A Don’s Life

Pit stop at Pompeii

Tourists have been complaining about the refreshments provided at, or near, Pompeii since the mid nineteenth century. The careful Murray's Handbook to Southern Italy warned visitors in the late 1800s to be careful about the prices at the Hotel Diomede (a convenient watering hole near the entrance to the site, just outside): better to fix a price with mein Host before you sit down to lunch; else you might find yourself seriously ripped off.

For the last few decades there has been a decent restaurant in the middle of the ancient city, not far from the Forum. It came courtesy of the allied bombing which smashed holes in Pompeii in 1943 (it had been reported that the enemy was hiding out there). One of those holes was not made good after the war, but found a new use in providing for hungry visitor (plus one of the few loos on the sites). It wasn't ever brilliant -- but it did offer a decent plate of pasta rather cheaper than the modern equivalents of the Hotel Diomede just outside the site.

Then a couple of years ago, it was closed.

I wish Nick Griffin hadn't seemed quite so MAD

Don't misunderstand me. I think the policies of the BNP are appalling. But the Question Time programme did play into our comfortable assumptions that people with terrible ideas are recognisably monstrous -- when the truth is that some of those with the vilest views on earth can be charming dinner guests.

And it's that truth that politics needs to grapple with. Demonisation is easy, but it doesnt reach the complexity of the problem. (Look where the demonisation of Saddam Hussein got us.)

Part of the problem on Thursday night was the way the programme had been reformulated to consist in a series of personal attacks on Griffin himself. The husband remarked, after we had watched, that it felt as if Griffin had been in the stocks and the audience and other panellists had been pelting him with past its sell-by-date tomatoes. (Bonnie Greer was the only one who used a bit of cleverness and wit in the attack -- and I gave her full marks for that, even if not for what she said after the programme.)

Where, I wondered was that old-fashioned idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin (a nice formulation of Gandhi, St Augustine others)? The problem about Griffin is his ARGUMENTS, and it's those that need to be demolished, not his personal qualities, or lack of them. But sadly Griffin played into their hands, and came across as barking, if not repulsive.

The bigger problem here is how we understand Virtue and Evil. It suits the cheaper side of political debate and media hype to imagine that somehow all the virtues (or vices) come together, as a package: a good person will be good across the board, a bad one similarly bad. It's a view with a long pedigree (and Aristotle has got a lot to answer for), but it crudifies political culture, is almost always a gross oversimplification and it undermines our capacity to deal with racism, terrorism, discrimination or whatever.

It's a don's life -- the book

The book of this blog is due out on 5 November. But advance copies are now available from Amazon, and are on their way to those commenters whose comments are included in the compendium (you know who you are). I like the look of it and, obviously, feel some trepidation about how it will be 'received', and -- of course -- bought.

The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc.

I hope you'll like it.

Did Portnoy's Complaint deserve the "Booker Prize"?

When I was a teenager, I took Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint to school in my satchel, in the hope -- I think -- of having it discovered by some prudish teacher and provoking an argument about freedom of speech and sexual expression (and also to show how hip I was). My Mother, I remember, requested it from the local library, for similar -- if slightly more grown-up -- reasons.

Until a few weeks ago I couldn't remember much about it, apart from the description of masturbation with the piece of liver. Presumably that's what everyone remembers.

I have, however, recently re-read it. It wasn't a happy experience. What was the virtue or merit of a 200-and-something page monologue of repetitive, blokeish sexual fantasy, preoccupied with the pleasures and guilt of masturbation (or alternatively with exploitative sex with exploited women...or if not sex, then constipation and other aspects of the 'lower bodily stratum' as Bakhtin would have put it). I wasn't shocked. In fact the liver bit was quite coyly done and the use of a cored apple for the same purpose was a rather underwhelming image.  It was the sheer self-indulgence of the book that was so irritating.

For a moment the horrible thought came to me that this really was what men thought about all the time -- that this was a true exposé of "what men were like". If so, I thought it was probably better not to know.

The history of holidays

I spent most of yesterday on a business park just outside Peterborough. I was at the HQ of Thomas Cook, the travel company -- not booking a holiday (though the vast number of people working busily here suggested that the holiday business had not been as hit by the recession as you might guess), but exploring the company's archive. For the company goes back to the mid nineteenth century, and to an excursion he arranged in 1845 from Leicester to Liverpool. In fact one of the objects on display in the archive was an 1840s Cook's guidebook-cum-brochure for Liverpool.

I was there, as you might guess, to try to find out more about Cook's travel to Pompeii and Athens in the nineteenth century. Now, Cook's customers were not anything like so downmarket as they are sometimes painted (and were painted at the time in the more snobbish sectors of the British press), but they do give you a glimpse of the travel experience of those who are not simply blue-blooded aristocrats. Amonhst his early travellers to the Mediterranean, you find retired army officers, families from New Zealand, single ladies and all sorts.

So what did I turn up?

