All in a Don's Day Read online

  This is particularly awkward with graduate students, who get the same kind of open reports. Imagine this fictional scenario. (Don’t worry my grads – it really is fictional and not about you.)

  Suppose that I am supervising a relatively weak PhD student … let’s call him Jim. Jim is reaching the end of his fourth year of research and is struggling to finish his thesis, is on the verge of depression and of giving up. (The end of a PhD is a tense time for even the most robust individuals.) Frankly I am not confident that Jim will make it, but I meet him every week, with a pretty upbeat message: what he’s written so far is more or less fine, and all he needs to do is get those last 20,000 words done. This isn’t entirely true, but if at this point I tell him that his first two chapters aren’t really up to scratch and will need a lot more work, he will simply give up … and I reckon that the best chance of successful completion is to get some kind of draft finished. Then we can work on improvements. ‘Do you really think it’s OK?’ asks Jim. ‘Yes’ I say with some caveats … though Jim doesn’t spot the caveats. And I don’t really intend him to.

  Then the termly report has to be filled in on-line. The truth I ought to be conveying is that we have a potential disaster on our hands here, but if Jim reads that, he’ll simply give up or go right over the edge. It’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he’ll accuse me of gross hypocrisy to boot. So I tailor something to be not entirely untrue, but with roughly the same upbeat message that I’m transmitting weekly and not much anxiety showing. (‘Although there has been some slippage in his timetable, Jim is now making great strides towards completion …’)

  Let’s suppose I don’t win with Jim, and he does give up – or finishes but doesn’t pass. My colleagues try to find out what went wrong and summon up all the reports. There’s not a single one which predicts the disaster that came. The disaster was completely unpredictable, they conclude.

  No it wasn’t, I think. This isn’t transparency, it’s opacity in a new guise. Can’t we accept that a bit of secrecy might be a price worth paying for honesty?

  Comments

  Yeah, Jim’s a worry … but what is the actual difficulty here? Wasn’t it better he should give up, which Mary put all that effort into coaxing him not to do?

  PAUL

  Wouldn’t it be possible to try and be frank with this fictional Jim well before it comes to potential disaster? If he doesn’t think you’ve noticed and you continue giving him positive feedback, he won’t ask for help he knows he needs or for the push he knows he should get (let’s face it, sometimes you know you need a good solid push from your supervisor).

  ZAREEN

  The laughter lover

  15 March 2009

  I should have known that giving a big lecture about the late Roman joke book (called the The Laughter Lover or, in Greek, Philogelos) in Comic Relief week would attract more interest in this particular byway of the Classics than usual. But when – months ago – I fixed the date to go to Newcastle for the gig, I hadn’t realised that it was Comic Relief.

  In fact, I didn’t actually realise the coincidence till someone pointed it out just before the lecture started. ‘Funny you’re lecturing on Roman jokes when it’s Red Nose Day tomorrow,’ they said.

  Anyway, thanks to the efficient press release put out by Newcastle University, there had already been a number of media inquiries to my mobile phone before I reached the banks of the Tyne. In this case, they were quite hard to deal with. The problem was that most of the journalists had got the impression that I had actually discovered – or dug up, perhaps – a new and entirely unknown book of Roman jokes.

  The Daily Mail asked if they could have a picture of it and didn’t seem quite to think that a picture of Roger Dawe’s published edition in the Teubner text series (which is all I could offer) was actually what they were looking for.

  It was hard to get the point across that the text had been known for centuries (Dr Johnson had been keen on it, and Jim Bowen had recently performed parts of it), but that I was looking at it harder than anyone had done for ages and in a new way. That’s what being ‘new’ is, for the most part, in Classics.

  Still, I soon found that having a little repertoire of ancient jokes that I could quote, tailored to the paper or show in question, did the trick. I even found some that pleased the man from The Sun

  I think the biggest hit with The Sun was this one.

