RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. Friday, September 4, 2026. The print copy of the 13 August 2026 issue of the London Review of Books has finally arrived at my front door. And I have finally had a chance to read its lead article — Emily Wilson’s controversial review of the new movie on Homer’s ancient Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan.

I should preface my short report here by noting two earlier appearances of the brilliant University of Pennsylvania Classical Studies professor Emily Wilson on counterweights.ca.

Back in the middle of March 2019 (somewhat more than seven years ago, during the first Trump administration, my colleague and friend L.Frank Bunting posted “Taking time out from current madness to consider one woman’s brilliant writing more than 2500 years ago.”

This covered Emily Wilson’s admiring review of Anne Carson’s translation of the limited surviving work of the great ancient Greek lyric poet, If Not, Winter – Fragments of Sappho.

Then, somewhat more than three years later, in late August 2022 during what now seems the interim sanity (relatively speaking) of the Biden administration, the collective wisdom of the Counterweights Editors posted “As summer winds down there’s a Quebec election in the air (and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey on YouTube!).”

Emily Wilson — more respectful and supportive of Christopher Nolan?

There is another Quebec election in the air in the late summer of 2026. And Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of Homer’s original Odyssey in ancient Greek is also referred to in Ms. Wilson’s 2026 LRB review of Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie:

“As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

It is of course remarks such as this “I would be ashamed” that have made Ms. Wilson’s review of the Nolan movie so controversial.(And this particular sentence confessing her shame has been cited more than once in mass media reports on the controversy.) But I have now read her review twice, and I think the case she’s making is both more broadly respectful and ultimately supportive of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie than her critics seem to suggest.

This ultimate feeling about Emily Wilson’s review was fnally stiffened as well by my reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s almost parallel review of Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie in the August 20, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books. (Which still more recently has arrived at my front door, pristine in its elegant American plastic wrapper.)

Daniel Mendelsohn agrees with Emily Wilson on key issues

Mr. Mendelsohn, who has also quite recently (2025) published an English translation of Homer’s original Greek Odyssey, is more polite (or even deferential?) than Ms. Wilson, toward the mass market muscle of Mr. Nolan. (Who has also directed such seriously interesting movies as Memento and Oppenheimer, along with the Dark Knight trilogy on the life of Batman.) At the height of this arc in his review Daniel Mendelsohn urges that :

“Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the ‘accuracy’ of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.”

At the same time, Mendelsohn ultimately agrees with Wilson on key issues. Wilson reports, eg, that Nolan’s “Odyssey is not boring … My teenagers had a good time.” Mendelsohn complains that : “Nolan deletes” some classic stories from his Odyssey, “while retaining material that adds little … except perhaps an adrenaline rush for the eighteen-to-twenty-six crowd..” Even Wilson’s “I would be ashamed” about Nolan’s movie script is matched by Mendelsohn’s “The dialogue, alas, is pedestrian throughout.”

Wilson complains about another “muddled subplot … foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear … Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour — all perfectly fine in the world of Homer — are, in this version, very bad.” Mendelsohn alludes somewhat more broadly to “the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.”

Whatever else, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a movie worth seeing

Wilson’s deepest critique is that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie lacks “narrative and emotional depth … psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.”

Mendelsohn echoes something similar with “the only side of Odysseus—and indeed of the Odyssey—that you get in Nolan’s film is the negative one.”

Both reviewers seem to me to be saying that the Nolan movie gives us a (Matt Damon) Odysseus, who suggests the ancient world of the Mediterranean Sea was much like our own world in the 2020s global village, and has many instructive parallels to offer us today.

Both seem to be regretting that Nolan did not take on the greater challenge of pointing to the deepest truth — that this ancient world was in fact much different from our own, even in the Middle East (and even if we can still learn more constructively from the differences).

At the same time again, both reviewers leave me in no doubt that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a movie I should and no doubt will see myself, when the opportunty arises. The critical Emily Wilson’s final paragraph is worth quoting here at length :

“… the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas … may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.”

RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2026. Here on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario (where the Indigenous Wendat “name Lacus Ontario was first recorded in 1660 by Francis Creuxius”), not far from a 17th century Seneca village, it is impossible to resist the thought that the USA USA in 2026 is in the presidential hands of a maniac, plain and simple.

