As American as an Anthora cup
I am teaching a reading seminar on Homer’s The Odyssey this semester. On the first day of class, I gave all my students Anthora cups. I wanted them to have something American to drink coffee from while reading their thick paperback books filled with stories from Ancient Greece.

I remember reading The Odyssey aloud in an undergraduate college seminar in the Meiklejohn House at the University of Wisconsin-Madison around 1987. That’s me below, around three years later. Perhaps it’s needless to say that by my senior year of undergraduate work, I was way more into modern South Asian literature than Ancient Greek. That’s why there is a water buffalo in the photo. It was taken somewhere outside of Kathmandu.

To be clear, I don’t love The Odyssey, but I do love Anthora cups. Both are artifacts of a place no longer there—Ionia in the 8th or 9th century BCE and Manhattan in the 1960s. So, it is important to remember them every once in a while and hold them close.