“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. So opens Homer’s Odyssey. Cowboy Clay and I recently went to see the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. I had just finished listening to the Robert Fagles translation of the poem narrated with great gusto by Sir Ian McKellen. At the very end of the poem, I was thunderstruck by a scene. It is a scene that spoke to me as a cattle rancher’s wife.
The scene I’m talking about is at the end of the tale It is when Odysseus, upon his return to his kingdom of Ithaka, slays the one hundred and four suitors who had been pillaging his lands and harassing his wife for twenty years. He, with his son Telemachus, then goes to see his father, Laertes, who is living in the country taking care of the cattle and crops. He proves to his father that he indeed is Odysseus by speaking with fond memory of those crops which include “thirteen pear trees, forty fig trees, ten apple trees…fifty rows of vines” and a herd of very fine cows.
In celebration of the return to his land and its people (or oikos which is Greek for household), they butcher a beef and share the feast with their loyal servants, the swineherd and the shepherd and their children. Today, it would be like John Dutton of the “Yellowstone” series celebrating with his ranch hands at the Dutton Ranch. But this scene is not in the Nolan movie.
Homer emphasizes the Greek notion of “nostos”. Nostos means “the return” from war and a journey filled with strife. Nostalgia comes from this word. It is also a person’s personal journey to define his place in the world. Through the trials and tribulations of life, a person defines what is important to them. But this theme is not the main one in Nolan’s adaptation. In one scene, Damon’s Odysseus says that he is not sure he even wants to go home.
There are two examples in Homer’s Odyssey that emphasize “nostos” that are also not in the film. Odysseus is offered pretty good deals not to return home to Ithaca. Calypso offers him immortality if he would stay with her forever on her lush island. After he leaves her and is washed on to the shores of Skyeria, the king of the Phaiekians, Alkinoos, offers him the hand of his young daughter, Nauskiaa, and a large, beautiful and peaceful kingdom to rule over. But Odysseus rejects the young and beautiful gals to return to his aging wife and his own herd of cows. He rejects Alkinoos’ vast herds and land ‘o plenty for that of his less lush but much cherished pile of rocks called home.
Cows play another part in Odysseus’ journey home. He is told by the prophet Teiresias when he goes to Hades that if he goes to the Sun god Helios’s island, he and his men cannot kill the cows there because Helios loves his cows. Of course, his men disobey and eat a cow. But Odysseus, honorably, minds the words of the prophet and does not eat the meat of the cow. He also, as a cattleman, knows that nobody should come between a man and his cows.
Our ranch was not the Dutton ranch. Our ranch house was smaller than the Dutton Ranch’s bunk house. Cowboy Clay had a herd of beautiful white-faced brown Hereford cows, one of the oldest Hereford herds in the state. Clay’s place in the world is defined by his neighbors who helped round up his cows, his good wife and family, and his grasslands for his cows.
Odysseus was indeed a man of “twists and turns”. Odysseus was also described as smart and wily but could also be tempted by drinking too much wine. Besides loyalty to his household, he was also described as a man of great cunning (metis). And boy howdy can Cowboy Clay fix almost anything with the right tools and a whole bunch of baling twine.
Like Ithaca, Montana is not a pretty place nor is it charming like the New England towns I’ve lived in. It’s vast and rocky and literally stunning. “High, Wide and Handsome” is what John Kinsey Howard calls it in the book by the same name. Arizona, where Clay and I have moved, also has a plainness with it sandy landscape and adobe homes. But with bursts of colorful flowers coming out of scraggly cactus, it is quite beautiful and much softer than Montana. The mountains are rounded and not the craggy miles high peaks of Big Sky country. It is where, like in Homer’s tale “Dawn touches the sky with her fingertips of rose” and the sunsets are mesmerizing. It is like the Mediterranean in a way, as it has a healing aspect to it.
Clay is retired now. Tequila has replaced bourbon and branch. Our irrigation system waters cactus not alfalfa. But Clay knows what his place in the world was. It was raising cattle to feed people and provide for his household. I once asked him with a bit of pouty face why he always said that “the cows come first”. He’d smile with that sly grin of his (another feature he shared with Odysseus) and say, “Happy cows…happy wife.”
