And damn, that shit is good. I start guzzling it almost as soon as the plane lands in Atlanta. I text Naomi that I’ve landed and sink to the floor in arrivals to wait.So Greek mythology has become one of my hobbies lately, a source of some of my recent artistic inspirations. That and old fairy tales. The original, creepy versions. And there’s a lot of creepy shit out there. I got the watered-down version of the Greeks back in tenth grade, in a unit that combined literature and history. The two teachers—Ms. Kramer and Mrs. Austin—were stoked because it meant they got to combine the classes for six weeks and take turns going on coffee runs while one or the other of them babysat us.Mrs. Austin, the history teacher, tried to gloss over the incestuous relationships between the gods—Zeus and Hera are siblings as well as spouses; Persephone is the offspring of Demeter and her big brother Zeus. Then there’s all the other weirdness—Zeus transforming into a swan so that he can seduce Leda (but what, exactly, is seductive about a swan?).
