A Don’s Life

A classicist watches Britain's Got Talent

Yes, I confess. The husband is away and I am catching up on stuff -- and I couldn't resist watching the final of BGT. I hadn't seen any of the previous parts, but I had heard of the Susan Boyle phenomenon, and just today I had caught up with Hollie Steel, aged 10, crying on stage in the semi-finals.

I had a pretty clear view of the whole process, Not so very different from the display of 'cripples', 'freaks' or 'exotic foreigners' in nineteenth-century spectacles (or from gladiatorial shows, for that matter), this was another version of mass-market exploitation of the disadvantaged. How could people -- or a parent -- subject a 10 year old child to that?

So it was with the intention of enjoying some righteous indignation that I switched on.

Professors of poetry -- and how universities really make appointments

This is NOT a post about Ruth Padel and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. But it's about what this whole sad story might (or might not) reveal about how universities appoint people to jobs.

I was rung up at 7.30 yesterday morning by the Today programme, who wanted me to talk -- this is my gloss -- about how "the academy" conducted itself. Was the Oxford scandal typical of how people get jobs in universities? What role did gossip and back-stabbing play? I was to be talking with Lisa Jardine.

Big mistake, Beard? Lisa was as usual wonderful and persuasive. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Oxford case, universities -- she argued -- should clean up their act. There was too big a role in the academic job market for gossip and back-biting. Indeed it was still an area, she said, where people asked for references BEFORE they decided who to short list.

I am, of course, in trouble again -- last week I was spilling the beans about Newnham grace, this week I ended up saying my colleagues were all pretty boring. More to the point, as I ought to have said (sorry guys!), they are far to busy doing their jobs to spend hours gossiping.

If only we had time to gossip and plot the downfall of our (academic) enemies.

Is there a Euro election going on?

It has just struck us (that's the husband and me) that there is a big Euro election taking place on 4 June, but so far we have had nothing through the door telling us who the candidates might be, or urging us to vote in any particular direction.

We have had some stuff about the local county council elections, just from the BNP and the Lib Dems (for whom I shall be voting). Though I'd rather move further to the left, the LD's have been good in Cambridge, and the sitting MP is not only a friend, but has very modest expenses. Maybe our LD poster has put off the other parties from knocking on the door (but it can hardly have put them off sending their literature through the mail -- so much for local democracy).

But on the Euro front, we have had NOTHING from anyone.

Living with Jane Harrison

I'm posting this from Oxford, where I have been lecturing, first to the Oxford University History Society, then at Wolfson College in a lecture series on "Lives and Works" (and I'm just about to motor to Bristol to talk about Pompeii at the Bristol Festival of Ideas . . . a little tour of one night stands, you might say).

The idea at Wolfson was to go back to the life of Jane Harrison -- the famous, charismatic and utterly infuriating Newnham don at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- about whom I'd written a book almost a decade ago now. To start with, I wasn't hugely looking forward to the prospect of this return to my own vomit. But it actually turned out to be rather interesting to reflect back on the whole process of "writing a life" (which I hadn't done before and don't honestly imagine that I will do again).

What struck me most, even at this distance, was the uncomfortable nature of the kind of archival research that underlies any such biography. A prurient, prying business -- which involves a good deal of reading someone else's private letters, certainly not meant for your eyes.

Great lecturing disasters

Students (and ex-students) dream about exam disasters. I still occasionally wake up with the horror that I've just arrived in an exam room to find that it's the wrong paper (I've revised for Latin Literature, but it's Greek philosophy on the table).

The lecturers' nightmare is about something going terribly wrong when they are trying to perform in front of a hundred or so restless students. Most of these nightmares can come true.

A decade or so ago, I really did turn up to give a big-gish lecture in my Faculty with my sheaf of notes. I should have checked them carefully before, but my kids were playing up or something. Everything went fine until I got to page five of the notes, then --  when I tried to turn over -- there just weren't any more. Maybe it would have been fine if I had been expecting to improvise, but I wasn't. I cant quite remember how I managed (or where those other pages had gone; I never found them).

Then there's the being drunk problem.

Christianity banned -- and some better news

It was perhaps (as has been pointed out to me) a little beyond propriety to blog about Newnham's internal discussions on its college grace. But I just couldn't resist ("It is easier for a wise man to stifle a flame within his burning mouth than to keep bona dicta to himself", as the Roman poet Ennius said). Besides, I thought college came rather well out of it, over all -- students taking multi-culturalism, multi-faith, and the traditions of their institutions seriously, dons taking students' comments and suggestions seriously, the discussion going at the problem from every angle. Amusing from the outside it might have been, but it was feisty stuff -- showcasing argumentative young women at a flourishing single sex institution, not a load of Laura Ashley clad wimps.

