A Don’s Life

Graduation rituals

I've been feeling a bit sorry for our undergraduates this year. I'm not sure that May Balls etc give the image of Cambridge that I would most like to project, but I really dont see why they shouldnt let their hair down, binge drink or whatever for a week -- because almost all of them have been working themselves sick for months.

This year the post exam celebrations have been rather rained on -- and there's not been much opportunity for languidly  sprawling on the grass.

Some rituals go on nonetheless. Tomorrow the Newnham students have their graduation, in the senate house and then in college. Although I never graduated in the formal sense myself (crushed with embarrassment at all that flummery, and not being quite sure how to navigate divorced parents), I actually rather enjoy this. Partly because the students are happy (this year 2 of them got firsts and 4 of them 2.1s -- so how could they not be?), and partly because I get to meet the Mums and Dads etc, which is always fun.

To be honest I am not all that keen on the new habit of involving the parents all the way through. I realise I'm off message on this one, but I dont much like it when Mum and Dad turn up with junior t the interview, and I dont go to the 'meet the parents' sessions we now have. I think for the three or four years they are with me, it's the students that are my business; and that's only disrupted by contact with their parents.

That said, I love getting to know them when all is done -- and some I've kept in touch with a bit. Only once, about 20 years ago, has any Mum or Dad NOT been great to meet (on that occasion the Dad in question gave me a good ticking off for his daughter's 2.2, which made me see what the poor girl had had to put up with.

Moving the books on the Titanic

OK, after recovering from the run of one night lecture stands, I knew that I had to get the books off the floor of my study at home before I could start to write the next chapter of the book I'm supposed to be writing .. two chapters down, six to go. And that is where last weekend went.

It is of course a hopeless task. The problem I have is basically the same as the problem faced, on a much bigger scale, by the Cambridge University Library, and probably many others: too many books, too few shelves, and too few walls to put up any more.  We have a large enough house for living in, but not large enough for the books. And trying to clear the floor and fit a few more into the space that already seems full does develop some first principle librarianship skills.

Obviously if you took the UL strategy and systematically sorted the books by size as well as subject, you could find space for a lot more -- but at home do I really want to have the small commentaries on Cicero separated from the larger ones? I have, though, decided  that 'out-housing' some of the lesser used things can open up a foot or two (in my case that has meant sending the series of 20 volumes Balkan Studies to the husband's study -- though it's not clear he wants them, and honestly it only shifts the problem elsewhere...the book equivalent of nimbyism).

Then there's the duplicates which really might free up a foot or two if one could get one's act together to flog them or give them away. No household needs three copies of Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, or two copies of Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, or two identical translations of Joubert's Treatise on Laughter. Quite how we acquired these duplicates isn't exactly clear -- some are no doubt the consequence of marriage, some I suspect are the consequence of mess (I mean I bought another copy because I didnt realise I already owned it).

As far as layout is concerned, I sort of wished I'd been braver about forward planning. I mean it's all very well to squeeze everything in without an inch to spare, but if you are acquiring books at the rate of 3 or 4 a week, that only means that the new ones end up . . . well, on the floor. So this weekend I determinedly left 6 inches of shelf space empty, for the next volumes of the Journal of Roman Archaeology that will arrive in due course  (though how long it will survive...).

But most of the time it was more like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic. I'd worked out that I should use the big shelves downstairs for big books not the run of penguins. So I got good exercise swapping around the Lucky Jim's etc with the exhibition catalogues (non classical) that had been in the spare room.

The good news is that it did magic up a bit more space and clear the floor, and yesterday I had an hour in my study actually working on the book (only an hour, but sheer bliss). But the horrible truth is that I am due to retire in 10 years time and then I'll have two more rooms full of books to house. So we spent the weekend looking at the garden and wondering where we could put a bookshed . . . and feeling we shouldnt be quite so snooty about the Kindle.

 

Saving Latin from the Tory Party

For me, one of worst effects of the Michael Gove education agenda, with its stress on traditional skills, is that it tends to make Latin look as if it is the favourite subject of the radical right wing. At the same time -- it makes it an easy symbolic target of any Labour parliamentarian looking for a cheap hit against "syllabus Gove".

"What do the Tories want for schools?" Answer: "Toff, useless subjects like Latin, not useful subjects like engineering etc".

