More Fun Than A Pile o’ Cats

This past week was so full! It wasn’t just that we did a lot (we did); it was that there was such a variety of things. Bring it on!

Last weekend, Christina and I met up with our friend Maria (see below for more on Maria!) for a hike in Kaisariani, a gorgeous wooded mountain region on the eastern edge of the city of Athens. The mountainside has a Byzantine monastery, glorious views of Athens, and miles and miles of hiking trails. We saw hikers, mountain bikers, trail runners, and at least one film crew while we were there. I’m certain Christina and I will make it back for another hike before the end of April.

Tuesday, 25 March was Greek Independence Day, and we made a point of walking down to the center of the celebratory parade with the students. We positioned ourselves about a block away from the Parliament building and Syntagma Square, which is the real epicenter of the event. Though we arrived about an hour before things kicked off, we missed our opportunity to stake out a spot right on the curb. It was difficult to get a good view (the photo above is of half a dozen enormous main battle tanks, by the way), but it was a fantastic day for people watching, too. I realized while we were experiencing the parade that I don’t have much experience with parades of this sort outside the U.S., and though American 4th of July parades have military aspects to them, they are not usually actual displays of current military strength. But this was unit after unit of the Greek military marching, driving, and flying through Athens. There were jeeps, armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers, surface-to-air missile launchers, and flight after flight of low-altitude military aircraft flyovers. You saw all of this equipment, but more pointedly you felt it in your chest. It made me think a lot about how the Greeks experience the parade and what they are thinking and feeling three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and two months into a very different NATO dynamic (to put it mildly).

On Wednesday, we all met up near the sundial inside the Athenian National Garden for a plant walk guided by Maria Christodoulou (Bucknell ’05), The Greek Herbalist. As I have mentioned before, the National Garden is where Christina and I often get our runs in, because there are miles of trails inside all of the fantastic greenery. But before our tour this past week, we didn’t know much about the greenery itself. Maria focused more on the various tree species in the park, because we’re not quite at the right season for herbs. I’m generally not one of those folks who can identify trees for you when we’re out and about, so I was grateful to learn some new things!

We met this fellow inside the museum for the Kerameikos Archaeological Site on Thursday. The Kerameikos was both the potters neighborhood of ancient Athens (due to the rich supply of clay from the nearby river), as well as its graveyard.

After spending time in the small but fascinating museum of Kerameikos, we toured the site itself, where our archaeologist Prof. Scahill asked the students to make more connections between the art and architecture of the monuments we were seeing with the other ancient structures they have already studied. Does that square grave monument looming above the students look like one of the Parthenon metopes (the centauromachy, in particular), or maybe part of the panathenaic games Parthenon relief? I think it does.

Last Friday we visited the Archelon Sea Turtle Protection Society in Glyfada, a coastal suburb of Athens. We had the chance to learn all about the three species of sea turtle that visit Greece’s coastal waters and in particular the species that nests on the beaches. Archelon is essentially a turtle hospital and rehabilitation facility, and it was amazing and uplifting to see people taking direct action to keep threatened population alive and to help it thrive again.

Maybe I’ve already mentioned that Athens is a city of cats. (There are a lot of dogs here, too, but very few neighborhood strays.) I’m sure lots of folks have cats at home here, but cats are everywhere on the streets and in the parks, and it seems like a popular pastime to provide food, water, and shelter to these lovelies. In fact, despite our routine warnings about “passengers” on these cats, our students are very quick to pet them or let them curl up in their laps when we are on archaeological site visits. We have at least a dozen neighborhood cats that we see more or less daily within three blocks of our apartment. These four are just some of them, but they are among the most entertaining for their Olympic piling skills.

Worlds with Friends

This past week has been spring break for the program, and that meant no classes (except for the Modern Greek course that I am taking as a student) and no student activities. Most of them have gone off to see other parts of Europe and will reconvene here in Athens over the next couple of days.

