Two Years in a Poet

Time come for the yearly performance review: another local maximum of internal- and external-examination, nicely criss-crossed and synchronised into a dense moment of existential crisis. Every Michaelmas term (October-December) I must prove myself before a jury of the wise. And here we go again. The script is by now set. We all know each other too well. I'll go into that room to be told what I am to be told: 'Ok Tom. Lots of ideas here. Where's the philological rigour? Where are the footnotes? Where the sly sideswipes at the historical malpractice among editors of Juvenal? Where the opinions on whether the manuscript should read 'ideas are not everything' or 'sort yourself out already' in Satire 13 verse 29? Either way, you have your work cut out for you. Mediocre at best. Next.' This merciless technocracy will sign and stamp a sample of my year's work with a 'grudgingly accept'. And I shall press on into the abyss of kindled ambition that is impossible to burn through full and proper. Cambridge extracts your already unattainably high standards through your nostrils and dangles them a nose-hair out of reach. You poke your tongue out but it gets no further than your nose. You really want to touch those standards. You wiggle your ears. You point your navel. You strain your highest moles, even allowing the mole hairs to grow beyond the prescriptions of polite society, to get there. And then you look in the mirror and see that the person with your standards in his hands looks like a piece of collapsed furniture lying in a heap of off cabbage. You laugh that you ever bought into the delusion. So begins another year of shattered confidence, regained perspective, eroded perspective, no perspective: till the death, just you and me, PhD.

PhD blues make not for the best reading matter, so I'll try and jazz this up a bit. Reasons for bitching have recently congealed; so at least I can make the pessimism edgy as possible. In addition to the predictable review annoyance, things are looking grim at present for the simple reason that I signed up to give a paper at what is sure to be the most hilarious cringefest of my life: The Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, World's Biggest Classics Conference, Walmart of Ancient Produce (including much off cabbage). If I were stepping in as an invisible observer, documenting the strange rituals of awkward handshakes and cut-price interest exchanges in the timber-panelled hotel lobbies, I'd be feeling mighty well primed by now. But the sad fact of my moral blackening is getting me down. I'll be an observer-PARTICIPANT, and that's putting it politely. 8.30 on the last morning of the meeting, I'll be picked out of the snarling crowd and forced to crumple my own cutting-edge findings into so much shrill fart. One bespectacled octogenarian will ask me whether I think Juvenal was Really exiled to Egypt. The second and last person in the audience will fumble over a question from which I'll only be able to rescue a few key words like 'Girard' and 'theoretical model'. Then the crickets will boo, and the tumbleweeds will hiss.

What I most resent about this process, to which I voluntarily signed myself away, is the censorship (i.e. cutting and packaging an argument in concise, palatable form), and what this censorship reveals in my own empty closet. The void is the most chilling point. I have to boil down a big idea of my PhD into something like 2000 words; and in the boiling I cannot help noticing that what this all boils down to is: there is not all that much to boil down. The fairest assessment of my PhD so far - which I'm sure will be another item on the second-year review agenda - is that it looks like a series of marginal notes run together under the umbrella 'cool things I like about Juvenal'. I'm at a point where that would actually be the most descriptive and accurate title. Chapter 1 might then be 'check out these sweet verbal echoes, they're all ambivalent and shit, and they show that J was a really complicated dude and he thought loads, you could even call him a philosopher, if you changed your definition of philosophy, but then you could say that about anything couldn't you? but shh, let's just jump over that and look! some more sweet verbal echoes what does that MEAN WO?' Chapter 2 might be the same watertight principle applied to a different poem.

In the likely event that the CIA captures me, tortures me, and tries to bleed a story from me under duress, however, what am I going to say? If they ask me what I'm working on, I'll have to say in all good honesty that I don't know. And this is perhaps the most scintillating fact of my PhD thus far. Bear with me as I take you through two years in a poet. Let us dock together in his intestines, and wait patiently for the next ship out. Could be another year - so get comfy.

Lately I've been dusting off that hoary question of biography: how much of a poet's life is in his/her poetry? And does it matter? 'Biography' is a filthy word in classical literary criticism nowadays, partly due to the nature of what we're working with: exiguous 'external' evidence means it is near impossible to reconstruct even the rustiest nuts and bolts of any ancient poet's life (bar what we can extract 'internally', i.e. from their own poetry). Also - and this varies widely across the great range of poetic genres - ancient poetry tends more towards the 'conventional' and 'impersonal' as we understand it. If I can try to imagine a vox populi lifted from a banker on the central line, he would probably say 'poetry is a deeply-felt medium of self-expression: always direct, always confessional. Sell!' Even if this were a law of averages for modern poetry, ancient stuff is a whole different game: highly formalised and bowing beneath tight restrictions of genre and metre, ancient poems have a habit of looking far more 'literary', as if the poet self-constructed from encounters in the library, and got nothing out of 'the world'. The artificial choice between biographical and literary interpretation is always hovering in front of the critic, especially when it comes to the more (relatively) personal genres of ancient poetry such as lyric. Two explanatory impulses when reading a Horatian Ode, for example: 1. Horace really was prompted to write this poem about a love affair he was having at the time. 2. Horace was reading a similar poem by some Greek and wanted to play around with his own imitative exercise. More specifically, same problem with Catullus 51: a love poem seemingly as sincere as anything this guy ever wrote, but we just happen to have the original Sappho of which the poem is a fairly close translation. Ok, so 'I love you' is always iterative, always a quotation - what of it? Quotations mean the most because they've been said the most times; and if there's one thing we classical scholars like, it's a good pile-up of quotations.

Orthodox now is to suppress any mention of 'biography' for fear of the never-ending hermeneutic knots it gets us all into - after all, many 'biographies' of ancient poets, often travelling down the centuries as the frayed ribbon around the poet's packaged corpus, look like no more than a feeble effort to reassemble the poet's life from fragmentary details in his work. And if you then reapply that same biography to interpretation of the work - well, madame/sir, have fun with your happy twirling. That is a very nice dance you have choreographed there. But on the other hand, chanting 'death of the author' stops no one being fascinated with the biographical conditions of literary production. One of the pet questions of the author interviewer worldwide is: 'how autobiographical is this bit?' We take it as read that novels, for example, are invariably 'based on' some kind of direct authorial experience. And thanks to Freud, even the remotest flight of imagination can always be replanted in the scum of autobiography and authorial psychology. A friend in English was telling me about a conference she attended on Joseph Conrad in Poland, the major refrain of which was that we need to start taking account of Conrad's Polishness in order to understand his work fully. Conrad never really mentions Poland in his texts; indeed, he seems to have gone out of his way to suppress any hint of Polishness (as I myself am still doing, 150 years after my Polish ancestors suddenly became Australian). No matter though. Absence is revealing as presence, concealment as revelation. That bit of sea he describes in Nostromo is, fact, directly based on that bit of sea he saw as a six year old child hanging at the Baltic.

