A Don’s Life

My Cousin Rachel meets Cleopatra

The Daphne du Maurier centenary doesn’t seem to be making the impact over here that it is in the UK. Unsurprisingly perhaps (too much Cornwall??). But it was a bit of a jolt to go to a screening of the 1952 My Cousin Rachel – with Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland – and find that the film professional doing the introduction was a bit uncertain that the whole plot had been based on a novel and certainly couldn’t pronounce her name (not even the Daphne).

We hadn’t actually gone to My Cousin Rachel for the sake of the movie itself. I think I had probably seen it before anyway, but all those black-and-white cliffs  get a bit mixed up in my memory with the pretty much identikit ones in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. So honestly I’m not too sure.

The main point of the visit had been to see the movie theatre. For the film was playing in Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, one of those marvellous 1920s themed extravaganzas like the even more famous Chinese Theatre just up the street.

From the outside it looks just like you are going to see a movie in an Egyptian temple and apparently, when it first opened, a guy dressed in Egyptian costume used to patrol on the roof calling out the times of the movies. We wanted to see what happened on the inside.

The answer is that quite a lot has been changed (including – for good or bad -- the seats) but the ceiling of the auditorium still has a wonderful Egyptian fan design. And part of the ventilation system (not that we could see it) is modelled on Cleopatra’s needle.

But the other reason was the Q and A session after the movie with the son of the production designer of the film, John de Cuir Jnr talking about his dad, John de Cuir Snr.

How thuggish were the Romans?

We have just made a trip north, to San Francisco. This was partly to give a his and hers, husband and wife pair of lectures at the University of Stanford. And it was partly to explore the University of Berkeley where I’m going to be giving some lectures in the autumn of 2008. I’m both hugely looking forward to it and terrified by the prospect. But the first thing was to think about was where I might live. The good news is (much as I love cruising around LA in my Rent A Wreck car) that Berkeley is a place with sidewalks, with every appearance of a good transport system as well as bicycles on the streets . . . so it look like there’s the prospect of finding a place from where I can bike if not walk to the university.

Back in Stanford – which also has a vast and lovely campus, much of it erected in the late nineteenth century in memory of a treasured 16-year-old only son who died, Leland Stanford (what a way to get immortality) --  my talk was on prisoners and captives in (unsurprisingly Roman triumphal processions. But the underlying message, which is quite a big theme in my book, was that the triumphal procession was a place where the Romans not only celebrated but also debated and questioned the idea of military glory. Roman stories about triumphs are full of incidents where things go wrong (for example, the axle of Caesar’s triumphal chariot broke half way through), where tragedy strikes the general at the very moment of his glory, or where his glamorous and exotic prisoners upstage him (in the triumph of Aemilius Paullus in 167 BCE, for example, all eyes were apparently fixed on the pathetic child captives, not on Paullus himself).

Then there was question time. Apparently it is a Stanford custom for students to have first go at questions (a good idea it struck me: it would stop all the big guns – me included, I guess --  marching straight in, as they do at home, with the “I have three related points of disagreement with your paper…” speech). One of the students, who had come from Women’s Studies, came in with a good question. Why had no one looked at the triumph like this before?

Human sacrifice at the Getty

Human sacrifice can still pull in the punters. To put it another way, more than 60 of us got together at the Getty on Friday at a workshop to discuss this curious phenomenon across a wide range of cultures, ancient and modern – from the Phoenicians to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (human sacrifice of a kind, I suppose), via the Hebrew Bible, classical antiquity (it’s the sacrifice of Iphigenia in the picture), the Aztecs and French eighteenth-century painting. I was performing on the Roman engagement with this ritual.

One of the questions that preoccupied the participants was a simple one: did it ever actually happen? Is it one of those practices that we project onto outsiders whom we don’t particularly like (like some people have claimed for cannibalism or sacred prostitution)? That is to say, is it a cultural distancing device – a nasty habit that defines “us” by the simple fact that “we” don’t do it?

That is what is called the “revisionist” position. The other side argue that this is a weasel tactic, adopted by a load of squeamish academics who cant face the fact that human beings can do such horrible thing to each other. (Or at least that they used to do very horrible things: there’s not much support for any modern forms of human sacrifice except in movies, or in the metaphorical sense of what is happening to both sides in Iraq.) For the “non-revisionists” the history of religion is stained by human blood.

Of course, the evidence is as tricky as could be. Suppose you find the remains of an Iron Age man in a bog, with some very odd vegetable remains in his stomach and an axe in his cranium. Is that a clear case of human sacrifice, after a ritual meal? Maybe. But it could equally well be a vicious murder following coincidentally on a feast of Iron Age delicacies?

The death penalty . . . with dignity?

Every morning these days I drive twenty minutes down Sunset Boulevard from our apartment to my ocean-view office at the Getty Villa. Just how glamorous is this, I muse … ignoring the mundane surroundings of the old Toyota Corolla that I’m driving. No cadillacs for Beard.

To pass the time, I listen to the only radio station which seems to give any “proper” news: KPCC, the local branch of National Public Radio. This is a very worthy station which has sober features about student debt and illegal immigrants, and for some time during the night joins forces with the BBC World Service – which is about as worthy as you can get. But yesterday two of the morning news features sounded chilling rather than worthy.