Brian, Andy, and CAT on the Acropolis

For us it meant the arrival of our friends Andy and Christen. We’ve been close for over twenty years, and we’ve all been fortunate enough to remain excited by and able to travel. The four of us have met in Ireland before, and we have done a fair amount of traveling together within the United States. This year we had the opportunity to host them in Athens for several days.

The walk-and-talk
The nooks of Nafplio
The streets of Nafplio
The kitten
The cats of Nafplio
The square of Nafplio with the fortress of Palamidi in the background

We started off with a brief trip to Nafplio in the Argolid region of Greece a couple of hours outside of Athens. Christina had already been there with the students on the one trip during which I stayed home to look after Nibbler when she wasn’t doing well. This trip allowed her to share most of those sights with me and our good friends. We enjoyed a couple of days and one night in scenic Nafplio where we enjoyed great seafood, walked the picturesque streets, communed with neighborhood cats, and generally enjoyed ourselves. While in the area, we also paid a visit to the Argive Heraion, the ancient theater of Argos, we drove by the Acropolis of Tyrins, and we sat for a tasting at Skouras Winery.

Back in Athens, we shared as many sights as we could with Andy and Christen (the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, Plaka, Anaphiotika, the National Gardens, Kolonaki, Syntagma Square, Monasteraki, and more!) and did our best not to miss on opportunity for a stroll or a meal for the rest of the week. We were able to cap off their visit with a morning at the weekly laiki, or open-air street market, which is full of amazing produce stands, as well as other stalls for clothes and household items.

Next week is a return to classes, but it is also Greek Independence Day on Tuesday, so look forward to plenty of parade photos next time!

Haunted by Love and Loss

This is a longer post, but it has great pictures!

Our first stop on the Peloponnese trip was to the new archaeological museum in Kalamata (yes, the olives!) which was built to house the finds from the Griffin Warrior Tomb recently uncovered outside of Pylos, as well as other finds from the surrounding area. One of the more fascinating parts of our semester is being able to compare and contrast so many different museum exhibitions and give serious thought to hows and whys of exhibition design and execution. But in any case, the artifacts and displays were engrossing and exciting.

And just as exciting to many of the students (and to me) was the fact that the area where we were traveling was the epicenter of filming for Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and so on. In the photo above, you can see fully functional replica of Odysseus’s boat at the right side of the pier in Pylos, as well as a smaller black-hulled boat on the left side of the frame. There were a lot of crew swarming around Pylos for the two days we were there, and the film crews also made it a little tricky for the students to see all of the castle at Methoni when they visited there, but there were no major star sightings that we heard of.

While the students were having a free beach day in Methoni, Christina and I were able to rent a car and visit Soulinari, the village where her father grew up, and the nearby village of Kremedia/Fourzi, where Christina’s aunt, uncle, and cousin live. As always, it was great to catch up with the family.

This, it turns out, is Sparta.

Despite the hubbub surrounding Nolan and his new film, our trip has also been the occasion for much rehashing of Zack Snyder’s The 300, with many opportunities to quote from the film, though as you might imagine, the students ultimately found more opportunities than quotes. This photo is of our students posing beneath the statue of Leonidis in Sparta, which is situated next to an athletic field. Further in the background, next to the fields, is a nursery school with dozens of small children on the playground. Passing by them on our way back from the Spartan acropolis, I mused aloud about whether modern Spartans expose the weak children on the playground rather than on the slopes of the Taygetus Mountains nearby, which I suppose is more or less what happened when I was growing up in Ohio.

We then paid a visit to the mountain monastery of Mystra, which is essentially the remains of a Byzantine city atop a mountain overlooking Sparta. The students in our program have been giving on-site presentations throughout the semester, and this photo shows Livia Z. giving her presentation about the site and in particular about its art and architecture.

On our way to the larger site of Messene, we stopped at the cyclopean city walls of Messene and contemplated once again the labor and ingenuity necessary to build these kinds of structures that can endure so long after the cultures that conceived them have vanished.

