Myth Happens

I have a T-shirt I don't wear much anymore because it is much-washed and the silkscreen process is fragile. I couldn't make it to a concert in Brooklyn in 2005; a fellow-student at Yale brought it back for me. It's this logo in slightly different colors. You can see the relevance. It was one of the nicest things that happened to me in New Haven.

The Mountain Goats don't only write classical songs. But they do title their releases things like Songs for Petronius (1992), Transmissions to Horace (1993), and Taking the Dative (1994), and I've linked a number of their songs over the years because I love them.

( The rivers were dry because it was late August and the bulls came out. )

John Darnielle just reblogged my poem "Homeric Hymn to Demophoon."

I was in no way expecting that pretty much ever.

handful_ofdust has Tumblr-posted one of my favorite artifacts. I first saw it in Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and illustrated with objects from Met's collections. It was photographed from a slightly different angle then, accompanying a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor:

I want to say your name, Naëtt! I want to make you an incantation, Naëtt!

Naëtt, her name has the sweetness of cinnamon it's the perfume where the wood of lemon trees sleeps.
Naëtt, her name has the sugared whiteness of coffee trees in flower
It's the savannah which blazes beneath the masculine love of the mid-day sun.
Name of dew cooler than shade and the tamarind tree
Cooler than the quickly-passing dusk when the heat of day is silenced.

Naëtt, it's the dry whirlwind and the dense clap of thunder.

Näett coin of gold coal of light my night and my sun
I your champion have made myself a sorcerer to name you
Princess of Elissa exiled from Fouta on a catastrophic day.

(I don't know the translator. The original text is here.)

It was "Fragment of a head of Queen Tiye. Yellow jasper. Egyptian, Dynasty 18 ca. 1417–1379 BC" when I read about it as a child. I see it's now "Fragment of the face of a queen," her identity as split and partial as the curve of her lips or her eyes lost to the smooth cleavage of stone.

It's still beautiful.