A Don’s Life

Hemingway's retreat: good books in Cuba

To finish with Cuba (a relief to some readers, I feel sure) -- I just wanted to tell you about our one day outside Havana; and it's a good tip for anyone making a quick visit to Cuba.

Another time-warp feature of Cuba is the cars, which include a load of US 1950s cadillacs (they come one layer lower in the Cuban vehicle stratigraphy than the Ladas). We were unable to resist taking one of these (pictured above) to go out to Ernest Hemingway's house just outside the city. Hemingway, who lived, wrote, fished and drank in Cuba for many years, on and off, from the 1930s till just after the revolution. Although he left pretty soon after Castro came to power, his few remarks on the new regime can fairly easily be taken as broadly supportive, and there are one or two pictures of him with Castro (most notably and characteristically at a fishing competition -- the daughter with one on the left).

After Che and Jose Marti, he seems the closest thing to a Cuban national hero. His numerous watering holes in the centre of Havana certainly boast of their famous client (and one, La Floridita, which was near our hotel, even has a nasty bronze <?> sculpture of him propping up the bar). And his books are everywhere in a variety of languages. Books, I should say, are a big deal in Havana. The picture on the right is of a book launch in the open air...getting more than the numbers that usually go to a British book launch.

Anyway, the Hemingway house has been left as it was when it was confiscated (when Hemingway had left for Idaho -- and shortly to shoot himself). You cant actually walk into the house itself, but you can walk round the verandah and look into the rooms.

An odd idea at first

From Cuba with love?

I posted my first post from Cuba about the classical heritage because I wanted to give myself a bit of time to think about what I saw. But -- with a few honourable exceptions -- most commenters have homed in on the "Cuba right or wrong?" question.

So? What do I think? Well -- the first answer is that no 4-day tourist is in any place to judge. I have no clue how to weigh up the supposed evils of Batista versus the supposed evils of Castro; and I hear, but can't evaluate, the anti-Castro stuff on the web. The Huffington Post has its own special Cuba page, which is worth a look.

So, that apart, I think it's a question of what strikes you. And on that score, there's  lot to be said for, and about, Cuba.

Classics in Cuba

I have been rather off radar because, as I hinted in my last post, I went with the family to Cuba for a few days -- a brief visit, but one driven by the desire to see the place before Fidel died and before Obama loosened it up to the United States (before, I mean, there was a GAP on every street corner). We couldn't, it seems, put it off much longer.

I shall report on some of the surprises soon. But lets start with the biggest of all. I never expected to see so much classical tradition, and classics around the place. At the top of this post is a a wonderful little 1828 classical revival temple from one of the main squares in the city (the Rough Guide claimed it was a miniature replica Parthenon, which it isn't -- but it still is a great piece of, archaeologically inspired,colonial classicism).

And there was more than just that. We missed the vast statue of Athena (the world's third largest indoor statue) in the Capitolio -- a 1920s building closed for renovation, but externally bearing an unnerving resemblance to the Capitol in Washington DC (on the right, from our hotel bedroom). But in the front hall spanking new university building (which looks, I have modestly  to say, a rather pricier piece of architecture than our own recent Faculty extension) was a somewhat smaller version of the cult statue of Athena from the Parthenon.

There were also a good deal of original antiquities around the place -- from pots, to paintings and sculpture. Most of these I am afraid I cant illustrate as photography was often not officially allowed , and I hadn't quite mastered the technique of buying the blindness of the guards.

How (not) to sell a van

I am currently part owner of an ex-Royal Mail van -- it feels rather like owning part of a race horse. To be precise I fronted up some cash for the son to buy HIS share in the said van a couple of months ago, to go round Europe on a tour with his band (that is, George Wright and the Keynote Speakers, if you fancy a listen).

Anyway, now they are back, they want to sell the thing (a proud red beast, as you see in the pictures, which toured the extremities of Europe without the need for garage treatment, they assure me). Needless to say, I too want to sell it and recover my stake.

