#yeah this is the sequel (?) to the other poem Prometheus

[slow-clap-processors]

Artemis

Chell said nothing.

And that was her choice.

But if she had the last word, she’d say:

“Yes.”

“You didn’t ask,

If I wanted to go;

Not that I’m going to correct you.

Because if I had a voice it would be screaming,

I deserve better.

"It’s no wonder the portals are orange and blue,

One behind my eyes and one inside you;

Gateways leading to different parts of the same room

We both know how this puzzle is solved;

Just look away,

A click of the gun and it’s finished.

The sound of the radio echoing after my footsteps.

"I am a predator and these tests are my prey-

That’s what you said. I don’t know what to say.

A huntress? oh please,

You make me sputter in outrage and weak in the knees-

I always knew the cake was a lie.

Don’t worry.

No one was fooled by my act either.

"I am the moon, and I am not.

They banished me there and I have turned it against them.

I love it like a crow loves it’s nest,

High in a maple tree,

Fabricated from plastics and pure poison.

What I mean is, I’m used to bad dreams,

Limited breath, and things which are not as they seem.

"I don't sleep, which is fine

I don't prefer my nights to be restful;

Maybe I should.

But maybe instead,

You could turn off the emancipation grill,

And we could grow seedlings in the companion cubes

So they'll always have someone to sing to them.

"Don’t scrape the floors

Of the vines and trees,

Don’t wash away your scars for me.

I will banish the crows, but don’t ask me

To sing for you.

Don’t look at me like they do,

Like i’m some slice of delicious

Vanilla,

Crazy,

Cake-

I promise, I don’t taste nice.

"Notice how you never use my name?

Look me in the eyes,

Coward, Titan, I know

Your cameras will never let you forget.

A girl could never dream of a prettier headstone."

GLaDOS’s sister poem: Prometheus

[catilinas]

hey Tate :^) randomly popping up to say that i just finished both 'The king must die' and 'The bull from the sea' in (almost) one go instead of working/eating/sleeping. and i can't thank you enough for recommending these books, the first one especially! so... maybe you have some other myth retellings or historical novels in mind to recommend?

hi!!! i’m so glad you enjoyed them / that i’m not the only person who felt like that reading them. the king must die especially Yeah. holy shit.

for Other Recommendations. the few ~myth retellings~ that i’ve read alas mostly are not novels. the genre of ‘myth retelling’ novels < the genre of weird long poems that Do Things with specific ancient texts rather than ‘myths’. but i do read a Lot of historical novels so i definitely have recommendations there! as long as you care about like. the roman republic. anyway here’s a list:

memorial - alice oswald. a ‘translation’ of the iliad, but only the death scenes (often just lists of names!) and the epic similes. it frames itself as yknow. a memorial. to the dead minor characters of the iliad but imo it also speaks to the futility of epic memorialisation. i have read the two page introduction approximately One Million Times.

nobody - alice oswald. you will be missing out if you don’t read this one against memorial. it’s a ‘retelling’ of ‘the odyssey’ and a lot of other myths that involve the sea at any point. a lot of the oresteia too. but it also never names any of its characters or indicates where each story starts or ends. oswald’s best poetry is always about water and this book is Mostly About Water so it snaps supremely.

war music - christopher logue. similar concept but completely different vibe to memorial. also a king poetic Selective reinterpretation of the iliad, but focusing mostly on combat scenes. i’m a big fan of the deliberate anachronisms and framing of the poem through camera angles / film terminology like it’s such a sexy way to ‘translate’ the omniscient moving narrator. AND it pushes you towards a v different emotional response than oswald like memorial is lowkey War And The Pity Of War (The Poetry Is In The Pity) while war music is like. uncomfortably fun. i think comparisons of ancient epic to modern (war-focused) action films can be Lazy or Done Badly (thinking only abt Violent Action Scenes Made Heroic and not the role of the listener/reader/viewer) but the elements of that in war music Work! also agamemnon gets called a piece of shit

tv men: hektor - anne carson. the spectatorship element of war music made more obvious and on a much smaller scale (it’s just one poem in a sequence). also v cool things going on w different degrees of Looseness of translation stacked inside one another

autobiography of red - anne carson. based on the fragments of stesichorus’ geryoneis but bcs the original is so incomplete it can’t really be a ‘retelling’ so much as an imagining of what the poem could and definitely Could Not be. technically a novel but A Novel In Verse. also one of my favourite books of all time ever. it’s in third person but the claustrophobia of the narrative style / the way the protagonist is often closed off to parts of his own thoughts is Weirdly Similar to theseus in the king must die? ALSO geryon ends up with a photography motif. this time we are also using it to think about the subjectivity of which fragments of a poem end up surviving / what gets cut off outside the edge of the photograph

red doc> - anne carson. rip so much carson But this is the sequel to autobiography of red. what happens when you live past the end of your myth. namedrops the battle of ager falernus. prometheus is there. (and also: h of h play - anne carson. i didn’t know whether to include this because it is A Play. like it’s a ‘translation’ (loosest sense of the word) of euripides’ hercules. but geryon (or a version of him) is there for long enough that it counts as the final installment of autobiography of red. to me.)

