THE MIRACLE OF BOOKS ON TAPE:
JESSE READS THE CLASSICS

Jesse believes firmly in books on tape. I think it's horrible, unethical, immoral, sacrilegious, slothful. It's just not the medium that the author intended and thus cannot be translated with any accuracy, and demeans the tangible printed word to that which is invisible, a mere sound wave, quickly forgotten and never heard again. As a writer, books on tape offend my sensibilities, much like colorization in the movies.

"People rarely re-read books," Jesse responds, "and I can always listen to the tape again." But when someone reads a book, it is typically the sole thing holding their attention; they are engrossed in a single activity. Books on tape are most frequently listened to by people who are supposed to be paying attention to driving: reading exit signs, avoiding other cars, reaching your destination. Listening while driving is a very different activity than reading, because it is only allowed to half-consume your brain, while reading consumes you wholly.

Writers don't write their books with the intention that they be spoken by a stranger vocalizing words in a car. The person reading the book, especially if different than the author, puts their own spin, their own layer of interpretation on the piece. Even if the book is read on tape by the actual author, a voice that is too nasal or too slow or too fast can ruin a masterpiece. A good writer's genius is in the written word, not the spoken word.

"But I wouldn't have time to read it otherwise", Jesse says. This is also his justification for reading one-page synopses of classics in tomes like "The Great American Bathroom Book." There's the dilemma: Is it better for a person to read someone else's one page interpretation or listen to the audio-taped dramatization in modernized English than to not come in contact with the classics at all? I have ambivalent feelings about this: for example, Jesse just came back from a car trip to Montreal, where he listened to Homer's Odyssey on the return journey. (What was Homer's last name anyway? Homer who??? Who did he think he was anyway: Madonna? Cher? ELJAY?!?) Jesse's previous exposure to The Odyssey was that he knew how to spell it when "Epic poem by Homer, seven letters" was the crossword puzzle clue.

Jesse asked me upon arriving home, "Was he called Odysseus because he went on an odyssey, or did his adventure get to be called an �odyssey' because his name was Odysseus?" Well, Jesse would not have asked a question like that if he had spent five hours in the car listening to WFNX or to Howard Stern.

Next, Jesse railed about why Odysseus actually had to go on an Odyssey in the first place. To refresh your memory and mine, (OK -- I haven't read the Odyssey in years and am not inclined to reread it) Odysseus was on his way home from the Trojan War -- that story is told in The Iliad, which Jesse doesn't have the audio tape for yet -- and would have gone straight home, except he got shipwrecked and caught by the Cyclops, a one-eyed monster. Odysseus got away by getting Cyclops drunk and spearing him in the eye. Cyclops then got his father, the god Poseidon, to curse Odysseus, which made his trip home take many years.

Incidently, Odysseus escaped by telling Poseidon "They call me Nobody". Thus, when asked by the other gods about who ruined his life, Poseidon shouted angrily "Nobody ruined my life"! They took him at his word, and Odysseus got away. Pretty clever. Nobody should run for president in l996. Nobody will lower taxes. Nobody will make America a great and just country. (Naturally, once Odysseus was safe from the wrath of Poseidon his macho ego prevailed: "Tell them Odysseus was the one!" Even in l500 B.C., machismo existed, otherwise there would be no myth, Odysseus wouldn't be a legend and hence, no epic tale would be told.)

Jesse's ravings focused on how he thought classics had to be about classical, meaningful, deep topics, not about violence and sex (read on!). "This guy Poseidon is a god, right? And, okay, Cyclops is his son, but gods are supposed to understand justice. Odysseus had to spear the guy because Cyclops was planning to eat him!" he exclaimed. In fact, Cyclops found Odysseus to be a charming guest, however, his only reward was that he promised to eat him last, after he had finished all of his crew. OK, so the Cyclops had flawed reasoning -- that's what makes him a monster. Spearing a guy in the eye was, even then, morally acceptable if the guy is going to eat you. (Blinding is a favored act of violence in Greek tragedies.) If Odysseus had been a polite guest, and passively let himself get eaten, there would be no problem. But instead he broke the Ancient Greek Code of Etiquette at dinner parties and had to pay the price; years of wandering, yet always finding adventure fraught with danger, encountering angry gods and monsters and, of course, frolicking on islands with nymphs -- an activity that is still important to a guy like Jesse today. The story often resembles, nay, mimics! modern-day comic books and cartoons! Odysseus might well be called Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Rambo, or the Terminator. Anyday now a Spielberg box office bonanza could be released, followed by "The Return ot the Perils of Odysseus", "Odysseus Part III" . . . .

"And why did his wife Penelope weave and unweave the same work every night?", asked Jesse, perplexed. I countered, "It's something Important and Symbolic. Apparently, Importance and Symbolism don't translate into modernized audio-tapes." The scholarly answer is probably she couldn't have a life without Odysseus. That seemed too sexist to even dignify by repeating to Jesse, so I told him maybe she couldn't bear to finish. Jesse comprehended her plight; during his entire adult life he has been unable to finish his weekly laundry, much less a whole book.

