A Don’s Life

Parent Power

The rise and rise of the school-run is a familiar story.  In the 60s and 70s my own virtuous generation used to get ourselves to school  on foot, by bus or bike. Now the kids get driven there in the 4 by 4, Ford Fiesta or whatever. Whatever the reasons (parental anxiety about murderous traffic and/or wandering paedophiles), the results are obvious in the shape of pollution and overweight/underexercised kids. Not to mention the fact that the average 10 year-old has lost the only half hour or so of independence that they used to enjoy during the day.

What people don’t realise is that the same phenomenon extends to universities too. When I was a student we used to go from home to college by train or bus, sending our assorted possessions in a large trunk – dozens of which you would see piled up at the Porters’ Lodge. (There was a British Rail service, I seem to remember, called “Passenger Luggage in Advance”, which I don’t imagine exists any longer.)

Now, most of them seem to get brought and picked up by their doting or long-suffering parents, in cars stuffed to the gills with clutter (and I confess that, wearing my parental hat, I do this too). Part of the reason may be practical. When we came home at Christmas and Easter, we used to stuff our things in cupboard and hop on the train. Certainly at Cambridge many colleges, with an eye on conference business, insist that the undergraduates – unless they can prove that they really do live on the other side of the planet – remove all their possessions every vacation.

But it’s not just practical (after all, there’s still the trunk option). Mums and Dads seem to appear much more often around college than their traditional single epiphany at graduation.

'La Clemenza di Tito': Mozart, the Colosseum and Yugoslavia?

Just back from the fleshpots of Los Angeles (the hard-working fleshpots, I should say), I had the treat of night at the opera – the final reward for some programme notes I wrote for the English National Opera sixth months ago. The chosen gig was Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) at the London Coliseum.

I hadn’t actually seen it or heard it before – and really chose it because I inferred (correctly but blindly) that it was about the Roman emperor Titus (79 – 81 CE, son of Vespasian and honorand of the famous arch in the Forum). It proved to be intriguingly weird in all kinds of way. The singers did a wonderful job, but a lot of the music sounded to us more like “School of Mozart” than “Mozart”. And the story line  was about as implausibly convoluted as opera seria can get.

It featured, on the one hand, a scheming Vitellia, daughter of the short lived emperor Vitellius, who wants to become empress of Rome – to avenge her father’s fall from power (marriage to Titus being the quickest route). And, on the other, the emperor himself, wanting a consort to replace his beloved Jewish Berenice, whom he has just sent away to assuage popular Roman opinion who would only accept a native Roman wife for their emperor. The search is predictably dogged by rival suitors, covert plots and outright rebellion in the city. To all of these adversities Titus responds by blessing his rivals and pardoning the disloyal. Hence the title.

But the fascination for a classicist was the set – on either side of the curtain. The performance was a revival of a David McVicar production which turned Titus’ court into an austere, if somewhat chilling, amalgam of the Ottoman and the Japanese palace (Topkapi meets the Chrysanthemum throne). We couldn’t decide if the long skirted, broad belted imperial bodyguard were meant to evoke janissaries or samurai. It was in this elegant, uncluttered imperial surrounding that Titus repeatedly forgave his various enemies and rivals.

But I wondered if McVicar had ever reflected on the ambience in which the Coliseum audience would be watching the show. For the Coliseum, built early in the twentieth century (my illustration is an early postcard), beats any theatre in London for its extravagantly Roman design. Taking its cue from what we generally now call the Colosseum, the interior is festooned with references to Rome and the Roman arena – chariots of lions, laurel wreaths, gladiatorial weapons.

Look up from the auditorium (on the right) and you’ll even spot a painted version of the velarium, or canvas sun shade, which used to keep the worst of the heat off the audience at the Roman games.

And who was responsible for building and opening the (original) Colosseum? None other than Titus, of course. So on either side of the curtain, we had two very different versions of Titus’ image. On the stage, the calm and forgiving ruler – too forgiving for his own good. On the audience side, the bloodthirsty monarch, who presided over those murderous  games (take a look at the Martial’s book of verses commemorating its opening if you want to know how murderous)  without so far as we know a jot of clemency.

But what was it all about?

Is David Cameron a Narcissus (. . . Or, was John Prescott right?)

