A Don’s Life

Don't blame Hadrian for Bush's wall.

President Bush has a strange enthusiasm for walls (strange, because that mother of walls in Berlin isn’t exactly regarded as a stunning success). He would like to put, if not a wall, then at least a barbed wire fence along the almost 3,500 kilometer frontier between the USA and Mexico. And, unless Nouri al-Maliki manages to put the brakes on, there will soon be concrete walls between Sunni and Shia areas of Baghdad, to keep car-bombers out (or in).

Bush isn’t the only one, of course. Israel is busy constructing its West Bank barrier, parts of which are 8 meters high, in concrete. Less well known is a wall put up in Padua in north Italy, as a “crime fighting measure”, around the high-rise Anelli estate. In fact the Guardian last week came up with almost thirty modern security walls, either built or under construction. One, the electric fence between South Africa and Mozambique has apparently killed more people than were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

The Great Wall of China may be one ancestor here. But the usual western approach is to point the finger back, way beyond Berlin, to the emperor Hadrian. Regret these awful barriers though we do, is the line, there is a fine classical precedent in the second century AD with Hadrian’s attempt to keep the nasty barbarians out of the Roman empire. That is, “Hadrian’s Wall”.

Another misuse of the classical past I’m afraid.

The American Way of Death

One of the unforeseen benefits of the visit to Warner Bros studio was that it turned out to be just next door to Forest Lawn Memorial Park (i.e. cemetery) at Glendale. Right next door, in American terms that is. It was about a ten minute drive away – or in our case a 45 minute drive because the Sat Nav took us first to the wrong Forest Lawn (we hadn’t realised that there was more than one).

After all I’d read about this vast necropolis – from Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford to Umberto Eco – I was prepared to be very scathing about the whole enterprise. In fact, I was rather impressed, at least in part.

PowerPoint virgins

After a two-day conference here at the Getty on “Rites of Passage” in Greece and Rome (that’s birth, puberty, marriage, death rituals, and the like), I can report that PowerPoint use among professional classicists falls into similar patterns on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the one hand are the PowerPoint virgins – those who start their presentation (and I suspect they do it every lecture they give) with a little speech about how it’s their first time and plaintively ask which button to press. Emotionally I’m one of these. After all, when I first lectured in Cambridge twenty odd years ago I used black and white, 3 inch by 3 inch slides, shown through something similar to a magic lantern. It was a bit antiquated even then – but it means that, for me the transition from hand held technology, through remote control slide carousels, to computer systems has been disconcertingly swift.

That said, this whole virginal line is beginning to wear a bit thin, or at least to look as self-advertisingly quaint as using a type-writer or taking snuff. Most places you go to lecture now wouldn’t know what to do if you turned up with a carousel of slides – or, at best, would eventually drag out of the cupboard a dusty machine that hadn’t seen the light of day (or a new bulb) in ages.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the PowerPoint professionals. Frankly, these are just as bad.

David Beckham's new tattoo -- a classicist writes

Becks has apparently decided that a move to Los Angeles demands a new tattoo or two. Not a feeling that the prospect of LA induced in me, but therein I suppose lies the difference between us.

Amongst the many designs now decorating the celebrity right forearm is what was originally a Latin slogan, here rendered in English: “Let them hate (me) as long as they fear (me)”. The idea is, or so I have read, to express something of Becks’s anxieties about the transatlantic move, and his determination not to be battered by any adverse publicity.

I don’t mind if they don’t actually like me, so the message runs, but don’t let them mess with me. Or, to quote “a source”: “David . . . .believes his tattoos can ward off negativity and help him battle adversity.”

The original reads in Latin: “Oderint dum metuant” (a nice example for you Latinists of the use of “dum as proviso, plus the subjunctive”). According to the Daily Mail, Becks first of all wanted the real Latin, but it was the word dum (“provided that/as long as”) that caused the problem. Could it be taken as a reflection of the mental agility of Mr Beckham? Better perhaps to play safe by avoiding it entirely?

In fact as any classicist must know, the word ‘dum’ is only part of the reason why having “oderint dum metuant” or its English equivalent might be an own goal.

Will we "always have Paris"?

I have been given an office to die for in the Research Centre at the Getty Villa. Visiting scholars working at the Getty are divided between two locations. Most are based in the vast modern hilltop complex, of Museum and Research Institute, designed by Richard Meier. But if you are a classicist, you work in the “old Getty”, by the ocean – where the Pompeian-style Villa houses the classical art collections, and the “Ranch House”  (where Mr Getty himself used to live) houses the library and scholars.

My office is directly off the library. It has a balcony which looks over the Villa and its new Greek theatre, and on to the Pacific Ocean. It’s hard not to feel very lucky indeed.

But, despite all these attractions, I left the office behind for a day last week to do some LA sight-seeing. First stop was to be a movie studios.

