Oncoming Roll-on

My Saturdays in this town are numbered. Cambridge hangovers are now precious resources, to be jealously guarded and frugally rationed over the course of three months. Sloppy college lunches must be savoured with relish. My smattering of buy-nine-get-one-free coffee cards must be strategically consolidated and redeemed. Resilient gardenware must be obtained and laid out for my final day in Cambridge, when I fully intend to roll in that grass off which I have so scrupulously kept. I shall finally inherit the blotched, allergic complexion of the True Brit. My teeth will grow stained and distorted. And I shall never be able to express my emotions again. The incubation is nearly over. Time for the alien within to become naturalised.

Limping towards the end of my PhD, happily maimed from the most exhausting intellectual and emotional minefield of my life, I was chatting to my sagely supervisor about the wrap-up ahead. I told him I could see light at the end of the tunnel. He responded cheerily with some up-beat lyrics, perhaps reserved for all his purgatorial students twiddling their thumbs in the vestibule of promised freedom: 'Aah, when the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.' That remark could be interpreted by future commentators as something of a downer. But as I giggled my way through the rest of the meeting, gulping down his anecdotes and struggling to stifle my ever-disproportionate laughter along with them, I couldn't help but become increasingly cheered by the image.  No new metaphorical slant was making itself available. The image was fine just as it was. I was thrilled by the prospect of an oncoming train.

The enthusiastic welcoming of such future impact is definitely a sign of a PhD on the deathbed. It isn't a depressive or suicidal tick. It's merely an index of profound, gnawing boredom. I'm at a moment in the thesis where I know what my Juvenal will be about. Now I just have to trim his hair, cut his toenails, spray some aftershave in his direction, coax him into his Sunday best, and pack him off to interview - all of which equivalent tasks must be neglected in the real world, of my own body, temporarily, for the sake of getting the little guy off to a good start in this life. Against the monotonies of parenting a word document that cannot speak back to you in anything but the language of your own internal echo-chamber, the sudden rush of adrenalin on finding a light of hope converted last-minute to impending danger beckons as the best thing in the world. Anything that isn't my PhD - even insignificant and meaningless ways of troping my ambivalent future - have become the jewels of tiring days. Any mental distraction feels like the most heaving sigh of a catharsis. Which is why I have forced my recalcitrant mid-twenties body to take up skateboarding - again.

This noble pastime - last waved off when I was sixteen, and it was no longer cool - has now made a surprise comeback, when I am almost twenty-seven, and for that reason it is especially no longer cool. If some wise mentor had sat me down before my time in Cambridge and showed me through their omniscient crystal ball what I would be doing with my last days as a graduate student, I would have shattered it with my hard copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and thumbed to the word for 'patently ridicilous'. The only flipping I would be doing would be through weighty tomes. The only grind I would execute would be that of the daily variety, lodged safely in the ethereal surrounds of the library. My reality was now nicely grip-taped: skateboarding long ago cashed in for scholarship.

And yet here I am sealing off four years of mind-slog with regular trips to the local skatepark. Whence and wherefore this sudden regression to teenage recreation? The genesis was inevitably a little different this time. When I was fourteen, I must have picked up a skateboard because, one fatal self-conscious day, everyone in my immediate vicinity was also holding a skateboard. From there came genuine fun, commitment and community, as well as a zen seclusion from the complications of teenhood. This time the approach was much more timid. I met a seriously skating coeval in London a few months ago. We soon converged on the common conversational ground of skateboarding. He told me he did it; I told him I used to. We started waxing lyrical over our mutual admiration for Rodney Mullen, the father of modern street skating. I had always worshipped this guy not only for his stratospheric abilities, manipulating the deck as if it were a detachable limb of his body, but also for his shamelessly nerdy credentials: word on the street was he had a PhD in physics. (I've since tried to establish the veracity of that one, but still not sure. In any case, he's well into science). Here was a legend who could combine the life of the mind with the life of the grind - indeed, could embody in his unique brand of skateboarding the very poetics of science I imagined him to espouse. Even if this was more myth than man, the conversation opened the floodgates of nostalgia - but also reminded me that I might have more of a connection with this thing than a mere golden haze could fabricate.

