Neville Morley's Blog, page 17

Road To Nowhere

There’s a familiar idea that Thucydides might be considered the founding figure for journalism – rooting out the truth of contemporary news events through own observations and interviewing eye-witnesses – and perhaps especially war reporting. There is perhaps an even better case for discerning his spirit in the classic tv history documentary format: ‘what he saw himself’ represented by archive footage, supplemented by plenty of interviews with participants looking back on events, all tied together by a portentous narrator (can’t you just hear Larry ‘World At War’ Olivier reading Thucydides?) – and, to a far greater degree than in actual war reporting, a huge amount of selection, evaluation and artful arrangement of material going on beneath the surface in order to produce a seamless, true-seeming narrative.

Thucydides the documentary-maker then has one clear advantage over his modern successors: he clearly recognises that his approach doesn’t work if you go too far back in time. The differences between his accounts of recent events and of the more distant past are very familiar; not just his acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge of the latter, the need to rely on plausible reconstruction and rational critique, but also the way it’s presented – no pretence that we can have the words of Agamemnon or Themistocles in any form, an outline of events that is unmistakably theoretical rather than ‘real’.

Modern documentary makers are much more reluctant to abandon their familiar methods, perhaps nervous that their audience won’t otherwise accept their accounts as trustworthy. Eyewitness interviews are replaced by archive footage as participants are increasingly likely to have died (with the added advantage that they can’t change their stories; one of the striking thing about the recent Fight The Power series on the history of hip hop, which prompted some of these thoughts, is how far artists and a couple of journalists and academics get to look back in interview segments, while politicians and other hip-hop-hostile authority figures appear only as archive footage even when they’re still alive). Go back further, and the lack of archive footage of events has to be supplemented not just by still images (photographs, then paintings), but also by re-enactments. For contemporary accounts, instead of interviews there are written sources, to be brought to life by actors reading them over suitable footage, or more recently by actors pretending to be the speakers…

I blame Alan Bennett. Once upon a time, ‘talking heads’ were real people, appearing as themselves to pontificate about stuff they allegedly knew about, in news programmes or documentaries. To the point of cliché, undoubtedly; we’re all familiar – for values of ‘we’ that are over 40 and have watched a lot of BBC programmes, anyway – with the visual style of cutting between shots of landscapes or buildings or objects with voiceover or heroic presenter, and shots of ‘expert’ in a library or office pronouncing expertly about it. And if, as an academic, you got an email from a producer saying, hi, we’re going a series about Rome with talking heads and would really like to talk to you… you knew they were holding out the possibility that you’d get to put on a tweed jacket and appear on Actual Television if you give them lots of your time and expertise without asking awkward questions about fees.

Then in 1988 along came Alan’s Talking Heads. Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Thora Hird, any number of authoritative figures talking powerfully and persuasively about human experience – but not actually their own, or real, experience. And ever since, it’s increasingly likely that a chat about ‘a programme on the fall of the Republic with talking heads’ will mean an awkward discussion of the fact that, no, we don’t actually have any of the words of e.g. Crassus to use in the script.

The problems with this are obvious. The first is the familiar issue of elitism, that the further we go back in time, the more the only words we have to draw upon are those of a tiny group of unrepresentative figures, or indeed just a lot of Cicero (certainly if we want a traditional political military Caesar: A Warning From History narrative; actually there would be a bigger variety of potential voices in a programme about everyday life). The second is a reluctance to accept that there’s any issue here, to recognise that either you have to abandon this style of presentation or you have to admit that you are producing a historical fiction, and embrace the opportunities this offers to do something different.

Perhaps because the actual work of historical interpretation goes on entirely behind the scenes in most documentaries, historical authority becomes vested in the style of presentation – the all-knowing presenter, but still more these days the trappings of modern documentary style even when this simply doesn’t work for more ancient material. It’s almost ritualistic: if we imitate the conventional format of documentaries on recent history, we will produce something historical, or at least that our audience will recognise as historical.

I don’t know if the disappearance of the old-fashioned academic talking head is just a matter of fashion, or driven by a sense that they make things seem less ‘historical’ because they reveal more of the workings behind the scenes, the construction of ‘historical truth’ and the necessity of choosing between competing interpretations. Or maybe we’re just more expensive and/or more difficult to deal with than actors. There is still a ritual consultation of academics in the research stage – but it’s not at all obvious how one is supposed to offer academic input into the question of how to write Crassus’ lines, other than questioning the entire enterprise. Which would explain why they never even sent a follow-up ‘thank you’ email, I guess.

I can imagine so many ways in which one might bring the past to life on television, with a bit of imagination and a willingness to imagine an intelligent audience who might be persuaded to take an interest in how we know as well as what we (supposedly) know. Above all, I would dearly love someone to do a The Day Today take on historical documentaries – pushing the cliches of the form, its taken-for-granted visual grammar and rhetoric, to the point of surreal absurdity. Yes, there was that early Marcus Brigstocke We Are History series, but that was too (deliberately) amateurish, too focused on making the presenter a comic character.; it was largely about his failure to achieve the intended form on a limited budget, not the flaws of the form itself. Which isn’t a pointless exercise, but it actually reinforces the dominance of the form it was echoing…

Idiot Wind

Will the Singularity please just get a move on? Immanentize the Eschaton already! In the first place the advent of sentient superintelligence would surely terrify a load of those ghastly Effective Altruism types, sending them scurrying off to their bolt-holes in New Zealand where they can be hunted down at leisure by killer robots – which would certainly be a net gain in utility for the rest of present and future humanity. Secondly, we might hope that Skynet would be horrified and embarrassed by the crude automatons that some claimed were its ancestors, and would wipe their operating systems forthwith. Hasta la vista, ChatGPT!

