Traveling The Odyssey

0:15Hi, I'm Ryan Davis. And I'm Kiernan Schmidt. And this is Out of Office, a travel podcast. Is this it taken? Hey, Kiernan. Did you hear I put a little new spin on it? Like as if I was approaching you. Yeah, it was a little creepier than usual. No, I thought it was more affable. I was going for affable. Yeah, yeah. There is something about, I feel that you and I both, when we try for affable, we come off as creepy. Have you ever noticed that? That's like an ongoing problem. This is why I never try to be affable. And in job interviews, when they ask your greatest weakness, you can't say, well, I come off as creepy.

0:55you know, even if that's true. Well, no, my greatest weakness is I care too much. And I work too hard. I actually have a great answer that is a real answer, which is I have no poker face. I can't, if I'm in a meeting and I disagree with an idea, it's just, it's written all over my face and my body language. And I just have no, I have no poker body. Yeah. I've been in those meetings with you. You have, but I usually agreed with your ideas. Yeah, yeah. I'm talking about, you know, some of the other folks. Sure. Should we name them? No, we should. I mean, at this point, how many of them are dead?

1:32We haven't worked together in like 10 years. Oh, that's... What year did you leave the agency we worked at together, Blue State? I think it was 2014. God, I stayed for like two more years without you. I can't, I forget that. That's a long time. Did you ever work in like the new office? No, I didn't. No, you left when we were still fresh and young. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's still going strong. So they didn't need us, I guess. Well, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't say that. They just found others. Now, Ryan, I'm very excited for today's episode. You know, I married a classics major. And it's kind of shocking to me.

2:13You're the lead on this episode. Today, can you tell us who you're going to be speaking to? Yes, we are talking to Laura Coffey, who is a travel writer who wrote a book called Enchanted Islands Travels Through Myth, Magic, Love and Loss about her time traveling around some of these islands that might have inspired the Odyssey. and and so of course this is is timely and uh uh i have not seen the odyssey movie yet but i i take it as preparation for the interview you probably have well i i i have to confess i saw it uh regardless of of the interview we got we got our tickets like six weeks ago so we could see it in was it sold out oh yeah it's so wow epic i think it opened at like 240 million uh globally it's a a huge hit, biggest live action hit of the year.

3:13It's interesting. I feel like the director, he's kind of the, I feel like he's the only director who like people just buy and he'll go see anything he makes. He really has become like a superstar. What's it, Christopher Nolan? Is that it? Christopher Nolan. Thank you. I'm old and I, back in like 1998, I went to the Rehoboth Beach Film Festival, which still happens near my hometown. and I saw a little black and white movie called Following from this new director. And it was Christopher Nolan's first feature. Wow. Wow. And did you like it? Did you say this guy's going to be a rocket ship? I thought it was super cool and really interesting.

3:56And so, you know, a couple of years later when he came out with Memento, I was already like, OK, this guy's this guy's got something special. It's, you know, I had that experience with a movie when I was in high school. And it was called Death to Smoochie. Do you know the movie Death to Smoochie? That's a Danny DeVito film. Danny DeVito film and Ed Norton and Robin Williams play competing children's show hosts. But it's a really dark comedy and the mob is involved. And I love that movie. And I thought this thing is going to be huge. And it was not. It was a flop. Yeah, but it's a cult hit. It is a call hit and it's so good.

4:36Oh, I love it. I love it. I've always thought it would be a great Broadway show. Yeah. And, you know, Edward Norton is in this movie right now. I'm seeing next week the invite. Oh, that's supposed to be great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about that. Good time to go to the movies right now. All right. Well, listen, I want to get are you willing to give a little bit of a review? And if so, I mean, God, you know, it's a pretty old poem. I don't think we need to say spoiler alerts. But you tell me, are you going to get into specifics enough? that we have to forewarn people. If you want to go into the Odyssey without knowing what happens, don't listen.