So if biography continues to be one of the major ways in which we make sense of an author - even in the academy, which is always quick to smug out that it knows better - my favourite part of my poet Juvenal, and the one that makes him most difficult to anchor whenever I want to get him to shake hands with other friends, is the complete, utter, impenetrable darkness surrounding his authorial self. Roman satire, Juvenal's genre of choice, built itself on one of the strongest reality claims of any ancient poetry. Horace confesses to us in his own confessional satires that the canonical founder of the genre, Lucilius, transcribed his whole life onto the page - no editing, genital warts and all. And certainly, what makes satire seem so real, so autobiographical, is it's striking exposure of the poet's dirty bits, or, as we say in the factory, the 'bodily lower stratum': in Horace's Satire 1.5, for instance, we get a glance at Horace going to sleep after an abortive sexual encounter and waking up in a puddle of his own semen after a wet dream. Safe bet to win any teenage boy over to Latin literature, even one that is stuck in the body of a 26-yr-old man. But then my man Juve-daddy comes along and says: 'you ain't seen nothing yet, for the precise reason that you ain't gonna see me ever.' His mode is absolute eschewal of autobiographic or bodily revelation. Like some sort of hooded magician, he makes the self disappear beneath the thunderous cloud of his words. J aims for the voice of the crowd, the anonymous tail that could be pinned to any donkey you care to name. It's hard not to write satire, as he says in his opening barrage; these words could be the work of Quintus up on the Palatine as much as Furius down in the burbs. Muffling the identifiable mouth, he fans out to become the disembodied loudspeaker of Rome.

'So you like him because he's mediocre!' pipes up a voice from the contemporary crowd. Well, I like him because mediocrity is his main bid for survival. Bear in mind that in a competitive elite culture obsessed with literary immortality, everyone in Rome is trying to get their name on the good stuff. Horace confidently declares he has constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, and will live forever accordingly, thank you very much. Ovid blasts out positive predictions on the fame trumpet: after his own death, the better part (his own poetry) will survive. Authors of epic, that most impersonally grand of ancient genres, can't help attaching poetic signatures to the work that authenticate the product: 'I wrote this, yes I did - I, Spurius the Boring.' Chronologically closer to J, a poet called Martial starts making a name for himself in the genre of epigram - small pieces of a few lines length, usually containing a wimpy joke at the end. But attending him is the constant paranoia of plagiarism and misattribution, the fear of other poets stealing his stuff and passing it off as their own, or branding their own execrable poop with his priceless name. Assertion of authorial identity is one big rat-race.

But then the late great J bursts onto the scene and screams the deliciously thick paradox 'I don't want to be noticed.' No autograph. No name. The only strict autobiographical information he releases in his first satire is 'I had a rhetorical education' and 'I shaved my beard for the first time once.' Every elite Roman worth their salt had a rhetorical education and shaved their beard for the first time once. So that autobiography is no autobiography at all - or rather, it is the biography of a whole people soaked in depersonalised 'culture'. So J enters a street of literary kebab shops wherein everyone is furiously claiming, plugging and defending his own garlicky poetic property - and suddenly says 'I'm gonna look and sound like all of plural You.' An ambitious claim itself, if ever I couldn't see one.

J also blended into a societal background where self-effacement was a strategy for survival. Imperial Rome enjoyed its safety in numbers; best not to stand out in a political pool that only allowed one stand-out figure, the emperor himself. Satirists ancient and modern are quick to overplay the danger of the game: when you verbally attack people by name, watch out for the reprisals. It's the fashion in literary criticism to smirk at these assertions of the perilous precipice on which the satirist always thinks s/he is tottering. But J's blurry anonymity speaks to me in the clearest tones of what it meant to be a poet writing under an authoritarian regime. Hiding beneath Everyman was your best bet. The path to personal immortality was diverted and perverted into multiple reroutes through the generic. After two years in a poet, I still don't know who he is. But I'm beginning to appreciate the merits of an unrecognisable genius, the more I fail to see him.*





*Word to James Uden's (big kid at my school, now blazing the trail of Juvenalian studies way ahead of me; at least it's also fashionable to be late) recent thesis 'The Invisibility of Juvenal' for helping me see that darkness more sharply. Have a read here if I've piqued you some.

Spam Me Your Sympathy

A hypothetical: what if this blog post - piping hot off the press, hard-fitting, oozing topicality as usual - registered on your collective consciousness neither via the mild ripple of the blogosphere, nor through the everyman's land of your facebook home page, but rather through a direct breach of your email inbox? What if I, dissatisfied with my audience of equally tired stalwarts, made so bold to shove this thing down your plural throat in a targeted campaign aimed at expanding readership? What would happen if I s-worded all of you; what would you do if I spammed you?

Probably become quite annoyed, a reaction of similar ilk to your reaction against my rhetorical premeditation of your reaction. For I have observed, or finally come to think about, a very strange general phenomenon of late; from which the premeditation that annoyed you so much is but one fair extrapolation. That is this: no one on this digital earth seems to be able to cope with the contemporary disaster of questionably relevant email traffic. I don't understand this phenomenon at all. So I shall use this medium for the purpose it serves best: venting my splenetic aporia against a world checked out into cyber-rage.

A preamble before we roll: this post may well turn out the most offensive tirade I've ever typed, so widespread is the problem, so alone do I feel in my aggressive indifference to it. But it is also the most deeply felt post I have attempted in a while; unquestionably the most urgent, at any rate. I imagine I'll generate far more hate mail than rallying cries for this effort, but in case you should agree, please raise your hand and join the new movement I'm currently plotting: Spam Is Not That Bad, Affluent Complainers Please Chill the Fuck Out. For those who stand by their righteous indignation, bring on the hate mail. You will note the philosophical equanimity with which I welcome a clogged inbox.

To clarification of terms: I'll be avoiding discussion of spam proper, the background noise of the cyber universe which all email service providers manage to block out but for a few open windows from time to time. This kind of spam - truly undirected and opportunistic, trying to meet with any and every reader out there - is a minimal part of a cyber human's everyday online life. The rare bird that makes it through the highly effective filters, however, will underscore the point I will thrash out lengthily below. That is, the odd Russian Beauty for sale, the odd humble request for bank details from Nigeria, the odd remedy for erectile dysfunction, are all part of life's spicy variety. They are nothing more than a mischievous child attempting to put stinging nettles in your underpants, whom you catch with ease and send along with a little tousle of the hair and a playful smack. And as for those unlucky few who end up with sore perinea from all those stinging nettles - well, they are quite silly, and they provide a good laugh as red-raw collateral damage.

The kind of spam I shall treat, then, is the more ordinary variety: the stuff that comes in through those various channels you have set up to direct things of vague interest into your inbox, or the noticeboard stuff that you have to receive for work purposes etc. In other words, list-spam. As a PhD student, I am by definition interested in everything; so along the way I have signed up for many a list. I get emails from the Spanish-speakers-society, whose events I never attend because I don't speak Spanish. I get emails from left-leaning organisations, whose events I never attend because I find political commitment quite uncomfortable (I'm working on it). I get emails from the Cambridge Capture the Flag Club, whose events I never attend because I find the sport quite pale and tiresome. I choose not to unsubscribe from these lists because they tell me, in no uncertain terms and at no uncertain times of the day (usually 10:32, 12:46 and 16:21 respectively), about other things I could be doing at that particular time. They remind me that I am a person with the capacity to be elsewhere and doing otherwise at that particular moment, and that it is by a mere effort of maintaining a consistent identity that I neglect these alternatives and choose to hunch over my computer writing about Juvenal's tendency to thingify the human. In a world where I cannot possibly do everything, I can at least read the subject lines about doing things and ignore the content.

