Neville Morley's Blog, page 6

Future Shock

Nostalgia gets pretty well everyone, sooner or later; if not an actual longing to return to the past then at least a sense of discontent with the present, fuelled by a feeling, general or selective, that it no longer makes proper sense and/or that things just aren’t as good as they used to be. It’s easy to dismiss this – in the case of other people, anyway – as a combination of rose-tinted spectacles and the aging process: the past seems preferable because you didn’t know any better then, your back didn’t ache and you didn’t have to go to bed by half nine every night in order to get through the next day. There’s a snarky comment about Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes by A.L. Rowse: “Because the Germans were defeated, Western civilisation is to be regarded as coming to an end”. Perhaps it would have been truer to say that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket because Spengler’s hair is receding and he now gets out of breath when running for a bus.

How we interpret change is always a personal, subjective thing – even if we seek to elevate this reaction to a world-historical principle as a means of concealing its actual content from ourselves – but that doesn’t imply that there is no change, nor that change must always be welcomed and celebrated. By convention, middle-aged music fans measure contemporary pop and rock against the aesthetic criteria they absorbed in their late teens and early twenties, and so find most of it derivative, superficial, worthless and/or incomprehensible. Now, ever since my brief period of reactionary nostalgia in the late eighties, when my teenage aesthetic criteria rejected most contemporary music, I’ve consciously rejected such an attitude. There is always going to be something interesting to be found in new music, even if you have to learn new ways of listening and appreciation; just listening to familiar old stuff, or new stuff that sounds just like the old stuff, is narrow-minded defeatism. Yes, my quest for interesting new arrangements of sounds and noise now largely takes me in the direction of avant-garde jazz rather than pop or rock, which is perhaps a different sort of growing old and stuffy, but at least it’s forward-looking, dedicated to artists who are increasingly much younger than me, rather than dead.

Nostalgia is death! Totally on board with changing styles and forms and genres of music. What I was not prepared for, however, was changes in the conditions of consumption, which then have huge impact on the conditions of production. Streaming, for me, is a simply convenient means of accessing music when I’m away from my cd collection, and in many cases of sampling a new record before buying it; I still think in terms of albums (mostly) and singles, and think about track sequencing, and cover design. The idea of listening to an endless stream of disconnected, decontextualised tracks does not compute – I can make my own mixtapes if I want, thank you very much, from stuff I know I like. And the way that streaming has, far from promoting the ‘long tail’ of less popular artists as was once promised, in fact consolidated the dominance of a very few megastars while paying everyone else peanuts, is just horrifying. So, yes, nostalgia: not for the music of my teenage years, but for the structures that produced it and within which I discovered and consumed it; the system that made sense, if only because it’s the one I grew up with, and the system where music seemed to matter rather than being merely a commodity.

I could say the same about written media, I realise; it’s not so much that I still occasionally buy a newspaper and magazines in physical form, but that I automatically think in terms of distinct publications when I consume articles online, rather than a decontextualised fragment of an undifferentiated digital realm. The fact that I have individual subscriptions to a few of these publications, rather than a subscription to a single portal that gives me access to a whole load of them (wouldn’t that be nice…), reinforces the impression. This world-view can persist alongside the fact that I’m perfectly well aware of the proliferation of newsletters and Substacks because, I think, I still tend to regard the latter as basically equivalent to the world of blogging ten years or more ago. It was eye-opening to read this article on the unsustainable economy of subscriptions, together with some illuminating commentary on BlueSky from @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com on the situation of the freelance writer, and to realise quite how out of touch I am with the way things now actually work when it comes to either legacy media or the new fragmented ecosystem of personal newsletters.

The obvious explanation for such ignorance is that my livelihood doesn’t depend on navigating these systems. I’ve never made any serious attempt at a career in music, and producing jazz compositions that I’m barely capable of playing badly in real life is never going be a reason for taking this more seriously – the best I can hope for is persuading someone else to give them a try. I can wonder about the economics of US musicians playing to an audience of thirty-odd in Austria (Thumbscrew) or selling records solely by expensive mail order (Maria Schneider) or cross-subsidising a big band from film and tv commissions (Colin Towns) without having to worry about how this works.

Writing is a little more complicated, as there is a small amount of money involved – occasional royalty cheques are nice, and I was hugely touched over the last few days to receive a number of donations towards the upkeep of this blog (and now feel embarrassed that I might have come across as guilt-tripping) – but this is only ever an adjunct to having a job that pays me in part to research and write without too many constraints on what I choose to do in that time. The idea of trying to make a living from this… Obviously I wouldn’t say no (though I would want to keep teaching) – but it is symptomatic that my mental image of how that ‘making a living’ should work revolves around my forthcoming Thucydides book getting reviewed in proper newspapers and magazines and gaining a general readership, with my blog posts helping to build a wider audience, probably leading to regular invitations to contribute to revered publications and maybe even get on the telly, and at the same time I’d get the novel finished.

And I know enough to know that things don’t really work like this any more, and there are lots of people out there better at hustling and more willing to compromise in writing stuff that people might actually want to read, insofar as there are still readers out there. My ambition may actually be not too dissimilar to the celebrity children’s book author, displacing those who are really dedicated to such writing through an unfair advantage. Should I in fact stop publishing this blog, or put it behind a paywall, to avoid undercutting those who are genuinely trying to make a living by writing by reinforcing the idea that everything should be free to read..? I suppose the least I can do is make this as niche as possible, the sort of art that has to be subsidised for the benefit of the few who enjoy it; so, yes, ‘Twelve Months in the Year’ will be back at the end of January by popular demand…

The general point, that we can be perfectly comfortable with certain sorts of change and completely thrown by others, especially systematic or structural change, holds true more widely. ‘All fixed, rusted-shut relations are dissolved… All that is solid evaporates’ was not primarily a commentary on mid-C19 gentleman’s fashion. This trend has become unmistakable in the field from which I do make a living, higher education. Again, I’ve never had any problem with changing the contents of my courses or the style of teaching, or adapting to new technology, new student demands and expectations, or new challenges, even online marking; none of this is sacrosanct, even if I have my preferences. But it’s all predicated on the continuing taken-for-granted existence of a wider structure in which learning and scholarship matter, including humanities learning and scholarship, and this no longer seems to be a given.

