A Don’s Life

Robert Louis Stevenson and a prehistoric Pompeii

For me, one of the pleasures of tourism is not just seeing the sights, but stepping in the footsteps of those who have come to see them before. I’m the kind of person who gets a kick out of visiting the Parthenon not (just) because it takes me back to the age of Pericles, but because it makes me feel I’m sharing something with Freud, or Virginia Woolf, or Jane Harrison, or whoever.

And part the fun of Mycenae, for me, is the visitors’ book at the old hotel, the Belle Hélène, where  Schliemann lodged when he was excavating the site, and where you can still see the signatures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Debussy and Henry Moore – and wonder if they came with the same expectations as you did, whether it was quite so hot or crowded for them  . . . and so on. . .

What I hadn’t realised about California was that tourism had really taken off in the late nineteenth century. After the Gold Rush, the tourist industry seems to have been one way of making a living – turning any curious local feature into a ‘visitor attraction’. Nor had a realised (this is a bit shameful) that Robert Louis Stevenson had actually spent his honeymoon here in 1880 – and wrote it up in The Silverado Squatters. 

It turned out that in our trip to the Californian countryside, we were indeed following in his footsteps.

Wild Wonders of California

Last weekend I saw my first (wild) elk – that magnificent specimen in the picture. For my first trip outside Berkeley, we went to see some wonders of  Californian nature. First stop was the National Park at Point Reyes, which runs along the coast north of San Francisco near where Francis Drake may (or may not) have landed.

Surprisingly Americans seem rather tolerant of this nasty British pirate whose circumnavigation of the world was, so far as I can make out, a thin veil for rape and pillage. But here we have ‘Drake’s Bay’, and even ‘Sir Francis Drake Boulevard’. There is even a brass plaque in Berkeley library, found in the 1930s near the Bay, which has Drake’s claim to the land inscribed on it. It’s a forgery.

Next stop was the vast redwood trees in Muir Woods, another National Park. (That’s the other  photo, again courtesy of the husband). We were so taken with them that we bought a sapling and a seed to plant in Cambridge. OK, an act of environmental vandalism, I admit. If  Huntingdon Road is a redwood forest in 500 years, you’ll know who to blame. But with my usual record on growing things, there’s not much to fear.

It was a tremendous trip, into nature. And you can only be grateful to the National Parks organisation for managing this territory and keeping it like this for everyone to enjoy. All the same, the longer you spend in these places, the less ‘wild’, and the more ‘tamed’ they come to seem.

Strange American customs.

Please don’t misunderstand this post. I am having a wonderful time here and am feeling increasingly 'at home' in all kinds of ways. I have started to look on one o’clock as an unconscionably late time to have lunch, and the other day I almost caught myself saying ‘gotten’. There’ll be a good deal of un-learning to do when I get back to Cambridge.

I have also observed a variety of things that could well be exported to the UK. American showers, for a start. But also some social norms. People in Berkeley at least appear to have a healthily instrumental attitude to email. So, of example, you get an invitation to dinner by email. You cant make it, and you reply by email to decline. That’s the end of the exchange.

People in Britain just cant let go. The simple “Can you….”/“Sorry I cant . . .” message almost always gets dragged out, with no-one quite being able to end the conversation. “Never mind,” replies the inviter, “we’ll have to have you another time, perhaps when our daughter Lizzie is over.” “Oh marvellous,” will come the next answer, “I would so love to see Lizzie… “ And on and on. It’s as if it was somehow impolite to let it drop. A bit of American business-like practicality would save us hours.

On the other hand, there are some things I haven’t got my head around. The restaurant doggy bag, for one.

Barack Obama -- and the first 'African-Roman' emperor of Rome

I’m surprised that no-one seems to have spotted an obvious Roman parallel for the success of Barack Obama. Or have I missed it? In the second century AD, Lucius Septimius Severus became the first ‘African-Roman’ emperor of Rome. Like Obama he was of mixed race -- his father from Libya, his mother of European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife, from Syria. And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 AD was to deal with a military disaster in Iraq (‘Parthia’ as it was then known). The success of his surge was commemorated in the great arch, which remains to this day one of the most impressive monuments in the Forum at Rome.

