Word: iliad
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...with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered." Moral: "When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be." He recalls the Greek phrase he learned as a seminary student: asbestos gelos -- unquenchable laughter. "I traced it to Homer's Iliad, where it was used to describe the laughter of the gods." Moral: "He who laughs, lasts...
...this be the first time that technology has changed the very way we speak: the invention of typography alone, as Neil Postman writes, "created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression." No less a media figure than Karl Marx once pointed out that the Iliad would not have been composed the way it was after the invention of the printing press...
...mother says the children used few "formal" textbooks, but instead read novels and instruction manuals. Their favorite books include Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, The Double Helix by James Watson and Homer's Iliad...
...source material is the longest epic of world literature, a 100,000- stanza poem about seven times the combined length of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like those works, the Mahabharata is a glorious welter of incident and digression, evoking not just a central story of ruinous war but an array of myths and human archetypes and an animal world aquiver with magic. It would be hard to overstate its role as a wellspring of Indian culture. Brook, however, was drawn to its transcending themes: man's joyous awakening to nature and love and duty, the menacing lures of vanity...
Equally frisky are Simmons' descriptions of Belles Lettres' book conferences (Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings is presented as "the Old Testament written by Mel Brooks, the 'Book of the Dead' by Henry Miller, the Iliad by Woody Allen, the head of Nefertiti by Red Grooms"), an intraoffice scandal about an aging office boy who enriches himself by selling review copies as well as slots on the best-seller list, and a Shakespeare hoax that brings down the magazine's lowbrow chief, Newbold Press. Simmons demonstrates his versatility by composing nine "lost" sonnets by the Bard...