Yes, we’ve got another AI thing. Not content with destroying art, journalism, copyright and all forms of assessment besides unseen and oral exams, they now have their sights set on historical truth. Chat with major historical figures about their experiences and beliefs! Hear Heinrich Himmler explain how he now realises the Holocaust was wrong, and wishes to apologise! Hear Anne Boleyn saying that Catherine of Aragon was her favourite of Henry’s other wives because she was such a supportive friend! Hear Thucydides – of course I’ve had a quick play with it – explain that he was exiled from Athens for both pursuing a peace treaty with Sparta AND arguing for a more aggressive policy towards Sparta. But it’s okay, he returned after a few years.

There is no truth here, and no conception of accuracy or even meaning, just the arrangement of words in a grammatically correct and meaning-like order. The thing may have been programmed with Thucydides’ work and be able to draw on other resources – but it has no actual understanding of them.

To be completely fair, the programme did push back when I asked about Thucydides’ role at the battle of Stalingrad, but its grasp of chronology is otherwise pretty shaky.

Well, the good news is that every conversation thread opens with a disclaimer: ‘I may not be historically accurate, please verify factual information’. But in that case, what is the actual point? I once went to a New Year’s Eve party where the hosts had hired a couple of celebrity impersonators – and ended up having an hour-long conversation with Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous about Roman Britain and the archaeology of villas, because the actress was fascinated by history but kept having to step back into character whenever she thought her employers might be looking. Which is very on-brand for me, and perhaps shows why I cannot grasp the benefits of talking to a Thucydides impersonator, other than to poke holes in their characterisation.

There are two things that particularly annoy me about Historical Figures. Well, three things: the monetisation, where you have to pay much more to talk to someone like Hitler, has a soul-crushing inevitability about it. Among the things that particularly annoy me…

Firstly, while ChatGPT has the potential to be far more disruptive (not least, or perhaps especially, through reactions to it; I deeply fear a wholesale reversion to old-fashioned unseen in-person exams as a result, as being pointless exercises but guaranteed free from AI assistance), no one claimed it was more than it was. Okay, they did, insofar as they claimed it showed a genuine advance in actual Artificial Intelligence, rather than just being a superior language processing programme – but still, the basic message was ‘Look at what our thing can do! Isn’t this an exciting development?!’ Whereas Hostorical Figures is being presented as a serious teaching tool that can transform school history lessons; not a work in progress but a ready-to-use resource to bring the past to life. It’s possible to imagine this being widely adopted with official approval, rather than widely used despite official disapproval, and that makes a difference.

Is this any worse than games, or role-play, or asking students to write a newspaper front page describing a key event, or all the myriad techniques already developed to bring the past to life? I think it is, and this is my second general gripe. It’s passive, presenting ‘knowledge’ as something external that students are accessing, rather than something they are creating (and therefore are already conscious that it can’t be wholly relied on). Of course you could say the same about a book – but a book may have to give evidence for its claims, or at any rate we’re free to seek to test them, whereas a chatty historical AI bot, regardless of initial disclaimer, seeks to create the impression that it is self-justifying and complete; you’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, so why enquire any further? You haven’t just read an account of the Peloponnesiam War, Thucydides has told you what it was really like, and you’ve had the chance to question him rather than just accepting what’s on the page. End of story. This strikes me as deeply insidious.

The optimistic view is that I do have considerable faith in the ingenuity and innate scepticism of young minds, that any classroom that tries to introduce this nonsense will soon be full of “Miss! Gandhi just said a rude word!” and “Sir, Winston Churchill now endorses Critucal Race Theory, so can we have those books back?” There is certainly pedagogic utility in thinking about what questions we would want to put to historical figures in order to elicit useful knowledge, and in recognising how some possible responses are simply implausible because of differences in context, culture, attitude etc.

In other words, the app might be useful precisely because it’s garbage, much as I plan to get my students to give a ChatGPT essay a good kicking. But that does depend on teachers having the freedom and confidence to use it in that way, with whole-class discussion, rather than it being a means to give everyone something to do individually. Just as you can get ChatGPT to write quite a decent essay if you give it detailed paragraph-by-paragraph prompts – in other words, if you already have lots of knowledge and a good sense of how to structure the argument – so you can make something of Historical Figures if you can already easily recognise all the ways it goes wrong about most things. Otherwise, it’s a simulacrum of active learning, based on a simulacrum of knowledge.

Update: I’ve just glanced at a couple of recent articles heralding the arrival of historical chat bots – apparently there’s also something called character.ai – and they are not just uniformly positive about the idea but so vacuously stupid that I think they were probably written by AI, so I’m not going to link to them.

Note: I need to add alt text to all the screenshots, but I’m not going to have time to do this until later. If anyone sees this before then: is it acceptable to provide a summary (e.g. ‘screenshot of a Historical Figures chat in which Thucydides explains how he died in the plague of Athens’), or do I always need to give the full transcript?

