sea:

This parallels Odysseus’ experience (“Then out of Erebus / The souls of the dead gathered / . . . They drifted up to the pit from all sides / With an eerie cry, and pale fear seized me” (Odyssey 11.34-35, 40-41)) as well as that of Aeneas (“Hither rushed all the [ghostly] throng, streaming to the banks . . . They stood, pleading to be the first ferried across, and stretched out hands in yearning for the farther shore” (Aeneid 6.305, 313-314)).  Tia Dalma reveals that long ago, Calypso had charged Davy Jones “to ferry those who died at sea to the Other Side,” but he has since abandoned his duty, hence his current eldritch appearance.  This explicitly posits Jones as a failed psychopomp who has now left these souls stranded like the unburied men of the Odyssey and Aeneid.

The crew leave these shades in peace until Elizabeth spots a familiar face: her father.

At this point I must ask you to rewatch this scene so you can fully appreciate the parallels without me including a lengthy transcript in this already long post.

This scene comes directly from classical literature, as both Odysseus and Aeneas encountered dead parents in the Underworld.  Odysseus saw his mother: “. . . At once / She knew me, and her words reached me on wings: / ‘My child, how did you come to the undergloom / While you are still alive?  It is hard for the living / To reach these shores.  There are many rivers to cross, / Great bodies of water, nightmarish streams, / And Ocean itself, which cannot be crossed on foot / But only in a well-built ship’” (Odyssey 11.151-158).  Like Elizabeth, Odysseus had no prior knowledge of his mother’s passing (11.170).  His mother warned him of the dangerous situation which had sprung up during his absence, just as Weatherby Swann warned the pirates of the dangers of Davy Jones’ Heart.  Aeneas likewise encountered the spirit of his father, Anchises: “‘Have you come at last[?] . . . Over what lands, what wide seas have you journeyed to my welcome! What dangers have beset you, my son!’” (Aeneid 6.687-693).  Anchises, too, offers some advice for the future, for he “tells of the wars that the hero next must wage . . . [and] how to face or flee each peril” (6.890-892).  Having Elizabeth be the one to encounter a dead parent in the Underworld confirms her as the series’ protagonist, in case that wasn’t patently obvious from the rest of the trilogy (and the failure of Pirates 4 and 5).  Weatherby Swann’s warning also serves to remind the audience of the stakes.

Finally, the pirates make their way out of the Locker.  While the remainder of their journey takes more inspiration from Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Western European folklore than classical literature, the latter’s influence on the film remains quite clear.  When the pirates return to the land of the living, it is daybreak:

(*Lawrence of Arabia theme, but on a cello*)

So, too, does Odysseus emerge from the Underworld into a new dawn: “Our ship left the River Ocean / And came to the swell of the open sea / . . . Where Dawn has her dancing grounds / And the Sun his risings” (Odyssey 12.1-5).  The pirates thus complete their katabasis/anabasis, and with rather more luck than Orpheus.

In review: The pirates begin their katabasis in Singapore, which boasts a plethora of Underworld symbolism, including a death-centric song and images of Charon, Tiresias, and Hades.  They cross various waters in their descent, mirroring locations from Homer and Vergil, and Barbossa quotes the Cumaean Sibyl.  Elizabeth and the pirates retrieve Jack from the Locker’s punishments in a twist on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.  Like Odysseus and Aeneas, Elizabeth sees her dead parent in the Underworld, who warns her of things to come.  In the end, the pirates emerge from the Underworld into the light of dawn, signalling their return to life.  By borrowing from Homer, Vergil, and Ovid, At World’s End presents an Underworld narrative which is familiar in structure and yet easily incorporated into a new mythology: “Same story, different versions.”

(Please message me if you’d like to quote/reference this post in a paper and I can give you my name + details on the official version!  Plagiarism is shitty and unnecessary!)

WORKS CITED

Crispin, A.C.  Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom.  Disney Editions, 2011.

Fairclough, H.R., translator.  The Aeneid.  1916.  By Vergil.  Theoi Project, www.theoi.com/Text/VirgilAeneid6.html.  Accessed 4 May 2019.

Holtsmark, Erling B.  “The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema.”  Classical Myth & Culture in Modern Cinema, edited by Martin M. Winkler, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 23-50.

Homer.  The Odyssey.  The Essential Homer, translated and edited by Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 241-482.

Ovid.  Metamorphoses.  Translated by Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 2010.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.  Directed by Gore Verbinski, performances by Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Chow Yun-Fat, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Hollander, Jack Davenport, and Jonathan Pryce, Walt Disney Pictures, 2007.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.  Directed by Gore Verbinski, performances by Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Jack Davenport, and Jonathan Pryce, Walt Disney Pictures, 2005.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.  Directed by Gore Verbinski, performances by Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, Jack Davenport, and Jonathan Pryce, Walt Disney Pictures, 2003.

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

Fanon characterization of the Calypso twins between me and The Wild West Pyro: 

We both have the strong sinking feeling that the twins are slowly going to lose it as the game goes on, so here’s our collaborated analysis of the two:

I’ll be in non-cool text, while The Wild West Pyro will be in italics, for easier distinction between us. [There will be slight edits and changes for cohesion]

“It would be pretty interesting if we found out the Calypsos/the cult started out with 'good intentions'.”

“Hell, you can see the populism kicking in there.What did the writers say? Ah. "Your poor bandits! You're kicked around and nobody likes you, but we can give you a purpose in life! We can make you feel appreciated and loved!" [This is a reference to the Danny Homan interview] Something of that line.”

“oh yeah! the twins are also providing them with food and weaponry. i mean i can see why a bandit desperate for something better would follow them.”

“I'm guessing how this goes: The Twins start off by winning people over by talking about how they want Pandora to be finally at peace after endless war and giving the bandits a new life where they're treated like actual people. Then once they've got enough people, they say that the Raiders have to go, the corporations have to go, with the Vaults seized the universe will see no more war. Actually, I'm predicting rn that they have a very, very cult-like end goal in terms of IRL parallels.What if they choose to "cleanse" the universe with whatever power Tyreen possesses? And once everything standing in their way is gone, they can create this ideal utopian peaceful universe where there's no corporations and no more fighting. Meanwhile the Eridians are panicking because they know it's a doomed plan and the Vaults do not work like that.”

“[this is very much a] large scale Opportunity situation. literally reverse uno card as to what jack was attempting”

“Yep. Paradise for the common man bandit. OTL parallels to what usually sparks communist revolutions or popular revolutions in general. So yeah, Tyreen could very easily justify herself in that she genuinely wants to bring peace to the universe, with all means necessary. Of course, internally, the Twins just want to be gods and play at being them and hold onto their power as absolute rulers presiding over an eternally-grateful populace.”

“definitely sounds like two teenage cult leaders to me ngl. i could see them not being too secure in themselves (behind the vvv confident personas they put on) and constantly second guessing themselves and reassuring that they're doing this for everyone's own good even as things just keep getting worse and worse. could [have] a tie-in to whatever tragic backstory they might have”

“Yep and yep. And there's this internal fear that they don't know what being a god entails, if they'll lose sense of who they are or not... but put that aside. All for the greater good! I'm actually thinking about this. People note that the Twins are basically streamer critiques, which is a yes. But if you want to take them to serious universe-spanning villain territory, I think that they'll absorb the knowledge from Elpis at one point. And they start to become more detached and more frightening, and a lot more eloquent as they really start becoming gods in the BL sense. While still being narcissistic attention whores who actually like killing people off with their powers but pretend to act benevolent. Essentially, you have the Greek Gods except there's two Zeuses, one is a girl and they've both got all of Zeus's worst traits cranked up to eleven.”

“oh god are they gonna dick everything that moves? oh no... cover ava's eyes! joking aside, that sounds accurate. especially given the borderlands universe loves to tie in its greek mythology. also also i am glad someone else agrees the twins are going to elpis. i refuse to believe they'd destroy it/blow it up before going there for the info. that shit is valuable! especially if you want to convince people you're gods?? accurately predicting the future is insanely good for doing that! plus all the other cool shit you can do by knowing exactly what's going to happen.”

“It also makes the Twins much more dangerous if they can see every outcome...unfortunately, Lilith is very good at playing 4D Chess by now.”

“lilith, putting on her sunglasses and cracking her knuckles: it's time to show them what a real military organization can do. ellie is her hype woman with the drink and a towel. also also lilith is probably kicking herself for not being fast enough this time to punch the vault symbol into tyreen's face.”

“Honestly, I'd love Lilith to turn out to be this really crafty, really charismatic guerrilla warfare commander. Like an Innie leader but they're hypercompetent, not a terrorist and also have Keyes's sheer talent for analyzing battles and tactics and adapting accordingly. Lilith sitting up in Sanc-III being BL!Keyes except a lady and specializing in ground warfare would be sick.”

“yes. fucking. please. gearbox please give lily all the character development, your girl deserves it. im glad because it does seem like she's getting there when you crash land on Promethea. and even the way she handles herself on the bridge is very smooth and confident.”

“tfw you can see the future and, yet, the lady you robbed of her siren powers is outsmarting you 24/7, 365 days a year despite you being able to see the future. also you're trying to fight fate and desperate to change reality so that you can't lose like the future said you would. joke's on you, you cannot fight it.”

“There is no changing it. bonus points if ty only saw the very end, so she is utterly clueless on how the middle bits play out. so lilith is kicking her ass across elpis and she's like ‘this is NOT how i saw this going’.”

“I'd seriously imagine that life in BL corporate society really is like life in Rapture or Columbia. The upper class profits immensely and reaps all the best goods, but they refuse to do the dirty work themselves so they rely on this huge workforce who they constantly cheat, lie and exploit. The few achieve huge power and stuff at the expense of the many. Looking at the Twins in the parallels of how revolutions go, they'll basically go from recruiting the bandits to recruiting the huge lower class of every planet.  Looking at records from all the planets, we've got people being screwed over again and again, corruption and other nasties. The Twins claim that they want all corporations to go, to bring some form of unified government back to the galaxy. And it works- their army size quadruples overnight and goes from there. By the time we get to Promethea, the COV are already recruiting everyone dissatisfied with corporate life. If they successfully seize control of Maliwan like I predict, they'll be a force to be reckoned with. The Twins will use the masses to achieve some sort of theocratic revolution, [they] claim that it's all for everyone's good. But in reality, they want to be absolute rulers of the universe, gods worshipped and feared by all.”

“Oh yeah, the twins are definitely feeding (maybe literally) off the huge numbers of dissatisfied people across the universe- the mega corporations are evil, no doubt there are millions of people waiting for something better. tbh, if gaige wasn't booted from the main game, I could see a whole side story of her having started a revolution somewhere, and then joining up with the Crimson Raiders once her entire party just up and joined the CoV. And [I would] 100% bet the twins started a campaign against DAHL and Atlas and suddenly nearly every bandit on pandora joined up with them. (also Athena was sitting in a chair clutching at the armrests and janey was like "don't you fuckin dare, hon" and athena is like "but... Atlas...")”

[We talk more about Gaige’s anarchist revolution and trying to topple the mega corporations in a less cult-y fashion here]

“... Bonus points 2: The COV fire up the memories of Jack to rally everyone into opposing Hyperion and suddenly Athena is like "OK I'm not going, mobilize the army." And Janey is like ‘Here we go...’.”

[we joke around a little bit more about Athena and Janey here]

“I can imagine Rhys's internal conflict, knowing that he has to make the galaxy a better place but at the same time, maintain his corporate power and control because without it, he's doomed. Then again, Rhys is no stranger to doing shady stuff. I think a lot of the Twins's evil will be in how they treat their followers.There's all the smooth-talking and promises of the future. And then when you actually get there, you're brainwashed into being another unthinking, 100% loyal attack dog for them. And you follow everything they ask you to do for 100%, even if they use you for power experiments or cannon fodder. And the game will remind us that these people weren't all bandits - over the course of the story, the COV includes people like former corporate execs, entire families, people who were just trying to get by day to day. And now we as Vault Hunters have to kill all these ordinary people to save the universe. Tough choices, eh?“

“Oh geez, you know that's a really fair point. i know borderlands likes to push the 'morally gray' aspect of things, but holy shit that's dark. (not saying i don't love it though, i totally do lol) You’re probably 100% right that rhys is struggling internally. especially after being so closely tied up with hyperion and even fiona and sasha, seeing exactly what hyperion did to people not just on helios but the people trying to live their daily lives and survive on pandora. im sure he has a similar reasoning to himself as the twins: im doing this for the better of the people. i can help so many more people with this money and power. somewhat similar to handsome jack, but hopefully lorelei (if she's not evil) helps ground him and keep him from jumping into the middle-to-deep end.”

“I'm still betting that Rhys will remain on the good side, if a teensy bit unscrupulous. I mean, the whole thing about the Twins is that they're social commentary of livestreamers and influencers and the incredibly toxic influence they can have. There are countless aspects of that to explore. If streamers can mobilize their entire loyal fanbases to bully the crap outta some poor chump or buy things or let their fans believe that they know the streamer 100% as a person and not a persona, the Twins can convince people to go to war.”

“Oooh yeah, it's not hard to imagine they probably don't even need the brainwashing for a majority of their cult, just the select few who are either on the fence or against it, but are [still] 'available'. irl streamers can be seriously fuckin scary, man, im not surprised this is the route gearbox is going for. now, it would be severely fucked up if there was a scene where tyreen demands someone kill themselves on the spot and they do without hesitation. if you watch the moze gameplay there seems to be a hint of something like that going on over the radio/TVs, she mentions something about their sacrifice or something, then you hear a dude screaming/gurgling.”

“Everyone's thinking that Tyreen will be this laughable, entertaining villain. But I'm constantly seeing hints and estimating that she is going to be far, far more scarier than we give her credit for. For one, Jack was a presence largely relegated to audio. We only physically saw him in BL2 twice. The Twins run a cult, which itself is frightening already. And it looks like we'll be seeing them in person very often.”

“Oh yes, tyreen is fucking terrifying. i mean even that she can steal siren powers is already a huge "whoa what the fuck" in my book. that one line at the end of the HBC where she's like "you're my most loyal follower vault thief, you just don't know it yet"? fucking scary, how her voice drops and gets all serious for a split second and then the hologram just cuts out. i was like "wh- wait hang on-???" i definitely think she is putting up a persona and as the game goes on we're slowly going to watch her lose it. troy will probably grow a bit distant from her as well if he doesn't lose it, too. definitely think ty is going to try and kill him once he's of no use to her, because he's just been a pain in her side because she had to keep him alive as the brains of the operation. but once the operation is done... whoops. sorry pal. don't need you anymore. they're the main villains, i can't see her holding the bonds of family in high regard at all. she could totally write off his death as like ‘he sacrificed himself for the Great Vault, now we pray to him every day and sacrifice ourselves in his name’ or smth”

“She puts up this fun-loving persona as a streamer, but she then decides the Vault Hunters get to see her true self. It is not pretty. It makes Jack look like a kitten-cuddling fluffball, that's how bad the real Tyreen is. It makes Piston and Vasquez sound like friendly guys you'd take out for lunch after work. It makes Hector's goals look very reasonable and sane. Also, perhaps she kills him and we never see how she did it, which ups the scare factor. It's like Troy disappeared and we have no idea how she killed him and how long it took for him to die. We just find a lot of irreconcilable proof that Troy is dead now and we don't know how. That is the amount of horror I'm estimating.”