I am very conscious that these presentiments of doom may be just another age thing, not least because I have a clear memory, from back in the early years of my career, of senior colleagues like Charles Martindale bemoaning the impact on academic life and the idea of the university of the imposition of things, like having clear student guidance and feedback questionnaires, that seemed to me to be obviously necessary and no great burden. But I do think there is a decent case to be made that recent changes are of a different order, not least because it’s the younger scholars who have hitherto endured most of their impact while we established middle-aged figures have been more shielded (not least by having a lot of experience to draw on, which compensates to some degree for slowness, tiredness and less reliable memory), rather than the young taking things in their stride while we complain that things aren’t what they used to be.

Put another way: we can look back at the universities of the 1960s or 1930s or 1890s, and they don’t seem too alien; one might not have stood much chance of a career then, but the nature of what such a career would involve seems straightforward enough. From their perspectives, present-day academic life would doubtless seem like a dystopian hellscape, but I would suggest that this is a reasonably recent development, and that even today’s situation, let alone that of twenty years ago, is probably a lot closer to their experience and expectations than anything that’s likely to be the case in a few decades’ time.

On the one hand it’s difficult to forget Saki’s sardonic comment on this sort of thinking. “There always have been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people’s grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable.” On the other hand, it’s a sense of the past and of possible futures, rather than assuming the present to be either a permanent state or change to be something entirely (rather than mostly) beyond our control, that offers any hope of anything beyond despair or quietism.

This post is, believe it or not, me in positive mode; I feel much more myself, after years of COVID-induced fatigue and brain fog, having had a refreshing and inspiring autumn in Innsbruck, and can look forward to some serious writing and thinking over the next year. It helps, however, to have a realistic sense, both of the nature of the problems and of my capacity to engage with them, and to anatomise my discontent.

It’s not that I got old and boring; the world does not have to be this way. New Year’s resolution: the revolution of the 21st century cannot begin with itself until it has cast off all illusions about the present…

2024 On The Sphinx

Compiling my list of favourite blog posts from this year, I was struck by how many of them seem to be from Substacks, or similar platforms like Buttondown, rather than traditional blogs. As ever, this does lead me to wonder whether I’m missing a trick, or at any rate being thoroughly Quixote-like in not just persisting with an old-fashioned blog rather than a newsletter but also actually subsidising it (not least by paying the No Ads tax) rather than trying to monetise my ramblings (it will not surprise anyone that my total income from adding a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button has been zero). On the other hand, who would pay for this tosh?

I think I have successfully overcome the last vestiges of any ambition to be a Significant Public Intellectual and trying to use this blog as a means of leveraging attention – I’ve managed to avoid getting into any public spats with dodgy Swiss research centres this year, which is the main reason viewing stats are down – and have indeed managed to spend less time on social media in general, not least because Ex-Twitter has ceased to generate any new Thucydides misattributions (just intermittent bursts of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ thing) and Bluesky is still small enough that squashing Thucydides misattributions takes relatively little time.

So it’s a question of whether writing occasional blog pieces here does anything for me besides serve as a distraction from proper work – and on the whole it does, though it’s an open question whether this year’s periodic rants about GenAI count as the productive working-through of relevant ideas or as a total red herring. I am finally starting to feel a bit more like myself after four years of Long COVID, as might be judged from the relative absence of self-pity in the blog this year – which meant that I’ve relied less on this place as somewhere to keep my hand in at writing anything at all, but at the same time can feel grateful that it seems to have done the trick over the last few years. Looking ahead to 2025, I really need to get on with finishing some long-overdue books, but it seems entirely plausible that this will inspire more posts rather than fewer.

In the meantime, partly because I have written fewer (but also, arguably, better) posts this year, and partly in order to make this one a bit less unwieldy than usual, I’ve decided to try to be more disciplined, and just pick a single post from each month.

January: Screwface Capital on the enshittification of both academic publication and universities. “It does appear as if it is basically impossible to get a job as a university leader these days without a grand outside-the-box synergistic strategy for radical restructuring…”; this hasn’t got any less true over the course of the year.

February: Slave to the (Algo)rhythm on JSTOR’s ridiculous ‘if you liked this article, you might enjoy this sixty-year-old publication which has a couple of the same keywords’ widget, and its possible impact on student understanding. “We may at some point identify significant changes in research, reflecting the younger generation’s radical eclecticism and obliviousness to traditional narratives of disciplinary development…”

March: Shoulda Woulda Coulda in which, as ever, I seek to learn important life lessons from the cats. Notably, the pointlessness of long-term individual research plans. “Do I look like a man with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing random ideas, though to be fair I do have some idea what to do with one if I catch it… The idea of drawing up a five-year strategy seems absurd, in a world where resources are not instantly available but have to be hustled.”

