Tag Archives: News

Big News Coming

Not Another Jump ShotThe blog is taking the day off  today, Labor Day, but I am not.  I am preparing an upcoming month full of excitement. You may have thought we used up the thrills quotient this weekend, what with finding an unidentified orange blob in a tree (Photo essay here) and having my question to Hisham Matar asked on BBC Radio, but NOOO.  There’s more to come.

Tuesday: Announcing the Biggest Travel Literature Giveaway Ever.

Thursday: Travel Photo Thursday This is new to me–starting with last week’s photo of Uncle Sam at Hatch New Mexico, but it is a fun way to share with you some of my travel memories.

Friday: Africa–new and amazing memoir

Monday: Paris–a famous biographer explores 19th century Paris.

Wednesday: A visit to Etruscan Italy, led by a famous (and controversial) novelist.

Upcoming: Portugal, Wisconsin, China, England and more literary travels.

That brings us to October, when we’ll be announcing a NEW partnership that will bring you enticing content.

Oh dear, it is all so, so that I think I’m getting the vapors.  Quick–to the fainting couch–Gotta go lie down now.  See you tomorrow.

Fainting Couch

Travel to the New Acropolis Museum

The Acropolis Museum beneath the Parthenon
The Acropolis Museum beneath the Parthenon

Tomorrow, at long last, is the day. After a week of sneak-previews, the Acropolis Museum (having dropped the “new”, I believe) will open to the public–residents, tourists, everybody. The new web site opened with much fanfare. In typical Greek fashion, it was mostly unfinished as I write this in June 2009. Whole pages are blank. It reminds me of the houses you see in the countryside in Greece–concrete block walls partly finished with rebar sticking out the top. But eventually it will get done. The most essential page–where you buy tickets–is finished. And this is a big deal, because this is the first museum in Athens to offer tickets on the Internet.

Since I cannot travel to Greece for the opening, I’ve been traveling around the web gathering news.  So much is being written in newspapers, magazines and on web sites about the Acropolis Museum, about Greece, about the British Museum, about the British Museum vs. the Acropolis Museum…… that I decided just to hand you some references and let you go off to read these good sources, instead of risking repetitive redundancy. If you read nothing else, please read the Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens.

  • Reuters reports that 200 fragments are returned To Greece by various European countries. (https://reut.rs/2Q0gPNl)
  • A blog called “looting matters” that discusses the ethical concerns of collection of antiquities (https://lootingmatters.blogspot.com)
  • Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens weighs in.(https://bit.ly/2z9riMK)

Note: Hitchens wrote a book called  The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, and it is worth quoting a couple of paragraphs from his article in Vanity Fair, particularly since just yesterday we were talking about Euripedes and Sophocles, Medea and Antigone:

“When we think of Athens in the fifth century b.c., we think chiefly of the theater of Euripides and Sophocles and of philosophy and politics—specifically democratic politics, of the sort that saw Pericles repeatedly re-elected in spite of complaints that he was overspending. And it’s true that Antigone was first performed as the Parthenon was rising, and Medea not all that long after the temple was finished. From drama to philosophy: Socrates himself was also a stonemason and sculptor, and it seems quite possible that he too took part in raising the edifice.”

“If the Mona Lisa had been sawed in two during the Napoleonic Wars and the separated halves had been acquired by different museums in, say, St. Petersburg and Lisbon, would there not be a general wish to see what they might look like if re-united? If you think my analogy is overdrawn, consider this: the body of the goddess Iris is at present in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London, and the rear part is in Athens. And so on. This is grotesque.”