Christina and I (and the students) were deeply impressed by the ancient site of Messene. The city stretches for acres and acres and includes an amphitheater (above), temples, fountain buildings, a smaller political amphitheater, as well as a stadium and gymnasium. Simultaneously, the site showed off the loveliness of Greece in the early spring with small and riotous flowers in red, white, and yellow.

Within the bounds of the ancient gymnasium and the palaestra, our students practiced boxing and pankration.

Our bus made a brief scheduled stop at a beach on the way to Ancient Olympia. This is a beach where conservationists routinely mark the egg beds of sea turtles. It was a lovely day to stand on the shore, no matter what was going on in the world or in our lives.

We finished off our Peloponnese trip with a visit to the extensive site of Ancient Olympia. This photo shows a small section of the tunnel arch through which competitors entered into the stadium. As is traditional, we were all given the opportunity to engage in an impromptu footrace on the actual stadium race course. For some, there was the thrill of victory; for others, the agony of defeat.

This past week also included a day trip to Ancient Corinth, where site Executive Director Dr. Chris Pfaff showed us around the exterior grounds, pointing out the archaic, Roman, and later Byzantine points of interest. It was a windy day, but that made for some dramatic views of the site and its surrounding geography.

Acrocorinth looms behind the students in this shot, shrouded in clouds. Chris Nolan filmed here recently, using the amazing and indubitably cinematic Frankish citadel as a stand-in for Mycenae. Sure, the citadel that still stands atop the mountain is over two-thousand years younger than the citadel of Mycenae and sports utterly different architecture, but Hollywood.

Ioulia (the Associate Director of the Corinth site) and her graduate student giving us the hands-on introduction to some of the artifacts from Corinth. We were able to examine ancient representations of body parts (hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc.) that were used as part of the healing sanctuaries to Aschlepius. We also got to look at a couple of ancient curse tablets (in the orange box).

This is not Nibbler, but it is also not not-Nibbler.

I posted about this on Facebook earlier, so I won’t say much here, but Christina and I lost Nibbler this past weekend (on Sunday afternoon, our time). She had been in decline since the summer, and this past week she chose to leave us on her own terms. She wouldn’t eat, and it became harder for her to move. This period was mercifully short, and she was surrounded by love and care when she passed away. This is precisely why we brought her to Greece with us, because we couldn’t bear the thought of being that far away from her during this time. We’re so grateful to everyone who helped make sure that happened. It means we can focus on the eighteen years of utter joy that we shared with this superlative tiny panther.

My students and I are discussing Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis today, and the finale includes a heart-wrenching discussion of mourning and why Iphigenia doesn’t want Clytemnestra, her mother, to mourn her once Iphigenia has been sacrificed so that her father(!) can appease the goddess Artemis and finally set sail for Troy. Her daughter asks Clytemnestra not cut a lock of her hair or cry at the grave (which will be a sacrificial altar). And then we come to this:

CLYTEMNESTRA: I don’t understand. I am not to mourn for you?
IPHIGENIA: No. I shall have no grave.
CLYTEMNESTRA: What of that? It is not the grave we mourn, but the dead.

This is what kept coming back to me as Christina and I dealt with the loss of our beloved Nibbler while surrounding ourselves again and again with the monuments of people long, long dead. It is not these things and places that hold our attention, not of themselves, but rather our imagination and/or memory of those connected with them. We are mourning for Nibbler because of who she was to us.

Our love for her is the sanctuary she leaves behind to mark her passing.

Swift-Footed Professors

It’s easy to imagine that Athens might be a good place for running, what with its historical associations with Marathon, etc. But that’s all that they are in my admittedly limited experience: mere associations. Modern Athens is not particularly friendly to runners, at least in terms of infrastructure. Sidewalks are of wildly varying widths, uneven, and surrounded by highly unpredictable and therefore dangerous traffic. It’s a big city with some fun/challenging topography, but ultimately it’s a bit too deadly for Christina and me.

