Reviewzzz

I know this is cheating, but a couple of peeps have asked about my reviews which appeared in The Cambridge Student (one of the student rags) earlier in the term. Since I'm concerned about you wasting your lives, I've deliberately made them short. One's on Nabokov, the other on Pop Science (a few of my favourite things). The Nabokov was for a 'Cambridge Classics' column, a weekly review of pieces set in Cambridge; hence the focus on setting.


Here's something I prepared earlier:

Vladimir Nabokov – Glory

It was a sad moment when the man in the UL pasted a virgin date slip on the inner cover of Glory. I calculated that the book had sat there unborrowed for twenty-seven years; a harsh service of solitude for any book, but particularly for an all-time favourite, and for one which images 1920’s Cambridge so beautifully.

Sadness, however, quickly transmuted into gush, as I remembered how much I loved this novel. Glory is a charming Bildungsroman-type story, which tells the life adventures of Martin Edelweiss, a Russian born boy/man whose father dies early, and mother dotes dearly. Just as Martin hits the romantic stride of adolescence, he and his mother must flee revolutionary Russia. Via a formative dalliance with an older woman in Greece, and a brief refuge with his Uncle in Switzerland, it’s decided that Martin should attend Cambridge. Here he falls in love with an unattainable family friend, forms an awkward threesome with Darwin, who is equally smitten with first friend, dines with the pederastic professor of Russian literature, wins the college championship over St John’s as goalkeeper for Trinity, floats down the Cam in the languid suspension of an early summer, post-exam, pre-result day, fights Darwin in the meadow, then tenderly washes Darwin’s wounds in the river.

If those vignettes narrow too much, it may be because Glory’s program encourages delight in the small details, pointless joy in the ordinary everyday. Martin is a wholly sympathetic creation, a naïve, imaginative youth who relishes adventure for adventure’s sake. The happy portrait of Cambridge is one more reason to read a novel that doesn’t require them. All it asks is to feel that mysterious something upon arrival at an ending which is not-much-of-an-ending: ‘just a bird perching on a wicket in the grayness of a wet day’.

Review of S. J. Gould Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time

Stephen Jay Gould was the original golden-haired jock in the now crowded cafeteria that is the genre of ‘popular science’. So popular was this populariser that he even made it into the elite pop-culture club of animation as himself in The Simpsons. But don’t let your anti-vulgar reflex deprive you of reading Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: for there was certainly substance to the hype.

This book is superficially about geology. But it is also a fascinating application of literary criticism to a discipline that doesn’t tend to indulge this kind of close reading. Treating non-fiction genres (especially history, science) as art is still a small business. Gould’s strength is just this: the recognition that scientific discourse is as much about the wrapping as the precious idea-nugget inside.

Gould frames himself as a man on a mission: the revolutionary re-reading of three ‘canonical’ works in the history of geology. These are Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth (1680-89), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. All three feature prominently in the ‘textbook’ (Gould’s term) narrative of geology’s history, from armchair dilettantism to real (masculine?) empirical observation. Gould brings in the straw men only to set them alight; he deconstructs the myth with a dexterity that would impress any self-respecting revisionist. His strategy is to unlock these texts by showing that all three scientists were contemplating the same dichotomy: namely time’s arrow (a view of time as one-directional progress) versus time’s cycle (time as eternal repetition). The debate is old as time itself, but it puts our (sometimes) unquestioned 21st century view of time-as-progress into long-term perspective.

In Gould (1941-2002) we had an historian of science who was not only receptive to the literary art of his scientific predecessors, but a wonderful practitioner of it himself. His language is rich in metaphor and vivid with pithy phrases like ‘Science self-selects for poor writing.’ Yes it does: and Gould made the evolutionary cut. I would heartily recommend this book to posterity, which, according to Lyell’s cyclical time, might well be another race of ichthyosaurs.

The Sandstones of Time

It's well established that most Australians love old bricks. The wide brown land ticks several utopian boxes: weather, food, great barrier reef. But on the venerable building front, the marks are much lower. There would have been a time (twenty years ago?) of great confidence in the enshrined value of Australia as a place to see, when our lack of flashy European monuments was more than outrun by our wonderfully varied landscape. That's as nationalistic as I'll get, and besides, pride in landscape is the worst form of a rubbish phenomenon: love of country, if it has to happen, would better take its justification from the human institutions we can take responsibility for, not the rocks that were strewn there by a scatterbrain deity well before humans were around to invent universal health care. There's another rant in that. Anyway, I was on the point of the point: how sobering a thought that these natural beauties, once believed to be stored in the securest treasury of unchanging nature, may not outlast Trinity College. You can restore a chapel, but not a rise in sea temperature. The scales of permanence have tipped.

