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catilinas · 2 years

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hey Tate :^) randomly popping up to say that i just finished both 'The king must die' and 'The bull from the sea' in (almost) one go instead of working/eating/sleeping. and i can't thank you enough for recommending these books, the first one especially! so... maybe you have some other myth retellings or historical novels in mind to recommend?

hi!!! i’m so glad you enjoyed them / that i’m not the only person who felt like that reading them. the king must die especially Yeah. holy shit.

for Other Recommendations. the few ~myth retellings~ that i’ve read alas mostly are not novels. the genre of ‘myth retelling’ novels < the genre of weird long poems that Do Things with specific ancient texts rather than ‘myths’. but i do read a Lot of historical novels so i definitely have recommendations there! as long as you care about like. the roman republic. anyway here’s a list:

memorial - alice oswald. a ‘translation’ of the iliad, but only the death scenes (often just lists of names!) and the epic similes. it frames itself as yknow. a memorial. to the dead minor characters of the iliad but imo it also speaks to the futility of epic memorialisation. i have read the two page introduction approximately One Million Times.

nobody - alice oswald. you will be missing out if you don’t read this one against memorial. it’s a ‘retelling’ of ‘the odyssey’ and a lot of other myths that involve the sea at any point. a lot of the oresteia too. but it also never names any of its characters or indicates where each story starts or ends. oswald’s best poetry is always about water and this book is Mostly About Water so it snaps supremely.

war music - christopher logue. similar concept but completely different vibe to memorial. also a king poetic Selective reinterpretation of the iliad, but focusing mostly on combat scenes. i’m a big fan of the deliberate anachronisms and framing of the poem through camera angles / film terminology like it’s such a sexy way to ‘translate’ the omniscient moving narrator. AND it pushes you towards a v different emotional response than oswald like memorial is lowkey War And The Pity Of War (The Poetry Is In The Pity) while war music is like. uncomfortably fun. i think comparisons of ancient epic to modern (war-focused) action films can be Lazy or Done Badly (thinking only abt Violent Action Scenes Made Heroic and not the role of the listener/reader/viewer) but the elements of that in war music Work! also agamemnon gets called a piece of shit

tv men: hektor - anne carson. the spectatorship element of war music made more obvious and on a much smaller scale (it’s just one poem in a sequence). also v cool things going on w different degrees of Looseness of translation stacked inside one another

autobiography of red - anne carson. based on the fragments of stesichorus’ geryoneis but bcs the original is so incomplete it can’t really be a ‘retelling’ so much as an imagining of what the poem could and definitely Could Not be. technically a novel but A Novel In Verse. also one of my favourite books of all time ever. it’s in third person but the claustrophobia of the narrative style / the way the protagonist is often closed off to parts of his own thoughts is Weirdly Similar to theseus in the king must die? ALSO geryon ends up with a photography motif. this time we are also using it to think about the subjectivity of which fragments of a poem end up surviving / what gets cut off outside the edge of the photograph

red doc> - anne carson. rip so much carson But this is the sequel to autobiography of red. what happens when you live past the end of your myth. namedrops the battle of ager falernus. prometheus is there. (and also: h of h play - anne carson. i didn’t know whether to include this because it is A Play. like it’s a ‘translation’ (loosest sense of the word) of euripides’ hercules. but geryon (or a version of him) is there for long enough that it counts as the final installment of autobiography of red. to me.)

lavinia - ursula le guin. the second half of the aeneid told from the perspective of lavinia. BUT what sets it apart from other What If Myth—But Woman ‘retellings’ is like. v close engagement with the aeneid as a story and specifically A Story Written By An Actual Author who created his fictionalised past in very deliberate directions. like it doesn’t just treat the aeneid as an authorless body of mythic stories. vergil’s ghost is a character also. fate is real also. ALSO the setting in The Mythic Past As It Becomes The Historical Past + le guin’s decision to include vaguely supernatural elements but never the gods directly is like. very similar to the texture of worldbuilding in renault’s theseus books.

fire from heaven - mary renault. speaking of her. she wrote a whole bunch of other historical novels which you might like! this is the only other one i’ve read so far though. it’s the first of a trilogy about alexander the great. alexander has lot like theseus in that they are both deeply fucked up little guys :-)

dancing with the lion series - jeanne reames (@jeannereames hi 👋). also about the early life of alexander the great. i’ve only read the first one of these (again) but like. i read the whole thing in a day. the level of historical detail is also absolutely nuts. which makes sense bcs reames is an alexander specialist. but still!!!

