A Don’s Life

Throwing red wine at my laptop

I particularly like writing at the kitchen table. So long as it isn't the kind of writing that requires total peace and quiet, I much prefer to be part of things going on. (You can find examples of some of these kitchen table products here and here -- and I think they pass muster.) The husband, however, has always said that this is an accident waiting to happen. One day the cup of coffee or the glass of wine would go all over the laptop.

Well, on Monday night it did. I came back after dinner out and thought I'd just check the email. The son had broached half a bottle of red wine, which was temptingly open on the table. I thought it would be nice to take a glass to have with the email -- and the inevitable happened. I didn't actually throw it at the computer, but I might as well have done. The wine went right over the laptop screen.

The good news is that the machine itself is working fine. But it is a bit disconcerting looking at the screen, which has the appearance of being covered by a colony of amoebas.

So what is the solution. Thanks to our computer officer, I am pretty certain that I need either a new screen, or at best someone to remove the screen cover, wipe it down and put it back. (The problem is wine trapped between cover and lcd screen we believe.)

So what are the options. There are some do-it-yourself instructions on the web. But they looked a bit like that old Monty Python joke "How to take your appendix out on the Piccadilly line." Dont go there, I thought.

So what else?

Keeping out the academic terrorists

I suppose we should be grateful to Mr Brown and his government for trying to keep out terrorists from our land. But the new visa regulations, which are meant to tighten our defences against potential suicide bombers, are a sledge hammer to crack a nut. They are likely to exclude more innocent academics than violent ideologues.

Surely there is a problem here. On the one hand we are told that the international distinction of the UK university system is a shining star in the national firmament. On the other, the intricate new rules (and points system that underlies them) for anyone wanting to come here from outside the EU make it more and more difficult for people actually to take academic jobs or pursue their research in the UK. It's no good having a wonderful international reputation if you cant  be a real global academic player in the real world because people cant penetrate your borders to teach or study.

Imagine that you are a Classicist from, lets say, the United States -- a US citizen. You have just been offered a university job in this country. Will you get a visa to come here to take up the job? Your first port of call is likely to be the UK Border Agency website.

They have a handy calculator to see if you are likely to get a visa, based on the points you have accrued.

So what happens to our notional young academic from the States?

Lloyds TSB up to its old tricks

I don't mean the big banking tricks (which led them into more or less public ownership). I mean the old tricks of quite outrageous charges for minor misdemeanors -- a punishment out of all proportion to the crime committed.The kind of charges out of which they no doubt imagine they will crawl back into solvency.

Last week, when the son was away in France, a letter arrived from Lloyds bank. Now, mothers are not supposed to open their children's mail, but most mothers can tell a nasty letter from the bank without even opening it.

Which I did.

What were job references like in the old days?

Anyone who has been involved in academic job interviews and selection -- especially for early career posts -- knows how important the references are. The candidates in question probably have very few publications that you can read; you need a supportive but honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses from someone who knows them.

Anyone who has recently been involved will also know how difficult it is to get a supportive but honest assessment. The current rhetoric is of unadulterated praise, sometimes (I fear) laughably dishonest. It's worse among American referees, but the Brits are fast catching up. In writing the instructions to referees for our college research fellowship competition a few years ago, I added some phrase to the effect of "an unadulterated eulogy will not help your candidate". I can't say that it had much effect among the persistent offenders.

I always vow to write to these with a few simple queries. "Could you please compare Dr Y whom you rate this year as "the most brilliant student you have ever taught" with Dr Z of whom you said the same last year. It would help the committee to know which in your view was absolutely the most brilliant". But I never quite get round to it.

Anyway, clearing out my study, I found some references for a Cambridge job, advertised and appointed well over 20 years ago.

They were both better and worse than their modern equivalent.

Getting vetted for school visits

It has just occurred to me that if Philip Pullman needs official vetting to do his school visits, then so do I. I do more than 12 school lectures and talks a year -- and this appears to bring me within the terms of the ghastly "Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups"  Act (explained in a relatively user-friendly way here). Though, as I talk at schools for free, I assume that I count as a volunteer and so will not have to pay the £64 fee. Are these best-selling authors really charging struggling under-funded state schools for their appearances -- I hope not.

But, in general, I am absolutely behind Pullman and the others (despite the slight sense that comes across in some of the reports that these writers think that the laws that apply to the rest of us don't really apply to our more creative brethren).

For a start the act is a terrible knee-jerk response to the Soham murders, riding the waves of the mass terror of paedophilia. It goes without saying that the harm of children is a dreadful thing -- but in 300 years time there will be doctoral theses being written about our obsession with it, much as today's graduates write on seventeenth-century witch hunts.

There is something dreadful about the name of the Act anyway. It seems to imply that if you are against it, you really don't care about Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups. A better title would be "Mass compulsory registration and tracking of all those working with the under 18s". Act. Because it is simply the "throw a database at it" solution to the problem -- in this case one which will include well over 20% of the UK population (minus Scotland where it doesn't apply). That would not be an insignificant step on the way to the government's desire to have us all registered, tracked and coded, in case we might commit a crime some time in the future.