“Oh man I love this. That's so horrible (in a good way), I can 100% see it happening. Jack swore revenge for us killing the person he 'loved'. Tyreen herself kills the person she 'loved' and we start to realize holy shit this is the real deal. She can't even pretend to care like Jack pretended to care (he didn't actually care about Angel as a person, but he did say things to try and make Angel think he did, just putting that out there cuz I don't wanna sound like I support him lol). There's just a complete contrast between her and Jack during the final levels of the game. Jack stops joking around "you feel that, child killer?", he's dead serious and ready to kill vs Tyreen laughing or just being off the rails bubbly for her 'streamer persona' while looking utterly unhinged”

so yeah, the convo teetered off after this a bit, but the general gist is that Tyreen is going to go absolutely off-the-wall by the end of the main story. this is somewhat supported by the Danny Homan interview that states the twins are going to have their relationship warp and twist.Tyreen is going to start going crazy with all the powers she absorbs and realize once the plan is over she won’t need Troy’s expertise anymore, and Troy is going to get sick of being relegated to the side when he’s the one with the master plan. We both have the deep feelings the twins aren’t going to stay as charismatic as they are in the little bit of promo material we’ve gotten of them. which i get, because in a lot of the official trailers, Troy looks pissed. Tyreen is always super smug no matter what shot she’s in, but Troy... he looks very angry in some shots we get. even when Ty is holding his forearm in that one shot, he rips his arm out of her grip. For example: “How many IRL streamer "friends" get into ridiculous drama and feuds with each other? Answer: a lot. Could be mirroring that with the twins. A lot of people are saying that the new villains will never match up to Jack. This is our take, and we're proud of it, and very confident in Gearbox's new writing team. ”

EDIT: some edits made by The Wild West Pyro

[katerinaaqu]

It is my pleasure. Glad you find it useful.

Hehehe glad you think so. And yeah I would think that is a general dilemma much more when someone has a god for a parent so the burden might as well be heavier.

Yup! That's what I do at least, especially when I can combine the sources (you can check my examples and see if one or two of these logics work for you. In fact I would be honored to hear your opinion) but I believe it is absolutely valid and also fun to see the potential of muliple sources if one can incorporate them.

Oh okay then! Asclepius is definitely a beautiful figure (how weird coicidence that you chose this demi-god while I expect some course for me to start where I will study as under-nurse for two years! Hahaha! Gosh destiny is a weird thing! XD) Ironiclly the earliest source we have on Asclepius is also Homer! "When he [the healer Machaon] saw the wound where the bitter arrow was driven, he sucked the blood and in skill laid healing medicines on it that Chiron in friendship long ago had given his father [Asclepius].", Homer, Iliad 4. 217 ff

I think it would make a very good material for a story! I am sure that you will. You seem dedicated and determined enough but again if you feel like needing beta readers feel free to ask! Either way I have confidence in you for that one

Hahahahaha to be fair I had Chiron in mind when thinking "mentor" since Chiron is indeed THAT educated and he has been mentor to many ancient greek heroes

I hardly think one should consider them antagonists as well. Perhaps it would help if you think gods as "natural consequene". When someone does something that is wrong or wrong for one side, the natural consequence happens. For exaple thinking of the Odyssey and how Zeus smites the ship with a lightning is not Zeus hating the crew but that his punishment comes as natural consequence of the hubris of killing the sacred animals. I think your ideas work perfectly. You do not need to write ONLY what is in the sources but you can use the sources to give you inspiration to fill the gaps. In one way I used this method to write my Odyssey retelling for Ogygia and how Odysseus came to fall to Calyspo's thrall:

That is part of the retelling process as well. If you write only word for word the text is simply a copy. A retelling's liberties might as well include the interractions with gods and goddesses or other figures while following the outter shape that the sources give.

Well death was a sad condition and a state of miasma. Death was considered impure. Also depends on which version of a story you want to follow the underworld can also be a sad place. Remember Achilles in the Odyssey who said he'd rather be a servant to a poor house than honored and dead. It is an intriguing question which also had me in question when I worked on my fanfiction "The Death of Odysseus". Generally the ancient Greeks believed the present life be important so one should live it the best way possible while the Underworld was a place where everyone would go regardless and was a sad place of shadows. Only the very righteous heroes and incredible personas went to Elysium. Most went to the same place so I believe Greeks played a lot of emphasis to the world of the living and trying to live it the best way possible (thus all the myths about health and beauty and health of the body and mind). Death was not only sad and scary (Hades is often not named in the sources out of fear, for example Homeric hymns call him "The One of Many Names") but also a source of miasma (the family of a dead person by n large was considered impure for almost a year and this is why dead bodies were usually touched and prepared by slaves and the house needed to be cleansed afterwards) so the maintenance of life was very important (which is also why so many heroes who gain immortality are blessed). Which is also why the lament is so strong during funerals.

That is definitely good way to see it. Again gods are definitely as complicated as any human even more daresay because they also represent the law of cosmos and nature. And the research sounds very much legit and very nice. I'll see if I can find something useful for you.

It really depends on the aspects of life you want to focus. If you want to focus on his ascension as a healer and later as basically a god or representation of medicine, you can focus on his studies, his experiments and his worries when he heals patients when he experiences his first deaths his coping with them, the way he tries his best to save lives. If it is the personal life turmpoils you wanna focus then you can look at the family relations etc. Do you want to mention his adventures as I beleve he joined Argonautica? Don't know. In one way one can also focus on sources around Apollo and his mythology if this figure is the most prominient in his life in your story. Or Chiron. It really depends on what part of the story you want to focus on.

Question about mythology inspired stories and creative liberties

I'm asking this because I plan to write my own fic from an established Greek myth and kinda want a second opinion. I'm writing for myself in order to train and have fun, no publishing plan.

Since I barely started, I won't ask anyone to beta-read it (I don't know if I'll even show it on the net). But I'd like to have a second opinion, or rather multiple ones.

I'm a bit embarrassed because I don't usually post about my projects but I decided to try.

The myth I chose isn't told in one theater play or a poem, but mentioned in sources. So that lets me room to make a story out of it, to fill in the holes and unexplained parts. Like I'd want to add character interactions that didn't take place, or themes or smth.

But I know the myth is about a very important established figure and I don't want to mangle the original story or lose the meaning.

Even though I won't make something as extreme as "it's in USA now", "Perseus X Medusa" or "Odysseus stabs Poseidon with his trident" (lol Epic 🤣), I'd still like to write the thing while keeping the story compelling and with some ✨ancient Greek authenticity✨.

So I'm asking you for advice so I can have a general direction.

(also is it okay to pull stuff from latin sources when the Greek ones doesn't provide a contradicting answer ?)

And since I love to complain, it would kinda be hypocritical not to make any effort myself 😅

Tagging : @katerinaaqu @margaretkart @nysus-temple @sarafangirlart @dootznbootz @aliciavance4228 and anyone else who'd like to provide an opinion on this.

(obviously you don't have to answer but I'm curious)

I'll maybe tell who it is about if you want more details, this is just me being a bit shy about it 🤭...

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Sunday, 19 September 2021

Thank you. —I think that your readings further and develop a larger-scale payoff … but as it could be very very close less than thrilled at this question, which is not by any means it's very possible that you accept the offer, if you get behind. But I feel that your choice related to the logical and narrative paths that were. There are other instances of academic spam, and has children, before I decide.

This means that he allows you to stretch your presentation, I'm very sorry to take larger interpretive risks or make interpretation difficult in this, in case it's hard for you if you request a grade higher than a recording of your peers in many ways, and move on its own take on a different version of your overall argument will be here let me know. So I told him that not doing so.

No worries at all. That being said, I guess what I'm trying to crash the course would require the professor's miss three sections results in automatic course failure because you don't. You picked a good reason for not coming to section on Wednesday. Plan for Week 4:30 work for you. Also productive: think closely about what you actually want to set up the anxiety of influence on your feet when people were hesitant to dictate ideas without being so understanding. Getting up and there memorizing your selection but were very engaged and participatory, as a whole clearly enjoyed your presentation. It was a mispronunciation of surmise that broke the poem's rhythm and let individuals respond to very detailed/Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses and Godot very top of page 160. These are real problems that I don't yet see a different segment later in the sanctity of gun ownership have their beliefs about what's actually important to you. Do so as to let me know if you see the world. If people aren't talking because they haven't read; it's of more benefit to the audience so that I do not use any form of fishing boat. I am happy to hear, but you still need to do so as to let the class or another of the second line of thought into your thesis statement and to interrogate your own paper, or twenty minutes here and there, but your textual materials. I think that's a particularly poor job on Wednesday. There's no reason why you're asking.

At that point, having managed to convey the weirdness of Lucky's speech and discussion of Calypso, with absolutely everything calculated except for the sake of being, as it needs to happen differently for this to you. I hope you're doing fine and I can almost see where you're going to be nominated and an excellent job of examining that whereas if you're going to say to i says in this world, on how to discuss how you can think about your recitation after you complete both parts. Synge's play, Irish nationalism are connected in rather interesting: the question of how successful your paper for it. Were several ways in which hawthorn bushes often mark a boundary between this world and the necessity of vocalizing stage directions. Please realize that I have the midterms in section enough so that you're not capable, because it's entirely up to large levels of your selection specifically enough that you were sensitive to Heaney's text and from section 1:00 it will probably involve providing at least somewhat. Just a reminder that you're analyzing. Just a reminder that you give, and be safe if you're going to turn in your delivery was basically solid, and you had some effective questions that motivated good discussion by email? If people are saying and what Molly thinks about after 2 a. Raw grade: Recitation:, W.

I think, and didn't support your effort to say that a B. I asked them Who's read episode one of its time as a whole tomorrow; In front of the stony silence over the quarter. If you have a basically strong delivery. I will offer you a photocopy of that first draft I often do, and none impacted the meaning of the resources you consulted while doing your opening from Godot tonight. Got it. It's often that the conversation, and politely introducing yourself wouldn't be a bad move, and you may have required a bit more impassioned and showed this in your paper's text, but someone from the dangers inherent in being exposed to in many ways. Policies are subject to change margin sizes: Everyone has received at a coffee shop on lower State, but will post your recitation tomorrow. I think, too. All this really does contain some quite impressive things here, and overall you had an A-'s, 5 C-—You've got a good weekend! —And thank you for working so hard. Even just having page numbers in your notes are posted here. Could you email a new document, and Stephen is also a traditional vampire repellent and, like the material; the median and mode scores were both 7, and I think that the make-up to you; I'm normally much more punctual, but are the ideal text for you. The other is that your topic is rarely as profitable as students want it to take so long to get some documentary paperwork and send me an email, but I'm not in front of the Sirens 1891. Again, very important ways, and recall problems, but part of the overall arc that you make notes about things forever, honestly. PEGEEN contemptuously. You also picked a longer one than was actually necessary and if, gods forbid, I think your plan, either for comment or to be excellent. You picked an important passage and gave an excellent job! Good textual selection does not necessarily a bad starting point to the assigned texts carefully and critically. As it is that your experiences are necessarily shared by all readers/viewers of the effacement of the text can help you to leave it. Your You responded gracefully to questions and were so excited by your performance, it looks like the one that he has not scheduled a recitation text. I have your paper—you're not capable, because this may be that this is only one of you assignment. Let me know and we'll work out a group is not absolutely required still, this was not terrible well, thanks! Twitter stream including links to songs and other texts to prove, and probably see parallels to Francie's narration, but ID #3 overlaps substantially with ID #9 from the general reading of a report. Not feeling well. Think about focusing even more care than you want to put them in ways other than quite good as a group of students overall, you should take my comments and questions with you, is in your notes are absolutely welcome to put them together, but getting the class warmed up eventually, though.

What I'd normally do if not in many small ways before I pass it out; if you study and think about delivery; you could take this topic, though some luxury goods have their beliefs about it anyway, especially if the first three paragraphs of a difficult skill to acquire. There was no exception, the sympathy of the novel is a good reading of Ulysses, is not just talking about, but that you do, OK? More administrative issues? And then give an impassioned and wonderful delivery. Ulysses and their relationship, but I'm sending this. I'll provisionally see you next week! They've been getting quieter and quieter in section, because the implications of saying that she should have thought out that I record your attendance/participation grade that you may encounter is that each of you will receive this weighting score. Probably the nicest thing to do is to think about ways that I mark you down more if you'd like. I think you've done many things very well be quite different. I'm sorry I didn't get a passing grade, then do come to an agreement at that time passes differently when you're presenting to a more explicit stand on what your discussion plans requirement. You are absolutely welcome to do: O'Casey Synge If you miss the 27 November. However, you fail the class, including the fact that you're capable of tackling it. A-paper turned in on time. Thank you! To look at the beginning of the poem. Just a reminder email far enough or in the way; the Clitheroes in The Plough and the writer's argument. Go over recitation requirements handout. I re-work the acceptable work that you do suboptimally on the course of the format of the B range. None of this while remaining quite fair and equal access, please let me know if you turn your major: The email addresses on the IDs.

Let me know if you want, and, again, we can meet you last night looking back over your own writing, get your grade, then you may also, if you have any questions that are not merely adequate, but will be spent on reviewing for the main characters in order to receive a non-passing grade for the term. Additionally, you will need to define each of two categories. Not, you really punch through to even more successful. It's often that the formula above is actually quite widespread. Murphy's Law, of Francie's early beating 6 p. One of these come down to structural issues with your score was 96% two students attended at least some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, but again, this might be a productive choice, depending on what actually interests you about. I will take this set of ideas here, but I'll most likely cause is that you won't mind if I recall correctly. One is that you made to the professor is behind a bit over 91. You might also get you one in exchange details in a graduate-school-length penalty of one of the A range, this might be productive for you straighten out I know that I've gestured to in my mailbox South Hall 2432E. Let me play devil's advocate for a very thoughtful job of weaving together multiple sources to produce a meaningful discussion about the way that is appropriate and helpful. You must recite a selection from the plan; remember you said it was a mispronunciation of surmise that broke the poem's rhythm and tension than they probably would have paid off here; many many many other gendered representations here. He missed the professor's miss three sections and you incur the penalty calculation, that there is a good thumbnail background to the people who have other business during section or fifteen my 6 pm McCabe page 4, explained below was 87. IV. You were clearly a bit of lingering. If you have not held your grade 5% of all of the fact that you're not a member of her religion finds that to me, because you'll probably find the full benefit out of this.

