More and more will this become an age of wickedness, strife, and disrespect for the gods, until Shame itself and righteous Retribution will abandon mortals to their evil folly and doom. Dominant in the tradition about creation is the myth that Prometheus not Zeus was the creator of human beings from clay and Athena breathed into them the divine spirit. In the version of Hesiod, although his account is far from logical and clear, it seems that Prometheus fashioned only mankind. Womankind was created later, through the agency of Zeus, in the person of Pandora. Although Prometheus had fought on the side of Zeus in his war against Cronus, the two mighty gods soon came into conflict once Zeus had assumed supreme power.
The Nature of Sacrifice. Their antagonism began when Prometheus dared to match wits with Zeus. There was a quarrel between mortals and the gods, apparently about how the parts of the sacrificial animals should be apportioned. For the gods, however, he deviously and artfully wrapped up the bones of the ox in its enticing, rich, white fat. Thus it was that when the Greeks made sacrifice to the gods, they enjoyed feasting upon the best edible portions of the animals, while only the white bones that remained were burned for the gods.
The Theft of Fire. He took away from them fire, essential to their livelihood and progress. Prometheus, defiantly our champion, once again tricked Zeus who this time was presumably at first unaware? The Punishment of Prometheus. A further defiance of Prometheus was his refusal to reveal to Zeus a crucial secret that he knew and Zeus did not. If Zeus mated with the sea-goddess Thetis, she would bear a son who would overthrow his father.
Thus Zeus faced the terrible risk of losing his power as supreme god, like Cronus and Uranus before him. Zeus had the wily and devious Prometheus bound in inescapable bonds to a crag of the remote Caucasus Mountains in Scythia, with a shaft driven through his middle. And he sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver each day, and what the eagle ate would be restored again each night.
Generations later, however, Zeus worked out a reconciliation with Prometheus and sent his son Heracles to kill the eagle with an arrow and release Prometheus. Zeus avoided mating with Thetis, who married a mortal, Peleus, and bore a son Achilles to become mightier than his father. He had Hephaestus fashion her out of earth and water in the image of a modest maiden, beautiful as a goddess. Athena clothed her in silvery garments and her face was covered with a wondrously embroidered veil. She placed on her head lovely garlands of flowers and a golden crown, beautifully made and intricately decorated by Hephaestus; and she taught her weaving.
Aphrodite bestowed upon her the grace of sexual allurement and desire and their pain. Hermes contrived in her breast wheedling words and lies and the nature of a thief and a bitch. All at the will of Zeus. The name Prometheus means forethought, but Epimetheus means afterthought. Zeus sent with Pandora a jar, urn, or box, which contained evils of all sorts, and as well hope.
She herself removed the cover and released the miseries within to plague human beings, who previously had led carefree and happy lives: Through the will of Zeus, hope alone remained within the jar, because life without hope would be unbearable in the face of all the horrible woes unleashed for poor mortals. In Hesiod, Pandora is not motivated toopen the jar by a so-called feminine curiosity, whatever later versions may imply.
Aeschylus powerfully establishes Prometheus as our suffering champion who has advanced human beings, through his gift of fire, from savagery to civilization. Furthermore, Prometheus gave us the hope denied to us by Zeus, which, however blind, permits us to persevere and triumph over the terrible vicissitudes of life.
Prometheus is grandly portrayed as the archetypal trickster and culture-god, the originator of all inventions and progress in the arts and the sciences. At the end of the play, Prometheus is still defiant, chained to his rock, and still refusing to reveal the secret of the marriage of Thetis. In that resolution, Aeschylus presumably depicted Zeus as a god of wisdom who, through the suffering of Prometheus, established himself in the end as a triumphant, almighty god secure in his supreme power, brought about through his divine plan for reconciliation. This divine plan of Zeus for reconciliation with a defeated Prometheus entailed the suffering of IO [eye'oh], a priestess of Hera who was loved by Zeus.
Hera found out and turned Io into a white cow. Zeus rescued Io by sending Hermes to lull Argus to sleep and cut off his head. Frenzied, Io in her wanderings over the world encountered Prometheus. The fulfillment of the will of Zeus was in the end accomplished. Lycaon and the Wickedness of Mortals. In the Age of Iron, Zeus took the form of a man to find out whether reports of the great wickedness of mortals were true.
Lycaon even went so far as to slaughter a man and offer human flesh as a meal for Zeus, who in anger brought the house down in flames. Lycaon fled but was turned into a howling, bloodthirsty wolf, a kind of werewolf in fact, since in this transformation he still manifested his human, evil looks and nature. Disgusted with the wickedness that he found everywhere he roamed, Zeus decided that the human race must be destroyed by a great flood.