lavinia - ursula le guin. the second half of the aeneid told from the perspective of lavinia. BUT what sets it apart from other What If Myth—But Woman ‘retellings’ is like. v close engagement with the aeneid as a story and specifically A Story Written By An Actual Author who created his fictionalised past in very deliberate directions. like it doesn’t just treat the aeneid as an authorless body of mythic stories. vergil’s ghost is a character also. fate is real also. ALSO the setting in The Mythic Past As It Becomes The Historical Past + le guin’s decision to include vaguely supernatural elements but never the gods directly is like. very similar to the texture of worldbuilding in renault’s theseus books.

fire from heaven - mary renault. speaking of her. she wrote a whole bunch of other historical novels which you might like! this is the only other one i’ve read so far though. it’s the first of a trilogy about alexander the great. alexander has lot like theseus in that they are both deeply fucked up little guys :-)

dancing with the lion series - jeanne reames (@jeannereames hi 👋). also about the early life of alexander the great. i’ve only read the first one of these (again) but like. i read the whole thing in a day. the level of historical detail is also absolutely nuts. which makes sense bcs reames is an alexander specialist. but still!!!

cicero trilogy - robert harris. welcome to the rome zone. this is the series that got me into roman history :/ it follows the life of cicero from the perspective of his secretary tiro (the inventor of a shorthand system!). It Makes Roman Politics Fun I Promise. for real though these books manage to cover a very complicated period while also not getting bogged down in it And showing you cicero’s Wit. like i know i’m tumblr user catilinas but these books mean i can never really dislike cicero

roma sub rosa series - steven saylor. but if any books Could make me dislike cicero. well. these are a Long series of detective novels set at the end of the roman republic. catiline is there And He’s Sexy. you WILL get invested in the fictional detective’s family drama. also the author is gay and writes lgbt characters in a way that like. actually thinks about what that means In Ancient Rome. catilina’s riddle (book 3) is one of my favourite books of all time ever. also congrats to saylor for writing detective novels which really get into the function of the figure of the detective / Who Is The Detective Really Helping Here / cicero is a massive bastard etc

masters of rome - colleen mccullough. i’m just going to link the review that convinced me and also my entire family to read these. they are terrible they are amazing marcus livius drusus is there. they are massive they cover almost one hundred years of history sulla is sexy and kills people and you will know so much of the minutiae of roman politics If you get through them all

the key / the lock / the door in the wall - benita kane jaro. the key and the door in the wall are a duology about marcus caelius rufus and his relationships w catullus and then caesar. and also clodia. the lock was written later but i’d chronologically in between, and is about cicero and his conflict with clodius. BUT also all three books repeat A Lot of the same events, just from slightly different angles. the unreliability of the narrator helps / makes this v fun. the prose is A Vibe also a lot of the focus is less abt the political situation than like. caelius being young-ish as the republic collapses.

attis - tom holland. legally i have to include this :/ i don’t even know how to describe it like it’s a cryptid of a book you might have to get it through interlibrary loans. it’s not even brilliant it’s just so so weird and also the author cannot explain why bcs he can’t remember what happens in it. it’s about catullus (archeology student?) in a modernised alternate history version of rome (90s london?) being involved in a mystery involving ritual murders (tom holland HAS read girard. if you were wondering). there are also clowns.

hostis - vale aida ( @valeaida hi also 👋). first in an in progress series abt an alternate history version of the second punic war. i read the whole thing in a day instead of writing one of my essays earlier this year :/ have you ever read livy/silius and been like uurfgjhgh the narrative parallels between the lives of hannibal and scipio…… What If That Was A Book. you will go nuts over the barcids

augustus - john edward williams. my highschool philosophy teacher recommended this to me :-) it’s a kind of epistolary novel In That it’s framed as a collection of (imaginary) texts like. letters and biographies and memoirs, all showing Sides but never the entirety of The Emperor Augustus over the course of his life. i read this around the same time as A Source Book for the augustan period and was like. yeah.