The trouble is, how? I know exactly how you sell a house: tidy up, grind some coffee for a nice smell, and hope they (or their surveyors) don't notice the asbestos in the garage. Vans are quite another matter. Everyone says that you should do it yourself and not get ripped off by a dealer who will give you £1000 and flog it for £3000.

But actually doing that seems fraught with difficulty.

Don't do Art History

When I whinged about the cost of reproducing a photo (taken by the husband) of the inside of the new Acropolis Museum, I had forgotten the other stresses and strains of illustrating an academic book or article -- that is, time, frustration and bafflement.

The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show -- well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image.

OK -- people who write really popular books have picture researchers -- battalions of (usually) ladies, who "source" the images and arrange the copyright fees to reproduce. It's a full time job. Most of the rest of us do it ourselves (though in my case I am lucky enough to have an assistant to share the burden). However the work is organised, next time you pick up an illustrated book, you can reckon it will have taken 8-10 hours to find and get permission for every picture in it.

I am just now finishing an article -- or rather chapter of a collaborative volume -- to be published by CASVA; it's on the nineteenth-century 'visitor experience' of Pompeii. There are about 15 illustrations. And me and Debbie ("the assistant") are about half way through the 15 days it's going to take.

So why exactly does it take so long?

Losing my lock

I have bad luck at Naples airport. When I came back from filming the Pompeii show, I had the wonderful mozzarella that I had been given confiscated at security. Fair enough, actually. There was certainly more than the allowed quantity of liquid surrounding the wonderful cheese...though whether "the mozzarella bomber" was a likely scenario, I am not so sure. Better safe than sorry, though, you might say.

Anyway this time, coming back from the cruise, I had my Kensington computer lock confiscated from my hand luggage (a device which, at £35.83, is the Rolls Royce of the computer lock world). Now this lock has been through many airport security screenings, without any trouble. But the young lady at Naples (very politely, I must allow) hauled it out of my bag, showed it to her supervisor -- who pointed out that it could be used as a weapon to strangle someone. If I wanted to keep it I should go back to security and put it in the hold. That would have meant buying a box to put it in, renegotiating a vast queue at the BA desk (British Airways you need more staff at Naples and they need to come on more than 2 hours in advance of the flight), then renegotiating a vast queue at the security gates (and besides the last time I took that option in Mexico, with an ornament with suspiciously sharp edges, the damn thing got lost en-route and might as well not have bothered).

I started to observe that the vast array of power cables I had with my computer could also be used for strangulation purposes (and probably rather more easily that the carbon steel of the Kensington lock). But I soon thought it wise to shut up, else they would have confiscated all my cables too, and that would have been even more inconvenient.

But two thoughts struck me. First, the mad illogicality of these security restrictions. If your definition of what should not be taken on board as hand luggage is anything that can be used as a weapon, then almost everything surely counts. As my travelling companion (and allotment lover) pointed out, my computer could have been easily used to knock someone out, his belt could have been tightened around someone's neck -- and, honestly, if you wanted to strangle someone then hands were the best weapon of all. Unless we are going to send people into planes wearing tracksuits and handcuffed, most of these restrictions are window dressing (not all, I think we would all rather people didn't get on board with a loaded revolver).

Second, what does happen to the stuff they take.

All at sea: the don goes cruising

I have never been on a cruise before. I have crossed the Aegean and the Channel in a ferry and my granddad was a merchant navy captain (and we plenty of photos of him "on the bridge" as it were). But that's about as far as my nautical experience goes.

Anyway -- I am now cruising. Just for a few days, lecturing on Pompeii (and assorted other ancient topics) on two cruises run by Voyages to Antiquity, on a ship called 'Aegean Odyssey'. I'm actually picking up the end of one cruise and the beginning of another, so I'm not really going very far -- from Naples to Sorrento, to Civitavecchia, and back to Sorrento. Hardly much of an Odyssey. But the truth is I'm rather enjoying it.