There are a good number to choose from, but the reviews on the web of the various tours offered suggested that most involved several hours of walking between sets that were generally underwhelming. The best was supposed to be Warner Bros “VIP tours” (there is no category below VIP), where, for $42 a head, you are at least taken round the studios in a shuttle bus.

. . . and where  – this was the draw for us – you can still see the French Street from Casablanca, and the restaurant where Bergman and Bogart lunched before she did her runner.

The limits of globalisation

I came to Los Angeles with just the clothes I stood up in, plus a swimming costume. The intention had been to be more organised. But the moment of departure coincided with the time that the now copy-edited version of the manuscript of my new book was due back with the publisher – with my very final corrections.

It should have been a quick job. All that was strictly necessary was my response to the copy-editor’s questions: Did I really want to use the adjective “subversive” three times on the same page? Did I realise that the phrase “own-goal” wasn’t much used in the USA? On most of these questions, she politely gave me a choice. But she was so often, so obviously right, that it wouldn’t have much mattered if I had just sent it back saying: “do as you suggest, passim”.

But I actually decided to go through and check all – well, it ended up being most – of the footnotes and bibliography again. They had all supposedly been checked before, but as I’m feeling a bit sensitive to howlers after the Agrippina incident, I decided to err on the side of caution.

Thank heavens. I didn’t find anything dreadfully wrong, but there were too many things that were not exactly wholly right – including a handful of nasty embarrassments with German endings. It’s hardly fair, but if you end up, in English, printing “ot” instead of “to”, everyone assumes it’s a typo. If, in German, you put “der” instead of  “den”, the assumption is that your German is ropey.

So I went right up to the wire, nerdishly checking everything I could, and then with a couple of hours to spare before getting in the cab to the plane, I stuffed some books into a case and that was that.

Since I arrived, I’ve been reconstructing a wardrobe, and other essentials of life. Some things, it turns out, transfer seamlessly from the UK to the US.

Other surprising areas still fall short of  easy “globalisation”.

Sleepwalking to totalitarianism?

After all the irritations of getting my visa to come to the USA, let me give all credit where it’s due -- the process of actually getting into the country was seamlessly quick and efficient.

But I do have two things to report/confess. First,  on the way through Heathrow, I gave in to temptation and (entirely against my principles) registered for the British Immigration Agency’s Iris Recognition Service -- which lets you speed through the passport check coming into the country, by just blinking at a camera. 

Second, I discovered something I’d always wanted to know – that is, what happens if you don’t manage to hand back when you leave the US that little green or white card which they staple into your passport when you arrive.

Praxiteles in Paris

Just three days before leaving for the Getty I took myself to Paris to see a new exhibition at the Louvre on the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Not just myself, actually –this was a day trip we organised for our third-year Classics students at Newnham. You can just about squeeze seven Parisian hours in, if you leave London at 9.00 and take the last Eurostar back in the evening.

The idea is that it’s fun and bonding, a reward for hard work and ‘good behaviour’, plus a kick start to their revision for the final exams. Praxiteles is spot-on relevant to most of them. Some are taking our paper on the Classical Body in art. He’s a key figure in that, partly because it’s generally thought that he was the Greek sculptor who in the fourth century BC produced the first female nudes (his ‘Aphrodite of Cnidos’ usually takes the prize for being the very first).

Others are doing a paper on Sexual Ethics, and he comes in there too – largely because of stories the ancients told about this particular Aphrodite. One of the most extraordinary of all passages of Greek literature is found in a work (“Erotes” or “Loves”) by Lucian, the second century AD essayist. It is discussion between a couple of men, around this very statue, on the topic of whether the love of girls or of boys is preferable. Or to put it another way, do you admire the front or the back of the Aphrodite? In the course of the discussion one of them tells the story of a poor young boy of Cnidos who fell in love with the statue of the goddess, got himself locked into her temple and made love to her, leaving a tell-tale stain on the marble on the front of her thigh (and front is crucial to the argument, of course).

Praxiteles is in principle, then, a great subject for an exhibition. The only trouble is that with the exception of a statue of Hermes at Olympia (and there’s a question mark over even that) no certain original work of his survives.

So how do you make an exhibition?

History Carnival 51

It’s been a good two weeks to be planning a history carnival. Bloggers have been pondering on Zack Snyder’s version of the battle of Thermopylae, with those 300 suicidal Spartans. They’ve been joining in the debate about just how sloppy Michel Foucault was with his footnotes and whether it matters. And they’ve been arguing about exactly how celebratory we should all feel about the 200th anniversary of the British parliament’s abolition of the Transatlantic slave-trade.

History has been getting to parts of the blogosphere that it doesn’t usually reach. So I shall mostly be concentrating on these.

But I’ve not forgotten our more familiar territory – some new museums and historical theme parks, Jane Austen’s new publicity shot and sex in the eighteenth century . . . Not to mention an intriguing niche blog about the turbulent history of English hymns.

Do please click on!