Neville Morley's Blog, page 14

Positively 4th Street

Dear X,

Please find attached the revised version of my chapter for your volume. I have endeavoured to address all the many points and suggestions you raised, while still trying to keep hold of the fact that it’s actually my work. You are free to write the chapter yourself if this is insufficient.

I do remain sceptical about your demand for illustrations – is discussion of George Grote, a reasonably familiar name to historians of Ancient Greece, really enhanced by including a picture of him? – but I have, as requested, expended the necessary time and money to get the permissions for reproduction, and attach the files.

Best wishes,

Neville

Dear X,

I am by nature the most peaceful, conciliatory, accommodating and indeed doormat-like of men. My ‘Enemies List’ – meaning personal enemies, of course; the list of ideologies, organisations, public figures, television shows and the like which I would happily raze to the ground is quite substantial, plus badgers – has hitherto contained just a single name. It now has two.

“My 1st report suggested that your writing was sometimes a problem. I need you to continue to improve your writing. There are still sentences here that are too long, and semi-colons (‘;’) and colons (‘:’) that need to be replaced with full stops (‘.’). I note as many of these problems as possible below. I sincerely ask you to revise them thoroughly. Me having to do so on your behalf would be far from ideal.”

Leaving aside the fact that my English is entirely grammatical and correct, how can you imagine that this is an appropriate manner to address a colleague? Or indeed anyone?

You seem to be labouring under a remarkable delusion as to how much of an honour it is to appear in this volume, and how much people may therefore put up with in order to do so. It gives me great pleasure to withdraw my contribution rather than submit to this unprofessional nonsense.

Fuck off and die,

Neville

Dear X,

Thank you for your message – though any hint of actual courtesy here is purely formal, as I have no doubt you will fail to register.

It is the nature of an edited volume that individual contributors, at least those of the right disposition, can be kept in line with reference to the impact on fellow contributors of their action or inaction. I don’t for a moment imagine that the volume would be seriously weakened by the absence of my rather mediocre chapter, but I am sufficiently susceptible to appeals to the collective good to let you off the hook of having to explain to the publisher why I had withdrawn at the last minute.

In the interests of a quiet life, I have replaced every semicolon and comma with a full stop, and trust that this now meets your peculiar standards. I have, after some thought, decided not to include a footnote to explain why the prose is quite so unspeakably leaden. Regular readers will probably recognise that this is effectively a hostage situation.

Yours,

Neville

Dear X,

What a surprise, after two and a half years of complete silence, to receive chapter proofs this morning – and with nearly a whole week to turn them around! I note that you have taken on board my comments about whether the images were really necessary. Obviously it might have been nice if you’d done that before I expended time and money on sorting out permissions, and if you’d thought to mention this rather than just making a unilateral decision. But clearly I should count my blessings that you have not unilaterally replaced some of my footnotes with references to your own publications, as you’ve done with one of my fellow contributors. Do you honestly not see why that might be an issue, or do you not care?

I can at least say that working with you on this volume has brought the rest of us together in a truly heart-warming manner, and we have the special t-shirts to prove it. But what pleases me most is that you have not made any changes to the two opening paragraphs that I added to the final version.

Very much hoping that this is the end of it.

Neville

What I Owe To The Ancients

It can’t be the beginning of a new academic year already. After all, it’s not as if you’ve been having the nightmares.

Of course I have; the one in which it’s my first day in a strange place, where I don’t know anyone or where anything is or what I’m supposed to be doing, and I am desperately looking for a place about which I know nothing but supposedly it will be perfectly clear when I come across it, in a ruined building that is somehow entwined with a forest and yet is definitely a Cambridge college…

By way of distraction, I found myself thinking the other day about what I learnt from my own teachers thirty-odd years ago – not the contents of lectures and supervisions, but the stuff that actually stays with you for decades rather than just until after Finals. The habits of thought, the values, the ways in which they modelled different ways of being an academic or a teacher or a human being. It’s fair to say that, at the time, I didn’t always realise what I was learning or how my outlook was being shaped; it’s also entirely possible that I learned some wrong or counter-productive things at the same time, but perhaps that should wait for another post; perhaps at the end of the year rather than the beginning.

Christopher Brooke: boundless intellectual enthusiasm. I wrote about this back in 2015, when he died (n.b. this was the medieval ecclesiastical historian C.N.L. Brooke, not the very much alive historian of political thought); the fact that among the few lectures I actually attended in my first year of undergraduate study was a series of seminars on early medieval history with no plan or structure and no connection to any exam, just the professor – who looked like an elderly professor, and my gods it’s terrifying to realise that he was then only six years older than I am now – enthusing about Wolfram von Eschenbach as a historical source, entirely unperturbed by the fact that he must have talked about Wolfram von Eschembach dozens if not hundreds of times, and on this occasion it was just to an audience of a visiting Japanese scholar and a vacant-looking first year. I think this modelled for me the need to keep things fresh and not too structured, rather than those lecturers who simply worked their way through their books, and the idea that you should still be enthused by your subject even when you’re – horror! – sixty, or why bother?

Rosamond McKitterick: patience. I can still, in my mind’s ear, hear her comment in our final supervision on the Carolingian Renaissance: “You know, you could actually be quite a good historian, if you really put your mind to it.” The latter point was entirely fair; I was at this point, iirc, co-editing a student magazine, playing bass in a series of really terrible bands, playing hockey and badminton regularly, drinking far too much, writing truly terrible poetry, wasting a lot of time on entirely unrequited crushes and attempting to get through all the academic stuff on the basis of plausible improvisation. The former point is still open to debate, given that my professional trajectory has to a great extent simply come up with a different set of distractions – and probably I should pay attention to this voice more often. But what I really take from this in retrospect is the patience required to talk encouragingly and supportively to the sort of student you really want to shake violently by the shoulders, or indeed slap.

