A Don’s Life

Royal wedding: ten questions

I am writing this from Heathrow, on the way back the Washington to give my 5th Mellon lecture on Sunday. I did take a peek at a bit of the wedding coverage before I left. Let me say straight away:

If these are two young people wanting to tie the knot, then I wish them all the best.. and what follows is not mean to be mean spirited or churlish. Good luck to them.

And anyway thanks to them, I got to Heathrow in record time (1 hour and 10 minutes from Cambridge... as against close to 2 hours).

All the same... there are some of the puzzles I am left with after the tv nuptials

1) How come the great and the good of this country don't appear to know the words of "Jerusalem" without looking at their hymn sheets, and even then dont seem to be quite certain of how the words fit the tune..?

2) Who WERE the two grey nuns sitting next to the bride and groom right up at the chancel end of the Abbey?

I have just voted "no" (sorry)

In the 'fairer votes referendum', that is. I have done this by post and with a heavy heart.

For this election  (unusually) we have had a load of stuff through the door, and each side had such bad arguments (as well, to be fair, the occasional good ones) that all I could do was:

a) not vote at all (and so let my mum down who thought that any woman who didn't vote was ratting on the whole of woman kind)

b) vote no, for the status quo (ie a sort of abstention)

I suppose I could also have spoiled the ballot paper, but I hadn't really considered that option before the postal ballot went in the post box.

I suppose I should be a natural for a change in the system - and the 'no campaign' had some truly repulsive and quite misleading arguments. But the argument for change has got to be more powerful to get me behind it.

The thing that tipped the balance was the last piece of paper that came from "yestofairervotes".

The wedding: my hypocrisy

On "THE DAY", I shall be flying back to DC for my fifth Mellon lecture (do come, one and all... please don't lose the habit after the spring break!). So I don't have to fuss too much about whether I will watch it, still less whether I will whoop it up at a street party (well, a street party in Huntingdon Road would bring a frisson of risk, speed cameras notwithstanding).

The truth is though that the wedding brings out the hypocrites in us all.

If you asked me straight whether I thought the monarchy had had its day, I would have to say yes. It matters not whether the Queen is a hardworking woman (I am sure she is)... or, conversely, whether Prince Charles has his tooth brush "pasted" by his man-servant (I really hope that that is NOT true). Whatever, the fact is that the monarchy costs a very great deal, legitimates a class structure and aristocracy that we would be much better off without (just think how the Dukes and Earls would tumble if Her Majesty was relocated to a small semi), and is an insult to all the hardworking and struggling people in this country, who would be happy with 1/1000th of the space that the royals occupy.

But all that is easy to say, harder to live.

Will I get to meet Bob Dylan?

I am feeling chuffed beyond imagining to have been elected an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I was enormously pleased a year ago to have been made a fellow of the British Academy .. but then there had been a prior, and very discreet, request for a cv, so I knew that something was going on (even if, as all communications made clear, it would come to nothing).

This came right out of the blue. In fact I had the first congratulation before I had got the letter, and that is always the best. Not to mention the fact of my real warmth to the Academy that they did not hold some of my past crimes against me.. if ever there was a case for blazoning the community of scholarship, the welcoming of lost sheep, the broad church of democratic freedoms of speech, and the virtues of "live and let live" then this is it. For which I am truly grateful and touched and honoured. (Those of you who dont know what on earth I am going on about, click here.)

But I got even more excited when I looked at the other electees.

The Museum of London. A glimmer of hope?

 
Since my last post on the subject, I've gone on being worried about the Museum of London. And there was a powerful piece this week in SALON (the really excellent e-magazine that goes out to Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries).

The redundancies are now out in the open, and basically there are cuts...and the posts of Roman and Prehistoric senior curator are being combined (and in my book those are rather different specialisms). But the question is whether this new curator will actually be appointed. As SALON reports, so far not. And that leaves anything before "modern" in the Museum without a senior scholar.

This is what SALON had to say:

Howler averted

It's a good principle not to build any argument on a work of art you havent seen. That's for the obvious reason that when you actually look a painting, or a sculpture, or an object you find out something crucial about it that you won't have spotted from a photograph; nine times out of ten. Sometimes it's as simple as a matter of size. I know that good books will note the dimensions of a painting... but even so it is hard to take in until you see it. It took me years to understand that many of Alma Tadema's nudes were not great big pin-up but small scale things (for the study rather than the hall).

Anyway, that's the principle but it isnt always possible in practice.

This week, I've been preparing my fourth Mellon lecture, on representations of the female members of the Roman imperial court, and I have found myself focussing on the Agrippinas.One of the scenes I have been collecting is a favourite of later painters -- Nero inspecting the body of the dead Agrippina.