April: No More Drama reflecting on the choices involved in presenting archaeological sites to particular audiences, with specific reference to ancient Philippi. “The site management knows which side its bread is buttered, as at least four of the various tour groups we passed (or rather, stepped out of the way of as they charged through), the majority of the ones that weren’t sulky/distracted Greek teenagers, were expressly following in the footsteps of St Paul…”

May: The Style Council muses randomly (in response to another excellent piece by Henry Farrell, https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-apocalyptic-systems-thriller), on the fictions of factional representation in historiography. “On the one hand, we’re saddled with a history that often involves an uncomfortably close relationship to story-telling, sometimes of the most banal kind, and on the other we’re repeatedly enjoined, or expected, to confine ourselves to the supposedly plain facts rather than indulging in excessive moralising.”

June: Trust In Me on the rhetorical aspects of GenAI bullshitting. “As someone commented in one of my focus groups, it doesn’t write like a student – and the point is not the snark that, yes, it can place apostrophes correctly for a start, but rather that it shows no sign of the caution and humility (sometimes in excess), the sense that things are always more complicated, that undergraduates have learnt is appropriate.”

July: Twelve Days in the Year. No particular point or coherence to this, as it is simply an account of a single day – something I’ve now been doing, with only occasional lapses, for a year and a half. I am wondering whether it’s worth continuing, as hardly anyone shows any interest – but when the only other post this month is another variant on my GenAI ranting, the practice does have its uses…

August: Die Like A Dog. Lots more GenAI stuff this month, especially focused on the fact that summarising tools may be a far greater threat to student learning than all the fuss about them getting their essays written by ChatGPT – but the point of my blog has always been that it’s for everything that interests or enrages me, not just academic stuff, and changes in veterinary practice certainly fit the latter label: “my sick cat is not your continuing professional development opportunity.”

September: Breathing. By this point I was actively trying not to spend my whole time getting cross about GenAI in university teaching and learning, not least because I’d put together a complete list of all the stuff I’d written over the last year or so, and it added up to a lot of words. But they keep pulling me back in… “I’ve been trying to think of a suitable analogy for the rise of Generative AI. Currently, I’m torn between cigarettes, asbestos and neoliberalism.”

October: Best of All Possible Worlds. Yes, there is an alternative timeline in which I went off to Nashville to become a songwriter under the tutelage of Kris Kristofferson…

November: Waterloo. On Richard Duncan-Jones and different approaches to academic life. “If your goal is neither to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their graduate students, nor to be acclaimed and envied by all as the dominant figure in contemporary ancient history, nor even just to be invited to somewhere nice occasionally to give a paper, then slipping away quietly is no tragedy.”

December: Land of Make Believe. “Do we need to devote huge energy to fact-checking something that is manifestly what would result if you gave Lawrence Alma-Tadema an unlimited CGI budget and asked him to make a Warhammer 40K movie?” Why the crass ahistoricism of Gladiator II matters in a way that the fantasy of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings doesn’t. Besides the crappiness of its crap sharks.

Blogs of the Year 2024

As usual, my list of blog posts and other less mainstream internet publications that I’ve enjoyed, found thought-provoking and/or just felt that others might appreciate if they missed them first time around – though I have to admit that either there were some rather quiet months this year, or my reading patterns have been a bit erratic…

January

Any blog post that opens with a pertinent reference to Philip K. Dick’s Time Out Of Joint has to to be essential reading; Henry Farrell on LLMs: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/chatgpt-is-an-engine-of-cultural

Ellie Mackin Roberts offers advice for temporary lectureships: https://elliemackinroberts.net/2024/01/12/dos-and-donts-of-a-visiting-professorship-a-uk-response/

Kevin Munger does some intellectual history with Google ngrams: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/17/the-hayakawa-question/

Dan Davies on the British Mittelstand: ‘We dominate the world when it comes to “doing miscellaneous stuff”. Nobody can touch us when it comes to “things that don’t fit in any other category”’: https://open.substack.com/pub/backofmind/p/the-thing-that-makes-the-thing-in?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Alexandra Sills (@belovedofoyzis) on the classicists list melting down over Palestine solidarity: https://ancientalexandra.weebly.com/blog/what-is-the-fucking-point

February

Foluke Ifejola Adebisi on ‘decolonising’ university catering: https://folukeafrica.com/decolonising-catering-in-uk-universities-an-often-elusive-quest-for-good-jollof-and-dodo/

Joshua Nudell on the absence of discipline-redefining blockbuster history: https://joshuapnudell.com/2024/02/02/the-historian-as-opinion-columnist/

Keith Flett on boom and bust in craft brewing: https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2024/02/12/breal-beer-brands/

March

Claire Millington on the BM’s shambolic attempt at doing Instagram memes for its problematic Roman Army exhibition: https://clairemillington.com/2024/03/04/behind-the-tweets-at-the-british-museum/

Paul Musgrave on normalising the job of the professor: https://musgrave.substack.com/p/what-do-professors-do

April

Glen O’Hara on academic mental health: https://voicesofacademia.com/2024/04/05/its-not-your-fault-that-academic-life-is-getting-harder-by-glen-ohara/

Liz Bourke on cosy fiction: https://lizbourke.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/67-considering-the-cosy-turn-in-sff-who-gets-to-be-comforted

Abigail Nussbaum on LGM on different adaptations of Patricia Highsmith: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/04/ripleys

May

Catherine Baker on Eurovision 2024: https://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/im-done-playing-the-game-between-disenchantment-queer-solidarity-and-artist-activism-at-eurovision-2024/

Justin Myers @theguyliner on the utter crappiness of Facebook as a means of keeping up with people: https://theguyliner.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-connections

Will Pooley on the joys of Excel: https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/sheet-happens/

June

Tallulah Trevesant on the antiquity to alt-right slippery slope: https://www.workingclassicists.com/post/the-antiquity-to-alt-right-pipeline

