Conversations: Old Tales, New Media, The EPIC (!!) Takeover w/ Christie Vogler, Joe Goodkin, and Joel Christensen (Part 2)

Finally, the second half of Christie Vogler's EPIC takeover episode. Christie speaks with Homerist Joel Christensen https://joelchristensen.substack.com/ and modern Homeric bard Joe Goodkin https://www.joegoodkin.com/ about the intricacies of EPIC, modern musicals as reception, and all their favourite moments from EPIC The Musical! If you're keen for more EPIC talk listen to the Movies We Dig episode https://open.spotify.com/episode/1zqVRyJeb4qjmhRMIfOg21 Christie mentions! Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com grouptrip.

• 0:44Speaker 01

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• 2:17Speaker 03

  Hello. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I'm your host, Kristy Vogler, from the podcast Movies We Dig. You might be wondering why I'm here today. Well, Liv is off in London doing some awesome things, and I am taking over to further discuss Epic the Musical with some very special guests. Joining today's conversation is Joel Christensen, professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, and Joe Goodkin, who's a Chicago-based musician and modern bard, who composed and performs two modern folk opera retellings of Homer's epic poems. Which, if you haven't

• 2:58Speaker 03

  checked those out yet and you like epic, I highly recommend. And this was really an excellent pair to bring in this conversation about Epic the Musical and the process of this new media, looking at a very old story. I really wanted to bring these two on in particular because we had an excellent conversation with them about the film The Return, which is also a new take on Odysseus and his return home to Ithaca. And I think some of the similar hangups that we have with the film help inform us of how we can

• 3:40Speaker 03

  engage with epic. Now, if you've not listened to the previous episode where I introduced Liv to Epic with a song voted on by her listeners, you should go listen to that first because, you know, maybe it's not a fair process because Liv's reaction to the one song that was chosen... Is missing context. And as an archaeologist, I think context is important. That being said, though, our conversation made me want to revisit the songs and think more deeply about some original critiques I had about the musical as well. Does that mean I enjoy it less? No, not at all. I still love it, still listen to it, jam out to it in my car.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  And I think that's what people don't realize is that we can be critical about the things we love. And through that critical analysis, new and wonderful things can be created. So please join me in this conversation about Epic the Musical. And maybe if Liv listens, she might, I don't know, give some more songs a chance.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Conversations, old tales, new media, the epic takeover, part two, with Jo Goodkin and Joel Christensen.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  So, thank you so much, Joel and Jo, for joining me today to talk about Epic the Musical. As, as I was mentioning, I think when I reached out to both of you, like you both were like top of mind of like, I really, really want to talk to you both about this after having talked about the return. So I was really excited for this conversation with y'all. And as I mentioned, so I am doing this takeover while Liv is hanging out in London, which is great for her. And the reason I'm taking over for this episode is because she has not really listened to Epic. I had her fans vote, her listeners vote for like their favorite songs. And so she's listened to one song in its entirety so far.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  And that was "No Longer You" from the Underworld Saga, which I think was a really good choice. But then it led into this longer conversation that was really interesting because her first question was like, oh, do the women of the underworld show up in the Underworld Saga? And my answer could only be, well, his mother shows up for a line. And she was really upset because that that book has so many women come forth and tell their stories to Odysseus. And I thought that was kind of like a really good point. And our discussion became more broadly, this conversation of like, this is still

• 6:48Speaker 03

  a reception that is very focused on Odysseus and to an extent sanitizing Odysseus, which Liv loves The Odyssey. And it's because Odysseus is presented as such a complex character that we can't always decide if he's good or bad. And I do think Jay, the creator of Epic the Musical, is is trying to do that as well. But they still make certain decisions like having Odysseus being wholly faithful to Penelope, removing the death of the slave woman at the end of the book. And just like a couple of other choices that did actually end up sanitizing this character, even though you pretty much opened with him throwing a baby off the wall. So

• 7:33Speaker 03

  that's kind of where her critiques came in. And I think it made me want to reevaluate how I felt about it. And so I wanted to talk about it more. We've already had a chance to talk about it on Movies We Dig, and that was a fun conversation because it was Elijah's sister who came on to talk about us about the musical with us. And it was really interesting because she doesn't have a background in classics. She basically just came in as a fan of the show. And like remembers reading The Odyssey in high school. So it's like, I'm not really sure what actually happened or not in, you know, the source material. So that was a fun conversation because it was a chance to talk to someone who, you know, isn't immersed in in Greek mythology like we are

• 8:18Speaker 03

  and what they take away from this modern adaptation of it. So that's kind of all the different things that were going on. And I'm going to open up to you guys. I want to hear, you know, what was your introduction to Epic? And what do you think about it overall? Just to get us started?

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Joe, you wanna, wanna take first swing?

• 8:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, um, so my introduction to it was becoming aware of it because the audiences at my performance of the Odyssey and, and the Iliad started asking me if I had heard of this musical, you know, that's how it came on my radar. And I was like, at first, no. Um, and it prompted me to go check it out, I think, kind of mid, mid release at this point. It was a couple of years ago, right? It took him, uh, like four years or so, is that right? Five, I don't know.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, cuz it just finished in December of last year.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. So it was, it was a cool way to get introduced to it because it, it sort of is a good model for how different retellings and oral tradition works. You hear about somebody else's version, the audience knows about somebody else's version, and they're trying to integrate your version into the, the other version in the source material. So I dipped into it very lightly at that point. I, I did not go back and actually listen to the whole thing until I knew that we were gonna do this. And I think that has its upsides and its downsides. Like, I kind of envy people who were taking it in on an episodic basis as the sagas were coming out, because I think those are reasonable amounts of music to listen to, sort of as a new release, you know, and, and I sat down and I was like, well, I'm just gonna listen to all forty songs, you know, that's what we're gonna do.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  And I don't, I don't think it's meant for that. Like, I'm just, that's the, I, I really don't. Um, I mean, I'm glad I did it because it really, it is a, it's a cool way to listen to it, and clearly it all, it all holds together that way, I think, in, in a pretty cool way. So that was my, my introduction was like a little bit at first, and then a flood once I knew we were doing this. And so I think maybe my opinions of it are sort of colored between those two. Uh, but I will say they're like, I'm fascinated with it, first of all, and I love the energy around it. And I think it raises a lot of interesting topics and points and questions about both the story, and especially for me, the medium. Like, I think it's, I think that's where I'm most interested in, is that he

• 10:38Speaker 05

  sort of invented a new medium. That's like, he's tricked people into thinking it's one thing, but it's really none of these things. It's something completely different as a way to present the story. And that, that really excites me. Like, I really dig that. I think when you can see the stories. Evolve within new media like that's that's amazing. That's basically is true to like the, the, the, what's, what's moving about it to me? And what's important about it to me as anything.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think we joked as like, oh, out of all of the things to come out of the internet in recent history, sometimes it's not bad. And this is one of those things.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Joel, how about, how about you?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  I, I mean, one of the reasons I love, one of the many reasons I love talking to you guys, and especially having Joe on something like this, is every time we start a conversation, like, I change my mind, right? On this one, though, like, this isn't gonna be like the return. We have to get Joel to like, incept himself. I actually, you know, like Joe, because my profession involves Homer in some way. Every time something like this comes out, people are like, have you heard about this? Have you heard about this? And like Liv, every time somebody asks me, my first reaction is, oh, I don't know if I want to know about it because it might make me angry and unpopular and like show that I'm getting so old. And so there, there are two people. I had a student, Spencer McDaniel, some students of my myth class, and then my daughter, Alia,

• 12:03Speaker 04

  who's just about to be 15, who said, you have to listen to this. And the reason we started listening, or I started listening a lot, and this goes to the episodic thing with Joe, is that we have a, a rule in the car in the morning, which is that everybody gets to choose a song. So the three kids and me go on a commute every day. And some days we do a theme, we'll do like, all right, we'll pick songs that only have a color in the title, right? And or that do have a color title. And Joe, you may have seen my tweet about this one. The kids hated Purple Rain and still mock me for making them listen to it. I don't know if I'll ever live that.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  Heartbreaking.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  It's killing me. But Alia said, listen, you gotta listen to this epic musical. And part of it's because she's come into epic more broadly, both through pop culture and through having a father who is a Homeress, right? So she actually has from when she was really young, well, not so young, maybe six years ago, a signed copy by Gareth Hines of his graphic novel of The Odyssey and has read it several times. And then, you know, something else we joked about before is she will text me. Uh, when people say things about Homer, I don't agree with, especially if it's one of her teachers. Uh, she would send me a screenshot of her textbook saying Homer was a blind poet who wrote the Iliad, The Odyssey. And then I'm restored like, how did he write?