And yet happily enough, in our ongoing In Search of Canadian Liberalism we the Canadian people have now fortunately landed on Prime Minister Mark Carney — former Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, and yet another Canadian “first among equals” with a relevant PhD. (Even if almost a quarter of us still do not believe in the good fortune.)

These also plain and simple preceding 120 words at least summarize my own feelings about and even analysis of the current moment in the politics of the Canada-US trade war, started by the second Trump administration for its own twisted reasons.

And these reasons have nothing at all obvious to do with the long-standing friendships and even (as I can personally testify) family ties between The United States and Canada (also the title of a Canadian political science textbook, first published in 2019 during the first Trump administration).

Strangely enough as well, I do continue to think that, whatever the ultimate world-history judgments about winners and losers, the Canadian future will be in one way or another enhanced by the Carney government in Ottawa’s current standing-up to the clear madness south of the border — clearly enough supported by a clear and even strong majority of the Canadian people.

At a time when no less a political pundit than Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, is reprinting poems by W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden as guides to the present, I can only return to one of my favourite lines from T.S. Eliot (from his “Gerontion” first published in 1920) : “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,/Guides us by vanities.”

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RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2026. My immediate reaction to how the Government of Canada has just stood up for the home team in the ongoing trade war unleashed on the true north strong and free by the increasingly wild and crazy Trump administration next door is four cheers (or more) for PM Mark Carney.

By way of quick prelude, note that Mr. Carney has also just won applause from as unlikely a pair of US observers as Anthony Scaramucci (“Carney now leads the West”) and Mia Farrow (“Mark Carney and Canada are now the ‘leaders of the ‘Free World’”).

For the moment I just want to offer some quick numbers that set in some wider perspective the no doubt big enough challenge to Canada in the madman Trump’s new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

These numbers suggest that the Trump administration’s own claims about the impact on Canada in the latest lunacy from south of the once undefended border are at best wildly exaggerated.

According to CTV News : “Roughly 87,000 Canadian jobs could be at risk because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, according to an analysis conducted by University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe … The hardest-hit provinces for job losses are Ontario (36,100), Quebec (18,300) and B.C. (11,200).”

If you are or fear you might be one of the 87,000 Canadians who just might lose their their jobs in this context these numbers are no doubt seriously fearsome. And public policy must do something to soften the blow — as PM Carney and provincial premiers have acknowledged.

At the same time, according to Statistics Canada’s latest Labour Force survey there were some 21,215,000 jobs in Canada as of the end of this past July 2026. And Professor Tombe’s 87,000 jobs at risk amount to a mere 0.4% of this number.

Moreover, Ontario, Quebec, and BC are the most populous provinces in the Canadian confederation today. To say that they are also the provinces where the most jobs could be be lost (or are “at risk”) is just to say that the most jobs lost because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods will be in the most populous provinces. Which is hardly surprising.

Moreover, while 36,000 jobs could be at risk in Ontario eg, according to the July 2026 Labour Force survey Ontario gained some 52,000 jobs last month — even with all the earlier Trumpian measures meant to harm and humiliate the sovereign (and bilingual) Canadian confederation (whose modern history goes back some 400 years).

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RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2026. Through no fault of my own or that of anyone at all close, I live in one of the three Canadian federal electoral districts (or ridings in the old school lexicon) where a byelection is taking place this coming Monday, August 31 — only 10 days away.

Judging by traditional election signage in front of houses and apartment buildings and so forth, you might be hard-pressed to know that a local federal election is just 10 days away. At the same time, from those who run sign campaigns I have learned that a lot of signs finally just means a strong well-organized sign campaign in some technical sense. — and not too much more.

(I should also confess that we have a small sign in front of our house. This is entirely the result of my TV-watching-partner’s down-on-the-ground action — with my prior agreement. In the interests of objective reporting, I will not reveal who our sign is supporting!)

Today’s Rabble Review is headlined “NDP feels momentum growing in run up to Beaches-East York by-election.” But M. Fournier at 338Canada would not be impressed His Beaches—East York numbers for August 16, 2026 put Liberals at 62% , NDP 18%, and Conservatives 15%. It will take A LOT of momentum over the next 10 days to carry the New Democrats into anything close to Liberal territory, if M. Fournier is anywhere close to the real world.