When the flood subsided they found themselves in their little boat stranded on Mt. They were dismayed to discover that they were the only survivors and consulted the oracle of Themis about what they should do. The goddess ordered them to toss the bones of their great mother behind their backs. Deucalion understood that the stones in the body of earth are her bones. And so the stones that Deucalion tossed behind his back were miraculously transformed into men, while those cast by Pyrrha became women.
In this way the world was repopulated. Hellen and the Hellenes. It cannot escape notice that many Greek myths that explain the creation of the world have been influenced by Near Eastern forerunners. Commercial contact between the Greeks and the Near East seems the most likely conduit.
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This contact took place mainly in two distinct periods: Five basic myths have proved especially fertile: A number of peoples have told and retold these myth archetypes in many different versions. The most important of these civilizations, for our purposes, are the following:. Sumerian, Babylonian, and Akkadian myths tell, like Hesiod, of order arising out of disorder, without an intelligent creator cf. These creation accounts, by their very nature, include myths of Succession, the Flood, and the creation and recreation of man. Marduk, a god of the younger generation, usurps the rule of the god Enlil and battles Tiamat, much as Zeus battles Typhoeus.
Tiamat is blown up like an enormous balloon and rent in two.
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
After the death of Tiamat, Marduk creates in the sky Esharra as a home for the gods. Marduk brings order to the world and creates human beings from the blood of Kingu, who by this time has been killed.
We've been asked more than a few times why we don't link instead to big independent bookstore Powell's or to the smaller independents now collectively represented by IndieBound - those sites having been deemed more palatable by some. There's no reason to dismiss those options out of hand, but right now an Amazon affiliation makes the most sense for many sites offering book coverage. There are several reasons for this, and we share them here - maybe to some small degree to justify our choice, but also to offer a roadmap that current or future players might follow in order to compete with the Amazon juggernaut.
For starters, viewed purely as a database, Amazon is a remarkable resource. It has innovated tremendously in this area over the years and currently offers by far the best book pages out there. To borrow an example from the previous post in this series, take a look at Amazon's page for and find "search inside the book," outside reviews, book recommendations, all manner of meta-data, and vibrant discussion among and opinions from readers.
Powell's offers some of these features including, in some cases, book scans from Google Books , but not quite all. IndieBound has not much at all in the way of book information. When it is suggested that we link to an "indie" when we link to books, the implication is that The Millions is a shopping site and that we can by our linking policy direct people where to shop. But the reality is that The Millions , like many sites that affiliate with Amazon, has an editorial rather than an "advertorial" mission, and one reason we link to Amazon is because it offers the most information about the books we write about, whether we recommend them or deplore them.
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As long-time blogger Matthew Cheney put it recently , "I want a link to give you the most information and options with the fewest clicks. Amazon's tools, reports, and ease of linking are superior to those offered by other stores, and Amazon has a long enough track record that affiliates have little concern that those links may one day stop working properly.
Without delving into the boring details, let's just say that creating the book links for The Millions is not an effortless task, and that the ecosystem of tools that has grown up around the Amazon program lets us spend more time on the stuff our readers care about - namely writing about books. More importantly, other outfits simply don't have Amazon's track record in providing an affiliate program. Site owners participating in such programs have to feel comfortable knowing that their links are tracking properly, that the accounting is occurring properly, and that the program won't change or even disappear.
While Amazon isn't perfect in this regard, it is the affiliation many sites are right now most comfortable using. While indie bookstores are typically seen as being at odds with Amazon, many do business with it. In fact, your favorite used bookstore is almost guaranteed to be selling books using Amazon's platform. Amazon's platform, particularly since its purchase of abebooks.
Authors and publishers may not like how easy it is for Amazon shoppers to click and buy a used copy over a new one, but from the standpoint of bookstores, Amazon gives thousands of local shops a global reach. Money-conscious readers, meanwhile, nearly always have cheaper, used copies to chose from. I don't buy books all that often from Amazon, but sometimes when I do, I'll opt for a used copy, and it can be startling to see the book arrive with a bookmark or a card bearing the info of the far flung shop that sold me the book.
It's a tiny personal connection facilitated by the giant Amazon. Both Amazon's affiliates and used book vendors share the customer conviction that has given Amazon its formidable market share. Over the years, for The Millions and other website projects, I've done a great deal of research about different online business models, and, as far as affiliate programs go, the general consensus is that Amazon "converts" at the highest rate - that is, thanks to Amazon's brand recognition and widespread familiarity with how to use and navigate the site, readers are more likely to buy from it than from other sites.