But we have not been forced to give up our passion for running. There are, fortunately, two very solid options for safe running on something other than a treadmill. The first is the one we use most often: the National Gardens that abut the Parliament building. The gardens are extensive, lovely, and honeycombed with well-maintained meandering trails. If you run the trails the more or less trace the park’s iron fences, each lap is very nearly one mile in length, and this route offers some fairly serious elevation gain (I think around 450 feet over the course of the loop). There is a shorter, flatter loop that comes in around 0.85 miles, and this is the one I use if I not up to the hills, or I want to work on speed.

The National Gardens also offer a tremendous amount of excellent people watching (and occasional fist shaking) and even some animal watching. The park is full of cats and also features a small zoo with a small collection of maybe half a dozen different kinds of animals. But one of the really striking denizens of the park is a fairly massive flock of green parrots that would normally be found in the foothills of the Himalayas or in sub-Saharan tropical forests. Supposedly, these parrots either escaped a large shipment that were headed to Greek pet stores, or they are the result of pets that were lost or released by individual owners (this feels less likely than the Big Bang version of a shipment getting loose).

Just a few minutes closer to our apartment is the Kalimarmaro, also known as the Panathenaic Stadium. This is the enormous ancient marble stadium that was refurbished prior to the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It is still used as the end point of the Athens Classic Marathon, and it played a role in the 2004 Olympic Games as well as playing a continual role in the handover of the Olympic flame from Greece each time the games take place. It is an imposing and evocative structure, but you do have to pay an entry fee to get into the stadium itself with its track and stands, etc.

However, the stadium is built into a natural valley between two hills. What this means is that the top of the stadium is ringed by an asphalt path that in practical terms offers a sort of emergency exit from the structure. Now, however, the asphalt path is a near-perfect 500-meter U-shaped track. This kind of repetitive running route is something that I can do pretty well, but I discovered the first time I tried it out that you can catch some serious wind in the face up there at the top of the stadium. If all I wanted was to mix up my running routes, I would certainly come back to the Kalimarmaro, but the truth is that it is an inspiring place to run with its history and with the enormous set of Olympic rings looming over the center of the stands.

Keep Athens Weird

“I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s aliens.” (Image from Dogtooth, 2009)
The Lion Gate at Mycenae

I didn’t go on the weekend trip to the Argolid region (Nemea, Mycenae, with ouzo and wine tastings, etc.) this past weekend, because Nibbler has been in decline. She seems to be doing better, but she is approaching her eighteenth birthday, so we’re realistic about her health and her prospects. She’s been losing weight for the better part of this year. We discovered she has thyroid disease and got that under control, but that revealed her underlying kidney disease, which is harder to control. She’s here with us in Greece because we couldn’t imagine being away from her when it comes to it. She was in a rough patch last week, so I stayed with her while Christina, David, and the students spent a few days out of Athens.

I thought I would tell you a bit more about what I’m doing here as part of the program. Christina is the lead faculty-in-residence, and as such she is teaching two political science courses. David handles the archaeology course and the many fascinating site visits. I am teaching a course that is mostly focused on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos but which also makes some room for talking about the wider so-called Greek Weird Wave. If you don’t know what that is, or have heard the term without much context, here is Steve Rose’s article from The Guardian in 2011 that accelerated the use of the term internationally.

The class I’m teaching is about myth in the films of Lanthimos, but anyone who has seen most of his films knows or suspects that these influences must be more or less implicit. We wouldn’t necessarily expect Lanthimos to do an updated adaptation of Oedipus Rex, even though we do expect him to make films that handle incest and familial violence as prominent themes. So that’s really where we are with this class. We watch all of Lanthimos’s films up through The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017), and we also add in two films by other directors associated with the Weird Wave: Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) and Koutras’s Strella (2009). We read some ancient texts like Hesiod and Euripides as well as some contemporary writing about the films we’re watching. We’re trying to get at this theme of weirdness, strangeness, oddity and hold it up to the light, look at it from as many angles as we can.