Obama's Nobel Prize. Why does the Peace Committee have such a bad record?

I am fairly sure that Barack Obama's heart is roughly in the right place, but to give him a Peace Prize when he hasn't yet achieved any actual peace anywhere in the world (and indeed may well yet raise the stakes in Afghanistan) is faintly ludicrous. In fact, it seems a bit like giving Neville Chamberlain one in 1938, on his way back from Munich, without stopping to find out what happens next. The Peace Prize should surely be for achievement, not effort.

But there is 'form' here. While the Nobel Literature committee every other year or so hands out its millions to geniuses most of us have never heard of (and good for them, I say), the Peace committee seems much more star struck. Or to put it more generously, they can be uncomfortably quick to reward any world leader (or plucky campaigner) for what seems to be the faintest, temporary step in the right direction.

Don and dusted: The "Institute of Ideas" meets HEFCE

A few months ago I agreed to be part of a debate at the British Library organised by the estimable Institute of Ideas (a great and brave name which somehow manages to stay this side of over-confident). The theme was to be "was the age of the 'old-fashioned scholar' over"? ... what with new HEFCE models, a pressure for research "outcomes", "impact" and "evidenced based research" (what other sort is there, I wonder?). The title (another great one) was to be "Don and dusted?".

No great surprise then that, as the day approached, the Today programme got interested (for their nice post-8.30 slot when nutty academics get wheeled out to discourse on their new theories and have a donnish argument for three minutes or so).

Yesterday, as a prequel to the debate, I was to go head to head with David Sweeney, Head of "Research, Innovation and Skills" at HEFCE. Now I am not a knee-jerk HEFCE hater, though like many academics I have a visceral distrust (or at least wariness) of the men and women from HEFCE. So I had rather expected that Sweeney would be a bit of a "now look here, how on earth can you expect the taxpayer to support thirty-year research projects on ancient Athenian dice" sort of man. ("Athenian dice" is one of my friends definition of a "useless research subject".) So I did my passionate opening about how no subject was "useless" (only a subject for which we had not yet found a use) -- and so on, throwing in a bit of stuff about humanities research contributing to human happiness etc.

Far from being the academic equivalent of a hanger and flogger, Sweeney came back with the wonderful line that people like me and my research was precisely what HEFCE was trying to support and protect. You can listen here.

But do we believe him?

High School Latin -- and the Gettysburg battlefield

As I hinted in my last post, I have been in Philadelphia - giving  a couple of lectures at Dickinson College in Carlisle PA.

It was a great occasion, at a wonderful Liberal Arts College founded in the eighteenth century, with an audience comprising academics of all shapes, sizes and disciplines, plus ex students from Dickinson, plus  interested people from the local community.

But what was most striking was the glimpse of the state of Latin teaching in US high schools, on the East Coast at least. I had always been fed the line that Latin was effectively dead in US schools (or the non-fee-paying ones anyway). And, even though I had met a good number of high school-teachers from Virginia who had thriving Latin classes, I had assumed that Virginia (and its links to the founding fathers) was a special case.

I wasn't entirely right. One of the great things about the lecture at Dickinson was that so many "alums" turned up -- and a good number of them were teaching at Philadelphia schools. The basic position seemed to me that public (ie state) schools in "Philly" would normally offer four languages: Latin, Spanish, French and German. A  bright student would take two, possibly -- but rarely -- three. 

Exactly how far they got in high school wasn't clear (and there did seem to be some odd idea that you didn't study two languages simultaneously, but normally one after the other). All the same it seems a far cry from the limited range offered in UK schools.

The other surprise was going to Gettysburg.

The luxury amphitheatre at Portus

Oh dear a good deal of tosh has been written about this luxury amphitheatre discovered in the 'imperial palace' at the harbour of Portus. The 'emperor's private amphitheatre' enthused the report in the Times. It was the setting for 'gladiator fights, bear baiting and even mock sea battles', suggested the Telegraph, 'probably reserved for use by emperors such as Trajan and Hadrian and their guests'. And there was plenty more along the same lines.

Who is responsible for all this? Well partly the excellent team of archaeologists who are currently excavating the Roman harbour installations. Public 'impact' is the order of the day for universities at the moment, and they obviously saw an opportunity to make some. But if you look carefully at what Simon Keay, the Director of the project actually said, the more extravagant claims are always qualified by 'possibly' or 'could have been', and other careful caveats (apart, that is, from his assertion that all this should "certainly .. be rated alongside such wonders as Stonehenge and Angkor Wat".... do you really mean that Simon??)

Maybe the Portus team was blissfully unaware of the tendencies of the genus journalisticum when it comes to archaeological discoveries. Because not many caveats are in evidence in the reporting, and most people will come away with the impression that an exclusive luxury  amphitheatre, a miniature Colosseum without the rabble, has been found in the emperor's seaside palace (a useful stopping off point on the imperial trips abroad).

Sorry, but no.