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.

Meeting my class for the first time in the building on Sarasota Bay that used to house the New College Library and where, in the late 1980s, I used to cut my Humanities class at Riverview High School to go there and study and meet boys.

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.

This is me in the spring of 1991, trekking in Nepal instead of attending my graduation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I majored in Integrated Liberal Studies, history, and South Asian Studies. Undergraduates did stuff like that at American universities in those days. Between 1990 and 1991, my senior year of undergraduate work, I studied Telugu and did ethnographic field research in Vishakapatnam, India.

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.