cicero trilogy - robert harris. welcome to the rome zone. this is the series that got me into roman history :/ it follows the life of cicero from the perspective of his secretary tiro (the inventor of a shorthand system!). It Makes Roman Politics Fun I Promise. for real though these books manage to cover a very complicated period while also not getting bogged down in it And showing you cicero’s Wit. like i know i’m tumblr user catilinas but these books mean i can never really dislike cicero

roma sub rosa series - steven saylor. but if any books Could make me dislike cicero. well. these are a Long series of detective novels set at the end of the roman republic. catiline is there And He’s Sexy. you WILL get invested in the fictional detective’s family drama. also the author is gay and writes lgbt characters in a way that like. actually thinks about what that means In Ancient Rome. catilina’s riddle (book 3) is one of my favourite books of all time ever. also congrats to saylor for writing detective novels which really get into the function of the figure of the detective / Who Is The Detective Really Helping Here / cicero is a massive bastard etc

masters of rome - colleen mccullough. i’m just going to link the review that convinced me and also my entire family to read these. they are terrible they are amazing marcus livius drusus is there. they are massive they cover almost one hundred years of history sulla is sexy and kills people and you will know so much of the minutiae of roman politics If you get through them all

the key / the lock / the door in the wall - benita kane jaro. the key and the door in the wall are a duology about marcus caelius rufus and his relationships w catullus and then caesar. and also clodia. the lock was written later but i’d chronologically in between, and is about cicero and his conflict with clodius. BUT also all three books repeat A Lot of the same events, just from slightly different angles. the unreliability of the narrator helps / makes this v fun. the prose is A Vibe also a lot of the focus is less abt the political situation than like. caelius being young-ish as the republic collapses.

attis - tom holland. legally i have to include this :/ i don’t even know how to describe it like it’s a cryptid of a book you might have to get it through interlibrary loans. it’s not even brilliant it’s just so so weird and also the author cannot explain why bcs he can’t remember what happens in it. it’s about catullus (archeology student?) in a modernised alternate history version of rome (90s london?) being involved in a mystery involving ritual murders (tom holland HAS read girard. if you were wondering). there are also clowns.

hostis - vale aida ( @valeaida hi also 👋). first in an in progress series abt an alternate history version of the second punic war. i read the whole thing in a day instead of writing one of my essays earlier this year :/ have you ever read livy/silius and been like uurfgjhgh the narrative parallels between the lives of hannibal and scipio…… What If That Was A Book. you will go nuts over the barcids

augustus - john edward williams. my highschool philosophy teacher recommended this to me :-) it’s a kind of epistolary novel In That it’s framed as a collection of (imaginary) texts like. letters and biographies and memoirs, all showing Sides but never the entirety of The Emperor Augustus over the course of his life. i read this around the same time as A Source Book for the augustan period and was like. yeah.

#if this end up being formatted weird. whoops. i am on my Phone #book list #beeps

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burberrycanary · 7 days

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Tagged by the wonderful @booksandabeer 😘🍻🥰

Last song I listened to: Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor played by Nelson Freire with Riccardo Chailly conducting the Gewandhausorchester.

I listen to a lot of classical music but I have never felt the urge to listen to Brahms much. Brahms, meh. But a friend got me into symphonic music a few years ago and I have yet to recover. I stumbled onto this magnificent recording by chance and I love how it combines the huge sturm und drang scope of this very cap-R Romantic concerto with a startling clarity that balances both a structural clarity about the overall shape of the work and at the same time an equally meticulous clarity about so many of the fine musical details. It’s sweeping, passionate and fun.

Last thing I read: I’m terrible about finishing things and generally have a half dozen books going at once, but the last thing I finished was either Red, White and Royal Blue (I was somehow very much the target demo for the film but not the target demo for the book even a little) or Christopher Logue’s War Music, which I have read at least a half dozen times by now. I am 100% exactly the target demo for this book, a brilliantly idiosyncratic partial translation of the Iliad that Logue worked on for decades, up until his death. If you like Anne Carson’s translation work, give Logue a try.

Last movie I watched: René Clément’s Purple Noon on a gorgeously restored 35mm print. A recent binge-watch of Andrew Scott’s Ripley happily lined up with a local theater’s Alain Delon film series and here Delon is at his most impossibly beautiful. The film is shot almost entirely on location in 1960’s Italy and the colors are almost too beautiful, giving the film the quality of a fever-dream fantasy. But Highsmith’s cool eye and colder heart are still there, driving the story, right under the sun-struck surface. Delon gives a performance that’s ranging, nuanced and deceptively light.