• 13:25Speaker 04

  What are we talking about here? But she loves to get me agitated. So I haven't even gotten to Epic Musical yet, but we started listening to it before it was complete. And the commute from when we leave the house to dropping my oldest off at her school is about the perfect amount of time for one of the songs. Right? And so that episodic listening is something that is really important because you get into the moment. You're just thinking about that, not the full arc. And I think the experience of just listening is crucial. Right? And I know, uh, go back to the new media thing in a minute, uh, but my kids have seen Joe perform twice. They've seen him do his Iliad and his Odyssey, and they loved it.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Uh, and they saw it several years apart, right, Joe? They saw it like from, they grew from like seven years old to like teenagers. And then they saw Joe perform again. So they're used to these sort of receptions of, of Homer and they all got into it. My three year old, my thirteen year old son is kind of an Alia. And, you know, it brings a weird mix of stuff that's not great. Like I, I think one of the first songs I heard was Warrior of the Mind. And I was just like, yeah, I'm not loving this. I'm not loving this at all. Um, or the God Games one, you know, it's kind of amusing, a little weird, right? Um, but then I listened to Love in Paradise.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  And that song, I wish that, uh, lives listeners had suggested that song.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Cause that's. It is, it is up high.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  But that's one of them.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  The one that converted me. Because what I see going on in the middle of that song, when he's talking about like his memories and all the loss and the suffering is I feel that, that, um, Jorge has read into it, has read into two lines from Book Five.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  And created this entire rich internal drama, right? That entire moment is based like, so the lines from um book five that I'm thinking of is, you know, uh, when the narrator says Odysseus was spending all his days sitting by the edge of the shore crying, was spending his nights sleeping with Calypso, even though she's no longer ple- pleasing to him. The Odyssey never unpacks why he's crying. But one of the genius things about epic is that it's ambiguous. Homeric ambiguity allows audiences to read themselves and to read other opinions and views into characterizations. I think Penelope and Helen are prime examples of characters who you can never quite pin down.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  And that's because like Homer or the text wants audiences to be able to make judgments, needs them to. Um, and so, you know, what I saw there was, all right, this is a really clever reception of the Odyssey, really leaning into Odysseus as a traumatized figure. And the music's good, right, on that? Yeah. And, you know, with a lot of that, I mean, some of it, some of the early stuff um really has a kind of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda thing going for it, like a little too much talk singing, right? Hatter, Hatter songs, right? Um, but as the arc develops and as Horde develops his style, like it expands.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  And mus- musically it gets more interesting, the lyrics get more interesting. Um, and I'm rambling a bit here, but I just want to go back to that moment. I think, you know, when we all met and talked about the return, um, I hadn't really started to think about the two primary threads in reception of the Odyssey over the past, like since I'll, I'll go to two thousand, two thousand and one. One thread is the critical one that I'll call the Atwood theme, because I think it was, it was Margaret Atwood who first like really hit us hard with the Penelope ad. Without her work, I don't think we would have Cersei. And I, I think we'd have less of the criticism we get of Odysseus that we see even implicitly in Emily Wilson's translation. I'm not saying they're all that.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  started it, but I think it's a canary in the coal mine, right? Really, so it's showing there's this thread that we all need to be aware of, of how nasty this man is. On the other side, I think there are readings that really start in a way with Jonathan Chay's Odysseus in America, right? Which I think is a less critically acclaimed book than Achilles in Vietnam. But to me, it's again, another bellwether that came at a time right before war on terror had really expanded to the level it had, before we had millions of service people who are impacted by PTSD. And so there's that arc that I think is central to the return

• 18:12Speaker 04

  and to Epic the Musical, just trying to, trying to figure out why this villain is who he is, right? So the question is, if I, if Liv were here and we were talking to her, the question would be, you know, is this a whitewashing of Odysseus? Or is it a psychoanalysis of him that tries to get us to see how he became a monster, right?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  And to me, the answer to that is, well, it is still kind of whitewashing, because you don't have the final minutes showing him to be monstrous, right? You start out with him killing a child, but you don't get him still being a monster at the end. And that's where, again, if we're thinking about modern anti-heroes, two I think of in mind are Walter White from Breaking Bad, or The Penguin from The Penguin, right? And I don't want, I don't, have you guys watched The Penguin?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Okay, well, I'm telling you, it's genius in anti-hero work. And you find out at the end, I don't want to ruin it for you, but, but like, at the end, there's no redemption, right? And that's the thing that, that I think, if we're looking at Epic the Musical, it combines with different themes. One is the, you know, the traumatized hero, but it's also a romance. And so at the end, you can't, you can't have Odysseus be irredeemable for the romance to work.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting that like the ending of the return was almost very like almost the exact same as the ending of Epic. Um, with the focus on Penelope and Odysseus rebuilding the relationship together, saying there's still, there's still something there and we're going to move forward together.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Would you fall in love with me again? So like, well, like we waited like the day the Ithaca saga was released to streaming. Like we listened to it in the car and when it ended, I was like, wait, like, where's book twenty four? And then Joe, like in the car, like I yelled in the car, like it's just the return all over again. The kids are like, well, what's wrong?

• 20:17Speaker 05

  I was wondering how we were going to integrate your take from the last one into this, but you just did it for me. That was good.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  I know it's coming like there, there are, it was so weird because it's like so much of Epic, the musical is really focused on the first half of the poem.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  And literally just the last saga makes up the, the rest of it. And obviously a lot gets missed as a result of that.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Well, and I think a, an interesting contrast that we could make before we go back to maybe praising Epic the musical a little more. Um, is that, you know, when, two years ago, when, um, Chat GPT first came out, I asked it to summarize the Odyssey for me. And the summary it gave was just the legendary scenes, right? Pretty much just from books five through twelve and very little else. Like its understanding of the Odyssey was Odysseus's narrative. And the homecoming and reunion with Penelope. Everything else was out there. Now, over time, like I've actually changed, so I have two ideas about this. One is those legendary things are what everybody knows anyway, is what they walk away with.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  And it's actually probably what was well known about the Odyssey, um, prior to the performance of our poem. Um, but it, it, it then this puts a pressure on me as a homerist to explain why all those other parts of the Odyssey are important and why they're there. Right? Uh, I mean, note, none of these retellings spend any time worrying about the telepathy. Like they have, nobody had any. Patience for that. And so I think it's part of it's just dealing with the legendary and the mythical part of it, because the rest of the Odyssey that we know is so damn weird that people don't know what to do with it. And so it's really forced me to rethink the Odyssey. Like, like, was it torturing ancient audiences, the way it tortures us? Right?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  That's a good question, frankly, like.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's really, it's been really useful for me because I think, you know, Joe, with your songs, you do this too. I mean, great reception is interpretation of a poem, right? It's, it's, it's taking an artwork and looking at it. And what it comments on is critical, but also what it can't engage with tells you something.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Like, Joe, if we were to sit down and like, lay out everything you did for the Iliad and the Odyssey, there would be interesting elisions, right?

• 22:38Speaker 05

  Yes, uh, the elisions is pretty understating it.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, like, I, I listening to you talk about, so I basically leave out books nine through 12 in my version of the Odyssey, or I condense them into one song that imagines Odysseus as a bluesman singing about where he's been, and the song is called Blues and B. And there's all these oblique references to, to the different episodes, which I thought was interesting for a lot of reasons, but plenty of people have come listen to me play and say, I was expecting a song about the Cyclops, and I was expecting a song about this, to Joel's point, the stuff that everybody knows. And, and, you know, my center point is, well, if you already know it, why should I sing about it? Like, why don't I sing about something that you haven't thought about, you know? So I, I, I think a lot of that rang true. Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Joe, I have a question about Blues and B, actually, because after having listened to Epic, the musical, I, I went and listened to your Odyssey as well.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And there was a line in Blues and B that's, but through it all, the world never got the best of me.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  And to me, that line reads as like ambiguous, because you could, you could read it as like, the world never bested me.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  But like, after listening to Epic is like, and everything Odysseus goes through is being very human and almost monstrous. It's like, they never got the best version of me. And I was wondering if that was intentional or unintentional in the wording.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Well, now it's intentional that you brought it up that way.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  It works.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Joel, the audience is always right.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  I, nobody is bigger proof of that than me, Joel. Every performance, an audience member finds something in my work that, that I don't remember intending, but it's a better version of what I thought I intended, um, which is really beautiful. And actually I, it was a turning point for me when I learned to lean into that because, you know, I wrote that piece now 20, uh, oh geez, 24 years ago. And that recording is from 2010 and that's, so that recording is from 300 performances ago, at least at this point, um, maybe more. So I think I meant it more as the, the, the first one. My, but ambiguity is sort of the hallmark of what I did.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  Like I went with a lot less is more, and I went with no narrative as, as compared to epic, which is sort of high, way more highly narrative than, than, than, than like that to me is the sort of, we can slide right into it, but this sort of sleight of hand of saying it's like a musical is not true. Like in musicals, you don't sing like I have a hat on because you're on stage wearing a hat and you don't have to tell the audience. And so he's, he's doing something like really interesting. That's a lot more to me like a bard where he's painting a picture for the audience like that you can listen to in your car, to your point, Joel. And like telling you, setting up and then telling you the emotional part of it and sort of exploding these little moments. And it's, it's kind of messy in, in, in a beautiful way in that it's neither, it's neither, it's nothing.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  It's its own genre almost, I think. Like that's, that was kind of as I thought, thought about it more. I think that's, uh, you know, and there are positives and negatives, uh, or just differences of that approach as well, um, compared to others. So yes, I did mean that, Christie. That's what I meant by that. Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  I, like I said, I don't know if I would have. Brought that reading into it, had I not listened to Epic first and really, you know, thought about this question again, because as we've talked about in The Return, I'm much more about the Iliad and I are, everyone already knows Achilles is a very complicated character and, and talking about him and like talking about war had, to me, has always been much more front and center in the Iliad and less so in the Odyssey, but people are bringing that reading to it a lot more. And so like, I think Epic and like more recent discussions has really started to make me think more of Odysseus as someone suffering from ten years of warfare. And again, why I liked The Return is like, well, why did

• 26:42Speaker 03

  it take him ten years? Sure, you could have this grand narrative of like all of these obstacles in his way, but at the end of the day, he's like, feels like a broken man. And what is he returning home to? Like, is that, how, how, like, how do you do that? And?