Paul Cartledge: intellectual adventure. I’m doing this in chronological order, so we’re now into my final undergraduate year, and I have switched to Classics in a fit of pique that the History course doesn’t offer enough medieval stuff, and in particular the Early Christian History course that at this point feels like my way forward. Paul’s ‘Greeks and the Other’ course is the sort of overwhelming explosion of ideas I’d vaguely expected to define the whole university experience. Structuralist anthropology! Feminism! Postcolonialism! Reading Herodotus and Thucydides through Hayden White, and vice versa! This is both tremendous fun and incredibly serious, and I get a powerful sense, not quite that anything goes, but that a good basic idea gives you a solid basis for then making some of it up as you go along, and that ‘theory’ in the broadest sense is vital. What is really striking in retrospect is how little of this was directly promoted in the classes; it was largely implicit, something you could respond to if you wanted to, and I imagine that others had quite different experiences of the course – and that’s also a valid lesson, that not everyone will share the enthusiasms of the lecturer so you can’t design teaching around them entirely, but you can leave Easter eggs, so to speak, for the ones who might appreciate it.

Jonathan Walters: kindness. If I divided this list into two lists, undergraduate and postgraduate, then Jonathan would appear on both, albeit for the same basic reason. He had the dubious pleasure of supervising my over-excited discovery of post-structuralism – and was the only teacher in three years who took the time to consider a pattern of mood swings, intermittent failure to submit essays on time and general evasiveness, and suggest to my Director of Studies that there might be some mental health issues to consider (whose subsequent enquiries I then evaded without any difficulty, but the thought was there, and meant a lot in retrospect). And then when I began the PhD he offered the sage advice that the doctoral state was in essence barely distinguishable from having glandular fever, so it was important to take care of oneself, just in case it was glandular fever. At the time, one was mainly struck by the shortness of the black leather shorts; from a distance, it’s ever clearer that Jonathan was someone who saw students not just as students but as people. Much missed.

Peter Garnsey: meticulousness. And so much more, obviously; one’s Doktorvater is the alpha and omega of academic Vorbild. But if I have to identify the single most important thing I learned from him, which I try desperately to inculcate in all my students, then it’s the importance of taking care. To test every claim to destruction, to obsess over every reference, to be constantly aware of the possibility that there might be another reading, or another bit of evidence, or a new publication that changes the whole perspective. And all of this conveyed through the minimalist method of writing the occasional question mark in the margin – or, even more terrifying, “Are you sure?” It’s a two-edged sword; yes, students, your every misplaced apostrophe and inconsistently formatted bibliography entry wounds me, but not as much as if I did it myself.

Keith Hopkins: be interesting. Again, many possibilities here, from the importance of clarity and elegance at the level of argument to the negative example that you really shouldn’t treat young research students like that. But if I think of Keith’s work, the lesson I draw is something to the effect that it’s better to be interesting with the possibility of being completely wrong – to take intellectual risks – than to be right but boring. No, this doesn’t sit well with the meticulousness, which is why I tell to fall into the middle ground of ‘some potential here but vague and sloppy’ – but I never said I managed to put all these lessons properly into practice…

No, I’m not sure they would welcome being described as ‘Ancients’. But you wouldn’t look to Friedrich Nietzsche for a dispassionate summary of the legacy of classical literature either.

Do It To Me One More Time

Historiography was invented in response to a replication crisis. Herodotus and Thucydides recognised that different people offered different accounts of the same events – that even eye-witnesses, for a variety of reasons, remembered things differently. Thucydides in particular observed how they might then seek to apply this unreliable knowledge, and the false understanding derived from it, to other situations, and were then shocked and surprised that this didn’t in fact work. The political principles that the Athenians established on the basis of their story of the overthrow of the Peisistratids were misconceived and hence not replicable in the case of Alcibiades…

There has been some discussion recently on social media of a piece by the always-interesting historian of technological development Anton Howes, asking whether history might have a replication crisis. The idea of developing such an argument, given how much controversy there has been about the actual replication crisis in various areas of the social sciences, is really clever. Unfortunately, in practice this seems like a category error. A researcher asserting the existence of a general law or principle of psychology or social life on the basis of experimental data, but if the experiment is repeated there’s no sign of said law or principle, is not the same thing as two historians producing different interpretations of the same set of fragmentary and ambiguous data relating to a single specific event or series of events. The historical data are neither controlled nor complete, and there is no possibility of re-running events under the same or slightly varied conditions. To be fair, Howes recognises this, and suggests that we might instead describe it as a ‘reproducibility crisis’, but I’m not sure that gets us much further.

Could we talk about a replication crisis or reproducibility crisis in literary studies? It might be rather fun as a way of annoying people, but, a couple of would-be objective approaches to textual analysis from the 20th century aside, the fact that different people have different interpretations of and responses to works of literature is generally seen as a feature rather than a bug. It’s interesting, therefore, that the idea seems superficially more plausible in the case of history; in part, one imagines, because the past appears to be A Thing Of Objective Existence that we ought therefore to be able to analyse objectively and reach the same conclusions about, and in part because of the legacy of the mid-19th-century Geschichte Als Wissenschaft crowd and their drive to make historiography as science-ish as possible.