Last tv show: I recently finished Ripley, which I liked a lot. The cast is strong overall and Andrew Scott is mesmerizing. The cinematography is often striking and only very occasionally forced. The choice to shoot in black and white works well for the story they wanted to tell. Having such a definite point of view on an iconic and repeatedly adapted novel is refreshing and successful. The touches of black humor are pitch-perfect. One misstep at the end is sadly very much sticking with me—Caravaggio!—but I’ll always have all those fucking stairs.

And I just started X-Men ’97, which is a must-watch for anyone who saw the X-Men Animated Series as a kid. As a queer kid, the X-men meant a lot to me and so far this series feels like a complicated love letter to something formative I still have a ton of nostalgia for.

Last thing I googled: Setting aside how I use google to look up how to spell things…spaghetti al burro and before that moliterno al tartufo, which are things I am going to eat this week 😋

Last thing I ate: A dark chocolate kit kat

Sweet, salty, or savory: Savory just edges out salty—but only just.

Sleep: Who amongst us sleeps well? Or enough.

Currently reading: To pick one among several, I’m listening to Andrew Scott read Joyce’s Dubliners. Ideal.

Tagging, no pressure—and if you haven't gotten to this one already— @village-skeptic, @deadalien, @skarabrae-stone, @amoneth-art and @starlightafterastorm

#tag game #about me #this came at the perfect time in a crazy stressful busy week

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hektora · 25 days

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haul. if you even care

(christopher logue’s “war music: an account of the iliad”, three aristophanes plays, a swedish translation of antigone, anne carson’s “antigonick”, “a short history of greek literature” for my tragedy course, icke’s oresteia)

#the antigone and the aristophanes and the greek lit one are directly required for my current course #antigonick bc i want to own it… and war music bc i need. to read it #gah. money #has anyone read saïd / trédé’s greek lit history #my prof is super christian and this book feels like such a random choice lol AND #the blurb online said ‘BY CHRISTIAN AUTHORS!’ so i’m. 🧐#but whatever. i guess

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entheos-alios · 2 years

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- War Music by Christopher Logue

#apollo #apollon #hellenic polytheism #helpol #poetry #iliad

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thegroovywitch · 1 year

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“I was very much into the poetry and music scene that was going on at the time. A vinyl EP of Christopher Logue’s Red Bird was something that I listened to frequently. So when Royston Ellis invited me to accompany him on guitar I knew exactly how to play textual music around his poems.

I knew about the Beats using music behind their writing. Jack Kerouac read from On the Road with a piano backing him on the Steve Allen Show. Royston did some stuff with the Silver Beetles (the Beatles). Royston was going to be reading poems, and I could play guitar behind them, not with just abstract content, but with melodic passages as well.

I did three events with Royston in 1961: a Heretics Society talk at Cambridge University in March, the British Poetry Festival in July and a TV programme in September.

The British Poetry Festival was a massive, week-long event in London with various literary luminaries such as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There were even poets I had read at school such as William Empson, alongside actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company such as Dame Flora Robson. It was a huge honour to take part, courtesy of Royston.”

— Jimmy Page

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oflights · 7 months

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top five sentences? (either ones you’ve written or sentences you just really love, up to you 💕)

hi!!! ooh i like this one a lot. cheating a bit to include lines of poetry, bits of prose that have just stayed with me, etc.

Back out of all this now too much for us (the first line of Robert Frost's Directive, my favorite poem)

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. (Piranesi, Susanna Clark)

But we remembered, you and I. It saddened me. Who would speak of these things when we were gone? So, too, must the makers of those distant fires have asked themselves as they fought the fading of their world. I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking might see how it had been. (Inland, Téa Obreht)

And Patroclus, Shaking the voice out of his body, says: “Big mouth. Remember it took three of you to kill me. A god, a boy, and, last and least, a hero. I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet Somehow it sounds like Hector. (my favorite lines from Christopher Logue's War Music, aka my favorite version of The Iliad [which the Wilson translation is quickly surpassing])

Draco looks back. (from Close Behind, because 😈)

this took me so long omg. i love so many sentences!!!

ask me top 5 anything! ✒️📝

#asks #thehoneybeet #ask meme #top 5 lists #i was going through fics too but i'm so bad about remembering fic quotes #and the ones i picked out were so long lol

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biphaviour · 9 months

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sex war sex cars sex "a poster poem" by Christopher Logue and Derek Boshier

