A Don’s Life

Writing my first chapter

Happy New Year all...and Happy Birthday me (55 on 1 January).

We have had a great Christmas, but not a huge holiday. Daughter and son working like devils, husband writing an article and Beard trying to write the first chapter of her Roman Laughter book, and a lecture for California.

The good news is that I met my resolution to have written the first page by Christmas Eve. Since then things haven't gone quite so smoothly (though I have been in the library plus laptop on every day except The Day itself). Let me explain a bit .... what follows may be a bit dull, but so few people ever try to share the PROCESS of writing academic books. So here goes.

I have more or less determined to keep the structure of the six lectures I gave in Berkeley last year as the basic structure of the book. But I still needed an introduction, to get readers interested -- and to give a first glimpse of the big issues coming up.

I had decided to start with a couple of scenes from the Roman comedy "The Eunuch", by Terence, first performed in 161 BCE. The are from the middle of the play (around lines 420-500), a patch of repartee between a "braggart soldier", Thraso and a professional sponger, Gnatho.

I chose this because on two occasions during these lines Gnatho ("Gnasher") actually laughs -"hahahae" (there are a dozen or so "hahahae"s in classical Latin literature). And it is a great couple of passages for showing just how slippery Roman laughter is.

Gnatho, as a professional sponger/flatterer, is bound to laugh at his patron's "jokes". So here we have two "jokes" that Gnatho cracks up about, but of course they are emphatically NOT funny. Lesson one: laughter doesnt always erupt at the funniest jokes (and you can see how the methodological line might go on from there).

So far, so good.

Obama's axis of evil

As soon as we heard on the radio that the failed Detroit bomber had attempted to detonate himself underneath his blanket, the daughter remarked that that would be the end of blankets on flights to America. She was nearly right.

Working on the (barmy) principle that the next terrorist will try exactly the same tactics as the last one, blankets are now banned in the last hour of flights to the USA. For the same period you are to be confined to your seat, with nothing on your lap (if this is enforced, there will be a good few kids pee-ing in their seats). And, just to make sure you can't target any specific (American) location, the sky map is to be turned off for the duration.

I have to say that, if the most dangerous terrorists rely on the sky map to find out where they are, then I think we can rest fairly easy -- whether it is turned on or off. Cant they look out of the window?  Half the time the map doesn't actually work anyway.

As many people have said, this is all bonkers. It is also dangerous. If the average traveller (that is 99.9999% of us) ceases to think that the security measures are appropriate, then we jeapordize the security system that should be protecting us all. For it relies on our support as much as on the high tech scanning.

And where do these silly, PR, ideas come from? The heart of the Obama administration.

We might have guessed it.

Happy Christmas: the anthropology of ritual

Happy Christmas everyone -- and especially to those who have sent wishes and cards etc to me.(That's me feeling happy at home, taken by the daughter, on the right.)

I am writing this at seven o clock on Christmas Day...after opening the presents, cooking the turkey, eating the feast, playing some party games, all accompanied by industrial quantities of alcohol. Now we are watching a classic Morse on the television, before Poirot in Syria comes on at 9.00. Sounds familiar?

As the children have observed, this is about the only ritual we do without feeling stupidly self-conscious -- I couldn't  for example, mount an Easter egg hunt without a certain sense of self irony (and even when we DID mount such things, it did always seem faintly silly).

So, we asked ourselves, if we were doing an anthropological analysis, what would we point to?

Shutting the stable door...

This notice is currently on display at Cambridge station (photograph kindly taken by the husband).

Does it have a point?

Suppose I am under the influence of alcohol, I see the notice and think "Gosh I must take special care while on the platform, as I am indeed under the influence of alcohol...". Isn't part of the point of being under the influence that you don't realise that you are?

The notice is clearly pointless (except to enable the station authorities to say to the coroner, when an inebriated passenger has slipped under a train.. "but there were notices warning the drunk to take extra care").

Within a few years there will no doubt be a notice threatening a few years in prison if you are caught drunk in charge of a suitcase on Cambridge station.

That is because 'we' (I mean new Labour and the Tories, and the Lib Dems I suspect, if you scratched the surface) have only one reaction to behaviour we dont like: namely, bang the buggers up.

Who should clear away the snow?

Cambridge looks beautiful, and numerous photographers are out capturing their colleges in the snow for the next prospectus (rumour has it that a particularly fetching shot of a snowman at Emma some years ago did more for the college's applications than a lifetime of school visits). You can see the view from the windows of my college room on the right.

It is also treacherous. Hardly any roads have been gritted or salted, and many have become skating rinks. The pavements likewise are uncleared, and you walk on them at your peril -- even two days after the snow fell.

So who is supposed to clear the snow and why don't they?

Answer one: the local council is supposed to do it, but they don't, first of all, because it is uneconomic.