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Well, and I think these questions, though, are exactly the things that animate the receptions, right? But, you know, and this is in a way no different from what happened in past performances, like in, in antiquity, when people were rewriting the story, coming up with new explanations all the time to tell different, to, to sort of tweak the narrative. I mean, they're radical things, of course, like Helen being replaced by a cloud Helen and like spending all of her time in Egypt, you know, or Odysseus having a different version of events where he actually spent all that time in Crete, um, instead. But no, but, but I think that the fascinating thing about this is I go through, I'm looking at the track titles and reminding myself, is how many of them actually acknowledge

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Odysseus's violence and failure, right? Like the song Six Hundred Men, uh, you know, I mean, or just opening with, you know, the opening songs, A Horse and the Infant. There is no attempt to say Odysseus has not done monstrous things. Like, that is very different from, say, you know, a typical essay about Odysseus from the 20th century, right? It's hitting it straight on. Instead of saying he's a monster, we need to get rid of him, right? Or trying to retell the story by recuperating someone else's narrative. Hmm. It gives tries to give some reasons. Yeah. Uh, and what's interesting about this is where I think the return makes him traumatized and makes his violence

• 28:26Speaker 04

  uh, uh, and outcropping of his suffering. I think the the more dangerous thing about Epic the Musical is Odysseus doesn't ever seem to be uncalculated to me. Hmm.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Right? Like, he seems to be a means justify or ends justifies the means type of character. And I'm wondering to what extent is this a cultural mirror? Hmm. For our attitude towards violence and colonialism. And I'm not saying that the that the author, the author, sorry, the creator of this means that, right? I do wonder apart, like, if we could get him in a conversation, I'd want to be like, so how do you feel about Odysseus? Like, I'd want a little to know a little more if if we're being roped up into rooting for a guy who the creator actually knows is is really still terrible at the end, right? Which again, is a feat of its own, uh, because like, nobody's a monster to everyone. Right.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Like, dictators have wives and children who love them, like mass murderers do as well. Uh, and so I I just think that engagement with violence and slaughter and conscious decision making i- in that direction. Um, I'm wondering if it could have been made in a different century at all. Hmm.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that was, we with Liv, I talked a little bit about the song Monster, because what it does is it's this opportunity for Odysseus to put himself in everyone else's shoes that he's come across and rethink about like, well, why they did, why they enacted violence against me and my men. Uh, cause he does it for Cyclops, um, does it for Cersei, and I think there's a couple other characters. But it also just ends up being a justification for his own actions, which again, opens with throwing a baby off the wall and

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  And and it's interesting too, because like, it's presented as

• 30:24Speaker 03

  He had no real choice because Zeus is telling him, well, either you do this or you and your whole entire family die. And that's kind of, that's something I pointed out with this class I did on mass killing events across time is like, what ultimately gets people to commit the most atrocious acts against others? It's the threat against yourself or those you care about. Like, that's just it. And Odysseus' whole justification the entire time is, I'm doing this for mostly my wife, kind of my son, too. And I think what's hard about Epic, and I I've seen recently that there's some missing songs. There's one song that gives kind of the, like, how did Odysseus and Penelope

• 31:05Speaker 03

  get together? Like, why are they, why is he so obsessed with Penelope? Because that's never really a given in Epic. We just know he is.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Joel's, Joel's point about like, that there, that's a great example of, there's a, there's a line or two you could pluck in and go in and create a whole world around this thing that is just presented to you in behavior or, you know, and never explained, which I, I'd, like, I'd love to hear that. I think that would be a, you know, I have my own ideas, but I think that's really, a really interesting thought.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Well, then, so, so maybe there are some other specific things I want to talk about, but maybe we go back to Joe's earlier comment about the genre and the form. Because I do think that is what is sneaky radical about this as well. It's not just the ad- adaptation of the Odyssey, but I can't, you know, I've had the conversation several times with my kids where they've said, oh, are they going to stage this now? Are we going to be able to go see this whole thing? And I said, well, what would it be like? How would that work? Like, how long would it be? And then we've also, I don't know if you guys have watched the videos, right? TikTok videos that have been on YouTube. But I just, after seeing them, I don't know if, if it's possible to stage it in a way that is as

• 32:22Speaker 04

  powerful. Like, I will confess to, I have, I've, I've cried while listening to and watching it. I mean, the, some of the arrangements are beautiful. Some of the harmonies are just beyond. Vocalists they have really push what at times are an unsingable, almost unsingable melody. To to an exit, like to to make it seem easy. And that, like, you know, Joe, we talked about this some before, but I had some experience in this with Reading Great Tragedy Online. And the different experience of the intimacy of the performances on the small screen, right? Um, and although also the compression of the sound, right?

• 33:02Speaker 04

  When you compose music and vocals for the purely digital environment.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Recording.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Not for the, oh yeah, open soundscape of a large auditorium. It's different, right? Yeah. And so I wonder how much of it would even sound good in a large auditorium. I'm sure they could figure that out. Uh, but there's something about the intimacy of the experience. That is so different from every other engagement we have right now. Because you're sitting there and people aren't sitting in a room with thousands of people watching this. It's on their phone, right? Or their computer.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Then you you have this direct access to the creator and it being. Released over time. Um, it it it's a serial musical that's not a musical. That's also a sustained engagement with an epic and then literary and reception, reception tradition. Uh, and I'm still working my way through what that means, but also how it's forced me to reconsider ancient epic. Joe, I mean, you've done something similar, right, with your work, but then something very different because it's live and it's always got people and it's iterated.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think all the the things you just raised, when I was thinking about, you know. If I were trying to build a musical out of a a a more conventional stage musical, which actually I've been doing with my Elliot piece for the last three years. So I know the, I know the the pain of trying to hold on as much as possible to these things that work in one realm. But understanding that they they're not meant for this other realm. Uh, uh, you know, I've had the experience of somebody much better at theater than me, basically. Telling me for thirty six hours, everything that didn't work about my version of for this new medium. A kind woman named Ellen McLaughlin, who's a wonderful actress who who did a great job helping

• 34:53Speaker 05

  me re-envision it. But like if I were building a stage musical out of epic, I would take one line from it. I would take the line ruthlessness is mercy on yourself. Is that the line? It's something like Joel might have it there. I would build the entire musical on that one line. Like I would just start with that because to me, that's, that's a, that's a really salient kind of like fascinating concise explanation germ slash origin story like you're talking about. And I would, you know, I, I don't know what else would stick around, but that's the thing that stuck with me as being would translate to this environment of, you know, this different environment you're

• 35:33Speaker 05

  talking about. It's funny because when I wrote my odyssey, I was really hell bent and committed to not letting it be documented. I want, I spent the first decade that, that recording of it you listened to was a decade after I wrote it. And that's the first recording I did. I would prohibit videotaping, video recording in my performances and I had people take down video performances of it off the internet when, if I found out that they did it. Because I was so attached to this idea of something impermanent about it, like exactly what you're talking about, Joel. I want this to only be an experience and I want it to be special. And I don't want people to, to know what they're walking into before they see it, things like that. And that really guided like so much of what I did, probably

• 36:15Speaker 05

  to the point of, of hurting my career with it. I think if I had gotten on board with documenting it earlier. But, but my point being is this epic is so self consciously harnessing the exact opposite. Like Joel said, it's created for this digital realm. It's not, it's sort of again, a sleight of hand, like it's an oral performance, but it's not. It's a highly processed, highly produced, sophisticated as heck, you know, presentation with visual aspects to it that you don't need, but certainly are like.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Became just as important to the engaging in it as the audio. And it's like, I don't know how you untangle, you know, clearly, once it took off and he got juice behind it, he very self consciously wrote the rest of it engaging in these aspects of it. So I don't know how like, I don't know how you would untangle. You'd almost need to do like a full adaptation of an adaptation and, and, you know? Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  But it does. And Joe, like, I've got an idea, right? But this is also, but it's been a part. I'm going to go back a little and, and, and, and tell you about this idea because I think it matters. But before that, I do want to say that one of the remarkable things about this with the videos that's important is that you have bodies, skin colors, people from different backgrounds who are singing these songs and involved, who would not have been involved 30, 40 years ago. And so just as a reception, it's an astounding accomplishment. And I don't know if it was intentional, but I'm going to assume that everything was, right? Because I think it's also important and the traction has gotten with people under a certain age, right?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  So yes, some of it's cheesy, some of it's weird. They have to learn, they may not know what's going on with, say, um, you know, the one with the lotus eaters, which one is that? Is that open arms?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But they do see people who look like them and who seem like they're fans, right? Like, this is a fandom driven piece at this point, right? Which is important because too often in Academy, especially, we, we, we, we look down on fandom, right? But I think, Joe, the, the, the model for this has made me rethink again, ancient performances. And I think you saw the version of this, um, which was my piece where I compared the performance of the Iliad to the, um, the video recording of the Stop Making Sense performance video, right?