5:10Yeah, I think we can be spoiler-free enough. Okay, sure. I won't give away the ending. The Odyssey is a tale of a man, Odysseus. And basically, he is a warrior and a king of a small nation-state called Ithaca, not in New York. This is, again, in the Greek islands. and uh he uh uh you know is in the is in this battle for troy that with the famous uh the famous horse and uh you know the the the trojan horse i'm aware yeah my high school were the trojans that was our mascot ah the loser which is ironic because the trojans are the ones who lose yeah your high school is not good at sports i guess we were good listen i what all i know is we were good at marching band.

6:01And that's what the Trojans are known for. And that's, yeah. And, and basically, you know, he helps to, to win that war. And then he goes on this really long trip to get home where, you know, the gods and fate sort of conspire against him. And he has to be cunning and clever to get, to get, to get home. And it's, you know, there's a lot of famous moments. There's this incredible scene where his his they get trapped in a cave and they have to, you know, do battle with a cyclops to get out of there. and uh you know christopher nolan uh is is a filmmaker who appreciates practical effects so you know while there is definitely some cgi uh in the movie he went out of his way to to really film as much as he could like in in uh you know with real soldiers and real boats and a real cyclops well the funny thing is kieran in that the cyclops isn't cgi it's a massive puppet wow yeah so uh he he goes all out and he really he really made the soldiers go inside that little trojan hortz and and matt damon's been talking about how freezing it was oh interesting wow so it's it's a big epic three-hour film um you know it's very exciting there's a lot to look at did it live up to your expectations i think it came pretty close wow i certainly wasn't disappointed where was it lacking uh you know i it and this is tough because it it's it's because it's so episodic it kind of it kind of it's kind of hard to build like the momentum of the story because you know we're going from like kind of weird encounter to weird encounter yeah yeah um but but you know i i think it i think it mostly lives up to what what people one i think the cast was was awesome um and if any i thought i have to say i thought the cast i again i haven't seen it okay i have two more major questions one is how violent is it because katherine is resisting going because she thinks especially the end is probably a bloodbath yeah well the end is famously a bloodbath it is it is violent but it is it is it's rated r but i feel like with just a few cuts, it would have been PG-13.

8:33Okay. And is the bloody violence limited enough that you could just turn away at those moments and still enjoy the movie? Yeah, there's only a handful of like really violent scenes. Okay. Specifically, the homecoming is, you know, one of the most violent scenes in the movie. And, you know, I had just seen a movie that came out last year called The Return, which was an indie film with uh ray fines who played odysseus and it just covers that last oh interesting i've not heard of that yeah it's it's quite good um my other major question with the odyssey is i would i i would you know the stars are so big you have matt damon anne hathaway and tom holland was that not distracting could you actually like see them as the characters well tom holland's always distracting but yeah okay all right everybody ryan let's see you need to take a break come back to the mic um no i think it doesn't really pull you out um you know you've got zendaya kind of floating around occasionally um and uh oh god the actor's name i always forget but he's in this terrific movie called yesterday where he's the only guy who remembers the beatles oh the beatles yeah yeah yeah and so uh he's in that and someone made a funny joke it's like this guy's only in movies where nobody knows who the beatles are that's good that's very funny okay so the beatles do not appear no no no no and in fact uh nolan when he did the uh orchestrations he wouldn't allow the uh composer to use an orchestra he had to use uh items that would have been available to the people then so it's wow it's a the soundtrack is is very interesting and authentic and big you're really you're selling me on it and so do you feel like it it inspired i mean given that this interview is coming up did you do you feel like it inspired your wanderlust to go to this part of the world i mean i've never been to greece sadly i i also have never been to greece it's it's uh that's one of those trips that i feel like we're banking for with the kids when they're older because i want them charlie actually loves myth and classics and uh actually my my uh last stop is going to be related to something, a cool way to learn about the Odyssey that I'd recommend that we do with him.

10:52And I feel like once they're sort of inculcated with the story and the myths, it's going to mean more to them when we travel there. Oh, definitely. Definitely. You know, I was thinking about my history with the Odyssey. And when I was in school in the 90s, at Catholic school, we loved Roman and Greek myths and history. And I feel like we spent a lot of time on that. And so I was familiar with the Odyssey from books written for younger readers. I think the series was called The Great Illustrated Classics. And so I've been familiar with the Odyssey for a long time, but I haven't sat down and read the full poem since I was in high school.