I have seen public polling numbers as well that suggest Mark Carney’s Liberals have at least some prospects of winning all three August 31 byelections. Least likely may be Chicoutimi-Le Fjord in Quebec. Here an August 15, 2026 post from Polling Canada put the Liberals at 35%, Bloc Québécois 31%, and Conservatives 26%. An August 9, 2026 Polling Canada post for the bylection in North Vancouver-Capilano put the Liberals at 54%, Conservatives 31%, NDP 10% — not quite as Liberal-likely as Beaches-East York in Toronto, but close. (And the east-end Toronto Beaches are sometimes locally critiqued as a den of “Vancouver wannabees.”)

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RANDALL WHITE, CANADIAN REPUBLIC NOTEBOOK. TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2026. Toronto’s annual “Canadian National Exhibition” (CNE) starts just a week ahead — August 21, ending Labour Day, September 7. And this is just one day before the start of Vancouver’s 2026 “Pacific National Exhibition” (PNE) — August 22–September 7.

These seasonal fairs in the air mean it’s also time to at least start waving goodbye to “August for the people and their favourite islands.” One approach currently in the news focuses on an issue of serious if still too much un-debated importance to the Canadian people, who form the real sovereign power in Canada’s “Westminster” parliamentary democracy of the 21st century.

Two recent posts on the CBC News site illustrate the current state of this particular art : First, “Supreme Court of Canada to hear case on constitutionality of requiring oath to the Crown … Decision comes after Alberta’s top court decided requiring oath for lawyers violates Constitution.” Second, “Quebec law ending mandatory oath to King faces constitutional challenge … Lawyer takes aim at 2022 law scrapping requirement for Quebec legislators.”

The general form of the Canadian “oath of allegiance” involved here“derives from that which was, and still is, taken by parliamentarians in the United Kingdom.”

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2/026. With the fabled local “Exhibition Weather” almost about to settle over this Canadian metropolis where I live, I have just been inspired by two pieces in the July 23, 2026 issue of the New York Review of Books.

The first is “Space Oddity … Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.” This is a review of Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by the 47-year-old Irish writer (and Dublin resident) Mark O’Connell. (Not to be confused with the Mark O’Connell who is a “Board Director & Investor” and lives in Toronto.)

My second NYRB piece is “The New Ellis Island … A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.” This is a review of Jazmine Ulloa’s El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by the 75-year-old American journalist and eminent immigration specialist Julia Preston, who grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois and now lives in Hoboken, New Jersey (just across the Hudson River from Greenwich Village in New York City).

The long and short of my inspiration is that I was first especially struck by the last few sentences of Mark O’Connell’s review : “Musk’s worldview … is an explicitly antihuman one. But it is also—and this is the point of Slobodian and Tarnoff’s persuasive and vital book—not just Musk’s worldview. It already underpins much of contemporary capitalism and may come to be seen as the presiding pathology in our time of monsters.”

My initial reaction here was to wonder if we do in fact live in a “ time of monsters” right now? Donald Trump, eg, is to me an essentially ignorant schoolyard bully and total jerk who is not remotely qualified to be President of the USA. But I wonder if he has an at all big enough personality to also qualify as a credible monster?

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RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2026. A few days ago Curtis Fric at Canadian Polling posted “After Years of Control, Ford Faces a Real Fight … A string of weaker polls and collapsing approval ratings are raising new questions about Doug Ford’s political future.”

(1) Ford faltering?

Curtis Fric’s post also raises a broad issue I opined on here a few weeks ago with “‘In Ontario Donald Trump is pronounced Doug Ford’ .. & Premier Ford’s current 21% approval even more appalling if he stays in office until April 2030.”

Premier Ford’s latest claim that the federal government has been listening to a “fringe group” on Toronto island airport expansion is still more appalling.

His conservative party has never won even close to a majority of the popular vote (an average of 41%) in any of its three elections in seven years. But thanks to a divided progressive opposition it has won decisive majorities of seats in the provincial legislature.

Moreover, only 44% and then 45% of all eligible voters turned out in the most recent 2022 and 2025 Ontario elections.— the lowest voter turnouts in the province’s history since 1867.

Doug Ford’s conservatives are the real fringe group in Ontario today.

