#critchley

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jurgen Klopp responds to Liverpool Under-23 boss Neil Critchley’s Anfield exit

Liverpool Under-23 chief Critchley has left to take over as head coach of League One Blackpool, after six years with the Reds Go to Source