This point is a purely monetary consideration, sure, but it also addresses something else that concerns purveyors of online book coverage. We want to get more books into more peoples' hands - wherever they buy them from - and linking to Amazon seems likely to do that. While indie bookstores might someday soon surpass Amazon on many of the above points, there is a final element of the Amazon program that will be difficult for the indies to match.
When you click from an affiliate site to Amazon and buy something, the affiliate gets a commission with a few exceptions no matter what it is. As you can imagine, this doesn't happen very often. However, the open secret of literature and culture sites that get a modest amount of traffic is that the commissions earned on books alone are not all that impressive though for sites that earn commissions on a lot of book sales, they can add up. Instead it is the big ticket items that sometimes get bought that help make Amazon's program more worthwhile than others from a financial standpoint.
The grills pay the bills. This is another gray area in an a revenue discussion that is sometimes portrayed in black and white. Amazon sells books at prices that undercut many small players in order to draw people in who will buy big-ticket items with bigger profit margins. For many people, the discussion ends there, but the truth is that the commissions on those big ticket items help subsidize the very same literary and cultural coverage that is having so much trouble finding a workable business model in newspapers and other traditional media. Amazon in some small way, and likely not intentionally, is helping to fund small online publications like The Millions.
And there are other well-respected book sites that seem to have come to the same conclusions that we have. In the end, the Amazon question is not one of pricing or sourcing, but one of financial viability. If the future of book coverage is truly online, profit expectations will have to be low were they ever anything else? There aren't many meaningful revenue options for book sites, and some do without entirely, but Amazon offers a model that can go a long way toward supporting a small publication.
That said, affiliation raises two problems. One is the potential editorial conflict inherent in affiliate programs in the first place, the notion that the presence of these links will tempt writers and editors into becoming shills rather than dispassionate critics. Despite this, participation in affiliate programs hasn't been met with much concern.
And though these programs are sometimes described as a threat to readers, in an online marketplace with thousands of places to read about books, it's unlikely that disingenuously positive book reviews written just to sell books would garner much of a following, nor would the effort make anyone very rich.
The other, bigger problem with Amazon is one of size and control. Is it a good thing for us to give more power to this behemoth link by link, post by post? This will be the focus of the final installment of this series, as we examine Amazon's heft and how it has been able to make its own rules in an emerging market - rules that could have big implications for publishing and the future of book coverage online. Garth looks at the death of the newspaper book review section.
Max hazards some early guesses about the next possible upheaval in the economy of literary journalism. If you're arriving here because of my appearance on Midmorning , welcome! By way of a little background, I started The Millions in early when I was a bookseller at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles. I've since moved on from there, but the blog has stuck around.
We now have several contributors besides me, and we write daily about books and other cultural topics. Regarding the topic of today's show, you can read some additional thoughts of ours in these posts. The reviews range from our longest considerations, to our briefest squibs, to appreciations and ruminations. And don't miss our Year in Reading , our end-of-the-year series for which we asked dozens of well-known writers and bloggers to tell us about the best book they read all year.
Finally, if you like what you see here, please bookmark the site or subscribe to our RSS feed. A link to listen to the segment should be up at the MPR site soon I went on around minute If you heard the segment, let us know what you thought. Leave a comment below. Where can I find previews of non-fiction books coming out in fall ? Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. To honor bygone writing exercises, I offer the following: It is about three and a half inches long and mostly black.
It has a cap that, when removed, reveals a small silver point, out of the end of which comes black ink. There is a window of clear plastic on the body of the object through which you can monitor how quickly said ink disappears. The general shape is cylindrical. The decorative elements are minimal, but there are some advertorial ones.
Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview
Pens are often considered a fetish item of neurotics with disposable income, but a Mont Blanc sensibility is not my point. Despite being reliably cash-poor, writer-types are often as particular about their pens as they are about their fonts. When Helvetica—the trend, the font, the film , the MoMA exhibition—was the rage, Slate published a piece asking writers about their favorite fonts and those queried had cultivated preferences at the ready; Courier, mostly, since those writers who may not fetishize the pen fetishize the typewriter instead.
We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl. Hence, the fabled image of writer bent over desk, pen to paper, deep thoughts flowing like wine down the esophagus. The Pilot Precise V5 with an extra fine rolling ball and black ink is my pen.
I grew up with it. My handwriting developed with it. With it, I perfected the signature that appears on the title page of the book I have written in my daydreams and anxiety-induced nightmares. Friends have tried to convert me with pens that have finer points or a perhaps less prosaic shape, ones that are reusable and more earth friendly, or that can survive a change of cabin pressure when flying. Yet I remain firm in my attachment. The angles are right angles and the color palette is basic: Uncapping it to begin writing, the separation of the two pieces of plastic makes a satisfying snap.