Doug Muir on vampire stars aka the T Coronea Borealis nova: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/06/15/waiting-for-the-nova/

Tom Hamilton on terrible, terrible Tory football analogies: https://dividinglines.substack.com/p/into-injury-time

July

Liz Gloyn on being a student again: https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2024/07/10/from-the-other-side-of-the-fence/

August

Erik Robinson at Sententiae Antiquae on mortality and libraries: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/author/palaiophron/

Spencer McDaniel on Space Karen’s reading of the Iliad: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/08/28/whats-the-problem-with-elon-musks-iliad-advice/

September

Suyi Davies Okungbowa on the expectation that writers will perform: https://suyidavies.com/essays/against-performance

Will Pooley again: “vibes are not a research method”: https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/09/05/vibes-are-not-a-research-method/

Henry Farrell (again) on Patrick O’Brian’s conservatism: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/patrick-obrian-is-a-great-conservative

October

Josh Nudell’s Weekly Varia post is always a treat, a pick’n’mix assortment of ideas and links, but rarely the sort of thing one returns to – but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to include it in case anyone reading this blog isn’t aware of it, and this one was especially interesting on several different topics: https://joshuapnudell.com/2024/10/06/weekly-varia-no-99-10-06-24/

Irina Dumitrescu on managing creative energy most effectively in the way that suits you: https://irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/managing-energy-for-creative-work

Not sure if it’s a blog or an online edited collection, but Marcella Ward on Islamophobia and historiography brought Everyday Orientalism’s essential series in Palestine to a powerful conclusion: https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/can-islamophobia-be-historiographical-eopalestine-20/

November

Eryk Salvaggio critiques the guide for teachers using ChatGPT (or else): https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/how-does-openai-imagine-k-12-education/

Will Pooley (yet again) on the urgency of joy in the creative process – third in a must-read series on doing history in an era of permacrisis: https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/11/22/the-urgency-of-joy-3/

Alexandra Sills gives Gladiator II a good kicking AND explores why the issue of ‘historical accuracy’ is so fraught when it comes to Ridley Scott movies: https://ancientalexandra.weebly.com/gladiators/gladiator-ii-pedantry-passion-and-pictures

Yvette M. Hunt on what family scone recipes tell us about Galen: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ae1gu9A6y/?mibextid=K35XfP

December

Deborah Cameron great as ever on Gregg Wallace: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2024/12/06/women-of-a-certain-age

Liv Mariah Yarrow on experimental grading: https://livyarrow.org/2024/12/20/did-i-give-too-many-as/?

Parklife

One of the thing that radio does well, for obvious reasons, is directed conversation; a skilled interlocutor, drawing out someone with interesting things to say, within a structure that provides some shape and direction without being too artificial. Talking about music and life on Desert Island Discs; talking about walking along a particular route on Claire Balding’s Ramblings; talking about historical topics on In Our Time (still the most impressive of the lot, even as the shift to recorded rather than live programmes relieves some of the burden on Lord Bragg to keep waffly academics on track).

BBC Radio 4’s latest offering in this field, however, is annoying the hell out of me, albeit on the limited basis of a sample of two episodes. This Natural Life, a walk through a bit of countryside with someone, talking about aspects of nature, with the generally reliable Martha Kearney; sounds promising. There is surely huge mileage in talking about the natural world in different contexts, encouraging curiosity in plants and animals wherever you are – not just out in the countryside or natural parks, but I’d love to hear a programme about, say, rats and foxes and pigeons and peregrine falcons in the heart of the city, and the role of parks and trees along streets, and even (given iirc that this is one of Kearney’s things) beekeeping.

But, whether because they want to draw a clearer line between this programme and Ramblings or they’re just fixated on celebrities, what we’re offered is a half-hour chat with someone off the telly (Delia Smith, Martin Clunes) who owns a large enough country estate to support a half-hour walk around. An interest in ‘nature’ is assumed to follow from ownership of a substantial chunk of it. Smith, I will concede, does at least have a vague sense of the seasonal arrival of geese at her lake, though there’s no mention of what varieties; Clunes has lots of dogs and loves horses, and once planted a wildflower meadow.

What is the point of this? We learn nothing about nature or engagement with the natural world (and the concluding “how do you as a rich person with a nice country estate feel about the future of the environment?” question, clearly a feature of the whole series, is infuriating). We learn nothing about the interviewees except that they like horses and like having a nice country estate. Whereas Ramblings regularly offers a sense of the joys of walking that might well inspire people to follow the same route or do something similar more locally, none of us listeners will be in a position to decide to acquire our own country estate, and it’s not as if we’ll get to experience these ones. Really, they should have just called it Country Life. And whereas Ramblings engages with a wide range of ordinary people and shows how interesting they can be on topics they’re enthusiastic about, this presents an implicit agenda that (1) Famous People must be listened to whatever the topic, and (2) if you don’t own a country estate then your views about the natural world simply aren’t very important.

I will concede that there is an element of sour grapes;p here; I do tend to listen to these conversational programmes and imagine myself as a participant – just as one draws up one’s own list of Desert Island Discs and the explanation for each choice. I can imagine talking about childhood fishing for sticklebacks and poking around in rock pools and bird watching, and developing an interest in gardening, and the complex relationships with different creatures involved in trying to grow vegetables, and of course the fascination with bats and the newts and dragonflies in my pond that came out of the pandemic. But I don’t remotely think that I’m the only person who could talk interestingly about such topics – nature is utterly fascinating, and indeed often the most frustrating episodes of Desert Island Discs are the ones where the guest doesn’t get much time to talk about their work and interests, when manifestly they don’t have much to say about music – thank you for that 15-second summary of primate ecology, now let’s talk about why you’ve chosen Adele.

