Breakfast with Pandora

Janus! Nice to see you again (and again)

I try to keep the navel gazing to a minimum here at BwP, but it is the end of the year, we are facing both sides of Janus, god of transitions, and a bit of self-reflection is in order.

I liked 2011. 2011 took a long time to be over and was challenging, which to me is a good year. As I get older, I want time to go slower, not faster.

Image found here.

When I was younger I couldn't wait till summer and the leisure that summer brings. Nowadays I am savoring every day, regardless of the activity (or lack thereof).  

I learned in 2011 that I value BwP and want to keep at it, even if infrequently. This year I only did 37 posts, including this one, but I enjoyed writing every one, and I hope each of them was a good read. (37 is in fact an increase from 28 in 2010).

In the first years of BwP my focus was on Greek mythology, and most search engine queries still concern that topic. I am most frequently visited during the school year, when students are taking Greek myth courses in college. 

But much of what I want to say about Greek Mythology is up. My focus in recent years and going forward has been on contemporary good stories, Hollywood and otherwise.

I would like 2012 to be a year for BwP where

• I write 50 posts or more. A post a week on average. Not too much geekifying on deep subjects, not too little



• I continue movie reviews, following mainstream Hollywood as best I can, searching for clues about what makes America tick, and what our future holds (stay tuned for Sherlock Holmes post)



• self-published books continue to get attention. I have decided not to do reviews except for those books I like, or at least books that someone will like. Life's too short to devote space to something you don't want someone to read. Note: I am very open to authors sending me books to review-- if I don't like the book, I'll tell you why in an email.



• I post on Greek Mythology as I am led.



• at least one food post gets done. Food is good.



• I keep up the dialogue about the business and craft of writing, and report on (fingers crossed) my publication success

BwP will serve as my brand name when and if I publish or sell my novels. One, Healing Knowledge, is in the query process with agents and publishers. Longtime readers will remember I posted several chapters of that a long time ago. Another, Skater in a Strange Land, currently has 12 chapters posted online. I just finished my first draft and have high hopes for it. Read a bit and see what you think.

Sometime in March 2012 I'll publish my 6th anniversary post. If you've read me from the beginning, why, thank you very much. If this is your first time having a spot of breakfast with the young lady from Greece, welcome. And however frequently you spend time here, I hope you are getting a diet rich in mythos and logos.

 

Tintin take

It's a sign of the times when a family goes to an eye-popping, spectacular, exquisitely animated computer-generated animated feature film and the composite score (out of 10) is a smidge north of a 6.

That was Tintin's fate tonight, premiere night, when my particular group of relational units went to see the newest Spielberg project.

Movie poster from here.

To be fair, there were only 2 true Tintin fans in the focus group, my son and I. Bedtimes were our favorite time to read all the classic graphic novels by Herge, the Belgian genius storyteller. We also watched all the animated TV shows that were out there on VHS tape back in the day. I first saw one of those way way back in the seventies, and for me, it was the greatest thing ever, the books brought to life.

The movie was a careful tribute to the original books, including references and Easter eggs throughout.

Yet for all that, I couldn't give it more than a 7. There was something tiresome about the whole thing. I have read the books so many times there was no suspense as to the ending (the plot is, if you don't know and do care, based on The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure). And all the unlikely chase scenes and explosions and hotels with tanks inside them ended up feeling contrived, as if thousands of people had worked on them to get them perfect.

Which, I think, is what actually happened.

Plus, this idea of a one-on-one duel with the bad guy at the end that lasts for about 20 minutes is getting boring as well. (Do not worry, I am not spoiling anything by saying this. You probably won't see it coming, and it has a lot of unusual elements that are somewhat surprising.)

I liked Tintin the character. I like Jamie Bell, who voices Tintin, and the animation does a good job capturing him and his dog Snowy. Snowy was the consensus favorite character among our crowd. We do have a little white dog at home. Maybe this influenced things.

There will be a sequel. I will go see it. But I don't think that it will ever replace the memory of that TV show in my young heart. Often, nostalgia for a thing is better than someone else's vision of the thing itself.

INTPs I have known

BwP gets a fair amount of traffic from web surfers interested in the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator (MBTI). Some time ago I did a whole set of posts on Greek divinities and Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs chatrooms are among the few places my blog is linked elsewhere on the web.

Delphi: Apollo's home.

Here is a good summary of the system. Go there and come back if you are not familiar with MBTI.

I like Myers-Briggs. Some people think it's as reliable as astrology; others consider it reductive and not reflective of the variety of human personality. I think it's true that if you stick to the basic 16 personality types not everyone is going to fit in. But if you use the "X" option, where a person straddles the line between the four basic opposites, things get extremely various. Some people believe, for example, that Jesus Christ would have tested out as XXXX.

But sometimes Myers-Briggs is dead, straight on. I was reminded of this recently when my son posted to Facebook his annual college football bowl winner predictions. There are 35 bowl games, and he spent a large number of hours analyzing each matchup, then crafted capsule summaries of his analysis with a predicted winner for each game. I don't doubt he will be very accurate with his predictions. He got no remuneration out of this process (his mother pointed out the pro journalist at Sports Illustrated only disagreed with him in 5 games). He did it for its own sake.

This type of behavior is totally characteristic of the INTP, or Apollo in my mythological typology. INTPs are often extremely gifted intellectually. They have a singular ability to concentrate. Their intellectual output is detailed and finely considered. They live to analyze, deduce and explain. Sports statistics are male INTPs' Garden of Eden.

