Walking Squares with Old Map Man: National Gallery to Victoria Embankment

Oh, how self has missed the Squares Challenge!

It is so good to have Becky at Life of B back. For the month of November, the theme is Walking Squares.

Here’s another set of Walking Squares: London, June 2022. Old Map Man leads the best walks! We met outside the National Gallery, walked down small streets (Craven Lane was a memorable one), and ended up on the Victoria Embankment, when a thunderous downpour began. Self gives up too easily: even with the rain starting to come down horizontally, Old Map Man was quite willing to continue the walk. But self knew she had reached her limit and told OMM in a most urgent tone: “There is water inside my sneakers (dammit).”

Here are a few of the pictures she took, that memorable day:

Lens Artists Photo Challenge # 220: One Subject, Three Ways

To explain this challenge, P.A. Moed quotes Shivanand Sharma:

Working a shot is the photographers’ way of refining the shot; to make an extraordinary imagery from the ordinary scene. It is just like a writer wandering about for the plot of story or a painter re-working his canvas for a finished outcome. 

Shivanand Sharma

Self had quite a hard time settling on a subject. So many possibilities! Which shows how many pictures she actually takes: for her, framing is all.

But, finally, she settled on her newest rose, Moonlight Romantica, bought just this past spring. It has entertained her with its beauty for months — all summer, in fact. It is not blooming right now, so these are pictures she took in July. (In addition, it has grown to a great height: it’s almost 5 feet right now)

The colors change gradually: from the bright orange of a new bud, to a pale yellow when first unfurled, to almost white when past its prime.

Moonlight Romantica rose, July

Flower of the Day: One More Round for Roses

One of the greatest pleasures of the summer just ended has been the new roses self bought in the spring. All Dressed Up (pink) is just starting to bloom again, and her Chrysler Imperial (deep red) is getting ready for a spectacular show.

Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.

Who Will Be a Hero? GONE, p.235

Astrid to Sam: He’s one kind of person, you’re another. When life is going along normally, you’re sort of the same. But when life turns strange and scary, when there’s a crisis, suddenly you’re completely different people. It’s not Quinn’s fault, really, but he’s not brave. He’s not strong. You are.

Cabeza de Turco: Gone, pp. 182 – 183

For the last couple of pages, self has been so shocked by the beating of a young girl named Bouncing Bette.

Of course, self knows people get beat up in high school. But three guys beating up a defenseless girl? And she has to crawl — crawl — to the fire station, because Sam, his best friend Quinn, and a Honduran immigrant named Edilio are the new fire brigade.

The three boys who beat up Bette are Orc, Karl, and Chaz, and they come looking for her, armed with aluminum bats. Not once does anyone say, She’s a girl! which, in the name of gender equality, is pretty impressive.

Bette’s crime was that she was doing “magic tricks.” And no one is supposed to use magic any more, according to the self-appointed mayor of Perdito Beach, Cain (Sam’s secret half-brother. Sam doesn’t know, but Cain probably does, since he’s been giving Sam some pretty significant side-eye). Anyhoo, Sam tells Bette she can stay the night at the fire station.

She can stay the night? What if these boys attack her again? If self were Bette, she would move permanently into the fire station. But apparently, Bette herself does not want to spend the night at the fire station. She needs to get home to her little brother. Commendable maturity there, Bette!

This convo happens after Bette leaves:

Quinn: “Look, Sam, I’m not saying it’s right for her to get beat on, all right? But what do you expect? I mean, kids get picked on for wearing the wrong clothes or sucking at sports or whatever. And that’s when there are teachers and parents around. That’s just everyday life. You think now, as messed up as everything is, kids are going to be thinking, ‘Oh, Sam can shoot firebolts out of his eyeballs or whatever, okay, that’s cool?’ No, brah, that’s not the way it is.”

Edilio: “He’s right. If there’s more people with, you know, like you and Bette, there’s going to be trouble. Some folks with the power, some folks without. Me, I’m used to being a second-class citizen. But other people are going to be jealous and they’re going to get scared and, anyway, they’re all weirded out, so they are going to be looking for someone to blame. In Spanish, we say cabeza de turco. It means someone you blame for all your problems.

