Teaching “The Odyssey” at San Quentin

My father, who was not highly educated, spent a lot of time in the Arctic during WW2 in the company of an Oxbridge classicist and managed to pick up a lot of Homer, even though by his own account he never tried to learn it - it just "stuck".

What I take from that is that although Homer has a reputation these days for being a bit esoteric these stories, some of the oldest we have, are capable of very wide appeal.

As an aside - what I personally find most interesting is the potential historicity of Homer, probably through the combination of my father's love of Homer and watching Michael Wood's "In Search of the Trojan War" at an impressionable age...

A great read about the possibility of finding redemption in literature; I wish we saw more stuff with this depth on HN.

The opening of “The Odyssey” describes Odysseus as polytropos, a man “much turned” and “much turning.” He makes much happen, and much happens to him. When I selected “The Odyssey” as the first text for my English 101 course at San Quentin Prison, I worried about the choice. It’s a difficult work for readers of limited literary background, and I wondered how a population of mostly black and brown men doing long prison terms would relate to the story of an ancient Greek king. As it turned out, I had them at polytropos.

I liked it as an example of the positive effect of pure education without a vocational component. Too much emphasis is placed on vocational training for vocational reasons. Education improves your entire life, training merely improves your job performance. Or education makes life worth living, where training merely makes it easier to earn money.

There was a bit of journalistic make believe in the story. Anyone who's actually read great human literature would not remotely be surprised that all humans like it, especially hard core types like people who teach the subject, so the first line or so about pretending to be surprised black and brown people would like human literature is just ridiculous journalism.

(edited to add: It was an interesting article, worth the time to read, and shows linkbait doesn't have to be as icky and stereotypical as the worst linkbait out there. If you must have advertising supported content, let it be this good.)

In 2002, This American Life did a show on a Hamlet performance in prison - available at [1]. It's compelling radio, and I'd highly recommend it.

"Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It's a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers, living out the consequences."

[1]: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/218/a...

I recall having drinks in 1990 with a 30 year-old Ivy League grad in Manhattan, an up-and-coming type, somewhere in the intersection of Wall Street and politics, can't remember exactly what he did. He was adamant about cutting off the western cultural canon in education and repeatedly used Homer as an example of its irrelevance. His theme was we should be teaching young people about other cultures because the world will be ever more connected, there are more people from non-western cultures in the world, blah, blah, blah. He was real up front about this being social engineering. My Ivy League companion who had introduced us thought I was a real jerk for arguing with him. History has shown high culture surviving the most determined political onslaughts because it has intrinsic value.

One of the most interesting things about Homer's works is how very, very different the system of morality was back then. Throughout the book they talk incredibly casually of killing civilians and raping and enslaving their women. It is not just in war situations either (which is bad enough) - it is just not wrong to kill some island people who aren't part of your home country or allies.

One thing unique about Christian values (new testament) was the introduction of the idea the might doesn't necessarily make right, and the focus on the downtrodden instead of the epic. If you read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the main reason Christianity spread so quickly and powerfully in their missionary work was that they accepted the outcasts of the society, lepers, poor people, weak people, etc.

What a preposterous article, everyone who reads HN comments has learned that anything other than non-fiction is 'fake,' offers only the heavy-handed opinion of the author and is a waste of time to read.

But really, while I am struck by how apt the idea of The Odyssey as a parallel to imprisonment is, it's not so surprising that Homer would resonate. It's not self-absorbed academic stuff, it's gritty human drama. The Iliad is more gruesome and brutal than your average Tarentino film-- perhaps even more harrowing as it constantly introduces people who are neither bad guys or good guys just as spears shatter their teeth or pulse in their dying hearts.