"And what about this Calypso?", Jesse shouted. Calypso kills Odysseus' crew and tries to poison Odysseus, fails, so she propositions him. And he succumbs. For seven years. "You mean after she does these evil, horrible things to Odysseus, afterwards he just thinks 'she sure is pretty' and he has sex with her?! That's a classic? That wouldn't make it as a made-for-TV movie plot today!" Jesse's just envious because whenever he tries to kill someone, she never goes to bed with him afterwards. That's why Odysseus is a classic guy, a legend, and Jesse's . . . Jesse's . . . not.

"Odysseus is such a classic guy?" retorts Jesse with disdain, "Well, how about this: Odysseus gets tied to the mast to avoid being seduced by the evil Sirens, right?" His crew had wax in their ears so they wouldn't get seduced by the seductive (sex again!) Sirens: these are men we're talking about, eliminating an actual "choice" option. The Sirens were on a nearby island doing incredibly provocative, seductive, aural things, thus the need for earplugs. When the Sirens accomplish their mission, they would kill the men, thus preventing them from consummating their Important Missions and force these men (some things never change) to consummate other . . . missions. To protect himself from this unqualified inevitability, Odysseus insisted on being tied to the mast of the ship so he couldn't get over to the little Vixens. He later of course, begged (to presumably deaf ears) to be untied so he could go to the lascivious Sirens and do. . . what most red blooded guys, even one that lived 3500 years ago, would do.

"But what about The Guy who tied Odysseus to the mast? He had to have his ears open, to listen to Odysseus tell him to tie and untie him, so he had to have heard the Sirens. HE had enough will power to resist them, so how come he wasn't the Captain of the ship and the hero of the story?" questioned Jesse, conclusively, self-righteously, and obviously jealously, feeling that this mere oversight proved the story to be totally worthless. Obviously distraught by this hole in the story, Jesse persevered; "When Gene Wilder played Doctor Frankenstein, he told Igor not to let him out of the room with the monster even if he asked, and then he begged and screamed, very nobly! It's the same scene, but in Young Frankenstein, it works!" Jesse insisted, defending the nobility, character, and inherent logic of a seventies Mel Brooks movie, over that of the great Odysseus. Jeekers! Jesse had made his very first literary reference -- probably the first time Young Frankenstein has ever been compared in any way, let alone favorably, to the Odyssey. Jesse's just upset that Sirens never try to seduce him.

Jesse was most enraged about the rationale of Odysseus' son, Telemakos, to finally search for his father. "Telemakos goes out to find Odysseus -- not out of love; not to honor his father; not to save his mother, not to save the kingdom, not to save his name -- nope, it's to save food! Odysseus enters hell itself, and what does hell's prophet tell him??! 'Better get home; Penelope's suitors are eating you out of house and home!'" A quick check to the aforementioned Bathroom Book, which Jesse keeps readily accessible, reflected that theft of caches of cheese (and food in general) was viewed as a justification and rationale for many criminal acts. "And, do you know what Odysseus does when he gets home and finds that it's true?" I remember the general finale -- he kills all the suitors with some sort of shiny, elongated dagger (perhaps blinding them first). "They were eating him out of house and home," I reminded Jesse. Jesse suddenly stopped shouting and was unusually pacified as he contemplated the implications of missing a meal -- by theft. At first it had seemed like an extreme reaction to him, to murder people for eating your food, but now, he seemed to understand. Food is very, very important to Jesse.

I Don't Know. These are not the points I remember while struggling for hours through the book. Maybe those of us who were forced to read The Odyssey missed the point entirely. But we could feel the paper of the book; we could revel in the verse.... "Ha!", mocked Jesse, "you're just reading a translation anyway! �anero� o� dh pou leuk' �stea puqeai �mbrw,' that's the original!" I felt an unknown emotion, resembling. . . guilt. I did find the poetic version of the Odyssey much more difficult to read than the prose version. Indeed, at a more idealistic time in my life, I actually considered learning Russian to read Dostoevsky properly; French to better appreciate Stendhal, Greek to really understand Homer; but of course I eventually realized I would never have time.

"And while you're at learning Greek, you'd better learn ancient Greek, not modern Greek, because that's the real language of Homer! And you'd better read it on clay tablets, too!" That Jesse, how provincial, how silly, of course Homer didn't write on clay tablets. "This wasn't the stone age, you Neanderthal, he would have written on papyrus!" I said finally losing my cool at Jesse's usual utter unawareness of even what era we were discussing.

Suddenly it occurred to me -- Homer was blind! He never wrote it down at all! For a second, the sheer symmetry of this escaped me -- I thought only of Homer living in the nineties, never driving (as he was blind) but perhaps listening to books on tape. Then it hit me as I envisioned Homer sitting atop a rock, with listeners gathered around...Wait a minute! The Greek classics are an oral tradition! They are meant to be listened to! An audio-tape is closer to the original Homer than any book could possibly be. Somehow, across the centuries and across culture, the Americana fad of 1996 has recaptured something lost over time. I'm going out to find "The Iliad" on tape!