Quinn: “Scapegoat.”

Edilio: “Yeah, that’s it. A scapegoat.”

Siri Hustvedt: Sentence of the Day

Self finally finished The Peloponnesian War! It took ages — like, 10 days. Those cunning Greeks just seemed to bleed out by the end, crushed by centrifugal force.

She’s beginning a new book, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind.

She’s never read Siri Hustvedt before, but this book was on many “Best of the Year” lists, and she was intrigued.

Since she found The Peloponnesian War truly exhausting (and she hopes Hustvedt isn’t), she’s decided to make it easy on herself and attack the longest essay first, The Delusions of Certainty. There’s an argument about life and death and oh well — is summer brain really colonizing self’s mind? The first sentence was not a grabber, but further down the first paragraph she encountered this:

What constitutes death is also unclear, although once a corpse begins to putrefy, all doubt vanishes.

— from the essay “coming in and going out”

Book VII, The Peloponnesian War

Just as self predicted after reading about Athenian victories in Book I and Book II, the Athenians are now losing. The war is in its seventeenth year. Have to hand it to those Peloponnesians for sheer tenacity.

She fell to skimming Book VIII because, when a book turns out exactly as self predicted, she tends to lose interest. And she sort of liked the Athenians, for no particular reason other than the fact that they were Masters of the Universe! At least they were in the beginning. Later, they are complete boobs, losing to minor states.

Demosthenes, who was an Athenian general, is still directing battles in Book VII (Wow! After 17 years), but there is no mention of Sophocles (the philosopher?) who, in Book II was placed in charge of an army. He was either defeated in battle and killed, or died of natural causes. It seems natural to assume a philosopher would not make a good battle leader. Hmm, she should google Socrates.

There was a Pericles, but he must have died earlier in the war, because he does not linger in her memory (It’s got to be that Pericles, right? There is only one)

There are more massacres of innocents (every time a town was taken, all the inhabitants, whether children or adults, were slain without mercy), more great naval battles, more speeches.

She has to hand it to the Greeks: despite the ongoing war, they still kept holding their games, with the same ceremony. At least, Thucydides makes it appear that they did.

Stay tuned.

Book V, The Peloponnesian War

Summer was now over. The winter following, a battle took place between the Heracleots in Trachis and the Aenianians, Dolopians, Malians, and certain of the Thessalians, all tribes bordering on and hostile to the Heracleots’ town, which directly menaced their country.

Still Reading Book II of The Pelopponesian War

At this point in the narrative (Book II of a total of VIII, self will probably speed up the pace the closer she gets to the end), Athens is still the Master of the Universe, and all the other city-states are just upstarts. But something happens in the fifth year of the war that shakes Athens’ complacency, and it has to do with an ally, Corcyra.

Someone named Peithias, a volunteer proxenus of Athens, had convened a meeting of the city council of Corcyra when a band of citizens, “armed with daggers,” suddenly burst “into the council chamber” and “killed Peithias and sixty others.”

WHAAAAT?!!!

There was an Athenian galley sitting in the harbor, luckily, because the survivors of the massacre were able to take refuge there.

Fearing the wrath of Athens, the conspirators “sent envoys to Athens to justify what had been done” but “upon the arrival of the Embassy the Athenians arrested the envoys.”

Self would like to point out that the conspirators were not just some troublesome riff-raff opportunists, but were the richest citizens of Corcyra. They saw an advantage to themselves, and implemented their plan, which placed them in direct opposition to “the commons” or common people.

“The next day the Athenian general, Nicostratus, son of Diitrephes, came up from Naupactus with twelve ships and five hundred Messenian heavy infantry.” So Athens was not going to take this rebellion lightly. Besides, murder is murder. And sixty people is no trifling number. And the sixty were murdered in council chambers yet!

This is such a fascinating book.

Stay tuned.

The Oracle to the Lacedaemonians

A Dorian war shall come and with it death.

— Book II, The Peloponnesian War