Apocalypse later. For now, back to the Australian love of sandstone. When I first arrived here, I was stunned at the ancientness of it all. But it was a kind of ancientness that was different from the cordoned palaces and grand cathedrals of Europe; these felt like monuments in the most sterile sense of the word, intact ruins advertising a lost age when there were royals without tabloids, and god had a capital G. I'm not bulldozing ruins here. Ruins are my business; day by day I wade through the fragments and remnants of 'dead' languages, half-lost literature, and wrangle with the tourist infrastructure that has built up around them. So I'm devoutly pro-ruin (not the same as pro-destruction). But it did seem that most of the architectural wonders of Europe were built in devotion to power structures which are no longer very important (sorry to all kings, queens and Catholics reading this). Well, modify that: no longer very important to me, a run of the mill secular Aussie. From centres of government and worship to pockets for collecting tourist coin; when a space is used for seeing and not for doing, in my eyes it's got the ruin bug.

I think that's what set the old buildings of Cambridge apart. The colleges are indeed dumping grounds for tourist money and 'I waz 'ere, 2009' photography, but they are also, as every self-respecting college sign will tell you, places where people 'live and work'. The sandstone is inhabited. The cobbles are smoothed and cracked from long use. The walls are scuffed and uneven at handlebar height after years of cycles leaning on them for support. It's nice to think that the heavy stones are not just inert spectacles, or, worse than that, still propping up campaigns against abortion and contraception: they are frames for work always in progress, and good work, for the most part. This is one of he homes of the progress myth, which, though humbled every day, sticks around tenaciously. You'd hope that, however long humanoids last, they could use a Cambridge to reflect on how far they've come, and then to help them go further.

Anyway, as always with the humdrum rhythm of routine (which is more of a lullaby to me than most people), I sometimes fall asleep on my bike and forget where I am. Not literally of course. Don't drink and ride. But however far down my head is kept at times, I've been trying to take more stock recently of where I am: what I'm seeing and what I'm doing. I realised that a weekday in my life here involves a pretty good level of contact with beautiful things.

I lumber into the world at about 8am. I eat some sweet cereal which my lovely girlfriend has concocted from a mixture of nuts, fruit, inferior and superior grade muesli, much more than the sum of its parts. Beautiful thing number one. I have a cup of tea, which tasted good in Australia, but in England, where it's zero celsius and falling, it tastes more like free cocaine to a retrenched executive. Beautiful thing number two.

This is quickly deteriorating into a day-in-the-life-of; if it's too banal, have my blessing to leave. Right, now that the ADHD's are out of the way, back to it. Feasted and dressed, I check the BBC 24-hour weatherwatch. The greatest-hits selection of weather in any given day, snow, rain, sleet, sun, drizzle, and the most exciting of all, clouds, inevitably results in me getting dressed for a second time. Then it's off to the dream factory, the place where cola and fullstops fondle each other, footnotes get made and laid: the library. I bike off along the path from my apartment (west of the city centre): first I pass a huge field, spanning to the horizon, full of hibernating haystacks in black plastic wraps, which I once thought were sculptures lamenting the modern substitution of plastic for hay. On the left, along the whole path, a tiny stream with its dependent greenery runs parallel. The brush is thick, almost hedge like; several times I've walked along it only to have some cocky birds burst out of it right above my head, making me jump when I'm trying my best to do a composed Cambridge gait. Round a bend I come to a picturesque little lake on the right, part of a grove that forms the northern tip of the University Athletics ground. It invariably reminds me of how I'll never do another 10km running race. On the left is the Cambridge Lawn Tennis Club. If I have anything to do with it, this dormant little volcano will go off in the spring. The lava will look like a mixture of Pimms, sweat and vomit.

Then it's onto the 'real road'; every day I reenact the terror of unscrewing the training wheels. This quiet street (Adams Rd) is one of the ritzier bits of town: big houses with hedges in the front and mini-orchards in the back. I warm up to the daily college perve with a view of the most boring first. Robinson College's red brick, direct from the 80's to you, neither offends nor impresses. The Grange Rd intersection then presents me with my first decision of the day, an oh-so-literal fork in the road. Should I cut through the chaff and head straight on to the beauty spot, staking a claim on a desk in King's library? Or should I hang a right and move towards the Fac, the f-word abbreviation for the Classics Faculty Library?

