[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

I read that 5^th century BC Athenian book sellers probably sold supplementary Sappho material. My first thought was that they weren’t book sellers yet. Then I mentally shuffled through alternate phrasing like scroll sellers, literary merchants, and pre-codex barkers, sympathized with the source, and decided there was no harm in book sellers. I had just been complaining that streaming services are killing album liner notes.

If you’ve ever read the liner notes accompanying the Steely Dan album The Royal Scam, you’ve missed a gem. There’s no greater rendering of coked up Los Angeles Me Gen slimeballs to be had. Read that and realize, of course they later wrote “Hey Nineteen.” That doesn’t make “Hey Nineteen” a bad song or The Royal Scam a bad album, it just gives insight into the minds behind the music, fuels personal distaste, and serves as another go-to in the the argument about judging the art separately from the coked up artist. Album art is still a going concern, relegated to iTunes or Amazon Music thumbnail icon art, but still. Liner notes are gone. I figured I sensed an million-dollar idea opening, but found a site already dedicated to collecting and archiving record art, scribblings, and really deep thoughts from Justin and Lance. And another. Neither seems to be raking in dough.

Sappho wrote lyrics meant to be sung to accompanying music. In her work she mentions specific types of harps, lyres, and flutes and then in art—she tops whatever they call the archaeological Billboards List for most appearances on recovered vases, potsherds and whole, for a female poet, Mediterranean category—with a variety of instruments. The ancients didn’t have sheet music, or if they did, we don’t have any. We have flecks of her metered verse. That combined with knowledge of what instruments were around probably results in more arguments than certainty of what a Sappho concert would have sounded like, but it’s fun for those drawn to figure out such things. Now, the source that mentioned supplemental material said the booksellers probably sold such things. “Probably” means some contemporary or classical source threw out a reference telling us such things existed, but we don’t have one to look at. That must be tantalizing to scholars.