There is a great series to be made about ‘nature in your back yard’, for everyone who doesn’t have an estate to stroll around; there’s a great series to be made from talking to different amateur nature enthusiasts. It’s not about the nature itself, so to speak – stunning pictures of landscapes and fascinating creatures can be left to the television – but about the engagement and the curiosity, which is perfect for radio.

Tl;dr: yes, I would really enjoy half an hour of Martha Kearney interviewing Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Note: December 27th 2024 was incredibly boring, most of it being spent either packing, unpacking, or driving slowly along foggy roads between Suffolk and Somerset surrounded by reckless, impatient idiots, so I really can’t be bothered to write the usual journal entry for it. Whether I continue with this series may depend on how I feel at the end of January…

Monument

Last month I briefly wrote about the so-called Ehrenmal that stands in the square outside the main building of the University of Innsbruck. It’s clearly the kind of monument to problematic values and with a problematic history that will always upset or enrage someone, and I have some sympathy with the colleague who feels that the university should simply have moved it to another location – massive row in the short term, and then pretty well everyone could forget about it. The problem with the approach that was actually taken, the artistic intervention to question the values commemorated – or at least to suggest that this needs thinking about – is that it could always be reversed, whether through vandalism (as happened earlier this autumn) or a university leadership that decides to swing pragmatically in line with far-right tendencies in Austrian politics. The monument in its current form is a standing provocation.

But I think it’s great; it’s the sort of thing I felt should have been done with the Rhodes statue in Oxford – paint his hands red – and so I’m very pleased that the letters have now been restored. And, since a key part of my public lecture yesterday evening (marking the end of my visiting professorship here, sob) was an emphasis on the need to question antiquity and use antiquity to question (yup, basically Nietzsche’s notion of untimeliness), I couldn’t resist the idea of incorporating this into the conclusion – since, after all, the key thing about a public lecture is not the content but the pictures…

Land of Make Believe

On Tuesday evening, the Innsbruck Gesellschaft für Klassische Philologie organised a trip to see Gladiator II – private room, presumably to protect ordinary cinema-goers from loud chuntering and arguments by the ancient historical contingent – and I tagged along. Well. I enjoyed the not-at-all-predictable-or-clumsy repurposing of Calgacus’ speech from Tacitus’ Agricola, but otherwise suspect that I benefitted hugely from hearing the dialogue in German, so that some of my critical faculties were occupied with remembering bits of vocabulary. Sadly this couldn’t disguise the terrible narrative structure, incoherent plot or confused politics. Or the sharks.

I should stress that my objection to the sharks was not historical nit-picking but the awful CGI – how hard would it have been to make them swim properly, rather than zipping around on speed? It was obvious from the ridiculous full-frontal naval assault at the beginning – I am tempted to write to colleagues at Trier to check on their view of the physics of mounting huge catapults or siege towers on ancient boats – that a proper accounting of stupid anachronisms would require multiple viewings of a basically awful film; after all, it’s late-period Ridley Scott, and a year or so back a friend who specialises in Napoleonic-era warfare was clearly just getting started a good half-hour into his rant on the subject of Napoleon…

Various colleagues have made a start at cataloguing the innumerable ways in which Gladiator II is an incredibly silly, confused and misleading depiction of Roman history; see Sarah Bond and Brett Devereaux, for example. I want to pick up on a slightly different issue, which came up in some subsequent discussions in Innsbruck this week, and was also raised by David Rafferty on Bluesky this morning. In brief: does any of this actually matter? Do we need to devote huge energy to fact-checking something that is manifestly what would result if you gave Lawrence Alma-Tadema an unlimited CGI budget and asked him to make a Warhammer 40K movie? Don’t we just come across as humourless pedants, getting angry about the fact that we’ve been given an entertaining OTT fantasy rather than a minutely-researched documentary? Can’t we just enjoy the fact that this might bring more young people to an interest in antiquity, which then gives us the opportunity to explain gently how some of it might not be completely reliable?

David’s comment was that Gladiator II is obviously ahistorical fantasy – “a movie set in a Rome theme park”. True, but – and that’s the pattern of thought that seems to me to be relevant here. Clearly it’s tosh, but it both draws upon and reinforces a whole load of tropes about the Roman Empire that are not quite so obviously tosh, and smuggles in an assortment of new ones. The sharks and the undead baboons are, to to speak, the blatant anachronisms that distract us from all the less obvious and egregious anachronisms – look closely at this shiny distracting thing. Gladiator II is not presented as pure fantasy – the film might have been rather more fun if it had just turned everything up to eleven for the hell of it, rather than self-importantly trying to make a Big Political Analogy – but rather as, at best, a fictional version of Real Events, and that means that in all likelihood people who are not professionally pedantic will accept some – much? – of it, without thinking very much about this.

Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings are obviously fantasy all the way down, and recognised as such, rather than fictions that, somewhere, have a real historical referent. You can do “Yes, dragons, but…”, to consider how GoT depicts medieval-ish warfare or patriarchal desert clans or how LotR imagines orc social organisation, but that exercise pre-supposes detailed knowledge of the material that is being received and reworked in those films, the construction of a coherent (ish) fantasy world out of existing material. It’s rare that anyone’s view of, say, medieval warfare is going to change as a result of watching such a film; the history nerds already possess the knowledge and are just having fun thinking about how the stereotypes have been interpreted, and everyone else thinks they’re watching a film about dragons.

