Brown Station

Almirante Brown is an Argentine research station in Paradise Bay. I like the way the red jackets in the zodiac match the buildings.

Sunday bird blogging

Two king penguins in St. Andrew's Bay yesterday.

We left South Georgia last night, and are on our first of two fairly rough sea days heading to the Antarctic Peninsula. I will try to sort out some photos to post during this break, but unsurprisingly, I took so, so many and I've had very little chance to go through them apart from deleting the badly underexposed or overexposed or blurry mistakes.

I loved South Georgia. It is wild and beautiful and almost entirely uninhabited, and I am so glad that I finally got there.

Saturday reflections

A truck on the Upper West Side.

I had three separate sets of plumbers snaking my drains this week, trying to locate and fix some persistent clogs and leaks in the building. So I was stuck inside, unable to pee, and trying to create class materials while the machines rumbled and my apartment vibrated. It felt like a giant root canal, but without novocain.

When I was heading for the escalators after class today, I ran into two of my former students, then met three more in the lobby. All of them hugged me and told me that they miss me. I hadn't realized how much I needed a hug this week and I got five.

Saturday reflections

A quote I read today from Molly Housh Gordon, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Missouri:

I think humans in Western cultures often need to feel like there is an upward arc to history and some promised arrival, in order for there to be meaning in our lives.

But the place we are going is just around the sun on a miracle of a planet.

And I want to tell you that we are still alive in a world that is so beautiful and so brutal all at once, and always has been.

The Library of Celsus

This is the picture-postcard image from Ephesus, and it is even more spectacular in person. So much so that it makes me want to overcome my usual reluctance to post pictures of myself and give myself a little visual pinch. Yes, I was actually there!

The library was built in the second century, and was one of the three great libraries of the ancient world, after Alexandria and Pergamum. The library contents were burned in 262, and the building was destroyed by an earthquake in probably the 11th century. Archaeologists re-erected the facade in the 1970's; the rest of the building is still in ruins.

Knossos

Or, rather, the archaeology museum in Heraklion. Most of the art and artifacts worth seeing at the palace of Minos at Knossos are actually in the museum, like this fresco, rather than at the site itself.

The site is still very much worth visiting, but if you are expecting another Ephesus or Olympia, you will be very disappointed. It's much, much older, for one thing; parts of the palace were first built around 1900 BC, and it was destroyed in 1350 BC. So while the size of the site is mind-boggling—archaeologists now believe that the myth of the Labyrinth was based on the palace itself—a lot of what you will see is ditches and stone walls, with some reconstructed elements to give an idea of what the palace looked like a few thousand years ago.

The Triangle Factory Fire

Monday was the 113th anniversary of the Triangle fire. On March 25, 1911, 146 workers, almost all of them Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly teenagers and young women, died when a fire started on the eighth floor of a building on the east side of Washington Square. Some died when the single fire escape collapsed; many jumped to their deaths to escape the flames.

I knew about the fire, and I'd often walked by the building, but “work” is the theme of my class this semester and we've studied the fire. And there was so much I didn't know, about the fire ladders that only reached the sixth floor, about the lucky few who escaped by sliding down the cables in the elevator shaft, that the entire catastrophe lasted less than twenty minutes. Or that Max Blanck, one of the owners, who was acquitted of manslaughter because there was no proof he and his partner knew that the exit doors were locked, was arrested again in 1913 when locked doors were found at his new factory. He paid a $25 fine.

Or that Frances Perkins, who I knew only as the Secretary of Labor under FDR and the first woman to serve in the cabinet, was having tea with a friend on Washington Square and saw the fire. It had a profound effect on her and she quit her job at the consumer league to work for the state commission that investigated the fire. She later said that the fire was “the first day of the New Deal.”

I went to the commemoration on Monday, and also participated in the Chalk project. For the past twenty years on March 25 volunteers have written the names and ages of all 146 victims in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the buildings where they lived. My friend Jayne had two names and I had two names and we went from the Lower East Side below Delancey to East 12th Street, remembering Jennie, Bessie, Sarah and Josephine. We may have lacked artistry—getting down to the sidewalk and back up again was a challenge and chalk wasn't as easy to manipulate as I remembered—but it was a strangely moving experience.

Saturday reflections

A Turkish diversion—I just found this photo from Ephesus. This is the entrance to the site, with some of the ruins reflected in the windows of the ticket office.

Not anachronistic at all

As we walked through Al Balad, we constantly had to jump aside to avoid the golf carts that the construction crews, and occasionally other, unidentified but obviously official, types were driving. And when the walk was over and it was time for us to meet the bus taking us back to the ship, we also went by golf cart. I took the picture on the right through the windshield as we careened around corners at a speed I hadn't realized golf carts could achieve, while the call to prayer from multiple mosques echoed through the streets.

That's actually my favorite memory of Jeddah. (The horse-drawn carriages at Petra have also been replaced with golf carts, and while I appreciate how much more efficient the carts must be, not to mention cheaper to feed, I did miss the carriages.)

Saturday reflections

A window in central Jeddah.

The Seven Wonders of the World

This is the view from the Basilica of Saint John in Selçuk. The single column that you can see on the left-hand side is most of what remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Looking at this picture made me realize that on this trip I saw the locations of three of the seven wonders: the Temple of Artemis, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

They're always coming up with new versions of Seven Wonders, but the original is the only one I ever remember. I've seen the Great Pyramid, the only one of the wonders still standing, and I've seen where the Lighthouse of Alexandria was, so that's five of seven. I'm almost certainly never going to Iraq and no one knows whether the Hanging Gardens of Babylon even existed, so unless I happen to find myself in Bodrum, Türkiye, where the omnipresent Knights of St. John used stones from the famous Mausoleum to fortify their castle, five of seven is all I'm going to be able to check off. And that's fine with me.