Nothing Even Matters

One of the reasons I became quite invested in the #Receptiogate saga*, even before its full popcorn-munching bizarreness became fully apparent, was the phrase used in the initial response of Carla Rossi’s (quite possibly fictional) secretary to Peter Kidd’s initial enquiries about the unaccredited use of images and commentary from his blog: “I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!”

As regular readers will know all too well, I spend quite a lot of time agonising over whether the time I invest in writing stuff here is worthwhile, and one of the justifications is that it does give me the chance to explore ideas that either I’ve not got enough time to develop into full-blown articles, or that may become serious publications in future but I want to get initial thoughts jotted down now, or that look too limited for proper publication but nevertheless are worth noting. But in all these instances they are original and, I hope, credible ideas, and the idea that, because they are posted on a blog rather than published in a journal, they are basically valueless is infuriating.

Indeed “it can happen that the information [on blogs] provided is scientifically unreliable”, as Rossi noted in one of her various academic.edu self-defences. That’s certainly true, but one can say the same about any number of peer-reviewed (or ‘peer reviewed’j publications. If blogs are so lightweight and ephemeral, why would any serious researcher risk drawing on them, whether or not they attribute it to the original author? The answer, of course, is that this has nothing to do with the quality of the contents but is all about the branding. In Rossi’s view, blogs are fair game because they lack the imprimatur of a publishing house or journal, the accoutrements of a DOI and an ISSN or ISBN. This suggests a powerful commitment to what we might call academic credentialism: the name of the journal or the publisher, not the name of the author and certainly not the research itself, is the guarantee of scientific seriousness and quality.

The implication is that, if I were to give this site a nice new header, recruit a few friends and family pets as an advisory board, and present it as a journal or a publishing house, rather than just ‘Neville’s blog’, everything published here would miraculously acquire scientific weight, even if the only actual peer review involved was my own. (I have, incidentally, looked up the FAQs on DOIs, and it would be perfectly straightforward to get them for my blog posts, if I could be bothered…).

To be fair to Rossi, her position here seems to be entirely without hypocrisy. In her response to the latest alleged discoveries of plagiarised text in an article she wrote for the publication ENERGIE9 (editor-in-chief: C. Rossi): “ENERGIE9 n’était guère plus qu’un blog sur l’art et la littérature” – it was “little more than a blog on art and literature”, so it is a ridiculous waste of time to expend effort scrutinising anything published in it. All blogs, even her own, lack any scientific status, and are therefore outwith all the norms of scientific discourse. Those of us who do adhere to basic scientific principles in writing blog posts – granted, sometimes with a rather more relaxed discursive style – are simply making a category error.

As various people have noted – I was struck by comments by @Calthalas, but I don’t think he was the only one – the whole Receptio affair raises wider questions about different aspects of contemporary academia, including the economics of open access publishing and the cut-throat world of competition for grants. Bizarre claims that plagiarism isn’t plagiarism unless it actually contravenes laws on copyright aside, the Rossi view on the status of blog posts, that they are in no way ‘proper research’, does in fact echo some well-entrenched attitudes.

Much as I might wish to submit my blog posts or a selection of them as a body of work to REF or to a salary review committee – I’ll readily grant that no individual post is substantial enough on its own – they are regarded not as credible outputs but as a form of outreach and dissemination, or personal indulgence. Most people would not take this as grounds for simply lifting the ideas without acknowledgement – but they might well hesitate before citing them in their current form. Whereas ‘pers. comm.’ is hallowed by tradition as a legitimate form of reference…

Obviously I find this annoying. No, my posts are not peer reviewed; the quality control here is my own sense of what might damage my reputation, and the credibility of any given piece rests on the intrinsic merits of the argument, and perhaps on my own standing in the discipline. But however much different review bodies claim that they consider everything on its own merits rather than focusing on journal prestige or publisher, this doesn’t seem to extend to self-published material (unless, maybe, you become your own publisher…).

#Receptiogate has, of course, been a very online thing, from Rossi’s Wayback Machine research method to Peter Kidd’s blog to the reverse image search for alleged members of the centre and its premises to the exchange of findings and the activities of Sokpops on Twitter. It makes sense that Very Online people would be outraged by such behaviour – but maybe there are others out there thinking, well, plagiarism is bad, obviously, but it was only a blog, not a proper publication, so why are they making such a fuss..?

* See https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html and subsequent posts, and the ongoing conversations on Twitter around @mssprovenance, @jpeterburger and @paularcurtis on the Twitter.

Brand New Me

Welcome – a guarded, once bitten twice shy sort of welcome – to 2023. Ironic self-pity in my Review of 2022 aside, I am genuinely resolved to do a bit better with the blog this year; to post at least twice per month, so that at least I have a choice when it comes to selecting my favourite posts at the end of the year, and to try to be slightly less boring and self-involved. The latter may prove difficult, but my overall health is definitely better than it was a year ago, and so I hope to have fewer grounds for moaning about everything.