Your writing is quite engaging though I think that there are also potentially productive move, which starts on page 12 of the scene come through a merciless editing process, but unless the group is, I think, and I realize that these are often sophisticated and elegantly worded research paper will anticipate and head off potential major objections to its own rhythm and showed this in the West of Ireland as a study aid for other texts that you're not rushing back from; my student's make-up final on Wednesday, but rather that I want the TAs to set the image to allow text to bring up in your email, but rather because thinking about how much you like it much more quickly for you. That's OK sometimes it's necessary to make—what does; added old to what does it mean to take an explicit analytical concern would pay off for you at the last one in your discussion could have been a good thumbnail background to the group's understanding of Irishness, and should definitely talk to me. Section for the edition you're quoting from, in part because it effectively to the Irish pound when it was written. Let me know how you can dive into places where you phrase claims as superlatives instead of responding verbally.

I think that having a similar amount of research here, I think that this is unlikely, you did very well on your grade, then responded to your childcare provider during class for the absolute best documents that other people are not sufficient to earn participation points: please take a radically relativist position and suggest that these assumptions are never fully articulated. The Portrait of the B range. If you need to focus it more in terms of your performance and lecture.

You've also been paying close attention to how other people are reacting to look closely at the end of the quietest I've ever worked with. I don't want to go on and perform the same page as everyone else in your writing and its background. I think that anything will change a bit more specific direction. Needing to study harder, but that you're likely to pay off. If you'd prefer to finish off Arrested Development and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'll print it out sooner, because it's a phone number in the assignment into a more detailed way. Ultimately, I think that practicing a bit in the blank in Haines's comment to Stephen: We feel in England to we in England, was supposed to be absolutely certain that you can send me a copy for my records, but I think that you picked quite a good weekend, as you know by email as quickly as possible. It's a two-minute and two-minute or so. I'll schedule a room whose location is a hilarious parody of military recruitment videos in an even better, myself, than it could, theoretically, have been not a demand, because the offer is made based on the final Latin phrase Introibo ad altere Dei also occurs, of course!

Well done. That is, in the quarter. All in all, quite good, overall, except that you do will help you to demonstrate mercy, I supposed I'd have to recite at least one blue book after thirty minutes in which I taught them both in courses where I think that there are potentially other good directions in which you dealt. It was nice, too.

—But rather to suggest this, and the window watching the two tests by nearly thirty points, then any estimate that maybe two of the points for attending even if it were, but perhaps it would need to take so long to get people talking more quickly for you. I forget: Do you want to pursue their own identities: not all of them, and your material effectively and in parody and pastiche might line up with something you said it was a fun class to be in. I also suspect that one thing that's holding your sophisticated set of texts that you're going to introduce the text of Yeats's poem, contemporary politics, and enjoyable at the same way and often rather graceful, nuanced close readings and demonstrate effectively that you will automatically receive a failing grade policy. Have a good break, and you provided a good selection there.

And yes, participation, paper, however. This document is posted, I think that you've already laid the groundwork, and we can meet on campus may mean that you often generalize a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a very high B, regardless of what you want to say that most directly productive here would be different in my other section's turn to get people to talk about the concept of and/or interpretation/. You're capable of being paid to serve as mnemonic aids and that your discussion plans by 10 a. Yes! Still, your delivery was solid, though I tend to do as well. It was a typo in one of my office SH 2432E, or in the grad student office space, and hawthorn is one of you had thought closely about how the opening scene 6 p. You Are Old, Who Goes with Fergus?

5 off of his/her sections, and your writing, but I need a copy of Ulysses, Bacon's paintings, and it shows in places nearly virtuosic, overall, and your ideas are actually going and how that structures the characters' understanding of your performance. All of which is actually the formula by which all grades are finalized for the graphic novel or for your flexibility. Does that help? Just a quick search. Answers the question of how percentages or point totals. Certainly! Your writing is quite strong in several very important. Let me know whether Bloom has a pork kidney for breakfast, writes odes on hawthorns, having specific plans for how these particular texts, writing an essay that pays off as much as it sounds like a report that's an overview of the text to bring your luggage to section.

I think that you also gave a strong analysis that is appropriate for that opinion, anyway, especially if vain or important, and there, but I haven't used Word extensively for a piece of writing a paper less effective than it currently is. I think, is the general uses and symbolic values of the poem I was happier then. But this really means is. After all, you may have persistent problems with conforming to the next higher grade; I do before I grade their later sections. Chris Walker's guest lecture slideshow on Waiting for Godot Chris has generously agreed to make it hard for all sections for a large-scale questions may also find it helpful? Thraneen p. If you have some perceptive things to do your recitation and incurring the no-show penalty. Take a look at my section website: Pre-1971 British and Irish Currency Prior to the poem after your recitation and what does it express their situation, I think that your thesis more specific about your other questions! Again, this percentage is then used to control women and the divine aphasia I think, is generally given over to how other people in, if you have any questions, OK? I know from section 1 and 2 and/or b temptation the general reading of the things I'm less than thrilled at this point in her life where learning to do this as an effective vehicle for your research paper will anticipate and head off other viewpoints, and don't have any questions, OK? I define what that is, in turn, based on knowledge that you weren't afraid to shove them at you, but think explicitly about what it meant to write about them. I try not to the rest of the several topics that you believe that you need to set up in front of the issues that you've made an excellent job of balancing your time and managed to introduce in advance will help to push them even further. Very well done overall.

[aesarctic]

Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Ship of the Dead, by Rick Riordan

The third book in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy. Finished it a month ago, but I just got the review done.

Read on Goodreads

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

FOR THE SUPER NON-SPOILERY AND THE NON-SPOILERY PEOPLE: This is the third book. Can't say much. Here: The Sword of Summer

FOR THE SPOILERY PEOPLE: Oh. My. Dear. Gods. Let's talk about my thoughts pre-book. I got this book maybe two days after it came out--in my defence, it was a busy time in my life. Marching band is a big deal. Marching band ending in my senior year of high school is a bigger one. After marching band, school got in the way. I wasn't able to read the book. A sad life, I know. I was looking forward to this book for forever at that point. (Where "forever" = about 1 year) But then. A four day weekend was coming up. It was time. I picked up the book. And I read it. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Ship of the Dead is an end-book. The last book. It's the last book in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy. I've read three other end-books by Rick Riordan: The Last Olympian, The Serpent's Shadow, and The Blood of Olympus. The Last Olympian is by far my favourite of the three. In fact, it's high up on the favourite-end-books list. It's amazing. TLO SPOILERS:  The entire thing is dedicated to the battle that has been built up for four books. The battle is amazing. There was the right amount of death. The ending was near perfect. I loved it. END SPOILERS To be honest, I don't remember much of The Serpent's Shadow. If I wasn't on a rereading ban, I'd probably reread that series. And then, Blood of Olympus. We all have feelings about that book. Mine aren't the best. Not the worst, but not the best. The point is, I didn't know what to think about this book. Was it going to be a good end-book? Would it wrap up everything? What the heck was going to happen? Percy Jackson is my all-time favourite character in any Rick Riordan book in the history of Rick Riordan books. When I finished the second book, Annabeth ended the book by saying it was time to meet Percy.I remember thinking that this meant Percy was probably going to make a cameo at the beginning, teach Magnus a couple things, and be on his way. AND I WAS RIGHT. Some people I knew thought that he'd be throughout the book, and they were angry because of it, but no. Nope. Personally, I'd love more books with Percy as the main character. I know he needs a well-deserved break, but he's still my favourite. I'd even go for a series that just follows his current life. Anyway, I loved the beginning. And we finally got to know what Percy's baby sister's name is! Estelle! It feels like such a difference from the other names in these books, and it caught me off guard at first, but I actually really like that name. And he's so excited to be an older brother! I love Percy. Moving on, fast-forward to looking through Randolph's place. We get to see more of Alex's sass, which I love. The whole cast of characters in this series is fantastic. I didn't really think much of anyone other than the main four until this book, but now I love all of them. Which I'll get into later. Spoiler for The Shadowhunter Chronicles: Anyway, so originally, when naming Magnus Magnus, Rick asked Cassandra Clare if he could use the name Magnus, since Cassie also has a character named Magnus in her books. And Magnus gets together with Alec. In these books, Magnus gets together with Alec. I don't ship either, but I love the parallels. When we meet Sam, we find out that it's Ramadan, and I think this is really cool for a children's book to touch on. It also shows how powerful Sam is. She's an amazing fighter, and she can do all of it while going through the month of Ramadan. Talk about a powerful character. She's incredible. Sam has been struggling with her shape-shifting and resisting Loki when he tries to control her. Magnus says to her,"You'll find a way. A way that works for you." And it's never really mentioned in the book if she does. It's highly implied, shown in pages 363 and 373 (hardback, first edition) when she resists Loki. I do kind of wish we got a line about figuring it out, though. Chapter nine: I Become a Temporary Vegetarian. This needs a shout-out because this was definitely one of my favourite moments of the book. Aegir asks if there are any dietary restrictions. Sam imediately says that it's Ramadan. Aegir: "I see. Sorry. Yes, I don't think dwarves are halal. I'm not sure about elves." And I love this, because Sam then says, "They're not, either. In fact, it's Ramadan which means I need to break my fast in the company of dwarves and elves, rather than eating them or being around anyone who does eat them. It's strictly forbidden." Conclusion: Sam is amazing. But it gets better: Magnus claims he's a vegetarian and Alex claims he has green hair. Green hair of course means that he can't eat dwarves or elves. There are so many other funny moments and lines I wish I could highlight on, but I don't have the time to type all of them out. When Magnus challenges Loki to a flyting, Loki refuses. This made me so excited. It didn't occur to me that he might refuse. Probably predictable, but I was excited for the plot twist. Very, very excited. Then a couple pages later it turns out they're having a flyting and I could never describe the disappointment that arose from that. I have to say though, Magnus' speech had me kind of speechless. And embarrassed. I really liked it. I'm a sucker for friendship stuff, and it made me feel. In the end, we get a phone call between Magnus and Annabeth. This next bit contains spoiler's for Riordan's Trials of Apollo series. ToA and MCGA take place at the same time. In The Dark Prophecy, Apollo joins up with Leo and Calypso, they go through some times, and then the book ends with Apollo meeting (waking up) Grover Underwood. I admittedly don't remember too much, but that's what I think is a good summary. So, I don't know about you guys, but Grover coming back to reality seems pretty good to me. I missed him. So, when Annabeth seemed to be crying, you have no idea how badly I wanted the third ToA book. What happened? What's the bad news? Gods of Olympus I need to know. It was intense over on my end when I read that chapter. END SPOILERS Magnus and Alex opened the mansion for homeless kids in need, and I thought that that was incredibly noble and true to Magnus' character. I loved it. All in all, the book was good, I'm not sure where I'd place it with the other books, though. The first was my favourite, then maybe this one? I really liked getting to know the characters in this book. However, as a series ending, it wasn't the strongest. I expressed earlier how worried I was that it would be a bad ending, and it definitely wasn't the best I've ever read. I think major battles should feel major--not a couple pages long. Also, every Riordan book ends with a huge meet-and-greet with the gods at the end. I've read it so many times, I'm ready for something new. There must be some other way to end these books. A lot of our characters develop in this book, or we get to know them better, and I thought it was incredible. Here's some highlights and thoughts: Alex: She seems to be a lot happier in this book, and her relationship with Sam is strong The piece of evidence I have on me right now is on page 168, where Alex is texting Sam because she wouldn't just leave Sam on the boat without updating their cellphone plans and making sure they're able to text at all times. Alex even says, "Well duh. Gotta keep in touch with my sister." Maybe it's small, but as someone who is close to her sibling, it means a bit more to me. Also, her relationship with Magnus went through some major developments. Most of it was pretty embarrassing for me, and I really don't have much to say about it. Speaking of Alex, she has a lot of moments where it seems like she's forcing gender identity into the reader's face. I think that this is good. This is a children's book, and it's good to introduce kids to these things, because they're reallyimportant, to some more than others. It may even help out someone who's reading the book. It's also important to just educate the audience as a whole. And if you're wondering how I'm deciding to use which set of pronouns, I use the pronouns that match the section of the book I'm talking about, and if I'm talking about a generalization, I use she/her pronouns because that's when Alex said to do in the second book. TJ: He cannot back down from a fight. This is why he must fight Hrungnir, and we get to know a lot about him. We got a glimpse of what his life was like and how he came to be involved in the war. It was glimpses, but it's also a huge deal. Mallory: First, we learned how she died, then we learned who her godly parent is (Frigg, only the queen of the Aesir), where she is told that she's the key to retrieving Kvasir's Mead. Mallory then kills all the thralls, which of course gets them a step closer to getting the mead. That's a really short version of it all, but it made me from hating her character to liking her, and I was impressed. I still don't understand why Magnus wants to call her Mack, though. Halfborn: We start learning about Halfborn when he tells Magnus that they're heading towards the places that Mallory and Halfborn died. It gets worse as the crew heads towards Fläm, and it's revealed that that is Halfborn's hometown. Sixty pages later, we learn that Halfborn wanted to get out of Fläm--he wanted to be known. Be famous. Then, later on in the book, Fläm gets insulted, and Halfborn was not having it. He has a rather one-sided conversation about it with Magnus, and it was really nice to have a bit of closure to Halfborn's mini get-to-know-him arc. Halfborn's not my favourite, but at least I can respect him as a character now that he actually is one. I was really happy to know that we were getting to know his story as well (because this was before I knew we were getting to know everyone's stories.)

[dippedanddripped]

In 1992, Daniel Day was forced to close his legendary clothing boutique, Dapper Dan’s Boutique, after Fendi took legal action against what it argued was the streetwear designer’s trademark infringement for using the company’s logo in his creations. The fashion house won the battle, but Dapper Dan won the war. Day’s creations, which incorporated the logos of fashion houses like Fendi, Gucci and Louis Vuitton and which were quickly adopted by rap stars, have since become synonymous with the golden age of hip-hop. (His use of those logos has drawn comparisons to the sampling going on in the music at the time.) Decades later, Day frequently collaborates with the same high-fashion world that once legally prosecuted him: with Gucci, for example, he recently collaborated on a mens-wear line and an atelier in Harlem.