Lunch in Florence -- punishment for my carbon emissions, and a glimpse of my own past

On Wednesday I went to give a paper at the European University, which is housed in stunning quarters outside Florence, in Fiesole. Getting to know about this has been one of the good consequences of working with the European Research Council -- it is a fantastic place, all graduate, which offers fully funded PhD grants and generous post-doc fellowships. (Why don't more Brits take advantage of this?) 

I left Gatwick at 10.00 (on Meridiana, as will become relevant later in the story) and by 1.15 (the time change works in your favour) I was lunching with a friend and ex-student overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. Niggling doubts about the morality of this in "Copenhagen week" were quickly overlain by the sheer fun of it all, and how easily it had worked. Breakfast on the Thames, lunch by the Arno.

But don't worry, punishment was to come.

Vote first, think later: vetting (and Iraq)

 
I am of course pleased that there have been changes to the vetting arrangements for school visits etc. I would much prefer that we didn't live in a world in which everyone was assumed to be a danger to children unless "proven" otherwise. But even so, if there must be legislation, then it is better that some of the rough edges are knocked off sooner rather than later.

But the bigger question is: what on earth were the MPs doing when they passed this vetting bill, in its full form,  in the first place? Why did it take a group of authors, among other interest groups, to see what the implications were going to be for school visits by poets and novelists, or for language exchange arrangements, or for sports clubs? In their enthusiasm for flushing paedophiles out of the woodwork, did no MP spot these issues? Did they not have their brains in gear, or listen to those that did?

To offer a comparison with something much more trivial (though important to those involved): when we are changing regulations for our exams in Cambridge, we make sure to think through all the implications, however remote, very carefully. How might this change impact on someone who was reading Latin and French, and was currently on a year's placement in France? Might they possibly be unfairly disadvantaged by a change that is brought in for the benefit of the majority of students. Taking account of all the possible consequences is what making rules is all about.

So what has gone wrong to make our legislature so conspicuously sloppy?

It reminds me of a meeting we had in Cambridge in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Should the Rosetta Stone go back....where?

What is the best selling post-card in the British Museum?

The last time I inquired -- admittedly more than a decade ago, but was told that it was the permanent "number one" -- it was a rather dreary image of the Rosetta Stone. That outsold its major rivals by several thousand. If you are interested, the main post-card rivals were:  various views of the Museum itself, the (also Egyptian) bronze "Gayer Anderson" cat (displayed on the card plus or minus a real live tabby cat) and an original drawing of Beatrix Potter's Flopsy Bunnies.

There is no doubt that the Rosetta Stone (seen a few years back above) is a major icon of the British Museum -- and in fact, its post-card celebrity is backed up by its presence on best selling umbrellas, duvet covers and mouse mats (remember them?), all especially popular, I am told, in Japan.

I was once very puzzled about all this. After all, it is a rather uninspiring lump of black basalt, inscribed at the beginning of the second century BCE, recording an agreement between the Greek king of Egypt and a group of Egyptian priests, concerned among other things with tax breaks for the said priests. It came to London, as spolls of war in the early nineteenth century, captured from the French.

So why so charismatic?

Presumably because it was the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the inscription was trilingual -- in hieroglyphs, Greek and Egyptian demotic. Whether you think that the key work was done by Thomas Young (British) or Jean-Francois Champollion (French) depends  partly on your national prejudice.

And now, again, Zahi Hawass (Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt) wants it "back"? Does he have a point?

Modern languages or -- "What's French for entrepreneur?"

Occasionally, I hate the House of Lords. That's when the unelected Lords Mandelson and Adonis are busy running the country, with no come-back from us voters (Daily-Mail-style rant has been suppressed here). More often, I thank God that we still have them -- with all their unelected, clever and un-self-interested sense of responsibility and duty. (Yes.)

Last week was a great example of this when Baroness Coussins (ex of my own Cambridge college, I confess) launched a debate (starting at "Column 807") on the state of Modern Languages and its relationship to the economy. One nice fact she brought out pretty soon was that languages in this country are in such a parlous state that we may not be able to provide all the translators we need for the 2012 Olympics. Now I have very mixed feelings about this money-burning sporting extravaganza -- but the idea that it should fail because we haven't got enough interpreters... That does hurt.

Academic impact: last days to comment

This post is a manifesto. I don't usually (?haven't ever) used this blog to urge any specific protest. But there is less than two weeks left to register your comments -- pro or con --  on the HEFCE consultation exercise over the new "Research Excellence Framework", which threatens to distribute a significant proportion of government funding to universities on the basis of the social and economic "impact" of their research.

Don't misunderstand me. I am all in favour of research making an impact outside the academy. But that is quite different from funding (and so, implicitly, directing) research on that basis. In fact, it is probably the case that the reason that UK research has had such a significant impact is simply because it didn't set out with an "impact aim" in mind.

It has been "curiosity driven" research of the highest quality -- and for that reason, for causes and effect that could not be predicted, precisely calibrated or explained, it has made its impact, five, ten, twenty, maybe fifty or a hundred years later. (Stefan Collini in the TLS is good on this; and me and others have a go here).