Last night we watched and discussed Dogtooth (2009), which is the film that put Lanthimos on the international stage. It is his second feature and firmly established both his directorial style and the thematic concerns that would remain a part of his work up through today. The students had varied and strong reactions to it, which always makes for worthwhile and valuable class discussion. They certainly were not bored, and for those who were made uncomfortable, that did not stop them from having something to say. This was our third film after watching Kinetta (2005) and Attenberg, and it feels like we’re off to an excellent start.

And is if that wasn’t enough film for you, here’s one more. Like many, many other cinephiles I’ve been thinking a lot about David Lynch since his recent death. The combined grief and admiration manifested in concrete ways here in Athens. Two different organizations held screenings of all of his cinematic works. The first ended with an all-day Twin Peaks marathon of the entire series. The second was called The Complete Filmography, and that one ended with a screening of the international pilot for Twin Peaks on Twin Peaks Day, February 24. Virtually all of this latter series was sold out when I first saw the poster for it. The only tickets left were to the February 23 screening of Inland Empire in its 4K restoration. I leapt at the chance and took myself out on a film date Sunday night. The Cinobo Opera is a pretty big theatre near the university downtown, and the place was packed that night. Inland Empire is a three-hour film, and it didn’t get rolling until 9:30pm, but I had fortified myself with an after-dinner americano, which did the trick. Maybe it was the larger context, but I came away from that screening with a deeper appreciation for that film than I had previously. Christina and I are currently in the middle of the Twin Peaks rewatch we began shortly after Lynch’s passing. We watched Episodes 11 and 12 on Twin Peaks Day, and we’ll keep it going. I expect we’ll make it through the whole thing while we’re here.

Theban So

There are many wonderful things about the Bucknell/Penn State in Athens Program, but among the top must be the fantastic weekend trips that take us out of Athens several times throughout the term. The first of these was this past weekend when a bus took us first to Delphi and then on to the monastery at Hosios Loukas and finally on to Thebes before our return.

As I remind myself and you repeatedly, I am not a classicist, but I have read a smattering of ancient texts throughout my life and education. I have certainly heard of the Oracle of Delphi. But for whatever reason, be it my own inclination to dramatize or some cinematic influence, I have always imagined the oracle to reside in a cave rather than a classical temple structure. And I certainly never imagined her surrounded by an extensive complex of structures. And yet, that is so clearly the situation at Delphi. Perhaps long before the appearance of the temple complex, there was an oracle at a site of pilgrimage in the foothills of Mount Parnassus, and maybe it was in a cave at one time. But that’s not the oracle in the ancient texts I read. No, this is the site as we have found it, and there is nothing about it that is disappointing, for all that it is different from my imagination. Instead, the reality of the site and its dramatic natural setting instill their own sense of awe and wonder while raising questions of their own. As a scholar, these are the kinds of questions that drive me rather than frustrate me. I am not upset or uncomfortable with these questions; I am fascinated.

Dr. David Scahill points out the key architectural features of the reconstructed Athenian treasury at Delphi.

Did I know that the site at Delphi included an enormous amphitheater just above and behind the Temple of Apollo? No, I did not. Did I know that well above that amphitheater there is also a full-size stadium, because Delphi was one of the four sites for the pan-hellenic games (of which Olympia was only one)? No, I did not.

Christina in front of the stadium at Delphi

And maybe it’s because I either never saw Albert Tournaire’s famous rendering of the site in its heyday, or I didn’t appreciate what I was looking at when I did. A print of this painting is on display just inside the entrance to the museum at the Delphi site, and it helped to cement the conception of the place that our climb through it had formed in me.

Albert Tournaire, 1894

Inside the museum collections, I came face-to-face with the reconstruction of the Naxos Sphinx that once sat high above the Delphi site. A replica of this sphinx almost figured prominently in the film that Christina and I made with Daniel Nienhuis over the summer, so I felt this meeting was special in more ways than the obvious. And for the record, we made the right choice not to use the Naxos Sphinx in our film.

