31. 10 Greek Songs

Mykonos - Fleet Foxes
Girls and Boys - Blur
California - Joni Mitchell
Temporarily like Achilles - Bob Dylan
Lesbia - Lucky Jim
Oedipus - Regina Spektor
Common People - Pulp
Greek Song - Rufus Wainwright
Olympian - Gene
Helen and Cassandra - Al Stewart

Yes, there are some extremely tenuous ones in here, but, you know, she came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge etc. and I could have put in the theme from Zorba the Greek or Chariots of Fire if I was that desperate to make up the numbers
I don't know too much about Greece, really, though I guess I used to know a fair bit about what Greece used to be like.
There are lots of good stories from back then I remember well, lots of literary terms I half-remember. Daphnis and Chloe, by Longus, I particularly recall. It was Hitler's favourite book, worryingly enough. I still have an essay on it and in the first paragraph I use the words milieu, oeuvre, terpnon, ophelimon, leitmotif and ekphrasis. I think I know what three of those mean, if pushed.
Also, I remember the tragedies and myths pretty well, and certain characters from tragedies, like Cassandra, who always seemed very interesting. I looked up the Al Stewart song above and gave it a bit of a listen -it's really terrible and the height of po-faced singer-songwriter naffness. Sometimes the 1970s seem even further back than the Trojan War.
Also, we went on a school trip to Greece which was fun - I smoked my first cigarette there and there were some naughty but comparatively tame deeds. The teacher who took us, he was a good teacher, but on the trip, he got the balance wrong of trying to be your mate and your teacher and ended up displaying a bit of indiscretion and hypocrisy.
So we could talk him without worrying that he might pick up his name in the murmuring, we referred to him as Reg, and cos we were pretentious cocks, we spent a lot of time coming up with limericks, one of them by Wieland I vaguely remember went

There once was a fellow called Reg
who liked to live life on the edge
but like good old Janus
he really did pain us -
one day he'll be pushed off a ledge

or something like that. Not bad, albeit totally cockish.

But, I remember a few weeks later when we were watching the tape back of the trip that Ed Rubin made on his camcorder, and by this stage we'd got over our dislike of said Reg, we saw this limerick being read out, and the teacher asked us jovially "Who is this Reg?" and our embarrassed/guilty/half-arsed response was a pretty painful moment of realisation on all sides.
What a thrilling story. Really glad I told that.
My favourite place in Greece was Delphi, the city at the centre of the Ancient World, home of the Omphalos Stone, in the spectacular shadow of Mt Parnassus, really beautiful, I got drunk and rude there, then we had a race in the ancient stadium, which I won, before puking my guts up. The balance of the sacred and the profane makes fools and heroes of us all.
Most famously, Delphi is home of the Pythian Oracle, the mouthpiece of Apollo. Apollo it was who cursed Cassandra, daughter of Priam, king of Troy, to prophesy truth but never be believed, to know how her city would be destroyed but to not be able to do anything about it.
Her fate was to be taken back to Mycenae as a concubine of Agamemnon, who would then be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia - Clytemnestra would then be murdered by their son Orestes, who was pursued by the Erinyes/Furies, before finally being given pardon - thus the cycle of violence came to an end - though the Welsh poet RS Thomas wrote a poem called 'No Truce With The Furies', alluded to and then quoted by The Manics in You Stole the Sun From My Heart. Phew.
Anyway, Cassandra, bearing all that in mind, is a great and fascinating literary character, too much for me to get to grips with, though I dug this out from when I was studying 'Troiades'

I can hear the drums of victory
sounding out their tale of sorrow
from the shoreline to the city
glory leads them hence tomorrow
and I sing my song of vengeance
though of course no one will listen
cursed to win only indifference -
this curse, for once, is blessing,
As I stand outside my madness
on a platform called compulsion.
Now my triumph is my failure
I can revel in revulsion.

I like the one about the poohsticks better.