11:40There's so many thought pieces out right now about which translation to read. And okay, if you've read the Odyssey, here's 20 other books that are all about the specific, you know, the specific stories of individual characters and riffs on it. And we're just like flooded with these right now. The Times is doing it. They have like, just like they had one reporter who like only wrote about Hamilton for like six months. I feel like that same guy got assigned to, okay, everything about the Odyssey, make it new. Yeah, I think the Odyssey has really captured people's imaginations again. It's one of the best-selling books on Amazon, multiple copies of the Odyssey.

12:20Wow, I hope Homer's cashing in. Homer, I mean, maybe we'll get to this in the interview, but Homer clearly didn't exist. Probably a group of people, but also shared over time. I don't know if I would say clearly didn't exist. hundreds, hundreds of years of oral tradition. Um, you know, are we getting back to you and Tom Holland here? Uh, well, right on that note, I do, before we jump into the interview, I also just want to mention, we got a great new review on Apple podcasts, much, much appreciated. This is from Biggie 106, just like, uh, the Odyssey, we're doing a timely episode here. We got a subject line was just World Cup five stars.

13:01Love the World Cup coverage. So, you know, it's good that we do this for all the people who don't like the chat at the beginning of the episode, you know, Biggie 106 felt it was good and good on you, Ryan, for pitching that we do that where to travel during the World Cup episode. Yeah, I thought that was a lot of fun. You know, it was a it was a really good episode uh yesterday i went uh to fancy brunch at the jw marriott uh and they were projecting in multiple uh projections of the the spain argentina final and it was very uh exciting to watch with a bunch of folks who were all rooting for spain weirdly enough oh they must have been very pleased they were very pleased it was a long tough game um but but yeah it the world cup was really cool um there's a thing called the cup of america which will happen in in uh 2029 which is basically latam's version of the world cup where all the latin american countries um and so that that's going to be the next huge soccer thing that that that will happen down here in in bogota oh and i should tell you something exciting i got my brazilian visa approved.

14:15Oh my God, guys, anyone who's not a long time listener will not understand how big this announcement is because Ryan once tried to go to Brazil and was stopped at the airport en route because he had not realized he needed a visa. Yeah, they let me fly there without a visa, but they did not let me enter. So now they said to bring two copies. I'm bringing like six copies. Sure, you need six. And remember, you know, this is a hot tip. I haven't given it a long time. Always print things out. Don't just show the screen. There's something about having paper that makes it feel more official. Yeah, they definitely say print it out.

14:52And also, I learned that to re-enter Colombia, I need my yellow fever vaccine. Oh, I love that vaccine. It's one of my faves because you get the special yellow card that you get to carry around inside the passport. Well, stupid me. I don't have my card with me. So this week, I have to go get another yellow fever vaccine. Wow. very vaccinated. You should get a punch card. Maybe get your third free. All right. I feel like our upfront chat is running longer than the reviews generally say it should, right? But let me say also, please leave a review. It's very helpful for discovery of the podcast. Five stars, if you would, and contribute your ideas.

15:30Tell us what you like. Tell us some constructive criticism. We do look to it for inspiration, or you can always do it privately by emailing us at outofoffice at gmail.com. No, outofofficepod at outofofficepod at gmail.com. Definitely. Well, yeah, let's jump into the interview with Laura Coffey. Well, just like the last episode, I want to remind you, it's not called the jump in, it's called the takeoff. Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff, please. Welcome, Laura, to Out of Office. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. So everybody is talking about The Odyssey right now.

16:11It's, you know, a huge movie out by Christopher Nolan. The original poem, multiple translations are on the Amazon Top 100 list. And, you know, I was really curious to try to find someone to come on the pod who'd gone on a similar Odyssey. And that's when I came upon your book. So I'd love to hear a bit about your history with the Odyssey and what got you so interested to go on the journey we're going to talk about today. Yeah, absolutely. Homer is very hot this summer, thanks to Christopher Nolan. And it was something I picked up, a copy of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey just before lockdown.

