Joe's Odyssey

Here's what I wrote in the conclusion to my post about the 2021 (Virtual) NJCL Convention last July: 

"The NJCL Convention next July 2022 is scheduled to be in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I know by then we'll be able to travel and be in rooms together listening to music. And I can't wait for that day."

And... so it was: for the first time in three years I was able to make the trip to perform in person for what has been, every year since 2012, a wonderful set of shows for a group of mostly high school…

When you live in the world of Homeric epic, you're never too far away from grief.

One of things I find most interesting about the environment of the Iliad and Odyssey (and really a lot of Ancient Greek literature and thought that follows) is the consideration and acceptance of grief as a perpetual human condition. Heroes of the highest social order have grief.  The enslaved have grief.  Men have grief, women have grief. Achilles has grief. Odysseus has grief.  Everyone. Has. Grief.

Of course we know that in…

The last state I conquered in my somewhat Quixotic quest to perform my Odyssey in all fifty was Kansas in November. 

At the time I wrote about the pace at which I’ve been able to add new states and how it has slowed the last few years, complicated additionally by Covid. With only seven states remaining, I came into this year thinking it was realistic to get two more in 2022 and I wrapped up my successful spring touring season by visiting and performing in a place I’ve never been (performing or otherwise)…

After a wonderful virtual show for Vassar, it was equally wonderful to do an in person show at a place I've come to think of as a sort of home: UIC. The last true classroom show I did was... also at UIC last year, somehow already seven months ago.

Surveying those seven months, I find a number of notable in person shows: at two conventions, in a new state, and in three new countries. 

This time I was able to perform safely without wearing a mask, which was a nice logistical improvement over last semester's…

"Why did you adapt the Odyssey into song?"

Of all the thousands of questions I've fielded over 343 performances of my Odyssey, I find this one the most difficult. 

And there it was again, from the audience of Vassar students to whom I performed virtually on an April afternoon almost 20 years to the day of my first college Odyssey performance at Indiana University in 2002.

In my answer, I catalogued my academic and musical bona fides as well as some of the other versions of Homeric epic that inspired me…