A Don’s Life

Zero tolerance

Is tolerance a virtue in world religions? Last night I found myself arguing the apparently improbable case that it was not.

The context for this outburst was a public discussion, sponsored by the TLS and the British Library, in a series of events going with the BL’s current exhibition “Sacred” – a show of  “holy books” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“Sacred” has some marvellous stuff in it: a chunk of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest surviving New  Testament (the Codex Sinaiticus), the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the earliest Korans we have, The Lisbon Bible (a magnificently illuminated fifteenth-century Jewish text - on the right), and loads more. It’s definitely worth a visit  -- if only because you’re never likely to get to see such an extraordinary and stunningly beautiful collection of religious book-art ever again.

If there’s a problem with the show, it’s the underlying message captured in its slogan “Discover what we share”.

What is Big Brother doing in Durham Cathedral?

I have just got back from overnighting in Durham. I had a gig talking to a splendid Summer School – 100 schoolkids and adults giving up a week of their vacation to learn Latin and Greek (and some heroic teachers giving up a week of theirs to teach them).

Shamefully I hadn’t been to Durham ever before. The somewhat grumpy taxi driver who picked me up at the station didn’t really see why I was bothering.

After all, he opined, Durham was just like Cambridge – only smaller.

He was wrong, of course. They might both be overrun with students (“posh” students as he put it). But Durham’s got the cathedral . . .

. . . which is where I headed in the half hour I had before supper yesterday.

David Beckham among the feminists

After his 12 minute celebrity debut on the pitch for LA Galaxy (they lost 0-1 to Chelsea), David and Victoria were given a celebrity welcoming party to Tinsel Town, courtesy of Tom Cruise and Will Smith. The venue was the “Geffen Contemporary” -- one time hardware store and warehouse, converted by Frank Gehry into vast display galleries for the LA Museum of Contemporary Art.

The party was last Sunday. What no one seems to have spotted is the delicious inappropriateness of the exhibition that had closed there just a few days earlier.

Entitled WACK!, it was a stunning retrospective of feminist art in the 1960s and 70s.

All the girls were there: Cindy Sherman, ORLAN (who’d actually spent part of this year at the Getty, much to the thrill – as I can attest -- of the middle-aged academics), Nancy Spero, the tremendous Cosey Fanni Tutti (who got the ICA into trouble with her “Prostitution” exhibition in 1976), Mary Kelly, the lot.

I don’t know how long it takes to dismantle a big show like that (though I am sure it’s longer than you think). But could it have been that some of the pieces remained on the wall, while Posh – that stick-insect-cum-clothes-horse whom feminism has so far failed to save – partied away? The thought raises ironies that are almost too good to contemplate.

Falco in Pompeii

I am just back from a great conference in Bristol on Pompeii: “Ruins and Reconstructions”. This wasn’t on the ancient history of the city, but its history since its rediscovery. Fascinating titbits of information were flying around (one speaker informed us that the average time spent by tourists in the reconstructed brothel on the site was 30 seconds – surprisingly long, I thought). But much of the talk was about Pompeian fiction, in particular Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii.

This is the classic (1834), much-filmed, pre-Robert Harris story, of the virtuous couple, Glaucus and Ione, who manage not only to escape the nasty schemes of Arbaces, the priest of Isis, but also the lava flow of the eruption (with the help of a conveniently loyal blind flower seller) – and end up happy ever after, married and Christian, in Athens.

Delegates were divided on the literary merits of the book. One group regularly inserted the adjective “ghastly” in front of every mention of it. In fact one speaker pointed out that in the USA there is an annual Bulwer Lytton prize for the worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel. (The organisers have in mind “It was a dark and stormy night”, the first line of his Paul Clifford; but “Ho, Diomed, well met”, the opening of Last Days, is in the same style.)

Others opined that it was a neglected gem – and, in any case, a good deal better than any of the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott. Though that’s perhaps not saying very much.

Should we ban Babar?

I have been keeping my head down for the last few days since the story broke. But I have to confess that I belong to one of those politically dubious households who actually own a copy of the infamous Tintin in the Congo, which the Commission for Racial Equality thinks is only fit for “a museum, with a big sign saying ‘old-fashioned racist clap-trap’”. 

And I have read it, which -- I suspect -- is rather more than many of those sounding off about its virtues and vices have done.

In mitigation I would claim that it was not used to pollute the minds of the very young In fact, we bought it quite recently, at the behest of the daughter was doing an A level History project on Leopold and the Congo. So in a way we were using it as the kind of museum piece that the CRE would allow.

But it is now lodged on my shelves next to couple of books that our kids did read and enjoy when very young, but which look – on the CRE principle --  as if they could be next in the line of fire. The Story of Babar and Babar the King are, as several critics have already pointed out, potentially dangerous and racist tracts. Cute as he may appear, Babar is worse than an unwitting and unreconstructed colonialist: his blacks are all silly “savages”, targets of ridicule with no positive valuation at all; and his apparently utopian foundation of Celesteville is riven by class and gender discrimination, not to mention bearing a passing resemblance to Leopold’s Leopoldville.

Surely it’s the next kids’ classic in the line of fire?

Do "pissing" and "sex" get you more hits?

Veteran bloggers must know this already. But, until the clever technocrats of the Times introduced me to “Google Analytics", I had no idea that you could find out what phrase the surfers had typed into Google to end up at your website.

