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Christopher Logue’s Iliad
War Music is Logue’s long-running version of the Iliad. Which I’ve been reading recently. Bits of it can be found here, here, here, and here.
I guess the most obvious thing to comment about in WM is the relationship to Homer (use of anachronisms, scenes cut, others added). But actually I think the most interesting thing is the possibility that it offers an exciting new model for contemporary narrative poetry. It’s a film in verse, rather than a novel in verse. It reads like a cross between a screenplay and a poem.
Some specific qualitites of WM wouldn’t suit all subject matter or all poets – the terseness, the metre, the layout on the page, the varied line lengths. But the cinematic aesthetic – the way it’s dialogue heavy, the ‘cuts’ between long shot and close up, the use of simple visual details to set the scene – could presumably be adapted. In setting out to write a narrative poem, one could perhaps do worse than to actually storyboard it as though it were a movie. We’re brought up with cinema, so the techniques are deeply familiar to us.
Anyway, that aside, I’d recommend the poem.
Iced tea is a habit I picked up in Japan. Not the revolting canned stuff with added sugar and lemon they sell in this country – just chilled tea. It works quite well to put some tea leaves in a jug of water and leave it in the fridge for a few hours. You end up with a very light tea – scented water, really. It’s the perfect soft drink for grown-ups. I’ve been using things like oolong, green tea, and jasmine tea, but I daresay you could use any tea. Or indeed something like rooibos. I wonder if herbal things would work. I might try verveine (lemon verbena).
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more middlebrow
Perhaps the difference between the US and the UK is simply that, over here, being an intellectual has never had any social cachet.
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middlebrow again
A post at Whimsy Speaks alerted me to some more web chatter on the middle-brow, including a NY Times column on the subject.
What startles me is that so much of the commentary (in, for example, the post and comments at Pandagon), is quite clearly aimed at the idea of a socially aspirational category, not an intellectual one. So Jonathan’s examples of Starbucks and Target, which I just thought were an odd quirk of his, turn out to be quite typical. Martha Stewart is cited. If Starbucks is middle-brow, presumably my home-ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe is high-brow. A high-brow cup of coffee. Hmmm. What they really mean is presumably that Starbucks is middle class.
And yet Americans still refer to the British as class-obsessed. Martha Stewart seems to me to be a good example. I’ve never seen anyone who is has so openly built a career on stoking people’s social insecurities and then selling them the cure; and I can’t actually think of a comparable British personality. There are hundreds of programmes on TV about improving your home and garden, what to wear, and what to eat, but none of them seem to have that stifled, buttock-clenching aura of gentility. Which isn’t to say that the UK is a snob-free haven, just that the American self-image on matters of class is sometimes a little skewed.
I really shouldn’t be attempting US cultural commentary, of course – I just don’t know the country well enough.
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Australia lose again
Even better, this time it was to England. Yes, I know, the one-day game (let alone Twenty20) isn’t the same, and the Aussies probably weren’t properly focussed against Somerset and Bangladesh, and the class of the team has to come out some time. But even without counting any Ashes chickens, it’s been an enjoyable few days.