Hasta la vista, baby

Maybe I've overdosed on the Iliad, the Battle of Maldon and Terminator II, but I am filled with admiration at what we humans, with our weak bodies and simple genetic urges, can do.

Warriors again

I'm still working on this "warriors" course night and day, and I think I have, as the Turks put it "broken the devil's back." I now have the following texts;

1. Various translations and interpretations of the Iliad, including Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Christopher Logue's amazingly cool account of the last moments of Patroclus;
2. The original Anglo-Saxon and two translations of the end of The Battle of Maldon;
3. the Ground book from A Book of Five Rings;
4. An essay on Taoism and t'ai chi from one of my old t'ai chi friends, Nigel Sutton;
5. a paper reviewing the literature on the psychosocial benefits of martial arts;
6. a chapter from a book about Amazons;
7. a paper on gender duality and Xena.

I need to add some chivalric Arthurian stuff, and I really, really need a good paper on women in martial arts and self-defence courses, but apart from that, it's looking pretty good, and I'm feeling like the Chinese/Japanese ideal of the scholar-warrior. As Miyamoto Musashi said, "pen and sword in harmony."

Achilles heel

I have just realised a delicious irony. I've been spending all this time researching warriors, and reading translations and derivations of the Iliad, while being unable to do any martial arts practice. The reason? I have pulled a muscle in, of all places, my heel.

Achilles to Thetis: "When you dipped me in the Styx, why didn't you think of tying a string around my ankle rather than holding me by it?"