When I was in college, taking a class in Greek mythology, I got a set of poems to read that I wish I’d held onto. I remember laughing at them in the cafeteria, heedless of any food stains I was getting onto the cheap, legal-sized Xerox paper.
They were delightful in their knowledge of mythology, use of language, and comical, poetic placement of words on the page, as if e.e. cummings were a classical scholar but also Robin Williams.
They were called Zeus in Therapy by Douglass Parker.
If you look for them today, you’ll find what seem to be promising leads at first. Though Parker died in 2011, his website is still active, and a sub-page states “the sessions [of Zeus in Therapy] are available in eBook format as well as PDF.” However, no link is provided, there or anywhere else.
More remarkably, the plays were adapted for the stage. The Tutto Theatre Company produced a limited run in 2013. But all my attempts to find them—including speaking to the play’s producers and trying to contact Parker’s family—have so far ended in failure. Janice did suggest a new angle as I started composing this. I’ll let you know if it does the job.
Zeus in Therapy is a modern “lost work,” literature that we know existed once but can’t produce today. There are other cases, and some would be treasures in the history of wordplay.
Magrites by Homer (maybe) was supposed to be as much a classic comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey were great epics. Aristotle himself said so. Not much is known about it except that the title character was such an utter buffoon that his name became an insult. A few quotations from it survive in other classic works, including this great line in Plato: “He knew many things, but he knew them badly.”
Speaking of Homer’s footprint in literature, On Words in Homer with Multiple Senses by Longinus might have been the first-ever wordplay study, one of a set of his many Homeric analyses.
Pamphilus of Alexandria wrote a 95-volume lexicon of obscure and foreign words, just the sort of thing every author needs to expand the range of their tricks with language.
There are lost Shakespeare pieces too. Or…we’re pretty sure there are. The one most likely to have existed is Cardenio, a late play whose name suggests a connection with a story in Don Quixote. There’s also loose talk about Love’s Labours Won, a sequel to Love Labour’s Lost, although some think that title is just a renaming of one of Shakespeare’s other comedies.
But from a wordplay perspective, one of our greatest losses is a far more modern one: Satire: Veritas by David Stephens, a palindromic novella published informally in 1980. It’s not quite the longest palindrome—that would be Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo, by Lawrence Levine, a bizarre, often nonsensical detective story. And I can find no information about Satire: Veritas’ actual content…one assumes it’s a satire, but that’s all we got.
What is clear is that its length was 58,795 letters. It may have grown in never-published revisions, if this Reddit thread is to be believed—one of the participants claims to be Stephens’ granddaughter.
Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo isn’t exactly available everywhere books are sold. I can locate only two copies, both in Los Angeles libraries. But that’s two more than I can find of any of these other works. If you have knowledge of any of them, please share it in responses or comments!
what i really want to see is Tryphiodorus's lipogrammatical Odyssey... which seems to have disappeared sometime after its 10th century mention in the Suidas, although everyone who writes about lipograms seems to confuse it with that poem of his we still have, "The Sack of Troy".
i bought a copy of "Satire: Veritas" back when he was offering it from an ad in the back of Word Ways. it's on a par with Howard Bergerson's snippets of palindromic opera that no one has ever wished had been completed. i also have "Dr Awkward..." from about the same time. until Anthony Etherin writes a good one, i think it's pretty obvious that giant palindromes, like giant dinosaurs, are an evolutionary dead end.