Fine, Howes might respond; granted that the problems of historical knowledge are not in fact problems of replication in a strict sense, is it not still a problem that two historians can look at the same lot of evidence and reach different conclusions? Well, if you think historiography is, or ought to be, ‘scientific’ in a reasonably robust way, then, yes, the extent to which the whole thing is based on subjective judgements about the selection, weighting and interpretation of different bits of evidence, the rhetorical and literary representation of that evidence and the historian’s understanding of it, and the place of this activity within a set of wider, overlapping discourses makes it look distinctly unscientific.

It’s a problem, if you have such an unrealistic idea of history in the first place. It’s not a new problem; it’s all there in Hayden White’s ‘The Burden of History’ essay from nearly seventy years ago, and most of it can be found in Nietzsche’s ‘Zum Nutzen und Nachteil der Geschichte für das Leben’ and other mid-19th-century discussions (my old friend Wilhelm Roscher’s book on Thucydides shows a powerful awareness of the subjective and discursive nature of historiography even as he’s desperately trying to bring it up to the status of a science).

From that perspective, the issue is not the fact that historians spend their whole time arguing over the interpretation of evidence and the reconstruction of the past – it’s basically the whole point of the enterprise – but rather the gap between this professional understanding and what (parts of) a wider public believes about and expects from history. It’s there in the (perhaps disingenuous, perhaps just stupid) claims of people like Restore Trust or the opponents of the 1619 Project that the development of new interpretations and more rounded, socially-conscious accounts is somehow Destroying The Past (rather than enriching our understanding of it).

There is a desire for a single version, so long as it’s the right version (‘right’, for values of cultural conservatism and invented tradition). Questioning the ‘scientific’ status of historical knowledge is potentially a threat to this project, insofar as it implies the existence of multiple perspectives on the past rather than a single shared narrative – but it is also potentially an opportunity, as a basis for rejecting any new interpretations (since these are self-confessedly subjective and provisional) in favour of the traditional story. In other words, the idea of a ‘replication crisis’ in history might be deployed as a means of condemning its failure to lend wholehearted support to national and cultural myths. How dare Thucydides question the Athenians’ beliefs about their own past? It can only be because he’s a disaffected opponent of the established order…

Quite a lot of Howes’ piece falls firmly within a Thucydidean approach; he’s concerned with the persistence of various ‘myths’ of technological development despite the absence of concrete evidence when the issue is actually investigated properly (so in fact the reproducibility problem is about there being too much reproduction rather than not enough…). Historians are sometimes lazy and cut corners; peer reviewers really don’t have time to check every single point; speaking as an obsessive pedant who is completely paranoid about the possibility of getting anything wrong without realising it, I totally get this, but I don’t think it amounts to an epistemic or methodological crisis. Nobody in history thinks about it in these terms, as Howes notes – perhaps because they are not the right terms in which to think about it?

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 August 2023

Woken from a deep, exhausted sleep – yesterday was a very long day, up at 02:30 to drive to Heathrow, the usual hanging around, two-hour flight to Munich and then a succession of trains, München – Regensburg – Weiden in der Oberpfälz – Bayreuth, with cancellations and missed connections due to running late, and then a torrential downpour at the end. Actually A. could have set her alarm for an hour later, as we’re not meeting our friends M and C for breakfast until nine, and the beds are, as always in Germany, really not well designed for sitting up in bed reading (and of course there is no kettle for a cup of tea) – we should be getting up immediately and off to work! Nevertheless we both read for an hour, smelling fresh coffee and cigarette smoke from outside, listening to the rain. This is certainly the first time in Bayreuth that we have been wondering about turning the heating on, rather than arguing with the air conditioning…

It’s now our fourth time in this hotel – having discovered it, we wouldn’t go anywhere else when we visit here – and it is reassuring that, after four years’ absence, there are still some familiar faces among the staff, but a shame that they no longer have professionally-photographed portraits of the staff on the walls of the breakfast room (too much turnover recently?), which always used to be a nice touch and a sign of the management valuing everyone who works there. But the breakfast is as good as ever, an intimidating range of possibilities with some particularly good Weißwurst, and of course A.’s favourite waffle machine with yeast batter standing ready. As we’d seen at dinner the evening before, the prices are higher than before, but not ridiculously so – which is to say, of course they are ridiculously inflated as it’s Festspielzeit, but not dramatically more over the top than four years ago.

Our German continues to get a thorough work-out. M did at one point start a reply to A in English, and was firmly cut off by C; Wir sind in Deutschland, wir alle sprechen Deutsch. (Whether, when they visited us in England, we consistently spoke only English, I am not going to comment – but since I am already falling into my habit, after a few days in Germany, of weird Denglish constructions and word choices even when speaking English, and even of dreaming in German, I am not going to object, and it is as always good practice; at least it is all nice, clear Hochdeutsch). Again, as yesterday evening, the idiocies of Brexit loom as a conversational theme; as with so many people we meet, including taxi drivers, the question ‘Is your country just really stupid?’ constantly looms (as if they have no unscrupulous populists feeding on resentment and weaponising genuine grievances in Dresden…). I offer the humourous account of my recent smuggling activities, bringing British wool to a conference in Bochum to exchange with a colleague for a box of my favourite coffee beans ordered from Niederbayern as it would cost a fortune to ship either of these directly, and that takes us safely onto topics like the funding of conferences and the persistent expectation that they should then be published.