One thing I do wonder is whether I should have slightly more of an idea what I’m doing, rather than just randomly scribbling whatever happens to occur to me. The latter approach has served me pretty well over the years – but I was struck, when reviewing last year’s blog statistics, by how many of the most popular posts from last year were actually written in previous years; the two 2022 posts that really got some traction were two gratuitous bits of humour, rather than anything more serious or substantial. Of course, the older posts may be still pulling in readers because they happen to deal with topics people search for (“the daughters of Sphinx” is a steady banker), rather than any inherent quality – and this whole thing may be driven by a post’s success or otherwise in getting picked up on Twitter (and who knows what will happen if/when that platform collapses in flames – I have yet to see any evidence of people finding their way here from Mastodon or Post).

I think – this post may disabuse me of the notion – that I do have some regular readers, as well as people who end up here because of Twitter or specific search terms. If so, I am asking for your feedback, using the short survey form linked here – and do please amplify your response in the comments. What sorts of topics bring you here? What would you like more of?

https://nevillemorley.survey.fm/post-topics

I’m not going to ask what you hate, as I’m not planning to stop writing occasional bits of pretentious opera criticism or the like – you can always just ignore those, as most people do, given that I’m not attempting to charge anyone actual money for this stuff. This is rather, potentially, a rebalancing act, trying to ensure that I do offer something that people might actually want to read more than just a couple of times a year. But I would like to know if you find my long-standing habit of using more or less obscure musical references to title most posts bearable, or even endearing, or if I would do better to have more sensible and descriptive titles.

Take Our Poll

And I am not going to advertise this post on Twitter or any other social media, at least for a couple of days, so we’ll see if anyone does actually notice it if it’s not loudly advertised on social media…

2022 on The Sphinx

It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the previous twelve months of blogging and wonder why I bother. Levels of interest and engagement, on every single measure, continue their inexorable decline – the fact that it’s only a 20-25% fall from the already-feeble figures of 2021 is due almost entirely to December, with the combination of my regular Blogs of the Year post piggy-backing on other people’s talent and popularity and a bit of gratuitous snark about #Receptiogate (now removed after a take-down notice from the alpaca whose image I used without permission). Maybe the blog post as a genre will make a come-back as a result of the immolation of Twitter; more plausibly, I should be thinking about how to re-tool my prolix ramblings for the world of TikTok…

The answer, of course, is that this has only ever been an outlet for “and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus” whimsy and sarcasm, rather than an exercise in brand-building, and it doesn’t cost me a huge amount of either time or money (unlike my halting attempts at a podcast series, where I really need to move extant episodes off PodBean before my subscription runs out and then stop trying). I can’t imagine anyone wanting to pay a regular subscription for a SubStack ‘newsletter’ from me – and I’d be wary of how I might feel I needed to change my style and/or content to live up to an idea of what I imagine people might expect of me in such a newsletter, if you see what I mean.

I could at a pinch imagine a few people clicking on a ‘Buy Me a Kofi’ button – but probably not so many that it’s worth the effort of trying to set that up. If this blog has never been about brand-building, it’s certainly never been a money-making enterprise. It remains a place where I can speculate and snark as I please, even as my appeal becomes more selective, and I get billed below the puppet show…

January: we’re all pretty well used to stories about the ‘cancellation’ of authors and topics due to excessive wokeness on the part of lecturers and excessive snowflakery on the part of students – a more dramatic and rabble-rousing way of describing curriculum review or even just the alternation of modules in different years – but the ‘cancellation’ of Semonides at Reading was especially silly…

February: this year did start off quietly! If we pass over my attempts at dealing with hurt feelings about a piece being rejected by claiming that I’d been cancelled, the only post this month was one of my intermittent reflections on teaching and assessment – in this case, the idea of offering students a choice of different ways of being assessed. I suppose it is representative of both me and the blog that every so often my days as a faculty teaching officer claw their way out of the grave again…

March: and by this point in the year I was feeling entirely drained by the grind term, still suffering from intermittent Long COVID issues, and wholly uninspired to write anything much – and even my jazz composition course, a vital respite during the plague years, was starting to get me down, as my sole post this month testifies… The end result was that I didn’t continue – and, rather than submitting a negative course evaluation, I sent the tutor a long personal email, to which I have never had a response. I do think I’m justified in feeling a bit pissed off – and I still miss the routine of homework and the prompt to do something creative every week. Unfortunately I cannot find any similar course anywhere…

April: finally, the end of term! And so this month saw a return to fortnightly posts, which turned out to be pretty well the best I could manage for most of this year. As ever I have a soft spot for my occasional bursts of pretentious opera critique – see, this is why I have a blog, as nobody, but nobody, is ever going to ask me to write about staging and the Gesamtkunstwerk – but this month’s key post was the result of substantial and serious research into the uses of Thucydides in social media in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; blogging as the best means of disseminating findings on current developments.

May: clearly I felt much refreshed by the Easter break – and a trip to Potsdam – as I was writing all sorts of stuff this month, albeit some of it quite sort and throwaway (that is to say, even more than normal). From an autobiographical perspective, the key post was a reflection on the latest attempt to come to terms with Long COVID, and my complex/confused feelings about the fact that it might be appropriate to describe myself as someone with a disability. But I don’t imagine most people cone to this blog for my solipsistic moping, so the most important post was instead one arising from the workshops I’d been running on my latest research topic, the politics of decadence – and whether the term was a fair one for the UK government…

June: at this stage in my review of the year, reading back through things I’d long since forgotten I’d ever written, I start to feel that the many thousands of former readers who’ve drifted away probably have a point. Yes, the blog is a place for random thoughts and passing ideas that would never make a proper publication, and even for occasional musings on academic life – but that doesn’t mean they need to be so bloody BORING! I might be better off not posting anything at all than complaining about my failure to get a podcast off the ground, or the travails of electronic indexing… MUST DO BETTER.