But by far the most relevant list I subscribe to is the UK Classicists' list: a smorgasbord of job adverts, seminar timetables, special lecture postings, and all things classical of interest to anyone, even if it is just so for the lonely person that posts. The esoteric nature of the emails is sometimes amped up, the conversations sparked sometimes sprawl on, and recently (the event which engendered this blog) a voice in the ether finally stood up to be counted, following a (to him) particularly irritating intervention on the part of a pathological spammer. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. And the snap came hard and fast:

'Dear friends and colleagues,

Pardon my intrusion, but I think it was about time someone said something about the current situation of the Classicists list. Some time ago a member of the Papyrologist mailing list circulated the following email, which I quote:


I appreciate Lucian's subtlety and diplomacy, but I think there are some things that need to be spelt out a bit more clearly. Could people who want to express their personal musings publicly, ranging from their psychological state, their literary taste or their more or less insulting feelings towards colleagues please find a relevant list to do this on? I am sure the internet is not devoid of alternative fora for the free expression of one's feelings and frustrations. This one is in principle devoted to information and queries regarding papyrology and related areas. Let's keep it at that. We get enough emails in our inbox without the ones we did not quite subscribe to...

Thanks.


I personally feel that the same has been going on with the Classicist mailing list for quite some time now (and as I've been told, several other lists too). Although Asterix can be amusing, and the current situation in Libya and NATO may be interesting to some of the members, this list was created - I humbly believe - for academic purposes, and the circulation of academic information and queries. I personally find it rather annoying to have to wake up to a spammed inbox every other day, and I trust this may apply to many of you.

So please let's try to keep things on this list academically related. As the email quoted above nicely puts it, Forums and 'alternative' mailing lists surely exist for more general discussions and expressions of one's own ideas.

Best wishes to all,

Equally Annoying Dude'

I sniffed a very familiar smell. Whenever a list threatens to run off topic and inboxes everywhere begin to feel suffocated with 'spam', there is always one valiant soldier who steps up to say: 'Enough! Liberate us from this tyranny of pointless information! You can take our second-lives, but you will never take our limited yet ever-increasing megabytes!' The crowd roars, mindful of every affront to their digital dignity ever suffered at the hands of these ruthless spammers. 'We are not interested in your petty opinions! Voice them elsewhere! Moderator, please! Give us cold hard fact, the kind of fact that this list was designed to communicate. Purge these undesirably marginal elements. If you don't, who knows what kind of nasty index finger RSI will develop? Then there will be no one left to read your list. We will all be in digit rehabilitation twiddling our (thankfully) better-preserved thumbs.'

Last time I checked, my Gmail account had a capacity of 7634 MB. I signed up in 2006 and have not deleted a single email since. The inbox is 23% full. If I fail to die before I reach capacity and find myself forced to delete emails, that's fine: I'll search and delete anything with the word 'facebook' in it. Plan B, I'll delete anything with the words 'sorry, I can't supervise your undergrads at this late point in the day. Please be more organised in the future.' And that should do me. The fury is obviously not an issue of space then - for memory storage is about as expensive and rare as a piece of fluff from my infrequently scrubbed belly button. There is something far more sinister and irrational at play here - something difficult to put a finger on, especially when that finger has been lovingly opening unloved spam all day long.

After a significant hour of thought committed to the topic, I can conclude that the whole world has a bad case of obsessive compulsive disorder. For some reason, the deletion of an email is seen as a hugely time-consuming and laborious task instead of an item towards the more pleasant end of life's possible tribulations. But deletion itself is a questionable practice in the first place. Why bother with deletion when space is not even an issue, let alone of the essence? My theory is that an inbox is beginning to function more and more as an extension of the self, competing with - even supplanting - more conventional markers of identity (a room of one's own, for instance). People are starting to feel anxious when this online repository is not completely in order. Spam represents a threat to this order, and one's sovereignty in controlling the database of the self. No one wants to swim in the filth of a contaminated inbox. They would rather sleep in a bed of ear wax than allow a miscategorised email remain in its incorrect folder for up to an hour. Every piece of spam rocks and wrecks the delicate garden of a tidy cyberself.

Another rankler is the narrow-minded and self-centred policing of relevance that the antispammer is ever indulging. A dedicated antispammer feels that anything s/he is not interested in is spam, without realising one person's spam is another person's specialty. Of course lists send in content which is 99 per cent irrelevant; that's the price paid for the odd gem. Even if the email is only of interest to one person on the list - nay, even if it fails to catch the attention of any - its existence is justified by the fact that at least one other person (sender) thought it might be interesting. So-called spam is the lowest stakes game of irrelevancy possible. But people think of every piece of boring written drivel in the same league as an afternoon of detention with their garrulous mustachioed aunty who can't stop talking about her hemorrhoids. They're actually quite different things. You can't walk out on an aunty in her hour of need, even if that need is not particular to you, and is spammed all over everyone, every day. You can, however, choose not to read an email. I choose not to read things all the time. A PhD is in fact nothing more than the sum of things you have avoided reading.

Spam rage is by no means society's number one problem, but it is certainly up there for sheer levels of disproportionate reaction. Not to mention disproportionate self-awareness about engaging in the activity oneself. 'Sorry for spamming, but...'. This is my most loathed email opening of all possible email openings. Anything that begins with an apology for spamming, I stop reading immediately - not because it is spam, but because it perpetuates the ill-founded notion that there is something wrong with spam. If there is a crime in question here, it is precisely this: the demonisation of spam. I look forward to the day when spam is redeemed and restored to its rightful pedestal as generator of some of the only opportunities to run into random crap in an increasingly mechanistic existence. I see the bright future wherein 'SPAM!' will be a subject line specifically designed to pique the reader's interest. A time when you will spam me unapologetically, and there will be no perceived annoyance for which you will feel obliged to apologise. I will write an email back to the list thanking you for this email and asking you on a date. I will send another email saying that wasn't intended for the list. You will send an email to the list saying no worries. I will send one back saying cool so how about that date. And all will ignore our inane chatter with the minimal fuss of rounded people whose inboxes are an appropriately small part of their rich and varied lives.

To the Future of the Past: a Gingerly Toast

History's flux aside, the Cambridge Classics faculty must have always fancied itself at the rear, van and centre of ancient world study. If its position has largely remained constant, what has changed is the aptness of that opening metaphor in the articulation of what classics is about, what classics does. As 'classics' has precipitated into a field like all the others - one tightly regulated range of Dewey numbers in the sum of human knowledge - it has also, simultaneously, turned into a battlefield. Fighting off attacks on all fronts, classics has become an exercise in self-defence as much as anything else; the anxiety of relevance has been so deeply internalised in the discipline that even the greatest practitioners of the thing, the beacons in an intellectual twilight, are wont to be asked repeatedly, and ask themselves repeatedly: 'why?' To some extent, the existential pangs are common ground among all the humanities at the historical moment: sweep the soft carpet of public money out from under anyone and they'll feel those raw floorboards splintering their back and puncturing their self-worth. The murmurs of the classicist are bound up with the nail-biting of the philosopher and the goosebumps of the historian. The hunched back and atrophied muscles of the professor are finally being called up to fight for survival - and, surprise of millennia, it's not going that well at all.

