History as Fiction - Erin

             When Mr. Mitchell asked last week if any of us had seen the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, the name sounded vaguely familiar but I was pretty sure that I hadn’t seen it. However, when the title screen was pulled up in class on Tuesday morning, I immediately recognized the cover. As it turns out, one of my favorite songs is from the soundtrack and I recognized it as the album cover. The song in question is “I’ll Fly Away” by Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss, which I grew up listening to due to my mom’s love for Alison Krauss (I would recommend listening to the song on the official soundtrack because for some reason the one they play in the movie is a little bit different). It’s just one song of many on my playlist dedicated to music that I heard my parents playing throughout my childhood. I was thrilled because I think that the soundtrack of a movie is very important in conveying the emotion in a movie....

             Something that has struck me throughout the recent discussions we’ve had in class is Odysseus’ emotions. The first time I really noticed this was in Book 5, which I presented on. Wilson very explicitly mentions Odysseus’ habit of crying while on Ogygia, “since he was sitting be the shore as usual, sobbing in grief and pain; his heart was breaking. In tears he stared across the fruitless sea,” (5. 82-84). At first, I found this amusing and it didn’t stand out very much to me as Wilson’s language often feels very familiar. However, when we started planning our presentation on the book, I looked back at that and noticed that this was something that you might not see very often from your cliché “hero”. Perhaps you might see the main hero cry after a character close to them dies, but outside of that, this is something that is rarely portrayed, particularly in today’s climate of what masculinity looks like. ...