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And so if we look at the 40 songs and the B-sides that haven't been released in the same way, what we have is a series of episodes that I Think are equivalent to the way that epic was performed episodically in antiquity. Right? You would never get every possible story told at once, right? You don't start the Ra- the Rage of Achilles with the story of Paris, but that story is somewhere there in the background and someone could have sung that song if they wanted to. Right? So the model for a stage performance, I think would be closer to rock opera than traditional. Stage.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  That's what we kind of figured.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it would be all right. Let we've got two or three hours. We're going to do this. We're going to expand some songs, truncate others, throw others out and surprise. Here are some new ones to go with it. Right? Because it's about creating a new text for the experience that may not fit the same way. Right? So Joe, it's like with you right now to create a stage experience of of of your long work, you're making adaptations for the genre, but it's based on what you've done before and those experiences. So I can imagine a tracklist, an adaptation that would work. But again, it would be a very different thing from the engagement that you get on that on the small screen of the internet.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 00

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• 43:24Speaker 03

  A couple of things I wanted to follow up with what Joel was saying was kind of rethinking how people would have experienced these stories, these songs in the past. Cause like I noticed that, and I think some of the comments when we were asking lives listeners, you know, what song should we pick? And a lot of people talked about like how you engage with different ones based on mood or circumstances. And I've definitely felt like when Ithaca came out, I was obsessed with the Ithaca saga for a long time. I was really obsessed with the Cyclops saga for a long time. And then lately I've been back to like the underworld and the one immediately after that, because I like that the darker tones were introduced, which makes sense for my

• 44:07Speaker 03

  more recent mood of events happening. So like, I thought that was really interesting that people were like instinctively picking up that like, you don't sit down and just listen to it from beginning to end. You engage with what it's kind of speaking to you in the moment. And that's a really cool aspect about it. The other thing that I really thought about with the visual elements and the animatics that were created, and now people are doing, they're picking other media that they like, other visual media that they like, and they're putting the songs over it to reimagine characters and other media within the story, which is fascinating to watch as well. Yeah. And the one thing I noticed about the original animatics is you do have different artists

• 44:50Speaker 03

  doing different things, but they came like certain aspects of like Athena or like little things about how you're supposed to kind of represent Odysseus became somewhat standardized. There's still individual to the artist, but like there's certain things that you like, what does Polites look like? He wears glasses for some reason. Weird little elements like that. Yeah, obviously. And what I, what it made me think about is like so much of mythology that we forget about in the ancient world is visual, like those stories were visually told as well. I love Greek pottery for that reason is like you can go and see these stories being these

• 45:30Speaker 03

  scenes and you can fill in with your knowledge, like what happened before this picture, after this picture, like what is the overall story this is telling? And now I just imagine like a painter humming along part of The Iliad or the Odyssey as they're painting out this scene.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's that that the visual thing, I'm glad we're talking about it because I think that's just as important in a sense as the audio or it's it's it's it wound up shaping the back half of it clearly. Once he got community involved to that level and it built up this whole world that, you know, you don't have to just listen to it in your car. You can engage in it visually and maybe that's good or bad. Maybe the visual engagement is a little like it's it's narrowing what you can think of it. Well, I can't see Polite as anything but a glasses wearer now. Okay. Well, but I mean, that's, that's a great, that's a, that's a real time example of how these things work and how the narrative is shaped and how the meaning is shaped by every little thing that goes into a retelling

• 46:32Speaker 05

  based on the technologies that are available at the time, you know, I got a chance to see how my songs played in Zoom during the pandemic that I'd been playing in person for almost 20 years at that point. Right. So I got to see how a medium innovation or or a forced limitation or whatever it was, the same material played in a different medium, you know, just like going from oral to writing and now like, nobody could have written a viral Tik Tok musical until six years ago because there wasn't Tik Tok like this is you know, it's like your point bringing up David Byrne, who's a genius like he has his book, How Music Works, and he talks about how creativity is always subject to whatever

• 47:16Speaker 05

  limitations it's going to be presented in and how we think of, you know, the limitations always or the opportunities always drive way more the creative process than than than people who are listening to it think about. And that could not be more homeric as an observation to me.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  Also, I think what both of you are bringing out, and I just want to clarify to make sure we're on the same page, but also for everyone listening, is that collaborative influence that leads to some assimilation over time is exactly an indication of how ancient poetry and performance worked, right? Like you're talking about standardization of Iconography for the characters.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Wasn't someone in charge saying Paulides needs glasses?

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Someone did it. Someone else liked it.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Those images were preferred by people viewing them.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  And the artist assimilated over time because it came it became a stock feature, a grammar of the shared experience. And there was nobody in charge of that.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  And so that's where like this whole, the model itself, like the five year journey into the Odyssey. Um, that created it. Uh, I mean, how much of what was created was reliant on audience engagement response, the fandom. Right, Joe, what you said about how you can feel in the music, the acceleration of what happens after people get more engaged. I mean, one, to go back to your point about the technology facilitating it, right? You don't, you can't get real time i- independent audience feedback while you're performing, Joe. And change the song to adapt to them, right? You may hit notes differently, you may hold something longer. You over time, you change the way the songs flow based on audience feedback.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  But like the real time, instant uh, feedback of the internet. Especially in a period where majority of people were sitting around in their homes.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  But facilitated the shaping of this, which again reminds us of how much, you know, historical context. Feeds back into the shaping of art, not just its content, but it, but it, but its form as well. Um, and so that's, I mean, that's one of the things about this that I think is, is also really important. Like we say, well, this person created it, right? But like all of these songs, you know, all of the audience engagement, the passion about it, I mean, that. It's not the tail that wags the dog, but it's kind of getting close.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  It's a partnership now, but it's a partnership.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  It's, you know, it's, it's complex and it, it, it's also not a one way street. It goes over time, back and forth, you know, there's clearly still one person who is. You know, has his intention at the beginning of it, but, but when it's being informed that much by, by this real time feedback. He's gonna, you know, if you had written forty songs without taking audience feedback, they'd look a lot different than. Forty songs that are spaced out, you know, in groups of whatever, four or five over time, you know?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And I, I'm wondering if part of why this went viral, especially as a new type. I would ar- argue a two ti- new type of media.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Is, is the fact that. You know, we talked about the return Christopher Nolan's Odyssey coming out.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Wait, what?

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Is you. Yeah, I know, right? I know, I'm bringing it back. It's this like, I had to engage with a lot of Ridley Scott for my paper on Gladiator and Gladiator two. And it's kind of, it seems much less open, like the creator gets, it feels like the creator gets to decide everything. And then you get this finished product at the end. You don't get to see the input that goes into it because it's still within the realm of what appears to be specialists. Right? Like screenwriters, producers and all of that. And like, the audience feels very detached from the creative process. Now, that's not necessarily true. Obviously, cultural knowledge of the story very much informs the way the creator decides to tell it.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  But this process was different because it had that much more give and take, that clarity. Like, you know, Jay would go on and be like, oh, here's some, I, here's some questions that people had about like these musical notes. Or here's like some misunderstood lines in the chorus that I, you know, it's like, I want to talk about. And, and so he's very much engaging with like, what could be the flaws within the music with the audience? And they get to be, feel more involved in the creative process because he's having that open conversation throughout. And I think that's something that's very much appreciated.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Like, there's this aspect of authenticity that younger people really like in their, what their creators, their content creators at this point. But again, that also feels much more ancient than modern in a lot of ways.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's, you know, I, you're pointing out something I really hadn't thought about, but I think it's crucial, right? Even the return or in addition to Nolan's movies, these are finished cultural products that are sold to you. Yeah. Right. They're just given to you. You didn't ask for them, right? Nobody said, pass a lady, make me, make me a return, right? It just happened, right? Yeah. But when you, you know, a crucial part of fandom, right? Especially at the level of the peak that you get with around Epic the Musical is the, the feeling of ownership and about it, right? You get to watch it develop, right? Joe, it's like when we were kids and like if you found out about the Pixies before everybody else did,

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  like you were cool and like you had purchase on it.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  But there was a seller, right?

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Everybody, I was into Nirvana before they went mainstream. Like, sure, nobody listens to Bleach. It's really not that good. Sorry. Um, right. So, no, but, but it's like it developed over five years and people got to watch it come out. They got feedback. They felt ownership about it. Um, and again, I think that's a part of, of, uh, the, you know, the responsiveness of the artist, um, but also, um, it's about the technology, right?

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Because like you just, you feel like it's right at your fingertips. You watch it changing over time. And I think Christie, you're absolutely correct as well that, that, that feeling of ownership about our story, right? And the story we shaped together had to be part of, of ancient performances as well.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  That's, though I will say, and maybe this is just a difference in either age or agenda or something else, like that idea of taking audience feedback on something I write and integrate it, it sounds like a fucking nightmare. Pardon my French.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  I don't think it's easy.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I don't, I don't, I mean, if that is his process, I clearly, it clearly was part of the six, the success of it of why it's connected and I'm, it's, there's no right or wrong and nobody's process, like your process is your process. But I just, I, I don't know. That's incredible. Let me just say that.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  I think he still like had to have had a vision throughout because like themes you saw in the very first few epics definitely pay out at the end.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Um, I, I, it never felt like anything, you know, there wasn't a thread left at the end that hadn't been tied. It felt like so.

• 54:28Speaker 05

  No, and some, I mean, all of it's kind of created sleight of hand in some sense, you know, and uh, which, which is great. But everybody does it in some way. It got me thinking about though, you know, if I, I wrote my Odyssey piece in two thousand and one and two, you know, in a bedroom by myself with just my dog. Like if I had had the technology to start like leaking those songs one at a time, like I probably would have and it would have shaped my final result. Like my own art was like, at the time, I just had my bedroom and an acoustic guitar.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Like that's all, you know, I had, I couldn't, I didn't even record it till 10 minutes late, till 10, uh, 10 years later. So.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. No. And so I'm thinking, yeah, if there's a different metaphor or analogy for this, maybe something to consider both for this and for ancient material, um, is a long form television show that starts out with like lots of open ending things. But over time, it keeps getting trapped by decisions it's made until it has nowhere else to go. Right. Because you know, i- i- if we were to go back and listen to early ones, I think you're right, Christie, that a lot of the themes are there, but once you get an audience involved and you release things, you can't backtrack easily.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  You can't retcon it.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You get trapped into the, the thematic flow regardless of whether or not you still agree with it. Right. I think of like, ha, ha, go ahead, Joe. Sorry.

• 55:54Speaker 05

  No, no, I was just going to say that's, that I was kind of, I think we were headed this direction anyway. So, uh, you know, the art of preserving something though, that's where you can't go back with it. Right? So like, you know, a bard can take feedback and like make an adaptation in the story. The next night he or she tells it, if there's no record of it. You can backtrack, you know, it's like, it's like, it's like, uh, when, when Helen, you know, like in what is either book or three or four, where Helen tells the story and Metalas is like, wait a minute, that's not how this went. Like, you know, the perfect example, like, like of oral culture being able to revise, you know, competing stories, right? Like, so the act of preserving it to me and being locked into that, you know, like, choose your own adventure. You can't go

• 56:38Speaker 05

  back at this point unless, you know, you do something dumb like in Star Wars, where at the beginning of nine, you go, psych. She was actually, sorry, spoiler alert, everybody.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  But I mean, that's a great, like, I, I, that was, you just put it perfectly, where it's like, you can't, you make decisions and you start narrowing that thing. And, and, and that's where technology, you know?

• 57:01Speaker 04

  And the audience remembers, right? I mean, that is the flip side of having such a dedicated audience, is that they probably know your lyrics better than you do.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Right?

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  And like by the end, and so that's what like, one of the things, and because maybe we can talk a little bit more about some of the content and interpretive moves that, that's made in, in this, these songs. But to go back to Love in Paradise, right? Um, the, again, my favorite, but you know, that the idea that he is haunted by his losses and the men who have died, right? It's powerful and I love it, but I don't see that same type of emotional complexity in the Ithaca saga, right? I'm wondering, and I didn't follow in real time, audience response, but I'm wondering if there just wasn't room for an Odysseus who wasn't rational and romantic at

• 57:59Speaker 04

  the end.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like some of it got unloaded on the suitors, which is something we talked about with the return as well. Like, I love, uh, shoot, the song after the challenge, Hold Them Down. I love that song with how horrifying it is. And I, I think I talked about in our episode covering it. The, the like lines of, of them planning to rape her is, is said quietly and calmly, just laying out in, but in this flowery language that never comes out and says rape, right? And like, it's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. And like, to me, that was, that was a really powerful song. Mm hmm.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  But to put it just on the suitors feels wholly unfair to all the men in, in, Yeah. in the epic poem. Uh, cause that, that is a tool of terror.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so that, that, that desire, and so it seems pretty essentially modern, if not modern, Western American to sanitize one person to let there be a hero. Um, I'm still struggling with that in this, this whole performance. Cause Joe, though, you brought up the song ruthlessness before, right? And one of the creative things of, about this interpretation, um, is the cause that if I'm following the narrative right, is the cause that it gives for Odysseus' prolonged suffering. And that's that Athena wanted him to kill Polyphemus and he didn't. He only blinded him. And Odysseus poses that as an act of mercy, right? And so what's different about this Odysseus from the return

• 59:41Speaker 04

  is that he makes ethical statements, right? He says it would be wrong to kill Polyphemus, right? Uh, he's the monster. And so like, you know, those of us who know the Odyssey are like, wait, he didn't kill him because of a strategy, because he needed to move the big stupid stone. Right? Uh, and so then we get like, I just, I'm trying to figure out what it does to the Odyssey, Joe. And you brought up, so I'm gonna put this on you. What it does to an interpretation of the Odyssey to have Athena being punishing him for not killing Polyphemus.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  Well, that's all that's that's all the time we have for this podcast.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Well, and I think that goes to like the discussion I had with Liv and this overall critique. And I, what I compare it to in my experience in a lot of ways is Disney's Hercules Zeus of the loving father figure. Right. And that is by far not in any way how most people would imagine Zeus. They would imagine Jeff Goldblum from Chaos instead. Being a little bit more accurate to the depiction of Zeus. But that was one of my first introductions to Zeus as a Greek mythological figure.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  And I still love that movie. But like, I, I'm trying to decide if like, is it problematic that that was my introduction to Zeus? Is it problematic that the epic, the musical is the introduction for a lot of people to the character of Odysseus? As a loving husband trying to get back home. Yeah, he commits some violent acts. But that's okay, because frankly, that's okay in America. If you're doing it for the people you love. Or self-defense, it's acceptable. Like, that is kind of showing us what our world is like currently.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  And when we were talking around, she pointed out, it's like, you know, I am really sick and tired of media keeps showing me these stories of men who cheat on their wives. And that's a broader problem in popular media is like, what is a good male figure as a father, as a husband? And it's really sad that like, most people can only point to Bandit from Bluey right now. As like a really good example.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  I'll interrupt if they go back into the flow there. So, so my son, my son was 13, has a theory about why kids love Bluey so much. Right. And the, and the theory is this, he says, in every episode, the parents spend all their time playing with the kids and paying attention to them. And kids like it because that's not what happens in real life and their parents aren't as good.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I looked at it when he said that I'm trying to tell him something. It's like, it's just the way it is.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  But I think that's why adults like it too, right? Like it is an idealized version of what they want the relationship to look like with their children and their spouse. And okay, we're getting on a weird blue side.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  No, I, I think though, I mean, it has a weird parallel and it's like, what, you know, if there's a lot of different things you can take out of a story, which is the reason to me that, you know, things stay relevant is that they open themselves up to being relevant in a lot of different situations and not just one specific angle, then of course you're gonna, you're gonna have times when certain, certain parts of a, a story are, are heightened and more engaged with because like Joel said of cultural, you know, current cultural environments or, or what have you. I don't like, I think this, the, the desire to analyze Odysseus as good or bad is, it's not, I don't want to say it's flawed,

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  but it's, it's, it's the story to me is much, is much more than that, is open to much more than that. I understand it because of course people do, right? But like, I, I'll never forget, I saw, um, I think it was Richard, I know it was Richard Martin, give a talk about the, um, the word hero being connected to Horus being to, to border stone, right? Because there were these warriors or, or heroes, mythical heroes who protected these cities, right? As their, as their warrior cult or what have you. And like, so this idea of Odysseus as good or bad wasn't really why he came around. The story even came around, he came around because he was powerful and he could protect your city from other.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  So like you said something, Joel, I think you wrote this last week about epic being about the consequences of people with power behaving a certain way. You know, and I think that's so, that's what's interesting to me about this story, I think.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  I think you're right, totally, Joe, and I wanna, I wanna riff on that a minute. And I want to, I wanna try to present an interpretation of the depiction of Odysseus here that is redemptive, right? Or maybe not redemptive for Odysseus, but for the play. And that's that, let's go back to, to the Odyssey itself. Joe, you and I have talked about this so much, but it won't hurt rehearsing. People, I'm always saying people misinterpret the Odyssey, right? But that's probably wrong. Uh, the way I should say it is they don't see in it what I see. Um, and, you know, I present my interpretations as, as correctives. Because we've lionized Odysseus, not based on what's in the poem,

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  but based on our desire for men and leaders and heroes to be good. But what the Odyssey is really about, at some fundamental level, is the cost of survival.