Those tidbits of gloom-mongering were a dime a dozen at a gigantic classics conference held in the Cambridge faculty last week. Recognising full well that you can't do classics without picking up a heightened sense of irony along the way, the brain behind the meeting chose to call it 'Cambridge Triennial 2011: a Celebration of Classics'. Pre-colon was solid enough: this Oxbridge effort happens every three years (alternating between Oxford and Cambridge), one of the best (well, quality if not quantity) conferences on the calendar for our fair subject. Post-colon on the other hand was, in the course of the proceedings, unveiled as a cruel joke. 'Celebration' turned out to have the lugubrious resonance of a 'celebration' of someone's life at their funeral; half-hearted smiles and fond memories vainly claiming to compensate for the grim fact that the person is DEAD. And all the while uncle Tom sat in the corner getting drunk, screaming that he never liked the fucker anyway.

I predictably exaggerate; but the question 'whither a whimpering Classics?' was certainly a refrain of the conference whose frequency made it difficult to ignore. The tone was perhaps set by the timely announcement that the teaching of classical languages at Royal Holloway (one of the colleges of the University of London) was about to be scrapped, with sizeable staff cutbacks to match. Everyone knows that UK humanities, and tertiary education in general, are gurgling down the plughole thanks to those brave Oxonians in government; but the Royal Holloway news had such talismanic force for many classicists precisely because it seemed so safe there. Like Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London is one of those dusty places the classicist would always retreat to in her weaker moments, one of those few institutions with synecdochic importance for the discipline, containing the message blazoned across its chest in Carolingian Minuscule: 'Classics: If Not Here, Then Nowhere'. The number of British classicists that googled 'civil service jobs' on the day the Royal Holloway music died must have been astronomical. I certainly started dreaming of a kind of paradisiacal bank that would need my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence in order to turn a profit: 'You tell me to buy or sell as if they were disjunctive phenomena; but are they not - I submit to you, Mr. Goldman Sachs - two sides of the same coin?' I was promptly fired and forced to sell my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence for hits of crack diluted with cornflour.

My own personal nightmares were what they were; but needless to say the general mood was severely affected by the fog over Royal Holloway. And of course it didn't help that the first plenary address of the three-day ancientfest was given by none other than a great scholar from...Royal Holloway. Edith Hall had written a famous book called 'Inventing the Barbarian', so the obligatory reference to the barbarians at the gate of classics was already knocking in the chair's introduction. Her speech itself was about deliberation and democracy in the Athens of Sophocles, and the processes of such that filtered into his tragedies. Her last powerpoint slide drew the barbed point that everyone knew was coming even if they couldn't quite see how (a bit like tragedy itself): no deliberation, consultation or democracy to be seen in the university administration that ravaged one of its departments at the drop of a hat. People loved this conclusion, and allotted a good measure of applause accordingly; I myself lapped up the energy and politicisation of a crowd which, in the long light of history, is not quite famed for broad social conscience. But I still (as ever) felt tremours of guilt and reservation vibrate between the vigorous claps. Was this not the very definition of middle-class activism - only devoting yourself to a cause when your immediate interests are threatened? It's certainly difficult to make a clean case for the indispensability of classics to humanity from the position of someone who gets paid to do it. To a (cynical) outside observer surveying speaker and captive audience, it would have looked like a wholly consistent collection of self-reinforcing 'you would say that's and 'you would clap there's.

A central bind, as I see it, is that those who are best qualified to expatiate on the value of classics in terms of knowledge (the people that do it, that is) are least qualified to preach in terms of moral position; and yet, self-evaluations delivered by someone whose neck is in the noose are neither innocent nor trustworthy, but they are still more accurate than the executioner's own valuations, the person that looks and sees only a job to do and a nuisance to get rid of. The classicist is made into a precarious mix of advocate and defendant, the one that isn't necessarily, but could well be, saying anything to save their own skin. One of the grand arguments deployed in the humanities tends to monopolise humanity itself, claiming something like 'the humanities make us more human' or 'humans are no longer human without the humanities'. I've always been sympathetic to this warm and fuzzy sentiment, especially when fleshed out convincingly in a book such as Martha Nussbaum's recent 'Not For Profit'. But as I drank in the programmatically and ambitiously titled first conference paper 'Reception: A New Humanism?', I found myself bristling a little over the implicit hubris. There was talk of classical reception (a recent growth-area of classics, in simplified version a charting of the classical world's influence on and afterlife in the history of art, literature, philosophy etc) stepping up to become the 'saviour' of classics - as if the subject had messianic value not just for classics itself, but for humanity in general. There was talk of ten year plans and setting the agenda, controversy over the pedagogical worth of the canon or a canon...as if we were determining the future of humanity that very day, in that very cramped lecture room. Again, I couldn't help positing the outside observer, perhaps the cleaner who would come in the evening, to whom these debates would be so many half-empty plastic bottles and a couple of scrunched-up handouts. Even if we were to let stand the very circumscribed and elite definition of humanity that 'humanism' throws at humans, even if we were to agree that the human would be irrevocably impoverished without the humanities, the jungle would merely thicken the further we hacked; for the question would have to be begged: 'Humanities, ok - but why Classics?'

And yet I couldn't even beat the first hurdle. Does the study of the humanities really create more sympathetic human beings, equipped to flit fleetly into the lives of others, tolerant, compassionate, generous? Or does it create shrivelled husks of humanity that prefer their books to their fellow beings, rendering them misanthropic carriers of some kind of torch - but a torch that would only illuminate the 'cultured' half of humanity as they worked at their desks, and happily incinerate the rest? Classics, second perhaps only to mathematics in the high-level autism it generates/attracts, doesn't exactly specialise in positive exempla of humanity. Plenty of people I've met in this discipline wouldn't quite fit the open, calm, smiley prescription of humanity that you might want to put in photographs for a 'Welcome to Planet Earth' brochure. Nor is this wholly their fault; the pressure of the academic climate is not the best at producing collaborative and patient members of the species. As with all segments of modern capitalism, the free market education system needs a lesser version of humanity to thrive: a jostling crew of selves competitively defending their intellectual property. So if humanism were all it's cracked up to be, I felt, then it should be the antidote to this shrunken homunculusness, not another victim of it. But nothing around me told me so; it was all ill-fitting suits, publishers' stands, intellectual tussling, taut minds, contracted bodies.