Reading through my son's predictions, I was immediately reminded of another INTP I knew very long ago, about whom I once posted. Ted was a precocious sports journalist, and when he was 13, in the 8th grade, he wrote an analysis of a college football game between the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California that was published in the student newspaper at Cal. He predicted the Trojans would win, but as well we know, all the logical analysis goes out once the chaos of life intrudes. Berkeley won, behind the heroics of quarterback Joe Roth and running back Chuck Muncie.

Ted and I went on to write at student newspapers throughout high school, and as he went off to college I thought he would be a broadcaster some day, one of my predictions that did not come true. Recently my son has expressed an interest in broadcasting. Last year he was the play-by-play announcer for his high school's Powder Puff football game. He was brilliant, in my humble opinion.

Apollo is often seen as the perfection of Greek manhood, the eternally shining youth. This is a fiction of 19th century romantics. Apollo was an excellent athlete (another INTP, Tiger Woods, is an example of the extreme athletic potential of INTPs), but he is mainly a geek-- interested in such complex and theoretical arts as music, poetry, medicine, and prophecy (e.g. bowl game predictions).

This is the INTP. Yes, a reductive way of classifying the variousness of human beings. But useful for those of us "N" types who love to see the big picture.

Question: Is Zeus perfect?

It's been a while since I did a pure mythology post. But in honor of all those students these past two months who googled "Odysseus death" and came to BwP, here's a new one that I think would make for a great paper for your college mythology class.

Image from here.

Last week in school a student asked a brilliant question: "isn't Zeus perfect?"

The question is brilliant because it raises (some would say "begs," but that would be a misuse of the term) so many other questions, among them

• What does "perfect" mean?
• Why would Zeus above all other gods be perfect?
• Why would we think that any god could be perfect?
• What do we know about Zeus that makes it seem like he should be perfect?

Some thoughts follow, rather than complete answers.

If anyone knows anything about Zeus, it's that he's the supreme god of Greek mythology. He's the one with the beard, the thunderbolt, the throne. He's the Big Guy Upstairs, the Father of Gods and Men.

Which makes him a lot like the popular vision of the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, who, despite generations of sermon messages to the contrary, is still thought of by many as a Very Large Dude with a Very Large Stick.

The modern God in whom many still believe is supposed to be perfect. That is, he knows everything, sees everything, always existed, will never go away, never makes a mistake, always does the right thing. This God's son Jesus is a good example of who God is. For some people today, Jesus hovers about six inches off the ground and is utterly "perfect" but not quite human.

So, perfection in this popular view involves traits that regular humans could never have.

Zeus was never perfect in this way. None of the Greek gods ever were, either.

In fact, though Zeus was supreme, his stature never approached that of the one holy God of Judaism and Christianity. Zeus was powerful, but within a system of many divinities. His brothers Poseidon and Hades were nearly as powerful, but in different spheres. Aphrodite, goddess who was in charge of making people fall in love, worked her magic on Zeus a number of times. It could be argued that the Fates are the most important of all Greek divinities, for they presided over those things that had to happen. Zeus himself could not change Fate.

Zeus is, in fact, a god of justice who himself doesn't always do just things, among them cheating on his wife Hera ("Aphrodite made me do it!"). That's why philosophers sprang up in Greece who wanted to convert Zeus into something more like the God of Judaism and Christianity. In any case, philosophers were not interested in the bearded man on the throne who was the original do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type of guy.

Being perfect is a tough job. The movie "Bruce Almighty" starring Jim Carrey, and Morgan Freeman as God, demonstrates in a light but effective way what it might mean to have 3,000,000,000 conflicting prayers on your plate at any given moment. Remember the "You've Got Prayers!" scene? Not everyone can win the lottery who prays for it.

So, Zeus is not perfect in our sense of being perfect, which is part of the reason why Greeks of later times looked at Christ and the God of Christianity as a perfect alternative. I don't think we can actually grasp what perfection is, but many of us hope that perfection in a God includes love. 

Pie on a brisk Saturday morn

Hereabouts, the December morning light is charming, almost as white as winter white light when there's snow on the ground, but calm rather than brilliant.

Here's some pie for those of you who like pie:

Piggybacking on my post about the ideal school, here's something from C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian. What young person wouldn't like this curriculum, heavy on the music and physical education:

[Caspian] had not many hours to spare, for now his education was beginnning in earnest. He learned sword-fighting and riding, swimming and diving, how to shoot with the bow and play on the recorder and the theorbo, how to hunt the stage and cut him up when he was dead, besides Cosmography, Rhetoric, Heraldry, Versification, and of course History, with a little Law, Physic, Alchemy and Astronomy.

Granted, there's no Latin or Greek in Caspian's school day, but Rhetoric (the art of giving and analyzing speeches) and Versification (creating poetry within metrical rules) are excellent substitutes. There is no art per se, but Heraldry can be like art, if Caspian is copying or painting coats of arms.

*

Men's Health magazine has released a list of the top one hundred sexiest women of all time. All time is a lot of time. Does that mean that Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world, was in the running? Not, I guess. Perhaps only women who have been photographed get to be contestants, because the winner was someone who is lovely but not the greatest of all time: Jennifer Anniston.

There is no contest as to who is the sexiest of all time: Grace Kelly, of course. That is because class in a woman is the sexiest thing of all, and Grace had more class in her bitty pinkie finger than nearly all of the other hundred combined. Audrey Hepburn, honorable mention.

Grace Kelly ended up #86 in the list. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Photo from here.