Brian films the Sphinx of Naxos

After a long day of trekking up and down the marble stairs of Delphi, Christina and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with our colleagues David (who teaches the archaeology course that is part of the program) and Dimitra (who is one of the fantastic staff members at the Athens Center, which manages various logistics for our program).

Christina, Brian, David, and Dimitra

Delphi is also quite close to the ski resort town of Arachova in the foothills of Mt. Parnassus. Since Christina and I spent seven years living above the Adirondacks, we immediately reacted to Arachova as Greece’s Lake Placid. It has a tremendous amount of natural beauty, a dizzying variety of ski shops, boutiques, restaurants and bars, as well as A LOT of rich people. It was a nice place to visit, but it is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers, and maybe in that way it’s not unlike Delphi.

Arachova, a beautiful and chic ski resort

As we left Delphi and Arachova, we stopped at a still working Byzantine-era monastery, Hosios Loukas. It was a rainy day, which somehow seemed to fit, and we arrived during a service, so that the sound of the liturgy filled the courtyards as we quietly made our way through the galleries and museum exhibits as well as into the church where the service was underway.

From the monastery, we continued on to the town of Thebes. Yes, for those of you who still remember your Sophocles, Thebes is the kingdom ruled by Laius and later by his son, Oedipus. In fact, on our way into the foothills of Mt. Parnassus on Friday, David had directed our bus driver to stop at the side of a quiet and lonely road just after sunset. In the faltering light, we walked a few yards to a stone monument with a bronze plaque in ancient Greek, which identifies it as the very crossroads where Oedipus unknowingly killed his father. It was uncanny to stand in that place, yielding to the encroaching darkness, despite knowing very well the meaning of the spot, wondering if knowing thyself is sufficient and not merely necessary.

But on our way out of the Copaic Basin, our goal was to visit the Thebes Museum and learn more about its collections and the importance of the site. Thebes is particularly special to our Bucknell Program, because David and our very own colleagues Dr. Stephanie Larson and Dr. Kevin Daly have done important work on the digs at the site, and some of their finds are in the collection (again with the sphinxes!). The students have seen a lot of museum collections already, and they will certainly see many more, yet they remained eager and attentive as David led us through the museum and its intriguing displays.

Dr. David Scahill introduces students to the collections in the Museum at Thebes.

Though the students had just returned from this exciting weekend trip, Monday found all of us at the National Archaeological Museum with the intent of focusing on the prehistoric collections. I have my own interest in the so-called “frying pans” of the Cycladic culture as part of a film project about which I will be sharing more with you in the weeks ahead.

Students examine some of the key artifacts in the Cycladic exhibit at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Whew! That was quite a weekend. I’m so grateful for this experience, and not the least because it is so obviously of the sort that can’t be easily or quickly processed. I am learning and seeing and feeling so much, that it feels like I am recharging as a person. Writing in my journal every morning and keeping this blog are key parts of making the most of this experience, but I also know that I will continue to learn from it for years and years to come.

Ah, The Siren Song of A Cat at 0430

Until this morning, and aside from a standard couple of days of jet lag, I have been sleeping very well here in Athens. I don’t generally, so it has been a welcome change, and part of that change was doubtless due to the fact that Nibbler was not waking me up sometime in the three o’clock hour, as is her wont. Maybe she was dealing with jet lag, as well, though we all know from Miyazaki that this is unlikely.

Regardless, Nibbler’s trills and occasional yowls woke me at 0430 and eventually roused me out of bed entirely by 0545. We have lived together long enough that I know better than to think I could just feed her and then go back to bed, and this is even more the case these days when her food is such a fraught issue. Nibbler is well into the kidney disease stage of her life, and this has upended her relationship with food. She clearly wants it, but she has little interest in most food we put in front of her. She has an intake appointment with her Athens vet tomorrow morning, so we hope to make the transition to prescription food over the next week. It may be a challenge, though. Well, this is another reason why Athenians’ love/need of coffee is so convenient.

