A Don’s Life

The anti-Power-Point party

I hope this isn't going to come across as Luddite as it might sound. But let me draw your attention to the anti-Power-Point party in Switzerland (which claims that it will save £350bn globally if we ditch PPT.. not quite sure how, but surely a good thing for the world).

I confess that I rather like some aspects of PPT. I constructed what I thought of as great slide shows in Washington DC for my NGA lectures -- entirely with PPT(though it took as long to make the PPT as it did to write the lectures) .. Credit where it's due: Therese and Mattie were very strict on the quality control of the slides (no crap images please)... and I refer you to them for further info. But that was just slides and captions, no bullet points. Indeed T and M were pretty suspicious even about the presence of captions.

But my question is: what next? I dont mean, how many pictures can you get to zoom across the screen apparently unaided, and explode in one corner to a welter of on line cheers... I am far behind that.

Gaddafi's Roman home -- or not?

One strange thing for me over weeks of the Libyan War has been the all the bells of ancient North Africa that it has rung. I have never been to Libya (though my old Director of Studies -- who is getting better after the hospital stay, by the way -- has spent many years studying its Roman inscriptions), and so I have found myself matching up all the places of conflict to the ancient map in my head.

Some of this was easy enough. Tripoli has a good old ancient name: "Tri -- polis" = "three cities", and the name goes back to the Roman name given to the region under the empire, "Tripolitania" -- the three cities being Oea (on the site of what we call Tripoli), Lepcis (or Leptis) Magna and Sabratha.

There is not very much Roman to see (I'm told) in Tripoli. But Sabratha has a tremendous theatre, and Lepcis was the original home of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (whose rise to, and tenure of, power was not all that much less bloody than Gaddafi's). It's the ancient Roman site that I feel most guilty not to have actually seen, because Septimius poured money into the place -- and it has what are (as you see above) some of the best preserved Roman buildings anywhere (though rather more helped by the restorers of Mussolini -- another dictator who was elbows deep in Libya -- than we like to imagine).

So far, so good. But I have got terribly mixed up with Gaddafi's home town of Sirte.

Fakes

The idea of the "fake" has for some years been fashionable in classical archaeology. What's the difference between a "copy" of a sculpture (made by a enthusiastic eighteenth century sculptor) and a "forgery" (made by an equally enthusiastic and skilled sculptor -- but one who was intending to pass it off as "real")? And how do we deal with all those many pieces of "ancient" works of art, that have a bona fide ancient torso, but arms and legs courtesy of Bernini etc? To put it at its simplest, which part of the Museum do they belong in? (Sometimes, as with the Commodus bust in the Getty, we cant actually agree whether the whole thing is ancient or (early) modern..).

Anyway the "Jubilee Museum" (of the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire) in Brussels has a great little case which illustrates these issues rather nicely. It includes some obvious "souvenir" copies (like a tourist version of the sacrophagus of Scipio Barbatus), some equally obvious "fakes" -- though quite why anyone should bother to make the weird little pig on the right, I haven't a clue.(It is supposed to be an object connected with an "Oriental Cult", and interestingly was given to the Museum by the famous Franz Cumont (it wasn't clear if Cumont knew it was fake or not).

But a particularly intriguing one was the little "Tanagra" figurine at the top. It had been thought "OK", and was now believed to be a late nineteenth-century fake. And it was interesting to think why . . .  so far as I could see, it was mainly the subject matter: so close to the slightly flirtatious feel of some Tanagras, but at the same time so far (it was impossible quite to believe in that friendly satyr, putting his hand gently on the lady's knee..).

So far, so good. The trouble was that there were quite a few cases nearby without many labels in them, with apparently ancient objects on display. Or were they?

Why does the Manneken Pis?

The icon of Brussels is (to judge from the souvenir shops at least) the bronze fountain/statue of the little boy pissing, the Manneken Pis. It is an image that, in Brussels, goes back to the seventeenth century; but the idea of a fountain spouting water as if it was peeing goes back at least to the Romans, and probably before. It's not a hugely imaginative idea.

Anyway, you can now buy battalions of this little guy, most made I guess in China (a few blazon "Made in Belgium",  but most are not homegrown --  has anyone ever gone to one of these Chinese factories where miniature images of the great monuments of the West are churned out?). And if you dont fancy a key ring, you can buy him in chocolate, or see him in a more than life size pretend-chocolate model. Every tour group is brought to admire.

My question was: why has THIS become the icon of Belgium? Most cities have a much more visible symbol (Big Ben, the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower), but this little boy is barely a metre tall and in what would have been a back street, if it hadnt been for him. He is supposed to go back to the early seventeenth century (stolen and broken up in the nineteenth, and remade from a mould of the pieces), and there are all kinds of urban legends about what he might stand for. The one  I was told years ago was that he was a lost rich child, whose father vowed a statue of him doing whatever he was doing if and when he was found. But there are plenty of others. I rather like the ideas that it reminds us of the brave kids of Brussels who ensured their city's victory by pissing on the enemy from trees.