The two little children he took with him to the palace did not fare so well. In fact they grew up to be murderous thugs – even if the elder, Caracalla, did go on to initiate the most daring extension of civic rights in the whole of world history. Once he had got rid of his brother (nastily murdered on his mother’s lap), he gave full Roman citizenship, and the legal privileges and protection that went with it, to all the free male inhabitants of the empire.

Did the success of Septimius Severus show that race no longer mattered in Roman politics? And is there a message in his story for the new president-elect?

Encountering the wild fires of California

Yesterday – that’s Friday here – I was set to give a “Roman Laughter” lecture at the University of California campus at Santa Barbara. I got up to find an email, reassuring me that my lecture was “still on”. As I hadn’t yet seen the news it had never struck me that it might be “off”. But I soon saw why: hundreds of houses destroyed in wild-fires whipped up on Thursday night just outside the town, though far enough away from the campus for the university to be thought safe.

While I waited at the gate for the plane, it was  clear that several passengers were going back to threatened homes to get out what stuff they could. My next door neighbour on the flight was one of those, and he explained to me just why it had been so devastating. Not only was the whole place very dry and the early evening winds very strong (the so-called ‘sundowners’) but the particular place where the fire had become established was an area of single track, twisty roads and cul-de-sacs – so it was very hard to get the fire equipment in the right place. The fire was, he explained, moving into the town, but it was much easier to contain there.

It was a low key, but rather moving account, particularly when told me that he (with his neighbours) had only recently invested in a herd of goats, which is still -- notwithstanding any advances is modern technology -- by far the most cost effective way of keeping the brush wood (and so the fire risk) down. But the goats had only been installed for a couple of weeks; hardly time to make an impact and heaven knows what had happened to them.

So was it business as usual when I arrived? And what was the mood?

What's the matter with Google Earth's Ancient Rome?

Just how great is the new Google Earth 3D recreation of ancient Rome? The one that is supposed to let you wander through the streets of the city, in virtual reality authenticated and developed by academics from the University of Virginia.

Inspired by the enthusiastic reviews and having a bit of time on my hands now that the lectures have finished, I decided to spend an hour exploring the site.

No, it wasn’t as good as I had hoped.

For a start, it proved impossible to load it onto my relatively new Mac laptop.  So I had to wait till I got to my newer and larger office desktop. Here it loaded OK, but it still wasn’t all plain sailing. Maybe if I had more experience of computer games, I’d be more adept at the controls of this sort of thing. But for it wasn’t so much a pleasant stroll through the ancient streets, but a ghastly roller coaster of a ride. As with Google Maps, an inadvertent click on the mouse and you find yourself zooming wildly in and out – and in this case, given half a chance, the reconstruction of the ancient monuments dissolved uncontrollably into an image of the archaeological ruins and back again.

After 30 minutes of this I had a fearful headache and felt a bit as if I’d been on a rough Channel crossing. And I never did manage to do anything remotely like ‘walk through the Forum’.  Practice at the controls would no doubt help.

But was the whole thing any good?

To Chicago and back -- just

I haven’t told you about my trip to Chicago last weekend. Partly because I realise that some readers of this blog have little sympathy for “the don’s” complaints about the inconveniences of  air-travel. If she will gad about the world, needlessly consuming the planet’s resources, then she deserves all she gets. That’s the tough, austere line.

But perhaps it’s worth putting it this way. When some sweet-talking boffin like me turns up to enthuse and inform for an hour about ancient Greece or Rome, exactly how much time and effort has gone into that hour (no to mention the time taken preparing the lecture, and the life-time of swotting to be able to count as a boffin in the first place)?

Let me tell you the story of my trip to Chicago last Friday and Saturday to talk about the Parthenon. I had agreed months ago to do a gig at the Humanities Festival there. That was when I assumed that by late October all my Sather lectures would be long written. In fact, I had the last one still to write, so it wasn’t exactly brilliant timing.