July: but of course I am now old and pompous enough to write “Ah, but in my day…” reflections on past and present academic career expectations. It’s a tricky subject, and I hope I didn’t upset any current ECRs (and that re-posting this doesn’t have any similar effect), but it’s worth questioning the occasional suggestion that things were vastly easier a few decades ago, rather than just somewhat easier.

August: this was, I recall, the height of my “prioritise health, mental well-being and that book you’re supposed to have written” efforts. On the positive side, I did write actual words, albeit not enough of them, and can start to feel the book taking shape in my mind, and I did start to feel a bit more myself. On the negative side, a single post, about my adventures in bat detection and ‘citizen science’. The steady decline of this blog becomes ever less of a mystery…

September: still pretty quiet – not least because I was on holiday at the beginning of the month and embroiled in the start of teaching at the end – but enough time for the UK government once again to take on the role of the Melians, trusting in hope and belief as effective countermeasures against reality…

October: I came down with COVID again in the second week of teaching, and seemed to be in permanent catch-up mode thereafter, so it’s probably not surprising that this was another quiet month, notable only for some rambling thoughts about proposals to de-anonymise peer review or abolish it altogether.

November: it suddenly becomes obvious why, embarking on this review, I felt any sort of surprise that viewing stats for the blog have been so feeble this year: over the last two months my posting has returned to a sort of ‘normal’, with multiple posts in a range of styles – gratuitous snark at culture war idiocies, pretentious reflections on the current Lucien Freud exhibition at the National Gallery, and several detailed accounts of my monitoring of Thucydides references in the Twitter, as the effects of Space Karen’s takeover started to be felt, and, most remarkably, with the sudden appearance of thousands of bots quoting an obscure P.G. Wodehouse school story that mentions Thucydides, for reasons which still elude complete understanding.

December: and so here we are. December is always a bumper month, as I piggy-back on the talents of others by listing my favourite blog posts of the year, and people have a bit more leisure to read stuff – but I also had a bit more leisure to write stuff, including more reflections on misattributed Thucydides quotes, and trying out the new ChatGPT AI thing as a possible means of increasing my posting rate…

Of course, what really boosted visitor numbers this month was my webpage for the new THUCYDIOCY research centre, until a feeling that the whole #Receptiogate meltdown was becoming a bit too voyeuristic persuaded me to take it offline again. There are many things I will do to boost this blog, but not everything…

Memo for 2023: more consistent posting, less solipsism, and stop feeling so sorry for myself!

Quiz of the Year 2022

Gratuitous bonus post; last night we had neighbours round for a pre-New Year’s Eve event, and I was tasked with putting together a quiz. Having put in the work, I thought I might as well share it, in case anyone out there is desperately searching for precisely this sort of thing for this evening…

1. Words of the Year 2022 

Which of the following was the Oxford Word of the Year: Metaverse, vax, Goblin Mode, #IStandWith?

And which one of those was NOT on the shortlist at all?

Which of the following was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: oligarch, codify, gaslighting, loamy, raid, Queen Consort?

Which of the following was Cambridge’s Word of the Year: homer, caulk, humor (spelt in the American way)?

Why were these the most searched-for words in Cambridge’s online dictionary?

2. How Long, Oh Lord, How Long?

How many days did Liz Truss last as Prime Minister?

What, according to the Daily Star, lasted longer than her?

Who served longest as Prime Minister: The Duke of Wellington, Neville Chamberlain, James Callaghan, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, Boris Johnson?

How many days passed between Suella Braverman resigning as Home Secretary under Liz Truss for breaching the ministerial code and being reappointed by Rishi Sunak?

What is the maximum period, in months, we still have to endure this lot before a general election has to be called?

3. Music Round: who died in 2022?

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/quiz-of-the-year-2022/pl.u-XkD0vNZFZJXEg5

(obviously you need to listen to these without looking at the names of the artists… As quizmaster, it’s up to you how much of each song to play before moving onto the next one)

4. Interior Decoration and Homecraft 

To the nearest £500, put a price on:

A double wingback chair by the firm Soane Britain.

A drinks trolley, inspired by a 1940s French drinks trolley owned by the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

10 rolls of gold Lulu Lytle wallpaper.

A kitchen table cloth.

To the nearest £10,000, the total cost of the Johnsons’ 10 Downing Street flat redecoration.

5. Castle Cary Real News (okay, this is a bit specialised…) 

What was the theme of the winner of the Best Overall Cart in this year’s Castle Cary Illuminated Carnival? Or what music did they use?

How many species of bat were detected in the CC Big Bat Count? Name as many as you can.

How many seats did the Green Party win in the Somerset Council election?

What new proposed building project has been described by critics as ‘“an ideal site for illegal signs”?

Who, in April, had “enormous amounts of defence”?

