A Don’s Life

Sortes Virgilianae -- and the future of the book

Until last night, I had never experimented with the sortes Virgilianae. It's that do-it-yourself form of fortune-telling which involves opening a text of Virgil at random, plunging your finger in, and whatever phrase it lands on, that's your answer.

It's got a long and noble history going back to the Roman world itself (the emperor Hadrian is supposed to have done it, for example) and beyond. One of the most famous modern consulters was Charles I, who went to the Bodleian specially to consult a copy (didn't he actually have one in his palace, I can't help wondering) and got a predictably gloomy answer.

But it came in handy for ladies too. Mrs Thrale apparently resorted to Virgil when she was trying to decide whether to marry Mr Piozzi and decamp to Italy. Her finger came down on "O decus Italiae" (Aeneid 11, 508) ... "O jewel of Italy" -- and off she went! Mary Shelley was another keen consulter, but her copy seemed to have a nasty tendency to fall open at the Dido episode, which was hardly ever good news for poor Mary.

Anyway last night was my first go.

Alcohol abuse, the imperfect subjunctive and a sense of history

One of the advantages of giving up alcohol for Lent is that is gives you carte blanche to sound off about the government's fixation with the demon drink, without feeling that you are being merely self-serving.This weekend has seen a torrent of such stuff.

In one paper today was an article about how GPs were going to be paid extra (that is to say, in government euphemism, "incentivised") to talk to us all about our consumption any time we went to visit them, and about how alcohol (limitation of consumption thereof) was to become a regular topic in any general health check-up. "The evidence suggests that this actually works" said one leading medic.

I have several reactions to this, and all of them negative ones. I know perfectly well what the safe limits are said to be (though I have never heard a clear explanation about why these ARE designated safe limits, rather than a few units more or less); I know whether or not I am exceeding them; and I know exactly what to do if I want to cut down. The last thing I want is to fetch up in the surgery with an ingrowing toe-nail and to get the alcohol speech, simply because you -- Dear Doctor -- are getting an extra tenner if you can tick the box saying that you have delivered it. In fact, knowing that you have been incentivised in that way erodes my trust in you and your judgement. And it makes me far less likely to show up in the surgery for any kind of regular health check up.

I have a nightmare fantasy of how this approach might look, in my neck of the woods, if we thought that quite a lot of students were having trouble with the imperfect subjunctive. We could "incentivise" us all, and give us an extra fiver (we're rather cheaper to bribe, I imagine than very well-paid GPs) each time we dwelt on the imperfect subjunctive for at least five minutes in a supervision.

 

The view from Euronews. . .what's lost in translation?

I am now back from my 5-days of total French, and I am feeling pretty pleased with how it went. Haven't felt so knackered for years, but I ended up with a very strong conviction that I could speak and understand French much much better. The fact is that reading French for me has never been a problem (and for some bits of my work I read as much in French as in English); it's the expression orale and the compréhension orale that's been the weak spot.

But how do you know that you've made the leap, beyond just feeling that you have? Well for me one of the best bits of the whole experience was when I came back via Bruxelles and spoke, in passing, to a few guys in French (ticket collector etc) and they actually replied in French...rather the usual English I've been met with in the past. Surely a sign of progress.

The problem is now how to keep it up. No point in getting fluent in French in March, and losing it all again before you lecture in June.

French immersion

I am writing from Belgium (the wonderful town of Spa, to be precise), where I have come for a five day French immersion course.

My problem is that I have to give a big lecture in Paris in June. 10 years or so ago I used to get by lecturing and (even more crucially) answering questions in French, but I haven't done it for years, and "rusty" would be too polite a term. My first instincts were to start taking regular conversation lessons in Cambridge, but realism soon intervened. I would be bound to end up cancelling them when something apparently more interesting came my way and frankly I couldnt see myself sitting round the kitchen table (or at the desk at the Alliance Francaise) jabbering away in French "en plein Cambridge" ("en Cambridge profonde"?).

So I decided to opt for the (re-)baptism of fire and go for a total immersion course. The pricey option. My Faculty and college (thank you) both contributed a bit to the cost, but I'm still spending more than I will get in the fee. But look on the bright side. I will know French a lot better by the end of this.

I chose a place from the web...in fact I picked about the only language school which I could find which actually talked about helping academics with lectures to give (rather than just a business deal to make). And I committed myself to a regime of 6 hours one to one lessons a day, plus social interaction (with language correction) entirely in French.

As the date got nearer, I got progressively more scared. My fantasies ranged from the idea that the whole thing might have been a scam (set up to trap Anglophone lecturers in France) to the thought of a "hell is other people" scenario, locked up with assorted and unknown students and teachers for 5 days... with no escape.

In fact I have fallen on my feet.

Who else hates telephone fund-raising?

Some years ago, my college decided to go in for an annual campaign of telephone fundraising -- that means getting current students to ring up ex-students and ask them to get cheque books and credit cards out and give to the old college. Some of us awkward squad objected strongly to this. It all smacked far too much of double glazing salesmanship, and the worst excesses of cold-calling. And wasn't there a risk that it would actually put people off giving money? (It certainly would me  . . .)

We were assured that it was not "cold", as people would get a letter in advance to explain that they were about to be called and would be able to write and ask not to be (... get real I thought). And we were told that even if it did put off the occasional mavericks (like us), it would raise a lot of money on its own account -- and re-establish relations with alumnae.