What I hadnt realised till we went last week was that he also had a wardrobe.

The Africa Museum in Brussels -- and David Starkey

Even if you haven't read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, it's hard not to have picked up the point that Belgian rule in the Congo was terrible even on the usual standards of European colonialism in Africa. That said, I've always had a soft spot for the Royal Museum of Central Africa, just outside Brussels (and it has an honoured place on of my list of favourite but little-known museums -- a series I started several years ago on this blog and have been meaning to get back to).

I first visited this museum (in Tervuren, a quick tram ride from central Brussels) almost 10 years ago, with the daughter when she was doing a school project on the Congo. Then it was in its pristine state: it was a museum of itself, 'celebrating' the Belgian 'achievment' against the African 'savages'. Pride of place went to the statues in the front hall, large gilded personifications of kindly Belgium bringing peace, prosperity and civilisation to the grateful Congolese (as you see at the top of this post, in the statue of the look-alike Leopold clutching the African kids to his breast, and on the right with Mother Belgium doing much the same) -- but the early nineteenth century display of colonial memorabilia told a similar story. Stanley emerged as almost as much of a hero as Leopold, and the Heart of Darkness was nowhere to be seen.

A few years later we went again, and things were on the move -- for the worse I couldn't help feeling. There were glimpses of post-colonial political correctness appearing in the galleries which, understandable as they were, were so against the grain of the collection and its display (the whole thing had been put together under the auspices of Leopold himself for heaven's sake) that they risked looking faintly silly. They were in fact a bit like the new wave at the Natural History Museum in London, with its pious little notices about how we wouldn't hunt and stuff wild animals these days. It seemed to me that it would have just been better to leave the whole thing as it was and let us see what the colonial vision was like straight, and allow us to make our own minds up.

The Cambridge Chancellor election -- in 1847

I  haven't been to the Manuscripts Room of the University Library for a year of so (chance would be a fine thing). So I hadn't caught up with the new policing regime that I found when I showed up there this week: you now have to sign in on a separate admissions list, and you aren't allowed to take in even the small size bags that are allowed into the rest of the Library; instead you have to leave it in a locker outside. . . and you end up having to get the key back (because, wisely maybe, they dont trust you to keep the key on your person) every time you want to get 25p to buy a new pencil, or whatever.

I'm sure that this is all very sensible, and a good way of protecting the collection. But it does have a nasty way of criminilising you, and of raising the uncomfortable possibility that you and every other reader in the room might be liable to snitch some precious document as soon as anyone's back might be turned. (I wonder how many people it pushes to crime, at the same time as it makes it harder for them.)

Anyway, I was not to be put off, as I was there on the search of more things about the history of the Fitzwilliam. One thing I wanted to get to the bottom of was the celebrations in 1842 in honour of the new chancellor, the Duke of Northumberland, part of which took place in the Museum before the building ad even been finished. Just HOW unfinished I wondered.

One likely looking document was catalogued as the description of the election and installation of about 5 new Chancellors over the course of the nineteenth century, a manuscript written by eager, obsessive and rather smart nineteenth-century bureaucrats, keen to pass on the proceedings to their successors.

It turned out not to have anything to help me about the state of the Fitzwilliam in 1842, but it had lots of juicy stuff about the election of 1847 -- which turned out to have quite a lot in common with the election we are to have in October.

In "hairdresser country"

Today I made a rare visit to the hairdresser. I rather like my unkempt look, but there is a fine line between idiosyncratic eccentricity and wild barbarity -- and things were verging on the barbarous.

Even so, I have a bit of a phobia of the salon. It's the terror of humiliation. Looking at my hair, the stylist is likely to utter the capillary equivalent of the usual plumber's line -- "what cowboy put that in?". Worse, I always think, they might then take things into their own hands. I go in to have a trim, and come out with a trendy cut, ten inches shorter. Once they get the scissors out, how do you stop them?

But, I am about to do a new tv mini-series, and felt the need of a little tidy up. All the same entering the salon is a little bit like entering a country whose language you don't speak very well.

What do e-petitioners want? Not the death penalty.

If you had listened to the news last night, you would have been under the impression that the government's new(ish) e-petition scheme was shortly to be landing us with another full scale House of Commons debate on the restoration of the death penalty. It was echoed over the world and in this morning's papers. There was a mixture of glee on the one side and other other (mine) some shaking of heads about the consequences of government by click.

The point about democracy is not that we take every silly idea seriously , it is that we take every worthy idea seriously -- and that those should not be the ideas of the rich or the privileged or the men or the old, but ANYONE's ideas. That's what's democratic about it. Democracy isn't something done at your lap top after a glass or two late at night (even the Athenians wouldnt have liked that... and even a referendum should demand you making some effort, with the rival positions laid out for consideration).