This is where the two tales diverge a bit. King Odysseus is finally home with his cows and has memories of his wild adventures fighting Cyclops and Sirens and such. Clay never left home until now. And he’s not even a cattle baron, let alone a king. There is a pretty big similarity though. When asked what Clay misses about Montana, he always says, a bit wistfully,
“I miss my cows.”
I can imagine that might have also kept Odysseus from yielding to the seductresses, Circe and Kalypso. It wasn’t just Penelope. Those herds of females were waiting for him too.
Cowgirl Cassandra
Note: First Odyssey quote come from the Robert Fagles translation and the “the fingertips of rose” quote is from the Daniel Mendelsohn translation.
Cowboy Clay made this observation recently: “Montanans don’t get outraged. They get bothered.”
This was in response to my query about how I should feel about the latest documentary on the frontier called Kevin Costner’s ‘The West'”. The chapter on the Lewis and Clark expedition didn’t look like around here which is in the middle of Montana along the Yellowstone River. From the ranch, I can almost see where the expedition overnighted. They wrote that they had to use two trees to make one canoe, the trees being pretty scrawny and there weren’t that many of them. But in this retelling, the expedition seemed to be traveling through a lot of greenery and whole bunch of trees. It’s not like that here. So I tried to ask an AI where the locations were and couldn’t get an answer. I casually mentioned to rancher husband that I was rather outraged as a Montanan of thirty years that they didn’t get “where the plains meet the mountains” right. I was quite proud of my observation. That’s when he reminded me that Montanans are never outraged. They are bothered. And he added “Pilgrim” at the end to also remind me that I still had a bit of midwestern Puritan harumphing in me and that I had a ways to go to understand that Tao of Cow.
After a long and frustrating day of baling hay (too wet, too dry), my husband goes to town for some beers. There he usually runs into an assortment of fellows who will invariably give him the latest shocking examples of evil government doings gleaned from somewhere in the Fat Cat News.
“The IRS is gonna charge our athletes $9000 for winning a gold medal!” a wizened fellow exclaims.
“That ain’t right. Gud dam gubmint ” grumbles a guy in a green cap as he slams his beer glass down on the bar, “Why they are fighting for us over there.”
“Get the ropes! String ’em up”, two more guys yell out as the crowd now becomes tense and restless, grumbling about lack of good swinging trees because of the gd tree huggers. Continue reading →
“Why was a man stuck on a barbed wire fence with his pants down in our recent blizzard?” people were asking last night at the local watering hole. “Did his wife not have a wire cutters?” “Why did the school teacher go to town and back (10 miles) on foot in the middle of a blizzard? Well, it turns out none of those things were true even though it was reported in the big city paper “”The Billings Gazette”. http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_b4508e50-8143-51fd-ac88-dbaf15ea5b87.html
The hub of a small town for the men is usually a coffee shop. Ours is “The Frosty Freeze”. The hub for women is the salon. So thank goodness, I had a nail appointment at “Janet’s Hair and Nails”. I would get the real story from the gals there. Continue reading →
I’m in the movie business and I don’t go to the movies much anymore. It’s only partially because I live 70 frickin’ miles from a multiplex, but more because the movies have been really sucky of late. Sometimes a “Michael Clayton” studio movie comes along. You know, a movie with dialogue and some sort of social conscience like “Network”. Yes, we fortunately have the Cohen brothers for creepy yet thrilling character portrayals and Pixar for joy. But mostly we get a lot of hurling; large pieces of car flying at us or guys throwing up a lot.
So I’m happy to report that even though this is a movie about a bunch of narcissistic guys who invent a way to avoid social contact, “Social Network” about the origins of Facebook had me laughing one minute and on the edge of my seat in another. Yes, it was worth the 2 hours of driving, (although driving on Interstate 90 in Montana is sheer bliss with little traffic and kick ass scenery. You know the whole eagles soaring deal above the Yellowstone River and against the backdrop of the buttes.) I could kick myself for not asking the young Montanans there what they thought of the excess of Harvard life. I mean those Harvard dorms rooms are mighty swanky. Their refrigerators are filled with Heineken. Loads of it. And the women’s underwear in the first party scene? Oh boy, did I feel like I needed to go shopping.