Until, that is, our own Messiah came: in the guise of Tony Grafton. Feeling shrunken and guilty myself over taking a few days off 'urgent' work time, I very nearly missed this gem of a plenary address; the title piqued my interest, but no more than the usual vague titular titillation ('How Classical was the Classical Revival? Jews and Judaism in the Renaissance Vision of Antiquity'). The speaker was unfamiliar, and my excursions into the history of classical scholarship had never made it past the corner store. All signs were pointing to an escape to the library; but slowly I wrestled myself out of the desire with some familiar self-guilt-tripping: 'How often do you get a chance to learn from people rather than books in this game? When did reading that shitty article become more important than learning something new? Your failure to attend this lecture is an indirect capitulation to the iron grip of RELEVANCE. Sit your ass down home slice.' Bowing to the commands of my internal monologue was, in this case, one of the best decisions of my life.

The talk was, as (I think) the Germans say, balm for the soul. It featured wit and sparkle, but these can always be later additives; what was really unique was the combination of good humour with the solid research nugget you simply can't invent from nothing. Its humbly-put claim was really quite revolutionary (bear with me): that for at least two of the great renaissance classical scholars, Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger, the study of Hebrew and the traditions of Judaism was a fundamental comparative pivot for their more famous work on Latin and Greek. This may not sound like much to most; but for a young classicist trained in the idea of the renaissance as a reflowering of the Classical world, confined to the hermetic corpus of Greek and Roman, it was a beautiful moment of seeing history afresh. Avid, prolific readers both of them, the Greek manuscripts that passed through the hands of Casaubon and Scaliger are littered with comments in Hebrew; indeed, one of them (Casaubon?) spent so much time in autodidaxis that he could translate bits of complex Greek into Hebrew like it was going out of fashion (which it probably was). Bent double over a desk in the Bodleian, this scholar-figure made our own conception of classics, however broad, seem sickeningly narrow. The best talks, I find, make you want to learn everything merely by adumbrating the boundaries of your own knowledge and gesturing to a perimeter outside - and once the perimeter has moved once, there is no necessity that it remain in place there either. If Hebrew, why not Aramaic? Why not Akkadian? Why not classical Chinese? Classics became, in a rare moment, not an intimidating collection of German monographs on Juvenal's use of rhetoric, but an open field of ever-receding borders. Wonderful and humbling, yes; but the question was: humanising?

The talk answered this too. One of its other distinctive marks was the amusing snatch of biography surfacing from time to time; Casaubon and Scaliger were not just marginal comments on a manuscript, but letter-writers too, full participants in their unique historical moment. Grafton had mentioned, half-way through the talk, a young Jew in Oxford who sat with Casaubon and gave him one-on-one Hebrew lessons. This important character made another appearance in the final anecdote. The university had gotten wind of the man's linguistic expertise and wanted to appoint him a professor of Hebrew; but given the strict intertwining of institution and religion, that couldn't happen without the man's conversion to Christianity. Happily Jewish, the man had no interest in converting, and so, as the pressure mounted, he fled Oxford. The university authorities tracked him and hauled him back, imprisoning him as punishment for the affront, and assurance that it wouldn't happen again. Casaubon heard the news and intervened immediately, doing everything in his power to free his former tutor; eventually he went right to the top, writing the archbishop with a special plea for the man's freedom. It was granted, and our man walked: still himself, still Jewish.

The message fell short of rocket science and tumbled towards triteness, but was powerful for its clear intelligibility: in an atmosphere of normalised suspicion and hostility, where anti-semitism was the absolute default, the understanding gained from a deep relationship with another culture chiefly through text, was directly transmitted into appreciation, tolerance, friendship. One of the most basic operations of the humanities - our equivalent of addition or multiplication - is comparison. We compare things that seem different to show they are the same, at least as much as we compare things that seem the same to show they are different. The constant acts of connection and comparison performed daily by Casaubon settled in his mind until the commonalities between 'his' culture and another were habitual and obvious. This was the grand tradition of sympathetic humanism at its basic best: training by text to appreciate another human being, activating this training into a political intervention. As the story washed over me, I felt a lump in my throat.

The tears were already forming as the applause rolled on for many, many seconds; but it took Malcolm Schofield's dignified response for the real wells to start flowing. He took Grafton's words and put them side by side with the Norwegian killing spree, one final act of time-straddling comparison to close. But this comparison showed differences, opposites: on the one hand, a humanism that created a bond between two full-fledged humans; on the other, a narcissistic extremism that denied to others what it granted in full measure to the self. If we can claim anything as classicists, we can claim that our efforts to familiarise the past are parallel to, and fortify, our efforts to know our fellow humans; and our efforts to distance it can't do much else other than increase our enabling sense of relativism, make us aware that if humanity was different in the past, there is no reason that it can't be different (better) today, tomorrow. The practice of classics is just one (particularly good) way to dissolve stony extremism into harmless, silly-looking sherds. Anthropology will do it, philosophy will do it, literature will do it; the humanities will do it. If classics jumps in as an important player, it would do well to drop its rhetoric of 'foundational importance', as if it owned the humanities by spawning all of them. Rather - there being no I in team - it should take its place alongside every arbitrarily divided realm of human knowledge and stand or fall as all or nothing. Humanity doesn't depend on it; but a better humanity does.

Ain't No Lie: The Sport of Kings

Magisterial sleight of hand: this post, like the last, contains a king in the title, but this post, like the last, will have very little to do with King's or Cambridge. Nor will it have much of sport to recommend it. If you feel cheated, you may read all about the phenomenon here. Looks a worthwhile activity.

No, I would fain talk to you about the more specific counterculture of planking - or, as that hyperlink you've just followed would have it, the 'Lying Down Game' (henceforth LDG). Now, up to this point I've considered myself a relatively cosmopolitan citizen: broad traveller, crisscrossing from the richest to the poorest, and good hunks of residential time chewed at opposite ends of the earth, such that I can now verify through autopsy that Greenwich meantime is not a daily, temporary revival of childhood hostilities. But more and more I am finding that the greatest comic joys - those born from reality, no less - are being introduced to me via Skype conversations with my parents: particularly my dad, who has always been an avid follower of current affairs, but is only now really discovering how many current affairs there are in the world when he has infinite time to peruse them. Just envious dad, happy retirement. Anyway, as the parents filled in the details surrounding the current crisis in Australia, punctuating the story with mingled ridicule and condemnation, laughter slowly boiled over within me. Not that brief-remark-on-an-amusing-quirk laughter; that heavy, chest-heaving, open-mouthed, physiological hilarity. Yes, I have a short wire for the laughter bomb. But for some reason, this topical anecdote, that probably just made the cut in my dad's rigorous filtering process for what gets into our Skype conversations, really got under my skin.

There was an element of stubborn nostalgia at first, certainly, intensified by my present conditions of life: I'm in a country where the appetite for Australian stereotypes is bottomless. The way to every surly Englishman's heart is to tell him that you've met Harold from Neighbours in the most parodically Australian accent you can muster - admittedly easier if the parody is self-parody. Near three years in a land and the land must leave its mark on you, by now a bruised and unwashable suggestion of Britishness. And so I'm sure that an element of the laughter was the condescending spring of the colonist's brain: 'Haha! Only in the antipodes would they be daft enough to kill themselves by planking on a seventh-story balcony!' These myths are the grease and oil of empire, legitimating British exploitation of Australian resources such as sun: those convicts are so busy lying down in high places that they'll never notice how sunburnt we are. Just for the record, Brits - and now I speak as a native of the land downunder - we always plank with one eye open.