It still seems to me, however, that constitutionally (as most recently formulated in legislation passed by Premier Ford’s large majority of seats in the legislature), Doug Ford can still remain in office until April 2030, regardless of what opinion polls, pundits, opposition politicians, or mere bloggers such as myself may say or do.

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RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2026. Among many other things, the 180 forest fires currently burning in (mostly Northern) Ontario — see eg “Ontario firefighters battling record wildfires … Ford government says it has increased resources” — bring a largely still evaded big difference between “Near Northern” and “Far Northern” Ontario into the harsh light of day, down here far away in the provincial capital city.

Like the Ontario forest itself, the current forest fires in the province are concentrated in Northern Ontario (which accounts for some 90% of Ontario’s land area but less than 10% of its population). And, although it is customary to distinguish between Northeastern and Northwestern Ontario, an equally or even more poignant distinction betwwen what might be caled “Near Northern” and “Far Northern” Ontario is still far less common.

One key human geography feature of this last distinction is that there is no provincial or virtually any other large road network in Far Northern Ontario : “Secondary Highway 599, commonly referred to as Highway 599, is a provincially maintained secondary highway in … Ontario.” It “connects Highway 17 near Ignace with the remote northern community of Pickle Lake; its terminus at Pickle Lake marks the northernmost point on the provincial highway system.”

There is still a lot of Ontario land area north of the end of Highway 599. And this Far Northern Ontario is especially notable for First Nations communities “in remote northern regions accessible only by air or winter ice roads. Ontario contains more remote First Nations communities than any other province in Canada.”

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2/026. One of my approaches to coping with the extreme summer heat and wildfire smoke we are currently assailed by in Toronto (along with many adjacent places in both Canada and the US) has been to sit in my most air-conditioned room, and read the latest print issue of the London Review of Books to arrive in the old-school mail.

I have been especially struck by John Lahr’s 3,650-word piece on David Margolick ‘s When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy.

John Lahr is an eminent if now somewhat retired theatre and movie critic (“currently a chief theater critic emeritus of The New Yorker”). He is also the son of Bert Lahr who played the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. His review of David Margolick ‘s new Sid Caesar book (rated 4.4 out of 5 on the Amazon site) is fun to read and well worth any deep reader’s time. And it comes to more than a few heavyweight and no doubt apt judgments.

Mr. Lahr, however, does have his (man-in-his-80s) reservations about both Sid Caesar and David Margolick’s book. (If it is true eg that Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, John Lahr complains, “then gallstones are jewellery.”)

I

My brother and I — both pre-teens at the time — were enthusiastic TV fans of “the hour-long Caesar’s Hour (1954-57).” We missed the earlier Admiral Broadway Revue (1949) and the 90-minute episodes of Your Show of Shows (1950-54), almost certainly because our family did not have a TV set until the mid 1950s.

I have only a few sketchy recollections of particular Sid Caesar TV skits and characters from 1954 to 1957. (I am also an old man in his 80s.) But I do happily remember how much my brother and I enjoyed watching Caesar’s Hour. (I don’t have memories of my parents watching almost any TV at that point : they had too many better things to do with their time. Our modest TV set was always sequestered away in some small extra bedroom, or in the basement.)

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RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SATURDAY, July 11, 2026. The already hazy early summer probably is a good time for Prime Minister Carney (acting as principal advisor to the Governor General, in strictest 1867 written constitutional terms) to make his first four appointments to the still unreformed Senate of Canada.

Appointees include two new representatives for Quebec — “now-former Conservative MP Richard Martel and longtime Liberal Tom Pitfield, the PMO’s principal secretary.” To round out this first batch of new PM-Carney-appointed senators, add “Geeta Tucker, for Manitoba” and for New Brunswick, Dr. Rodney Ouellette.

Some observers have seen these appointments (and the apparent process or lack thereof behind them) as “most cynical” or at least “disappointing.” I may be too much of a cynic about the various real worlds of Canadian politics myself to altogether agree. But I get the point.

At the same time, the Prime Minister’s statement announcing his first four Senate appointments has also announced that : “With five more Senate vacancies anticipated before the end of 2026, a new Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments will be established in the coming days. Guided by constitutional requirements and merit-based criteria, the Board will identify highly qualified candidates with diverse experience and perspectives, and make recommendations to the Prime Minister. Canadians are invited to apply to serve in the Senate through an application process that will open in the coming weeks.”

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