#poster #poem #my scans

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finelythreadedsky · 9 months

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hey, Rebecca! do you have favorite works about reception of ancient greek mythology/culture/literature etc beyond the ancient world? I know this is wayy broad but I really don't know much about the subject or where to begin, so anything goes (and I trust your judgment!). thanks anyway

if you mean works of reception, i have a list of recommendations here (to which i would add lisa peterson and denis o'hare's play "an iliad" and mary renault's "the mask of apollo" which i've read since then, christopher logue's "war music" which i've decided since then is more reception than translation, and nina maclaughlin's "wake siren: ovid resung" and mary zimmerman's play "metamorphoses" which i didn't include because strictly-speaking they're roman and not greek. maybe i would add black orpheus, still not sure about that.)

if you mean scholarly/theoretical works about reception, i don't think i've read widely enough to have recommendations on that but charles martindale is The Classical Reception Theory Guy and therefore probably a good place to start

#mine #ask #anonymous

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hauntedmilkshakeghost · 2 years

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Character List

Characters I am CURRENTLY writing for (requests, one shots, blurbs)

Kelly Severide (Chicago Fire)

Brian ‘Otis’ Zvonecek (Chicago Fire)

Kevin Atwater (Chicago PD)

Will Halstead (Chicago Med

Crockett Marcell (Chicago Med)

Adrian Chase (Peacemaker)

Steve Harrington (Stranger Things)

Frenchie (The Boys)

David ‘Deacon’ Kay (Swat)

Dominique Luca (Swat)

Jim Street (Swat)

Dick Grayson (Titans)

Conner Kent (Titans)

Behrad Tarazi (Legends of Tomorrow)

Steven Grant (Moon Knight)

Characters I ALWAYS accept concepts for (dialogues, ideas, general talk) (current favs highlighted)

Any of the above characters

Marc Specter (Moon Knight)

Kaylee Frye (Firefly)

Inara Serra (Firefly)

Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)

Zoe Washborne (Firefly)

Hoban Wahborne (Firefly)

Christopher Smith (Peacemaker)

Emilia Harcourt (Peacemaker)

Rick Flag (The Suicide Squad)

Harley Quinn (The Suicide Squad)

Robert Dubois (The Suicide Squad)

Owen (Bly Manor)

Jaskier (The Witcher)

Geralt (The Witcher)

Sean Renard (Grimm)

Monroe (Grimm)

Jaal (Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Garrus (Mass Effect)

Jake Martin (The Crew)

Robin Buckley (Stranger Things)

Jim Hopper (Stranger Things)

Chris Alonso (Swat)

Dominique Luca (Swat)

Victor Tan (Swat)

Daniel ‘Hondo’ Harrelson (Swat)

Kim Burgess (Chicago PD)

Jay Halstead (Chicago PD)

Antonio Dawson (Chicago PD)

Adam Ruzek (Chicago PD)

Hank Voight (Chicago PD)

Greg ‘Mouse’ Gerwitz (Chicago PD)

Sylvie Brett (Chicago Fire)

Matt Casey (Chicago Fire)

Joe Cruz (Chicago Fire)

Stella Kidd (Chicago Fire)

April Sexton (Chicago Med)

Ethan Choi (chicsgo Med)

Connor Rhodes (Chicago med)

Maggie Lockwood (Chicago Med)

Dylan Scott (Chicago Med)

Tim Drake (Titans)

Jason Todd (Titans)

Hank Hall (Titans)

Donna Troy (Titans)

Dawn Granger (Titans)

Kori Anders (Titans)

Nate Heywood (legends of tomorrow)

Ray palmer (legends of tomorow)

Jefferson ‘Jax’ Jackson (legends of tomorrow)

John Constantine (legends of tomorrow)

Zari Tarazi/Tomaz (legends of tomorrow)

Astra Logue (Legends of tomorrow)

Esperanza Cruz (Legends of tomorrow)

Nora Darkh (legends of tomorow)

Cisco Ramone (the flash)

Evan buckley (911)

Eddie diaz (911)

Nancy Gillian (911 lonestar)

Marjan Marwani (911 lonestar)

Owen Strand (911 lonestar)

Mateo Chavez (911 lonestar)

Judd and Grace Ryder (911 lonestar)

Derek Morgan (Criminal Minds)

Aaron Hotchner (Criminal Minds)

Spencer Reid (Criminal Minds)

Emily Prentiss (Criminal Minds)

Penelope Garcia (Criminal minds)

Luke Alvez (Criminal minds)

#about me #write list

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