• 1:05:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Right? Is the cost of living in a world that's not simple. At some level, Hector's world is simple. You kill, or you get killed. There are no choices there. And that's part of the tragedy of the Odyssey, is the people, sorry, the Iliad, is the people who have choices choose to fight and be in a position where they no longer have choices. Right? And so the Odyssey, you know, the way I talk about it, you know, in class, is I say, the Iliad is a poem that teaches you about death and how to die, and it's simple. The Odyssey is a poem about what it means to survive and how hard it is to go on living. And so Odysseus in this telling, I mean, what I respect about it, I think what we have to sort of

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  anchor ourselves to, is that they don't lie about Odysseus's murders, right? Everything there, like, he lays everything out, except for the, um, infidelity. And I, I mean, you know, and not to be contrary to your comments, Christie, but I actually think our society doesn't give a shit about people being unfaithful at some basic level. Yeah. They're just like, whatever, like, Tony Soprano did it, nobody cared. Yeah. Uh, that's maybe the one thing about Walter White, um, in, in, uh, Breaking Bad that's surprising. Right? Like, oh. Like he does do it all for his family in a way. But so, so, you know, but we hear about the killing of an infant. We start out with that, losing all of his men.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  We have the slaughter at the end. And so I, I just don't think the poem, I'm sorry, the songs celebrate it. They acknowledge it and they give him the humanizing thing of the romantic story in the end. And so I'm wondering if we can read it as that cost value situation, right? Odysseus, like anybody else has gone to wars, done terrible things, and that's who he is. But this is still someone who can feel love, right? And because we have this notion in the simplicity of our storytelling, that there are bad people, there are psychopaths, there are serial killers, there are dictators, they're bad, right?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  But the fact is, like, they were little kids.

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  They're human, they're human.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  People fell in love with it, they're human, yeah, they're human. And maybe the complexity that we're uncomfortable with here is that as well, right? Like, the truth is, um, nobody's fully good or bad. Right? Um, and some of us who seem good all the time have probably done things that far, fall far below our own standards.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  Christie, you brought up that song, if we could go back to a specific song, Hold Them Down, which I think is like, as somebody who's tried to write about the violence in Epic from a first person point of view and struggled with it pretty mightily.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  Like, that song to me was one of my favorites be- I think a, an interesting thing. I'm sure Jay's listening and he'll take my notes on this, uh, but, um, no, like, I would have had that song reprised and sung by Odysseus and Telemachus about the enslaved women. Like, I, that's the type of thing to me that would make for like. A full picture of this, or a fuller picture, a different picture, like there, to me, there are so many songs. Like, that song does a great job. That is like a menacing song, and it, especially in the style of music that he's writing. It'd be, it's so easy to like, go like, murder jazz hands, you know, and you're like, well, that's not.

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  But it's like, that song is really lyrically like, like, really bold, and it's a, I know that from walking that line with, with that, you know?

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  I, I just, I would love to see it also in, in Odysseus' mouth, or Telemachus' mouth. I think that would be cool.

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  Imagine this, a supercut though, as, as it is, of the bow scene and the murder and the return with that music.

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  Just to make us think about it.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  But for me, I mean, so to me, that indicates that they never gave up on Odysseus as having the monstrous capability. From infant and the horse to that one, right? But it does, but I just can't, you know, get my simple mind around the fact that Book 24 isn't there at all. Uh, you know, so maybe, Joe, to fix the return and this, you and I need to collaborate and do a Book 24, the musical.

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  See, that, I mean, that would be awesome, first of all. I'd be way into an entire musical on Book 24, like, starting, I mean, that would be. That's just the type of thing that nobody but the two of us would like, Joel.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  I'll be, I'll be there.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  Maybe Christie too, but maybe three of us.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  I, I'm, I'm here to jam out, as in, listen.

• 1:10:05Speaker 04

  Even professional homerists don't like Book 24. Uh, they'd be like, what is this garbage?

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  I love, I love Book 24. I've, I, you know, I, you know, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book 24 could be the title of my whole. And it was a real, it was a real revelation for me for two things. One, I think if you see book 24 as book 48 of both of them, I think it's incredible. Um, I think that's the way I think about it. Uh, and I don't know.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  I just feel like, like we could end and begin so many articles about the Odyssey with just that line. Joe Goodkin says, yeah, book 24 is book 48 of Homer.

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  And, you know, talk, talk about mine. Talk about, talk about like the realness, uh, which is, is, is a word that, that I always just attach to all epic stories. They're, they're powerful because they're something real about humanity. You know, not, and true, real, really, actually, maybe that's better, like truth rather than reality. The idea that you can come home and kill a hundred some people and not wake up the next morning after you sleep with your wife and have to deal with it. Like, that's the most like how you come home matters. Like, that's a perfect example. It's not, it's beautiful because it's real. It's not, you know, I don't struggle with it at all. I think it's, I think it's perfect. But you can use that Joel too, if you want. Joe Goodkin thinks it's perfect.

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  No, because it makes me think like, you know, I think the best and no, not maybe the best, but one of the most memorable depictions of a warrior coming home and losing his shit, um, i- is Rambo first blood, right? No, like, like, I don't know if you've seen it recently, like the later, like what Stallone became and what Rambo became. Yeah. Made it impossible for people to remember that. But first blood, like he comes, he freaks out, right? Kills a bunch of people and he ends up in prison. The end. Like it's, it's real. Like if this were myth, we would say the myth is saying, uh, society can't accommodate the damage done to veterans in its honor.

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  Right. Which you can also say about the, the record, uh, what's going on? The Marvin Gaye record. That's about a Vietnam veteran coming home and being alienated from his society. Right? Like it's the same, it's less violent, I guess, but you know.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  No, but that's what makes it even more, more disturbing. The late, the, the later Rambo movie weaponizes our warriors and sends them off to fight, uh, in Afghanistan before we even knew that was going to happen.

• 1:12:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:51Speaker 07

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• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  Well, that brings me to a question, Joe, I had about your odyssey compared to both The Return and Epic the Musical, is that in those ones, it is Penelope convincing Odysseus that they, there's still humanity to him, there's still the man she fell in love with. Again, we have no idea why Penelope is obsessed with... Odysseus in Epic the Musical. And she's arguing, you know, trying to convince him, it's like, no, no, there's still something here that we can build from going forward. And you have Odysseus making that argument in yours.

• 1:15:16Speaker 05

  Okay, so I think this is where I will, I just said I was not going to comment my own work in that way, but I'm going to. So I, I assume you're talking about the lines, uh, I'm still here and it's still clear. Right, okay. To me, what, what I thought of, what I intended when I wrote that was that you don't believe him when he says that. Like, I think, I think he's lying, clearly. Like, because he's trying to tell her he hasn't changed. Uh, and he's lying. He's coming home after 10 years of war and like, he's doing what Odysseus does, which is trying to, which is using words to try to get his way, right? So I intended that to be more ambiguous than, than him, you know, taking on that role. He's desperate at that point.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  Like, that's, that's, that's the way I thought. I, and this is a weird connection to a movie that, you know. But like, I imagined in, just like in The Blues Brothers, when John Belushi is down on his knees in the sewer, trying to, you know, convince Carrie Fisher not to shoot him. And he's just like, the dry cleaning was late. Like, I, you know, I, I, I didn't took the trash out, I got locked out. Like, that was my vision of it. Strangely enough, that was my vision of him.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  See, but I like that version, because again, that felt more real. Like, who is this woman who's waited 20 years for a man and expected nothing about him or their relationship to have changed? Like, that is what frustrates me about Penelope in those versions. And that's why I like Cersei's Penelope, because, oh, he's finally shown up and he's kind of destroyed our lives as we know it.

• 1:16:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  Well, and so I'm looking at, you know, I, I think you're absolutely right there, Christie. Cause I, one of the things I really struggled with, with the Ithaca saga is the, will you fall in love with me again? One, because Odysseus, like, I, again, I want to give props to the depiction of Odysseus, because this Odysseus is not being manipulative. Like, I'm, I'm, the lyrics are, I'm not the man you fell in love with, I'm not the man you once adored. I'm not your kind and gentle husband. I'm not the love you knew before. Right? And then she says, well, what what kinds of things did you do? It's like, uh, left a trail of red on every island, I traded friends like objects I could use, hurt more lives than I could count on my hands. But all that was to bring me back to you.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  And then I'm, and then she like, she says almost nothing, like, all we get from her is like, hey, hey, uh, can you just? Can can you you just check the bed over there? Like, is it still the thing? And so it reminds me like, no, it's something far more complicated and interesting to me if we're thinking about relationship. Is have you guys seen the show Homeland? I know of it, but I haven't seen it. Season one, so the basic premise is this guy, the main character was missing in action. He was a prisoner of war for like

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  years, um, with terrorists. And he comes home. Um, and the whole question of first season is whether or not he's been turned into um, an Islamic terrorist um, during his time. And so he's got the care, he's married to, you know, he comes home, his wife has like hooked up with somebody else because it's been like five years, like they bury that. She finds him secretly praying, unable of being like sleeping in bed, like not being intimate with her. And that gives us a whole season of complexity. Right? And so I'm wondering how much of like the inability of Penelope to be a complex figure here is about the form that we were talking about before? Or the focus, which is really just Odysseus?

• 1:18:44Speaker 04

  Because I think, to go back to what you say, Chrissy, there's a real lost opportunity here. Because what's amazing about Penelope, even in the return, is you don't really know what she thinks until that terrible.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Terrible line when she comes, Telemachus, this is your father. No, no, no. But like the ambiguity of Penelope is part of her, what's amazing. Here she's just.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  Place holder.

