Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Forgive me, friends. Between writing a silly little poem every day, and putting off revising the last two of the current tranch of chapters of my novel, I don’t have the energy to write a real weekend post. I tried thinking of one, but it’s almost midnight on Saturday as I write this, and I haven’t even finished today’s silly little poem. There’s just no way. So instead, I’ll just tell you a bit of what I’ve been up to this last week.

Recently, I’ve devoted a lot of hours to understanding Civilization VI, a video game I have owned since it was released in 2016 (I even own a physical disc for it). There is a Civilization VII now, but I don’t own it (yet), because I’ve only just recently figured out how to play Civ VI in a way that’s actually enjoyable. For most of this last decade, I’ve mostly been put off by the differences from Civilization V, a game which allowed me to build roads wherever I pleased, did not erase my workers from existence after three build actions, and did not require me to build specialty districts before I could build the structures inside of them (a mechanic which does not make sense—a theater district does not become a theater district until it has a theater in it).

But in playing a few games online with friends, and forcing myself to pay attention at last to the intricacies of its gameplay, I have concluded that Civ VI is a good video game. Maybe as good as Civ V, in its way. Recently I’ve been wondering if either of them are as good as I remember Civilization IV (the game that brought me into the series) being, so I tried installing it on my new computer using the CDs I bought back when George W. Bush was president. They installed alright, but the game won’t actually load up, because owning the software on a disc apparently does not mean I’ll always be able to play it. Fortunately, Ariele has it in her Steam library, so I don’t have to purchase it a second time.

So yes, I’ve played too much Civ this week. But also, I have been reading! I’ve spent the week reading a bit of light history, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Shortest History of the Soviet Union, about a chapter at a time. I find it to be fairly even handed about a subject that has long fascinated me, and helped me to form a clearer picture of what social and cultural life was actually like for Soviet citizens, when they weren’t being spirited away to Gulags by the secret police. I do have some weightier tomes on the U.S.S.R. that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, but I think they’re at my brother’s house, so I’ll have to try and dig them out when I go visit him in a month.

Speaking of weighty tomes (and works inspired by them), I went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey today, on an IMAX screen at a science museum, as the cinema gods intended. It is a pretty darn good film, though it is centered on a somewhat different set of themes than the original poem. As my friends and I discussed afterwards, any modern retelling of an ancient myth is going to necessarily present the story with modern sensibilities—in fact, I would go so far as to say that while it is critically important to understand the original on its own terms, there isn’t really any reason to make a movie out of it unless you are going to reinterpret its themes. After all, when we speak of “the original” Odyssey, we are talking about a nearly three thousand-year-old text transcribed from an oral tradition, written in Ancient Greek, a language the vast majority of us do not know how to read without assistance. If you want to experience the Odyssey as it once was, you’ll have to learn Homer’s idiom, and for good measure you should sing it (from memory) for an audience. But ours is a changed world, and part of what makes the tale of Odysseus a true classic is that it can bear the weight of modern themes as well as ancient ones.

I have naturally read the Odyssey myself, in translation by Richmond Lattimore. But I’ve decided that I would like to add to my shelf the newer translation by Emily Wilson, about which I’ve heard many good things. I lack the determination to teach myself Greek, but I can always enjoy a good translation. As for other contemporary adaptations, Ariele has recommended me a novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. I’ve also been thinking of rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and seeing how it holds up against Nolan’s opus. I expect it will be a hoot.