Joe's Odyssey

A short postscript to my "annual wrap up" blog from last week. 

I thought that show for Pomfret would be my last of the year, but I booked a last minute performance for a high school in Texas. It was an unexpected surprise (a teacher there saw me perform at UT-Austin some years back and thought of me for a class reading the Odyssey) and a nice addition to an already successful fall schedule. 

This Thursday morning performance had a number of features that have now become standard for Zoom Odyssey shows…

It almost, ALMOST, worked out that my last Odyssey performance of 2020 was for the same school as my last performance of 2019.

But I booked a last minute show for a high school in Texas that happened a few days after my November 17 virtual engagement with Pomfret School so... not quite the perfect framing moment about which I thought I might get to write. 

But... it's 2020 and there are no rules... so... I'm going to write the "end of the year" blog I was planning on writing for this show and do something…

I've written a lot here about how my relationship with my Odyssey has changed the farther I get from the time in which I created it.  

Lately I've taken to framing it as "when I wrote these songs I was Telemachus' age and now I'm Odysseus' age," which is cute but doesn't really capture the full complexity of the interaction between creation and creator.

In my performances I often get questions about why I made a certain creative decision in my telling.  Some aspects are easy to answer: I put instrumentals…

Last week I was scheduled to be performing my Odyssey in Stockholm and near Amsterdam as part of a month-long European tour. Instead, thanks to Covid, I performed my Odyssey via Zoom for a great group of students at Trinity College in Hartford. Some of these students are in their first year of learning Ancient Greek, and after I performed I got on a roll evangelizing about the language and, in particular, reading Homer.

The first time I read Homer in Greek, I had a feeling of physical space around the…

What is the role of divine inspiration in creativity? 

In Homeric epic poetry, the answer is in plain sight at the start.

It's the μοῦσα in the first line of the Odyssey, the θεὰ is the first line of the Iliad...

The Muse, the Goddess... the bard is giving him or herself over in the service of the song, to be a vessel through which the divine breathes the story. 

I think this is exactly how the best of creativity works and I said so to the students attending the second of two performances for St. Norbert…