I taught the first session of my course, Mythology in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos, at The Athens Centre on Monday afternoon. We won’t get to the Classics content of the course until the third week, so for now we were starting out with Lanthimos’s feature directorial debut, Kinetta (2005). It’s not an easy film, but not for the usual reasons when it comes to Lanthimos. Instead of potentially uncomfortable depictions of sex and violence, or the hulking specter of psychosexual taboos, Kinetta offers vaguely mysterious characters shuffling through a virtual anti-narrative with very little dialogue. As one of my students observed (without precisely complaining), it’s boring. I don’t entirely share that assessment, but I come to it with my own interests in independent film, so I’m not exactly impartial. Still, the students were great. They paid attention, and we had a rousing discussion of the film, what it does, and how it does it. It was a solid start to the course, and I assured them that, whether or not they enjoyed any of the future films in the course, none of them will be boring.

I’m also using this opportunity in Athens to really dig into modern Greek. I have been using Duolingo for Greek for over a year now, and that has given me an excellent context to begin more formal learning. I have a moderate vocabulary and some very basic grammar, but I haven’t forced Christina to speak Greek with me, and so my natural reluctance to sound stupid in public has kept me from trying to speak much Greek when I am out and about. To help me with that, I have enrolled in a Greek I class while I am here, and my first class (I’m joining late, sorry!) was last night. It’s been decades since I was in a language classroom, but it felt familiar and in this context a lot of fun. I’m excited to keep going and sound stupid even more often than I already do.

I can’t let this update pass without acknowledging the death of Tom Robbins this week at the age of 92. I didn’t find my way to his novels until I was in college (Thank you, Stacy!), and even then I read most of them after college while I was in the Army, since my English major kept my TBR pile Seussian if not Cyclopean. Robbins has always stood apart like authors I most admire. It’s not that he did something very well that other writers were doing; it’s that he seemed to be doing something entirely his own. Sui generis. On top of that, he was knocking it out of the park. I admire him a great deal as a writer, and from what little I know of him as a person, he seems equally admirable. He found joy and love and reasons to laugh and dance at every turn, and yet he didn’t back down when taking a stand was necessary. This is a model I’d like to emulate more. It’s easier to imagine being one thing or the other: a warrior for a cause, or a jester who keeps people’s spirits afloat in dark times. Robbins seems like an example of someone who could do both as needed. Maybe it’s something about dancing…

You’ll Myth Me When I’m Gone

Some of you know already, but for those who aren’t aware, Christina and I are in our first week of leading our first study abroad program: Bucknell/Penn State in Athens! Christina is the official faculty-in-residence leader of the trip, but as her partner and the instructor of one course this term, I am obviously helping her with the formal and informal duties and obligations related to shepherding ten undergraduates on an 89-day adventure into Greeces both modern and ancient.

Christina is teaching two of her own political science courses related to Greek political development and democracy in theory and practice, while I will be teaching a course on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and their often fraught relationship with Greek myth. Christina is also responsible for overseeing a Culture and Environment course that brings students (and us) into more direct contact with experts in the modern Greek context, including experts on wildfires, sea turtle conservation, various agricultural concerns, and more. In addition, all of the students take an archaeology course on ancient Greece, and they are given the option of enrolling in a modern Greek course, too.

The students are fantastic, animated, and engaged. We’re all getting over our jet lag, settling in to our surroundings, and finding our bearings around the Pangrati neighborhood of Athens near the Kalimarmaro Olympic stadium and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Christina and I have already twice returned for solid runs in the National Gardens next to the Parliament building, where we ran when came to Athens in December of 2023.

The program is facilitated partly through the Athens Centre, a local philanthropic organization that provides logistical support to academic programs of varying length and focus. There is a large classroom there where I found this wonderful framed poster from a film screening from decades past. It made me feel at home to be part of an organization that cares about sharing modern culture as much as it cares about introducing students to ancient civilization, as well.

One of the other extraordinary parts of this experience is that we chose to bring our elderly cat, Nibbler (she’s almost 18!), along with us on this adventure.

