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The Wanderings of Odysseus: Lotus Eaters (Donnie Hill, Rush Rehm, L. Peter Callender)

This is your last chance for a welcome reprieve from the summer action hero peddled at the local theater. Tired of the usual movie fare? Try a little Odysseus, who, after all, is known more for his brains than his brawn.

Stanford Summer Theater is offering The Wanderings of Odysseus through Aug. 15.

How has the production been going this summer?

“Good, brilliant, excellent,” said director RUSH REHM, professor of drama and classics.

This hero is so complicated, he’s played by four different actors at different points in the production.

“Part of the problem of one person playing Odysseus is it’s like one person playing two Hamlets back to back. It’s too much,” said Rehm. “The second thing is that although we identify with Odysseus throughout the poem, he’s very hard to get your hands around. He’s ‘the man of twists and turns.’”

Rehm describes The Odyssey as a fantastic tale centered on intimate, human values.

“I see the epic as a kind of developmental story of a man who grows in wisdom, not in the abstract sense but in how to get through the world,” said Rehm. “Odysseus is returning to his mortality, to his aging wife, to his home, restoring as much as he can the world before the war disrupted everything. But as the poem by Cavafy suggests ["Ithaca," 1911], these are experiences that can only come if he’s going somewhere.”

Rehm said Odysseus presents a protagonist very different from the “myths” of our culture today.

“All this is about a world that suggests more complications, and if you don’t meet these complications, you will fail. You can’t nuke it.”

Read more about the production in Stanford Report.

—Sam Julian

The Princeton Review,publishers of the popular guidebook The Best 373 Colleges,has been flooding the media recently with news of its latest rankings, which purport to identify everything from the happiest college students to the top party schools.

It also claims to judge the admission selectivity of schools – and its methodology certainly sounds legitimate. According to its website, the selectivity ranking is “determined by several institutionally reported factors, including: the class rank, average standardized test scores, and average high school GPA of entering freshmen; the percentage of students who hail from out-of-state; and the percentage of applicants accepted. This rating is given on a scale of 60-99.”

Words like these make RICHARD SHAW, dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid, gnash his teeth. For at least the second time in four years, the Princeton Reviewhas bungled the admissions data for Stanford – with no apparent consequence. For instance, the book claims that Stanford accepted 16 percent of its applicants. Not true, says Shaw. Stanford accepted 7.3 percent this year and 8 percent last year.

Undergraduate Admission pointed out a serious error when asked to review Stanford’s draft profile in April. The error was not corrected, and David Soto, director of content development at the Princeton Review,apologized and promised to work with the editorial and production staff to see “where this issue might have come from.”

Soto also promised a correction to the website and a change in any future printings of the guide. But the damage is done for any prospective students purchasing the printed version, claims Shaw. Shaw says the Princeton Reviewmade similar promises four years ago – and their word of assurance was to no avail.

Shaw says Stanford’s reputation for excellence can endure minor irritants like the Princeton Review.But the mistake in reporting Stanford’s data suggests how sloppy the data gathering of college guidebooks is in general and how misleading the resulting “rankings” are.

Yvor Winters

In a 1962 interview, Vladimir Nabokov said that his masterpiece Pale Fire “is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.” Stanford may be at the heart of one of them.

A few years ago, Stanford magazine published an article linking Lolita’s notorious Humbert Humbert with former faculty member Henry Lanz. But Nabokov’s short stay in Palo Alto might have left some other unexpected fruit. Was Stanford poet-critic YVOR WINTERS the model for John Shade, the mysterious murdered man at the heart of Pale Fire?

Texas poet and scholar R. S. Gwynn thinks so and has written the introduction for Pale Fire, Gingko Press’ soon-to-be-published book that takes Shade’s 999-line poem out of the ingenious novel around it. The poem is the obsession of the madman who annotates it – and so most have assumed the poem is supposed to be a Frostian pastiche. Or is it?

The poem “might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov’s talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers,” writes journalist Ron Rosenbaum in Slate. Nabokov’s son agrees his father intended the poem to be taken seriously.

Rosenbaum writes: “I was particularly struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary American poetry that Gwynn brought to his case that Nabokov meant Pale Fire to be a reproof to over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in American poetry. A reproof to the belief that formal poetics could not capture deep feeling in traditional verse forms. And that Nabokov had modeled John Shade on the well-known traditionalist American poet Yvor Winters, who was a partisan of formal poetics.”

In any case, Gwynn is hoping the publicity will ferret out someone with more detailed memories of the Nabokov-Winters relationship, before the trail goes completely cold.

The blog “The Book Haven” considers the association between Nabokov and Winters. If you have any information that can shed further light on the mystery, Gwynn asks that you contact him through The Book Haven.

— Cynthia Haven