And thanks to the wonderful French database, Joconde, I came across the painting at the top of this post ... a great 19th century view by Eugene Appert (no I hadnt heard of him either).

Architectural pilgrims

In the main concourse of the East Building of the National Gallery in DC, where I am based,is a plaque put up commemorating the foundation of the new wing, donors, builders, architects etc. It's perfectly standard stuff, except the name of I. M. Pei is practically blacked out -- thanks to the numbers of hot, dirty, sweaty hands that, since 1978, have dared to touch the holy spot where his name is carved.

What is it that makes someone treat an architect as a saint? Does this happen for others? Or has Pei got some special charisma that the rest dont have?

DC turns out to have a lot of celebrity architecture about. Some of it uncannily reminiscent of the work of the same celebrity architects' work elsewhere.

Shut down and shut up?

Yesterday was an edgy day.

My Mellon lectures are held in the National Gallery (which is a Federal Institution) and I am, I guess, under contract to the US Federal Government . . .  what is more, my temporary email address ends ".gov" (no doubt about as close to the heart of the US political system as I'll ever get).

That all meant that if there was a Federal shutdown, there would be no lecture on Sunday. The National Gallery would be shut and I would not be allowed simply to give it in an alternative venue.

I can't tell you how hard it is to write a lecture that you dont know you will be able to deliver. There is something about the adrenalin (aka sheer terror) of facing the audience that concentrates the mind (which is, I guess, one of the reasons why it always seem much easier to write a lecture than a book... even fierce letters from the publisher aren't as pressing that a few hundred faces).

Knowing that it was definitely off would have been better I think. But looking at the Capitol all day wondering if white smoke was about to appear and if a budget resolution had been passed  so te lecture could go ahead was increasingly distracting. I found myself with the Washington Post open on my desktop and every 20 minutes or so I would click on "Federal Shutdown" in Google News.

Google News revealed that there were thousands of people facing the shutdown with concerns about as selfish as my own. Never mind the thousands who would be going without pay, or passports or social security cheques . . . the headlines all seemed to be along the lines of: "Federal shutdown may hurt local housing market" or "What does a Federal Shutdown mean for Hampton Roads?" or "What about my tax return" (... "will Federal Shutdown stop my Mellon lectures?" would have fitted in nicely).

Work inexperience: the Clegg plan

When I got round to reading the coalition's new social mobility strategy, it was a relief to discover that it was not as bad as Nick Clegg's fronting of it. You can tell where he comes from when you read him thundering on about internships being fixed up at the golf club or tennis club -- or complaining about social opportunity being determined by "who your father's friends are". What has happened to influential mothers in Clegg's world I wondered? And if only the problem was restricted to the tiny proportion of the UK population who belong to a golf club or tennis club . . .  but, hang on, isnt the government supposed to be supporting these sports??. (It's the young Clegg above by the way, in the picture.)

The Cabinet Office document itself wasn't quite so silly, and was oozing with New Tory good intentions. But it was also loaded with problems and contradictions.

First: the definition of social mobility.This turn out to be a wonderful sort of movement, as it is in one direction only: that is upwards. In fact, so it is defined in Chapter One: "Social mobility is a measure of how free people are to improve their position in society." (my italics)  And all the graphs and data track only the percentage of people who do BETTER than where they started out.

Nice try, but mobility (especially in a recession) means people going down as well as up. In fact, may be the reason we have been so bad at achieving the upward sort, is precisely because we have thought about it as uni-directional. So lets have some data please on the downwardly mobile too, and wonder about how we should manage that -- and indeed wonder about what being downwardly mobile actually means. (I think this is what D. Willetts was trying to get at when he got rounded on last week by many of my friends: social reforms have victims as well as beneficiaries).

Then there are those damn internships.

The Haldane Principle -- and the next Mellon lecture

My colleague Peter Mandler was absolutely right last week to point to the erosion of the "Haldane principle" and the creeping idea that academic research should work to the government's objectives (would we have had Leonardo, Darwin, Freud, Einstein . . .  if they had been made to toe the government's strategic line?)

The particularly offensive thing was that one of the new research priorities was to be reserach into the Big Society. How come a half-baked electoral slogan becomes an AHRC research priority?

The facts are all a bit murky here. Where did the pressure come from? It looks like from the government.  But the AHRC deny categorically that they were coerced into supporting this bit of government blather. And even some government spokespeople say that the idea of putting reserach into the Big Society as a priority actually came from the AHRC.

I began to speculate that this was a clever idea from the AHRC (even if one that has back-fired). Imagine you were running the AHRC and Willetts and co want some research objectives. Wouldn't it seem a great wheeze to suggest the Big Society. After all the whole idea is so vacuous (and capacious) that anything you like would fit in (so business as usual) -- and the government couldn't possibly say no to it, because it is THEIR idea.