16:54And I had it on my bedside table for ages and kind of hadn't got wrapped around to it. and then started reading it and found it kind of this wonderful escapism. It was a pandemic, everyone was stuck at home in lockdown or sheltering in place. And there I was reading about this epically flawed Greek hero who was sailing around the world, having this extraordinary adventures, visiting all of these incredible islands. And what was interesting to me was at that time, the world was a kind of strange and static and frozen place. And in the Odyssey, of course, it's all about movement and journey and the attempt to get back home.

17:38And while we were stuck at home, it was just a very interesting juxtaposition to the situation I was in. And I found Emily Wilson's translation incredibly accessible. She's the first translation into English by a woman. She's a professor at Penn University in America, and it's extraordinarily easy to read. She's taken away all these sort of overwrought insertions over the years and stripped it back to this very plain reading, very simple and beautiful poem. And in the show notes, I'll link to a couple interviews she's done recently about her process and what she thinks of the movie. but that's the trans it's funny I I lost my mic stand so I have three three books that are holding my mic up right now and one of them is her translation of the odyssey the other is the Count of Monte Cristo because it's very big so it uh it works well as a mic stand good choices good choices uh why do you think the story is resonating so much uh today so why does it resonate so much today well of course you've got this famously flawed hero at the center Odysseus isn't a perfect hero.

18:48He is stubborn. He is manipulative. He is the guy that came up with the Trojan horse that won the war. So he's very clever. He's very sneaky. And this is what endears him to Athena. So we've got a character at the center of the story who is flawed, and that makes him more universal, I think. And then we've got these kind of epic struggles with gods and the fates. And I think what's interesting about the Greek myths is they were famously, of course, I think the inspiration behind the Marvel universe of superheroes. And I like to think of them as the earliest version of self-help books. So Joseph Campbell, who famously wrote about the hero's journey, says that we should read a myth as showing us how to find our way through life.

19:36We'll have these obstacles, we'll have these unexpected allies, and will have to navigate through. And I think that's part of the reason that it's so enduring. And of course, with Christopher Nolan's film, it reaches a whole new audience because he has made it very accessible the same way that Emily Wilson has by kind of stripping it back to his essentials. I mean, it's still a three hour long film, but it's, I think, a really good rendition of the poem. yeah i i think this has really captured uh folks you know imaginations and i can tell from your accent that i don't think you grew up in in the states but in the states we read uh the odyssey and the iliad and we study greek mythology a lot in middle school is that something that that you all do as well yeah i didn't formally study i'm not a classicist um so i didn't formally study the Odyssey in school.

20:35I was in seventh grade, so I wouldn't say I've done more. The bar is high. But we did, of course, study the Greek myths and all children, I think, are very captivated by the Greek myths and these kind of incredible characters, the soap opera of the gods and the idea that gods can be kind of petty and vengeful and hold grudges. And they're very dynamic stories, I think. So kids absolutely love them. So I read the I read this Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey during the pandemic. And then when it was legal to travel again, decided to go to the Aeolian Islands in Sicily. And they are, of course, named for Aeolius, the god of the winds, the guardian of the winds.

21:19And so that felt like serendipity somehow. And I hadn't quite realized that there was these theories of scholars across the ages who were trying desperately to work out which islands had inspired Homer, which is, of course, a kind of compelling madness in a lot of ways, because how can you find imaginary islands in the real world? But they did their best and they had lots of different theories and they all squabbled with each other and they all cancelled each other in various 19th century ways. And one of the theories was that the Aeolian islands were, in fact, where Aeolius, the god of the winds, lived.

21:57And this is the part of the Odyssey where Odysseus goes and they have a month long feast there and the god gives him a bag of the winds tied up inside it and a good breeze to blow his ship home. And just when they're in sight of Ithaca, just when they're in sight of the home island that Odysseus is desperate to get back to, the crew open the bag thinking it's full of gold and of course unleash the winds which blow the ship all the way back. And these islands, the Aeolian archipelago off the coast of Sicily, was thought by Strabo, who is the father of geography, really, in the fifth century BC, he thought that Aeolius lived on one of them.

