The Devil and J.K. Rowling’s nightmare
“‘The Devil Is My Running Mate’ puts mean, scared, human words into the mouth of a politician, so you know it’s a fairy tale.”
– The Village Voice, one decade ago.
J.K. Rowling’s 50th birthday party, held during Halloween, had a theme: Come as your own private nightmare.
Rowling wrote a political fairy tale on a dress, which she wore to the celebration, then promptly hung in a wardrobe afterward. And there it remains to this day.
Her private nightmare is a lost manuscript.
Homer’s first work, an epic poem, is a comedy called the Margites.
Aristotle liked it, writing, “[Homer’s] Margites bears the same relationship to comedies as his Iliad and Odyssey bear to our tragedies.”
Plato wryly summed up the poem’s titular hero with a Twitter-ready zinger: “He knew many things, but all badly.”
The Margites has been lost for centuries.
Today, there are those who believe that Homer, like the devil, never existed.
They believe that both entities were never distinct individuals, but are the products of an entire culture.
What do you believe?