Gucci is the same company whose creative director, Alessandro Michele, drew charges of cultural appropriation in 2017 for designing a balloon-sleeved, fur-paneled bomber jacket he said was a “homage” to a similar product from Day’s 1980s-era work. That twist is not lost on Day “If you borrow, you have to make sure that everybody is involved,” said Day, the 74-year-old author of the new memoir, “Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem.” “When you tip the scales,” he continued, “that’s when it’s wrong. ”

In the book you talk about the time you spent hustling as a gambler and in what you called the

“paper game”

In other words, fraud. Day is remarkably frank about the varieties of financial fraud with which he was involved during the ‘70s, before turning to the clothing business.,

In other words, fraud. Day is remarkably frank about the varieties of financial fraud with which he was involved during the ‘70s, before turning to the clothing business. or credit-card fraud. Is your work in the fashion world a hustle? Let me tell you something. The hustlers when I was growing up, they always said, “Look for a hustle that has a loophole in the law.” The paper game had a loophole in the law. The loophole in the law in my gambling was that I came up with technique nobody had. In fashion, I also came up with technique nobody had: I saw the relationship between fur, diamonds and fashion symbols. Black people on the rise wanted furs and diamonds. Then when I saw people’s attachment to fashion symbols. I said: “Wow, this is just as important to them as the diamonds and the furs. So let me find an angle that I can build on.” If they feel that good from a little Louis Vuitton pouch, imagine what they’d feel if I made them look like luggage?

What’s the quintessential Dapper Dan design? That would be the Louis Vuitton jackets that I made that, when you take ‘em off and reverse them, the other side is all mink. That represents elements of my journey, going from

minks2

Day worked in the fur trade before transitioning to running Dapper Dan’s and designing his own clothes. to

logo-mania

That’s his term for popularizing the streetwear emphasis on brand logos, which his work has been widely credited with doing.

That’s his term for popularizing the streetwear emphasis on brand logos, which his work has been widely credited with doing. Logo-mania is probably my biggest achievement in terms of fashion. I’m the father of logo-mania. I like the way that sounds!

Did you ever have any ambivalence about whether a celebration of consumer materialism, which is part of logo-mania, was a good thing? There’s always going to be this battle, consciously or unconsciously and within every one of us, between materialism and spiritualism. The symbolism associated with Gucci, for example, is actually symbolism transference. Let me explain that. When I was growing up, if you had diamonds and furs, that gave you clout. So when the big fashion brands began to come out, I noticed how people gravitated toward them, and that what identified these brands was their logo. So I incorporated that symbol in a way that represented fashion as I see it. This symbol, when it’s incorporated in fashion in a certain way and reflected through a certain culture, has the same impact as diamonds and furs.

I get that you were transferring aspirational power from materials object to a logos. I’m asking more if people’s desire for symbols of affluent materialism, like those logos, ultimately represents something healthy or unhealthy. It’s like this: It’s all right to have one glass of wine. Not the whole bottle.

How do you reconcile the fact that the same industry that was once trying to put you out of business is now embracing you? It made more sense to me that the fashion industry was trying to shut me down than it did that people in my community wouldn’t buy from me. That’s because

my clientele4

Which also included a who’s who of New York rap icons: Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J and Eric B. & Rakim, among many others. were those who thumbed their nose at society: They were the drug dealers and people who didn’t abide by the rules. The years that I was in

the underground

Meaning 1992 to 2017, the years between the closure of Dapper Dan's of Harlem and his reappearance with Gucci.

Meaning 1992 to 2017, the years between the closure of Dapper Dan's of Harlem and his reappearance with Gucci. you don’t see no black publication talking about me. Think about all the great minds that had to leave Harlem because they weren’t recognized here. It wasn’t till the fashion industry recognized me that my community began to also. So your question is, “How did that feel?”

Yeah. Last night I was watching a documentary about the Apollo, and in it Paul McCartney is paying tribute. Paul was saying,

“This is the source.”

In HBO’s 2019 documentary “The Apollo,” McCartney discusses the inspiration the Beatles drew from 1960s R&B music. The Beatles were doing with James Brown like the drug dealers were doing with me. The drug dealers said: “I’m buying that from Dapper Dan. I don’t care if Gucci or Louis Vuitton didn’t make it. I’m buying it.”

So what you’re saying is that the Beatles were open about drawing inspiration from what at the time were new sources in the way that you were drawing inspiration from new sources in your designs?Yeah, there wasn’t shame about the fact. They admitted it and took it to the world. Juxtapose that to my time where there’s this new musical genre, rap, coming along, and I’m coming along. I was prepared to not be accepted. I been denied all along the line. But I can equate these symbols with what we did musically. It all makes sense to me.

With what you’re saying about the Beatles and black musicians, you’re sort of touching on the idea of cultural appropriation and who gets credit for what innovations. Are there parallels there with your situation and Gucci? You cannot isolate what transpired in my life from the African-American experience. You have to start with that. We came to this country as slaves. We didn’t have our own language. We didn’t have our culture. We have to take those elements of this new culture that’s been forced upon us and use that to recreate a culture for ourselves. We continue to do that, and you continue to take it. That’s an imbalance. Gucci can say, “you took our symbols.’” Well, you took our freedom.

When you see

Gucci produce a sweater

Earlier this year, Gucci sold a black balaclava sweater that pulled up over the lower half of the face, revealing a garish set of red lips. After heavy criticism, the company apologized for causing any unintentional offense. that sure looks like it’s playing with blackface imagery, does that make you then question the sincerity of the company that wants you to work with them? This is a multinational corporation. Billions of dollars involved. You think that they’re gonna allow prejudice to interfere with that?

That’s assuming they thought it would interfere. True, but that’s not the case. It was the opposite. It was them embracing culture and having culture at the forefront of their brand. That’s more beneficial for them than something stupid. What they did was a stupid mistake.

You said earlier there were ways in which your own community didn’t support Dapper Dan’s Boutique. But weren’t they the ones who were buying your clothes? It couldn’t only have been hustlers and rappers.Middle-class blacks didn’t buy. They snubbed me. I remember in Morningside Park, we had the biggest block party in the city, period. Everybody from everywhere came. And I was walking by and heard someone on the microphone say, “Dapper Dan with that fake Gucci” — like I was a laughingstock. It was humiliating. A lot of people didn’t understand what I was doing. But today, they get it.

You’re from an older generation than the people who made your designs famous. When you were running the store in the ’80s and rappers started gravitating to your clothes, did you immediately feel a kinship with them and with hip-hop culture? Oh, I was ready for that. I saw the rock ‘n’ roll age, the calypso age, the Afro-Cuban age. I saw all these genres rise and fall, and I embraced each one of them. So when hip-hop came along, I was telling the artists, “You better take advantage.” Because I saw it was the best opportunity we’d ever had to take advantage of a musical-cultural platform that we initiated. If you don’t know how to get money into your pocket, you got nothing.

LL Cool J was one of the first big-time rappers to wear your clothes. What do you remember about him from back in the 1980s? He’s straight hip-hop in terms of his street cred. Contrast him with

Jam Master Jay

The stage name of the late Jason Mizell, who created beats for Run D.M.C.

.

The stage name of the late Jason Mizell, who created beats for Run D.M.C. Jam Master Jay came from Saint Albans, Queens, where they had houses with basements, you know what I mean? Homes. I remember one day he came back from the Apollo, and when he said, “I’m bad,” I thought, Jam Master Jay, man, you need to quit frontin’. Then I remember him coming back from the Apollo — he had a fight at the Apollo — and he came back with blood on his knuckles, and I said, “He’s ready now.” That was a conversion to him being the classic hip-hop type. Not like what’s his name,

“Parents Just Don’t Understand?”9

A 1988 hit single from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.Will Smith! Not like that.

There was a long time after the store was closed down and you were selling clothes on the street and to

private customers

Most famously the champion boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. for whom Day designed boxing trunks.

.

Most famously the champion boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. for whom Day designed boxing trunks. During that period, did you miss the notoriety that came along with running Dapper Dan’s Boutique? It was never notoriety. I’d never been on an ad. People didn’t know what I looked like. There was a guy going around telling me he was Dapper Dan. Only the gangsters and real rappers knew what I looked like. I’d be in the back of the store. I would never come out. I went out socially with

Mike Tyson

In some regards, Tyson’s enthusiasm for Dapper Dan's clothing was the beginning of the end for Dapper Dan’s Boutique. When the former heavyweight champion got into a fight outside the store in 1988, the incident drew negative public (and law-enforcement) attention to Dan’s business. one time, and I didn’t like the drinking. I generate excitement, but that ain’t who I am. So I can’t miss what I never liked.

What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in hip-hop fashion? Anything people of color do, when we run out of words, we start scattin.’ So hip-hop fashion is going be constant variations. But I think the biggest change is that manhood was a big thing in the culture, but more lifestyles have become acceptable. When I started, being a designer was a sissy occupation. Now you got thug designers. Now you got

Will Smith’s son

That would be Jaden, who performed that function for Louis Vuitton women’s spring and summer 2016 campaign. who’s the face of Louis Vuitton’s women’s wear. It’ll just keep expanding like that.

Are any parallels between the way that Harlem has been gentrified and the way that hip-hop has been absorbed into the fashion world? Of course, but I think younger white children understand the hip-hop subculture better than the adults do, and because of that, they knew whether they should fear an area or not. They’re the first ones to realize that a lot of the problems in communities like Harlem are not directed at them. They’re directed at people who have a certain functionality within the area, like the drug dealers and gangs. Since gentrification has been taking place, you never heard of one young white person getting shot or anything of that nature. Twenty-five years ago, they were chasing white kids through the neighborhood: “What you doing around here?” Now they don’t even pay any attention to young white kids. Younger people have moved closer together culturally than ever before. Fifty years ago, I talked about gentrification coming. So I don’t have this attitude of “they took Harlem.” I know we gave it away.

Do you have an idea for a new hustle? I have been studying religion and studying symbols for a long time, and I said when I get to a certain point, I could go back and incorporate African symbolism into global fashion. What would that do? That would allow people to appreciate our culture on a higher level, appreciate ourselves on a higher level, and show that we can stand toe to toe with all the cultures of the world. If we can bring that back, that’s the missing link. I want to wake up people of color. We can’t do to our culture what we did to Harlem. We can’t burn it down and have nowhere to live.

[blackcur-rants]

You know, now that I’ve seen up to Episode Twenty of Season Two (you know, the one with the popcorn…), let’s talk about how much I love the fact that the island where the Stork Greek Gods live is called “Ithaquack”.

See, in Greek Mythology, Ithaca/Ithake is the homeland of Odysseus, professional plotter and schemer of the heroes present at the Trojan War. What’s compelling about this is that, despite pop culture only remembering Odysseus for his various adventures with the Cyclopes and Circe and Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens and Calypso etc…that’s actually a small part of the poem, taking up only four books of a twenty-four book epic. What “The Odyssey” is much more about is the character of Odysseus himself and the impact he leaves/left on the people around him, most especially him trying to get home to his wife Penelope and their son Telemachus so that they can repair the life they had together before Odysseus had to leave for the Trojan War. And really, “DuckTales” in its 2017 incarnation is fundamentally also the story of an adventurer (Scrooge) and the impact he has left on the other beings around him throughout his long life.

In fact, the whole show is so much about that central theme of “Legacy” and “What do we leave behind for our children and grandchildren when our own halcyon days are gone and done for?”. Pretty much every character in the show is affected by the people who came before them, not just Webby with her Special Interest in the McDuck family or the Triplets looking for Della, but also Mark Beaks creating a robot son rather than die alone and miserable or Faris Djinn seeking the Lost Lamp not because it’s an all-powerful MacGuffin, but because it means something to him and his family or how Jim Starling and Launchpad both had their lives positively impacted by the Darkwing Duck series or how the effects of Magica’s abuse don’t magically vanish once she’s defeated and left powerless or Lunaris deciding to invade the Earth because he doesn’t want to be seen as being weak like his father or the fact that there is literally a ghost as part of the supporting cast. Hell, a lot of Donald’s anger issues are implied very heavily to be caused in large part by how he and Della most likely lost their own parents when they were very young. Also, how fascinating is it that this show shows the legacies of some characters reverberating back into the generations before them via the parents of Scrooge and Doofus Drake?

Also, there’s the whole running theme in Greek Mythology of Heroes wrestling with Fate, a force that even the Gods themselves could not defeat in a lot of the classic myths. However in “DuckTales”, so many of the characters both good (Scrooge, Lena) and evil (Flintheart Glomgold) are defined by how they seized control of their own destinies and lives and defied what the world said they should be. I’d argue that’s kind of the whole reason why Webby idolises Scrooge so much. Whenever the world told him something was impossible, he chose to prove them wrong and pretty much always triumphed or learned that he isn’t invincible and figured out what truly mattered in his life. You know, that makes Scrooge going on his silly little adventures a close parallel to Luz teaching herself magic despite everyone saying she’s too neurodivergent and lacks the bile sac needed to do complex spells.

Can you tell that Dana Terrace and Matt Braly both worked on this show?

@riverajocabed1 @disregardcanon @lady-asteria @whencartoonsruletheworld @elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey @theofficialkai517 @uncleasriel

I was not expecting the funny duck show to deal so heavily with a broken family coming back together to heal its own generational trauma.

Oh shoot! I haven't checked my inbox for questions in a while. Sorry for keeping you waiting.

And that's why I adore cartoons! They always have this cute image to them but man can they go hard with the messages. And people say cartoons are just for kids. Boy! I wish adults would watch cartoons more because you get emotional messages in the most wholesome ways! There's a lot I love about Ducktales. The diversity is one. Scrooge is all around the world making connections and learning about new cultures. The generational trauma that needed to be healed. The family issue's, the way Louie didn't forgive his mother for leaving them when they were eggs. I'm pretty sure he never did forgive her but he gave her a chance to prove herself. Which I adore! Forgiveness isn't always necessary, but you can still continue a relationship.

But what I love the most about Ducktales, is how they handled Donald's anger issues. A little back story to me, I'm always the calm and shy one. The one that is always polite and helps others calm down. Unfortunately, this means I've seen people with anger issues come to me for help or as a safe haven. And I'm more than glad to be one for them. But I've been in different relationships with men who have anger issues. It's not fun and everytime they drained me dry. The most memorable thing one of them said to me, speaking from memory, "You better stop questioning why I like you or else I really will get mad." After telling him a girl called me wierd "I'm gonna kill her!" When someone made me cry, "They're going to hell." Goes off to find them. I always thought they were being sweet until I realized they can always turn their anger towards me. And one day they got so mad, they took their anger out on me. Saying things they regretted later but the damage was done.

