It's Saturday morning, and a flashcard bearing this message is pasted on a door in a Riverside Drive apartment building: "Enter, bards of Homer! The door is open."
This is the weekly Homer Reading Group, and this is the apartment of Stephen Daitz, CUNY Professor of Classical Languages Emeritus, and founder of the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature.
Daitz has made a career out of trying to recite classical poetry as its original performers did. "98% of the questions are answered," he said—most of the useful evidence comes from ancient grammarians. Ancient Greek, like Mandarin and Swahili, is a tonal language, and when Daitz reads Homer, it is sing-songy, intense, melancholy, and quite unlike anything you've heard. His pupils, who follow Daitz's own five-stage rhapsodic method, warm up with the first five lines of the Odyssey. Evangelos, a Columbia undergrad, Stage 2, goes first. "Andra moi ennepe mousa..."
"Yuh, yuh," Professor Daitz nodded, in an FDR-inspired American accent you don't hear much anymore, "But watch the ictus."
Nat, a Stage 5 high school classics teacher who has been a member of the group "since the towers were still up," chimed in: "I got my eardrums busted with all the ictus reading at the contest last week."
An ictus is a stressed syllable, one of the big mistakes you can make in Homer reading. Unlike in English prosody, in which syllables are stressed or unstressed, in Greek they are either short or long—it's not the emphasis you put on a syllable, it's how long you hold it that matters.
The contest Nat referred to is the annual Oral Reading Contest, held at the New York Classical Club, where hopeful rhapsodes recite snatches of Homer and Vergil for cash prizes. Nat's students have perennially done well, and Daitz is one of the judges.
If Daitz and his band could travel back in time, I asked, what would the Ancient Greeks make of them, these people from another time and place trying to reconstruct their language and their poetry? "I think I would be like someone with a foreign accent. I think they would say, 'Well, we don't do it exactly this way, but we understand you, so...go on!'"
—Paul Barndt
The Indian Café, a dark, endearingly musty restaurant at 108th Street and Broadway, is not known for its crowds. But every Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m., the Red Harlem Readers, a loose-knit group of New York City playwrights, poets and actors, fill its seats and bring it to life.
They come from all five boroughs to sip spiced tea and watch while actors, perched on tall stools, give readings. They perform a variety of works: everything from Greek tragedies to hot-off-the-press plays.
On a recent afternoon, actors read from Soiled Wings, a play by Michael A. Jones about a young couple whose marriage disintegrates when the wife has an affair with a female neighbor. The performance was intense—occasionally, an actor's fevered exclamation caused curious waiters to sneak a glance from behind the bar. As the drama unfolded, the audience sat back. Older gentlemen in berets quaffed martinis while others nibbled vegetable pakoras.
When the readers finished, a moderator invited the audience to give a critique. The conversation that followed—a debate that treated love, stereotypes, community, religion and theater—was a crucial part of the process. The Red Harlem Readers aren't simply a group of folks who love theater, they're artists who are committed to collaboration. The all-ages, mostly black group represents the diversity of New York's performing arts and literary scene: some have worked on Broadway, others on "Law & Order."
The readings vary each week. "I read a piece I wrote on racism," said one audience member, brushing back her hennaed hair. And at Christmas, the group reads Dickens, said Ronald Wycke, one of the organizers. Wycke, who is a member of the Uptown Writers Workshop in Harlem and the author of a one-man show, explained that the group has a progressive ethos. That agenda is even reflected in the groups' name. "Red Harlem" refers to a once sizable Native American population in Harlem. "It's just a nod to them," he said.
As the afternoon wore on, the Indian Café darkened with the slanting afternoon light. It appeared that the posters for the event had served their purpose: the crowd seemed well-fed on "food for the mind, body and soul."
—Anna Louise Corke
Jonah Gropper is a vagabond philosopher with a message, but you won't find it in a book. "Philosophy has a short reach," he complained recently.
"There aren't that many people who will read it." Instead, he lives it. And dances it. And proselytizes about it on College Walk.
During his month-long stay in New York, Gropper has made it his mission to share his beliefs with Columbia's philosophy-literate campus. Maybe you've seen him, grinning in an orange hibiscus-print shirt. Maybe you've grabbed one of his flyers, passed him your email address or phone number—some do, despite his warning-sign plaid women's pants, persuaded perhaps by his out-of-place jolliness—and learned all about his hippie tribe, the Berkeley Bunny Society (known in this city as Columbia Kittens).
Though cats and rabbits are nowhere to be found at the Society's weekly gatherings in Central Park, Gropper often refers to other animals, like Grateful Dead-style dancing bears and werewolves, to explain the enlightened future he hopes will follow the "dark age" of the present era. His arguments are peppered with a hodgepodge of references to 1960s pop culture and Continental Philosophy—whether this is endearing or nauseating rests on your policy towards orange hibiscus-print shirts.
Gropper prefers the perspectives of outcasts like Neal Cassady, Randle Patrick McMurphy, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His project is to dismantle our social inhibitions, to get us to make eye contact while dancing, to loosen up about coolness and embrace what he calls his "philosophy of warmth."
Despite the volume of Gropper's discourse, and the catchiness of his pronouncements, his argument—that "growing up is learning how not to grow anymore"—hasn't attracted a following at Columbia. He will, undoubtedly, find his musings more welcome this summer, when the Bunny Society hops on the jam band festival circuit. There, perhaps, Gropper's dream for us just might be fulfilled. "I think we're going to become a bunch of dancing bears," he said. "It's going to be fun."
—Alexandra Muhler
