045: Brightness, in Spite of Everything

Kamila Shamsie's "Home Fire," Sophocles' "Antigone," honor, shame, love & other fundamental things, life after social distancing, Rena J. Mosteirin reinvents the sonnet, & Doodle Dispatches

Isme: This thing cannot be done

Antigone: But it still has to be tried

—Seamus Heaney, from The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone

We have a lot to weave together this week so buckle up my friends, I promise to get you back home safe. To start, here are four things to know about the tragic Greek play, “Antigone.”

1. Her name is pronounced an·ti·guh·nee, which I didn’t know until I was 30 and had been mispronouncing it for a decade, even whilst teaching the play to actual human children.

2. The play, despite stuck inside withered paperbacks with thick-necked Greek marble statuary on the cover, is a fuckin’ banger. It takes you from tears, to fistbumping cheers, to sister solidarity, to rage, and then back to tears again. In a good way.

3. If, in the last year or so, you’ve woken up on the couch after a news binge, whimpering to yourself, but why are they wearing Kente cloth, then help is on the way. Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ play and Kamila S…