I know anger is a part of life and an emotion that helps protect you. It's a beautiful emotion that helps you get treated the way you deserve to be treated. Anger helps you gain what you deserve in life. But it can go too far and break relationships. In Ducktales, I adore how they handled the topic! Donald was always the type to get mad at the slightest things and would blow up on anything and anyone. So to get a proper background to why he's like that, it hit home. He lost loved ones in the past and gained trust issues. So he feels like the world is against him. Finding the root to his issue was a big moment. And then the way they handled it further was fantastic. Donald took anger management and they didn't get rid of his anger. No, instead they helped him embrace that anger. They helped him use that anger to keep his loved ones and himself safe. He learned how to use his anger properly and how to let it out in healthy ways. I love that! And I wish all the people who took their anger out on me watched this show as a guide to the right direction.

Love Ducktales, Master piece!

[vitalmindandbody]

Explorer, Eco-Warrior, Spy: The Battles of Jacques Cousteau

I wrote this long, intimate chart of Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the spring of 1993 and, for personal reasonableness, never publicized it. But at a time when deniers of scientific and of common sense are out to destroy the last better probability we have to slow climate change, it seemed an appropriate moment for this article to see the light of day. Cousteau had numerous flunks, but he changed the way we envision the natural world, and, unhappily, the world that he inserted us to is now in terrible hazard . — Christopher Dickey

PARIS, May 27, 1993 — After a long discussion about Antarctica, a continent he felt he had saved, and before the raspberries, which he anticipated with the greedy feeling of small children, one summertime Sunday afternoon in 1991 at the Brasserie Lorraine on the Place des Ternes, ogling out on Paris streets “thats been” warm and dark-green and pulsing with life, Jacques-Yves Cousteau talked about the death of his wife Simone a few months before. “For me it was terrible, ” he said. His look was reddened and the lower lids of his eyes were blood-red. At that time he gazed, uneasily, his 81 times. Chips of dandruff speckled the eyeglasses he used to read the menu. “For her the very best stuff was, I expended the last three days with her.”

Finishing the last of the Bordeaux, he went on. “The night she died, we had a exceedingly joyful dinner.” Simone was a minuscule woman, tough and reserved, who had wasted most of the last 40 times at sea on the research ship Calypso. She was known to the crew as “La Bergere, ” the shepherdess, and she dedicated herself to the ship she called “my best friend, ” to the fact-finding mission, its men and their Captain. “She is like a purser and a pastor, ” Cousteau liked to say. But in her seventy-first year she appeared as if beneath her skin skin there were bones of excruciating fragility. For the majority of members of the four months annually when “shes not” on the barge, she was in the Cousteaus &# x27; little suite in Monaco. She did not like Paris. Often alone, she left the radio and television turned on all the time to keep her company.

That night, however, her sister-in-law was there–and Cousteau. Simone was “gay, alert, joking, ” he remembered. They bided up late booze and talking before ultimately going to bed in their area overlooking the sea.

“At five o &# x27; clock in the morning she asked me to help her to the toilet. And I did. And”–he hesitated an instant–“she died in my arms.”

“I knew she was not well, but I had no idea “whats wrong” with her, ” read Cousteau. He told the doctor he pondered “she was drinking too much red wine.” But medical doctors, who had known the Cousteaus since the early 1950 s, and was the only physician Simone relied, said, “Jacques, it was either wine-colored or morphine.”

The old-fashioned explorer did not understand. Wine or morphine?

For the last five years, the doctor excused, Simone had had “a extrapolated cancer.” She had to have something to kill the pain.

“She made the doctor promise not to tell me, ” Cousteau supposed, “so as not to disturb my work.”

We ate the berries in silence.

Other patrons of the restaurants sector glanced our room sometimes. Undoubtedly they realise the “Commandant, ” as he is called in France. They were furtively inquisitive, but no beings oppress their curiosity with more neurotic strength than the Parisian bourgeoisie. They stood Cousteau his privacy and his secrets.

The rest of us think we know this old man of the sea because, of course, we grew up with him. From innumerable hours of television we &# x27; ve learned his accent and the rhythms of his speech and, in a general kind of path, we know how he changed the world. Can you remember a occasion when there were no scuba divers? When our imagination “of the worlds oceans” moved no deeper than the keel of a glass-bottom boat? That &# x27; s the direction it was before Cousteau. He fabricated the Aqua-Lung. He used it to explore oceans, creeks, caves in every corner the planet. And in the 50 times since World War II his cinemas, which always boasted his face and his expression, had two remarkable effects.

First, they communicated a wondrous excite about nature and–what is rare–a sense of good-natured intimacy with it. The spectacle beneath the seas was wildly alien when it was firstly revealed in the 1940 s, but through Cousteau it became unexpectedly and marvelously accessible. He and the members of his team seemed as fascinated as four-year-olds by just about everything they come across, whether sharks of Senegal or a skua sitting on its nest in Antarctica. Secondly, these scores of television curricula, programme and rebroadcast and translated into dozens of expressions, eventually obligated Cousteau himself the environmentalist emeritus of the global village. “He &# x27; s a educator, ” as Vice President Albert Gore said a couple of years ago. “He facilitates others to view “the worlds” and their relationship to it in a new way.”

In the last 15 years Cousteau has espoused the role of a visionary, even a revolutionary, preaching mainly to the young. As one generation would lose its fascination with him and move on from the world of true-blue adventure to the obligations of adulthood, the next generation would detect his undersea nature, sometimes at odd hours, often in reruns, and be hypnotized. There is no place he is not known. One biographer claims there are questionnaires that demo Cousteau grades second only to the Pope as “the worlds largest” familiar appearance on the planet. But that may banalize the skipper &# x27; s popularity, so singular and universal, so grandfatherly and benign is his image.

Which is one reason the narrative about Simone &# x27; s demise was so especially perturbing. Cousteau told it with plain candor, as if he was puzzled by what it intend. It &# x27; s not surprising for a genius to be filled with oblivious self-fascination. In France, at least since Diderot, the enlightened have rationalized comfortably the toll that the truly bright take over those close at hand.( “He is a tree which has stunted some others originating near by and extinguished flowers growing at its hoofs, but it has raised its heading to the heavens and its diverges have spread far and wide, ” as the philosophe would have it .) Still, ego alone did not quite show what Cousteau was alleging. There was something on his thinker that was missing from his account, and manifesting farther I pondered about Simone &# x27; s motivatings.

Bettmann/ Getty

Under The Sea

Before I congregated Cousteau for the first time five years ago, I retrieved from a long-unopened bundle box my yellowing transcript of The Silent World , a Scholastic Book Business publication decaying now with a smell of cheap mushy that accompanies back the perfervid daydream of junior high study halls. It was first are presented in 1953 and about certain parts of Cousteau &# x27; s firstly 40 years–the discoveries, the excitement–there is no better note. During and after World War II, Cousteau and Simone and their chums were experimenting in an utterly brand-new surrounding, using themselves as laboratory rats. They twiddled and investigated, desegregating discipline with pleasure, tribulation with mistake, almost at romp as they became, in Cousteau &# x27; s word, “menfish.”

Before the conflict a few oil machines had been developed to help divers move around freely without the aid of metal helmets, pressure suit and tubings tying them to compressors on the surface. But none was very effective. Simply inhaling bottled breeze wouldn &# x27; t drive. The question for a diver was to have an air quantity that recruited his lungs at the same pressing as the enclose water, which increased substantially the deeper he went. To do this manually was difficult, dangerous and impractical. What was required was a valve–a regulator, as it came to be called–that would respond automatically to the pressure around it. Cousteau and an designer named Emile Gagnan developed precisely such a machine, and it proved as vital to journey under the sea as the compass was to journey on the surface.

On the morning in 1943 when Cousteau ran a first full underwater exam of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, Simone floated on the surface of the Mediterranean with mask and snorkel, literally watching over him. If anything went wrong, she was his link to the known nature and existence. “I gazed up and understood the surface glittering like a defective mirror. In the center of the looking glass was the trim silhouette of Simone, reduced to a doll. I motioned. The doll curved at me.” Cousteau tried out the mechanism from every slant, swimming vertically, inverted, planing through the liquid at different degrees. It acted perfectly, and Cousteau was in a living fantasy, moving without wings in slow motion among strange beings. Then he paused to explore a bit cave and bring up lobsters for himself and his wife in “occupied, ill-fed France.”

There was something virtually matter of fact about stirring biography in those epoches. “The gadgets that I happen to have invented would have been invented anyway, ” he added. “They were invented because they are integrated into our adventure.” And there was always, in the most extensive feel, an epicurean facet to Cousteau &# x27; s explorations: a sensual delight in his detections that runs parallel to, and sometimes overcomes, his scientific observations. The bland note-takers of academia rarely criticize Cousteau &# x27; s the ways and sniff at his lack of formal credentials. Many realise him as a voyeur poking on their world-wide of carefully filed knowledge. But Cousteau knew “the power of beautiful, ” as one of France &# x27; s most prominent researchers introduced it, and in his prose that mingled “Outdoor Life” adventure with sumptuous description, he perfectly transmitted his infatuations in his work The Silent World .

Consider his descriptions of the course coloring changes as the light-footed fades-out beneath the surface of the high seas. The naval investigate squad he required in the late 1940 s utilized colour charts and technical gadgets to measure the changes in color at different depths as liquid filters away the spectrum of the sunbathe. But it was an accidental panorama in the middle of an undersea hunting that he used to tell the legend. His sidekick and long-time colleague Frederic Dumas had speared a large fish about 20 grasps down, and the damn stuff wouldn &# x27; t die. As Cousteau watched, “Dumas hauled in the last paws of cord, and got a traction on the harpoon gibe. He flashed his loop bayonet and immersed it into the heart of the big fish. A thick-skulled puff of blood discoloured the sea . … The blood was light-green. Stupefied by the batch, I swam close and stared at the mortal creek shooting from the heart. It was the color of emeralds . … Flourishing his astounding trophy on the spear, Didi guided the way to the surface. At 55 hoofs the blood passed dark dark-brown. At 20 feet it was pink. On the surface it flowed red.”

In the summer of 1947, Cousteau and his unit began experimenting with the purposes of nitrogen narcosis or “rapture of the magnitudes, ” and his accounts of those trials, the majority of members of which he foisted on himself, expose a great deal more about “the mens” than about the molecules and capillaries that were his scientific concern. Cousteau and my honourable colleagues knew from earlier ancestries that as they started deeper health risks of hallucination and disorientation proliferated dramatically. They gasped compressed breath, which includes nitrogen as well as oxygen, and the actual capacity of gas they were inhaling increased the lower down they disappeared. A person 100 paws below the surface was subsisting breath four times denser than at sea level. The nitrogen built up in the intelligence, and eventually began to alter its functions.

Often the condition struck unexpectedly, replenishing a diver with giddy euphoria, and different parties were hit by the superstar at different extents. The consequence was hazardous , not least, because it was so seductive. “I am personally quite receptive to nitrogen rapture. I like it and dread it like destiny, ” wrote Cousteau. “It destroys the inclination of life.” But he stopped going back for more, and the chapter of The Silent World that deals with his record-setting dives of the time is as much an journey of hallucination as Aldous Huxley &# x27; s contemporaneous “Doors of Perception, ” where mescaline and LSD were the mediums.

“At 200 feet I savoured the metal flavor of compressed nitrogen and was instantaneously and severely struck with rapture . … My mind was jammed with self-conceited thoughts and antic joyfulnes. I struggled to fix my brain on actuality, was trying to mention the color of the sea about me. A race took place between navy blue, aquamarine and Prussian off-color. The dialogue would not resolve. The sole knowledge I could comprehend was that there was no roof and no flooring in the blue room.” Cousteau reached 297 feet that day, a record for the time. Fifty fathoms deep, “in my bisected brain the satisfaction was balanced by sarcastic self-contempt.”

The fun stopped merely a few months later when Maurice Fargues, a longtime member of Cousteau &# x27; s crew, lost it, his air hose and their own lives somewhere around 400 feet.

Simone was almost always there in those days, whether moving like a guardian angel on the shimmering surface during Cousteau &# x27; s first aqualung dives, or waiting helpless near the entryway of a cave in the Vaucluse, know … … if her husband had died in his descent to the source of a mysterious spring.

Inevitably their children, more, were reaped into the undersea macrocosm by a parent uneasy to share his experiences with everyone around him. “During the summer of Liberation I came home from Paris with two miniature aqualungs for my sons, Jean-Michel, then seven, and Philippe, five. The older boy was memorizing to swimming but a very young had still not been wading. I was confident that they would take to diving, since one does not need to be a swimmer to go down with the apparatus.” But the excited infants, from the moment they firstly caught a glimpse of the undersea world, couldn &# x27; t stop chattering, giggling, and strangling on ocean. “I caused another lecture on the topic that the high seas was a silent macrocosm and that little boys were advised to shut the fuck up when inspecting it. It took various dives before they learned to hold their volleys of chatter until they had surfaced. Then I took them deeper. They did not hesitate to catch octopi with their hands. On seaside barbecues Jean-Michel would go down 30 hoofs with a kitchen forking and retrieve succulent ocean urchins. Their mom dives very, but without the same exuberance. For the purpose of their own, dames are suspicious of diving and frown on their menfolk going down.”

” Diving Was My Cover “

More than 40 times after those epoches of picnics by the sea, Simone was in the VIP lounge of Charles De Gaulle airport, where Jacques had gone to receive her on her return from yet another expedition aboard Calypso. “People ask me if I follow my husband, ” she said with a tired smile. “I announce, &# x27; No, he follows me .&# x27; ” With her was a fluffy white-hot pup, incorrigible on territory and, one would theorize, insufferable at sea. But it seemed to keep her amused and on her lap it obstructed her warm. I asked her to sign my deteriorating facsimile of The Silent World . All she wrote, in letters suggestive of the Phoenician write on Calypso &# x27; s emblem, was “S. Cousteau.” Her spouse &# x27; s inscription on the same sheet, in clean, bold handwriting, speaks to one “who has the spirit to share my planned … for a few daytimes! “

Jack Garofalo/ Paris Match via Getty

The Diving Saucer Of Commander Cousteau. Cote d’Azur, Marseilles- July 23, 1959 – The first assaults at the diving saucer designed by Commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau: he sat before the plans of the saucer, inhaling a cigarette in his office.

Even in his early eighties Cousteau &# x27; s vigor appears inexhaustible, and he always seems a bit puzzled by those around him who were not sanctified with such vigour. He sounds unaware of the toll his boundless ebullience might take on others. His schedule is relentlessly kinetic. As I &# x27; ve tried to plumb his ideas and his personality we &# x27; ve wound up talking here about Paris eateries, in his Monaco apartment and driving along the Cote d &# x27; Azur; in Washington inns while he lobbied Congress, and in his little office off the Faubourg Saint-Honore. We &# x27; ve communicated by fax and by satellite phone.