In the excitement about John Prescott’s “Dame Osthenes” gaffe/joke, people have generally been less interested in his other creative use of classical learning. For on this parliamentary occasion, classical allusion was matched with classical allusion. If Cameron had likened  Prezza to the combination of Bevin and Demosthenes (a truly horrific mixture, even if it was meant as a kind of back-handed compliment), then Prezza was ready to fight back with some Greek mythology:

“The Leader of the Opposition reminds me of someone too. When I read classics and Greek mythology at the Ellesmere Port secondary modern school, we learnt about Narcissus. He died because he could only love his own image. Yes, he was all image and no substance!”

The trouble is that the message of the Narcissus story isn’t exactly about being all image and no substance. It’s far nastier than that.

Pompeii in Mexico

Sometimes “the penny drops” just when you are not expecting it. While I have been at the Getty, apart from tidying up the final stages of my Triumph book (and no, I still haven’t quite finished the proofs), I’ve been getting down to the next thing. As I've mentioned before, this is a book on Pompeii.

The project is a simple one: to use Pompeii to capture something about life in the ancient city. Books on daily life in the Roman world, with one or two honourable exceptions, tend to be disappointing (“Romans rose early and took a light breakfast” – you know the kind of thing). So why not try to go in through the one city we know best?

Besides there is a huge amount of specialised new work on Pompeii (like the ruts I posted about earlier) that hasn’t much impacted on books for a wider audience. They tend to make more of the vulcanology and its horrors (“their brains boiled”) than life pre-eruption. In my book, Vesuvius will definitely not have the starring role.

The problem I have is not getting together some marvellously evocative material. I had, for example, no idea that a monkey’s skeleton had been found among the bones at Pompeii. And I’m still curious about those ruts. The problem is being able simply to picture the street scene. I haven’t been able to close my eyes and conjure up the living city.

Until I went to Mexico.

Telling your Mixtecs from your Zapotecs

It’s our last couple of weeks at the Getty – and we took four mad days off to go to Mexico. The argument was that once you’re this close, it’s even madder not to go. The daughter – who came too – had chosen Oaxaca, in the south, as the best place for our first visit, for good reasons.

It is sufficiently “foreign”. It has some great pieces of Spanish colonial architecture. It is surrounded by highspots of meso-American archaeology. It currently is suffering a tourist dearth, largely because of some terrible violent riots last year in which a number of people, including a US journalist, were killed. And there is an extremely good hotel on the edge of town, where you can luxuriate for about half what it would cost in the UK.

The centre of Oaxaca is a colonial-style jewel. And, despite being a UNESCO World heritage site, and having had a major campaign of street pedestrianization, it remains firmly this side of twee. No Body Shop yet, so far as we could see. All the same, we determinedly got out of town to look at the meso-American sites, at Monte Alban and Mitla.

I have to confess that I am the kind of person who finds it hard to tell her Mixtecs from her Zapotecs. And, though I had intended to give myself some quick tutorials in the archaeology of Mexico before I went, I never quite found the time. The result was that I was a virgin tourist, armed only with a couple of guide books and whatever information the sites themselves offered.

In fact, even this badly prepared, I found lessons here for the wandering classicist – and for lovers of Damien Hirst.

Broken English

I am about to scram to Mexico for a couple of days (more later) – but last night I went to a “sneak preview” of a new movie: Broken English (title taken from the Marianne Faithfull number), by Zoe Cassavetes.

No, I haven’t made it big in Hollywood circles. But the premiere of a movie is a bit like the publication date of a book: that is, more symbolic than real. So I just paid my 10 dollars with the other film buffs of Santa Monica to go and see it at the Aero (less glamorous sister theatre of the Egyptian) a couple of weeks before it is officially released.

It is billed as a “Romantic Comedy”. But don’t let that put you off – it is a brilliantly funny story of a 30 something single woman, full of gags about the inadequacies (and simultaneously the adequacies, of course) of men . . . and how a good woman might learn to transcend them, even with their mother (Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ real Mum) breathing down their neck. And it has enough middle class serious drinking to have any member of the cabinet tutting. A thinking girl’s Bridget Jones, you might say.

We had gone not just for the movie, but again for the post-screening chat. This time it was with the director Cassavetes herself, and the lead actor, Parker Posey (she’s female too, for those of you who don’t recognise the name -- and the one in the picture). These women sounded as if they had had a very good day in LA indeed… and were at the height of their powers of entertainment by 9.30 pm when the Q and A started.

