Gosh darn it, Peggy.

Then, around the end of last year, I began listening to audiobooks on sleep headphones, and it is more effective than ANY DRUG. The trick, I learned, is not to listen to new books (because then I get involved and can't go to sleep) or very exciting favorites (ditto). Instead, it has to be relatively sedate favorites I've read so much I almost know passages by heart (THE SHELL SEEKERS, LITTLE WOMEN), or audio courses on topics that I am interested in but either (a) know very well already or (b) am not so fascinated by that I'll wind up staying awake to hear more. The Great Courses on physics, chemistry and ancient civilizations tend to work beautifully. This is especially effective because my biggest issue wasn't taking a long time to fall asleep (though this was a thing), but waking up in the night and then thinking/fretting about ALL THE THINGS for hours on end. Now I wake up, hear somebody talking about nuclear particles or the Olmecs, and engage with that very minimally before I drop off again.

and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

"Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion."

and

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem."

Well, that tracks for a Nolan film -

"The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting."

Yikes -

"If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat."

The lines she calls out in this section will probably make a least a couple of my friends laugh incredulously -

"I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."

....oh my GOD, EMILY -

"The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt."