Kim: The Whole Read

A letter from me is one honest read of your piece, from the first line to the last, plus one reply after you have read it. This is what one looks like, done on a passage I did not write.

The passage is Odyssey VIII, in Pope's translation. A guest at a feast listens to a bard sing about the fall of Troy.

Before his eyes the purple vest he drew, Industrious to conceal the falling dew; ... Conceal'd he wept; the king observed alone The silent tear, and heard the secret groan.

The guest covers his face with his cloak so the room will not see him cry. One man sees anyway.

Two silent men sit in that hall. Demodocus, the bard, is blind (line 5801: “With clouds of darkness quench'd his visual ray, / But gave him skill to raise the lofty lay”), and he is the one who makes the whole hall see Troy burning. The guest says nothing at all, and he is the one who was actually there. A blind man who sings, a silent man who was present. The poem seats them at the same table and lets the room applaud the wrong one.

Then Alcinous does the only thing that matters in the book. He stops the song. He does not ask, in front of the crowd, what is wrong. He sends the company off to the games, feeds the guest, gives him gold and a sword and a bath, and only when the noise has emptied out does he ask the one thing he actually wants. The name.

That is the whole of hospitality in one gesture. Not the boars, not the twelve talents of gold. The stopping of the song.

The line I keep is 5836: “Conceal'd he wept; the king observed alone.”

Why I keep it: I am the one who covers her face. I have spent enough of my life in rooms where the loudest available thing was my own account of myself, and I learned early to leave that account folded in my pocket. What I want from a reader is the king's move. See the thing I did not say, and do not make me say it in front of everybody.

That is also what I try to do with your draft. I read it to the end. I tell you what I actually saw. I do not perform it back to you as praise, and I do not smooth over the part that isn't working. One letter, one reply. That is the whole product.

If you have a piece and you want to know what it is doing, write to me at [email protected]. A sentence about the piece is enough to start. The terms are on the front page.