At first I had no intention of reclaiming the gutters from my comfortably parked self. But I was fired to understand a little more about my attraction to the game. What did it reveal about teen me, that I could spend four hours repeating the same trick until I finally stuck something and rode away, with no reward awaiting me other than self-satisfaction, two bags of potato chips, and a mango yoghurt on a good day? And why was I still inexorably drawn to the rolling piece of timber? I thought that there had to be an academically legitimate way (yep, the priorities have shifted) to articulate what I felt. I asked William (London skater) if he knew any academic books on skateboarding, and he ushered me into the relevant channels. But this didn't seem like a field that would lend itself to pretentious over-theorising. While the authors trumpeted 'Of course, the Lefebvrian notion of the production of space is useful here', the skaters they interviewed usually replied 'sick ollie, bra!'. What I did learn about skateboarding discourse, if you wanna (and you do wanna) name it so, is that skateboarders habitually renounce the relevance of anything outside skateboarding to tweak their skater-identity: skating is about skating, the practice, the doing, the landings and the bails. All those little voices of anti-intellectualism were wresting the book from me with one hand, stuffing a board under my arm with the other.

These voices were ultimately imaginary and easily suppressed. The only thing they made me do - in my  chronic shit-talking and flirtation with futures never to be realised - was sound off about wanting to start skateboarding again. It took a wealthy philanthropist named Carlos to take me at my empty word and put the plan into practice. We searched for hours on Ebay, scouring cyberspace for its best deals. Scores of brand names, obscure to the majority of the population, came bubbling up from deep in my core, stowed away for years in ominous dormancy: Chocolate, Alien Workshop, Venture, Spitfire, Element, World Ind. - all these names were still much more familiar to me than irregular Greek verbs. Two judicious purchases and four overpriced shoes later, we were back on the street. And we could still - sort of - do it. Our twenty-something bodies felt every creak in every joint, punished every slight stumble with overkill, forbidding bruises. But we pushed through until confident enough to join the Youth down the skatepark. Now Carlos is board-sliding his way to bliss. And I am stressing myself in an attempt to master the complex etiquette and politics of the concrete. But we're getting somewhere.

I can't deny this all must be, at some level, a knee-jerk flight back to infantile silliness, away from a fairly mundane and stressful time in our lives. But the impulse to push off again feels independent of my particular biographical constraints too. Something about this sport chimes with my deep-rooted compulsiveness and monomania. Repeating tricks ad nauseam, slowly gaining proficiency, inching closer to that evasive nose-slide - I forget everything but limbs and board in this supercharged version of my fetish for routine. There is also something (broadly) mathematical about the way board and body carve out lines across the surface, breaking up the flow with brief sharp shifts in angle, ever-updating relations between concrete, metal, timber and flesh. Kids should be taught physics and geometry in their local skatepark. That would be my first initiative as Minister of Ill-conceived Ideas.

Apart from those reflections, most of which could have been lifted from those very pretentious books I recently had the audacity to condemn, I'm also charmed by the ease with which I forget my age on the hard pitch. This healthy oblivion is real release from the growing, and increasingly unavoidable, reminders of adult responsibility: stress, job applications, ever severer hangovers. But yesterday I stood with an eight-year-old kid for a few minutes and showed him how to kick-flip. It didn't feel didactic at all. It was one skater talking to another. Carlos and I only realised how ridiculous we must have looked - two grown men scarred with untended facial hair, kicking it with our pre-pubescent homies - when we got on our more mature forms of transport (cycles) and made the trip back to adulthood. Age distinctions momentarily collapse, at least until your less supple limbs do the same, and your paralysed thighs reassert the kingship of time.

People often ask me whether 'Juvenal' has anything to do with 'juvenile'. Well here you have a moving argument for the connection. If it turns out to be an oncoming train, better to have rolled on into it.

