How To Fly

 After the first screening of O Brother, Where Art Thou , I'm gonna be real: for most of it I can't draw parallels with The Odyssey . The obvious things, like Ulysses as Odysseus, and the blind prophet on the rail car. Other things, not so much. Even though I feel stupid for admitting this, I really don't get how the baptism scene fits into the Odyssey, which I feel like is definitely a reference to something. One thing that I (think I) could draw a connection, was xenia. Delmar's relative (cousin or something) doesn't ask any questions when the three show up ratty and dressed as convicts, giving them food, clothing and shelter. He later betrays the xenia, but plot armor saves our heroes. I don't know much about 1930's America, but I don't think I would be willing to let in 3 convicts who randomly show up at my door, even if one of them is my "kin". Another example is the black guitarist they pick up on the side of the road. Hitchikers aren...

We've just finished Odysseus's tale in Book 12, and to be honest, I'm really starting to enjoy the story a little bit. It's pretty cool to listen to, and there are a lot of interesting monsters and events within the epic. However, this blog post is about xenia. As I was listening to all the presentations, one word I heard many, many times was "xenia". It seemed that every presentation had some variant of "this is x character performing good/bad xenia". This happened so much that towards the end of the presentations, I was writing stuff like "xenia shows up again... shocker" and "xenia part 37: Electric Boogaloo". Jokes aside, I think it's clear that xenia is obviously an important part of Greek culture, as even as Odysseus fights monsters and goes on wild adventures, he always manages to pull a host out of his ass and have them host him (or not, as the cyclops does). It's actually quite lucrative, it seems like his trave...

A big part of my childhood was the Doraemon  manga comic series by the artist Fujiko F. Fujio. The series features a motley group of second graders set in 20th century Japan, and the titular character Doraemon , a robot cat from the 22nd century who for expository reasons (I'm not gonna get into detail for the sake of brevity), time travels to the main character Nobita's room to help him out in his everyday life. The series doesn't really have an overall arc, as it's more of a "slice-of-life" manga who's main purpose is to elicit laughs from the reader. However, as you'll see, there are many hero's journey elements. Note: I read the Vietnamese translations of these comics, and actually didn't know it was a Japanese comic until much later in my life (despite numerous references to geological locations in Japan within the series). Nobita is clumsy, lazy, weak, dumb, and not really hero material at all. Each chapter usually follows this progre...