Gladiator II implies that its historical referents are very close to the surface, that Scott is just filling in a few gaps or just enhancing reality a little bit for the sake of spectacle, rather that it being 90% utter bollocks all the way down. The “It’s a movie, but…” pattern of thought here can focus on some really obvious movie-ish bits (indestructible hero who turns out to be the long-lost heir to the throne, the ability of Denzel Washington to twirl his moustache villainously without actually having much of a moustache, crap sharks) while taking it for granted that the background is just a slightly exaggerated version of historical reality. This is a problem.

And this is problematic not just because a load of people are going to think they know stuff about Rome which is basically wrong, but because this is also being used to present and legitimise some very questionable ideas about masculinity, gender and sexuality, race, politics etc. Indeed, one wonders whether the film is so over the top and yet lacking as much in fun as it is in coherence because Scott is convinced he is making an Important Statement About The Present Times.

Rome is depicted with every cliche of decadence in the book, as the corrupt background against which the nobility and masculinity of thoe hero will shine still more brightly despite every attempt at degrading and emasculating him; the crowd is bloodthirsty and vulgar and fickle until the moment when it recognises true nobility in this bloodied yet unbowed figure, at which point it becomes the oppressed people who will rise up against the corrupt elite in order to restore The Dream Of Rome, which is to say a different but much more masculine autocrat… Honestly, he could just have said Make Rome Great Again. Maybe in the English version he did.

My one consolation is that perhaps this pile of tripe will discredit crass ‘America is the New Rome’ analogies for at least a decade.

Zwölf Tage Pro Jahr: 27ten November 2024

At the moment, there is always a point where part of my mind realises that I am emerging from deep sleep and tries to push down the thoughts that are starting to cohere (even about how I’m going to write this up for this journal piece…), to start counting backwards in sevens or elevens, to start mentally singing the songs that sometimes help me drop off to sleep. This rarely works, but it means there is a powerful feeling of being dragged awake against my will – which does raise the question of what is doing the dragging, when semi-consciously I’m trying to resist it. Guilt and excessive work ethic, I imagine, The good news is that when I give up and get a cup of tea it’s nearly half past six rather than about four. Feeling rather hung over despite not having any alcohol since Sunday, but could be worse. Tea and biscuit, catch up on regular internet stuff, wonder about chucking in some comments on an online debate about ‘colonialism’ – someone is making semi-reasonable claims about ancient colonies in order to support a very tendentious argument about the present – and decide that life is too short.

Shower, breakfast, assorted emails and minor admin – including yet another reply to the Serbian academic who has a knack of asking questions that walk the line between ‘completely missing the point’ and ‘opening up fascinating rabbit-holes’ – before getting the tram into town. A grey day, but the clouds are starting to break up a bit around some of the hills – multiple layers, of different textures, and the occasional hint of blue sky. A thick agricultural smell hangs in the air, as the local farmer is spreading muck on the fields from which I gathered some unwanted brassicas last month. On the tram, a small blonde child decides to engage me in conversation, which never ends well – though actually it’s easier in German, as I don’t feel I have to spend any time worrying about whether my tone or level of discourse are appropriate for a three-year-old; it’s all going to be obviously foreign. “Ich heiße Neville” seems to floor her completely, and her father has to prompt her to give her own name. For much of the rest of the journey she simply stares at me – which is not unprecedented, and at least there were no tears.

The main reason for coming into the university today rather than hacking on with the chapter I needed to have finished months ago is that Wednesday morning is the informal research chat of the Institut für Klassische Philologie – every week, a colleague talks for just ten minutes about something they’re working on at the moment. For various reasons I haven’t been able to attend most of these during my stay in Innsbruck – which explains, but doesn’t excuse, my getting the time wrong: turning up at ten to ten to get a seat in plenty of time, to realise that everything had started twenty minutes earlier. Profoundly shaming, and I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that the speaker is my lovely co-host Wolfgang Kofler. There’s enough discussion time left for me to gather that he had said something about Gladiator (the big Institut trip to see the new one is next week) and for someone to get in a dig about ancient historians being excessively pedantic about historical details, without enough context to respond – something about dogs?

Brief chat with Wolfi about arrangements for next week – we’re getting into the part of my stay here where I need to earn my keep via participation in various panels and workshops, in this case a discussion with a visiting speaker about the future of classics. Quick cup of coffee, more admin emails, editing a submitted review and then home for an early lunch in preparation for a solid afternoon of writing. The weather, having worked its way through multiple dramatic variations on layers of cloud, is now glorious, so also thinking of a walk a bit later.

Writing actually start quite well – I seem to have got past the point in this horribly overdue chapter where it all comes together and starts to flow. Sadly this is interrupted by the need to help out A with various issues around checking in for her flight tomorrow, the printer not cooperating and so forth, none of which is very easy to do at a distance. Go for a walk to enjoy the sight of the western sky lit up behind a couple of Alps, and generally to clear my head a bit. It’s getting quite chilly – and I have serious pins and needles in my fingers after ten minutes of warming up again in the flat. Half an hour’s writing to try to recapture the mood – not quite, but not nothing – and then break for supper, which is deliberately quick and easy (if I’d got the chapter more or less finished I’d be heading out for a jazz gig later, but no); half-watching the next episode of Masterchef: The Professionals, which remains my favourite Masterchef variant but the contestants whose food I most fancy trying keep having a single bad day and getting eliminated.

Further work, less writing than checking notes, scribbling outlines of key points for paragraphs I haven’t done yet, and adding in references, in the hope that this works as a kind of scaffolding and tomorrow I can simply fill in all the gaps. It certainly won’t work like that, as inevitably I will come up with some new idea or formulation in the course of writing and will have to scramble to find some supporting references, but it’s definitely better than nothing, and I do feel that this is almost there. Also cleaned most of the flat in preparation for A’s arrival – just the hoovering to do, but I can’t remember what the hours are when one should avoid making too much noise, so better not to chance it.