This was the first time Nibbler ever flew in an airplane, and she pretty much handled it like a pro. She was a bit cranky on the second leg of the journey from Frankfurt to Athens, but we all arrived in one piece. Now she is getting to know her new stomping grounds.

Meanwhile, our other adorable feline, Madeleine Albright (the tortie), is back at home in Lewisburg with our house sitters, one of whom comes with a cat of her own, the relatively kittenish Annata (gray and white). We get photographic evidence with some regularity that Madeleine Albright is warming nicely to her new housemate.

On Approach

I spent several months in the weeds of a revision of my latest novel, Above and Beyond. It felt like I was circling Detroit Metro Airport, low on fuel, after a particularly harrowing trans-Atlantic flight punctuated by vertiginous microbursts over Lake Erie (if that sounds like an oddly specific simile, ask me about it sometime when we’re within arm’s reach of a bar–I’ve felt safer jumping out of a plane than I felt on that flight). This morning, during another session of a wonderful Zoom writing group I joined earlier in the year when the revisions had stalled, I printed out the full second draft. This is what I consider a readable draft, and whenever she’s done with her teaching responsibilities for the semester, my fantastic beta-reader Christina will read it through and share her thoughts. Is it a story? Does it work? How do you feel afterward?

It’s not as though I can’t answer these questions for myself. In fact, I’m getting better and better at being my own editor with each project, as one would hope. But pretty much every writer will tell you some version of how crucial it is to get out of your own head at some point. I’m not yet ready to let this story go and declare it finished, but I do want to know what someone else thinks of it. In some very real sense, I want every manuscript I give her to be better than the one before it, even though I know it’s not perfect or polished, and I am all ears when it comes to suggestions from a smart and earnest reader.

And just in case you’re wondering, the problem is not usually that I really like what I have written and maybe need to be brought down a peg or two hundred. Rather, I usually need to be convinced that it does not suck, because that is what it so often looks like from the weeds. Christina already knows the general shape of the story, so she’ll be able to look past the big picture and react to the execution, too.

Assuming that my my view of the weeds is not representative of the overall effect of the novel, query letters will go out within the month, giving me plenty of time to tinker with the issues Christina and I identify.

The author, hitting Print on his novel manuscript.

Here’s some money. Go see a Star War.

There was a lot about the fall of 2020 that was distressing and depressing and generally speaking not good. However, I found out yesterday that there was at least one small silver lining of which I hadn’t been aware. By the close of the year, my debut novel Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows had earned out its advance.

This is not monumental or earthshaking news, and maybe it’s really only of interest to me and my publisher, Ross E. Lockhart of Word Horde. This means that the earned royalties from book sales (print and ebook) have exceeded the amount I was paid as an advance on those royalties. I’ll actually be receiving another check!

As of the New Year, there are over 1,000 copies of my book out there in the world, on people’s shelves, and in their tablets. For someone just starting out in publishing, that feels pretty good. It’s a modest milestone that Christina and I will take an opportunity to celebrate this week.

Of course, if you haven’t read Memento Mori, and you’re the kind of person who likes weird fiction, The King in Yellow, underground horror films, Riot Grrrl zines, and general strangeness, then by all means purchase a copy and give it a go. I think you’ll enjoy it.

I also need to give a quick shout out to my publisher, Ross (buy all of his books!), who obviously took a chance on me and the book to begin with, and who is also an excellent person with whom to do business. Small press publishing sounds like a minefield sometimes, but Ross has a well-earned reputation as a stand-up dude who tirelessly promotes his authors and their work.

Finally, this post also comes courtesy of Molly Tanzer (buy all of her books, too!), who graciously invited Memento Mori to be part of the Word Horde StoryBundle in the fall. Without a doubt, it was those sales that pushed the novel over the top.

And if you already bought and/or read, THANK YOU, TOO! (Please consider leaving a rating and/or review on Amazon, GoodReads, etc. They really do help a lot.)