After breakfast, we stroll, in a light but steady drizzle, the mile or so up to the Festspielhaus to be fitted for the Augmented Reality glasses that will enhance the performance of Parsifal. The process is swift and efficient; the only issue is the necessity of deciding in advance whether to wear glasses or contact lenses. We spend some time looking at the permanent exhibition – in case it’s raining later; A and I have seen it multiple times, but this is a first time at the Festspielhaus for M and C – on the fate of Jewish members of the Bayreuth ensemble under Nazism (and Jewish-associated, so to speak; this time I happened to be most struck by some who were barred, exiled or imprisoned simply for refusing to divorce their partners or sack members of their dance troupe). Of course such an acknowledgement of the darker bits of the past is the least they can do, but it’s still good that they do it; C has told us about an ongoing production of the Ring in Dresden, carefully historically researched, where there is a constant need to ‘manage’ the reactions of local AfD politicians who are less than happy with the idea of “over-emphasising” such things. I attempt a brief explanation of the exploits of Restore Trust in a similar direction.

We walk back down the hill, still in heavy drizzle but never quite heavy enough to abandon the enterprise; A and C walk ahead, M and I return to discussions of university things: what to do (or rather, how to resign oneself) when a doctoral student insists on doing their own thing against all advice, the impact of Chat-GPT on assessment, our shared experience of the conference volume that never appeared and eventually each of us repurposed our papers for another publication, and of course much personal gossip. Back in the town centre, we are equally concerned with showing M some major sights (C has been here with a friend, albeit years ago, but this is new for him, and it really is a pretty and interesting city even in the rain), checking that our favourite haunts are still there (the Conditerei, yes, but the day’s schedule doesn’t accommodate Kaffee und Kuchen; the noodle restaurant, yes, but not open on Sundays; but the Nepalese restaurant has gone), and finding some lunch. We try a new place by the Neues Schloss serving traditional Fränkisches potato cakes and flatbreads with smoked salmon and sour cream or grilled chicken – actually not bad. Back to the hotel to shower and change, then a taxi up to the Festspielhaus ready to be let in early for the Augmented Reality introduction – which is mostly a series of things which one shouldn’t do, like leaving the glasses on the seat or taking the wrong pair; as far as their use is concerned, the instruction is simply to look at the stage and see some holographic doves – which to be honest I initially thought were seagulls – flying around.

Here we go, to Zukunftsgesamtkunstwerk and beyond!

Hmm. Let’s say that I can imagine the potential, if they could make the glasses a bit lighter – by the end of the first act the bridge of my nose was red and painful, and halfway through the second I, like the majority, pretty well gave up on them, especially as some of the projections were actively obscuring what was happening on stage. One obvious problem was that, because only a small part of the audience got to experience the AR, it couldn’t be used for anything essential to the story or the concept, which of course runs the risk that the inessential augmentation becomes trivial distraction. The other was that, having spent all this money on the new toy – and perhaps also to justify all the sore noses – the team had to use it all the time, where a more substle and restrained approach would have been far better. Dead trees – including dead root systems – echoing the single dead tree on stage in Act One: pretty effective. Showing the swan being shot by Parsifal’s arrow: yucky and overdone but memorable. Endless floating skulls and strange glowing figures wandering around? Not so much. Initially I wondered whether the addition of AR meant things on stage had to be more static, so people didn’t get out of sync with the images, but it became clear that there was no hesitation in blocking off the whole stage with giant floating skulls; it was just a static production.

I did make the error – admittedly, invited by the whole set-up – of spending too much time at the beginning thinking about these AR images and their significance, before realising that they could only be a supplement to the director’s core conception on stage. Focusing on the stage, however, didn’t greatly improve things. Parsifal was never my favourite Wagner opera, with its over-bearing motifs of sacrifice, punishment, hatred of the body and redemption; it was only seeing the Tcherniakov production in Berlin that persuaded me that it is actually as rich and ambivalent as his other works. This production is, one might say, not so much rich as indigestible – far too many different things thrown together (or indeed ar one another) in the hope that they might amount to some coherent meaning; and it’s ambivalent only insofar as I have no idea what it was trying to say.

In the course of the evening I developed all sorts of new ideas about what I thought of Parsifal; I still haven’t a clue what the director thinks it’s about. Some bits seemed entirely conventional, even traditional; the climatic scene in Act Two between Parsifal and Kundry, for example, appeared to be nothing more than a basic ‘female temptress tries and fails to seduce noble knight’ episode. Acts One and Three seemed to want to say something about environmental degradation and cobalt mining (and there’s an article in the programme going on about this), while making it rather unclear how that relates to Amfortas’ wound even if the grail is a big chunk of blue mineral – but what Klingsor’s pink Barbie kingdom is supposed to be in this conception passed me by. Two Kundrys, only one of whom sings; okay, lots of possibilities with the divided self and/or the might-have-been self and/or the Doppelgänger – but why is one of them living in a hiking tent?

As noted, in the event that anyone lets me direct Parsifal I have plenty of ideas of my own, that would make considerably more sense… This made me think more highly of productions I’ve disliked in the past, even Kosky’s Meistersinger. But musically it was wonderful, everything you would expect from Bayreuth – and I would, as far as opera is concerned, always choose irritating would-be innovative approaches over boring convention any day. A fabulous experience overall; the refreshments don’t get any less extortionate in price (but the Sekt was pretty good; A insisted on champagne nevertheless), and interestingly a higher proportion of men in simple dinner jackets and bow ties, in the very year when I decided – partly for ease of packing – to go with the dress code of the slightly more arty crowd…

Out into the rain in search of the shuttle back to the hotel, which proves tricker than expected. Not only did the taxi driver who brought us up give us the wrong directions, but the arrangement for paying hin-und-zurück fares and receiving a Quittung for the journey back falls apart; we get A and C into one vehicle without a problem, but the second driver refuses to accept our Quittung as valid in the absence of a special laminated ticket. I’d left the discussion to M as the native speaker, but when he apparently just accepted this situation – implying a mile’s walk back in the rain – I channelled my small piece of inner Germanness into determined litigation of the issue, which, if only because the driver has two free places and wants to get going, finally wins the day.