Except, of course, it will presumably be as inefficient as all such databases are (and so won't actually stop the next Ian Huntley anyway -- for that, a completely different approach would be needed).

I have another, personal, grouse though.

Victorians in Cambridge

Yesterday I gave my "Pompeii for Victorians" lecture to the big Victorian conference in Cambridge: the joint meeting of the British Association for Victorian Studies and the North American Victorian Studies Association. I thought it went OK, though it was five minutes too long (55 minutes is somehow always better than 60). The truth was I had dug up huge amounts of material and had to much to say.

I came away thinking that there was a great book to be written about Victorian Pompeii, even if not necessarily by me. I started with the re-enactments of Roman life staged on the site in 1884 (in aid of the victims of the recent Ischia earthquake, though in truth the whole spectacle made such a loss that the poor victims got nothing).

There were three days of performance -- a staged chariot race, a Roman wedding (that's in the picture) and a funeral, and of course some gladiators in the amphitheatre (with 'Falernian" served from the original bars of the city in genuine fake "antique vases". The British reaction to this was a bit mixed. One of my old friends, Jane Ellen Harrison, was characteristically acerbic: "Some of us,” she wrote in the Magazine of Art, “have perhaps felt that all this, amusing and archaeologically interesting though it is, is just a trifle out of tune. We may study the dead past to our profit, but we need not call it back to life and bid it dance for us.” 

Anyway, my point was that the nineteenth-century reaction to Pompeii (like the twenty-first I suspect) was always caught between seeing it as a place of the dead -- and seeing it as a place where the past could come, literally, to life (as in the re-enactments). Earlier in the nineteenth century, there are even weirder stories of idiosyncratic British men actually choosing to "become Roman" for a week or two, living in reconstructed houses in the city.

Crime victim in the University Library

I have been spending rather more hours than I have managed for ages in the University Library. And I am as happy as a sandgirl. I am working on a paper that I am giving on Monday to a big Victorian Studies conference in Cambridge. I'm looking at how Pompeii was visited, imagined, painted and written about in the nineteenth century. It's a pool I've stepped into before, but of course I've now found so much more material than I had ever unearthed before. So much it's making writing the paper very hard.

Some of the most fun stuff has been the spin-offs from Bulwer Lytton's, The Last Days of Pompeii. I knew about the sculptures and paintings inspired by this novel (all those blind flower sellers). But I hadn't realised quite how many theatrical adaptations there were... and parodies. I've had great fun with an 1870's squib called (a century before Frankie Howerd) The Last Daze of Pompeii (in which the virtutous Ione turns out to be a wicked little flirt) and another 1870s parody, The Very Last Days of Pompeii (in which Nydia is a very nasty piece of work).

Anyway in the middle of all this I was the victim of another crime!

10 Latin quotes for the underground

Last week it was reported that the drivers on the Piccadilly line would be adding some well chosen quotes to their announcements on the underground: "Hell is other people", "Beauty will save the world" and other appropriate thoughts for a commuting journey.

Surely, with Boris as Mayor, there ought to be some real Latin among the anglophone platitudes. Indeed, a surprising number of the best known Latin quotes turn out to be surprisingly appropriate for the journey to work. In no particular order:

1. "perfer et obdura! dolor hic tibi proderit olim" -- or "Be patient and put up with it; one day this pain will pay dividends". That's Ovid (Amores III, XIa) reflecting on the insults of his mistress -- but fits well enough for the rush hour commute.

2 "quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra" -- or "How long Catiline will you abuse our patience?". The famous first line of Cicero's first speech against Catiline, attacking the would-be revolutionary (or innocent stooge), Catiline. But you can substitute any adversary for Catiline.. 'quousque tandem abutere, Boris, patientia nostra?"

3. "arma virumque cano" -- or "Arms and the man I sing". The most famous line in the whole of Latin poetry, the first line of the first book of Virgil's Aeneid. Though Virgil didn't exactly mean the arms of the man digging into your side, as you're stuck in the tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

Was Alexander the Great a Slav?

This is a row I really don't get. Over the last few years FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been investing heavily in Alexander the Great. FYROM's main airport is now called "Alexander the Great Airport" (better than "John Lennon" or "Bob Hope" airports, you might think).  A vast statue of Alexander (eight storeys high, apparently) is planned for the centre of Skopje. And the word on the street is that Alexander was a Slav.

This seems to me to be at best rather touching. It's nice to think that there is still enough symbolic life in this drunken juvenile thug that someone wants him for their nation. At worst, it is faintly silly. The antecedents of Alexander are a bit murky, but in truth there isn't a cat in hell's chance that he was a Slav. I can see also that it could be a bit annoying to some Greeks who might want to try to claim Alexander for themselves (this is a better claim than the Slavic one, but not exactly cast iron).

But what on earth has persuaded over 300 classical scholars (several of whom are good friends of mine) to sign a letter to President Obama (copy to Mrs Clinton et al.) asking him to intervene personally to clear up this FYROM historical travesty.

I hope Obama has got some more important wrongs to right. But supposing that he has had a minute to look at this missive, I trust that he won't be won over by the outraged arguments.