Classical Pop
New York Magazine has an interview with Iggy Pop, inter alia:
You describe the album as an “alternative score” to Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 sci-fi novel, The Possibility of an Island. What else have you been reading lately?
I read The Jazz Ear, by Ben Ratliff, and I just finished Vermeer’s Hat, by Timothy Brook. And there’s a killer translation of Herodotus out now. I enjoy reading about the Assyrians and the Medians and the Egyptians. I get off on that shit.
This comes just as we were discussing on the Latinteach list some modern songs with a Classical bent … Iggy has a couple that I can recall off the top of my head: Caesar and Curiosity,
He also once wrote a piece on Gibbon for Classics Ireland:
http://www.ucd.ie/cai/classics-ireland/1995/Pop95.html
As a book agent a decade or so ago, I represented a former wife of James Osterberg [and knew girls he dated], particularly with regard to contracts with the renowned Barney Rosset.
Around here, which is Downtown New York, a lot of folks think the Igster is a jerk — I mean, musicians, artists, writers, and such, are infantilistically competitive. If I’m a duck, this water rolls off me.
In my main life I read Rogueclassicism.
I want to know which new translation Iggy Pop thinks is killer.
Got any candidates?
I assumed he’s referring to the Landmark Herodotus, translated by Robert Strassler … it just came out in the last month or so.
Okay. Good. I’m just now reading an essay in New York Review of Books online that incorporates both The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated from the Greek by Andrea L. Purvis, with an introduction by Rosalind Thomas Pantheon, 953 pp., $45.00 and Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV by David Asheri, Alan Lloyd, and Aldo Corcella, edited by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno, with a contribution by Maria Brosius.
Many thanks.
For anyone interested in the NYRevBoks essay, here’s the slink link…
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21370
Have a fine day…