There are few feelings more pleasing than the identity safehouse that is the fulfillment of a stereotype - if the stereotype is positive, of course. I take it as a grand compliment when someone applies 'Australian' to me as a fully-fledged adjective over here; it is usually an economical code for 'you can talk to someone for ten minutes with only five awkward silences or less'. But there was more to my planking moment than an affection for my country's celebrated buffoonery, and a humming contentment with life taking on the square dimensions of art. There was something about LDG that transcended taxonomies - something universal. Having said that, I'm not confident that the female half (well, majority) of the human race would find it as funny. And there you go: of course a man would say it's universal when it's not. At least this paragraph proves that the pleasure of the stereotype extends to gender. QED. I'm a man, and thus a scientist.

I shall return to the masculine principle of straight narrative and get back on track. So, there was something about this phenomenon that instantly struck a chord in the (still substantial) juvenile part of my soul. It took me back to my early career in the prank (of which the plank must be a sub-genre): filling up a plastic bottle with water, dog-poo and flowers, putting it on a neighbour's doorstep, ringing the doorbell, yelling 'Patak's Express' and running for the hills. There has always been something inherently thrilling - and comic - about the awkward situation. The idea that someone, that unsuspecting butt, will be at the other end, desperately trying to make the situation fit the laws of social logic; and you, looking on from afar, in no better position beyond the fact that you know the situation can't be fitted to any logic, and the universe, for that one moment, is completely, wonderfully, side-splittingly, random. Hence, during the brief efflorescence of practical joke shows on television, the emphasis on the reactions of innocent bystanders walking past and puzzling over the spectacle. The beauty of the practical joke is that there is nothing to understand, nothing to be 'in on' - apart from the recognition that the thing in front of you is a joke. An illusion more potent than any form of art. But the plank is morally superior to this, for, in its noblest forms, it has no real targets. It is absolutely passive, absolutely inert: you lie down in the most ridiculous location you can think of, and that is that. People only laugh when they exhale with recognition: Ahh, planking I see before me, hehe, nice one. But happiest were those plankers in the early days of the game, before it was an international sensation, who hooked their audience for the briefest of moments before the audience got on with its day. The most lazy, barren, stationary form of street theatre possible: so funny precisely because there is nothing to see.

Apart from its charming subversion of the conventions of practical joking through its understated refusal to perform any action whatsoever, planking also brought back memories of how funny raw physical comedy - slapstick in the pejorative - can be. A (female, for the record) student of mine once suggested that men are funnier because they are freer and sillier with their bodies. While I snapped back that men weren't necessarily funnier, and if they were, that was because humour is deeply implicated with power, and men set the terms for what constitutes funny because they set the terms for the world, and jokes are written by the victor dontcha know - I had to admit to myself that men, in my own experience, do play with their bodies much more (publicly). As an alumnus of a boy's school, I can pick a flashback to any given day in uniform among those deodorised pubescent rats: it will inevitably involve visible arse-cheeks, someone (usually me) doing a smelly fart, and, if we're lucky, a scrotum in a mousetrap. The body was a prime site on which the eternal bid for laughs took place. There is still a (majority?) boyish segment of me that finds unsophisticated physical comedy some of the most distilled humour out there. Even Monty Python - that enigmatic, ever-so-British band of genii - deemed it fit to dip into the comedy of arms and legs from time to time: witness the famous Ministry of Silly Walks.

The Art of Planking plays into this purest of corporeal humour. And one of the other prominent theatres of male bodily awkwardness is, of course, the modern day dance-floor. As a white man, I gave up on aspirations to the merest semblance of rhythm a long time ago. But, as I launch my repetitive moves into infinity and struggle to squeeze any juice out of my stiff German hips, I can't help finding this space one of the most intriguing in western society (G-real, know you've written stuff on this, so jump in and wipe the floor with me if you like). The dance-floor is a realm in which most guys - usually so in control of the comedy of bodies - feel absolutely powerless. They are not sure what their limbs are supposed to be doing. I may be extrapolating unwisely here; but many men I lock eyes with in a club scream to me silently of a world in which people could listen to music without feeling the social compulsion to motorise their appendages. And so one night, nauseous with constant oppression at the hands of the agile, I decided to take a stand. By lying down. I was drunk, and decided that the best move I could pull off in the middle of a cleared circle was to lie down and pretend to be asleep. I had found my niche. But what I didn't realise was that my niche had, in a broad sense, already been found, and had found me. I was unknowingly participating in a venerable sport which had been around more than ten years. I was planking the dance-floor.

So I must admit that part of the plank's special appeal lies (yes) in my wistful longing to have invented it. So, perhaps, with all things piss funny on this earth. To stiffen a little further, on fifth thought the humour of the plank reminded me of Henri Bergson's work on the comic; I haven't had much to do with humour theory (despite my predisposition to the cack), but this French man seems to come up a lot in the little I have read. Far as I can make head or tail of the philosopher's jests (and could you ever write a theory of humour that didn't take the piss out of itself?), much laughter is induced by the recognition of human bodies acting like mechanical entities, taking on the appearance of automata. And what could be more robotic than the plank - than a body, customarily the seat of free movement, suddenly transformed into a thing that doesn't work, doesn't do anything? Complete stasis is the degree zero of repetition. The plank thus teaches us a useful lesson: death is the funniest thing that a human can do.

After swearing solemnly to myself and my parents that I would never plank, I got drunk and I tried. I now have a small wound on my forehead. And though, after that disaster, I will never let the animal out of the cage again, I can't bring myself to join the chorus of moral hysteria. A good physical joke is an irresistible force of joy, and an injury inflicted in jest from the other side of the world is, if nothing else, the sign of a good physical joke. The joke is on me: on my neanderthal forehead that has evolved, or refused to evolve, specifically for a good planking.

We Three Kings

Being a classicist has its advantages. You are equipped with the raw knowledge to answer that obligatory ancient world question in pub-quizzes, subsequently no longer useful, and so at liberty to buy the next round of drinks; for both of which contributions your teammates are mildly grateful. You can etymologise your way out of, or into, any argument: 'Umm, I think you'll find that's from the Latin meaning 'your opinion is flawed because you don't know Latin very well''. And, at Cambridge, you can wince money out of the faculty for travel to any land that the Greeks or Romans touched in their, erm, fairly tactile imperial encounters. I think I speak on behalf of all professions and disciplines when I say, in all earnestness, that you would be mad not to be a classicist.

Fortunately, no one takes my career advice on board; and an equally fortunate corollary is that there remains a pot of cash in my faculty for travel to 'classical lands'. This time last year I dipped into the account for an excursion to Crete with good friend Volker. By law of there never being too much of a good thing, we decided to repeat the spring-travel pattern this year, keeping the company but riffing the destination. After characteristically small deliberation, we set on Israel as the target: close by plane, distant by culture, richly embroidered with some urgent world politics, and, above all, acceptably classical.

