A Don’s Life

Induction to California

As you may have guessed, I have arrived in California. I have been here a week and am now equipped with everything I need for a happy modern life: an office (decorated with some confident photos of previous Sather lecturers), an email account, an internet access code or two, and ID card to give me access to my building out of hours and library borrowing privileges.

Amazingly I have no borrowing limit. Accustomed as we Cambridge academics are to a more or less strictly enforced 10 book limit, I approached the Berkeley borrowing desk with some trepidation. How would I choose between the 12 I wanted to borrow (Berkeley has a wonderful collection – and I had stumbled upon the ‘laughter’ section)? I needn’t have worried. I can borrow as many as I like for up to year. This was like the proverbial child in a sweet shop (though I did wonder how many mainstream books I would find had been borrowed by other sweet-eaters like me). Maybe they library just doesn't have the space to store all it has, and this is a benign form of out-housing.

In many ways Freshers Week (or Welcome Week as I should call it) seems reassuringly familiar. I’ve had tremendous hospitality from the faculty -- and all those internet codes must have taken someone hours to get sorted. Meanwhile the students seem to be engaged in much the same activities as those back home, offering free water in return for signing up to some very worthy, but ultimately no-hope, Society. (In Cambridge they do it with alcohol – here apparently off limits till you’re 21 -- but the principle’s the same.)  Plus hours of partying, music, and non-stop hellos.

The local student paper is up in arms that Welcome Week has been cut to just two days from seven – the ‘authorities’ wanting to reduce costs. I can see why the students object but I have to say that after half a life time in Cambridge, I feel a sneaking sympathy for the mean ‘authorities’.

Anyway the only really, really different bit has been the two hour compulsory induction for foreign scholars provided by the International Office of the University -- to which I was firmly invited.

I must confess that I was not looking forward to this.

The Olympic Victors' Return -- some ancient lessons

The ancient Olympic Games were considerably more modest than our own -- and no synchronised diving, thank heavens. But the Greek cities made even more of a fuss than we do about their victorious, medal winning (or rather olive-wreath winning) athletes.

The classic ceremony was to have the victor enter his home town in a four-horse chariot through a hole in the city wall specially demolished for the occasion. Who needs walls, after all, when you’ve got splendid young men like this victor?.

The follow-up rewards included a state pension (in the form of free meals for life), front row seats at the theatre, and maybe a poem in celebration of the success. In some cases this was the most lasting honour. In fact, some of the most extraordinary (and difficult) poems to survive from the Greek world are Pindar’s Odes written to celebrate victories not only in the Olympic Games, but also in the rival Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games. (Click here if you want a taster of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode – and see just how dense and allusive it is. Even professional classicists find it hard.)

Maybe Andrew Motion is at this minute preparing an official ode for our own returning heroes. But whatever his manifold virtues, I doubt that much of Motion’s laureate verse is likely to survive and be studied in 2500 years time.

In fact, by and large, we tend to leave the free pensions to the lucrative Nike contract – and tend to follow Roman fashions in welcoming our boys (and girls) back home.

Give the Olympics back to Greece

How do you match the Chinese? As the Olympic Games draw to a close, presumably the London 2012 organisers get even more jittery about how they can even start to match the Beijing extravaganza, on half the money.

There are some obvious tactics. First, they could go even further down the Beijing road. Why stop at voice-overs and fake fireworks? It would be much more economical to have the whole opening ceremony done digitally – and distributed to anyone who wanted to watch on a CD. No athletes need ever march into the stadium. It needn’t even be finished.

Nor should we bother too much about the spectators. China has had enough trouble bussing them in, so we could just build an Olympic sports television studio, with carefully positioned cameras, but no human on-lookers, except a few cheer-leaders.

Or alternatively make a virtue out of necessity and scale the whole opening extravaganza down a notch or ten. Perhaps just the Queen, the athletes and some Girl Guides and Boy Scouts… and NO fireworks.

For the future, though, the answer is obvious. The games should go permanently back to Olympia (in Greece, that is).

Georgia, Russia -- and the Golden Fleece

Before I went on Any Questions last week I did a good deal of homework on Georgia etc. The one thing that was quickly very clear was that there were no ‘goodies’ in this conflict.

It’s certainly hard to condone the continuing Russian aggression. But I cant understand how quickly commenters have forgotten that it was Mr Saakashvili who struck the first formal blow. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he is solely culpable (there is such a thing as provocation), but the instant ‘whiting out’ of the Georgian first strike seems not all that different from the old ‘Turkish invasion of Cyprus’ story. OK, again the rights and wrongs are tricky, but it’s perverse to forget that the prompt to that invasion was a Greek-backed attempted coup.

In Georgia’s case a lot more gets swept under the carpet. For a start, it is a pretty disappointing beacon of democracy for the West to support: no independent judiciary, some recent strategic closing of non-government media, and – so far as I can tell – a good number of opposition leaders in prison (deservedly or not, I dont know).   

And there is a good deal of sabre rattling from the American Right. Not just Cheney. McCain’s foreign policy advisor was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia. Surely that makes a difference. Pointing this out, tends to get you labelled as ‘anti-American’ – as if being opposed to right wing Republicans was the same as being opposed to America. (It seems, if you believe the report in the Sunday Times that even Condoleeza Rice was trying – unsuccessfully – to put the brake on Saakashvili.)

The bottom line is that the vast majority of us are quite ignorant about the Caucasus. I don’t know any Russian beyond the alphabet and I know no Georgian whatsoever, never mind Ossetian. It helps a bit that my husband does know Russian and has recently been to Georgia, and receives e-mail pleas and justifications from both sides. But, for the most part, like almost all of us, I'm dependent on very filtered news.

