YMCA - A!

On the last night of what seems a long journey selling the virtues of the TLS (and some copies of Spartacus Road) I am at JFK airport watching on TV the same baseball match I was watching last night at Yankee Stadium.

I don't know anything much about baseball (as I type, the Yankees are 'coming back from the dead' but that is merely the view of the man next to me at this computer-stacked bar). What I remember most from last night in the Bronx is the singing, which includes a rendition of that gym-dance song YMCA, at a moment both  predetermined by tradition and not quite clear to me.

I'm pleased that Deborah Porter, the glamorous chair of the triumphant Boston Book Festival, has deemed our discussion of Spartacus, Cleopatra, Achilles and other movie-star ancients to have been 'one of the most popular sessions that people were raving about'.

That was 'a pleasant surprise'. she told the Boston Globe.

The audience did indeed seem pleased to have heard Stacy Schiff, Caroline Alexander and your blogger talk about truth and reputation in ancient history. All credit to my colleagues.

But at the end of this book festival journey I am not quite so surprised about a classical success as Deborah may have been.. 

One of the lessons to me from the last six weeks - from Wigtown in Ayrshire to Henley on Thames, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire to Boston, Massachusetts and Bloomsbury - is how great is the modern passion for engaging with the ancient world in different and surprising ways.

My highlight is still the 'How to read a Latin Poem' session at Cheltenham where TLS contributors, Mary Beard and Llewellyn Morgan, helped a big crowd through a difficult pice at 10 am on a Sunday morning.

Wow! Here at JFK, the Yankees are even further 'back from the dead', 5-0 ahead, and in stadium that is only one colossal, colosseal reminder of what today's warriors owe to the past.    

Comments

[Shelley]

I know as little as you about baseball, but since I write about a time when the worst thing players did was drinking and whoring, I was thinking the other day about what a monumental difference there is between respecting their prowess in that age, and suspecting their unnatural prowess in this one.