Homer Never Nodded Like This

They were having some Sunday afternoon readings at the bookstore, with a painfully earnest audience, necks craned diagonally, sitting in plastic-and-tube-metal chairs, while earnestly painful speakers declaimed their way through short story and poem, like your high school forensics meet. I would have been glad not to be there. No doubt these people, English majors and public radio pledgers all, fondly imagine they are recreating some scene from around a Bronze Age campfire, "Listen to the storyteller!" I got news for you, baby: Homer was never like this. Homer was never leadfooted. Homer was never dull.