In any case for a classicist, as my fellow blogger pointed out when we were discussing it last week, Georgia signals one thing above all.

Is it worth insuring your iPod?

I am off to Berkeley next week, so I’m catching up a bit on all those lingering things I haven’t quite finished -- in addition to the lectures, that is. And in addition to doing Any Questions on Friday night. (You can Listen Again here – and tell me what you think, please.)

Anyway, the controversy of the moment is one of those extended warranties, which we took out about a year ago on the son’s iPod, when we bought it from John Lewis (against whom, let me say, I have no grudge at all). Everyone said that iPods were always going wrong so, unlike for fridges or televisions. So the three year insurance from Landmark Insurers (who now seem to be calling themselves AIG) seemed a good idea.

Indeed the blasted thing did go wrong. So a month ago we had it collected for mending. It should take, the insurers said, about 5 days. Sounded fine. But a week or so ago we realised that no mended iPod had been returned. So we rang again to find out what was going on.

Don’t get your hopes up.

Were the ancient Olympics any better than the modern?

I am one of those inverted patriots who takes considerable comfort in Team GB doing as usual (ie badly) at the Olympics. For me it’s a badge of honour that our precocious 14 year old and his partner managed to come last in the finals of the synchronised diving.

Diving in principle maybe OK -- though it’s dangerous enough even without any illegal substances (our 14-year-old’s partner has apparently had two operations already for retinal problems  brought on by the diving). But what on earth is the point of synchronised diving?

And, of course, I smirk, when we discover that the fire-work foot-prints on the opening day were done by some version of CGI, or that the cute nine-year old was miming to a ‘less pretty’ girl’s voice (so much for communism’s commitment to feminism – if only), or that a good proportion of the eager spectators have been bus-ed in.

But were the ancient games much better? Were the ancient Greeks up-standing and honest sportsmen, honouring the gods rather than their own ambition?

Not really.

Even before the Roman empire and the emperor Nero came along (to win all the prizes), the Olympic Games were a hornet’s nest of corruption.

Lord Curzon and the Taj Mahal

Let me finish the India story.

The main point of the journey, as I said, was to see the Taj Mahal – partly out of that vague “what you should see before you die” impetus, partly because there is a great new book by Giles Tillotson just about to come out in my Wonders of the World series, which had sparked my interest even more.

We got to Agra from Delhi when it was dark, booked  to stay in the only hotel which has direct views of the Taj. If you’re coming all that way for such a short time you don’t want to miss a minute of the potential view . . though the truth was that it was mostly misty and/or dark while we were there (though see our best bedroom view on the left) .

Following all the advice, we then got up at 6.00 to see the building as the sun was coming up. Even on a grey-ish morning it was fantastic, and when we’d done the oohing and aahing, I read the family some pages of Tillotson on how the Taj had been fought over for centuries, how some of European critics had tried to claim a European ancestry for it (wasn’t it just too good for the Mughals to have done themselves?), and so on – up to Islamic-Hindu conflicts of more recent times.

It was in the imperial part of this story that Lord Curzon came in.

Heard the one about the Roman and the barber?

I’m now full steam ahead on my Berkeley lectures about Roman laughter. And to be precise, off to spend the rest of Sunday in the library (thank heavens that our Faculty gives us access 24/7), for a side-splitting afternoon with some Roman jokes.

I’ve already given you some choice examples. But just for laugh, here’s another favourite, from the collection known as the Philogelos (or “Laughter-lover”):

A man goes to get his hair cut by a talkative barber. “How would you like your hair done,” asks the barber. “In silence,” replies the man.

Not bad?

Anyway a number of people have emailed me to find out a bit more about my work on this. So at the risk of vulgar self-advertising, I’m giving a link to quite a long interview I did on this for the New York Review of Books. Click here.

What working mothers need

Some new Cambridge research has suggested that support for women’s equality in the workplace could be on the slide. This is not the usual sort of working mother scare story (“Recent research from the University of Poppleton suggests that babies who are not in close contact with their mothers for 23 hours out of 24 are likely to have lower IQs/ be prone to childhood cancer/will turn to crime . . . .<fill in your own nightmare>”). This is work on social attitudes. There is, as the research leader puts it, "mounting concern" amongst people at large that women who work full-time do so to the detriment of family life – and of themselves.

Surprise, surprise, I found myself thinking. As usual, with social reforms, you cant do it on the cheap. The solution isn’t to encourage mothers back to the kitchen. If you really think women have a right to the same career opportunities as men, and to expect promotion on the same terms, then you need to put money into it – and into the childcare provision and other forms of support that can make it possible.

It’s pricey. But so what? The women don’t get themselves pregnant, do they? Why should the impregnators get off scot-free?

Mad dogs and Englishmen

It’s time to confess that I’ve just been to India for the weekend – Friday to Monday. A mad enterprise in a way, but we (a) needed a break, (b) didn’t have time for more than a couple of days and (c) wanted to see the Taj Mahal. OK, it left rather a large carbon footprint, but no larger than if I had gone for a fortnight (as I told my conscience).

One tip for anyone thinking of following suit. Don’t try to do it cheap. If you want to cram a lot into a very short time, you have to pay what you would have paid for two weeks. You want everything to be comfortable and to work smoothly… you cant risk any of your three nights being hot and sleepless. Though there is one bizarre consequence of doing the trip upmarket --  you go to a very hot country and spend all your time being slightly cold, such is the over-efficiency of the air-conditioning (there is the carbon footprint problem, I fear).

Anyway, the result for me is that I now have the sense that I was there for at least five days – so much did we see, including the Taj (the ostensible reason for the visit).