The movie was a kind of me generation “Othello” with the Othello character (nice Brazilian roommate Eduardo Severin played by Andrew Garfield) becoming the supporting player and Iago (Mark Zuckerberg) becoming the dark maladjusted leading man. The movie starts out with the Desdemona character Erica (played by Rooney Mara) being condescended to in a Boston bar by Zuckerberg (played to dark perfection by Jesse Eisenberg) and finally dumping his sorry ass, thus ending that Othello comparison. (The movie theater I was in had a sound problem and the first couple minutes we couldn’t hear the dialogue which made us a bit rebellious. So they started the whole movie over and I’m glad they did because the movie starts off with such a bang that to have missed it would have been a sin.)
Every performance is dead on. Eisenberg provides the strange hypnotic but sad center. While Garfield provides its only beating heart. The Winklevoss twins played by Armie Hammer with body double Josh Pence are the epitome of privilege who are impossibly handsome, smart and , oh yes, are on the Olympic crew team. You start off hating them, but end up loving every minute they are on the screen. And just when you thought you were having all the fun you could stand, in walks Lucifer minion Sean Parker, played with astonishing dash and complexity by Justin Timberlake. A seducer of the first order, he lures Zuckerberg away from this best friend Eduardo into the Silicon Valley version of decadent paradise.
The direction of David Fincher couldn’t be better making even the scenes in the law office fraught with danger. The Aaron Sorkin script is fast, almost dizzying, but still luscious and spare at the same time. The first scenes are actually flashbacks. We then are shown the present which is a law office where the depositions are being taken of the people suing Zuckerberg over whose idea Facebook was. Who would have thought you could get that much drama in deposing people? And who is telling the truth? I’m probably not the first person to remark that Sorkin used the “Rashomon” structure to brilliant effect. Who is telling the whole truth?
The women’s roles are not so much. This is a movie about young masters of the universe in the making and their whirling neon drug and alcohol filled world of whoopee. If we let them, they will continue to infect our innate sense of community with a crapolistic sociopathy that will be the end of us. But somehow, thank goodness I saw another possibility. I ended up hoping that Erica was happily talking philosophy with her good friends at a Boston University hangout. She was not sitting with a bunch of assholes basking in their perceived glory or alone collecting friends on her Facebook page. Who will be the winners in this battle for a real social network? Tune in.
Seems that my website “disappeared.” Not sure if I’ll try to find it or use its demise as a way to start anew, be born again, rise from the ashes, reboot and retoot.
For six years I tried like heck to “be part of the solution” by becoming active in the Democratic Party. I worked on two presidential campaigns, one US.Senate campaign, and one local state representative campaign. I became a County Chair, I was a delegate to the 2004 convention, I attended rallies, and state conventions and state dinners. I had dinner with the governor.
I had the only left talk radio show in Montana. Every Saturday I drove an hour up and an hour back to do three hours of doing battle with a bunch of libertarians. The upside was that I got to interview great minds like Francis Moore Lappe, Dean Baker, Matt Taibbi, Charlie Derber, Stephen Kinzer, Glen Ford, Rick Perlstein, Melvin Goodman,
and many many more.
A year ago they gave us the boot, the heave-ho, the axe, the what-for, the pink slip. Replaced us with some Tea Party “reformers”.
So I’m done with the Democrats. I’m off the radio. I still work hard for a living while my husband works at wrastling cows and baling hay. But I occasionally have a thing or two to say. So that’s what this blog is for.
My Odysseus
My Odysseus
For the Love of Cows
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. So opens Homer’s Odyssey. Cowboy Clay and I recently went to see the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. I had just finished listening to the Robert Fagles translation of the poem narrated with great gusto by Sir Ian McKellen. At the very end of the poem, I was thunderstruck by a scene. It is a scene that spoke to me as a cattle rancher’s wife.
The scene I’m talking about is at the end of the tale It is when Odysseus, upon his return to his kingdom of Ithaka, slays the one hundred and four suitors who had been pillaging his lands and harassing his wife for twenty years. He, with his son Telemachus, then goes to see his father, Laertes, who is living in the country taking care of the cattle and crops. He proves to his father that he indeed is Odysseus by speaking with fond memory of those crops which include “thirteen pear trees, forty fig trees, ten apple trees…fifty rows of vines” and a herd of very fine cows.