To lay my traveller's cheques square on the table, I have a history of arbitrary tourism syndrome. In 2006 - bored by the prospect of an honours year in my beloved discipline - a crew of the curious span the globe blindfolded and lighted a digit on...West Africa. And so it was, an extempore adventure through the legacy of French colonialism. But this time, my interest in the destination had deeper roots than those that grew from the small arbitree. Israel had been firmly lodged in my imagination ever since Rabbi Blackman (?) bribed dialectic out of our teenage minds with a smorgasbord of fresh bagels. Since that day - not the last time I, an unapologetic member of the Goy family, crossed that sacred threshold of lunchtime discussion - I've built long-lasting relationships with many Jews, and much Jewish culture. With the help of incidental snippets of conversation, text and site over the years, I felt I had pieced together at least the bare bones of the diasporic people of the Sabbath. My mental efforts paled in comparison to the real life reconstruction that is the state of Israel.

For a guy who struggles with opinions, more adept at scorning the misplaced conviction of others than forming his own, Israel is a hell of a place. This hotly contested patch of barren land is about as far from my (equally barren) Australia as you can get: the middle class suburbs of Sydney, famed for their generous apathy, are sites wherein the residents scarcely hold their eyes open enough to see themselves from day to day, let alone the rest of the world. No one looks at us; and we have trouble returning a favour that isn't given in the first place. If some Euro type is ever riling you with his/her swaggering cosmopolitanism and railing at the American parochial mentality over a perfectly rolled cigarette, just ask them whether they have an opinion on Sydney's proposed second airport. Guaranteed they'll pause for a puff and swiftly steer the conversation back to Israel. For everyone, everyone is looking at Israel. It is the capital of the cosmopolitan gaze, the naval of world politics. It is saturated with the cumulative opinions of the human race. A space (discursive and geographical) where it is impossible not to put your foot in it, because it is impossible to keep both feet out of it.

I suspected that I would have to run the 'prospect of a second airport' diversionary tactic many times over in the holy land, averse as I am to heated conversation even in this cold country. But on arrival, I had trouble finding the belligerent opinions I was steeling myself to avoid. Mostly, sadly, people (and by people I mean the small subset of relatively liberal, younger generation Israelis we had access to) spoke with a weary resignation: rockets from Gaza creeping ever closer to Tel Aviv, IDF airstrikes, terrorist bombings, full-scale war brewing on the horizon. People talked of these matters with a kind of fashionable nonchalance. Our cabbie to Ben Gurion airport spoke for the whole (insofar as this country could ever be uniformly 'represented') when he slotted the insouciant comment 'There will be a war in the summer....Nobody likes the mud.' Violence in Israel belongs to the realm of the banal, its relapse about as surprising as (and intimately linked to) the passing of the seasons. People would gossip about the escalating tension as if it were tangible as the thick air before a storm; they could 'feel it coming'. I found this meteorology of war as staggering as the casual melodrama with which it was processed.

The intensity varies from place to place; but certainly Jerusalem was a focal point within a focal point. My imagination fell short before such a city: every stone loaded with religious significance, an unfair burden when each piece struggles to maintain structural integrity at the same time. And for every stone, at least a hundred fans and fanatics. It was another eye-opener for this secular soul whose religious education amounted to committing the first five books of the old testament to memory. Only four remain. Anyway, in a relaxed overlap, the third holiest site of Islam forms a metallic mesh with the centre of the Jewish universe, fortuitously married to the home of Christianity. Happy family, happy family. But all the while a cowboy wearing a kippah, holding a cross and reading from the Koran whispers in the corner: 'There ain't enough room in this one-mule town for the earth's three Abrahamic religions.' Everywhere a sensation of hostile jostling grips you. In the narrow, crowded passages of the old city, a pimply young Hassid weaves an ungainly route through hordes of aging German protestants in his hurry to school - almost tripping over a young Muslim shop runner who is carting a load of empty gas canisters in a diagonal direction. Competing identities make grabs for space at a wider topographic level too: the old city is divided into distinct quarters (Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish). The new city has its own abrasions, ironically magnified where there are no holy sites to fight over: ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim, a village of black-clad sidelocked men and invisible women, shares a main-road border with predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem. How about 'intra-religion' unity? Well, venture into the motley church of the Holy Sepulchre and feel the finely chopped love: every denomination has its own corner to whisper in (complete with whispering cowboy), and the Greeks intercepted any harmony of vista by putting up huge walls in the very centre of the place, walls that prevent border crossing through the most basic visual effort, being here and seeing there. From every vantage point, Jerusalem is a city of fractured views.

Not that walls in a church constitute the country's biggest mural problem. We took a day out from Jerusalem to venture across the hefty concrete slab dividing Israel from the West Bank (in recent years the quieter of the two Palestinian territories). Again, I carried my 'second airport' conversation in an emergency glass container. But all we found in Ramallah was construction, good cheer, and what appeared to be a whole lot of wealth: posh cars threaded through infrastructure that was brand spanking new, or will be in a year's time. The city seemed to be receiving a very direct, very conspicuous facelift when we were there; one of the central pedestrian roads was being torn up guts and all, in order to lay the foundations of what will be, fingers crossed, a new Palestinian nation. Seeing such a functional and - if a day tripper is licensed to say - prospering city was a much-needed complement to the images of abject refugee camps dominating western media. We were detained by the owner of a sandwich shop for a few minutes and listened eagerly to a spirited argument for sovereignty - all delivered (sandwich included) in a genial, non-aggressive manner. From our limited experience, this seemed to be an approach quickly snowballing into a zeitgeist: mainstream Palestine is committed to displaying an 'acceptable' face to the world, letting people (i.e. the west) into its primarily 'normal' everyday life. Mahmoud is just like you and me, Jimmy. While such a strategy might tend to occlude blemishes in favour of slapdash capitalist cosmetics, a change of image is not to be underestimated. Start building, acting, looking like an official state, and eventually you'll be treated like an official state, and eventually you'll be an official state. It worked for Dio Chrysostom, who became a philosopher by dressing up as one, until people started talking to him as one. And then he started talking like one. And then he was one. By no means the end of a complicated peace process; but it plays a role in this world of images.

As always in Israel and the territories, things change in the blink of an eye. The relatively rosy trip from Jerusalem to Ramallah was not the same thing in reverse: entering Israel is like entering a maximum security prison facility where the guards are convinced you're trying to kill them. All Palestinian residents had to leave the bus while their documentation was checked, and in the meantime, two IDF soldiers scoured the vehicle for bombs. Some poor sod had left a bag of snow-peas (or similar greens) under the seat. You could feel the tension surge as the soldiers reluctantly prodded it before picking it up and verifying its vegetable constituents. Then they ran off with our suspiciously unstamped passports. Guns a-swinging the whole time. I've had some distressing border crossings in my life. Senegal into Mali, for example: we gave it a fifty percent chance the bus would drive off without us as we waited on an interminable passport check. Even though I never worried about passport return this time, the crossing took the prize for sheer unpleasantness: looking out the window and seeing Palestinians herded through a wire gate while we surrendered our passports to some aggressive ambassadors already primed into a bad mood through suspicion of snow-peas, stuffed innocently into a guilty-looking opaque bag. The old Heathrow glare and robotic 'What do you study?' was looking like an immigration Club Med.

