Tag: athens

Museums/Galleries I’ve Visited/Want to Visit

It’s Long and Short Review‘s Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge time again and boy could this be a long one. I’ve gotten around to a lot of museums (my archaeological background and general love of art come to play here). So here it goes:

I’ve lived in Greece a few times but haven’t been back in years. Indeed, the last time I was there was about a week before the new Acropolis Museum opened. How tantalizing! I do want to get back there and see it as I have heard great things. 

One of my all time favorites is the Tate Modern in London, UK.  The exhibitions in the Turbine Hall have especially blown me away. I saw Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, each mind-blowing in completely different ways.

Perhaps less on people’s radar are Dia Beacon and Stormking, both in the Hudson Valley in NY. Dia Beacon is a great modern art gallery and Stormking is an outdoor, large-scale sculpture park. 

I could go on and on, but will end with the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, Italy. I think I loved it so much because by the time I reached it, I was sort of Madonna-burned out on medieval and renaissance art. The modern collection was like a palate cleanser between courses of older art.

What museums do you love?

NaNoWriMo Day 9

A good writing day (1863 words). I’ve been working (I’ve probably said) on a sequel to my alernative-myth in which Dido kills Aeneas and raises a Carthaginian empire in place of a Roman one. This novel is set a few hundred years later, at the end of the 6th century BCE around the founding of popular governments (democracy/republic).

Historically, in 510/509 BCE, the Athenians kick out the Pisistratid tyrants and head on the road to deomocracy (which is usually credited to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 503/502 BCE). And in what is a probably a case of synchronism, the Romans kick out the Tarquin kings/tyrants and found the Republic.

What’s striking to me is how both stories of the founding of popular rule are based basically on the woman in fridge trope (which trope I have discussed before). It is such an ancient and pervasive trope, in history stories as well as fiction. In Athens, what sets the revolution in motion involves a sexual shaming of the sister of Harmodius (one of the Tyrannicides). In Rome, it is the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king, and her subsequent suicide. Both motivate their male relatives to revolution, which leads to popular government.

I’m not a fan of the trope, but yet I find it at the center of some of my action. I think I’m using it subversively (the Tyrannicides in Athens historically fail and die and in my fiction I follow the shamed sister as one of my main characters; in my fiction, Lucretia doesn’t commit suicide – although the public is misled to believe she did – and she too will be a major player), but nevertheless it feels weird.

Onwards tomorrow.