Back to the hotel for a final drink. My ability to set aside traditional English ineffectual politeness is praised; C notes that, while she doesn’t much like the English and their refusal ever to say what they mean, I might be an exception. A, who thought the Parsifal was wonderful, explains her interpretation of the director’s concept; I remain unpersuaded. We retire to bed just after midnight, and sleep very badly.

Money Money Money

I wandered over to Substack the other day, not to read anything,, but because of a growing sense that I’ve been reading quite a lot of stuff there over the last six months or so that, once upon a time, would have appeared on a blog. There’s also been a discussion over at Crooked Timber on The Fragmentation of New Media that suggested, among other things, that newsletters and posts for subscribers are starting to look like the future, as social media becomes ever less effective as a means of bringing stuff to the attention of anyone else. So I half wondered whether this was something I ought to consider, rather than soldiering on with an old-fashioned blog – and I saw the tagline ‘Bloggers come to Substack to do their best writing and build thriving subscription businesses’, and hastily came away again.

I have a whole range of different reasons for persisting with this blog – but building a thriving subscription business has never been one of them (indeed, if you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t any ads on this site, it’s because I pay an extra fee to keep the site ad-free). It rather reinforces my impression of Substack that it’s really about restoring something like the old hierarchy of authoritative opinion-havers getting paid to opine at the grateful masses, rather than the more open and horizontal landscape of lots of different people offering a multitude of opinions and indeed talking back to the Great and Good. Switching to a newsletter model would, paradoxically, both set up a barrier against readers and comments (true, it’s not as if many people comment here, but I wish they did) and make me more anxious about trying to reach an imagined audience by giving them more of what they might want, rather than just scribbling whatever random stuff I feel like doing. Great for some, I’m sure, but it’s not why I do this – and of course I have the luxury of not needing to try to make any sort of living from this.

Nevertheless… The very eagle-eyed might, if visiting this page on a web browser, have spotted a couple of changes to the sidebar. One is the removal of the Twitter feed, mostly because it doesn’t work reliably any more, but also as I am spending a bit less time there and am not confident of its continued existence (and so am dabbling in all the other options, of which Bluesky is currently marginally ahead of Mastodon for engagement). The other is the addition of a Buy Me A Coffee button, in the event that anyone really wants to chip in to keep this blog going and make me feel appreciated.

I do have very mixed feelings about this; I don’t expect any great response, and certainly don’t want anyone to feel in the least bit obligated – and it’s entirely possible that I’ll remove it again. On the other hand, I know that I actually like being able to say thank you to people whose content I’ve enjoyed, whether by buying their cd even if I can listen to it on iTunes, or buying a t-shirt or book, or doing a regular payment through Patreon, or just buying the occasional coffee, and in my more positive moment I like to imagine that somebody might feel the same way about something on here.

Obviously what I really want to do is add a Buy Me A Coffee button to the University of Bristol’s online interactive grammar and referencing resources whose creation I oversaw 15 years or so ago, still apparently in regular use and adopted by at least a couple of other universities – for the students themselves to use, but still more any of their lecturers who have to deal with fewer comma splices and misplaced apostrophes as a result…

Consequences

In ‘Taking the Consequences’, one of Lawrence Durrell’s hilarious short stories about life in the Diplomatic Service, the British Embassy in Vulgaria finds itself “issuing Categorial Denials or Studied Evasions in batches of ten”, as a West German news agency keeps publishing scandalous stories about its actvities:

The Foreign Secretary wrote [the Ambassador] in prose of a secular tautness, asking him whether or not the following were true: a secret meeting with Mrs Khrushchev to negotiate a pact without telling H.M.G. Another less secret with Pandit Nehru outside a public cabinet d’aisance in Bombay. A third with Stalin. A fourth with the Baroness of Monrovia…

The source for such revelations, it is eventually established, is that the assistant Military Attaché has been selling the contents of embassy waste-paper bins to the German correspondent to supplement his income, which includes such Top Secret documents as these:

The British Ambassador met

Mrs Krushchev

In a lift

He said: “Will you be my satellite?”

She said: “Squeeze me when the lights go out.”

The result was The Warsaw Pact…

Yes, because of the Ambassador’s love of party games, the whole embassy had been playing Consequences regularly, which the German journalist, unfamiliar with such activities, had then taken completely seriously and printed as news stories…

I imagine that absolutely nobody plays Consequences any more, unless trapped in a holiday cottage in the depths of rural Wales for a fortnight of constant rain, and certainly not the younger generation – which is a shame, because otherwise this would be a neat analogy for LLMs: the algorithm (in this case, the regular structure of A and B met in/at C, A said X, B said Y, the result was Z; in the latter case, sonething more opaque) generates coherent sentences by putting together random words and phrases, and if we’re very naive we might imagine that they are genuinely meaningful.