And all this rigmarole at the end of a period of relative quiet, when checkpoints were supposedly at their mildest and mobility for the Palestinians at a modest high. As soon as tensions re-flare, travel times will explode; what should, by the assumptions and calculations of modern transport, take half an hour to cover, will inevitably balloon to hours. Being a Palestinian in this world must feel a lot like physical disability, or incarceration, or any and every metaphor of impediment: doing time, not on your own time, but on someone else's, the one who decides how long it will take you to cover the same distance you covered yesterday and will cover tomorrow, but who decides differently on all of these days. Hemmed in by a wall of force separating you from your people on the other side (East Jerusalem), and on the other other side of another gigantic territorial wall (Gaza). Contrast our trip to Haifa later that day: straight on a bus and at the opposite end of the country in a few measly hours. Uneven travel times are by no means the worst inequalities in this bumpy region; but they are a quotidian index of frustration in a world that, increasingly, is rightly giving the finger to the tyranny of distance (this Australian joins the chorus). It is no coincidence that some of the most famous scenes of apartheid are played out on buses: places of transition that should highlight community, but often advert to segregation. I leave the image as sketch and not fully-figured parallel; but I know my foot is already deep in it, deep in the picture.

I left this place more confused than I entered it, muddled in the mess of culture, religion, ethnicity; even geography posed problems as I reviewed the 'neutral' flat map. What would a Palestinian nation look like? An Israeli one next to it? I couldn't even complete this simple task of two-dimensional rearrangement and rezoning of space in my own mind. It made we want to erase every line drawn on the landscape in the history of human civilisation and start again, from principles that would give up on an equation between politics and geometry. How about on the moon? No: an astronaut cowboy will still confront me, gesturing towards the national flags that continue to jostle even as they sag: surviving without the life support of all the rhetorical wind and hot air that are some of the unfortunate side-effects of an atmosphere.

The Hegemony of the Interesting

Let my interests be made visible from the beginning: I don't consider myself very interesting. Whenever I read that famous Socratic dictum 'the unexamined life is not worth living', my heart leaps like a puppy that hears the the shake of the chain and falsely infers the promise of a walk - when the owner was just gearing up for some s and m all along. 'Know thyself'. Timeless classical wisdom! Introspection IS the mother of virtue! I swallow these nuggets to the letter, on the assumption - which really should have done itself a favour and self-erased by now - that something 'interesting' will emerge. But when I turn inward, all I see is a young boy on a comfortable couch, playstation controller in hand, thanking his mother for the orange juice, locking his eyes on mine, and robotically addressing me: 'C'mon Tom. You know me. Move along. There's nothing to see here.'

Once upon a time I fantasised about the possibilities of total renunciation, total reclusion. I thought the protagonist of Into the Wild embodied a pin-up myth of generation and demographic: absolute self-sufficiency. Imagine: giving it all up to be at one with nature, in the company of a beaver, the odd salmon, and a full circus of thoughts. Phwoah, the thoughts I'd have! I'd spend half the day deciding whether or not to eat that ambiguously coloured berry, half the day rethinking the institutions of literary criticism. No distractions. No interference. Just me and my world-altering movements of mind.

Since then - whenever then was - I've substantially revised my model of the solipsistic utopia. First of all, given the current frequency and frequent currency of the thought 'Hmm, think I'll have some cheese on toast again', if withdrawn to remotest Alaska, I would most certainly be thinking about the berry much more than the institutions of literary criticism. How about if I raised the bar a little and dwelled in a cottage with unlimited heat, food, other necessities? With the basics guaranteed, would I not be free to think on matters of far greater consequence? Wittgenstein solved philosophy (debatable, but let's run with it for now) on the fringes of Europe, holed up on a Fjord, with little more than pen and paper at his disposal. My mathematician friend daily violates the law of conservation of energy and produces something out of nothing. Given such paradigms, why doubt that solitude reigns as the solid precondition for creativity?

But a doubter I am. And partly because a Wittgenstein, I am not. I prefer to think of my brain in its present state as a Mac (or to be honest, a clunky underperforming PC) with an infinitesimally small hard drive. I divide the labour with my technological partner (a real Mac) according to what we do best. The real Mac acts as the external hard drive to my mind: I connect them and the data is accessible, as long as the cord remains. Every time I need to write something, I read over the notes made on and belonging to the Mac, and I sink beneath the dependency of memory. Very little is stored up here any more; and what is stored is compressed into a kind of zip file which requires a supplementary engine to be read. I no longer recall from scratch; I recognise from prompt. Same goes for what should be the 'objects' of my study, the texts I should know back to front. But until I have something in front of me, until I see the words on the page and the memories sharpen up a crisper universe, nothing happens. No matter how many times I've read the text, without the text's presence: nothing happens.

Self-sufficiency thus always strikes me as a howling oxymoron, whether at work or at play. When there's a whole world of other things and other selves out there, I can't help being struck by how gallingly insufficient the self is. Not just insufficient, but deeply, simply, boring. The opposite of interesting.

You won't be interested to know that I've been thinking (with the aid of my Mac) about the dominance of the 'interesting', particularly in academia, but also everywhere else. How long has this term been floating about as the ultimate goal? Everyone around me strives to produce interesting opinions, have interesting conversations, absorb interesting information; work out five year plans of cultural capital investment which will yield a more interesting person, plus interest. I read a book once (which, needless to say, interested me greatly) called Interpretation and Overinterpretation, and a polemic essay by a leader of the pragmatists ran something like: we shouldn't worry about what we can and can't say in criticism, enough of laws and limits. We can say whatever we like - as long as it's interesting. Other contributors in the book took issue with the ill-defined concept of 'interesting'; but it struck me as an extreme, and extremely accurate, transcription of the thick air of interest around us. 'Interestingness' rests smugly on the analyst's couch, yawning out loud, a pina colada in hand. We sit upright in the analyst's chair, our skin tensed and pencil at the ready. We know we have to listen to interestingness, because it's bound to say something interesting. Interestingness and interestingness alone is the thing that will pique our interest, the only worthy criterion for investigation.

To whose interests are we pandering when we try to be interesting? In the cutthroat world of academia, patterns of interest make or break careers. Interest someone whose interests are similar to yours, and you might just have a job. Fail to interest and the jig is up. Even if we try to go out on a limb and pursue what is interesting to us, and us alone, we play with other players, because our interests have always been set by the agendas of other people's interests. It takes a real visionary to buck the trends and define new areas of interest. And when this happens - Jesus Almighty, it's interesting!

As you can see, I don't have anything particularly interesting to say on the topic of interestingness apart from the fact that I deem it worth thinking about. Yes, interesting. But I'm also going to conclude by making the profoundly uninteresting move that I make in near every post, and contradict myself. As I become increasingly exhausted by the quest for novelty involved in leading an interesting life among interesting people, I become increasingly attracted to the boring. Boredom: that precious, ever shrinking resource in an overstimulated and overinterested life. That's why the puppy heart is going to keep jumping every time I recall - no, recognise - 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. I'll keep turning inwards, surveying the cacti and tumbleweeds, logging off, shutting down, never getting anywhere. And if I shake the shackles of the interesting, even for a few seconds: that's gonna be exciting.