The first was about a local “health care provider” who had made a landmark settlement and agreed “new protocols” on what is bluntly but accurately known here as “patient dumping”. There are 80,000 homeless in Los Angeles and when they end up in hospital, it seems no-one quite knows where they should be discharged to, after their treatment. This particular case involved an elderly woman who was apparently caught on CCTV being dropped off by a taxi in Skid Row (that’s a “cardboard city”) dressed in just her hospital gown and slippers. Frightening enough on its own. But there are 50 more such cases pending.

The second item was almost more shocking. This was about more “new protocols” – this time for the administering of lethal injections to condemned men in San Quentin prison.

Wonders of the World

I’ve just noticed that the Rough Guides have celebrated their 25th anniversary with a book on the 25 Wonders of the World – the must-see-before-you-die list. The Rough Guides are a great series, even if the “Rough” bit is getting increasingly genteel (“middle-aged and slightly, but safely alternative” might be a better description). But, for my taste, their choice of Wonders was a combination of disappointingly predictable and over-exotic. It was also certainly biased against anything classical.

Unless you count Petra -- the rose-red Nabataean city within the Roman empire --, they didn’t manage to find a single Greco-Roman monument that was “Wonder-worthy” . This is a bit of a slap in the face for antiquity, since it was the Greeks and Romans who invented the category in the first place. So no Parthenon (here seen in its Nashville re-incarnation) or Pantheon, no Colosseum . . .

Instead the list was worthily multi-cultural and dotted with natural Wonders amongst the man-made. The Grand Canyon here rubs shoulders with the Pyramids at Giza (who have made it through from the “ancient” list of Wonders). The Salt Flats of Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia (yes, they were new on me too) next to the Great Wall of China. Number 25 is Itaipu, the world’s biggest dam in Paraguay and Bolivia. Am I being irretrievably and conservatively “old world” or is the idea to boost sales of their South American guides, I began to wonder.

No fan of Hannibal

When radio stations ask me to contribute to classical programmes, I tend to say yes unless there is very good reason not to. (Television is another matter. There you have to look nice: what I call, the frock problem. You also need to give up something like an hour off your time for every minute they transmit, which raises an obvious effort/reward issue).

But when Irish Newstalk e-mailed me to ask if I would join in a discussion about Hannibal, my first reaction was to say no. Two problems. First, I don’t have all that much to say about Hannibal (except that, if the criteria of good generalship is actually winning, then Hannibal falls down my rankings pretty quickly – along with Spartacus, Napoleon and a whole lot of other blokeish heroes). Second, I am in Los Angeles – and I am doubtful that the phone line is good enough to do a radio discussion with Dublin.

Newstalk, however, was confident that I would be nicely audible – so I agreed to do a live discussion, going out 7.00 pm in Dublin (my 11.00 am). In truth, I was only just up…and I actually did it from bed.

Is "Religious Studies" sexy?

The fact that the USA counts as a single country, makes you feel that all travel within it is somehow ‘domestic’. So. last week, I blithely hopped over to the East coast – a journey which took, and felt, as long as going from London to New York (and cost about as much).

The first reason for going was to talk at a conference-cum-workshop at Yale (at the Divinity School in the picture) for Religious Studies graduate students from Yale, Harvard and Brown. This proved a bit of an eye-opener.

I might as well admit that I operate with a pretty old-fashioned stereotype of students doing Religious Studies. I know there are bound to be exceptions, but I do tend to assume that, nice and clever as they are, they’ll be pretty straight. And probably religious as well as in Religious Studies (in much the same way as it’s generally gays that do gay history, women that do women’s history, and so on).

These students were a very bright and talkative bunch, and I had a good time banging on about the Roman ritual of Triumph (once my book on the Triumph comes out in October, the subject will be off-limits…so I’m making the most of these final months). And their comments were spot on. But to all outward appearances, they ran to Religious-Studies type. That is to say, they were rather better scrubbed and tweed-jacketed than the average doctoral student.

Or so I thought until the time came, after an excellent dinner, when they went round the table and explained one by one what they worked on.

The nanny state . . . and rubber bullets in MacArthur Park

What do you do with school-kids who want to skip classes and go on a demonstration? May-day in Los Angeles was the date for demonstrating for immigrants’ rights, as part of the campaign for giving legal status to the millions of “undocumented” immigrants.

It’s an excellent campaign. But it soon became clear that what was really exercising the local media was the question of the high-school students -- who this time last year were a major component in the huge demonstrations.

On Monday, the sternly entitled “Superintendent of Public Instruction” was urging kids not to bunk off – but to devote those precious hours to their education (while simultaneously urging teachers to host some immigration discussions in their civics lessons). A nice try, but hardly likely to deter many teenaged activists.

By Tuesday itself, the tune had changed a bit. Staying in school was still said to be the best option, but for those who did decide to go and demonstrate, there would be buses to take them there and back. After all, as the local radio insisted, you couldn’t have them walking a couple of miles (and certainly not along the freeway like they did last year) .. because the poor dears might get dehydrated (honestly!).