  ‘A man says to his sex-crazed wife, ‘What shall we do tonight – have dinner or have sex?’ ‘Whichever you like,’ she replied, ‘but there’s no bread.’

  Oddly the interest didn’t fade once Red Nose Day had passed. The Today programme wanted a joke or two for the programme on Saturday morning. This was a bit of a problem, as I was due at my Speed Awareness Training in Milton Keynes by 9.30 (and the husband had rightly said that I was to be out of the house by 7.30). In the end, I told the gags over the phone at 7.25, before zooming (no, not zooming) off in the car.

  But not before the World Service had rung to ask for an interview for Newshour. The only time for this was in the car park at the Safety Training Centre, if I got there in good time.

  I did, and spent the last few minutes before 9.30 prerecording an interview via my mobile, to be used later in the day. Plaudits where they are due. The World Service outstripped even the Today programme in intelligence. There was no need to explain the nature of the ‘discovery’, and we spent five minutes talking about the interesting way that these Roman jokes played on questions of disputed identity (which I’m particularly interested in).

  And I gave them my favourite joke.

  ‘Three men – a scholasticos (an egghead), a barber and a bald man – were going on a long journey and had to camp out at night. They decided to take it in shifts to watch over the luggage. The barber took the first shift, but got bored. So to pass the time, he shaved the head of the scholasticos – then woke him up to take his turn. The scholasticos got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. ‘What an idiot that barber is,’ he said, ‘he’s woken up baldy instead of me.’

  Comments

  Commenters couldn’t resist adding some more favourite scholasticos (or scholastikos) jokes from The Laughter Lover …

  My favourite scholasticos joke is the one in which the scholasticos hears that one of a pair of identical twin brothers has died. When he meets the surviving brother, he asks, ‘So who died, you or your brother?′

  GILBERT L. GIGLIOTTI

  I like this one, which seems to me quite subtle. A scholastikos, having dreamt he had stepped on a nail, is bandaging his foot. His fellow scholastikos asks why and, on learning the reason, says ‘No wonder they call us stupid! Why ever do you sleep barefoot?’

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  … before moving on to the press …

  Many of the sensational headlines are promoted by universities’ press offices. Sometimes I feel sorry for the press officers because it requires a good imagination and cross-cultural thinking to sell ideas in this way. My own esteemed seat of learning once regaled the papers with stories of how its evolutionary psychology bods had discovered that mammals with bigger brains had a better chance of escaping predators. I saluted the free rag Metro when the latter reported this story ironically under the headline ‘No shit Sherlock!’

  SW FOSKA

  Heston’s Roman feast

  25 March 2009

  Heston Blumenthal’s historic cookery series on Channel 4 took on Roman food this week (filmed, I guess, before his Fat Duck restaurant had its nasty brush with the norovirus). There was plenty of luxury and sex (almost) on display. The Romans, we learned, were ‘theatrical, deviant and orgasmic’ – and Heston set out to recreate their theatrical, deviant and orgasmic food for a group of celebs who had been hired to consume and comment on the finished product.

  There was a lot of library work going on in the background, and plenty of pictures of Heston scanning the Loeb edition of Petronius’ Satyricon. But the fun came in seeing if he could actually make
the dishes.

  He did rather well with the Roman staple of garum – their favourite sauce, made out of rotten fish, which, as Heston pointed out, they seem to have smeared over most things. It is this that usually defeats undergraduate Roman dinner parties (anchovy paste doesn’t quite get it). But even if Heston didn’t have the patience to rot his fish for the three months that the Romans did, he did manage to heat up and blend together a load of mackerel intestines, so that they ended up looking rather like a Thai sauce which was (so Heston insisted) really ‘delicious’.

  The most interesting bit for me was the recreation of the ‘Trojan pig’. This is a joking dish described by Petronius in the Satyricon, but known elsewhere in Roman literature. It’s a large roast pig stuffed with sausages, so that when the flesh of the pig is slit, what looks like intestines tumble out.

