Wishing like hell that I'd never, ever met her

And tonight I had a solid wall of headache for five hours. I hadn't felt fantastic since I got up around noon with the unpleasant, sticky sense of nightmares I couldn't remember, but it really started on the way back from Porter Square with schreibergasse. I met derspatchel for dinner on his half-hour break despite not being hungry, because I thought food might help; it didn't. By the time I got home, it was functionally a migraine, light-sensitivity, noise-sensitivity, and nausea included. It cannot have helped that the next door neighbors were grilling essentially under my office window and the room was filled with charcoal smoke. I closed the window, brought in the fan and the air cleaner from the living room, turned both to full blast and fell over on the couch, where I lay with my eyes closed until the light went out of the sky. Autolycus slept on the couch above me. He did not once entice me to play, or bite my wrist as he sometimes does when he believes he's not receiving enough attention. He just stayed close enough for me to hear him breathing and was an immense comfort. I lost track of Hestia during this period, but she turned out to be sleeping under the papasan. Rob came home when his shift at the Somerville ended and inadvertently provided the clue for breaking the headache, because he brought me some very cold water from the refrigerator and it was the first thing that had felt good in hours. He went out to J.P. Licks and returned with coconut-milk vanilla ice cream. I just sort of held it in my mouth. It helped a lot. I am somewhat worried this means the problem was the TMJ or directly my braces. I need to survive two more years of these things. I can't think much about it safely right now.

The latest song that I'm playing over and over again is a random internet find: Bill Dees and Roy Orbison's "Tennessee Owns My Soul." It's a theatrical little murder ballad and it's one of the oddest songs, musically speaking, I've heard in a while. About half of it sounds like a strain of country-folk that I recognize from the late '60's, with little pop touches here and there. And about half of it sounds like the kind of unclassifiable weirdness that would get aggregated as proto-punk once punk had established itself sufficiently for antecedents, especially in the early outsider art days when knowing a band was part of the punk scene would tell you absolutely nothing about its sound. And it's all intercut in the same song. It uses nearly the same arrangement, but Orbison's studio version is nowhere near as strange. It's a bigger production, smoother and grander where the demo is energetic and eerie and scuffed around the edges. I haven't played the studio version twenty-four times in a row. Maybe it's the string section that's turning me off.

Anyway, never, ever met her made me think of PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me" and Captain Beefheart's "Dirty Blue Gene," so there's some actual punk to close out the night. I am going to try to sleep.

When I enter the earth I take this sky with me

I am entertained by the Guardian's poem of the week: Nic Aubury, "Decline and Fall."

Trying to compile even a short list of poems about the classical world is fraught, because that way lies a truly endless chain of retellings. I have at least two anthologies that are nothing but reworkings of classical mythology: Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (ed. Deborah DeNicola, 1999) and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, 1996). I see more every month on the internet and many of them are amazing. I could start with Erik Amundsen's "Under the Asphodel" (Mythic Delirium #26, 2012) and come up for air days later without having gotten even so far as Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). So here is another totally incomplete list of poems I like, mostly trying to focus away from myth or at least the direct retelling of it. There will be inevitably a few.

All of H.D.'s collections from Sea Garden (1916) through Red Roses for Bronze (1932) are deeply classical, specifically Greek, a mode she returned to late in life with Helen in Egypt (1961) and Hermetic Definition (1972). New Directions' Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (1986) is a solid, comprehensive collection, including some very good uncollected and/or unpublished material like the cycle A Dead Priestess Speaks and her early war poems. Ignore the biographical essay unless it's been updated, because among other things it gets Bryher's name and most of H.D.'s relationships wrong. I didn't even know Vale Ave existed and I suspect I should find it now.

Christopher Logue's modernist retelling of the Iliad, incomplete at the time of his death—the published installments were War Music (1997), All Day Permanent Red (2004), and Cold Calls (2005)—was as monumental and idiosyncratic a project as it sounds. I find the earlier books more faithful and the later more fragmentary and impressionistic, but the whole thing is wildly anachronistic, densely poetic, neither a translation nor a version in the usual sense, and passages of it convey better than anything except Homeric Greek the strangeness of the world in which the epics are anchored, which was never as historical as the Bronze Age. His description of Thetis' appearance in Book 1 won me over to the original volume.

So many of C.P. Cavafy's poems are set in the varied classical past, I might as well point to his Ποιήματα entire. The first complete translation I read was by Stratis Haviaras, but Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard appear to be the choice of the Cavafy Archive.

( And, Diomed, you did; nicking Love's wrist. )

A handful. Carthage gets better representation, though.