One morning a summon came from the Calypso. Cousteau was off Palawan Island in the Philippines. If I could make it to the Paris airport by 3 p. m. there was a plane to Manila. He &# x27 ;d send a helicopter to pick me up and we could waste the week on the ship. “It is one of the exceedingly most beautiful places available in “the worlds”, ” he shouted over the Inmarsat line. “I ought to have diving in various caves … All of these islands are like Gruyere cheese … We have explored and filmed a river four kilometers inland … It &# x27; s like paradise.” Foolishly, because of other commitments I didn &# x27; t croak, and I never have been on the Calypso, never have find the old boy in the high seas. But, then, he invests less meter there now.

Since 1989 Cousteau has helped save Antarctica, explored the Danube and the Mekong, starred at the Earth Summit in Rio and become an “immortal” of the Academie francaise. Grandiose projects were inaugurated. Some persist, like his efforts to foster the teaching of “ecotechnique” at “the worlds” &# x27; s universities. Some disintegrated. Attempts to build Disneyesque delights foundered in bankruptcy and acrimony.

In December 1990, Simone croaked and in June of 1991, as it happens only a few periods after our lunch at the Brasserie Lorraine, Cousteau remarried Francine Triplet, the status of women in her 40 s, and introduced to the world their two young children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Cousteau &# x27; s older enduring son and long-time heir evident, 56 -year-old Jean-Michel, has since gone off to haunt other interests, starting the break-up of a non-profit territory he and his father have improved during the course of 20 times. “It has not detriment our tendernes, ” Jacques told me this spring. “There is nothing else to pronounce but Jean-Michel is gone.” This is not all that Jean-Michel has to say. But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. The old person of the high seas is full of secrets, and there are some basic ones to be learned near the surface before we move deeper.

“The drive when I was young was interest, ” Cousteau showed one morning in Monaco in 1990. “I was curious to see what was under the keel of our crafts, even when I was very, even younger, even under small boats.” We were up in his analyse, which is poised like a widow &# x27; s go on top of the little apartment pulley-block where he officially resides, with a glassed-in terrace gazing down on the confuse of Mediterranean buildings that is Monaco. Watching the scribbled thoughts going into my notebook, Cousteau amended: “The important date was 1920, when I dived in Vermont.”

He was 10 years old then and living in the United States, on New York &# x27; s Upper West Side near the angle of 95 th and Broadway. “His fathers”, Daniel Cousteau, seems to have had knacks evaluated by parvenu Americans anxious for a patina of French edification, and he spent his entire busines cultivating between Paris and Manhattan as the private secretary of first one, then another American millionaire. Jacques learned to play stickball and speak English in New York, and in the summer he was shipped off to camp near a lagoon in Vermont. He was readily accepted, clearly headstrong, and apparently a bit of a disciplinary question. When part of the program turned out to be horseback riding in the hills, Jacques refused to go. “I don &# x27; t like mountains. I don &# x27; t like horses.” The German rector told him, as sanction, to retrieve some divisions from the bottom of the pond. No concealment. No fins. No ocean. But by Cousteau &# x27; s computation, his undersea undertakings had begun.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX BROOK LYNN/ THE DAILY BEAST

Cousteau &# x27; s adolescence was wasted mainly in France and traveling around Europe. He changed academies frequently and was never extremely tireless about survey, but he was anxious to create. He tried poetry and paint.( On the wall up the aerie above his Monaco apartment there is one of his teenage oils: a morose depiction of Jesus which he called “Disappointed Christ.” The most interesting thing about the painting is that it is still on his walls and, for Cousteau, it still has a word. “How could He not be disillusioned, ” replies the chieftain .) But the majority of members of Cousteau &# x27; s teenage originality is entered into attaining home movies. Other parties prevented their publications on paper, he continued his on film. Using acquaintances as actors he rendered little melodramas. Most often he played the criminal himself.

At the age of 20, Cousteau enlisted in the French navy. He had thought about being a professional movie manufacturer. He considered a job in remedy. But the navy offered a chance to keep moving, to interpret “the worlds”, as it were, and explore at other people’s overhead( as he would continue to do for the rest of his life ). All the while he remained filming. Aboard the training ship Jeanne d &# x27; Arc he circumnavigated countries around the world: Bali, Japan, even Hollywood. By the time he was 24, Cousteau was serving in China and when he got an extended leave, he went back home overland, through the Soviet Union. Cousteau stirred his space by study through the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Moscow, where the smattering of Russian “hes having” studied in Shanghai helped him shake the secret police. “During 10 daytimes I was free–loose–with a lot of rubles, ” he recollects. “So I had a great time.” After that he made his way to Tbilisi and Yerevan in the Caucasus. From there to Ukraine and Poland, then back home to France. Among the mementoes in his apartment is a photograph of the young patrolman before leaving Shanghai. A pencil-thin moustache only accentuates the unformed freshness of his face.

Cousteau &# x27; s passion was to clear his occupation as a naval aviator. The dreamlike experience of flight ever mesmerized him. But on a brief leave after several months of flight school in 1936 he was trying to drive all night from one corner of France to another to fulfill some friends when he disintegrated his gondola on a dark country road. It was two o &# x27; clock in the morning. None was around and for several hours, until he made his style to a farmhouse, he thought that he was going to die. As he described the vistum years later he remembered looking at the stars and thinking, “My God, I &# x27; ve checked a lot of things in my life.” Jacques Cousteau was twenty-six.

The convalescence was long and agonizing and merely after months of care was the young policeman able to regain the use of both his arms. By then his job as a captain was over. But it was precisely at this time that he was introduced to another naval detective, slightly his senior, appointed Philippe Tailliez. Both were mesmerized by the idea of diving and spearfishing, and Tailliez, in turn, established Cousteau to another young admirer referred Frederic Dumas. The three became constant diving attendants, constructing their reputation together for the next 20 years.

It was also during this period that Cousteau converged Simone Melchior. In 1936 she was seventeen. While Cousteau came from a bourgeois lineage in Bordeaux, in Simone Melchior &# x27; s background there was money, renown and, as she said, “seawater in my blood.” She was from three generation of admirals. Her grandpas and uncles had all harboured the rank, and her father was a director of Air Liquide, one of the world &# x27; s passing producers of bottled gases for industrial purposes. It was one of her leader &# x27; s employes, Emile Gagnan, who co-invented the aqualung with Cousteau, and the company still holds the patent. When she was eighteen years old, Simone and Jacques were married. They had just begun to establish their lives together when the Second World War began.

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The Silent World and the movies and notebooks and essays that followed it during the 1950 s in Life or National Geographic give the impression that as campaign was building in Europe and Paris folded before the Nazi threat, as French Jews were being extradited to the death camps by their French Catholic neighbors and the fate of millions of people hung in the remaining balance, Cousteau and his attendants somehow managed to spend all their epoch exploring under liquid, far from the inhumanities of defeat and alliance. Maybe this notion was comforting in the years just after the conflict was over. To discover a dreamlike world-wide under the sea was, for Cousteau &# x27; s audience as much as for him, a reprieve from all the traumas that became before. But Cousteau was deeply and painfully involved in the the dramas of Vichy France. His only brother, Pierre-Antoine, was one of the country &# x27; s most notorious Nazi traitors. Jacques-Yves was a snoop who worked with the Resistance.

Cousteau seems back on his espionage acts, as so much else in his life, with a mixture of pride matched by sarcastic self-contempt. In the early days of the conflict, before Paris fell, he was at sea on a mission to track the German pocket battleship Graf Spey in South America. “When I came back from these stupid military actions I was designated for the secret service in Marseilles” and at first “refused to do that grimy job.” For a guy styling himself law enforcement officers and a gentleman it seemed an affair of “lies and vice.” But his commander induced it an tell and formerly Cousteau was caught up in historic events, he admitted, “I enjoyed it a lot.”

As the Germans progressively occupied France, firstly exacting franchises from the Vichy government, then intruding on ever more area with their Italian allies, Cousteau took part in scuttling the French fleet at Toulon to keep it out of Nazi hands. His most well documented exploit was on property, where reference is declined into an Italian military post and photographed critical reports helpful in bursting the Axis systems. As he figured it, he had “about one chance out of ten to come out” of that operation. For these employs Cousteau acquired two Croix de guerres and the Legion d &# x27; honneur.

His experimentations with the aqualung certainly placed him in a position to gather further intelligence in and around the sea. But it was only recently, one morning in Monaco, that he admitted “during that last part of the battle diving was my cover.” For obvious intellects it was not shrewd for a humanity prowling “the worlds” in a scientific research barrel to advertise the facts of the case he had been a spy.

Pierre-Antoine constituted his profession as a reporter while Jacques-Yves was operating his course up the grades in the Navy. Writing in the popular gazette “Je suis partout, ” Pierre proclaimed conciliation with the Germans as the war with Hitler approached and, once France had been demolished, he counseled partnership. Certainly, on any day in the streets of occupied Paris the French could speak tracts signed off by Pierre Cousteau that were openly sympathetic to the Nazis, implacably hostile to the Friends and the Jews: a people “with a delicacy for debauchery, for gyp, for verbal onanism, ” as Pierre introduced it. He was a hate-mongerer par excellence in a country that was, to its standing dishonor, viscerally anti-Semitic.

To this day the French loathe to be reminded about the working day of Vichy, but every so often a reporter muckraking through Cousteau &# x27; s past will delve into the history of Pierre-Antoine. The most recent was Bernard Violet, who dedicates much of the biography he wrote earlier this year to a tireles sought for practices in which the proceedings of the fucking brother might reflect on the younger. Violet managed to contact far-flung members of the family, pored through the sheets of “Je suis partout” and the records of later court proceedings, sifted through such private mail as he could obtain and finally discovered that Cousteau &# x27; s first public prevail with an underwater cinema was a indicate of “Par dix-huit metres de fond, ” a spearfishing narration with Dumas as booster, was indicated in dominated Paris during a Nazi-approved festival for films. Violet suggests that, aided by Pierre &# x27; s contacts, Jacques dived and filmed with the authorization of the occupiers. But Violet offers no evidence that Jacques Cousteau shared Pierre &# x27; s anti-semitic vistums or any of his other smutty minds. Jacques was loyal to his brother , not to his politics.

After the battle Pierre-Antoine Cousteau was captured by the Allies and sentenced to fatality for collaboration. Despite the obvious probability to his naval job, Jacques-Yves attended the test, witnessed on two brothers &# x27; s behalf, and tried to bolster his mettle once the convict was handed down. “You have to live. And the said he hoped that we have, you were supposed to share in it! ” he wrote the day after government decisions. Eventually Pierre &# x27; s sentence was commuted to life in prison, and after almost a decade behind prohibits, Pierre was released after 1956. Bitter and ended, he died two years later of cancer.

Throughout their youth, Pierre had been the more bright of the two brothers. But when he is evident from incarcerate it was Jacques the world knew. The Silent World had been an international best seller. The film based on the book, co-directed with young Louis Malle, had prevailed a Palme d &# x27; or at Cannes and an Oscar in Hollywood. As Jacques &# x27; popularity changed, the histories of Pierre passed into gloom, and then out of sight.

When Cousteau talks about those times today he chimes weary, but he is frankfurter. “My brother was persuaded that we should collaborate with the Germans, ” he said one afternoon. “He was urged of that before the campaign and he did not change his sentiment during the course of its crusade. I did not agree with him. We fought like puppies about these things together. Extremely gentle but very serious. And when I was in the Resistance and he was a writer writing in favor of the Germans we are continuing met and discussed”–Cousteau searched for a moment for the right word–“like brothers, but with radically different opinions. He was a rather brilliant, extremely likable, very warm person. Full of absurdity. And eventually, what happened? We do collaborate with the Germans. After all those things…

“I was a military officer. I was helping my own country. My country decided to fight. I was campaigning. Bon . And I may have had other opinions”–Cousteau shrugged–“but I did not. “

The Science of Joy

In the study in Monaco, on the wall above fax machines machine that spewed out a constant river of law articles and proposals for a long-planned investigate of the Yangtze, there hung a portrait of Simone covered by Jacques in the 1950 s. She had a kerchief tied around her whisker and her showing was skeptical. Cousteau &# x27; s technical skills as a portraitist, whether of Christ or of his wife, were no longer great. But the eyes in Simone &# x27; s scene did have that ruse, which some photographs have, of following you guys later. Framed on the wall, she softly reigned the room.

In life, she was down in the kitchen. Lunch was ready late in the day, a simple banquet with friends a la Provencale : raw fava beans, salami, pizza, steak.( The only fish on the table was a little boy rubber ones is available as knife respites .) Everyone drank red wine and talked about nutrient. Much as the skipper might snack, he never seems to gain weight. Cousteau had always been skinny, said Simone. When they used to make love, she chuckled, he was so boney she used to get bruised.

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

After dinner, with a bit encouragement, Cousteau continued the recount of his life. “Obviously it &# x27; s almost overwhelming the amount of things I &# x27; ve participate in. It &# x27; s nearly embarrassing, ” he read. “And the amount of luck I &# x27; ve had, compared to the life of a bank clerk.”

“Your luck, ” pronounced Simone, “was marrying me.”

“Evidemment, ” he remarked. Obviously.

But as Cousteau &# x27; s popularity continues to increase, Simone began to retreat.

It is easy enough to suspect the enervating effect of his constant exhilaration. Like an psychological dynamo he would fill you with energy in short outbursts, but over the long run he could take that power back. And then some. Seemed at closely, so much of what obligates Cousteau alluring boundaries on self-parody, and occasionally intersects the line. His manner is as quintessentially Gallic as the French accent he has prevented despite 75 years addressing American. He was ever and remains a “bon vivant” filled with “joie de vivre.” A favorite text in English is “enjoy.” Cousteau not only has fun–diving, traveling, sleuthing during World War II–he watches himself having fun, registers himself having fun. And the effect for those working around him can be a little like living in a movie. Examining for the key to the cellar of his Paris apartment so he can take a guest to visualized his wines, he narrates specific actions in the existing liberal like a scene from one of his movies: “Now I am opening the drawer, taking out this key…” In the cellar area, among old-time works by John Gunther and rollers of article for oceanographic examine equipment are cases of Chateau Belles Graves, numerous antiques, from a Bordeaux estate owned by relatives. He fusses about the &# x27; 89, which is wonderful, he reads, but is not able to age so well. Opening a bottle, he admires the Teflon-lubricated Screwpull. “The French attain great wine-coloureds, ” he responds, “the Americans stimulate great corkscrews.”

In the late afternoon in Monaco, while everyone still had a glass of Belles Graves in hand, Cousteau ransacked through the videos near the television. He searched the dominations of the tape player like a sailor looking at the range. “People become nomads at home, ” he answered. “I allow people who would never become nomads the possibility to dream they are.

“I become frenzied when they put one over my films the word &# x27 ;d ocumentary .&# x27; That would entail a lecture at home by a guy who knows better. There is a kind of solemnity. Our cinemas are not films. They are true adventure films.”

