Oh, passin' the love o' women

[sovay]

I dreamed that Benjamin Britten had set both the first and second series of the Barrack-Room Ballads (1892 and 1896) for voice and piano; the recordings had just become available on CD. You should have heard Peter Pears on "Follow Me 'Ome."

Comments

[sovay]

I will need to seek these out.

The first two are some of my favorite secondary-world fantasy of all time and I will quite gladly snap up the sixth book when it manifests, supposedly late this year; P.C. Hodgell is one of the rare writers whose protagonists are fully as strange as the supporting cast and the scope of her world is genuinely alien, something which few fantasists seem to pull off. She can make deep time work. And she is perhaps the only writer since Euripides to invoke terror rather than comfort or complacency with the notion of gods who take an active interest in the mortal world. (And I will forever be proud that I pegged one of the characters mythologically from their very first, offscreen mention, but that is neither here nor there.) I wish that she had been able to write all the books in the '80's and '90's as she desired, real life being the interfering thing it is, but I am glad of their existence nonetheless.