Yes, Chat-GPT does (probably) aim for A, B, C etc to have a reasonable probability of appearing in the same context rather than aiming for the most surreal juxtapositions possible – but that just makes it seem more credible, rather than making the statements actually more reliable. In fact, more surreal juxtapositions might be more productive, suggesting new constellations of ideas that could then be explored and developed, rather than a lowest-common-denominator combination that is conventional, predictable and not even necessarily true. In other words, students might be better off writing lots of phrases on bits of paper and developing their arguments by pulling some out randomly and trying to make sense of them – Augustus / transformed / Gallic society / using / garum /and / the poetry of Vergil – rather than resorting to LLMs…

And You Will Know Us By The Interminable Appendices

Yes, things have been very quiet on here this month, partly because I’ve been trying to focus on making progress with my book and partly because I’ve been spending most of the rest of the time lugging hardcore from the bottom of the garden – and it’s a long garden, with too many steps to use a wheelbarrow for the whole stretch – and slowly hacking down the grass in the orchard where we’ve avoided mowing since last autumn, which yielded the wonderful result of a wild orchid appearing out of nowhere but is now bloody hard work. This all continues, so, apart from my ‘One Day Per Month’ journal entry at the end of the month, I wouldn’t expect any blog posts until September.

But I have been struck, amidst the ongoing collapse of Twitter and the slow migration to BlueSky (yes, I’m now over there as @nevillemorley.bsky.social, as well as on Mastodon as @NevilleMorley@historians.social, and I really must update various things to this effect when I have a moment…), by various interesting ‘Here we go again!’ teaching prep posts and discussions, as the new academic year starts to loom. And it occurred to me that I meant to post a copy of the guidance I’ve introduced into all my module handbooks on the use of LLMs and Generative ‘AI’, in case anyone finds them useful. It conforms to the general University guidance, which is words to the effect of ‘Check with your individual module director, we can’t stop you using it but if you submit AI-generated material as your own work we can come down on you like a ton of bricks’, but attempts to be slighter more friendly – not least because the dividing line between ‘AI-generated content’ and ‘content based in some part on AI-generated material’ seems to me tendentious in the extreme…

You can, if you wish, make use of ‘generative AI’ (e.g. Chat-GPT) in the development of your assessment, but this needs to be properly acknowledged; submitting AI-generated content as your own work constitutes academic misconduct. You do not need to acknowledge the use of AI tools for spell-checking or grammar correction, but any other usage, including the generation of background material for research or as a starting-point for your discussion, must be explicitly noted in your submitted work: at the end of the essay, before the bibliography, you must include a statement about which tools you have used and for what purpose, and after the bibliography you must provide a full description, including the prompts used and the original output. These statements do not count towards the essay word count. See the university’s guidance at https://libguides.exeter.ac.uk/referencing/generativeai.

Caution is strongly advised; gAI will at best give you a plausible-looking summary of information available on the internet, but its outputs are driven by probability models of what word is most likely to follow a given word, not by any criteria of truth or plausibility, and it is notorious for generating completely fictional references to scholarship. It is not in any way an authoritative source, and all its statements need to be critically evaluated. Where it may be useful is in generating material against which you can test your own critical skills, identifying flaws and errors.

A couple of comments. Firstly, this is very much a holding measure, as I have every hope that by the end of the coming academic year, having completed my project on how to develop the assessment of historical skills in the age of LLMs, I’ll have a much better idea how to respond; I can’t change the assessment of these modules, so this is an attempt at holding some sort of line, and trying to bring it all out into the open rather than issuing a blanket ban and (probably) just pushing the students who might think of using Chat-GPT into doing it secretly and probably badly.

Secondly, I am very conscious that this creates a whole load of new requirements on top of the usual things expected of students in presenting their work. I am simply following the guidelines in demanding information about prompts, output etc. – but can’t help wondering whether this is actually, secretly, intended as a deterrent, as it will just look like too much trouble. (It is also potentially a load more stuff for me to read, and I don’t know how useful this supporting material will actually be – but it cannot be as much work as trawling through a bit of coursework trying to establish whether the quotes and references are genuine or not). Again, I firmly expect that I’ll be in a position to develop this next year, thinking about how far (whether) Chat-GPT and the like can be actually useful rather than an annoying shortcut, and how far critical skills in LLM-wrangling can realistically be incorporated into assessment.

Thirdly, yes, I have taken the opportunity to flag up the deeply problematic and unreliable nature of gAI output, and will be very happy to mention stuff about its environmental impact, social costs, inbuilt biases etc. given the opportunity…

Pocket Calculator

Intelligent people whose opinions I respect are having thoughts about LLMs that I find…less persuasive. Corey Robin reported how he’d asked his daughter to run some of his essay questions for students through Chat-GPT; the initial results were superficially plausible but bland and vacuous, as one would expect, but with additional prompts and tweaks the results were pretty well indistinguishable from a really good paper. As he notes, a student doesn’t have to be able to write a good paper, just tell the difference between a good paper and a less good one. The outcome: he’s switching to in-class midterms and finals for the first time in thirty years. And then Dan Davies popped up in response to ask provocatively whether this is really just like the arrival of the pocket calculator making skills of complex mental arithmetic redundant; is it really worth all this fuss if the machine can do it more reliably and vastly quicker?

For me – and this is probably a VERY age-specific experience – the advent of the pocket calculator as an acceptable thing to take into an exam hall was never about mental arithmetic, as those skills were long since ingrained, but about the replacement of four-figure tables for working out cosines, logs and the like. I did actually still have to use those in anger once – I cannot remember which paper it was; Advanced Maths O-Level seems most likely – as the batteries in my calculator ran out, and in those days they still kept a stack of four-figure tables handy; and I got at A, so that was fine. These days I imagine they keep a stack of spare batteries.