• 1:19:11Speaker 05

  But that's part of the challenge of, you know, twenty-four books, twelve thousand lines. And, you know, another thing I think you would do that would make a stronger stage, actual stage production is you'd have to get rid of a lot of stuff and give more time to exactly, to these other characters, you know? Like, you have to give a lot of time to the trio of family members. That's, that's where the, you know, if you're really talking about a homecoming, you, you have to give five songs to Penelope and you gotta give five songs i- i- in that format, you know? It's okay to still have, you know, a dozen for Odysseus, because of course you would, but you, you know, you need to, that, it's really hard if you're gonna give the Cyclops, like, four or five songs, that's, you know?

• 1:19:56Speaker 05

  I mean, it's great, it's great, you know, great character to write about, but it's really, really hard to make people care about more than four or five characters in this format, you know? I guess, I think.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, that was one of my frustrations, is like, we are, we are told about Penelope throughout Epic the Musical. I don't think the singer for Penelope was the same voice for the sirens. I still haven't quite figured that out for sure. So it's like, we literally don't hear her voice until the final saga, and yet, all of this is being done for her. She is the refrain for Odysseus throughout, um, which is really frustrating overall. Because again, the first time you think you hear her, it's, even if it's the same singer, it's still a facsimile of Penelope at the end, i- in the siren songs, so.

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, to, to counterbalance then, that with what's actually in the Odyssey is we have Penelope and Telemachus in book one.

• 1:20:57Speaker 05

  Right up front.

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  Before we see Odysseus, right? Um, and they have that awkward engagement, but we find out that she's really upset even by songs of homecoming, and like, she's given some interior emotional life. And so, I think actually in the stage version, you could solve the problem with like, one good song, but it has to be a really good one.

• 1:21:16Speaker 05

  Up front. And it has to be up front, I think.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  And, yeah, and, and it has to be so. Something about her choosing to take him whatever she gets, some theme like that, right?

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 04

  What I see at the end is this, to go back to the whole, you know, we're all fucked up problems. We're all like bags of flesh with memories that may or may not be true, right? At some point, you know, whether you're with someone a week or thirty years, you choose to be with them despite the faults that both of you have pointed out in each other repeatedly, right? Like you make a choice that someone is part of your life.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what's difficult is like, but that's the kind of choice you make because you see them or engage with them in your life every day. This person's a stranger that has shown up and all you have is a memory of who they were. That's not the same person in front of you. So like, how can, especially as a woman, with a violent man, how can you make an informed choice that like, this is what I should choose?

• 1:22:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know, right? No, no, but I think, I think that's part of the story is that maybe, maybe him coming home is her best option.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, which could be, you know, I think again with the suitors helps with that a little bit, like it's this guy or these guys.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  Well, no, I was gonna say like, it, it's, this is where, you know, the facet of epic where that, that allows you to go in and create a backstory. If things are unexplained, maybe sometimes you don't wanna create a backstory. Maybe it's enough to just say like, human beings do all sorts of, make all sorts of weird ass decisions that nobody outside of them and maybe their significant other has any understanding why, maybe they don't, like, we don't, people are capricious, like they, there's, there's no backstory to this other than a decision that people of all genders have made for all sorts of reasons over thousands of years, you know, like it's, it's, I mean, I, I'm more intrigued, yeah, sorry, go ahead, Joel.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  No, I was just saying, try this out though. Imagine if the song were to give the idea, if not direct, eh, eh, eh, an implication rather than direct articulation, that she knows this is suboptimal, but it's the best she's gonna get and she's just gonna go along with it. Right? And then, you know, cause right now I think part of, I, I think audiences would probably rebel because I think people want to believe in the romance.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  They want to.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  To have that at the front.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  The other way is the reality, like a lot of the times, right?

• 1:23:47Speaker 05

  And I will say, I will pull my elbow patting myself in the back for a second. But you know, I have, I have two Penelope songs in my odyssey. And I have one at the beginning and one at the end. And that's the same thing I do with Telemachus. And, you know, I put that song up front of her, um, writing about, you know, losing her son to, to, to growing up essentially, and being afraid of that, because that was what I see in her, in her character at the beginning. And I was able to think about, you know, really my own mom, like, watching me go away to college and like, crying over me forgetting my laundry basket at home. And like, I just saw like, I saw all those same instincts of motherhood, you know, in, in Penelope. And then the song at the end is just not trying to explain what these two people see in one another,

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  but to try to present that it is a, clearly there's something mutual between the two of them that, or, or something understood that is their own little secret or their own little mystery between the two of them. You know, this idea of like, live in me like I live in you, which is what I have her saying. It is just like, I don't want to explain it, but it's clearly there because of the way they're behaving. Like, we see them behave a certain way, so.

• 1:24:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, maybe, maybe, yeah, not spelling it out is probably the better way, but giving her some more complexity.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  Because we all know if we are not ourselves involved in relationships, people go through terrible things and treat each other terribly, yet still stay together. And from the outside, people look at those couples and they're like, what the fuck? Like, how does this work? How can she stay with him? How can he stay with her? Yet somehow they make sense of the world.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, there's no relationship really between Penelope and Telemachus. I don't even think they have a song together. They don't. They, Telemachus references her. But what would be interesting then is like, if she's making, and the return kind of gives this sense, like, she's making these decisions to keep Telemachus safe.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Protect.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  As her young son. I think you could still do that. Like, I am still doing whatever. It's more likely that Odysseus, as the father of Telemachus, will keep him safe than the suitor as well. And you could just frame it as she's making the decision on behalf of her son.

• 1:25:52Speaker 05

  It's funny because I think what we're circling around is that an actual stage musical version of this would be essentially writing about all the shit that Epic the Musical doesn't write about.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  No, but I think, I think there's like, it's in the same place, first of all, so it would make for a great stage. Like, you could have it in the same place on Ithaca. But it's, I mean, it just shows you how much material there is to work with in poems. Where you're just like, forty songs, and we're talking about the sixty that you could have written, you know? It's, it's, it's amazing. It's so generative and it's so rich and, you know, it's, it's why it keeps providing people with inspiration to create things, which is what reception is.

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think that that was my impression almost from the first time I started listening to Epic the Musical. Was that it is, in some ways, a more powerful interpretive engagement with Epic than most books about Homer that I've read.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, it just gets in there and sees things that I think, you know, conventional scholarship and conversations fails to.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's like, I don't want to keep you guys too much longer. You've been so generous with your weekend time. There is like, so one thing I read while working on Gladiator stuff that really made me think about like, the, the most popular engagements with Greek mythology recently, especially for younger generations, is Percy Jackson and Epic the Musical. And someone pointed out, it's like, when you are producing media at like, a high cost, and that's not necessarily true of Epic, but like, to get the most outreach, you try to stay ideologically general. You don't want to piss off a particular group too much. And as a result, we're given this slightly sanitized version of Odysseus.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  He's still problematic, like, he's not perfect. He's still human in a lot of ways, but we root for him. We want him to get the girl at the end, like, just how a lot of our media is. And I think that's what's hard is then because we accept some things about Odysseus and still consider him a hero or someone worth rooting for. Is that just so it will appeal to every of larger audience of people? And is that necessarily should be the end goal? And I think Joel already kind of answered this question, right? Like, this has reached so many more people. Percy Jackson, which had Western Civ influence, especially in his earlier books, but the author has has worked on it since then.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  It's so popular because it fed into not the best aspects of our reception of the ancient world today.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Well, I think and I think we need to be really direct to the point that this is part of what makes the Iliad and the Odyssey successful. Is that they are, I wouldn't call them ideologically neutral, but they're ideologically ambiguous. Two clear things that that I think can be shown is one, you can give anybody the the information in the Iliad about the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and people will have different interpretations, even though it's pretty damn clear. But two, like the Odyssey, especially when people talk about its political ideology. Is it in favor of kings or not, right? Like, it can go either way. It's really just a complicated exploration. And so I think, you know, I was talking to my friend Elton Bark about this the other day.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  We need to be more conscious of the extent to which ambiguity is intentional to make the uptake or acceptance of epic even higher. And this is definitely the case with mass media stuff. But the thing is, it doesn't pull its punches completely.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:36Speaker 04

  Right? Like, you know, compare this version of the Odyssey, like epic musical to any earlier movie or Odysseus in Troy or Brother, Where Art Thou? Right? I mean, this acknowledges that Odysseus is not a good person and has done terrible things.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  I think what it does, I mean, the line I always use about Achilles and Patroclus' relationship is, which I think applies to everything you said, is everything is possible, but nothing is necessary. If that makes sense, like, and that's, that's the beauty of it to me. That, that is what allows it. And I think, you know, your question about what are the costs of, of, of imprinting a more narrow ideology on something? I, I, I, I think it's, I don't know if there's an answer to that, really. Like, I think it's the price. I think that's what reception is in some sense, is it's always going to imprint. And really, it's, you know, like, like Joel said, it, people keep retelling them because they can do that. Like, if they couldn't find all these different things in them, they wouldn't retell them.