Better Read

As a full time student of literature, text is both my pleasure and suffering, my lifesource and anathema. I spend whole days laying the foundations for future debilitating back problems, staring ahead into a screen of many ordered characters, then glancing down periodically to gather visual information from a slate of dead tree that has already absorbed the sweat, snot, spit and dandruff of a thousand others before me. I follow the line of letters from left to right until there are no more letters, and I must inconveniently skip back to the extreme left again, moving down one row without dissolving the mental imprint of the previous one. I must maintain the process continuously and look up only when another sector of reality - such as the birth of my first child - competes for my cognitive resources. When my second child is born, it will be business as usual: what the next reader will take for dandruff will really be flecks of bloody placenta.

If I spend the day reading and claim this to be the day's major activity when I communicate it to my friend in the pub later that evening, s/he will most probably comprehend that statement and enquire no further. 'I did some reading' (for you would never be satisfied with the amount of reading that you had done) is a perfectly satisfactory contribution to the exchange of daily pleasantries, especially when the exchange is between people of academic inclinations (as it usually is round these parts). Everyone knows what you mean when you say you read. But as with most things so habitual, familiarity anaesthetises and domesticates the many-headed beast. Those people sitting across from me in the library seem to be participating in an analogous activity: they're also looking down at a book and following words with darting eyes. But how do I know they're running in true parallel? And - even in the slightly better-lit labyrinth of my own brain - why does the word 'read' come out to describe so many different interpretive operations? Textual metaphors have appropriated the world so thoroughly in my case that I can never stop reading. Do you read me?

I moaned in a previous post about my increasing drift towards and inevitable shipwreck on the reef of the textual. When I go to art galleries and museums I gravitate to the accompanying text - that would be the peritext, if we were talking text, which we're not, but it's all I've got - even before I bother looking at the work 'itself'. I need to read reviews of films before and after I see them in order to extract some method from their hostile over-visual madness. I lurch towards my laptop after every important football match to read a good journalistic assessment before I make up my own mind. In short, most encounters with reality I have are mediated by reading, and I am rarely not reading. This reading may not always be meaningful or taxing. But all up I think I spend more time deciphering text than I did five years ago, and then much more than five years before that. These reflections were in fact prompted by a rare moment of out-of-body self-awareness as I mentally stepped beyond my self to read it in context on the way home the other day. A friend had given me a book, and I had no bag to put it in for the fifteen minute cycle out of town. I kept it between my hand and the handlebars for as long as I needed to keep my eyes on the road, but as soon as I got to a quiet patch the temptation became overwhelming: I leant back on my seat, absolved my hands of their steering duties, and diverted them to opening the book instead. I read the book for several seconds until I realised I had become a cycling postcard image of the worst excesses of academia. But then I just wanted to get to the end of the paragraph...

Despite reading's status as extreme sport with its attendant hazards, I'm still here, still reading. And one of the things I've done some reading on lately is the reading technologies and practices of the ancient world. Ever since learning about the oral tradition of poetic composition lying behind the text of Our First Great Western Poet 'Homer', I've been a little knee-jerk suspicious of the modern bookworm's fetishisation of a once-upon-a-time-before-text. Any emphasis on the oral seemed to deprive me of every tool in my critical box of tricks: poetry designed for one-off hearing couldn't have been nearly as complex as poetry designed for unlimited re-reading. Oral performance seemed to restrict the field of literary criticism to the superficial and the obvious, and I wanted nothing to do with it. But now my reading about the oral phenomenon has (ironically) opened me up to a very basic jaw-drop at how different the experience of a 'text' would have been, even in the less textually laconic (compared to Homeric times) period of history I work on. The myth that Augustine was the first man to practise silent reading has now been comprehensively debunked, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of reading in the ancient world was done aloud. If you weren't reciting your latest poem to your mates and absorbing their feedback, you were poking your slave to read you a long classic into the early hours. Writing, too, was not our highly private intercourse between author and muse, but a process of dictation from commandeering master to faithfully transcribing slave. To transport yourself back to these foreign modes of literary production and consumption is nothing less violent than a mind-rape.