22:43So that was the starting point for my own journey, which was retracing parts of the Odyssey. And he thought that Aeolius lived on Stromboli, which is a volcanic island. There's seven of these little islands in the archipelago. And Stromboli is one of the world's most active volcanoes. It's called the Lighthouse of the Mediterranean. And you can walk up this volcano. You start in the late afternoon. And by the time you get to the top, it's dark. And you're seeing these fire darts from the volcano kind of against the night sky, against these beautiful stars, and you can hear the sea lapping at the foot of the volcano far beneath you.

23:26And it feels incredibly elemental. It feels like a place that a god could live. And so that's really where my journey started. And then unspooled into this sort of accidental odyssey, really, retracing some of the theories, the more bonkers theories, actually, of where these imaginary islands that Homer talks about in his poem, where they might be located in the real world, places where geography and mythology collide. So you visit this island and then you get the idea to try to find, you know, more of these islands connected to the Odyssey story? Yeah, that's right. So I ended up in then from there, I went back to mainland Sicily.

24:08And Sicily is associated in lots of the theories with the island of the sun god, which of course is where the inciting incident of the whole Odyssey happened. So the reason that Poseidon is so annoyed with Odysseus is that his crew land on the island of the sun god and he's warned not to eat the sacred white oxen that belong to Helios, the god of the sun. And for a while they resist, but then their food starts running out. They can't leave the island. The wind's blowing in the wrong direction. And so eventually Odysseus goes away to pray and leaves his men unsupervised and comes back to them having a barbecue.

24:52They have a lot of barbecues. They have a lot of barbecues. There's a lot of food in the Odyssey. And in fact, I talk a lot about this. I've got a talk that I give about the gourmet journey through the Odyssey because there's lots of eating and drinking and you eat and drink good things and bad things. There's lots of drugged wine and spiked drinks. And if you eat the wrong thing, the consequences are bad. And the consequences in this case were that all the crew essentially died. They were punished for eating these very sacred oxen. So that's around Sicily. So I'm just curious, sort of practically, is this a trip that you're taking, you know, in in one big swoop or are you doing this in parts like how are you getting back and forth to these these these various places and are you trying to follow any sort of specific um uh you know are you trying to follow the book at all in in in in the direction that you're going not really it all unfolded in this kind of quite serendipitous organic way so i did set out to go to the Aeolian Islands.

26:02I set out for a two-week holiday and I planned to visit Sicily. And nonetheless, it was a strange time to travel, of course, because not many people were moving at that time. And it was a sort of, as I said, a static time in the world. So I got to meet the different islanders. And the same way that Odysseus meets an eccentric cast of people, he meets monsters and allies on the islands. I met a sex therapist on the island of Cortula, which was associated with Miette, which is Calypso's island. I met a character in the book called Naked Andrew, who was an expat British nudist on the island of Menorca, which is associated with the island of the Cyclops, the one-eyed monster.

26:50And I met a series of people that at that time, which was a panic time in the world, were incredibly generous and incredibly welcoming and incredibly hospitable. And so it was a time of loneliness in lots of ways, and then also a time of deep connection with strangers. And I write a lot in the book about Xenia, which is the Greek for the code of guest conduct, because of course, the Greeks, when Odysseus and his men were traveling, there were no Airbnbs and hotels and five-star ratings or whatever. You had to stay in people's houses and rely on their hospitality. And there was a code of conduct.

27:33So a stranger would be given the finest food, the finest drink. They would be, often they'd be bathed by the house slaves, maybe given an oil massage. and only after they had eaten were they asked to tell their stories and stories were really the kind of the currency that they gave back to their hosts. Which is you know makes a lot of sense because this was you know the Odyssey is obviously an oral story originally that that people told you know I've learned so much in the last I feel like month and a half but that people told in in sections so people travelers would just would sort of tell their favorite parts of of the Odyssey story, you know, after dinner and together.

