From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
li'o
The trouble is that Homer is simply he who wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad, and the Odyssey and the Iliad are the works of Homer. We have no independent notion of Homer, as we do of most authors.
he's little more shadowy than Shakespeare, or for that matter any poet before the time of Samuel Johnson; what's important (even if we wish to dispute it) is the idea of there being a unique text which is associated with a TE PEMCI. now, to discuss variant readings is another matter. at some point CENBA MILXE crosses over into FRICA, & we begin to talk about "families" of texts (GIRZU LEKA SIMSA). certainly the set which comprises canonical & uncanonical (i.e. Gnostic) Gospel texts is such a family. we have to pick out images & phrases & plotlike sequences that some or all of them share, & imagine that there were numerous authors, all of whom felt themselves contributing to a meta-enterprise somewhat in the way that writers today participate in "genres" (TCACI SE LISRI) more or less conformingly. if the Odyssey arose in this manner, it certainly received its last editing at the hands of a great creative artist, & this is the TE PEMCI we honor in "Homer"'s name.
----------------------------------------------------------------------"...the spring of the Army-McCarthy hearings... John [Berryman], as an addicted reader of The New York Times, once began a class by holding up the front page so the class might see the latest revelation in the ongoing drama. 'These fools will rule for a while and be replaced by other fools and crooks. This,' and he opened a volume of Keats to the 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'will be with us for as long as our language endures.'" --Philip Levine, in The Bread of Time (1994)
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