Stations of the cross

On the other side of the mountaintop, there's a giant cross, and the path leading up to it has 14 marble shrines representing the Stations of the Cross.

I don't think I've thought about the Stations—representing the events in the Passion of Christ—for decades, but when I was in grammar school we went to the church every Friday afternoon during Lent to do the stations. It started with the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death, and ended with the Fourteenth, Jesus is laid in the sepulchre, and there was a set of prayers we recited for each station. Our family bible had a set of fairly disturbing and graphic paintings (I used to have nightmares about the Eleventh Station, Jesus is nailed to the cross) but the church just had fourteen metal plaques. I actually liked the Stations of the Cross liturgy, the chanted prayers and the Benediction at the end with incense and music, and especially coming out into the sunshine afterwards and getting to go home early.

I left the church intellectually and emotionally when I was still in high school, but you never forget the rituals. When I took the picture of the Third Station, I knew automatically that it depicted Jesus falling for the first time.

The refectory

This was also the scene of a mass slaughter during the battle—there are bullet holes in the door and you can see the marks of both swords and bullets on the tables.

And I had a hard time with that. I can understand wanting to memorialize what happened here, but this is still a working monastery. I imagine generations of monks eating at those tables, looking at the bullet holes, and it doesn't seem likely that they would have been filled with warm feelings for their fellow man.

It may be that I had been thinking too much about Gaza to feel comfortable with one more long-standing historical grudge, or to understand wanting to preserve every last bullet hole. Maybe how we remember is as important as what we remember.

Bases of Zanes

One last thing I found really interesting at Olympia. These pedestals outside the entrance to the stadium originally held statues of Zeus (“Zanes” was the plural of Zeus in the local dialect.)

The statues were paid for by the fines imposed on athletes caught cheating in the games, and were inscribed with their names. All of the athletes had to walk past them on their way into the stadium, so they were a reminder of the shame of cheating.

The pediments

Pictures can't really capture the impact of these; when you walk into the room with these pediments on opposite walls, it's jaw-dropping.

The eastern pediment, on top, depicts a chariot race, while the western pediment depicts a well-known battle between humans and centaurs (Apollo, in the center, is looking at the humans indicating that he's on their side.) I'm not a classicist, though I like knowing all the mythological details behind the art, but in this case, the pediments could have depicted an early version of a particulary contentious Black Friday sale and I would love them just as much.

Mycenaean mythology

As you climb up to the citadel, this is the view from outside the walls.

In mythology, Mycenae was founded by Perseus, who landed here one day while he was riding around on Pegasus.

I prefer to think of Agamemnon, and imagine him striding off to the coastline on his way to retrieve his wayward sister-in-law, with Clytemnestra glaring daggers at his retreating back.

Mycenae

The citadel on the acropolis.

I really had very little idea of the historical—as opposed to mythological—significance of Mycenae (apart from remembering it as the place where Schliemann found that cool gold mask).

In fact the period from 1600-1100 BC in Greek history is called Mycenaean because the city was the major power in southern Greece. By the end of this period, though, it was part of the general Bronze Age Collapse in the eastern Mediterranean, and though it was partially rebuilt and had a brief renaissance during the Hellenistic era, its glory days were over. It's been a ruin for far longer than it was a thriving city.

I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon

This is what the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann is supposed to have wired to the King of Greece after finding this mask at Mycenae.

It's still referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon, even though it's from the 16th century BC, at least 300-400 years before the Trojan War. (And there's no proof that a king by that name ever existed outside of mythology.)

This mask in the museum at Mycenae is a replica—the orginal is in Athens—but I didn't care. I loved reading about archaeology when I was a kid—Howard Carter and King Tut's tomb, Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos, Heinrich Schliemann and Troy and Mycenae. Having a chance to gaze upon that face myself gave me goosebumps.

Omphaloi

The omphalos on the right is in the museum at Delphi. It is thought to be a Hellenistic or Roman copy of the omphalos inside the Temple of Apollo; the pattern on the stone represents the net that the omphalos was wrapped in.

The stone on the left is the one displayed by the temple at the site. I've read that it's a copy of the one in the museum, although the sign in the museum says that that one is the copy; other sources say that there were probably several different stones at the site. It may just be that Mother Gaia, the Earth, had an unusually generous navel, and collected navel stones the way mortal belly buttons attract lint.

Aqaba

I'm staying at a very nice hotel, one of several right on the water. I have a balcony, and can look out over the beach to the Red Sea.

But the hotel is empty. There are a few families staying here and there were half a dozen kids playing in the pool this afternoon, but when I went down to the beach to walk through the water (it was too cold to swim) I was the only person there. There were several dozen lounge chairs set up, but it was just me and the attendant. I think I'm the only foreign tourist here, except for one man I saw at breakfast. When I ate lunch on the terrace, I was the only person there (at table 65!) and I was relieved to find some nuts I took from the cruise ship so I don't have to go down to dinner.

I'd like to come back some time when things are calmer. Just because no one is bombing them doesn't mean these people aren't also being hurt by the war. As it is, I'm happy to be flying home tonight, and very conscious of how lucky I am to be able to go.