Some of mine are boringly predictable. If you put “Mary Beard” into Google (not a Google mega-favourite, I have to say: precisely 211 punters in the last month), then -- sure enough -- you’ll end up with this blog. Same goes for “Mary Beard a dons life” (24 in the last four weeks), or “don’s life times” (35) – or, I should confess, “sw foska” (33). And I suppose that “Beckham’s new tattoo” had a captive audience (getting more than 120 searches in its various forms . . . “Beckham tattoo”, “David Beckham new tattoo”, “Beckham Latin tattoo” etc).

I’m also happy (and un-shocked) to hear it again for the “Times Literary Supplement” (26) and “Michael Bywater Cambridge 2007” (21).

But there are surprises in store. “Where is your spleen” – presumably typed into Google by those in search of some medical information – has just landed 23 hits onto my post about undergraduates not knowing their ancient geography. Some disappointed punters there, I imagine.

And until very recently my biggest Google hit was quite simply “pissing” (though it reached only 15 this month), which linked directly to my post about the smell of urine in the pyramids (“pissing on the pyramids”). From this I concluded that a large number of Google searchers were lads aged 10-13, who would have been mightily disappointed to have been taken to a site on Egyptian tourism.

It reminds me of the colossal number of hits that fellow blogger Stothard got with  his “Syphilis and Mrs Hardy” post (it wasn’t Mrs Hardy that got them clicking, I can assure you). All of  which caused considerable envy on my patch.

But there are some even funnier surprises.

Beware: tradesmen in the library

It only takes a quick visit to the Cambridge University Library to dispel any suspicion that the book is dead, or even approaching the last stages of terminal illness. The whole place is bursting at the seams with new accessions, which have now outgrown all the shelves and are spilling over onto tables, window-sills and even the floor.  All over the library you find little notes saying, helpfully, things like: “Classmark 534.6 c 95 continues on the table by the window”. I rather approve of all this (the UL is one of the few big libraries where a lot of the books are open to readers and don’t have to be ordered up from some compact-shelving dungeon) – but it does mean that the whole place is coming to look more and more like my own office. That is to say a bit of a mess.

I’ve just been spending a few rare days in the UL. Rare? Yes, and not only because I’ve been away for three months. Despite what you might enviously imagine about the working life of the average Cambridge don, I hardly ever get the time to go there during term. And even in the vacation, the excellent library in the Classics Faculty is only two minutes from my office and meets most of my needs. So some solid hours in the main library (the one with the “up yours” tower) seems quite a luxury.

The UL is a marvellous combination of high-tech library science (or “information science” I guess I should say) and some endearingly quaint old-fashioned habits.

How to order a coffee in American

My trip to Mexico was another linguistic challenge. Pride coming before a fall, I thought that if I could read Spanish (…well, Spanish books on Roman religion, at any rate), I could speak it too.

In fact that wasn’t too far from the truth. Although the husband accused me of just speaking loudly in a bastardised form of Italian, I was quickly pretty confident in saying, “dos margaritas, sin sal” (“two margaritas without salt” as we have it), and the like. The problem was understanding what on earth was said back.

This is almost always how it is with foreign languages. It’s easy enough to muster enough German to say: “Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof”. But, unless you can understand “turn sharp right at the abattoir, then half left just after the war memorial, and you’ll see it on the other side of the roundabout”, you might just as well not have bothered.

But it’s not just in foreign languages. A few months in the USA made me think that a lot of successful human communication, even English to English, depends on knowing in advance what your interlocutor is likely to say back to you. It means knowing the script in advance, in other words. Try to order a coffee in Los Angeles, and before you get a nice steaming latte, you will have to have given a series of quickfire answers to a whole load of unexpected and quite un-British responses: “Regular?”, “Half-and half?”, “Long or short?”. More than once I was left as baffled as if the “barista” had been speaking a half-understood GCSE language.

It made me wonder if there were two versions of English learning text books the world over – the UK, and the US version.

And what would one of those “at the coffee shop” learning dialogues look like in each?

Index linked?

I should have known better. But when my publishers asked me if I wanted to prepare the index of my new book myself, or have them get a professional, I instantly said that I would do it myself.

The main reason was that I have, in the past,  seen some really dreadful, so-called “professional” indexes (the kind where you are enticed by an entry to – say -- Virginia Woolf, only to find, on looking it up, some such phrase as “Born in the same year as Virginia Woolf, our hero….”). I also self-importantly thought that only I, as author, would be able quickly to identify the underlying themes that were most worth signalling (so making the kind of index that transcends the simple computer word search, and, at its best, gives a parallel intellectual structure to the book for an attentive index reader).

There was a hopelessly optimistic side to this too. I thought that at this last stage I would positively enjoy reading the whole typescript through, post-partally, for one last time, then sitting back to reflect on the main index-able themes. I was going  to create an index-to-die-for.

I should have known better. For a start, I’ve done this before – and should know that those days of leisurely re-reading in an arm-chair never quite materialize; it’s always a rush. I had also read the long correspondence in the TLS at the end of last year, all about the pitfalls of indexing. That should have reminded me.

As it turns out, I’ve spent five days on it (for 440 pages of book), and actually I am not un-pleased with the result. But it hasn’t been remotely fun doing it.