“Another middle-tier writer of fantasy, I believe, the sort known more for being prolific than good. Her works include the juvenile So You Want To Be a Wizard and its sequels, a bunch of media novelisations (Star Trek, SeaQuest), and a few miscellaneous forgettable novels.”
…And almost immediately, so that the memory makes me chuckle, the voice of the Poetess speaks up in the background. Plutarch and Aristides suggest that Fragment 68 was directed at some well-to-do woman who had dissed her. In any case, you get a sense that Sappho was in one of her crankier moods when she wrote the poem of which this fragment is all we have left:
— You may be rich, madam, but when you’re dead
no one’s going to remember you:
you’ve got no part in the Muses,
no right to the Pierean rose.
Nameless and forgotten you’ll wander the Underworld,
just one more shadow among the shadowy dead…
My, my, those hypersensitive artistic types! They just take themselves sooooo seriously… Anyway, thanks to the journal-writer for a second’s worth of satori.
…Meanwhile, I need tea. Then I have to finish work on a reading for a friend’s wedding (Peter’s done the first half of it) and after that, do the final work on the book at hand… And after that, go online again and start looking for a new video card. The fan on the old one is failing, and after the weekend replacement of the old noisy PC case with a lovely glossy new Lian Li “silent” one, the whining, zzzzzing, urk-urk-urking noises that damn fan makes are endlessly more noticeable than they were before…and they’re driving me nutso.
