Daniel Mendelsohn
speaker
599 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
My father's son and also as a teacher.
So in the spring of 2011, the spring semester, my dad, who was then 82, decided for reasons known only to himself, maybe, uh, that he wanted to sit in on my freshman Odyssey seminar at Bard.
Every now and then at Bard, I teach an intensive seminar.
To first year students, sort of training them to be close readers of a
single text over the course of an entire semester.
And I had chosen the Odyssey of my father, I don't
honestly really remember how all this what his own thinking was, but he just called me one night and asked me what I was teaching and I said, Well, I'm doing the Odyssey and he said, you know, I I would wouldn't mind sitting in on that class.
So I you know, and it was a commitment because Bard is in upstate New York.
My dad and mom lived on Long Island in the middle of Long Island.
So it was, you know, it's like a two and a half hour drive for him every week.
The class met once a week for three hours on Friday morning.
And over the course of the semester, it, you know, it was a sort of semi-comical setup, right?
You know, you're a you're a middle-aged college professor, and suddenly you find your grumpy old father is one of your students.
And he was indeed grumpy because it very swiftly evolved that he didn't think much of the Odyssey.
And he didn't think particularly yeah, he didn't it wasn't the Odyssey.
He was very bothered by
the character of Odysseus.
You know, and as I explain in my memoir, An Odyssey, A Father, A Son, and an Epic, you know, my dad was a scientist his whole life.
I'm a literature person.
So we have very different ways of viewing things.
Showing 141–160 of 599 · page 8 of 30
← Previous
Next →