SYP Says

Phil in Chainmail (aka The Lost Spartan)

This morning, I woke up to a message from my friend, Phil Terry.

I had a chance to visit the offices of ThinkGeek last week.

They put me in some chainmail, a helmet and gave me a sword and took some photos (with my long-sleeve shirt, watch and suit pants on!).

The helmet I wore was real metal and very heavy - and the chainmail was also real metal and hard to get on and off. But once it was on, it was very cool. I was ready to join the Spartans at Thermopylae. ;-)

I suppose most people nowadays know the Battle of Thermopylae from the recent movie 300 which was based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name. You educated types would know it from the Greek historian, Herodotus, and his book The Histories, widely considered to be the first work of history in Western Literature. It tells the story of the war between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Book VII (Polymnia) details the story of Leonidas I and the Battle of Thermopylae.

For those of you who know Phil, you know he is a HUGE student of the classics and ancient history. He is also quite the persuasive fellow and a year or two ago, he got me to re-read The Odyssey, as well as The Histories. The first time I read the former, I was in school and translated it from Latin to English. On the one hand, I got to know some of the key passages very well. OTOH, I never really enjoyed the full story end-to-end. I had actually never read the latter until recently and I highly highly recommend Robert Strassler's version, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. It is perfect for the modern reader who is not a scholar with wonderful maps and simple, clear translation. We met Mr. Strassler at The Met when we read his Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian Wars--he is a very cool guy who is devoting his retirement to making the classics more accessible. (A pic of us at our Met dinner is here.)

If reading something a bit lighter is more your fare, try the Latin poet, Catullus. His work is short, often humorous, and quite shocking and explicit in its day, focusing mainly on matters of love, sex, and everyday life.

For more pictures of Phil Terry, The Lost Spartan, Phil in Chainmail pix are on Flickr. You are also welcome to join Phil in reading the classics. For more info, check out The Reading Odyssey.

And if you must have that chainmail shirt, get it on ThinkGeek.com (hint: check out the guy in the Action Shot!).

Fri 8/18: Back to NYC DAY 3

Waking up this morning was really tough. I guess st aying up until 5AM will do that to ya. I'm able to peel myself out of bed in time to meet my account reps at Hitwise, a competitive research firm that we've been using.

I met Loren & Keith at our place of choice, The Spotted Pig, a gastropub in the West Village. The last time I was there (also with Keith because The Spotted Pig has basically become his living room), I saw P. Diddy. This time, I was sitting in what was known as Bill Clinton's booth...need I say more. Anyway, the real reason I love this place is the gnudi. It's totally heart-stopping and if you ate it more than like once a year, you'd probably keel over dead from eating that alone. The last time I saw Loren was at the Internet Retailer show in Chicago a few months ago where she met me carrying a giant bag and smelling strangely of garlic. Why, you ask? Because she had brought a dozen everything bagels from NYC to help me out of my I miss Manhattan doldrums. What a sweetie!

Fortified by gnudi and the best chocolate torte in the world, it was off to The Met to meet my fellow book club members for a day of Greek art and literature. The Reading Odyssey was started by my good friend Phil Terry, CEO of the customer experience firm Creative Good and his best friend Pat Wictor, a blues slide guitarist. Last year, they decided to celebrate 20 years of knowing each other with a commitment to read the classics together and in typical Phil-style, they opened it up for others to join.

We were meeting at The Met to do a literary tour of the Ancient Near East and bring to life the first three books we'd read over the last year--Herodotus's The Histories, Homer's Odyssey, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The first part of our day we went through galleries and a packet that Phil had put together as an informal guide. We touched on Assyria, the Trojan War, Babylon, the Persian Empire, the Scythians and King Croesus of Lydia.

 

At this point, our dogs were pretty tired, so we went to the members-only area upstairs for cocktails and met up with Horton A. Johnson, MD, our private tour guide for the next part of our Greek adventure. I have met few people as passionate as he was about Ancient Greece, so it was a treat to have him show us everything from Cycladic art to Roman copies of Greek statues. Horton is so into Ancient Greece that a few years ago he published an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine about the foot ailment suffered by the hero Philoctetes during the Trojan War (depicted in a lekythos or small oil vase from the 5th century BCE at The Met).

Horton kept trying to show us just one more thing, and who were we to argue? But finally our tour was at an end and we went up to the Trustee Dining area to have dinner. We had a private room for the 7 of us--6 book club members plus  Robert Strassler, the editor of the Landmark Edition of Thucydides we were reading. It was so awesome to have him with us at dinner. It is so rare to be able to spend hours with an expert like him. We were able to ask whatever we wanted--from the differences between Herodotus and Thucydides to what lessons we can learn today from Ancient Literature.

We actually closed down The Met. Closing down bars is nothing new for me (don't mind me, mum), but closing down The Metropolitan Museum of Art? We left at 10 after 11pm and the guard had to escort me and Phil out. It was an amazing experience to walk through the museum after-hours, completely by ourselves. The only noise was our shoes clicking on the marble floor. I kept trying to walk extra slow so I could look at the priceless art in the near-dark (all of the overhead lights had already been turned off) but unfortunately Phil walks faster than I do and he apparently didn't get my hint. :)

8 hours at The Met--a record for me! It felt good to exercise my mind--I probably needed it after having killed several hundred thousand brain cells from the partying I'd done the night before. lol

Check out all of my NYC trip pix.

Stanislaw Lem & Ali Farke Toure R.I.P.

Two greats of music and literature recently passed away: Stainslaw Lem and Ali Farka Touré . Lem was a Polish science-fiction author known for his dry humor and versatility and Touré was a renowed blues singer and guitarist from Mali.

Many of Lem's books have not been translated into English. I was lucky enough to find a translation of THE STAR DIARIES a collection of satiric SF tales  starring Ijon Tichy, intrepid explorer and space hero, in a rundown bookstore in New Delhi back in 1992. From that point on, I was hooked. Lem's stories are philosophical, imaginative, absurd, and comic. One of his best known works, SOLARIS, was adapted into film twice--once by Russian director Andrei Tarkovksy in 1972 (try his movie STALKER) and much more recently by Steven Soderbergh starring George Clooney (don't bother watching this version--it turns the novel into a romance in space which it's not).

Lem is one of my all-time favorites. For more about him and his work, check out this Interview with Lem and Tribute to Lem by another fan .

Ali Farka Touré was often known as the "African John Lee Hooker" and his music bridged traditional Malian music with American blues. His style was hypnotic and he often sang in one of several African languages, including Fula. My favorite album of his is THE SOURCE although all of them are great. I'm not sure where I first heard about him, but I've been listening to Touré for over a decade and it's sad to know that there won't be any new music  of his to enjoy.

For more about Ali Farka Touré, check out this BBC Obituary and Bio at World Music Central.