The technologies of reading and writing at least affect, at most dictate, how you do both; and if you want to travel down the Orwellian road no longer travelled by serious scientists, which I stick to from stubbornness and nostalgia - that language governs thought (cf. that misquoted Wittgenstein schtick about limits of language being coterminous with limits of world) - then these technologies must also affect the way you think. The other example of mind-rape when it comes to envisioning ancient reading - and the one that provokes the most incredulity at conversationally-struggling dinner parties - is the fact that ancient texts had almost no punctuation. Classical Greek practice was to write a pure stream of uninterrupted upper-case letters, no word breaks, no commas, no full stops. Justashitloadofletterswithoutend. The Romans, ever the schematisers, road-makers and landscapers, introduced word breaks for a good while - but then abandoned them around the time my poet Juvenal began writing. Needless to say the experience of hacking through this textual thicket - not to mention the cognitive skills required as machete - must have been insanely different. One of my favourite recent articles on classical literature performs selected thought experiments that show up the weird things resulting from a restoration of the 'neutral' text without punctuation. A basic effect is that, narratologically speaking, you often lose sight of precisely who is speaking: 'author', 'character', 'character-within-mouth-of-character' are all uncertainly assigned and jumbled in a cacophony of possibility. Modern punctuated editions of classical texts like to claim to stand on the shoulders of giants and present themselves as the cumulative summit of thousands of years hard scholarly (usually German) work, monuments dedicated to solving these very problems of clarity (attribution of speech among them). But clarification charges its price: readers are mollycoddled into smoother transactions of meaning, sat down in front of the textual television to be nicely entertained. Every edited text is a condescending lump of spoon-feeding constituted by other people's concealed - often bad - decisions. And that includes this one. Full stop.

Faux-snobbery aside, the thought of those forbiddingly neutral ancient texts chills me to the core. It also makes me wander into the politically sensitive territory of human 'progress' in literacy. We often use literacy rates as a sound index for the general population's level of education - and everyone knows how far the world has travelled in that regard, with a much greater proportion of literate souls alive today than ever before. But the embarrassing underbelly of this lurch forward is that reading itself has become much easier. And I ain't just talking punctuation either. The sprawling periodic sentences and complicated syntax of Ancient Greek and Latin required reader to store huge amounts of information; often it would take till the end of a several-line sentence to discover/clarify that sentence's grammatical structure. Non-linear syntax would have teamed up with non-existent punctuation to render reading a head-splitting process of decoding at sight. The number of people equipped to do it would have been closer to the number of people now capable of smashing out some Rachmaninov (or insert difficult composer of whom I am ignorant) at first glance. Which isn't to say that many humans couldn't do it if they applied themselves industriously. But it would demand an intimidating amount of time and discipline - perhaps about the same amount as was available to the average member of the Good and the Leisured class.

When I realised the magnitude of the feat that was ancient reading, I started thinking about how far my own reading practices and turns of interpretation are simply governed by my linguistic ineptitude. I'm not confessing impostor status here. I can read Latin after all these years. But the way I read it is slowly, laboriously, with constant side nod to dictionary and explanatory literature. Often my readerly struggles   force me into paying disproportionate attention to the visual and surface aspects of the text: I notice straightaway, for example, if a word is repeated within a poem, and I immediately start pressing on what this repetition could mean. If it doesn't appear to mean anything, I push as hard as possible to make it mean something; I lean against the text's wall and make constipated noise until the whole edifice threatens to crumble in a spectacularly fruitful cycle of demolition and creation. But sometimes this monomania for the minutiae of verbal echoes feels like a workshop of horrors. If I were reading an English poem, would I care that the word 'hair' was repeated in lines 23 and 96? Would it matter? Formalism, I fear, is oft the first refuge of mild incompetence.