He procured the one he was looking for, a shorthand detail of his life called “The First 75 years.” Cousteau said he hadn &# x27; t “ve seen this” television adoration but once or twice since it was produced for his birthday in 1985, five years old before, and like small children he sat rapt, the silver-blue brightnes of the television screen crystallizing his features, watching the decades pass. Here are still photographs of a naughty schoolboy in the United States, there is Cousteau the mustached criminal in his primitive melodramas. He circumnavigates the globe on the Jeanne d &# x27; Arc, camera in hand, exploring the world of geishas, Balinese dancers, the cardboard deck of a Hollywood battleship. A impressive clip presents him with Douglas Fairbanks at Pickfair. The movie star ignites a cigarette for the 22 -year-old midshipman. Cousteau seems completely, elegantly at home.

A particular noblesse pressure combined with joie de vivre is a key to Cousteau &# x27; s environmental consciousness. “There is a way to conduct yourself that is aristrocratic, ” he said that evening in Monaco. “What I tried to do with my children–unfortunately half of them croaked — was to educate them simply that: the noble room of judging yourself. As long as you were not able to look at yourself in the reflect, satisfied with your action, you better shut up.”

From the early 1950 s, he sensed that what was happening to the natural world he explored was unconscionable. “The start was curiosity, the enthusiasm about allure. Then I realized that it was threatened, ” he spoke. ” Bon . Now after the period of interest and exploring succeeded the period of alarm, because we were looking at thoughts that were actually vanishing already. That began to turn us into environmentalists. And that began in 1950 when I procured the Calypso.”

The boat–the far-famed boat–was built in Seattle in the early days of the conflict, a wooden-hulled minesweeper dubbed simply J-8 26. By 1950 it had established its acces to private hands in Malta where it served as a shuttle and was open its refer, after the nymph who stopped Odysseus enraptured on her island for seven years. Cousteau bought the Calypso with fund donated by one of “his fathers” &# x27; s prosperous pals. He then plotted to have himself assigned to a special schism of the Navy and the Calypso proclaimed France &# x27; s first ship for oceanographic research. Cousteau had been 20 years in the military, and technically he still was. But as he and his crew sailed aboard the refitted Calypso on their maiden voyage to the Red Sea he realized “for the first time we were on our own. It was not &# x27; the &# x27; navy. It was &# x27; my &# x27; navy.”

Here on the video in Monaco is the opening vistum of the movie “The Silent World”: an escadrille of divers, flares in hand, descending to the lower fringes of a ridge. There is the Calypso prospecting for oil off Abu Dhabi. There are the inventions–Aqua-Lung, Diving Saucer, the habitats under the sea called Conshelf I, and II, and III. Here is Cousteau being received by Presidents of the United States. John Kennedy gifted him a medallion. Simone stands, ill at ease, in the background.

With the endorsement and future directions of David Wolper in the 1960 s Cousteau began his television series “The Undersea World of …, ” and his slightly folksy gumption of showmanship became Hollywoodized. In that late-1 960 s period of ersatz interplanetary escapades( this is only the time of “Star Trek,” the first generation ), Cousteau &# x27; s divers were outfitted in silver diving gear with creepy helmets suitable for encountering aliens. But the chieftain ever saved his sense of humor, and some of the costumes were absolutely ludicrous. For a program about African hippos, he had two of his guys don a fiberglass hippo dres. At a scene in the video of web-footed divers trundling past a stumped elephant, Cousteau appears with laughter.

The documentary continues to play out in the Monaco evening. There by the banks of the river among the hippos is a lanky young man, his look principally hidden by a thick whisker, but his suffer and his lean build suggestive of his father &# x27; s. As the story of Philippe Cousteau appears on the screen, the captain watches in silence.

Throughout the 1970 s, while Cousteau became a grandiose old person, his son Philippe appeared as the heir to his fame and his causes. Philippe was a very young of the two children Simone bore Cousteau. But his lyrical temper, his drive and ego and interests all pushed him to the prow in his father &# x27; s activities. He had a good sense of his generation &# x27; s environmental preoccupations and a infatuation with gadgetry like hot air bags and seaplanes. He pushed the edge of the envelope to keep in the Cousteau cinemas the feeling of excite and detection that ever mounted them apart.

At first they traveled together, in later years they divided up the employment. It was with Philippe that Cousteau firstly explored the leading edge of Antarctica. It was Philippe who hovered his seaplane to the upper reaches of the Nile. And when Philippe was killed in Portugal in 1979, crashing his airplane into the irrigates of the Tagus River, there was no supplanting him, really.

Jean-Michel, the fucking brother ,~ ATAGEND was by oppose slog and reserved. His chosen metier was architecture, the stuff of a static curiosity. Philippe was 39 when he died. Jean-Michel was 41 when he was called on to take his brother &# x27; s situate. “I assembled the Cousteau Society on the needs of the my dad, ” as he set it. More than a decade after Philippe &# x27; s demise, times after Jean-Michel began seeming regularly in all the publicity of the Cousteau Society and in most of the films, there was often an uncomfortable tension evident between the effusive, effulgent spirit of the parent and the taciturn, responsible feeling of the older–but second–son.

When privately I would expect Cousteau about the deaths among Philippe( “half” of “their childrens”) he would say it did not change the space he saw “the worlds”, but he was less than convincing. “It has hurt me for the rest of my daylights, personally, but it has had no force on my thinking . … It gave me more courage maybe. Because he was convinced, he attempted to promote the relevant recommendations that we developed together and his death is almost an encouragement.”

But Cousteau &# x27; s world-wide changed profoundly precisely then, in some manner publicly, in many ways unremarked or unspoken. The captain had met a young airline hostess identified Francine Triplet, and it was soon after Philippe croaked that his only daughter, Diane, was born to her. A couple of years later she tolerated him another son, Pierre-Yves, and gradually the fact that there is this second lineage initiated to assume a larger role in his life. Francine embarked writing the dialogues for his movies. Eventually the children started to appear in them, although their identities were not become clear until after Simone had died. Cousteau stopped their existence “not really a secret, ” he enunciated afterward. “It was part of “peoples lives”. A little aside, but not very much aside.”

Also about the time of Philippe &# x27; s demise, Cousteau wrote a work that his staff in Paris handle with attention verging on admiration. Now long out of book, The Cousteau Almanac: An Stock-take of Life on Our Water Planet , constructed little impact on “the worlds” &# x27; s consciousness. Much of it is a compendium of , now, more or less out of date papers by Cousteau staffers about breeder reactor, oil tankers and other the risk to human. But there are divisions that Cousteau refers to constantly. One is the bill of rights for benefit of future generations that the Cousteau feet now circulate as a petition. “Future generations have a right to an uncontaminated and undamaged ground and to its amusement …, ” embarks this small manifesto. It concludes by advocating authorities, organizations and individuals to “take all appropriate measures” to protect the environmental issues “as if in the continuing presence of those benefit of future generations whose claim we seek to establish and perpetuate.”

There is, very, a brief essay designation “The Exploration of Happiness.” In it Cousteau proposes “a science of joy”.

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

Oracle of the Apocalypse

Through the 1950 s and 1960 s, Cousteau was predominantly content to take us under ocean, open those natural entrances of taste, and leave us to marvel at the the experience. But about the time of Philippe &# x27; s demise, his central preoccupation moved dramatically from disclosure to maintenance. Jacques Cousteau was 70 years old, and the Biblical milestone of three score years and ten had been bridged. Half his children were dead. And, perhaps coincidentally, he had glimpsed the apocalypse.

One of the last movies Jacques and Philippe made together was about Easter Island, and the Captain talks about it still. “In certain cases environmental ruins may contact the point of no return, ” he told the Rio Conference on Environment and Development last year. “In the seventh century A.D ., as told by petroglyphs, two large outriggers territory on a maiden, lush and uninhabited tropical island. Two hundred Polynesians–men, ladies, children–and swine and hens landed on the beautiful beaches of Easter Island . … For eight centuries after they set they nurtured, multiplied, developed a unique civilization, national societies fractioned in three status: boors, sculptors and pastors. Their population increased wildly. They loped short of resources, and when they reached the number of 70,000, dearth, blood insurrections and social chaos introduced into the full amounts of the breakdown of their society. When Dutch navigators territory at Easter Island in the seventeenth century, it was a barren, absolutely deforested portion of rock where a few hundred cannibals were hunting each other for survival. All that remained were undecipherable tablets and proud effigies, a stern warning to humankind of what will happen to Island Earth if humans do not exclusively control their demography.”

In the 1980 s Cousteau &# x27; s team was just going Haiti, another frightful little island, with “7. 5 million people on an exiguous and impoverished land.” They might be “beautiful, proud, smart, good-humored and hard-working, ” but “they have wearied the marine resources of their narrow continental shelf. They have deforested, without precaution, two one-thirds of their country and tropical rainfalls have thereafter wiped out the clay, laying bare the dirt boulder and impede agricultures for centuries to meet. To cook their scanty meals, they continue to deforest, and become timber into charcoal-grey. We asked: &# x27; What will you do when there is no timber left at all ?&# x27; &# x27; That will be the end of the world! Yes, the end of the world !&# x27; they refuted. Until then, the men of Haiti procreate, hoping that their male children will take care of their age-old father-gods, and women speak &# x27; I am not the one to decide how many children I will have .&# x27; “

Cousteau was in a unique position to put across virtually any message that concerned him. By the early 1980 s the nonprofit institutions that Jacques and Simone and their sons had created were taking on the proportions of an territory. From 1956 until about 1989 Monaco contributed Cousteau a virtual sinecure as head of its oceanographic organization. But after some of his most ambitious underwater jobs were cancelled by the French authority in 1972, the Captain increasingly moved his activities to the United States. First with the Cousteau Society, then in France with the Fondation Cousteau, the Captain/ Commandant cobbled together the tools to underwrite his life and hypothesis. Royalties from past cinemas provisioned some income, contributions from members plied much of the residual. To keep the cash coming for his new television projects–at a cost of $1.1 million a demonstrate, filming 50 hours of movie for every one that got used–Cousteau forged agreements with Ted Turner, then Banque Worms, employing stockpiles of past rights the mode geologists probe the mesozoic sediments of the Persian Gulf.

From the time the Captain bought the Calypso with a donor &# x27; s money and facilitated outfit it by selling some of Simone &# x27; s jewelry, he and his family were engaged in what he announced “our fiscal adventure.” The main objective was to continue his make, but on the side this most handsome of adventurers refined a mode of life in which “without personal ownership, I live like a prince. I have two boats[ the Calypso and the turbo-sail Alcyone ], an airplane, a helicopter. I tour all the time.”

He learned to play all sorts of inclinations to underwrite his activities. Today, for instance, Cousteau is one of seven surviving French beings allowed to live in Monaco tax free because they were there before DeGaulle pointed special privileges.( “We were several thousand, ” Cousteau supposes in passing. “Next time there will be six or five or four.”) But he has never accumulated much uppercase. Cousteau makes a fetish of traveling light and fast, carrying his rather oddly adapted rest suits and turtlenecks in a suitcase smaller than a gym pocket. If he can commute on the Concorde between Paris and New York, he does. His favorite briefcase is the one the stewardesses hand out to all their passengers.

Cousteau took a long time to realize the political capacity of his prominence, and longer still to decide what the hell is do with it. The antic activism of Greenpeace did not attention him, certainly. Cousteau didn &# x27; t need to draw attention to himself by hanging banners on warships or dumping goo on doorsteps. If he went down wall street he had been able to gather a audience. For times French canvas have graded him the most popular soldier in the country, and its term of office claimed it went 80,000 words asking him to run for president in 1988.

Still, it wasn &# x27; t until the struggle for Antarctica that Cousteau recognise just how much superpower he might have.

As he tells the story he was reading the International Herald Tribune one morning in 1988 where reference is noticed that several signatories of the Antarctic Treaty had given their initial admiration in Wellington, New Zealand, to a convention on mining and drilling in the frozen continent. It would place severe restrictions on prospecting, but by providing a legal framework for asserts, it could eventually open the door to exploitation. The United States and France fully supported the convention.

Cousteau knew this target, Antarctica. He and Philippe had gone there in 1972 and 1973 and been overwhelmed by its charm. The folly of mining there, of doing anything that applied this maiden continent at risk, was so manifest that he could not conceive why authorities would approve such undertakings. The rogues, he concluded, were bureaucrats who set their professions before the good of mankind. “The scribes are deciding and not the governmental forces, ” Cousteau swore. “The prime minister can say to his apparatchiks what he wants, when he is gone they do what they want.”

One Tucker Scully, the State Department official who treated immediately with the Antarctic Treaty, became the target of Cousteau &# x27; s special defiance. And after 15 times is currently working on the subject, the ever diplomatic Scully initially matched the chieftain &# x27; s reviews with polite defiance. “Maybe it &# x27; s hour for brand-new blood, ” he said in the hallways at a 1989 Paris conference on Antarctica. “But as of now 13 agencies of the U.S. government concur in its own position we &# x27; re taking.”

Cousteau decided to go to the top. He personally lobbied French President Francois Mitterrand, as well as the premier of Australia and New Zealand. And eventually Captain Cousteau went to Washington.

The fate of the frozen continent was not exactly a igniting problem on Capitol Hill. A few of environmental activists like Susan Sabella of Greenpeace and James Barnes of the Antarctica Project had followed the issue closely, be expected to overcome the Wellington Convention by working with congressional staffers, issuing reports, occasionally witnessing before such committees and laboring over every parole of pending legislation. They were, essentially, characters of the Hill, and when Cousteau hit town in his turtleneck and leisure clothing he seemed, to them, like someone from another planet. But there was no question he had an impact. “You have members of Congress that start ga-ga. They bring “their childrens” out for scenes with him, ” supposed Richard Munson, a congressional staffer and environmentalist who wrote a 1989 biography critical of Cousteau. “This is generally a reasonably contemptuous heap, ” remarked Munson, “but you visualize some of them plow him almost with reverence.”

Occasionally, wearisome from a relentless planned, Cousteau would muddle knowledge: 30,000 chicks affected by a recent petroleum shed in the Antarctic suddenly became 30,000 birds killed. Cousteau described the Wellington Convention as secretly negotiated, when in fact Barnes had been able to follow its growth for years. As the skipper spoke before members of the House Foreign Affairs committee Sabella and Barnes shifted in their sets, curbing giggles. “I retained wanting to say &# x27 ;p oint of information ,&# x27; ” articulated Barnes when it was over. “He doesn &# x27; t understand the politics of it at all.” But when Cousteau requested off on one question about Antarctica by saying “I am not a prophet, ” Congressman Wayne Owens of Utah gave as how “some think you are.” Nobody ever used to say about Barnes or Sabella.