But may be we shouldnt have worried quite so much. When I got onto the site this morning, it wasnt quite as I had been led to believe. True, there were over 40 petitions calling for the return of the death penalty for various shades and varieties of murder (by paedophiles, by Class A drug dealers, of children or police...) in various shades of muddle:

Try this:

"Restoration of capital punishment for certain murders only is unacceptable. Capital punishment should be restored for all crimes of murder without exception. However, in conjunction with this, legal and court measures must be introduced to ensure that the innocent are not convicted of murder; it is better to let the guilty sometimes escape to ensure that none who are innocent shall be convicted."

(Like how...?)

Or this (providing an over-optimistic answer):

"RE-INSTATEMENT OF THE DEATH PENALTY. With new technologies and DNA etc, the excuse of getting the wrong person convicted is no longer applicable."

Compare this to the fact that there were no petitions at all submitted on areas covered by the Department of Education or the Department for International Development (which is itself one reason why government by petition is so dangerous).

But a second look offered a slightly different perspective. So far, more people have signed up AGAINST the death penalty than FOR.

On a quick calculation there were just over 6000 for some form of capital punishment, and almost 8500 against, albeit in far fewer individual petitions -- one of which had attracted 7300 signatures -- more than combined total of those wanting a return to hanging. (Either way it is still a long way from the 100,000 signatures required for consideration for debate in parliament . . .)

But an even closer second look suggested a signficantly different practice among the petition administrators across the different government department. Go to the petitions submitted to the Foreign Office, and you will find that 18 calling for some form of referendum on withdrawl from the EU have been rejected by the authorities on the grounds that "There is already an e-petition about this issue". So far (though perhaps the civil servants have not got to work with their electronic blue pencils) none of the various petitions for return of the death penalty have been rejected.

Maybe that is because the site administrators reckon that they really are significantly different: the man wanting death for paedophiles may NOT in fact want to hang Class A drug dealers (whereas, by contrast, everyone who wants an EU referendum wants much the same thing).

Or maybe there is something more subtle going on. As I understand the rule, an individual petition has to score at least 100,000 signatures in order to qualify for consideration for a debate. Could it be that the young mandarins in charge of this site are doing their quiet best to make sure that they dont reach that target). The divide and rule principle.

If so, I'm all behind them. But it somehow undermines the government hype on the scheme.

 

 

 

 

Size zero models: 1912

It comes as something of a relief to discover that people were objecting to waif-like images of women already 100 years ago.

I have spent a very happy day in the Fitzwilliam Museum, in their archive, investigating the early display of classical antiquities there. But, as always in real (as against a virtual) archive, you stumble across unexpected things.

Today that was a satirical story clipped out of a 1912 issue of the Cambridge student magazine, The Granta. Entitled "A tilt at the Fitzwilliam", it features a jocular student, "The Jester", and a woman he is walking out. Their first dilemma is whether to visit the Fitzwilliam (a picture gallery) or the local cinema (a picture house). Having opted for the Fitzwilliam, they don't have a great time.

The Jester points out to the girl that most of the good stuff on show is borrowed. You can find, he explains, "the most beautiful Nicholson woodblock (. . .on loan) among a whole crowd of Rossetti's languorous maidens -- these latter being on the permanent staff -- very poor and always with us".

But, objects the girl, "Oughtn't we to like Rossetti nowadays?"

"It's only done at Oxford," retorts the Jester, "not in artistic circles. You see no one except Rossetti, and a select crowd from 'the other place' ever saw a girl like that. And they never saw it themselves really. However, they're trying to show you what you ought to be like -- a protest against the standard pattern you're manufactured on."

Which seems to me as close as you can get to talking about body-image role-models in 1912.

From El Bulli to Apicius

I found myself decidedly unmoved by this weekend's obituaries of El Bulli ('the best restaurant in the world'). A friend of mine did make the gastronomic pilgrimage a decade or so ago, and came back full of stories of its brilliance. He had been especially impressed with the way the waiters had held appropriately scented flowers under their noses as the ate particular dishes. My reaction was not 'what brilliant attention to synaesthesia', but 'how bloody pretentious can you get?'.

Try some of his specialities (like the 'soup' above): liquid pea ravioli (that's ravioli shells, filled with pea soup) or flower paper (that's flowers pressed into a sheet of candy floss) or the ball of frozen gorgonzola. All this brings out the culinary philistine in me, or the 'Arts and Crafts, Truth to Materials' approach to cooking. (If God had wanted flowers pressed into a sheet of candy floss . . . etc etc. Or why bother to freeze good gorgonzola?) 

The husband is with me on this one, but for slightly different reasons. He hates the control exercised by these celebrity cooks; the 'eat what I deign to give you' philosophy. He can't even abide the amuse-bouches so beloved of more ordinary pricy restaurants. You know where the waiter comes up with a little pot of something you hadnt ordered between courses, and explains its ingredients to you in a carefully practised French accent. His line is: "If I'd wanted a 'mousse of dew-picked mushrooms with ginger and cointreau', I'd have asked for it."