One of the many offenders in this regard is Andy Burnham. And last night, on Question Time, he took basically the line I've just crudely summarized. And in fact (for all Burnham's no doubt many other virtues) he is a repeat offender in this respect. In February he was on Any Questions and said some very similar things, proving his radical educational credentials in the time-honoured way, with a pot shot or two at Latin.

In this case I decided to object, so I emailed him to ask  if he would like to come and see what we do in Cambridge with Latin and Greek (maybe rather different from what he expected). Needless to say, his assistant explained ( correctly, I'm sure) that he was much too busy with his other commitments to take me up on the offer. So I replied graciously (I think), asking her to pass on a few words to her boss, saying how radically exciting etc the study of Latin was and how Classics as a subject had one of the best employment records of ALL uni subjects.

She replied as follows: "He does know  - but sometimes he has to make a point...". (Something about the honesty of politics may be at stake here, don't you think? He knows about the virtues of the subject, but scoring a quick one against the opposition is just that much more important...err?)

To be fair to Burnham, he probably saw none of this exchange himself. And he is no worse than a lot of those who aim a wandering bullet at Latin when Gove and the rest look as if they are supporting it. But it's all a pretty cheap trick -- particularly if (as I suspect) you dont really have much idea what studying Latin is all about.

French lecture .. and the double ending

I guess that some of you will be well and truly fed up with my francophone problems. But there is at least a happy ending -- and a bit of a funny story.

This evening was my "Conférence Marc Bloch" moment -- in the vast amphitheatre of the Sorbonne (in the picture): "Les Romains riaient ils?" I had it written, I had it brilliantly translated, I had practised in my best French.. and yet there was still a big risk.

The end of the lecture featured a Roman joke from the Philogelos (the ancient joke book), and the point was to get the audience to laugh at it, and then to think a bit harder WHY they had laughed.

It was rendered very nicely (thank you all who did this, principally Jean-Frédéric Schaub) into a joke in the style of Coluche. Like this:

"C’est l’histoire d’un mec qui rencontre un copain qu’y croyait mort.
 Eh là, qu'y dit, j’croyais qu’t’étais mort…
Ben non, que dit l’copain, tu vois bien que chuis vivant.
Mouais, répond le mec, mais çui qui m’a dit qu’t’étais mort, j’le crois un peu plus que toi !"

The idea was to tell it to the audience and then get to think why they had laughed

Was it because it was still funny? Or because I (that is "we") had translated it to be funny? Or because a dear old middle aged English lady at the Sorbonne was pretending to be Coluche? Or because the whole idea of laughing at a Roman joke was itself funny?

The trouble was that the whole ending of the lecture depended on the audience having laughed at the joke -- and then thinking more about why they had.

But what if they hadnt laughed? Didn't that ruin the finale?'

Five words I can't quite say in French

All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. And that is pretty much what has been happening to me this last week or so.... two lectures (under different banners in the British Museum), a vast pile of exam scripts, job interviews to prepare for tomorrow (me doing the interviewing thank god, but prep still required), and the French lecture on Wednesday. It's one of those schedules that will work just about perfectly, so long as you don't want any time off, and so long as nothing goes wrong -- like the damn powerpoints for the BM at the end of the week, which worked fine of my Mac but were a total series of black images on the BM's PCs (thanks to the husband and a colleague for sorting that one for me).

Anyway now it is the French lecture that is rather looming. I think I said before that my problem here was that 10 or 15 years ago I could give a lecture 'en français' -- with some difficulty, it's true, but I could do it. And indeed so I did. But taking these French lessons over the last few months (first in Belgium, then with the French lectrice)  has made me see how delusional that "competence" was. OK, I could write something that was more or less comprehensible -- but it is now clear to me that I must have read it out in such a parody of a British accent (and, even more, intonation) that much of the basic point must have passed the average listener by.

What poems did you learn at school?

I have never much liked the idea of the National Curriculum. I saw what was driving it (let's make it impossible for schools not to teach a foreign language; let's make it easier for kids to move around the country and pick up with school wherever they go). But the whole idea made it easier for a cavalier Minister of Education to impose his own quirks (good or bad) on the nation's children... en bloc.

Michael Gove has just (so it is reported) decided that kids as young as five should learn poetry by heart. And no doubt, if this idea is adopted, it will shortly be followed by the list of 100 poems that they should know.