Sure, the whole idea of a floating hotel still feels a bit odd, and even three days in I haven't got the foggiest clue which end of the ship (which I keep wrongly calling 'boat' is which), and I can never remember which 'floor' is which (my cabin is on the 7th, but is Reception on the 5th or 6th? don't ask me). And this, despite the fact that the husband (who had sailed with an earlier cruise) had given me helpful practical guidelines about how the boat worked, and who is who etc.

But the food is good, the alcohol generous, the view from my cabin mostly bloody marvellous (the pics are from our Sorrento stop), and everybody -- from the crew to the other passengers and lecturers -- pretty charming. And there is, I confess, something nice about having everything arranged, at least for a few days. The bit I liked best was leaving the boat -- sorry SHIP - to go to Pompeii and being given a couple of little bottles of ice cold water to take along. Just what you need.

And there have been some good trips too. My favourite was to Oplontis yesterday morning.

Why learn ancient Greek?

I have only just caught up with a poll on the Guardian website: "Is learning Classical Greek a good idea". The good news is that the votes went 80% in favour of learning Greek, 20% against. But the more disturbing thing (as always) was the reasons that people gave on each side. This poll is now closed, but it is still worth taking a look.

Classicists do have a habit of over-egging the case. There is going to be a big conference in Athens in the autumn, to celebrate the achievement of Ancient Greece (fair enough) -- but also "to explore the potential of this legacy as a source for solutions to challenges that the world faces today and to those that it will inevitably come to face in the future". Well, thinking that Greek culture is marvellously interesting is one thing; thinking that it holds the solutions to the world's problems is quite another (and it is quite hard to resist the jibe that it clearly hasn't worked on the Greek economy).

In this case, the poll was prompted by some claims (from the excellent Iris project)  that teaching Greek in primary schools helps children's English. That is, I am sure, true in its way. But I've always thought that it was a dangerous argument. As several of the commenters on the Guardian poll said, isn't teaching children English an even better way of teaching them English? Or, to put it another way, if you decide to give kids a lot of attention and teach them something special, it is almost bound to have a positive effect on their work more generally. Arabic would probably work just as well.

So what are the reasons for learning it?

How much does a picture of the Parthenon cost?

How can we keep the Greek economy afloat? Well, one answer is by asking for permission to reproduce pictures from Greek museums.

Just recently I produced a new edition of my Parthenon book, brought up to date with a new chapter on the new Acropolis Museum (plus all the to-ing and fro-ing about the Elgin Marbles in the years since the first edition came out).

I am quite a fan of the inside of the new Museum, and so wanted to illustrate it in my book. Just a couple of weeks after the museum opened, the husband visited and took some photos. It turned out to be a small window of opportunity -- within a few days, photography was banned through all the Museum except the Parthenon Gallery; a few weeks after that the whole Museum was a no-go zone to cameras.

Anyway, I had a nice picture of the frieze as displayed in Athens, taken by the husband, which I wanted to reproduce in my book. My publishers did the proper thing and wrote to the Museum, explaining that we had a picture to reproduce, and asking what  the fee would be .. for black and white, inside image, world rights, with a print run of 7500 (well let's hope we need more, but that is the current number).

What do you guess it was?

My reply from First Capital Connect

This is positively my last post about the damn trains (I promise). But I thought those of you who were not bored with the saga would like to see the reply to my complaint that I received from First Capital Connect.

Can it really be true that large numbers of standing passengers bring no additional safety risk?

Anyway, as they say, this is supposed to be 'closure'.

But, just before 'closure', let me share something else (tipped off by my friends at Heffers/Blackwell). You may remember that I blogged a bit ago about the notices on Cambridge station warning us travellers of the dangers of being on the platform under the influence. Well now, the ticket barriers actually carry adverts on them for the demon drink (see below). Mixed messages, eh?