• 1:30:36Speaker 05

  And that's sort of the cost is your, you know, the, the, the, the solution to me, or the, I don't know if you need a solution, is always to just do another telling and find something different in it, you know? And people also, and this goes to maybe the, the, the process of, of engaging the audience with feedback. Like, sometimes people don't know what they want until you give it to them. Like, I think it's, I think it's like, I can't remember which 90s rock singer. It was probably one of the Gallagher brothers from Oasis, was just basically like, like, the audience will, will take what we give them. Like, they don't, like, you know, they don't know what they want until we show it to them, basically. And I think that that's also, you know, that has some ramifications that are, are not great.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  But also, sometimes you're surprised. Like, sometimes the audience doesn't know they want something until you hand them a finished product and they go, oh, shit, like, I didn't know I wanted, never mind, you know, or, or whatever, you know? All my references are 90s.

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  Joe, you got exactly right there, because I think the solution for a bad or insidious narrative isn't to point out how it's bad or to stop spinning narrative, it's to tell a better story.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Right? To replace it with something that fills the needs more, that fills the gaps, and shows how, through its performance, other narratives were lacking.

• 1:31:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it makes people feel something, yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Epic and Musical does that. I mean, again, it has millions of TikTokers caring about Odysseus. Uh, they may, they may have to learn that they care about a douchebag.

• 1:32:11Speaker 04

  Many a lover has had that realization.

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw up, I'm gonna put something provocative out, which is that the creator went to Notre Dame, right? Is that right?

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Uh, that's a great, I thought, I, I'm.

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm asking it like I didn't research it. Yes.

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  Okay. The music school, right? Like, he did go for music? Is that correct?

• 1:32:33Speaker 05

  So, in 2018, I performed the Odyssey at Notre Dame for the Classics and Theater Department. And they started this in 2019. So, I mean.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  Joe, I was gonna say, listening to your Odyssey, your, one of your Telemachus songs, which gives vibes to like a similar, like, young Hercules from Disney, like, I had really similar vibes with that, but that also really transitioned on Telemachus and the Wisdom Saga of just like, I don't know, I saw the parallel. I don't, I don't, I don't disagree with that possibility.

• 1:33:08Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying. Let's have a bard off.

• 1:33:11Speaker 04

  I will be there for it.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:33:14Speaker 05

  This is like the same experience I went through with Hadestown, where people were like, can you believe a musical about Greek myth? And I was like, I can believe it, because I've been doing it for the last three years.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  Honestly, like, has been our favorite ways to receive Greek myth recently. We love Hadestown. Um, three of us loved Epic. Like, again, we complicate our love of it, because you should, that, that's just what you should do. But like, at the end of the day, I'll still listen to it and enjoy it and sing along to it.

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  So will I.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  So, one other question I have also is, Odysseus shouldn't be a tenor, right? He should be a baritone.

• 1:33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's why, I totally agree. It really upsets me. Like, he should have, he should have an Eddie Vedder voice.

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, or like a Ray LaMontagne voice or something? I don't know.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, something like that. Or, or like, who's the guy, um, who's in, oh, now I'm forgetting his name. He does that song Skinny Love, Bon Iver.

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  No, but, no, but he used to, like, he is a baritone.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  In normal life. And then he started singing falsetto and got successful there. Odysseus should be a shapeshifter.

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  That's what I was thinking. It's like, the falsetto could actually be a really interesting component.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  He should basically be Michael McDonald, is what you're saying.

• 1:34:26Speaker 04

  He should be able to sing both parts of Temple of the Dogs.

• 1:34:31Speaker 05

  There you go. What a perfect 90s reference.

• 1:34:35Speaker 04

  Right, there you go.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  Well, well, to help us wrap up a little bit, because this is, you know, this episode is in part to being like, Liv, you know, you don't have to talk about this with us, but maybe you should listen to Epic. Have, do we agree that it is something that she and her listeners should listen to? Thumbs up?

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  Give it a try.

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  Give it a try.

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  How do you, so my last question to you, you guys, is how do you want to see people engage with it? Like, who are newly entering it, what would you like to see their engagement look like? And then how can we as scholars and creators be a part of that process? Like, help them to both enjoy it, but also see that, like, there are other versions that exist out there that could be better, could be worse.

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  Or just more.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  More of.

• 1:35:21Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, I think they should just start listening by the sagas, right? Listen, then watch some of the videos to, for how to do it. And then, second thing, I'm gonna do some, I'm gonna do at least one Substack post about it to encourage people to see how it's great reception. And then I'm actually working now on a book contract to write a book about the popular receptions of the Odyssey. And there's gonna be a chapter that's just about the 21st century. That, and Epic the Musical is gonna be part of it. Because what scholars can do is tell people that you can take this shit seriously, because it is serious.

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I, I, I think that was something that Monica Serino said that was kind of funny, was like, Camus will let you do reception panels, you can't get that at the SCS. And it's like-

• 1:36:07Speaker 05

  They're getting close, though.

• 1:36:09Speaker 03

  They're getting-

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  I've been working on, Joel, do you know anybody there with SCS?

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  I, I may be the vice president of program, so let's see what we can do.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Ooh, good to know.

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  But I mean, there's, there's like a movement, I mean, even within, like, when I took my class on the Odyssey, and it's what we would call receptions, in 1990- Seven or eight, like it was in the comp lit department, basically because you know, and now those, those classes are in classics departments like, like it's full on and it takes time to see the value in them, like, like minds have to shift, you know, like Joel's talking about, and they happen because people advocate for them and see the value and.

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  And we just need to make it clear. I mean, the audiences who watch on TikTok don't care, right? But my colleagues need to know that what Pausanias did by talking about the Odyssey or Virgil did, including Odysseus, is the same thing that's happening with Epic the Musical and Penelope Atwood's, it's, it's, sorry, the Penelope Atwood, Cersei, it's all part of receiving, critically receiving a text and re-envisioning it for your time.

• 1:37:18Speaker 05

  And to your point, like, like, okay, three million monthly listeners on Spotify or whatever, like, like, like if, if, if 250 of them took Ancient Greek, like, and I know I'm, I'm shouting into the storm, but like.

• 1:37:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I could hire three Greek professors.

• 1:37:35Speaker 05

  That's what I mean. With the number of the, like, a- and it doesn't mean that that's the way they should engage with it because everybody should, but it, it has the potential on that scale to, to get people back to the source material in all sorts of different ways.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  If we could get point zero one percent of the people who love Wilson's Odyssey, who love Epic the Musical and read Percy Jackson when they were kids to more language courses, our classes would be overflowing.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02Speaker 05

  And I know Joel, like this is something again, like I, at the heart, I got into it through the language of it, through, through reading it in Greek. And I'm not saying that that's like, that's clearly a very privileged way to be able to go after this stuff. But the thing that moved me and made me want to create a version of it was reading it. In the original text and connecting to other human beings through the text to have told it and other audiences that have experienced it. And, you know, if you can do that, if it's something you're interested in, you get to bypass everybody else's opinion of it and form your own.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Speaker 04

  Ultimately, I'm with you. I don't care what door people take to get into the room we share together.

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  Right. But I think that having unmediated access to the past.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 04

  Is a treasure.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, agreed. I don't know if you guys saw the reaction video I sent you, but my favorite line, it's this, just this YouTuber who's just reacting to the animatics of Epic, the saga. And at one point for Open Arms, they mentioned the Lotus Eaters. It's like, oh damn, the Percy Jackson Lotus Eaters Casino scene. And I just love that, like, that was his connection to this part of the story. And it's, but it like, but it was also pure joy. Like, it was like, when people realize they get to make those connect, like, cultural connections. And then, like, you can, that's what I want people to take away is like, go in curious, go in asking questions.

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  That's a good way to put it.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  And learning.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  My daughter, my daughter started bringing the graphic novel to the car while we were listening and saying, all right, what part of the story is this?

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  Oh, that's great. That's awesome.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  All right. Well, I think, I think that's a good way to wrap it up. Is there anything you, either of you would like to plug at the end here?

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Go listen to some of these songs. Listen to Joe's music, too. His Odyssey, and, you know, compare different versions, enjoy it, and make some of your own.

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  I would say also, like, I hope they can make a music of it, like a full record, like, that would be awesome. Like, it.

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  If the creator or producers ever listen to this, and you need someone to help in any way, I would love to see this onstage.

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Also, if that doesn't happen, but Jay needs a new project, Jason and the Argonauts, please, because I would love to see what could be done with that.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Have you talked to Liv about that?

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  No, I didn't. No, it was something we mentioned in our podcast, but I'm like, you could have so much fun with Jason and the Argonauts, like, Roman as reception of Greek heroes, and just go from there. And please have Medea.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  Well, nerds, it's Liv here for the first time this episode. So wild. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to Tuesday's episode and Friday's as well. I really, I really wanted to do Epic justice and I'm so thrilled that Christie, Jo and Joel were able to do it for me because not everything is for everyone and that's fine. But these guys absolutely love Epic and I could not be more obsessed with everything they just broke down about it. And maybe, just maybe, I'll have to start listening soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening. It means a whole damn lot. Let's Talk About Myths, baby, is

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  written and produced by me, Liv Albert, except in this case because Christie did it all. Absolute queen. Michaela Pango Wish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. More on that soon. It's early in the morning and I'm recording this. I am Liv and I absolutely love this shit. And one final note to all of my Canadians. Thank you. We did, I mean, things aren't good, but things aren't bad. Thanks.

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