It really is choose your own adventure made live in Cambridge, where you never quite know which library you'll end up in. I have to admit I'm more prone to the second option; literary material is more plentiful and accessible in the Fac. So, a right heading south down Grange Rd takes me past the University Library on the left. This storehouse is a legal deposit library, meaning it automatically gets a copy of every book published in the U.K. You'd think it would wear a smile on its face for all that free packaged knowledge. On the contrary, it's very gloomy about it on the outside (it looks like a ziggurat prison, something a Victorian mind may have drawn up for max-incarceration with max-efficiency). On the inside, it's even worse: books spill over from the shelves and invade your precious desk space. I often think that if I died reading in there, my body wouldn't decompose, but would grow books the next day. Merrily I bypass the UL, then. A bit further on the right, there appears the University Rugby Union stadium, which invariably reminds me of how shit a sport is Rugby Union. That cheers me up. Selwyn College comes up quickly on the left (more red-brick, but of the tasteful 19th century sort) and I round the bend into Sidgwick Ave, past the lesser bit of Newnham College (Women Only; this is actually one of my favourite colleges, not for the women part, but for the gardens, pretty even in winter). Down the tree-canopied Sidgwick Ave, and BAM! - the Fac hits you in the face with more, worse, red-brick mediocrity. It's housed on the aptly termed 'Sidgwick Site', along with some siblings: Law, English, Criminology, Modern and Medieval Languages. The Law Fac, as always seems the case with this aristocratic subject, got the brand spanking new architecture. Hence its recent occupation by students in protest over Gaza. They were going to take Classics, but their energy dissolved beneath the Kryptonite of red-brick. Not to mention the olfactory shelling from the graduate common room fridge.

A lot of people despise the Fac library, but I find something charming and utilitarian about it. Shelves run along the innards of the room, grouped in order of general awesomeness: Latin and Greek literature is closest to the entrance, while yawn-inducing art/architecture is relegated to the very back (jokes...but behind every joke...is a shelf of seriousness). Along the windows on both sides of the room are rows and rows of desks. I choose one where my nose-picking will be most conspicuous or least conspicuous, depending on the state of my sinuses. Then I set up shop and hoe down with Virgil, Horace or Ovid - whoever is the flavour of the moment. When I've read too much about how super Augustus is, and how the fields spontaneously produce spaghetti bolognaise under his reign, I answer my growling stomach with a walk. Sometimes, if organised, I head thirty metres to the common room and eat the leftover glory of last night's banquet (usually a roasted lamb with pig legs and cow bum - carnivorousness is the new vegetarianism), but other times, if lazy, I set off for King's hall. Here the beauty really kicks in. The famed postcard image of Cambridge, King's chapel with Clare College court to its left, is the view as I cross Queen's Rd. Once through the back gate of the college, I always jump a little bit. A tributary of the Cam follows by my right side as I make the gentle incline up the stone path towards the bridge over the river. Trees line the path, and of late, little yellow flowers (crocuses?) that seem to tease you with promises of far-off spring. When it snowed heavily a couple of weeks ago, this scene was transformed into monochrome heaven.

At the apex of the bridge, I always make sure I look right and left. The Cam was the line along which the colleges were first drawn, and it would be a waste not to get an ocular fill of the gentle river going down towards Trinity, and up towards Queen's. If God is feeling the weather for that day, punts are scattered in both directions: these are small, flat boats, more boring versions of the Venetian gondola. Their precious cargo is half Italian, half Japanese. Not only do they look picturesque, but also have functional value in keeping delinquent tourists off the streets. I have a brief stare at the Mathematical Bridge Newton apparently designed: it looks gravity-defying, so must have been built before his accident with the apple.

I tear myself away from the hypnotic rhythms of the river and stroll up the path, Bodley's on the right, back lawn on the left. In a few metres, the library appears, deceptively swallowed into the sandstone: but on the inside, one of the best rooms to discharge daily grinding ever. I'll be getting intimate with her later. Then, since all this gazing gets me groaning (tum-wise), I'm through the tall wooden doors and into the cafeteria in one deft movement (actually several steps...but this post is getting out of control). I take my pick of the meat or veg on offer, make sure the plate is seasoned with chips - which dish King's is especially adept at producing, sometimes curly, sometimes straight, ever savoured - and proceed to the Hall. Here I sit with comrades and talk poetry and truth; both categories are usually covered by comments on the quality of the chips. The chips are poetry, and that's the truth.