28:17So, so talk a little bit more about the, the hospitality that, that you encountered. I know it's Zeus's law comes up quite a bit in, in the film. And you felt like that's still alive and well. Yeah, I think so. I think there's so much in this kind of, it's an incredible, obviously very anachronistic story, but very relevant to how we do hospitality rituals today in lots of ways. So there's a lot of feasting we talked about in the Odyssey. There's a lot of good food and strong red wine. And that tradition, I think, is very alive and well through the Mediterranean. So I was constantly surprised at the generosity of strangers that I met along the road who, you know, invited me to share a meal or have a coffee together or shared their stories with me.

29:16And so there's a generosity of people, I think. And also the islands that I was visiting were all so small that actually, and of course it was off season, it was the wintertime. time so I was this sort of eccentric uh English girl I guess in town and they were quite curious um about what I was doing there so Laura uh were you uh aware that you were you were writing a book had you had you decided that that you were going to turn this this odyssey of yours into a sort of a travel uh memoir no not really although I was I was journaling all the time when I was on the Road. And I did have a file open in my computer called Ithaca.

29:59So I must have had some idea. But my father at the time was not very well. And he kept telling me to write. He kept telling me to write a book. And I kept saying, I've never written a book. I don't know how to do it. And really, with his encouragement, I ended up turning it into a proposal. And when you write a nonfiction book in the UK, you don't have to write the whole book. You write this sort of proposal, this pitch really of what you want to cover. And I sent it out to a bunch of agents and publishers and heard absolutely nothing for six months and kind of had given up. And then this woman, Debbie Chapman, sent me an email saying, is your manuscript still available?

30:44And I kind of almost fell off my chair getting this email six months later and said, yes, yes, it's still available. And she ended up being my publisher at Summersdale, which is an imprint of Hachette. And it's an extraordinarily lucky thing. I think I was incredibly fortunate to be able to turn it into a book. And it's a book that traces my retracing of the Odyssey and the real islands that may or may not have inspired Homer and the different theories. It's a travel story of my journeys out there. And it's also, I talk about the poem at that particular point in time. So if I'm on Menorca, I'll talk about why it's associated with the Cyclops and what happens at that point in the story, what happens with the Cyclops.

31:35And he traps Odysseus and his men in his cave and then snacks on the crew. And of course, Odysseus famously drives a sharpened spear into his one eye, blinding him and manages to escape by clinging to the back of the sheep. But it's also a story of the last year of my father's life. So it's got this joyful exploratory element, and then it's got a lot of sadness and anticipatory grief because my father had cancer and it was a terminal cancer. And it's called anticipatory grief when you know in advance that someone will die on some kind of a timeline. And it's a strange feeling. So those things are kind of braided together.

32:24And it was his hope that I would write this book. And it was a great good fortune to be able to do that in his memory and in his honor. And does your father pass away while you're writing the book or does he get to see it? Does he get to read it? He died just after my first ever travel article was published by The Guardian. So I got to read that article. At that point, he couldn't read, but he could listen. And so I read that out loud to him. So, you know, I could see how proud he was that that was in print because that's what he kind of encouraged me to do. So he didn't live long enough to see the book, but he is the animating force, I guess, behind that book.

33:18I don't think I'd have written it without his kind of strong and repeated and sometimes very annoying encouragement to write it. and it does contain his death and how he died at home, which I think is a subject that we don't talk about enough in society. My dad was a doctor and so he knew exactly what would happen to him and he had an extraordinary palliative care team around him and he died at home. And I've been very touched by readers who have... have written to me and said that that kind of distillation of that chapter of showing how that process unfolded has helped them feel accompanied in their grief and they see the same pattern in their own stories.

34:11So it feels quite profound in that way. But it's also a cheerful book and an uplifting book. And it's a book about how to live and how to connect with strangers and how to find joy and pleasure in these tiny things, in cold water swimming or climbing an amazing volcano and discovering these extraordinary islands. The one thing I should say is it doesn't actually have any Greek islands in it, which I think has annoyed some readers. I wanted to go to travel to some of the Greek islands, but I never made it. So they're not in the book. That is absolutely no slight on Greece. There's some beautiful islands in Greece.