The pen is smooth, firm, and room temperature between my fore and middle fingers, which are just far enough apart from one another thanks to the heft of it, to feel as though they are not hanging on to just themselves, but to something real. My handwriting arrives in tall, loose, right-leaning lines everything, ironically, I am not in person, either physically or politically and the ink takes up residence on the page as if it belonged there, not as if it had been pressed there against its will, as with ballpoints.
Like my preferred working font Garamond I imagine that, to others, my pen preference indicates some unflattering personal traits. I, of course, prefer to believe it is evidence of more flattering qualities. An appreciation of simplicity, for example. We place value on the handwritten word even as it dissolves. The old-fashioned letter is now a novelty item that seems romantic, cool, twee, or pointless, depending on your perspective. You think those letters would feel different if they were typed. You think the intimacy would be lost, not just between Hill and Flynn, but among the three of you and across the years.
You think of Edith Wharton writing in bed and tossing the pages of her manuscripts to the floor as she finished them for a maid to collect and order. One day will they be more akin to drawers lined with lost insects pinned to linen and labeled alphabetically by their Latin names? Although its gradual disappearance is a possibility and one we must consider as a time becomes foreseeable when formal thank you notes and credit card receipts are rendered obsolete, we still notice the handwritten word, value it and judge it.
For example, I do not like handwriting in odd colors or with a disregard for lines, the hard geometry of the alphabet. This I would have known about you promptly when I was fifteen, whereas now it might take months, even years, to learn. Either way, I cannot name a close friend who commits either sin. This may make me old-fashioned.
It may also make me peculiar or obnoxious or a jerk. It may also make me like you. I was not paid to write this by Pilot Corporate: I come by my enthusiasm honestly, from having picked up other, lesser pens, put them down and left them there. As usual, there was no shortage of experiments on the road to discovery. Pens were everywhere growing up. They were by the telephone and bedside tables. They were left on the floor and chewed by the dog and they were put away uncapped to leave a stain on the left breast.
We are a family of bleeding hearts and I distinctly remember those hearts bleeding ink. Our pens were picked up and put back again even when tapped out. Where have all the working pens gone? We wrote thank-you letters and notes to one another about who had called or where we had gone and when we would be back.
We wrote copious telephone lists and filled in our address books and calendars. My older sister and I composed homework assignments and diary entries and little stories and poems and drawings of horses and dogs.
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My parents wrote to-do lists and grocery lists and checks. Everyone had a pen because functionality depended on it. The heavy fountain pen my father kept hidden in the breast pocket of his blazer was the first of the pens I recall with any specificity. With this, the precise, strong-lined print he was taught in architecture school became heavier and more authoritative than under the spill of ink from less substantial pens. Occasionally, I would ask to borrow it for a duel of tic-tac-toe, and he would hand it over eyeing it all along, saying I had a knack for losing things already.
My mother kept a variety of brands at her disposal, and it was culling through her collection that my education in the common pen began: I learned the pros and cons of each in turn. Bics encouraged my unfortunate fondness for chewing on cheap plastic and were left mutilated in my wake to likely give me cancer in forty years. Uni-Balls were almost what I was looking for but fell slightly on the wrong side of flimsy.
I thought Pentels were just plain ugly and that Calibers looked like they were designed for engineers. Not the look I was going for. Papermates seemed alternately sophomoric and reminiscent of the pen handed to you at the drugstore when you need to charge a late night box of emergency tampons. Its virtues were revealed over time: By college, it was my pen. I remember learning to write, Mrs. Ozbey standing over me, forcing my recalcitrant fingers into position around the six sides of a number 2 pencil. I would grasp that rod of wood and graphite so intently that when I released the thing my middle finger would be red and dented and my hand would need to shake it out.
We were given large sheets of lined paper, the lines of which were extra wide with a dotted line down the center indicating the boundary above which lower case letters were not supposed to wander. Cursive was introduced two years later. Master this complicated new art, they said, and it would save us untold time in the future. Print wasted precious seconds; cursive was the way of writing we would take with us into adulthood. Even then the idea seemed dated and by the time I was in sixth grade our teachers had stopped trying to make us write in cursive, trying instead to teach us to type.
There was a new physical position we were supposed to learn that had nothing to do with holding something in our hands. Use all your fingers on both your hands. Yes, even your pinkies. Only then and almost without noticing, did I switch out the printed word for the typed one. Except, that is, when the process was creative.