Long have I rambled, and rambling is no hangover remedy. Anyway, that's a taster response to the question 'So...what do you DO every day?' I've gone out on a limb and assumed interest, feel free not to indulge. But come this far, you're probably well over-indulged by now. So those are the bricks out of which my days are built. Scuffed they may be; but they continue to look wonderful.

Supervisions

We did seminars; now it's time to get a little more intimate. The other primary outlet for human contact in the life of a classics graduate is the ominously titled 'supervision'. Scrub the word of its management speak surface rust and imagine a tall professor pacing back and forth in a book-crammed room, stoking fire, wielding cane, occasionally stopping to loom over the bedraggled student who scribbles away in the corner. Congratulations: you haven't imagined a supervision.

Or at least not one of mine. The supervision is, education wise, probably one of the best things about Cambridge. It is a rare event, happening only once every two or three weeks, but all the more special for the infrequency. Something wonderful indeed is it to pant up a narrow medieval staircase, boards creaking and hearts aflutter, knock on the door of your all-time academic hero, hear the first muted tones of that voice on the other side of the heavy timber, that honeyed voice which will be yours alone for the next blissful half hour. On paper, all a supervision involves is talking over your work, one on one, with your supervisor. But in practice, it's a whole lot more.

I scored a supervisor this term who may just be the best teacher I've/ll ever had/ve. Let him be known as Prof H. His method might be described as inspiration through bafflement. I sat down on his generous couch for the first time last Thursday, and, after venturing a bit o' the old tiny talk, started making lame enquiries about what he thought of the draft I had handed him the day before. An hour and a half later, I had no answer. Here is a sample of the notes I took:

No public broadcasting - lack of microphones.
No populace to be addressed by prophetic voice nowadays. We don't have a crier. Invented idea of upping and leaving.

Anchored.

Agrippa out there changing landscape.
What is the city? Something that could get into a boat?
The gubernator - ship of state. Those guys are reshaping the world...
Certain way of attending to reality.

...

Love is madness - access to philosophy. Erotic love to be the same thing as reading Plato.

Hating love, loving hate. Rough, real talk - perfect iambic woman a match for him? Just dreamt up woman. Giving elegy to iambist - the hatred a turn-on. Is this like difference between 7 and 16?

...

Everyone knows what Virgil is about to say.

...

Plutarch anecdote - two crows trained, one to say 'Ave Caesar', the other 'Ave Antoni'. Flexibility of civil war.

If that doesn't look nonsensical to you, then you are a genius. And that's not a quarter of my frantic scribblings transcribed. Basically the whole thing was one fantastic flight over the rooftops of Greece and Rome. Prof H hopped back and forth, digressing, alluding, eluding; I caught what I could in my flimsy ink and paper net, but fear I lost the catch of the day. An added problem was that the thoughts seemed to wilt as soon as they flowered, never lingering longer than the brief apex that the life-cycle demanded. Like those time delay shots of nature budding and dying in the space of a few seconds, it all appeared and vanished in a blink or breath. And then, just as you're kicking yourself for letting the delicate kernel fall through your fingers, he destroys everything by chucking a retrospective cloak of doubt over it all, topping off a five minute spiel with a 'or something like that, anyway' or the sonic silence of a verbal 'dot dot dot'. So do you really think like that, or were you donning the mask? Is that Prof H, or his inner devil's advocate? Will the real Prof H please stand up? Tangled in strands of irony, never until now did I really mean 'really makes you think'. Really. No irony. Dot dot dot...

To the untrained eye that may all look frustrating and pointless. And when I left the room, I did walk a rather perplexed walk up to hall for lunch. But a couple of hours later - the stupor snapped and dispersed - I revisited my notes, and they began to form a very fuzzy logic. I repeated a few days later, clarity factor rising; intervals of time seemed to make them speak, louder at a distance. Like the man's execrable handwriting, the squiggles started to reveal their secret forms.

After whining a few weeks back that the written word has become my only meaningful medium of communication, I now have to reassess. If I came across the story of the two crows - man in Rome brings out his talking crow after Octavian's (Caesar) victory, trained to say 'Hail Caesar!', then reveals that he had another one at home all along, trained to say 'Hail Antony!' in the event that the battle of Actium had gone the other way (or something like that...) - in Plutarch, I would have forgotten it straight away. But now the two crows peck at me for life.

Eight Hundred Years of Cambridge is a long time to get things right. This educational megalith has accrued untold wealth, eighty something Nobel prizes, buckets of Lord Byron's vomit (no matter how poetic). But eclipsing them all is that modest model of transmission, where Knowing Little meets and talks with Knowing Lots, baffled collides with baffler - and gets supervised to smithereens.