I’ve always loved the end of Odyssey 16. Odysseus and Telemachus are out in the country when Odysseus (in disguise as a beggar) and Telemac...

In Odyssey 17, Penelope voices her hope for vengeance against the suitors, and her son immediately sneezes. Telemachus’ sneeze is an omen f...

My review of Christopher Logue’s All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten , published in World Literature ...

I woke up this morning remembering one of the lines from George Carlin’s football v. baseball routine and realizing that it provides a good ...

From an article in today's Washington Post on materials used in federally funded abstinence-only programs: Some course materials cited in ...

From The End: Hamburg 1943 , by Hans Erich Nossack, translated by Joel Agee, an eyewitness account of the firebombing of Hamburg: A few airp...

From a New York Times article on the difficulties of returning veterans: The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is faci...

[Last words for English 2601, Backgrounds of Western Literature] When an interviewer asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite liv...

[Last words for English 3009, Myth and Culture] The ancient Greek word for “truth,” alēthia , literally means “that which is not forgotten.”...

From the word-a-day list offered by wordsmith.org : odium (O-dee-uhm) noun 1. Hatred accompanied by contempt. 2. A state of infamy...

3009 students: You can find the text of an interview with Stanley Lombardo in this issue of Jacket , an on-line poetry magazine. Much of...

Those were the words (all caps) on the cardboard displays filled with copies of Troy . Thanks to my son Ben, who has a fine eye for the ...

Somehow I think that Odysseus (engineer of a clever exit from Polyphemus' cave) would be impressed by this guy: A Slovak man trapped in his ...

Odysseus, in Book 10 of Stanley Lombardo's Odyssey : "We're in a really tight spot." Ulysses Everett McGill, trapped in the burning barn in ...

From BBC News: An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus. Robert Bittlest...

(for Stefan Hagemann) I'm teaching the Iliad again, in Stanley Lombardo's 1997 translation, and we just hit a line that always sticks in ...

For my 2601 students: From the British Library, an extract from Alexander Pope's draft translation of the Iliad , with Pope's sketch of Ach...