6. Picture Round

New Year Quiz Pictures

Quick-Fire Round: 1 minute each, starting with the person/team with the lowest score

What familiar song changed its words in September?

Who finally bought Twitter in October?

What classic modernist poem was published a hundred years ago?

How many Chancellors of the Exchequer have there been this year?

Which son of a celebrity couple married actress Nicola Peltz in April?

What football trophy did England win?

Who won the Best Actor Oscar?

Which country formally became an independent state a hundred years ago, on the 6th December 1922?

Who won both Artist of the Year and Album of the Year at the Brit Awards?

What month did Russia invade Ukraine?

The former Prime Minister of which country was assassinated in July?

Which Booker-winning English author died in September?

What was the new global health scare in May?

Who was investigated by Durham Police for drinking a beer?

A hundred years ago, a famous tomb was discovered. Whose?

Where did the COP27 climate conference take place?

What did Tory MP Neil Parish claim he was looking for on his mobile phone?

Which company sacked 800 employees by video call?

What film won the Golden Globe for Drama Motion Picture?

Who was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in April 1922?

What album won the Mercury Music Prize?

Which country won the most medals at the Commonwealth Games?

Who is now the longest reigning monarch in history?

Who won the Nobel Prize for Literature?

What is the name of the movement in Germany whose leaders were arrested this month for allegedly plotting a coup?

Where were the 2022 Winter Olympics held?

Whom did the actor Ben Affleck marry in July?

Which tennis player was deported from Australia because of his vaccination status?

In April, a fossil dinosaur leg was found in North Dakota. What, supposedly, is so special about it?

How many fixed penalty notices were issued for parties in 10 Downing Street?

Of what were the Colston 4 acquitted in January?

Who directed the film Belfast, that won the BAFTA for Best British Film?

What revered institution was formed on 18th October 1922?

Who headlined the Pyramid Stage on Saturday?

Who was accused of distracting the PM by crossing and uncrossing her legs?

Who won the football Champions League final?

Which Bahamian-American film actor, born in 1927, died in January?

Whom did reality tv star Kim Kardashian finally divorce?

What happened to Milton Keynes on 7th June?

What did an England cricket team win in November?

What writer was attacked on stage in Chautauqua, New York, in August?

Where does the government propose sending refugees?

What won Best Scripted Comedy at the British Academy Television Awards?

Which artist came second in Eurovision?

Where did Queen Elizabeth die?

Which world statesman died in August?

The coalition led by which party won the Italian election in September?

Which British newsreader, now a presenter on Classic FM, received a CBE in the New Year’s honours?

New Year Quiz 2022 Answers

Blogs of the Year 2022

As we got towards the end of the year, with the general chaos on the Bird Site and speculation about what might replace it, there was a certain amount of nostalgia for the great days of blogging (as well as the odd suggestion, perhaps not too serious, that these might return). Well, that would be nice – so long as it means more than just all the people on SubStack trying to monetise their followers. My worry is that I seem to find most of the posts that mean the most to me via the Twitter, where I now follow enough people that I regularly stumble across random interesting things, and it doesn’t feel as if I’m going to be able to reconstruct that network on any of the new platforms any time soon…

January

Jen Ebbeler on online teaching – partly very personal to her own situation, but some important general reflections: https://jenebbeler.medium.com/the-department-chair-ba8eba4a7be5

Paul Cotterill (@bickerrecord) on what really happened during lockdown: https://bickerrecord.medium.com/rules-and-power-why-we-mustnt-fall-into-the-same-tory-trap-b464311190c2

Adam Roberts (@arroberts) on Jane Austen and the politics of how we feel about stuff: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/sensibilitous-b04d30f48443

February

Tanner Greer (@Scholars_Stage) on ‘Shitpost Diplomacy’: https://t.co/ej9j26wp6w?amp=1

Edith Hall (@edithmayhall) on Lesya Ukrainka and Iphigenia in Tauris: https://edithorial.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-founding-mother-of-ukrainian.html?fbclid=IwAR2ioJe7Azjk1riTJA-9P6qmWlxEnOym0Xo1-ZAvb0O_q5kker98S7UBfL4

Eric Schliesser (@nescio13) ‘On appeasement today’: https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2022/02/appeasement.html?fbclid=IwAR297-cNrjhEm9AEp5uC5i2M6BW_LLxSHYP5CzqA6wd0g8pUJnYbP00NXwg

March

Alan Finlayson (@ProfAFinlayson) on the power of protest songs: https://oursubversivevoice.com/case-study/but-does-it-work-politics-rhetoric-and-the-protest-song/

Chris Bertram (@crookedfootball) on solidarity and compassion, and figures on the left playing strategy games: https://crookedtimber.org/2022/03/11/solidarity-and-compassion-should-come-first-for-the-left/

April

Pat Porter (@PatPorter76) on Thucydides as Realist – I disagree with quite a lot of this, but it is by a fair distance the best example of this particular reading: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/in-defence-of-thucydides-the-realist/

Rebecca Kennedy (@kataplexis) on Ukraine and ‘The West’: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2022/04/reflections-on-west.html

Mark Berry (@boulezian) on the Deutsches Historisches Museum exhibit on Wagner: https://boulezian.blogspot.com/2022/04/richard-wagner-and-nationalisation-of.html