I feared the worst when the Cambridge Evening News rang up to get some more information, but was assured (!) that the story would be carefully and accurately handled, when it appeared in the Thursday edition. Well the story was. But the headline (on the front page) ran GRACE BANNED (which it certainly hadn't been).

It was only a matter of time before it was picked up by the Mail, Express Telegraph, Jeremy Vine etc etc

How naive could I have been?

Does college need a new grace?

Here is another everyday story of academic folk.

Our students at College (or some of them, at least) are worried that the grace we use in Formal Hall is too Christian. Here we are, a college proud not to have a chapel (the only mainstream, undergraduate college in Cambridge for which that is true) -- and yet before formal dinners we are always thanking "Jesum Christum dominum nostrum" (not to mention "deum omnipotentem") , "pro largitate tua . . ." etc etc. A fair point, in a way.

So they brought to last week's college meeting an alternative grace for our consideration: "Pro cibo inter esurientes, pro comitate inter desolatos, pro pace inter bellantes, gratias agimus" ("For food in a hungry world, for companionship in a world of loneliness, for peace in an age of violence, we give thanks").

Now a lot of work had gone into this, and there were no obvious grammatical howlers in the Latin. But, irreligious as I am, I just couldn't stomach it.

David Miliband and his (modest) garden expenses

I'm not hugely engaged by the MPs' expenses controversy. No I dont think they should be on the fiddle, but we ought to realise that there may be all kinds of pressing reasons behind all this expenditure that the bare receipts conceal. (Though as the husband pointed out it was a bit rich to hear Harriet Harman defending them all by appeal to "rules" when she wanted to reduce Fred Goodwin's pension whether he had played by the 'rules' or not.)

Anyway aren't there more important things going on in the world that we OUGHT to be getting worked up about. (Like -- at the risk of a blatant plug for the daughter's enterprises -- the possibilities of elections in Sudan!)

All the same my eye was drawn this morning to the claim in The Independent that David Miliband "spent sums of up to £180 every three months on his garden prompting his gardener to question whether the work was necessary".

Apart from thinking that UP TO  £180 was not an unreasonable amount to spend on a garden every three months (have these reporters looked at the prices in a garden centre recently?), I still did feel a bit shocked that the nation was depending on Miliband's gardener to protect 'tax-payers' money'.

Mary Beard and Marina Warner have fun, talk myth (and do some ironing) in Brighton

Yesterday afternoon I went to Brighton. First stop was Brighton, Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College, to talk to a group of students about their AS and A2 Classical Civilization topics -- that is, Cicero and Augustus. There were about 40 of them in all, and they were good value. I banged on a bit about how impossible it was to write a biography (in our terms) of anyone in the ancient world, except fictionally. In which case, asked one of the audience after the formal session had ended, how should they study Cicero, when the whole AS topic was in a sense "biographical". A fair cop really. And I'm not sure that my answer -- which came down to reading the biographies "critically" and looking out for all those points where the author says "Cicero must have" (ie we dont know) -- really hit the spot.

Then it was on to the Pavilion Theatre where I was due to do a discussion with Marina Warner (chaired and hosted by Peter Guttridge) on the role of the classical world today. The event was sold out ( that was because Marina, not me, I emphasise realistically), which meant 200+ people -- and beyond a ten minute phone conversation earlier in the week we hadn't planned anything, nor had we arranged anything with Peter.

I was slightly anxious.

Reviewing: the nastiness test

I am just on the way back from Columbus Ohio, where I’ve done two gigs. The first was at a great colloquium on Saturday organised by the graduate students in the Greek and Latin department at OSU. The theme was the “Future of the Ancient”, and I was booked to do the last lecture of the day.

Classicists find it terribly easy to feel embattled, and love nothing better than predicting their own imminent extinction (this gloom-mongering has gone on almost since the second century AD). So I decided to take a rather more upbeat line. It’s not a question of whether the study of the Greeks and Romans will survive, but of in what form … And I took the opportunity to have a little attack on two current favourites themes of avant-garde classicists (‘reception” and “interdisciplinarity”). I have done quite a lot of both of these, but it’s always useful to think how odd our intellectual fashions might look like from the outside (or, as I said, from a hundred years hence).

The second gig was today, just before I left. It was a ‘brown bag lunch” on the “politics of reviewing”. I kicked off for half an hour or so, talking about how Classics books get chosen to be reviewed in the TLS (a much less devious process than most people suspect), what the basic ground rules are and various bits of “good advice” in the fine old craft of reviewing.

Near the top of the list for me is “never say anything in a review that you wouldn’t say to the author’s face”. I don’t think any author minds disagreement. I mean if everyone agreed with what you said in a book, it couldn’t possibly be really interesting could it. What they mind is nastiness. I said this with some feeling, having just had what I considered an onslaught, rather than a review, from a colleague in California that certainly did not pass the ‘Beard nastiness test’!