One point here – and this is where I think Dan is wrong – is that the pocket calculator does exactly the same calculations and looking-up of cosines that I did, only faster and to a far higher level of precision (more than four figures…). It’s a direct replacement, a superior replacement; the skill it renders obsolete in an exam situation is that of using four-figure tables to look up cosines, which is a skill that had also been rendered obsolete everywhere else. When all the lights go out, of course, you may be glad of people like me who could if necessary accurately calculate angles without the use of electricity, but for the moment it is singularly useless.

With LLMs, it is not at all obvious that the skills of processing, analysing and interpreting large quantities of complex textual information and developing original theses and arguments on this basis have suddenly ceased to be useful for human beings. Further, the LLM is not replicating the human thought process, even if it produces something that looks like the results of such a thought process; it is weighing up the probability of different arrangements of words, with no understanding of their content or relation to any sort of reality. Given its ability to use an unbelievably vast corpus of data for this purpose, perhaps this might yield some interesting results now and again, and certainly it’s getting better at mimicry. But Corey is absolutely right that if students can produce good-seeming critical interpretations by prompting Chat-GPT, the essay ceases to be a reliable means of testing their abilities actually to analyse and interpret material critically.

Where he goes wrong is in switching to in-class exams, as the ability to perform well in those is only partially correlated with the ability to analyse and interpret material critically, as opposed to short-term memory retention and bullshit – which is an area where LLMs might as well be brought in as replacements. There is surely a strong case to be made that, while skill in promoting Chat-GPT to generate convincing simulacra of human thought is definitely not the same as skill in actual critical thought, it’s a more useful skill than being able to scribble a plausible essay from memory in an hour or so.

I spent some time this week adding a section on ‘Use of Generative AI’ to my module handbooks for next year, given that the university’s guidance amounts to a vague and rather desperate ‘ask your module director if you’re allowed to use gAI for different purposes, reference this properly if you do, but never submit gAI-generated content as your own work’. Possibly the aim is make the process of working out what would constitute gAI-free content if gAI has been used in the process of research and writing so burdensome that students will steer clear; ditto the requirement to provide full information about all the prompts used and all the outputs. That’s certainly a more viable approach than attempting to bring any sort f disciplinary case on the basis of such guidelines, even if the phrase ‘academic offence’ is also bandied about.

I can’t help reverting to the guidance of the maths lessons of my youth: Show Your Working. A simple answer, whether produced through mental arithmetic or a calculator or intuition, is simply right or wrong; if you set out the steps in the calculation, up to the point where you indicate what you asked the calculator to calculate, it’s possible to see where you went wrong, and to gain some credit for thinking along the right lines even if the final answer is wrong. The humanities equivalent: the final essay in itself is not the thing we are interested in, let alone its conclusion, but the essay as evidence for the thought processes that generated it – the breadth of research and critical understanding of it, the evaluation and interpretation of different sorts of evidence, the logical construction of argument and so forth.

There may indeed be an appropriate place for LLMs within this process, analogous to the use of a pocket calculator for the final calculation; I haven’t yet seen a persuasive idea for where this might be, but I don’t rule it out on principle. The crucial point is that, for the purposes of this form of assessment, its role does need to be manifest, rather than the ‘black box’ approach of an essay generated by gAI. Perhaps we need to think of it in the same terms as an argument based on pure intuition or unexamined assumptions – equally ‘black box’ processes from the perspective of the reader, that need to be elaborated and explained to be at all persuasive. This may suggest that the polished essay is actually a problem – we need to be shown more of the nuts and bolts. But unseen exams are never the answer; they’re even more ‘black box’-y bullshit, just less polished…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 July 2023

Woke some time in the small hours choking on phlegm; it seems very unfair that, having spent most of last week struggling through a really nasty summer cold, I seem to be coming straight down with another one, despite copious consumption of fruit and vegetables. Perhaps it’s a judgement for giving away so many courgettes because A. was bored of courgettes for supper. Perhaps it’s psychosomatic, giving me an excuse for failure to make much progress with the book. Managed to get back to sleep until around five, when Hans started his routine of prowling, grumbling, making strange scraping noises to suggest that he might have pissed somewhere, and rattling the food bowl. Eventually he settled down again, stretching out all along my spine with his tail swiping the backs of my thighs – at which point the alarm went. Washed dishes, cleaned up assorted bits of poo – reminding myself that cats dropping poo round the house is better than cats having to have expensive operations to deal with constipation – and made tea.

It’s got to the point where I’d really rather not hear any news in the morning; the radio is full of nonsense about the fuss over Farage losing his Coutts account (it does feel like a combination of appeasement and bandwagon jumping; the idea that he is somehow the Voice of the Real People and therefore a vital political figure, which gave him a media voice far in excess of his actual support, persists even though he has no party). And the serious press is full of terrifying stories about global heating and its consequences – along with perfectly reasonably articles about why we mustn’t be doomers, but it is hard because it’s terrifying, and the pitiful response of governments – even those that aren’t a hapless dead-man-walking clown show – offers no hope. Maybe one should start believing in the possibility of technologically-advanced aliens: We surrender! Now please help!

It’s all too obvious in the garden, where anomalous weather patterns are now standard; after an absurdly hot and dry June, we’ve had a chilly and wet July. The great advantage of having it this way round, from an entirely selfish point of view, is that most plants are well established, so it’s not as if I’d have too much to do this month except pick and water – and the watering is being done for me, apart from the greenhouse. Not clear yet whether this is going to affect the squash and pumpkin setting fruit – there aren’t a lot of pollinating insects around – but otherwise it’s only the aubergines and the basil that are really sulking.