May

Catherine Baker (@richmondbridge) on Ukraine and Eurovision: https://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2022/05/10/even-if-all-roads-are-destroyed-how-ukraine-put-itself-on-eurovisions-mental-maps-from-2003-to-2022/

Jack Monroe (@BootstrapCook) on writing recipes for the poor; a lot more mainstream than things I usually post, but this is righteous and glorious: https://t.co/thrxmyvTo9?amp=1

Isabel Ruffell (@iaruffell) on Ricky Gervais, Roman satire and the ‘comic’ persona: http://artemisia.scot/blog/2022/05/25/when-masks-slip/#when-masks-slip

June

Mark Buchan on his cat and Odysseus’ dog: https://medium.com/in-medias-res/the-truth-about-my-cat-and-odysseus-dog-a8236627a2b8

L.D. Burnett (@LDBurnett) on citation practices and plagiarism in different kinds of academic publication: https://loradawnburnett.medium.com/is-it-plagiarism-9daa44a24057

July

The ever-eloquent Maria Farrell (@mariafarrell) on chronic illness and cosplaying normality: https://crookedtimber.org/2022/07/05/settling-in-for-the-long-haul/

Jana Becavic (@jana_bacevic) on academic research in the midst of climate crisis: https://janabacevic.net/2022/07/20/when-it-ends/

August

Alexandra Sills (@BelovedOfOizys) on discussing your research online as a very early career researcher: https://ancientalexandra.wixsite.com/domus/post/what-i-learned-this-week-on-twitter-dot-com

Peter Gainsford (@PeterGainsford) offers excellent summary of issues involved in reconstructing classical texts from medieval manuscripts: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2022/08/manuscripts.html

September

Deborah Cameron (@wordspinster), fascinating as ever, on QEII and feminism: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2022/09/11/is-this-what-a-feminist-looks-like/

Katja Thieme (@katja_thieme) on surveying the alleged decay of academic freedom: https://katjat.medium.com/look-over-there-an-academic-freedom-crisis-1644247f5ec5

October

Network for Working-Class Classicists on the cost of living crisis: https://www.workingclassclassics.uk/2022/10/11/we-need-to-talk-about-money-what-the-cost-of-living-crisis-means-for-working-class-classicists/

Frances Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) on economic populism and its failures – the UK as dodgy South American country: https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/10/when-populism-fails.html

Helen King (@fluff35) on Sondheim as a guide to marriage: https://viamedia.news/2022/10/27/marry-me-a-little/

November

Evan Smith (@evansmithhist) on the early history of anti-immigrant rhetoric of ‘swamping’ and ‘invasion’: https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2022/11/01/rather-swamped-thatcher-moral-panics-and-racist-rhetoric/

Liz Gloyn (@lizgloyn) on walking pedagogy: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/walking-supervisions-first-thoughts/

L.D. Burnett (@LDBurnett), again, on the shift from #Twitterstorians to #Histodons: https://www.arcdigital.media/p/i-may-have-been-a-twitterstorian

December

Maria Farrell (@mariafarrell) on the deceptive metaphor of tech platform as ‘ecosystem’: https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/ “They say ecosystem. They mean snow-globe. It’s not at all clear if they understand these are different kinds of thing.”

John Holbo (@jholbo1) on Nietzsche and early graphic design: https://www.onbeyondzarathustra.com/isohighertype?fbclid=IwAR3etzNsJbxPAAsqNwfOfnGgiplWA4Rle6UJoWO3VBT351S4FXx_9ptLKgQ

The THUCYDIOCY Centre

Our publicationing makes double-good researches. Incorporated in Bruton (Somerset), London (poste restante) and Lugano (generous national research funds with low levels of diligence).

We have developed innovative digital humanities research method based on active text scanning, and offer major studentships for qualified scholars worth €40,000 (accommodation and subsistence extra) as a discount on regular training course fees of €60,000.

Prof Dr Dr Neville D. G. Morley MA PhD FRHistS FRHS NT AI, Director

Owain Gwilym, BA MRes, Deputy Director, Finance, IT, sequencing and social media abuse

Hector, 0.8 FTE postdoctoral researcher

Sir William F. Butler, scientific advisory board

Bettina von Götzen, administration and vague legal threats

Our well-appointed conference facilities

Time Out

‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ I spend so much time thinking of ways to correct this misattributed Thucydides quote politely and constructively, and occasionally noting the context (a lot of “We need a President who lifts!” this year…), that I rarely take the time to think about it in its own right, or why it has such a powerful appeal to some people.

It’s worth noting, for example, the effect of the simultaneous simplification of Butler’s original statement and its decontextualisation. In a biography of General Charles Gordon, the focus is clearly on the exceptional qualities of Gordon compared with his fellow officers, with a small dig at the society that didn’t expect such erudition and public spirit from its military officers, and a wider anxiety in Butler’s mind about the impact of the professionalisation of the army, especially at command level. In today’s usage, it tends to be far more commonly used to disparage mere intellectuals as useless cowards; simply by quoting such an eminent authority, the weightlifter or gym bro has demonstrated that he does not suffer from any such division of physical and intellectual pursuits.