In celebration of the return to his land and its people (or oikos which is Greek for household), they butcher a beef and share the feast with their loyal servants, the swineherd and the shepherd and their children. Today, it would be like John Dutton of the “Yellowstone” series celebrating with his ranch hands at the Dutton Ranch. But this scene is not in the Nolan movie.
Homer emphasizes the Greek notion of “nostos”. Nostos means “the return” from war and a journey filled with strife. Nostalgia comes from this word. It is also a person’s personal journey to define his place in the world. Through the trials and tribulations of life, a person defines what is important to them. But this theme is not the main one in Nolan’s adaptation. In one scene, Damon’s Odysseus says that he is not sure he even wants to go home.
There are two examples in Homer’s Odyssey that emphasize “nostos” that are also not in the film. Odysseus is offered pretty good deals not to return home to Ithaca. Calypso offers him immortality if he would stay with her forever on her lush island. After he leaves her and is washed on to the shores of Skyeria, the king of the Phaiekians, Alkinoos, offers him the hand of his young daughter, Nauskiaa, and a large, beautiful and peaceful kingdom to rule over. But Odysseus rejects the young and beautiful gals to return to his aging wife and his own herd of cows. He rejects Alkinoos’ vast herds and land ‘o plenty for that of his less lush but much cherished pile of rocks called home.
Cows play another part in Odysseus’ journey home. He is told by the prophet Teiresias when he goes to Hades that if he goes to the Sun god Helios’s island, he and his men cannot kill the cows there because Helios loves his cows. Of course, his men disobey and eat a cow. But Odysseus, honorably, minds the words of the prophet and does not eat the meat of the cow. He also, as a cattleman, knows that nobody should come between a man and his cows.
Our ranch was not the Dutton ranch. Our ranch house was smaller than the Dutton Ranch’s bunk house. Cowboy Clay had a herd of beautiful white-faced brown Hereford cows, one of the oldest Hereford herds in the state. Clay’s place in the world is defined by his neighbors who helped round up his cows, his good wife and family, and his grasslands for his cows.
Odysseus was indeed a man of “twists and turns”. Odysseus was also described as smart and wily but could also be tempted by drinking too much wine. Besides loyalty to his household, he was also described as a man of great cunning (metis). And boy howdy can Cowboy Clay fix almost anything with the right tools and a whole bunch of baling twine.
Like Ithaca, Montana is not a pretty place nor is it charming like the New England towns I’ve lived in. It’s vast and rocky and literally stunning. “High, Wide and Handsome” is what John Kinsey Howard calls it in the book by the same name. Arizona, where Clay and I have moved, also has a plainness with it sandy landscape and adobe homes. But with bursts of colorful flowers coming out of scraggly cactus, it is quite beautiful and much softer than Montana. The mountains are rounded and not the craggy miles high peaks of Big Sky country. It is where, like in Homer’s tale “Dawn touches the sky with her fingertips of rose” and the sunsets are mesmerizing. It is like the Mediterranean in a way, as it has a healing aspect to it.
Clay is retired now. Tequila has replaced bourbon and branch. Our irrigation system waters cactus not alfalfa. But Clay knows what his place in the world was. It was raising cattle to feed people and provide for his household. I once asked him with a bit of pouty face why he always said that “the cows come first”. He’d smile with that sly grin of his (another feature he shared with Odysseus) and say, “Happy cows…happy wife.”
This is where the two tales diverge a bit. King Odysseus is finally home with his cows and has memories of his wild adventures fighting Cyclops and Sirens and such. Clay never left home until now. And he’s not even a cattle baron, let alone a king. There is a pretty big similarity though. When asked what Clay misses about Montana, he always says, a bit wistfully,
“I miss my cows.”
I can imagine that might have also kept Odysseus from yielding to the seductresses, Circe and Kalypso. It wasn’t just Penelope. Those herds of females were waiting for him too.
Cowgirl Cassandra
Note: First Odyssey quote come from the Robert Fagles translation and the “the fingertips of rose” quote is from the Daniel Mendelsohn translation.
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Posted in Bar Codes, Montana Life, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged media, Montana Ranch Life, social commentary, The Odyssey