We were democratically overruled, and in a way we have been proved wrong. The annual campaigns have raised a lot of money and most of the ex-students called claim to have enjoyed speaking to current students (and vice versa)

Fair enough. But I still don't like it. When I myself was mistakenly called by a student telephoner a few yeasr ago, I'm afraid  -- a bit to my shame -- I made mincemeat of her. And when the husband was called by someone from his old college a few days ago, I think he gave them a bit of the treatment he usually reserves for double glazing salesmen.

But in this case there was a sequel, which suggests that the whole thing has got even more corporate and slicker.

A visit to National Trust fake kitchens

We loaded up a few students and motored off to Ickworth this afternoon -- a National Trust property in Suffolk, where we intended to do some country-house creeping and to have a look at the late nineteenth-century "Pompeian room" (actually the paintings are based on a house excavated in Rome in the late eighteenth century). 

There was a bad start when we walked in through the front door and the nice volunteer told us that the Pompeian Room was closed for shortage of staff. Full credit where it is due: we looked crest-fallen and explained that that was what we had come specially to see, and she rang up the manager on duty -- who quickly turned up to take us in. Top marks National Trust for that; thank you.

But we didnt feel quite so buoyant, though, when we discovered what must have been the reason for the shortage of staff -- namely that a large number of them had been redeployed to the newly opened below-stairs kitchens.

So after we'd looked at the large number of Zoffany's in the house (including this one), a fantastic self-portrait of Madame Vigée le Brun (on the left), a brilliantly vulgar clock decorated with the scene of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, plus one of Benjamin West's many versions of the Death of Wolfe, we decided to venture to the basement.

It wasn't exactly our cup of tea.

 

 

How many condoms did Zoffany paint?

I went, earlier in the week, to get a glimpse of the new Zoffany exhibition at Royal Academy: Johan Zofanny RA: Society Observed. I 've always liked his stuff without knowing very much about him. But the big draw on this occasion was the chance to get a close look at his painting of the "Tribuna of the Uffizi" (1772-1777) -- detail above -- picturing the famous gallery in Florence, packed full of antique aculpture and modern painting.  I'd written about this years ago (in particular about the group of men leering at the flesh of the Venus de Medici), but I'd never actually seen the original.

As always there were some surprises in store. It wasn't as big as I had imagined it, but much more detailed, full of jokes, stories and cheeky collocations. And Titian's "Venus of Urbino" was a lot more prominent in the original than it ever seemed in the reproductions -- and much more obviously in dialogue with the Venus de Medici statue. The same was true of the Uffizi Wrestlers just behind, and the characters admiring it. The guy with his hand on the edge of the Titian, and pointing back to the Wrestlers, was apparently an instantly recognisable Thomas Patch, who had been banished from Rome for homosexuality. Originally -- according to the catalogue -- Zoffany had painted a black 'patch' onto the bum of one of the Wrestler's, just to make the point.

Anyway we then explored some of the paintings we didn't know. One (from the Gallery at Parma) was a curious self-portrait of Zoffany apparently putting on a friar's outfit, actually getting ready to go out to party in fancy dress. And he's looking forward to a good time, for on the wall were hanging up, the label said, two condoms.

"But" asked the husband, "why do they say "two"? There's three of them hanging up -- a pair, and one a bit further to the right."

The coffee police

I am just on the way back from Rome, where we have been doing the final weekend's filming for the new Romans series (which I THINK will be broadcast in April on BBC2). We are a happy crew ably managed by the producer, Caterina, who is brilliant at everything . . . except we do have one area of domestic controversy, and that's in the coffee department.

Caterina (on the right) is Italian and you will probably already have guessed what this might be. It relates to the time of the day when it is appropriate to drink cappuccino. The truth is she goes a bit pale, and looks as disapproving as she can muster, when any of us order a cappuccino after about 11.30. From then on, it should be espresso only -- or if milk has to be there, then it should be a macchiato.

It is, of course, one of the old "English in Italy" problems, and it isnt really soluble.

On the one side are the "Inglesi Italianizzati", who though busting for a nice frothy cappuccino, really wont be seen dead with anything but an espresso. When I was a graduate student in Rome, I knew plenty of those, "gone native". And I always suspected that they went back to their rooms and brewed themselves up a nice frothy,milky cappuccino in the afternoon when no-one was looking.

When was the Colosseum built?

Some myths (aka factoids) about the Roman world are so ingrained that I have begun to despair of ever unseating them. Pride of place -- beyond even the dormouse consumption, or the vomiting between dinner courses -- must go to the idea that the Colosseum was always there, pretty much as long as Rome was Rome.

In fact, that's what even some of our brightest and best seem to assume. In a nice article skewering the 2012 Olympics hype a few weeks ago, Simon Jenkins referred to the recent cabinet visit to the Olympic site. "The Olympics are now being so oversold" he wrote, "as to risk self-parody. Not since Nero hauled his court to the Colosseum has anything been sillier than David Cameron holding a Cabinet meeting yesterday at Stratford to discuss rebellion in a distant province of his empire, Scotland."

And then, just this morning, on "Thought for the Day" the excellent Michael Banner of Trinity Coll, Cambridge, talked of the Romans during the lifetime of Jesus watching the gladiatorial games in the Colosseum.

Both were as eloquent as usual. The trouble is that the Colosseum was not built in the reign of Nero (54-68), still less in the lifetime of Jesus (his earthly lifetime that is). It wasn't even an apple in any designer's eye. And there is no possibility whatsoever that Nero could have hauled his court off there, Cameron-style.