  In Petronius, it is a neat joke played on the dinner guests, staged between the host, Trimalchio, and his cook. The pig is brought in to the banquet, and with it comes the cook – full of apologies that he has forgotten to gut the animal. Trimalchio feigns anger and orders the cook to strip for a whipping, until the other guests plead for mercy. ‘OK,’ says Trimalchio, ‘gut it now.’ And out come all those sausages … and everyone applauds.

  Heston had rather more trouble with this one.

  He ended up having to push the pig in on a great trolley and arrange it rather awkwardly to have its belly slit. The sausages had been very carefully positioned inside, using a medical endoscope to get them in just the right place (not a facility available in the Roman kitchen). Even so, when the knife went in, nothing exactly tumbled out very impressively … even though the celebs made suitable ‘ooh aah’ noises, and he eventually managed to present them with a trayful of what you might easily have mistaken for innards.

  He had better luck with Petronius’ ejaculating cake, which was the centrepiece of his Roman pudding.

  So how did Heston score for authenticity? Could have been worse, I thought. True, it was the same old stuff about the Romans being the world’s first bulimics, and I kept having a nasty feeling that we were going to be told that old myth about them vomiting between courses (though we never actually were). And there wasn’t even a gesture to the fact that, even if the rich really did eat this sort of stuff (which they probably didn’t – the Satyricon is a fantasy novel, for heaven’s sake), the poor were on a much more subdued diet of cheese, fruit and cabbage.

  All the same, I’m pleased to report that he passed what I once called the ‘dormouse test’. (‘The longer you have to wait for a dormouse to appear in a recreated Roman banquet, the more accurate the reconstruction is likely to be.’) We learned about the Romans eating flamingos and sows’ udders, and there was a lurid sequence in which Heston whipped up a calf’s brain custard. But there was not a dormouse in sight.

  Comments

  I too was wondering when we going to get to the dormouse. I suspect that the procedure used for fattening the poor creatures didn′t make it past the welfare people – though to judge by Heston′s demeanour in the slaughterhouse, or when cheerfully disembowelling live fish, he wouldn′t have minded.

  The last dish, the ′ejaculating cake′, seemed to have been made largely of chocolate. Not too many points for authenticity there, methinks.

  NELSON JONES

  Should schools teach Twittering?

  3 April 2009

  There was much hand-wringing a few days ago about the idea that primary schools should give up teaching kids about the nineteenth century and should teach them about blogs, Twittering and Wiki instead.

  The thing that bothered me most about this was not the elevation of Twittering skills above (say) poetry, but the idea that central government would be requiring Twittering (or whatever) of all schools in England. More imposition of a one-size-fits-all model on to long-suffering, and very diverse, teachers and pupils.

  I can’t see anything wrong, in itself, in teaching kids about all kinds of different uses of languages and styles and genres. In fact, I vividly remember when I was about twelve, being required to practise writing telegrams in an English lesson at school. (And telegrams were almost the 1960s’ equivalent of Twitter, weren’t they?)

  The task set, I still recall, was to write a telegram to someone who had won a scholarship to Cambridge and ask them to confirm that they would be taking it up (an exercise that was also presumably one of the drip, drip ways in which our academic aspirations were raised.) My own effort (of which I’m even now quite proud) was: ‘WON SCHOLARSHIP CAMBRIDGE WIRE IF ACCEPTING’. (I thought it was clear enough without ‘STOP’ between ‘CAMBRIDGE’ and ‘WIRE’.)

  Not a bad exercise in concision. And nor would Twittering be, I suspect.

