Someone has left a spear stuck in the sand

[sovay]

Oh, hell! Christopher Logue. And the sixth volume of War Music still unfinished.

Achilles' face
Is like a chalkpit fringed with roaring wheat.
His brain says: "Kill him. Let the Greeks sail home."
His thigh steels flex.

I am totally watching him as Swinburne in Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno (1967).

Comments

[kerrickadrian.livejournal.com]

Oh, fuck. I quite liked War Music.

[sovay]

I quite liked War Music.

I know it is the common fate of epics to be left incomplete, or at least unrevised, but I really resent when it happens.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd heard of War Music before. The excerpts are brilliant.

I'm sorry he's gone, and without a chance to finish it. May he rest in peace.

[sovay]

I wish I'd heard of War Music before. The excerpts are brilliant.

I recommend it very highly. The only other mode of art I've seen apply that combination of time-slip, retelling, and defamiliarization to classical narrative is plays.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Damn.

That's magnificent stuff.

Nine

[sovay]

That's magnificent stuff.

I read War Music not because I was assigned it at Brandeis, but because I knew someone who was; I bought my own copy. I got the latest and now last volume from the bookstore at Yale, where I didn't even know he'd written it until I saw it there on the shelf, a thin, pollen-colored paperback from Faber and Faber with the title, as it should be, in scarlet red:

Diomed found, and threw, a stone
As heavy as a cabbage made of lead,
That hit, and split, Aenéas' hip.
Who went down on one knee
And put his shield hand on the grass
And with his other hand covered his eyes.
Dido might have become a grandmother
And Rome not had its day, except
As Diomed came on to lop his top
Aenéas' mama, Aphrodité (dressed
In grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold
And snake-skin flip-flops) stepped
Between him and the Greek.
A glow came from her throat, and from her hair
A fragrance that betokened the divine.
Stooping, she kissed him better, as
Queen Hera whispered: "Greek, cut that bitch."
And, Diomed, you did; nicking Love's wrist.

[sovay]

But without you I wouldn't have heard of it at all!

I'm sorry I didn't rave about him before! He had an even more varied literary life than I'd known. (The porn, yes. The jazz poetry, I had no idea.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ach. War Music is a work I've been going back to since vol one. Logue and I drank wine together after a reading, but I hardly remember the man at all; it's the poetry that bit deep. As it should be. Work for the ages. And, yeah. Unfinished. Which is maybe kinda fitting, but.

[sovay]

Logue and I drank wine together after a reading, but I hardly remember the man at all; it's the poetry that bit deep.

That is, actually, a wonderful kind of epitaph.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He and Russell within days of each another. Heigh-ho...

But didn't they both make hay while the sun shone!

[sovay]

But didn't they both make hay while the sun shone!

I know the twentieth century wasn't actually a non-stop artists' party, but there are people whose lives make you believe it . . .

[gwynnega]

I'd forgotten that it was Logue who wrote the screenplay for Russell's marvelous Savage Messiah.

I haven't read War Music, but I clearly must!

[sovay]

I haven't read War Music, but I clearly must!

Yes. It's brilliant.