The Pitch

The giant slumbers in Cambridge for the exam period; until May week (sometime in June), the Nerd is unveiled in her conspicuous absence. Sorry, the Nerd is not necessarily female, but I've gotten into the bad habit of using a female pronoun for 'the reader' in essays. You know, undermining Patriarchy and all that. One pronoun at a time. Actually, I'm feeling so bloody subversive that I'm going to decapitalise: patriarchy. There. Anyway, the androgynous undergraduate animal confines itself to its study space for the next few weeks, pulling the curtains over the distracting sun and sky. And you would too, if you were battling for the same stake. Cambridge is completely different to the Australian university model of assessment, at least, in that the result for your WHOLE DEGREE rides on final exams at the end of three/four years. Suicide watch runs round the clock.

The downtime has an up-side in that it provides an environment in which knuckling down is perfectly legitimate. My dissertation is due in a meagre six weeks, so the knuckle-down is nothing if not necessary. But, even though I've probably never had more to write in less time, I'm inexplicably calm. Being in Cambridge seems to have had exactly the opposite effect on me than I initially thought it would. I worried that the pressure-cooker would dissolve me into nervous mash, but I'm feeling more relaxed than I was during my final undergraduate year back in Syd. The presence of much cleverer, more ambidextrous, more ambitious lads and lasses has given me a humble prod, steady energy - no more and no less.

A bit of old fashioned quietude gives me roomy opportunities to indulge in some pre-emptive nostalgia. A fair chunk of friends I've made in college and faculty are off to greener greens next year, soon-to-be Masters of their own degrees. A great crew of people on my course will be sorely missed; three out of nine (including myself, thesis permitting) are staying for a PhD, which isn't a bad strike-rate in the scheme of things. Anyway, sombre reflections on the brevity of youth have left me pondering what to do with my own (litephorical) summer. Reading loads of Latin love elegy doesn't help. If I get the 'life is short you're only young for the most piffling of spans you're a flower about to wilt you'll be old and past it soon shit shit you're already there' topos one more time, I think I'll spontaneously sprout some grey. A good way to get out of it is to remind yourself that it's usually just a love-poet trying to convince his mistress to give him some cheap action. Nevertheless, the thought is a pretty permanent fixture in my consciousness. Propertius, I hope it worked for you.

Which leads me to something I've been flirting with and tossing over for a while now. All puns - as always - forcefully intended. Switch off now if classical material bores you by definition; alternatively, give it a go...it might just get you going. Just over two thou years ago, Ovid wrote a poem that supposedly - so the inherited knowledge engraves - helped to get him exiled from Rome to what was then the darkest edge of the earth: the Black Sea on the Bulgarian coast. Arguably it remains that way, though the Tourist Authority of Bulgaria, and my Bulgarian friend who has been acting as a plain-clothes agent for them since birth, might say otherwise. Get your hands on David Malouf's An Imaginary Life if you want to see what happens when a killer modern author imagines Ovid in exile. Anyway, this poem - the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love - didn't quite gel with the moral models Augustus was trying to build for Rome at the time. It's a didactic (i.e. instructional, like DIY how-to guides) poem in three parts which sets about teaching the reader the fine art of picking-up: the first two sections address the men about the ladies, the third the ladies about the men. The general impression of lurve it creates is one of free-and-easy communion between well-to-do men and women of the demimonde; although debate is always raging over just what kind of girl Ovid was talking about/to. Augustus was a family man and a good pagan, becoming more so as his own grey hairs multiplied. Evidently, Ovid's 'irreverent' poetic peccadilloes were never going to fly for long.

It's an absolute jewel of a poem, particularly for the non-classicist (or classical dabbler...sorry, it's a constant fight to pull elitism out of the package) who is usually, and I generalise, delighted whenever she feels a bond with the ancient world. 'Aah, isn't that nice? They courted and mated just like us, those R/Wo-mans!' Hold your horses, we've come a long way. But I'm fascinated with that inbuilt impulse to identification, in and of itself. Why do we always want to be close to Rome, that piss-awful cosmopolis of slavery, death, disease, stench, conspicuous consumption, oppression of women, rampant inequality? The Art of Love really concentrates that issue of proximity/distance by seducing us into thinking up a Rome which is comfortingly modern and sophisticated. The only other Roman poet who can work that spell on us is, to my mind, Catullus: the passionate lover who can still banter with the boys.

Fast forward a bit: I'm also deeply intrigued by the structures of modern dating. This is partly because I feel the same complex of alienation from this institution as I do from the classical world; which is a shiny euphemism to paint over the fact that I've never really done it. An American friend of mine over here is a chronic dater; for him, the straight-up New Yorker, that's the basic building block of any sexual relationship. We always muse over the difference between American and British approaches to the dating game. Apparently the Brits' equivalent building block is not the date at all, but the drunken snog followed by subsequent drunken snogs followed by possibly spending more time with the person if the accumulated memories are good or at worst non-existent. A method with which I have some sympathy, to be sure. This seems a fairish call, though I'd hedge a few caveats around age and location: I'd guess that dating is probably more prominent in a big world-city like London, and among older (non-students) who aren't granted access to a pool of booze-infused sexual primers most nights of the week.