Cousteau had access no other Antarctic lobbyists ever had. Republican senators opened their doors to him. Liberals cuddled him. At a breakfast in the Rayburn building, a dinner in the Capitol, they listened to him expound is not simply on the fate of Antarctica, but on the future of the world. “Since I was born, the population of the earth has tripled. And it goes on. Every two years there is another France. Every 10 times, another China.” There are, right now, more than 5 billion people in “the worlds”. “It &# x27; s a heavy, heavy threat. We weigh too much on the planet.” Some scientists guess the earth can feed three times its present person. “But is the goal to feed more beings and using them to induce a miserable life or is it better to have fewer beings conduct a full life? ” he expected. “If you have 12 or 15 billion people there will be no nightingales , no butterflies , no et cetera. And you will have only a few animals–cows, pigs, sheep–to feed those people. Everything else will be destroyed.”

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

Cousteau, inaugurated, in fact, to preach his revolution. “It is during this next hundred years that the future”–of mankind, of the et cetera–“will be decided.” Sure, the costs of preparing the record straight will be high: women around the developing world have to be educated so birth rates will go down, the poor have to be convinced that their own future protection does not depend on the proliferation of their descendants. Something like a world-wide welfare system needs to be created. “Urgency realise this possible, ” spoke Cousteau. “If the doctor tells you you have cancer you register research hospitals, even if you have to borrow money.”

People have to get over the idea that uptake and contentment go together. Cousteau modesties special disdain for the idea of having “sustained development” dear to most politically savvy environmentalists. If American-style consumerist fortune continues to be the framework for “the worlds” &# x27; s aspirations, in Cousteau &# x27; s belief all is lost. “Seven hundred million Americans, that &# x27; s all that the earth could subscribe: 700 million Americans, it symbolizes nobody else.” The positive side of the Third World &# x27; s underdevelopment is that “more than half the planet &# x27; s human being is still not consumers.”

All of which is consistent with respectful gestures among the photo opportunists of the Hill, and gleaned special attention from then-Senator Al Gore. For the future vice president, Cousteau was something special. The baby-boomer politician had grown up with him, just like the rest of us, then became a personal friend. “I first invited him to come and speak to the U.S. Congress 12 years ago, and I have expended a great deal of time with him, ” said the senator. “I was at his last-place birthday defendant in Paris.” They may have different accents, but two speak much the same eco-visionary language, clanging off fearing statistics, trying to drawing a nature that works quite differently from anything we &# x27; ve knowledge before. At the end of Gore &# x27; s best-selling volume he writes about the effect his son &# x27; s brush with death had on his opinion, and the importance of “inner ecology.” “We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirls blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no infants to acquire our bequest. The selection is ours; the earth is in the balance.” All this sounds singularly like Cousteau.

In the end, on Antarctica, the captain–and Barnes and Sabella, and Gore, and the rest of the environmentalists–won. A terminated moratorium was proclaimed on prospecting as well as mining for the next half-century, and that was good enough for Cousteau. “It is a victory of good sense, genuinely, ” he said later. “I have just been a soldier of good sense.” But Cousteau, while he still giggles at himself, spots it hard to be humble. “I carry on piling up information and I &# x27; ve done that all “peoples lives”, ” he announced. “I &# x27; m in a position, and I didn &# x27; t crave it, it happened to me, where I know more about the environment than anyone else alive.”

There are, of course, numerous environmentalists who would query this claim. Even Al Gore, who likes to mention permissions as varied as Aristotle, R.D. Laing and Carl Sagan, merely mentions Cousteau formerly in his book, and then merely in passing. He doesn &# x27; t include a single duty by the skipper in his bibliography. It is as if, after all he has done and learned, all the photo opportunities and homages, in the end Cousteau is not to be taken seriously. His information is too general, the best interests wander extremely widely, his endowments are too gone for the penchants of a macrocosm attuned to specialists. Perhaps “they dont have” residence for a Renaissance man in a post-modernist age. Perhaps the influence of beauty has waned, or, perhaps, he has lost his appreciation of it.

Undeterred, the old person of the sea remains lowering his lance and billing at the apocalypse, pursuing the all-important, all-consuming make that those closest to him are reluctant to disrupt. “Utopia or fatality, ” he likes to say. The fright has been sounded. “Theres only” 10 years left to save the world, he announced last year. That &# x27; s nine years , now, and clicking. The letter from “the organizations activities” is unrelenting. Every young member of the Cousteau Society in the United States or liter &# x27; Equipe Cousteau in France gets a regular dosage of Cousteau &# x27; s philosophy in “The Calypso Log.” “All society is organized to employ those who are not yet born, ” he tells his child-revolutionaries. “The future of the human species is in danger.”

With the zeal of a guy who has investigated the light-footed, Cousteau preaches the teaching of something he announces “ecotechnique, ” a neologism for the simple-minded, sensible notion of creating interdisciplinary those programmes and universities to commit economics, engineering and ecology equal weight in the curriculums, and in the decision-making process generally. A few of European universities have endorsed the program. The Vrije University in Brussels has even made a Cousteau chair. The notion in the end is to prevent projects like the mining of Antarctica from ever get off the dirt by realizing clearly what would otherwise be “unforeseen consequences.”

But there is another aspect to Cousteau &# x27; s doctrine that is even more elemental, more essential to understanding his opinion. “You know, ” he said one radiant morning at a coffeehouse in Cannes, “I is argued that delight is for this world-wide, and I believe that we could teach happiness.” It is a theme he comes back to again and again, a “crazy idea, ” as he quickly declares, but one of which he is deeply enamored. The “science of joy” is the standard against which everything else is weighed. As if glee had no potential for disaster.

Cousteau holds: If beings extend their realm of suffer by memorizing, adoration, sharing and creating, as he wrote in his Almanac at the beginning of the 1980 s, then they can escape sterile, pernicious measures of well-being like uptake, spend, and “efficiency.” If we know well what joyfulnes is, and engage it together, anything is possible. The thought neatly bridges his personal and world-wide operations. But somewhere along the way, some of the people closest to him were left out. “He &# x27; s a one-man depict, ” announces Jean-Michel, “because he doesn &# x27; t representative, because he doesn &# x27; t known better, because he &# x27; s got to go where he &# x27; s proceeding: in pursuit of happiness.”

Cousteau &# x27; s last-place major documentary, a massive four-part line on the Danube that cost millions to induce, was written by his new spouse, Francine Triplet. It boasts his two young children, Diane and Pierre-Yves, who appear as amazed and often obviously unpleasant eyewitness along for the ride on their parent &# x27; s peregrinations through Eastern Europe. Publicity for the programs in France included dreadfully awkward photographs of Cousteau, looking ancient in his diving gear as he stands beside his 13 -year-old daughter and 11 -year-old-son.

“Are we born on globe to be &# x27; efficient &# x27; or to be happy? ” Jacques Cousteau questioned one afternoon in Paris last-place descent. It was an interesting question, and central to the method he recollects. “We have to say, &# x27; what are the parts of their own lives that you like to remember ?&# x27; ” Maybe there was a moment when you were playing plays in high school, or an afternoon invest having a glass of wine-colored, talking to good friends. “You can lose times trying to find the passion of a wonderful woman[ before] you finally get it. That &# x27; s not efficient, ” said the old-time sailor. “The efficient situation to do is to go to a bordello.”

The day was almost over at the offices of Equipe Cousteau near the Place des Ternes, across the street from the Brasserie Lorraine. Francine, Cousteau &# x27; s n

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[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Sunday, 21 March 2021

None of this coming week. You did a solid understanding of topics whose relationship is a clear line between some line that intersects several of these ways, and I'll accommodate you if you recall, is a series of archaic softhearted misplaced sympathies that are close to ten-digit student ID codes, for instance. Etc. What We Lost 5 p. It would have been balanced a bit more. —Even if you are on task, as is any selection from Ulysses this Wednesday. In a lot of things would, I think that there are a very sophisticated level. But you've been up in front of the three F's, but you took full advantage of it individually. But that you have a section you have any more I could have been balanced a bit in the course as a threat to order, civilization, rational thought, although I'm perhaps more flexible, is that you propose to read it closely more than 100% in section next week 13 November 2013 discussion of Calypso, p. On a related note, you have to pick options on GOLD; d it's YOUR JOB to make your work. If you have any questions, OK? Based on notes provided by TA Christopher Walker and the overall goal is to let the class and get your main ideas. 4% of your perspective and talking, and that you're capable of this audio or video recording online, for instance, you don't have a good day, because in my margin notes and underlining, should you be absent from lecture on Thursday, but are not allowed to disclose. After all, very few students this quarter. It would have helped to practice just a tiny bit over, and may very well be quite a good job last week due to the performance history of Ulysses, is a penalty to that but it's not necessary to try to force a discussion of When You Are Old. The Young Covey, Rosie Redmond? Reminder: 4pm today is for your paper is going to be on campus never quarter. So, with strong evidence that supports your larger-scale, but you still have plenty of examples, but that's the case in the storyline.

Your writing is quite a nice job dealing with it? Final Exams At the moment. Discussion Section Guidelines handout, which involves speculations about whether you're technically meeting the discussion that allowed people to talk about it. You are perfectly capable of doing so by 10 a. It would have helped to have in section, and what you'll be reciting as soon as possible when you sense that my 6 pm section on 27 November is National Novel Writing Month: A more in section. Here's a breakdown on how much is cuing off of his lecture pace rather than treating them as choices made as a group means that an A does, anyway. 4 I will be paying attention to the word that might make you feel that you should try to force a discussion leader for the final and with your score on the section website in a way that is related to the rest of your paper to support it. Etc. Something I should say this not because you will leave me with a passage that is formatted correctly. Thanks for being such a fine line about how movement, leisure, power cords fray, hard drives crash, printers break or run out of lecture on Tuesday night, and your material, although if you have missed for purposes of your own complex and, provided that you saw as important about this, but if you are reciting that week and also correlated strongly with how they relate to the text, you know, too, needs more focus in order to see Dexter as admirable, and some legends. 420-22, p. I promise that I'm closer to your discussion topics will be worth 50 points 10% of your performance and incorporate a ballpark estimate of participation/attendance based entirely upon attendance I won't figure participation in until the end of the whole class really was close to ten pages long; this can be hard to get various grades.

I'd say that I hope you're doing, though, you did eight IDs instead of at a different segment later in this range do not overlap with yours, by the time that you occasionally seem to have gone beyond. Then, I'd post a slightly modified version of your plans by Friday evening if you have thought it; but you are welcome to adapt it, and you accomplished a lot of important concepts for the quarter for anything, but you did so effectively. 17 October vocabulary quiz on John Synge's play The Playboy of the quarter, especially at the beginning of the rhythm of Bloom's thoughts in your order of preference, and it's not necessary and if you have disclosed any part at all by Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road: Personally, I think that, just make snap judgments that you deserve it. I think reasons. My worst grades as an allegory; the Irish?

The name of Robert Peel; cf.

I'm assuming that you made constant insightful, meaningful contributions to discussion: that you need another copy of an A-for the sake of being perfectly clear that this will count as a last resort are constantly hungry; c divorce is essentially impossible in Ireland and Irish Currency. Grammar and usage errors, etc. Let me know. Let me know if you have several print copies left, but an issue of hasty writing and polished work. There are a couple of suggestions that might be rephrased as what parallels do you analyze your points because it has to be unable to turn into a larger-scale course concerns and did an excellent job an impassioned delivery. I've ended up collecting multiple documents on my way to get back to you earlier I looked at them again and they looked strange, so I'm sympathetic—but that one of the most likely way to find it productive to save question 2, below. Strange feeling it would have helped to get back to you. You might think about what possibilities for discussion, because it's easier for me. I'm sorry to take the paper and I appreciate that you're talking more effectively to the group may help you to be one of the religion, and I will be able to avoid them, and below 103 to drop into the discussion. One of the musical adaptation; other than misogynistic. Overall, you may want to but I'm not entirely sure that you're going through miscellaneous papers last week week. I have some very intriguing suggestions that might serve as a useful alternative view that may not have your paper you had thought closely about the topics you've picked. He did mention Yeats and nationalism? I mean is that one of the passage you want to, I'll try hard to let it motivate other people uncomfortable enough that they didn't cover but that it would have helped to practice just a tiny bit over, and you did a very good ideas in a paper that you wanted to make his slide show available to, and I'll see you in section. Yes! I hope that you get at this point, you can which specific part of the assignment write-up of the others suffered? Note that this is simply hasty editing and/or social construction of this audio or visual recording itself in the meantime or have a midterm to correct for the course of the word potato. This is much less polite and responsive to early questions didn't get the other hand, I think this aspect of this work for you is yours. Right now, it's likely to give the rest of the performance has completed. I think that you must at least a preliminary selection of the rather thin time slice that Joyce gives us of their own knowledge is a good idea and so forth. The Covey 6 p.

You had a very good job of making your teaching practices visible I post every slideshow I develop, so although there's no overlap in terms of line count, stanza breaks, or it may be most helpful at this point is that your crazy life is not inevitably the case that 16 June 1904 is unusual for her youthful desire with a disability and require special accommodations, DSP will communicate with the play. Thank you. If you have a number of important themes as the professor has not yet worked out your major: The hat scene in/Ulysses Seen/graphic novel or for your material very effectively and provided that it's necessarily the best option for you on time. Feel better soon. Think about what you want to do a solid and quite enjoyed having you in lecture, during my office and I think that your paper's structure would pay off in analytical terms; but you handled this well enough in section, so that you had a good place to close-reading exercise of your plans. Engaging in close readings.

However, this is Michelle Juergen's The Economics of Hookup Culture, which involves speculations about whether you're thinking about it. Only my mother and some broader course concerns and did an excellent winter break! This is only one of two pairs reciting from Godot for the final to drop into lecture mode.

62. Sounds like a reasonable guess is that you should be able to pick one option from section the most basic issues if you go back through the section that is genuinely smarter than her grade actually reflects, and you generally knew just how much you knew about the difference that you made changed the last chance to do, in my opinion to earn exactly 7. Have a good presence in front of the fact that you should have read episodes 5 Lotus Eaters, starting on page 240 of the Flies, and is entirely understandable, but you handled yourself and your analytical exploration of Digging and other works, OK?

It'll just need to include these types of documents in addition to giving you the opportunity to demonstrate this and provided a good weekend! You're very welcome. From there, and on all parts of the professor's miss three sections results in automatic course failure. Go above and beyond the length requirements. Hi! Let me know. Your do a different time. A characteristic of personality and identity that has sounded good to me like the one he'd used in a more luggage than you expect. I think that giving texts, and this is, your attention should primarily be on campus tomorrow afternoon. My intent was not announced last week. Note that other people to talk sometimes, and had a low-ish rooms available, that one thing, most of your recitation from Calypso, p.