  As it happens, you will be pleased, surprised or utterly horrified to learn that ‘A Don’s Life’ itself has already featured in one area of the nation’s pedagogy. One of my friends has just published a book (World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context) which, among other things, aims to help teachers with ways of teaching literary analysis in all kinds of different genres. There’s all sorts of stuff in it: Wordsworth, Eliot, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Julian Barnes and … well … of all the unlikely things … me. To be precise, there’s an old blog posting called ‘Self-promotion?’ It was written when my book The Roman Triumph came out and talked about publicity drives (‘I started the week with Start the Week. It gets 2 million listeners, so is probably the biggest audience who’ll ever get to hear about the book’) and launch parties (‘one in a really great location in Greek St – perfect place to have a Triumph party … geddit?’). And it went on to fess up to the terror and anticipation of the first reviews. ‘So far I’ve done pretty well, and luckily. There was a great piece in the Sunday Times … But don’t worry it hasn’t gone to my head! Partly because of the little torrent of bile poured over me by Freddy Raphael in the Spectator’.

  The other writers collected in World and Time (those that are still with us, that is) may be well used to people dissecting their poetry and prose, but I have never seen anyone having a go at mine before. I expected to think that they had got it all wrong, or that they pointed to clever little stylistic features that were entirely unintentional. But not a bit of it. The book put its finger instantly on the chummy yet crafted familiar tone of the blog (the ‘geddit’ and the ‘Freddy Raphael’), the insistent addresses direct to the reader (‘Don’t worry’) and the (trying hard to be) casual repetitions (‘I started the week with Start the Week’). It also rightly picked me up on some inelegant repetitions of the not very pretty word ‘pretty’.

  And at the end of the section there were some topics and questions to be tried on the pupils: ‘Can a blog really claim to be taken seriously as a literary text?’ or ‘Do we read blogs on-screen differently from the way we read essays on a page?’

  I think I’m really quite happy at a few kids dipping into my blog and wondering about writing and literature in the electronic age. (Well, I would be quite happy, wouldn’t I?) But the idea that the whole of the school population should be forced to hone their literary skills on ‘A Don’s Life’ – even I think that’s a nightmare vision of pedagogy.

  Comments

  Businesses used to be telegraphic addresses, in order to save telegram senders money on words. Blackwell′s was BOOKS OXFORD (which seemed a little hard on its neighbour, which was simply BODOX). The Oxford Union Society was ACME OXFORD – one sometimes wondered if the M was a misprint for an N. The notes that come with a passport (sometimes the only thing to read on a Turkish bus journey) recorded that the telegraphic address of all British consulates was BRITAIN followed by the name of the city and of High Commissions was UKREP followed by the name of the city, which made sense. More mysterious was the information that the telegraphic address of all British embassies was PRODROME followed by the name of the city – what had Her Britannic Majesty to do with St John the Baptist?

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  The on-line dictionary of protocol
gives this definition of PRODROME and its use in British telegraphy:

  PRODROME. The telegraphic address of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first registered in 1884. Taken from the Greek prodromos meaning ′precursor′, it was probably chosen on the assumption that most telegrams were precursors of longer and more informative despatches. In 1911, following the Italian invasion of the Ottoman province of Tripoli, it was allegedly mistaken by the Italian military censors for the address of a press agency, and the telegrams of the British consul-general, who was considered unfriendly, were blocked.

  TONY FRANCIS

  The history girls vs. David Starkey

  5 April 2009

  David Starkey (whom I have criticised before for being a trifle inaccurate on the history of the ancient world) has been sounding off in the Radio Times about how ‘feminised’ history has become: not a development of which he is in favour.

  He’s talking about his new TV series on Henry VIII: ‘One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But it’s what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office.’

  If only it were true, I found myself thinking. Much as I admire the work of my male colleagues in ancient history, I think that the subject could only be improved by being a bit more ‘feminised’. And, so far as I can see from my Cambridge vantage point, there’s not much sign of modern British history in universities being a bastion of women’s power and influence. In fact, it’s usually said of the gender balance in UK history departments that the further from the ‘central periods’ of British history a subject is, the more likely you’ll find a woman teaching it. We’re let in at the margins, in other words.