Let me say straight away that I learned poems at school from the age of, I think, five. When I was at the primary school of which my Mum was head (Church Preen above), we did at least a poem a week from the very beginning. I still somewhere have the exercise book that I wrote out, clumsily, what was to be learned. The very first one was the first stanza of Browning's "Home Thoughts from Abroad" (" Oh to be in England...."), the second was the "Duck's Ditty" from Wind in the Willows ("All along the backwater...").

I was still learning poetry by heart when I was seventeen (and I mastered the "Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock" for the rich reward from my inspirational English teacher of 50p).

So why don't I like what Gove is suggesting?

Jubilee done and dusted: now the Olympics

I was just beginning to feel that the media-fest of the Jubilee was well and truly over.. and indeed was reflecting on how we might remember it all in a year's time, even ten years' time. The rain? The apparent popular enthusiasm for her Majesty? The poor old Duke being consigned to hospital after hours of standing up in the (almost) freezing cold on that boat? (Personally I have to confess to rather liking the St Paul's do, so far as I could see it on the corner of my laptop . . .it was against all my instincts, but the stunning architecture and the choir certainly beat the aging pop stars of the night before.)

But, as I quickly realised, we are only spared national hysteria for a few weeks, because the Olympic Games are looming. For me this means a ringside view of that torch, which is going to run past my very house on 8 July... on its way, as I recall, to a waiting car to be driven along the A14 to St Ives (isnt this rather a cheat??)...more pressing though it also means two lectures to be given on the Olympic Games next weekend. They are both at the the British Museum, one on Friday early evening focussing on the Much Wenlock Olympics (that appears to be fully booked), and one on Saturday late afternoon on the Roman Olympic Games (it's free, but booking is advised).

I am still working out exactly what to say...

Am I Republican -- and what would Tacitus have thought?

The truth is that I have spent the last four days finishing my paper for Paris, and writing about the Olympic Games (for a couple of forthcoming gigs); but thanks to new technology, I have kept half an eye on the Jubilee romps -- in a small window on my laptop.

I started the weekend as a passive Republican, but really quite happy with the monarch we have (no doubt a good sort). And. I guess, that's the way I have ended it. I can't begin to justify an hereditary monarchy, but when I think of a (horribly spun) electoral system electing a head of state, I want to run a mile. So I'll go with what we've got, for the time being.

On the other hand, just as I am settling down to enjoy a (pro tem) monarchical moment, I find myself watching the BBC broadcasts on all this junketing. It's not just the inanity of the BBC 1 commentary that has unseated me (I never thought I would say this quite so loud and clear, but THANK GOD for Simon Schama and David Cannadine this morning.. apart from the excellent Clare Balding, at last some we've had someone who knows something.) The real problem for me has been the appalling sycophancy on display, among the crowds.

"I have come here from Durham (or wherever), with all my family .. " said someone "just as we came to the GoldenJubilee .. because we want to see the queen as close as we can.. she went right past, and I feel so happy.." And that was repeated time and again on the BBC. (Indeed anytime anyone suggested they were anything less than happy, the sound quickly turned off!)

At this point I want to shout out, "what better could you have done with the money..?" But then I see the self-contradictoriness of my own position. If I prefer a monarchy to a politicised presidency, then it's only sycophancy that will keep it going.That's what hereditary power is all about; there's nothing other to it than imagined, fictional charisma.

How are you spending the Jubilee weekend?

Here in Cambridge, exams rule... and, as usual, we are paying not a blind bit of notice to the season's festivities. We never observe the early summer bank holidays here. That is to say, university life goes on as it ever did, the libraries are open and the students sit the Tripos (and we mark it), jubilee or not.

My own priority for the next couple of days is to get a version of my big lecture in Paris done, to send off to the translator (the deadline was today, but I'm hoping that Monday won't matter too much). The students are heads down in their exams (but I havent got any scripts to mark yet) . . . remember please when they have a few nights of over the top celebration afterwards, that they missed this weekend's jollities.

The topic in Paris is "Les Romains riaient-t-ils", and I have got more than enough to say .. except I don't know what bits to focus on, for an hour's talk in French -- which always takes longer than in English (in my French, at least -- if I was more fluent, no doubt I'd romp through). So that's what the weekend is for. I'm hoping that a punchy version will be done by Monday, whatever else is happening.