By this point I’m pretty well running out of steam, so put on calming music (n.b. some people, my wife among them, might not find the harmonies especially calming, but the rhythms are all quite gentle…). Carry on writing up this entry; correct a misattributed Thucydides quotation on Bluesky (yes, they’ve started, with the huge influx of people in recent weeks, but perhaps I can nip them in the bud – and generally the reactions are more cordial), read some more of my current book in Volker Kutscher’s series set in pre-WWII Berlin – we’re up to 1935, so that’s all very cheerful and has no relevance at all to current events… Bed.

This Is Our Music

Two days after the event, I am still somewhat baffled as to what three of America’s leading avant-garde jazz musicians – Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara, playing and recording together as Thumbscrew – were doing in a small jazz club – sorry, Kulturlabor – in a small town just outside Innsbruck. Indeed, Formanek made a remark at the end that suggested it was a repeat visit. Maybe they liked the fact that the beer was only €4 a pint.

I’ve been a vague admirer rather than a fan of all three for some years, mostly for their work with other people (above all, Halvorson and Fujiwara In Tomeka Reid’s quartet); most of their compositions (Fujiwara’s Pith album is an exception) are, to my ear, impressive but frenetic, clever and intricate to the point of being rigid and over-composed, or, put another way, just not my style. They are, in my entirely idiosyncratic categorisation, Bristol artists; that is to say, if they were playing Bristol I’d certainly make an effort to see them (75 minutes’ drive each way, parking costs, beer definitely not €4 a pint), but they’re certainly not of London status (worth 2-3 hours train or bus each way, overnight stay, probably sticking to water).

So, having them turn up on my doorstep – or only a 35-minute bus ride from my doorstep, to be precise – was not to be missed. And it was awesome – the sort of gig when you spend an entire song focused on one musician, and then want them to play the whole thing all over again in exactly the same way so you can focus on another of them (it was therefore a relief when Fujiwara occasionally switched to vibes, as he was then, with all due respect, much less interesting). The fiddly, over-elaborate compositions are less of an issue when there are only two melodic instruments, and while it didn’t happen quite as often as I’d have liked, there were times when they locked into a serious power trio groove – very much the Weather Report “we never solo and we always solo” principle. Halvorson was especially amazing – capable of going twiddly-twiddly with the best of them (antipathy to which is why, despite being a guitarist, I listen to very little jazz guitar), but much more interested in textures and noises, very much in the Fripp vein, and with a distinctive approach to string bending that reminded me of very early John McLaughlin. I now need to get hold of lots of Thumbscrew CDs, as annoyingly they are not on Apple Music.

They received enthusiastic applause from an audience of…forty? Okay, avant-garde jazz isn’t ever a huge draw (I’ve seen similar crowds at St George’s Bristol for touring ECM artists, and so constantly fear that they will just stop booking them), but how can the economics of this work? At €22 a ticket, that is barely going to pay their air fares to the next gig (Spain, as it happens), let alone transatlantic crossings, let alone rent or mortgages. Even if the venue is run by volunteers and supported by the local council, it still has bills to pay. Someone, somewhere must be subsidising this to a hefty degree, and I don’t know if it’s local cultural organisations, the promoters, the musicians or all of the above. At the least, they probably need to push the beer up to €5 a pint.

Like A Virgin

It’s a sign of the rapid expansion of Bluesky that it now looks as if it’s worth my while searching for ‘Thucydides’ every now and then, in order to wonder whether I should trouble to correct misquotations and misattributions (given that it would be in my own name rather than via the Thucydides Bot). So far, the notorious ‘Scholars and Warriors’ misquote has been referred to twice, once many months ago so not worth bothering with and once when someone records their surprise at discovering that it’s actually by Sir William F. Butler – so this looks promising for the quality of discourse and knowledge on the platform. One person did come up with the extended/remix version of ‘Hope is a dangerous commodity’ (the added sentence from a 1988 biosecurity thriller…). But most interesting was a quote from a recent Aeon essay that had passed me by, on olive oil: “By the 5th century BCE, Thucydides felt he knew what separated civilisation from barbarism: the ability to graft the olive tree.”

I’m not sure how we know that Thucydides felt this, as he doesn’t say anything about it. There’s no reference, only a link to another Aeon essay, by Mark Fisher, that offers a thought-provoking overview of Thucydides but makes no mention of olives. The line, and select phrases from it, gets only the one hit on search engines, the article itself; take away the quote marks and the keywords are so bland and common that it’s impossible to identify possible origins.

I am however pretty confident that the origin of this idea is the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines edited by C.V. Daremberg and E. Saglio (Paris, 1873-1919), which claimed that “viticulture is the indication of an advanced civilisation” and cited Thucydides: “For Thucydides, the Greeks emerged from barbarism when they knew how to make plantations (1,2).” ‘Plantations’ here can refer to either vines or olive trees; this is the starting-point for the line that now circulates widely in English: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine” – it’s just interesting to see that it’s focused on olives for a change, where normally it appears in articles and adverts about wine. Obviously Thucydides didn’t actually say that – he’s focused on the contrast between pastoralism and settled agriculture – and there’s no mention of grafting at all.