The novelty which I find really wacky is speed-dating. At least in the incarnation I've heard about, this is the procedure: several singles (equal numbers of both gender, in hetero version that is) sit down in a restaurant, get ten minutes to chat to the person in front of them, then musical chairs fly all over the place as one side of the table gets up and moves one seat further along. And repeat, until all combinations (and involved parties) have been exhausted. People then send their 'picks' of the night to a central organiser, the organiser informs the lucky likeable kinda gals/guys as to who likes them, then they can decide if they like the liker and want to follow up the 10 min introduction with a date of more generous proportions. Pull me up if there are holes in that explanation: but be aware that you betray a disturbing amount of familiarity with the process by doing so.

This kind of mechanised courtship is, needless to say, very different from the pick-up contexts of Ovid's poem. At times he makes it sound like there are eligible ladies crowding out the porticoes to overflow; all a man needs to do is make a visit to the right parts of town. But if it were really that easy, we wouldn't have three books of poetry about it. Three books which are choking on comic caviare, to boot. Just from (poor) memory, a few moments give me giggles. At one point Ovid advises the male reader on being attentive to the comfort of his not-yet-conquered prey: if she's cold, make sure you put her hands in your lap. Smooth and subtle, that's O's middle name. There's also the 'shameless euphemism' section: if she's fat, tell her she's well-proportioned, if she stinks, tell her she's fragrant. Etc.

So there's the wind-up; where's the pitch? Here it is, in anticlimactic form. With the well-mined humour already inherent to dating in mind, I thought some decent comedy could be wrung from the potential of the Art of Love to be taken literally. I've been thinking about a play/film (not sure which medium would work better yet) which applies the Art of Love to the modern dating sphere. Our hero - let's call him Norman for convenience, and because it has an anagram of Roman, but also No-man, contained within - is single, mid-30's, desperately looking for love in a big city. Hitherto luckless with the ladies, he is happy to try any new method, however bizarre. One of his problems is that he's incredibly literal minded and insensible to irony. Just when he feels life is rubbing his moustache in a trough full of urine, however, he comes across a copy of Ovid's Art of Love. He's always had a deep respect for classical wisdom, but this poem becomes, in his eyes, something else entirely. He reads it cover to cover, stunned the way through. No wonder he hasn't met any lookers; he's never carried out any of Ovid's sound advice! So he sets about methodically enacting everything Ovid tells him. At work, over the water-cooler perhaps, he sidles up to an attractive colleague: 'Bit cold today, eh?' says Norman. 'Yes, it is.' the colleague replies politely. Norman takes his cue: he grabs her hand and shoves it between his legs, all the while making seductive eyes. She removes her hand, picks up her water, and walks off silently. Norman writes 'Progress - physical contact near genitals' in his notebook. Or something like that.

Basically the laughs would stem from what happens when a humourless man reads the Art of Love literally and applies its principles in rigid order. The jars and jolts already involved in reading an ancient text two thousand years on would be amplified by his appalling sense of timing and context. Another scene might involve Norman in Rome, doing his research and gravitating to the very pick-up hotspots Ovid identifies. There are no longer hordes of women milling around the (ruined) portico, but pot-bellied council workers having a smoke. He asks them where the women who usually throng the area in readiness to have sex have gone; one of them points him to a brothel. He goes in and comes out a few seconds later. Out with the notebook: 'Progress - sexual congress, though at considerable monetary expense'.

The first two books of the poem are structured around trapping and caging: how to catch a girl in the first place, and how to maintain her interest once she's there. There could be massive scope for Norman misjudgement on precisely when to progress to the next stage; he could decide arbitrarily when to move on to phase 2, for example, after the awkward encounter at the water-cooler. This guy would, in many senses of the word, be a walking anachronism: a figure who doesn't belong in his own time, or any time for that matter, but also without a comic's clock (and with a comic's clock for that very reason), someone who does too much too soon, at the wrong time, and doesn't know when to say when.

Yeah, there would need to be a plot. And it would obviously be a very different work depending on medium of choice. Film would give more freedom for spatio-temporal movement, but a play might concentrate things better: for example, the play could be set at a speed-dating table, where Norman has to apply his doctrine in express form, and things would get progressively more outrageous as the pace accelerated. Thousands of blanks as there are, I essentially wrote this to steal much-valued input from You, most competent reader. Do you think there's anything in this, or is it just a bin-bound hallucination? If it is just a hallucination, is it of slightly better quality than my usual ones which involve monkeys wearing top-hats made of hemp underpants? Star ratings necessary. Just make them out of a meaningfully large number, like 400.

To end with an apology: sorry. I'm usually the first to whine about pretentious idea-workshopping. But you all know that my ticker runs on hypocrisy. So let's run with it!