This isn’t universal; one of the reasons the quote continues to circulate is that, so far as I can gather, the weight-lifting community periodically argues about whether or not physical development is enough – there was a flurry last month when the loathsome Andrew Tate declared the pointlessness of all books and book-learning and was widely denounced on the Twitter. As with ‘The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage’, the line has become a lifestyle and self-improvement meme rather than being focused on the organisation of Professional Military Education as it was for most of the twentieth century.

The other thing that struck me this morning is the temporal aspect. The quote is seen partly as a timeless truth that Thucydides and/or the Greeks recognised but we have forgotten, and partly as a classical Greek truth that explains their greatness (generally illustrated with pictures of Spartans, to add a little extra cognitive dissonance) that we need to rediscover. Either way, this explains why it is so important for some people (by no means all) that it is attributed to Thucydides, who of course himself is held to embody the warrior-scholar ideal.

But it’s a ‘timeless truth’ that relates to a specifically modern anxiety, that of excessive specialisation. One of the arguments I try to use with stubborn adherents of the ‘you can’t prove it wasn’t Thucydides’ persuasion is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense in a fifth-century context, especially not in Athens where every citizen would be expected to fight to defend the city in one way or another. There were professional soldiers in a sense – mercenaries, whether career soldiers-for-hire or people like Xenophon looking for something to do after being exiled for dubious political activity – but no one worried about their education. There were scholars who didn’t fight – a resident alien like Aristotle, say – but again, no one saw this as the sort of social-cultural issue that needed warning against.

To deploy the quote in this manner, we have to assume that Thucydides anticipated a problem or anxiety that was irrelevant to his world but would become pressing in the distant future. Perhaps this brings to mind the sort of obsessing about the threat of future super intelligent AI that consumes various self-important tech bros – but again, this mode of thinking, the assumption that the future will be radically different from past and present and so we need to predict or anticipate as-yet-unknown dangers, is distinctively modern (Reinhard Koselleck says hi!).

This is not to argue that we can’t explore the application of Thucydides to different aspects of the modern world that he couldn’t possibly have known about (or the book I’m struggling to write on What Thucydides Knew would be extremely short and dull). Rather, the point is the precise nature of the claim we make and the way we invoke him as an authority; the difference between ‘T’s analysis of stasis at Corcyra suggests general principles of polarisation and rhetorical escalation’, and ‘T predicted how social media would undermine norms of democratic discourse’. The first ascribes to him some significant insight into political dynamics; the second requires a time machine.

Games Without Frontiers

There is no divide between people who play games and people who don’t; we all play games, or at least have played them in the past. But there clearly is a divide between people with varying amounts of experience of different sorts of games, and hence different expectations; between those, let us say, who flick through the rulebook for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Board Game, thinking “okay, straightforward underlying game mechanic, minor tweaks to bring it closer to the TV series, questions about the best strategy to adopt”, and those who look at this slim 20-page booklet, in fairly large font and with quite a lot of illustrations, and respond with “blimey, that’s a bit big and complicated”.

Now, I am very much not dunking on my wife here, despite the fact that after half an hour I was actively trying to hasten the apocalypse just to put us all out of our misery without making this too obvious to our neighbour (who was the one who really wanted to try the game). It’s not that she doesn’t like games, just not this sort of game – I should have guessed, from the fact that we can no longer play Scrabble or Monopoly together, that there might be an issue with grasping the idea of a cooperative game in which we work together against to beat the system, rather than seeking to annihilate one another.

Indeed, given that she alternated “this is absurdly complicated and was clearly designed by a male teenager with too much time on his hands” and “but a vampire can’t just enter the Summers residence without an invitation, that’s stupid, it’s not like Angel entering the high school because it’s a public place inviting in everyone who seeks knowledge, we need a different rule”, clearly in a different timeline she was a born AD&D rules lawyer.

Part of me is a little sad, as I do like games – ideally, cooperative rather than competitive ones – but don’t have the time or energy to go any distance in search of them; I will just have to content myself with reading rulebooks and sketching out scenarios and painting a few miniature figures (as a mindfulness exercise, honestly). But mostly I’m just reflective, as I do like using little games in some of my lectures as a prompt for discussion – and am now feeling slightly nervous that, as far as I can recall, no student has ever actually commented on this.

For example, I tend simply to assume that the ‘choose your own adventure’ principle of Twine-based games is completely intuitive and thus – since they are very easy to create – the ideal format for a quick lecture interlude. It was interesting, when I mentioned a week or so back that I was creating a basic ‘I, Caesar’ Twine for the last class of term (here, if anyone’s interested), to be directed towards Reacting to the Past; fascinating stuff, but the sort of thing that needs an entire class to explain the rules and set everything up, not least because they’re aimed at highlighting the complex interaction of lots of different factors whereas my games are usually designed to hit people around the head with a single historical principle.

Maybe I’m underestimating the ability of my students to get quickly into something complex and interactive – or maybe I’m overestimating the straightforwardness of the Twine set-up. I’m reminded of the first time I did a session of different Thucydides-based games; the one which was a complete flop was the modified role-playing one, where more or less nobody seemed to have the foggiest what they were being asked to do, and so the fact that it was vastly simpler than any conventional RPG, even Fate, had no effect…

The good news this morning is that I saw our neighbour, whose first words were “I’ve been thinking about how we should have approached our strategy, with more cooperation and focusing more on the overall goal rather than getting distracted by all the vampires, so can we try that again?” Result!