If you're on Genius reading Book V of The Iliad, the recommendation system has some suggestions for you.
I saw this screengrab this morning via a post by @bringsjohn on Twitter. I would love to know exactly how the collaborative filtering worked in this case! Maybe there's a significant overlap between the folks who use Genius to mark up Homer and those who use it to annotate Minaj's lyrics?
Or maybe it's … the content? After I tweeted this screengrab, @RolandJordan pointed something out:
@pomeranian99 @KeeganMKey @bringsjohn Isn't that what King Priam said to Achilles in his tent when begging him for his son's body?
— Jordan Etherington (@RolandJordan) March 19, 2015
He's got a point! At the end of The Iliad, Achilles has slaughtered the Trojan warrior Hector. Hector's father — Priam — visits Achilles and asks if he'll release the body. Since every single one of Priam's fifty sons have died in the Trojan war, the old man pleads that he is sad and lonely, and deserves this moment of closure with his last son. The passage is quite lovely and touching; here it is from Herbert Jordan's translation:
Not quite the sentiment Minaj is going after in her song, granted. But I like the connection nonetheless.
(BTW, given the slithy nature of recommendation systems, you may not see the Minaj link off Book V of the Iliad if you visit the Genius page now. A couple of times I refreshed the page I got it; other times I got T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the song/poem "The Hanging Tree" from the Hunger Games novels.)