One of the first questions to Cassavetes was how much had it cost to make… a 96 minute movie on general release?

Los Angeles in a Ford Escort

Don’t be misled by my green-ish reflections on garbage. The truth is that being in California has not helped my own relationship with the planet. There were two incidents this week of which I guess I should be ashamed.

The first was with my Rent A Wreck car. I realise that I have become Californian in one sense at least: I cant envisage getting anywhere (even to shop a few blocks away) except behind the wheel. So when the Wreck wouldn’t start when I left for work the other morning, all I could think to do was to call up and get an immediate replacement. I mean, how could I live without a car?

Actually, there had been a starting problem for some weeks, but Dave at Rent A Wreck had been up-beat in his suggestion that turning the key a bit more often should do the trick (typical advice of a man to a woman with a starting problem I later decided…would he ever have said that to a bloke?). But on Wednesday I decided that half an hour of turning the key was long enough and rang for help.

The man was here within minutes, and happily couldn’t start it either (I was relieved to discover, because that’s always the humiliating bit – like when the Computer Officer answers your SOS, rushes downstairs and just switches the machine on at the mains). So now instead of an aged baby blue Toyota Corolla, I’m cruising round in a very slightly less aged brown Ford Escort (both of them red cadillacs in my head of course).

The second piece of environmental violence was a bit more surprising.

Seminar power and willy-waving

When I go to a lecture or seminar paper, I expect it to end on time. If it is billed for 30 minutes, and Professor X is still talking at 45, I feel very itchy. Likewise if what Professor X says is plain wrong, then I expect to say so (politely enough) in the discussion session that follows.

All this seem to me to be quite “natural”. But actually, I’ve learnt, these reactions are distinctively British. Although at first glance academic seminars look much the same anywhere in the world (a group of people banging on about subjects that would leave most of humanity quite cold), they are in fact governed by all kinds of culturally specific rules.

When I first went to such gatherings in Italy, for example, I couldn’t understand why the chair didn’t just shut a speaker up when he (or occasionally she) was still in full flood 30 minutes after he should have stopped. And I couldn’t understand why the rest of the audience tolerated rambling responses from the audience lasting almost as long as the paper, and often on a quite different subject.

It took me years to see that in Italian terms this was the whole point of the occasion. For here academic power was calibrated precisely according to how much of the audience’s time you could grab for yourself. If your junior colleague spoke for 8 minutes, then you were losing out in status very publicly if you didn’t take at least 10 for yourself. And so on. Aggressive chairing and timekeeping would not only be breaking the implicit rules of the seminar; it would be disrupting the very roots of the academic power structure which the seminar supported.

In the UK (or at least in Cambridge, which may be a particularly extreme version of the British  case), things are much briefer and – to put it politely – punchy. How often have I heard my colleagues coming out of a seminar, one saying to the other “I thought you made a good point”? What “good” means in this context is, “a comment that in two witty sentences completely demolished the whole paper of the poor visiting speaker and showed how much cleverer you were than her”.

Does re-cycling do more harm than good?

The life of a scholar at the Getty Research Institute is not quite the luxurious existence that it is sometimes made out to be. It is true, though, that the rubbish in our apartment block is taken care of. We put it in big communal bins – then it’s taken away. But the other morning I did catch sight of what I call a “dustbin lorry” (?”garbage truck”) coming up our street and stopped for a moment to wonder at its sophistication.

The green, black and blue bins were lined up neatly by the curbside. But there was no jolly crew of bin men heaving (or guiding) the rubbish into the lorry. This contraption appeared to be operated by one man only – who manipulated a clever couple of prongs which emerged from the lorry’s side and gripped each bin and poured its contents into the bowels of the lorry.

The only trouble was that the contents of each bin, no matter what colour, all seemed to go into the same bowel. It is, of course, possible that I missed some clever internal sorting device, which separated the different sorts of rubbish as it poured out. But there was no sign of it from where I was looking.

To put it another way, so far as I could tell, the good burghers of Brentwood (or more likely their servants) had spent many an hour sorting their trash into what was  biodegradable/re-cyclable and what was not . . . only to have it all mixed back up again when it got taken away.

This is not going to turn in to a Daily-Mail-style tirade about the follies of fortnightly bin collections. But I should say that I am a bit ambivalent about the recycling industry.