Blog

“Achilles in the Court of King Lycomedes“ (marble, 240). Musée du Louvre. The Greeks’ greatest warrior and a king in his own right, Achilles is the main character and antihero of Homer’s “The Iliad.” His rage at his humiliation by Agamemnon, the Greek high king and commander, during a quarrel over women as war prizes sets in motion the catastrophic events of Homer’s “The Iliad,” about a critical moment in the Trojan War.

The once and future war: Israel and 'The Iliad'

October 15, 2023

Do we believe in coincidence or predestination? Is everything happenstance or is it a case that there are no accidents (Freud) and that “God does not play dice with the universe” (Einstein)?

Is that universe sending us a message by releasing a new translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson just as Hamas savagely attacked Israel and Israel responded with a ferocious declaration of war? It would seem so, for the ancient Greek epic has much to tell us about issues that speak to our time, not the least of which are overweening male pride and rage, power as a zero sum game and stupefyingly bad leadership.

Our failure to respond to 'the literature of rejection'

January 29, 2023

What do the Black cops who murdered Tyre Nichols have in common with the mass shooters in California — and indeed all the cops who murder and the mass killers?

They are all men with a disproportionate sense of entitlement and grievance and thus rage at some kind of rejection. They are part of what I call “the literature of rejection,” one with everyone from assassins like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to dictators like Adolf Hitler to terrorists like Osama bin Laden to mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh. And they share a great deal as well with such fictional antiheroes as Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad,” Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’a “Wuthering Heights.”

What they all have in common is that they are men with an overweening, overwhelming pride that seeks the destruction of everything, and everyone, in its wake.

Between a rock and a hard place: From Mitch (McConnell) to Meghan

February 19, 2021

We’ve moved on from the trial of the century — involving former President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment— but the fallout continues. The “magnificent seven” Republican senators who voted with the 50 Democratic senators to convict have faced blowback at home. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who voted to impeach Trump and is crusading for a Republican Party devoid of him, has been shunned by family members, one of whom, a literal Karen, sent his father a $7 certified letter in which she stated that Kinzinger was “a disappointment to God.” (Does she have him on speed dial?)

Perhaps most interesting is the clash of those Homeric heroes (not), Trump and Mitch McConnell, a face-off four years in the making that began when the Senate Minority Leader, like Odysseus, tried to navigate between the proverbial rock and a hard place, voting not to convict to try to appease the Republican base but then offering a blistering rebuke of Trump’s behavior before, during and after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol to try to woo back skittish Republican donors.

A legend comes to life

November 21, 2019

He was a realist and a romantic, a lover of strong women and beautiful men. And though he was in his day the richest, most powerful man in the world, his most prized possession was a book – Homer’s “The Iliad,” annotated by his tutor, Aristotle.

Most of all, he was as much a myth as a man and a mystery – even to himself.

When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C. – a month shy of his 33rd birthday – after conquering and reordering Persia, he left a sprawling empire and a burning question: What drove him?

It’s a question I explore in “Daimon: A Novel of Alexander the Great” (Nov. 30, JMS Books), the latest entry in my series “The Games Men Play” and its first historical subject.

The literature of rejection

June 9, 2018

I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.

But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)

As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …

Las Vegas and the literature of rejection

October 2, 2017

I was working on a story about Emily Katz Anhalt’s new book, “Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths” (Yale University Press), when I decided to take a break with The New York Times online. The headline hit me in the gut:

“At Least 58 Dead and 500 Hurt in Las Vegas as Gunman Rains Bullets on Concert.”

The suspect, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64 – and, according to Las Vegas Police, also dead by his own hand – was described as a quiet, unassuming man with no criminal history by his understandably defensive brother. Of course, he was. The president called for peace and unity. Of course, he did. ...

Esteban Santiago and the unending narrative in the literature of rejection

January 8, 2017

When news broke of the murder of five people and the wounding of eight more at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, TV anchors were quick to note that we did not know the motivation of the alleged shooter, Esteban Santiago. This was to damp down the rampant speculation that has inflicted the digital age, in which what is said or written is considered true by virtue of the fact that it is said or written.

Admirable as such discretion is, I’m afraid we knew Santiago’s motives even before knowing his story. ...