Today was supposed to be a writing day (and this post doesn’t really count), but I have plenty of miscellaneous tasks to get on with in the hope that my head might start to clear a bit: taking spare courgettes round to a neighbour, delivering last batch of Green Party leaflets for forthcoming county council election (candidate is someone I know, and a very active local figure, so there must be at least a chance), buying ingredients for supper, setting up new broadband router, writing student references, updating module handbooks for next year, completing the handover of Journal of Roman Studies Reviews Editor duties to me for the next three years… Oh look, it’s lunchtime already. Quick meal of egg-fried rice and some fruit, catch up on cricket score, washing up, short nap in the hope this will help.

The nap had no effect on my head, so after half an hour of staring blankly at the screen wondering where all my words had gone and whether they would ever return, I used the afternoon instead to review someone else’s words, checking a corrected dissertation – which had to be done some time, so this gets it out of the way and doesn’t really count as procrastination. Miscellaneous emails, mostly about reviews, plus one from the university about professorial salary review, which they have switched from Everyone Must Be Judged to Make A Case For More Money If You Dare; since at the moment I dread the possibility of being told that I am not even performing satisfactorily, I am entirely in favour of not having to volunteer for consideration until I have a bit more self-confidence and documented achievements (like getting the book finished). Completed the first part of the dissertation task (external’s corrections) while also making a ragu for supper.

An extremely quiet, dull evening. I’m going to take heart from the fact that Christa Wolf regularly spent her evenings watching middle-of-the-road Krimis, and admit that a substantial portion of the time was spent watching old episodes of MASH, as being undemanding and comforting. We are unfortunately now into season four, so missing both Henry Blake and Trapper John. What strikes me, since I last watched any episode – twenty years ago, maybe? – is how often you can vaguely recognise guest actors, and then look them up on IMDb. Loudon Wainwright! Emma the housekeeper from White Christmas! It’s just like watching old episodes of The Avengers and spotting minor characters from Dad’s Army or other sitcoms, only for Hollywood.

Remembered to collect some lupin seed pods from the wild garden and bring them indoors – the ones I’d left in the greenhouse to dry off earlier in the week had been opened and pillaged, presumably by some small rodent – and then to bed just after nine. A. says that we’ve become old after COVID; I feel faded and generally wrung out, like a cheap margarine spread over too much bread, and without any magic ring to compensate. A couple of killer sudoku, lights out. Drifted off immediately – and then woke a few hours later with scratchy throat and phlegm. Hans as ever realised I was awake and started demanding attention, headbutting my hand for tickles, curling up next to me for five minutes purring loudly and then getting up to prowl around again. Not at all clear what he wants at times like this; he’s got plenty of food. He even managed to turn the alarm clock off. I doze, wondering if it’s symptomatic that I don’t seem to be able to daydream at the moment, without heading off into work anxiety. Time passes.

Fire!

One of the dilemmas I occasionally face with the Thucydides Bot is whether, and how, to respond to people using perfectly respectable and genuine bits of Thucydides in less respectable ways. There’s a decent case that it might dilute the brand, so to speak, and reduce the account’s authority when it comes to fake quotes if it also pitches in on genuine quotes, and certainly I’m going to steer well clear of familiar debates about Macedonian identity and whether Thucydides contrasting ‘Athenians’ with ‘the Greeks’ demonstrates anything in particular. But every so often something comes along that seems worthy of push-back, if only to put down a marker for others who might come across the same comment and take it at face value.

Yesterday, one account suddenly sent out a flurry of identical tweets, responding to people talking about the wild fires on Rhodes, to the effect that ‘Homer speaks of wildfires in Ancient Greece, and Thucydides describes a wildfire that took place in the third year of the Peloponnesus War (429 BCE) from branches rubbing together on a mountainside’. Well, pedantically, Thucydides does not describe an actual mountain wildfire, but rather compares the fire set by the Spartans to try to break the siege of Plataea to one (2.77). But that is clearly beside the point.

The intention of the remark is clear: there have always been serious wildfires in Greece; therefore the current one is nothing special; therefore man-made global heating is a myth, or a deliberate lie. Invoking Homer and especially Thucydides is, I suppose, a means of giving the stamp of cultural authority to this claim, with perhaps a subliminal ‘Thucydides is all about the continuity between past, present and future’ message. No one actually claims that there were no wildfires in the past, nor that a single fire is in itself proof of climate crisis; it’s about frequency, and severity, and it’s always over-determined (e.g. land use patterns, fire management). So Thucydides is being cited against an imaginary argument – but it has the effect of reinforcing the familiar ‘climate has always varied, there have always been floods and droughts, nothing to see here, no need for action’ narrative.

Which is one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are, so the Thucydides Bot did politely intervene – as I said, to put down a marker in case anyone else read this stuff – and received a polite but rather confusing assortment of responses, half of them repeating the point that you can’t blame wildfires solely on global heating (true) and the other half suggesting that increased tectonic plate movement might be to blame instead (erm…).

This is an account that retweets Naomi Wolf on the subject of vaccination, so I am disinclined to take any ‘scientific’ claims at face value. I don’t think it’s a paid troll doing disinformation for the oil industry so much as a confused resin who has ‘done their own research’ and come up with a reassuring answer that then provides grounds for resisting any attempts at mitigation – or at any rate feeds into that, even if it isn’t their intention. Which is arguably as big a problem, as we see in the willingness of both major UK political parties to ditch climate policies for fear that they might lose votes.

Thucydides does not endorse this message. I like to think that he would weigh the evidence and cone down heavily on the side of the scientific consensus, and would be equally scathing about the short-termist, self-interested behaviour of politicians and the cognitive failings of too many ordinary citizens, deluding themselves that nothing can go wrong…