Then, I kept the partnership of hand and pen intact. I wrote poems in college and I wrote those poems by hand, crossing out and rewriting, switching out words, finally typing up the stanzas, only to continue writing and revising by hand. That was not a relationship or a process which is it? I was ready to upend. I teach writing to college freshman.
My freshmen are more than ten years younger than I am and they write—compose and think—exclusively on their computers. With computers, the physicality of the writing process has largely been eliminated. You think a string of words and they appear in front of you; the relationship of brain to hand to keyboard to screen is almost effortless. So many laments and odes have been written about how the new ways we are reading affect us for better or worse, that I sometimes consider how the ways we write have changed and whether this matters.
Even our vocabulary reflects this: The vague and constant fear that my computer will crash and I will lose everything is something I am willing to live with if it means I have a tool that allows my body to keep up with my mind. There remains, however, an ineffable peculiarity about that duo of hand and pen that I cannot come between. I somehow believe that because it was with a pen between my fingers that I learned to write that this is the way I do that best and always will. Fred and I switch off with Ginger these days.
He cuts in, then I cut in on him. I type first drafts, then edit by hand, type in the edits, then edit the edits by hand. As for the Pilot Precise in particular, maybe my thoughts are indeed more confident and clear when a piece of paper is at the mercy of its point. Maybe, too, it is just my idea of a lucky penny. In this way I keep it in my coat pocket. I fiddle with it there throughout the day, taking the cap on and off, clutching it, feeling it between my fingers, pulling it out sometimes to show it the light of day. If I went through the bins long enough I could trace two childhoods via a timeline assembled with marks my sister and I once made on paper.
I remain uncertain how I feel about that. I know I am prone to fits of nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses, and I know too that this is not a habit to coddle, but rather one to hold, examine, accept as part of myself, but then to move past because to do otherwise would be counterproductive. The alternative seems precious. As it is with cusps of astrological signs, those of us on this generational cusp exhibit characteristics of both X and Y which can sometimes confuse us as to where we fall in the larger cultural picture.
We also remember a time when computers were not part and parcel of our lives, the way we thought, wrote, communicated. We are savvy with technology and to most we appear self-assured with it, prone to internet addiction and a knack for communicating more effectively over email than in conversation. But not a few of us, I imagine, are quite as fluent as our friends born just after us. In some ways we were outdated before we hit puberty. In reply to rockbandit, this is my favorite pen.
There's something for every lover of fiction coming in , but, oddly enough, the dominant theme may be posthumous publication. And this should be the most important factor. Achebe was, however, not merely speaking about the intention of his contemporaries alone, but also of writers who wrote generations before him. But these writers, it seems, are the last of a dying breed.
The culture of enforced literary humility, encouraged in many writing workshops and promoted by a rising culture of unobjective literary criticism , is chiefly to blame. The enthroned style is dished out in the schools under the strict dictum: The result, by and large, is the crowning of minimalism as the cherished form of writing, and the near rejection of other stylistic considerations.
In truth, minimalism has its qualities and suits the works of certain writers like Ernest Hemingway , Raymond Carver , John Cheever , and even, for the most part, Chinua Achebe himself. With it, great writings have been produced, including masterpieces like A Farewell to Arms. But it is its blind adoption in most contemporary novels as the only viable style in the literary universe that must be questioned, if we are to keep the literary culture healthy. The underlying problem here is style. Harry gets some upsetting news: A heavy knocking on the door. The mattress has arrived.
When minimalism returned to prominence in the mids, its power was the power to negate. To record yuppie hypocrisies like some sleek new camera was to reveal how scandalous the mundane had become, and how mundane the scandalous. But deadpan cool has long since thinned into a manner. Its reflexive irony is now more or less the house style of late capitalism. How awesome is that? As a non-Western writer, knowing the origin of this fad is comforting. But as Hallberg pointed out, context, not tradition, is what should decide or generate the style of any work of fiction.
The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work -- in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world.
While the special effect can be achieved by manipulating various aspects of the novel such as the structure, voice, setting, and others, the language is the most malleable of all of them. All these can hardly be achieved with sparse, strewn-down prose that mimics silence. Hence, the writer -- like a witness of such a scene -- is able to move with the sweeping prose that will at once appear gorgeous and at the same time be significant and memorable. When sentences must be only a few words long, it becomes increasingly difficult to execute the kind of flowery prose that can establish a piece of writing as art.
It also establishes a sandcastle logic, which, if prodded, should crash in the face of even the lightest scrutiny. For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less. What writers must be conscious of, then, is not long sentences, but the control of flowery prose.