Anyway the extremely efficient administrators of the festival had booked me onto the American Airlines flight leaving San Francisco at 4.30, getting into Chicago at 10.30 pm. I already knew as I left the Berkeley campus at 1.30 that the flight was an hour late but there didn’t seem anything else to do but go to the airport. What if it miraculously caught up? It didn’t of course. The iron rule is that airplanes only got later, and we were only just beginning to board at 6.30.

Could have been worse. But soon, it was clear from the mutterings of the cabin crew that they were a person short. That person, we were soon told, was the captain. They were paging him, but no luck so far. It was by now gone 7.00. Within a few minutes it turned out that the captain was sick. Indeed he had called in sick the previous day, but finding a replacement had somehow fallen through the net. They would get a reserve captain, but meanwhile off the plane please.

California bans gay marriage

We in Berkeley are, of course, celebrating the presidential election results. But there is not such good news on some of the local propositions.

Our biggest surprise is that Proposition 8 banning gay marriage seems to have been successful. I say ‘seems’, because the large number of absentee and ‘provisional’ votes still needs to be counted. I wore my button protesting (against) this initiative – though not without a certain wry bemusement. In my day, radicals wanted to abolish marriage, as well the oppression of women and the state regulation of personal life. The last thing we would have thought of doing is extending its grip to those groups who had remained free of it. So quickly does the radical agenda change.

Even worse, in my view, was the passing of Proposition 9, a Victims Rights initiative (paradoxically bank-rolled by a rich Californian currently indicted on fraud and drugs charges). It reduces the possibilities for prisoners’ parole, adds to the vast Californian prison population and give victims of crime a greater voice in the judicial and punitive process. There’s something truly dreadful about this. Sure, we should support the victims. But one of the whole purposes of a state legal system is to break the link the link between culprit and victim – to stop punishment being vendetta.

But there was some better news on other fronts. Proposition KK, aiming to stop the development of a better system of public transport, has been defeated. So has the Proposition to insist that parents be informed of their ‘under age’ children’s abortions. And the Proposition to name a San Francisco sewage works after George W Bush didn’t make it. The sewage works was thought far too useful for that.

Republican propaganda invades my kitchen

No I haven’t forgotten that there is an election going on here. In fact I came back home to two new automated voice mail messages from the GOP.

The first must have cut off the beginning, but what there was went like this:

“He invites a major international crisis that he will be unprepared to handle alone. If democrats win full control of government they will want to give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators and state sponsors of terror. Barack Obama and his democratic allies lack the experience and judgement to lead America.”.. finished off by a statement that it was a message sponsored by the Republican National Committee.

So, I reflect, as I press the delete button, Ms Palin has got the experience to handle an international crisis, has she? And, anyway, dont some people think that the Republicans in bed with some state sponsors of terror? (Hence my poster above, in case you hadnt spotted!.) But no chance to put these points to the automaton... nor would there have been had I happened to have been at home when the phone rang. This is political harangue by CD (or however it's done); conversation not allowed.

The second message was shorter:

“Barack Obama talks a lot about change but we cant trust his track record to deliver it”

There’s something oddly irritating about all this -- blared in your kitchen, in an apparently human voice, but no opportunity to object or engage. So much for old-fashioned democratic debate.

Lets hope that UK political parties break off their brief flirtation with this nasty system before it’s too late.

It's bonkers to ban Latin

I was contacted last week by a Telegraph journalist, The Telegraph had uncovered, he said, the fact that local councils were banning Latin words from all official documents and in their dealings with the public more generally. This was information the paper had obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. (Hang on… do you really need the FOI Act to find out about this, or did the horrid truth emerge during a trawl for something even more sinister?)

What was my reaction? Well, at first thought, it was a bit mixed. It looked like another of those pseudo-populist gestures that councils and government are in the habit of making. They make you fill in a form 20 pages long to claim some tiny benefit you are entitled to… then they congratulate themselves for the whole document being entirely “Latin-free”. Humbug. On the other hand, there are some Latin phrases I don’t have too much affection for. I wouldn’t shed many tears for 'nil obstat', for example.

But when I discovered what the offending words were, the only conclusion was that the whole scheme was bonkers – and ignorant.

The list of words for the chop included not only ad hoc and prima facie, but eg, vice versa, ie and NB.