Much of the article is a really interesting discussion of the modern production of olive oil, its patchy quality and regulation, and how this all reflects broader economic, technological and social trends. It is written – as the authors of such pieces are encouraged to write, I know from experience – around some personal experiences, viewing the pressing process and learning the skills of olive oil tasting, which are then juxtaposed with the author’s academic expertise in the history and sociology of science. But it’s framed with a couple of paragraphs of historical/mythological waffle that could have been lifted from Wikipedia or generated by AI. Take the paragraph where the Thucydides reference appears:

First domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, the tree was cultivated by Babylonians, and by the 18th century BCE the Code of Hammurabi regulated the trade in olive oil. The tree steadily inched west, with its main centres of diffusion in Palestine, Syria and Crete. By the 5th century BCE, Thucydides felt he knew what separated civilisation from barbarism: the ability to graft the olive tree. The mythical foundation of Athens begins with the goddess Athena gifting the olive tree to the Greeks. Planting an olive grove was thus a sacred act. Especially revered were those trees whose oil served as prizes for the winners of the Panathenaic Games. In the 4th century BCE, cutting down or uprooting one of those trees could be punished with exile and confiscation of property. To this day in Italy, spilling oil on the table is viewed as a bad omen.

Well… The Code of Hammurabi mentions olive oil as one of various commodities that a merchant might be dealing or a boat owner transporting; “regulated the trade in olive oil” gives the impression of much more focused attention, and I wonder if this simply reflects the fact that someone published a web article five years ago, claiming that this was all about the olive oil trade (no, I am not going to devote any time to tracing the relationship between this and similar but briefer claims on the Filippo Berio Website or whatever. Let some Hammurabi scholar do this). The only source given for any of this material is the Thucydides link mentioned above. Athena gave the olive to the Athenians, not to the Greeks, and there seems to be some confusion about the sacred olive thing and Lysias 7 – and what has that got to do with the Italian custom?

Yes, I’m a pedant, but that self-knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling deeply irritated by this. We’re not being offered a serious history of the olive and its cultivation, but a ragbag of references and anecdotes, of varied reliability and total indifference to whether they’re reliable or not, intended to establish an ‘olives have been materially and symbolically important for nearly four millennia’ point of contrast for the impact of industrial oil production in the 18th century.

A real historical study might have discussed, for example, the evidence for mass production (not just mass consumption) of olive oil in Rome, and the literary and legal evidence for various sorts of dodgy practice in the pursuit of profit. But this isn’t a proper historical study, just a mixture of boilerplate context and rhetorical foil. The article would not in face be materially weakened by cutting the first four paragraphs. Alternatively, if this is being paid by the word, could we have a bibliography and some references?

Identity

It’s been a very interesting week on social media – specifically, BlueSky – with a mass influx of new users, the majority presumably fleeing Ex-Twitter in the aftermath of its owner’s embrace of Trump and an ever more overt far-right agenda, and the failure of enough American voters to reject this. Certainly my follower count has more than doubled in a week, and this has created an unfamiliar problem of how to respond.

My approach to social media has always been to emphasise dialogue, or at least to assume that this is what it’s supposed to be about (whereas I think we’ve all known some otherwise lovely people who joined Ex-Twitter solely to broadcast news of their latest publications or achievements, who therefore tended to follow a small number of people-like-them and/or people-they-aspired-to-be-liked-by-them); on the other hand, on practical grounds alone, I’m not going to follow absolutely everyone who follows me. As I was a relatively late adopter of Ex-Twitter, followers there tended to appear quite gradually, giving me leisure to consider whether they seemed like decent and interesting people. Being faced with a hundred or more in a day is a very different proposition.

Now, I’m certainly not going to limit myself to people I know or at least recognise – the whole point, so far as I’m concerned, is to extend my network, and in particular to replicate my Ex-Twitter experience of getting to hear from graduate students and younger colleagues whom I might otherwise not encounter, and likewise to get a sense of things happening in other disciplines. But I do actually prefer to follow real people, and to follow people where there is some evidence that we have something in common. Put crudely, if you’ve followed me but you don’t have a profile picture, your bio is humourous but uninformative, you’re never posted anything and your handle is a pseudonym, I am not going to follow you back.

I have generally posted under my real name – or at least my main account has been under my real name, even if I have also had a couple of pseudonymous accounts (now dormant) for different humourous purposes, the Thucydiocy Bot (still staggering on) and an Instagram account that isn’t intended to be professional. I am conscious that this is a reflection of privilege, and that some people have very good reasons to be pseudonymous, and it is perfectly possible to build up credibility with your online identity on the basis of what you post rather than relying on professional credentials.

But that takes time – and BlueSky doesn’t have an algorithm that is going to boost you into people’s mentions in the way Ex-Twitter sometimes did. It feels counter-intuitive, and it’s certainly the opposite from how I started out on the old platform, back in the day, but I would strongly advise writing a couple of posts, to give a sense of what you’re hoping to contribute to the conversation, before you actually start following anyone. No, no one is likely to see these at first because no one is following you – but when you start following people, at least some of them are going to click on your profile to take a look, and these posts may be what persuades them that you’re worth following back.

So, apologies to mrsmithgoestocleethorpes, you have no bio and your sole post is a repost of someone I already follow – so we may have interests in common, but there’s not yet enough evidence that we can be friends. And apologies to Jim – bio, “A questing soul” – but through no fault of your own, you’ve summoned up all sorts of negative associations that you probably had no possible means of anticipating (first thought: Jim the miserable bloke in Girls With Slingshots whose own men’s support group starts avoiding him for being a downer), and nothing else you say – which is in fact as yet literally nothing – counteracts this.

My shallowness is of an especially pretentious variety, I have to admit; at some point, AI-powered bots are going to recognise that something along the lines of “Bastard daughter of PJ Harvey and Grant Morrison. PhD in queer readings of Xenophon’s Anabasis. Release the Whiskered Myotis!” is the way to my heart, or at any rate an automatic follow. In the age of information overload, we all need our own algorithms, and at the moment, to be quite honest, I’m skipping over a lot of people simply on the basis of insufficient data.