A Don’s Life

Grounded -- with books

I had been going to New York this weekend, to do a serious piece of study on the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, which the husband hasn't yet seen. I had been kicking myself, because our flight out to New York was just after the shut down of Heathrow on Thursday -- but I now see that if we HAD gone, we wouldn't have got back by Sunday evening (and that would have been a nightmare for the first week of term).

If there is a moral in this, it is that British Airways fixed me up with a new flight in June (it was a sort of holiday, so that was fine), the hotel we had booked into (The Library -- ok we were splashing out) generously didn't charge us, even though we had technically been on a three day cancellation deal -- but our travel insurance (BUPA), from whom we might have claimed some incidental expenses, told us to bog off (act of god, etc...anyone know a good travel insurance company?).

Meanwhile I have to say that the husband, as often these days, looks righter and righter... couldn't the planes just fly lower, he asked on day one. And that is beginning to look like what they will do. (How can you tell the difference between sensible precautions and "health and safety" gone mad? But it is beginning to look as if this is "health and safety" gone mad, at the cost of billions.)

Anyway, what do you do with two and a half days to spare? To start with, it is hard to use the time you didn't expect to have, but then -- there are those books you've been sent.

It's a don's life -- the book

The book of this blog is due out on 5 November. But advance copies are now available from Amazon, and are on their way to those commenters whose comments are included in the compendium (you know who you are). I like the look of it and, obviously, feel some trepidation about how it will be 'received', and -- of course -- bought.

The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc.

I hope you'll like it.

Is it a bollard? Is it a sculpture? Is it a book?

A couple of weeks ago, as I biked past the University Library (my usual route from home to my Faculty), I saw what I took to be a series of new bollards 'under wraps'.

For years now, car-parking at the UL has been increasingly out of control. When I was a student cars at the library were kept firmly in the car parks. Then one area of the car parking was re-assigned to university staff who work in the central administration (a sign of the times . . .) and readers' cars started to spill over -- first along the grass verges, then right in front of the library steps themselves.

It was only a matter of time, I often thought, before "the authorities" will put a stop to this. And here were the bollards.

But what emerged from the wrapping was rather different. It was a work of 'public art'.

Reviewing: the nastiness test

I am just on the way back from Columbus Ohio, where I’ve done two gigs. The first was at a great colloquium on Saturday organised by the graduate students in the Greek and Latin department at OSU. The theme was the “Future of the Ancient”, and I was booked to do the last lecture of the day.

Classicists find it terribly easy to feel embattled, and love nothing better than predicting their own imminent extinction (this gloom-mongering has gone on almost since the second century AD). So I decided to take a rather more upbeat line. It’s not a question of whether the study of the Greeks and Romans will survive, but of in what form … And I took the opportunity to have a little attack on two current favourites themes of avant-garde classicists (‘reception” and “interdisciplinarity”). I have done quite a lot of both of these, but it’s always useful to think how odd our intellectual fashions might look like from the outside (or, as I said, from a hundred years hence).

The second gig was today, just before I left. It was a ‘brown bag lunch” on the “politics of reviewing”. I kicked off for half an hour or so, talking about how Classics books get chosen to be reviewed in the TLS (a much less devious process than most people suspect), what the basic ground rules are and various bits of “good advice” in the fine old craft of reviewing.

Near the top of the list for me is “never say anything in a review that you wouldn’t say to the author’s face”. I don’t think any author minds disagreement. I mean if everyone agreed with what you said in a book, it couldn’t possibly be really interesting could it. What they mind is nastiness. I said this with some feeling, having just had what I considered an onslaught, rather than a review, from a colleague in California that certainly did not pass the ‘Beard nastiness test’!