Beauty of the classics

Beauty of the classics One of the pleasures of ageing is having the confidence to chat up attractive strangers. Seating myself yesterday on a packed southbound train to London, I found myself opposite a classically beautiful blonde in her twenties. Our other travelling companions were more of my age, and my peripheral vision was reporting pained wincing when I opened a conversation with the beauty. How embarrassing, he's Hitting On The Blonde. To my malicious pleasure, Fay turned out to a postgraduate classics student and we had an animated discussion of pre-Socratic psychology, Julian Jaynes, and Christopher Logue’s recreation of the Troy Story.

Fay, if you’re reading this and get in touch, I have a copy of Logue’s The Husbands for you, that I bought in an over-excited moment in Foyle’s, not noticing I already had it as part of War Music.

Also: August Kleinzahler and Christopher Logue will be reading at the LRB Bookshop on 1 November at 7pm. I’ve been immersed in Kleinzahler’s new collection, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: here’s the title poem:

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep

The markets never rest
Always they are somewhere in agitation
Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat
Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons
Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15J mainframes
Across the firmament
Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets
As they make their nightlong journeys
Across the oceans and steppes

Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information
Trembling in the claw of Scorpio
Not an instant, then shooting away
Like an enormous cloud of starlings

Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary
The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness
Food trucks, propane, tortured hearts
The reticent epistemologist parks
Gets out, checks the curb, reparks
Thunder of jets
Peristalsis of great capitals

How pretty in her tartan scarf
Her ruminative frown
Ambiguity and Reason
Locked in a slow, ferocious tango
Of if not, why not

by August Kleinzahler, from The Strange Hours Travelers Keep