Made 3 worms in school called Ulysess, Critchley and Horace (took names off MPHFPC). heres how if anyones wondering - its pretty easy:
Get them pens that have the four inks or any pen. Get the spring out if youre using another. if youre using a four inks, stay with me now. You get a compass stabber, preferably a small one thats still sharp, and stab it into the little thing. pull up and take out the ink cartridge+take out spring.
Get the spring and get some paper. draw a face, get some glue over it and shove it on one end of the spring. i usually push it down on the table. if you want a leg on each part of the spring, fold some paper, stick it on etc etc! <3
In the nearly three months I’ve been in this fascinating city, I’ve met plenty of rather high-spirited people. But it was not until I visited the monastery at Mount Athos in northeastern Greece that I encountered the happiest person I’ve ever met.
I’d traveled from Athens with my friend Anthony Papadimitriou, who had very kindly arranged the trip to the Holy Mountain, as it is called here. We share an abiding interest in monasticism, although neither of us is fully monkish in our habits.
We had been on the road since very early in the morning when we left the port of Ouranopoli, the City of Heaven, in a small white and orange boat with a captain named Yorgos. The only way of approaching the long rocky peninsula of Mount Athos is by water, and it requires a special permit. I had it in my hand, stamped with the seal of the Holy Mountain, with four handwritten signatures. Anthony told me that the monks had checked out my credentials and noticed somewhere online that I was described as an atheist, which is not exactly true. But apparently that was better than being Catholic. On my permit, it read “Anglican,” which made me smile.
To understand contemporary Greece, and what connects it (and fails to connect it) with antiquity, you have to consider the Orthodox Church, which still has considerable ideological power over Greek life, for good or ill. Christianity is the connecting tissue in the body of Hellenism, for it is here that religious traditions and, most important, the Greek language was preserved. Mount Athos, the spiritual epicenter of Orthodoxy, is an entirely self-governing monastic republic, with its own parliament. Legally part of the European Union, Athos is an autonomous state with its own jurisdiction, like the Vatican, although the monks would not appreciate that analogy: The Orthodox Church has still not forgotten the Catholic sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Our next location is a mere 100 steps from where I’m writing these essays. I pass it every day on my way to and from the library. It is the Monument of Lysicrates, built around 334 B.C.E., just about the time Aristotle returned to Athens to found his Lyceum. I always pause there take in the view and watch the many seemingly well-fed and contented cats scattered around the place. If you let your eyes drift up from the monument, your vision is seized by the vast sacred rock of the Acropolis. It is skin-pinchingly sublime.
Indeed, New Yorkers might experience a feeling of déjà vu or double vision with this monument because you can find not one, but two copies of it atop the San Remo apartment building on Central Park West, just north of the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and died. The monument was also widely copied elsewhere.
The original Monument of Lysicrates is composed of a 9.5-foot-square limestone foundation topped with a 13-foot-high cylindrical edifice. There are six Corinthian columns, thought to be the earliest surviving examples of that style, made from marble from Mount Pentelicus, about 15 miles northeast of Athens. These support a sculpture divided into three bands that carry an inscription commemorating Lysicrates — a wealthy patron of the arts of whom little else is known — and a frieze depicting the adventures of the god Dionysus and some pirates whom he transformed into dolphins. The god sits caressing a panther as some satyrs serve him wine, while others, with torches and clubs, drive the pirates into the sea.
...To be sure, classical Athens was a patriarchal, imperialist society based on slaveholding. Yet the figures who are silenced in the public realm are represented in the fictions of the theater, as if the democracy that was denied to those figures publicly is somehow extended to them theatrically. As the classicist Edith Hall rightly writes, tragedy is polyphonic: It both legitimizes the chauvinism of Athenian power and glory at the same time as giving voice to that which undermines it.
If we fail to understand the polyphony of antiquity, then we also might be tempted to pick up a can of spray paint and begin daubing monuments with graffiti.
Since we began our little tour I have tried to take you to some of the less obvious sites around the ancient city, often at the periphery. But now I want to head right to the center of it: the Agora. This was a large public square, humming with human activity — shopping, gossip, dramatic performances, military and religious processions — and surrounded on all sides by buildings, including many of the key institutions of Athenian democracy.
Excavations since the 1930s have uncovered the Agora, an open green area, about 30 acres sloping down northwest from the rock of the Acropolis. What I most like about it is its feeling of space, the sense of absence that triggers the imagination and allows one to conjure the ruined city in the mind’s eye.
The reason for coming here on this particular day was entirely selfish: It was my birthday and I wanted to return to my favorite site in Athens and visit the ruins of the house of the source of my name: Simon the Cobbler. He also pretended to be a philosopher of sorts.
We arrived close to the entrance to the Agora as it opened. A railway line, built in 1891, bisects the northern edge of the site, emitting a low, pleasant rumble (not the anxiety-inducing squeal of the New York subway). The train line covers the remains of the Altar of the Twelve Gods and runs right alongside the Stoa of Attalos, rebuilt in the 1950s, which houses the small and rather lovely Agora Museum. With standard Athenian counterpoint, colonnades of bright white columns abut garish trackside graffiti. The contradictions reach further back: King Attalos of Pergamon was a student of the philosopher Carneades in the second century B.C. and the presumably grateful alumnus gave his university town the gift of a shopping mall, with 42 shops in the stoa rented out by the city. Everything was for sale in the Agora.
But the only thing that is helping me with the tedium of my own company at the moment is the grimmest, dirtiest, most obscene forms of humor. My suggestion to you, dear readers, is that you get off your social media hamster wheel, stop torturing or Cuomo-ing yourselves with the news, and think of the most inappropriate joke that you know, and just keep saying it, developing, riffing on it, extending it in the wildest possible ways. You can even do this with your friends and lovers, if you still have them. Try it for five minutes, or 15 minutes. After some days of practice, see if you can get to 25 minutes. Eventually, the obscenity will lose all meaning and become something like an experience of the transcendental, a pure light-winged vapor, like a dwarf Greek sparrow or a miniature shrimp. All I am saying is that this might help a lot more than the self-promoting whinging and dubious consolation of philosophers.
Simon Critchley: “Sorry to Disappoint (I knew I should have been a hairdresser)” The Quarantine Files: Thinkers in Self-Isolation - Los Angeles Review of Books
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