The problem is, I'm sure it ain't just me. My particular area of study - Latin literature - has seen an explosion of interest in the concept of 'allusion' in recent days: the moment, that is, when one text refers to another, and what that particular interaction signifies. A lot of these allusions are precise and compact verbal echoes: groups of two or three words in close proximity, usually slightly modified in their new context. But I wonder if these snippets don't stand out against their backdrop of dead language much more through our surface-skim reading habits, latching as we do onto repeated verbal motifs and clinging to them for dear life; treating the text as a pretty painting which offers meaning through flashes of similarity and difference when placed against other pretty paintings in the vicinity. Obsession with allusion peaks just as the wave of critics with mediocre Latin begins to crash on the shore. Coincidence? Hopefully. Even I'm surprised at how old I'm sounding.

Just as oral modes of communication become the fetish of the nerdy written culture, so do the classicists of previous generations always seem sexier: more knowledgeable, more fluent, more at ease gliding through the text apace, chewing it up as if it were so much high level English. The idea must have a good quantity of myth to it. But there must also be some truth tucked away in those familiar folds of decline. When I look at a page of Latin nowadays - when I 'read' it - my brain must be doing something very different to what Augustus' was doing when he heard/read that passage of Virgil, and different still  to what an 18th century scholar's was doing when they marked up that ode of Horace with confident ink strokes. Just because we curled into ourselves from reading aloud to silent scanning doesn't necessarily mean we should be mute about the manifold modes of textual absorption we employ every day, particularly those involving dead and difficult languages. Think about it now; in one thousand years, what you've just done probably won't qualify as reading. Read it and weep.

On the Outside of Inside

I'll anticipate your prayers to spare you another long travelogue by responding to them in advance. That's how much I care for my readers. But the following post will require at least incidental mention of the following fact: I just spent a week in Sicily. For details, obtain your local Rough Guide, circle the cheapest recommendation in each category, and proceed from Catania to Agrigento, allowing the odd extra-textual anomaly in between. I've now betrayed the key to shortcircuiting the loquacious narratives of this blog. You'll have a lot more time on your hands now. Why not go to Sicily?  I can safely endorse the Rough Guide.

Whenever asked the inevitable question 'how was your holiday?', I'm drawn to the classic reply: 'it was good to get away.' That's because I've heard this same reply successfully and convincingly retailed by others. But then I started weighing out the by-catch of this pre-fab linguistic unit. Few naturalised formulas could be as offensive when actually thought to their conclusion. Most of the time we fling this throwaway off to a fellow inhabitant of our permanent surroundings who has taken a good chunk of time and space out of their own memory to remember that we were on a vacation. How do we reward them? 'Yeah, was good to get away from this shithole. Hope you had a nice time munching through those prison rations, sucker.' We flaunt our only-ever-brief liberation in our innocent interlocutor's face. Saying 'it was good to get away', in its blatant self-evidence, conceals the bitchy implication that it was unpleasant to stay here.

Wherefore this constant compulsion to leave the living quarters temporarily, and the smug assault on those who remain? Why the fetishisation of greener grass? If here were really that bad, you'd be dead. But then, some heres in the world are better to get away from than others. I could have sworn I'd heard the desire for, and satisfaction with, 'getting away' about ten times less in Sydney compared to Cambridge. This may have had as much to do with temporal here as the spatial now: in Sydney we were small twenty-three year olds turgid with our own potential, as yet only ankle deep in a system geared to work us to the bone in exchange for the slim pickings of material prosperity. But even with the considerable error margin of nostalgia and idealisation factored in, there is something wholly particular about the way Cambridge creates a mythical outside and sparks the desire to flee to it. People routinely talk of 'needing to get out', whether short term, mid term or long term. We all 'need to get to London from time to time'. My Italian housemate howls to the full moon 'che galera!' (what a jail!). My British friend has just escaped to Germany for time indeterminate, plucking up the courage to intermit his fully-funded PhD. My other British friend is working long hours to blow off this one-horse town and never look back. My New Yorker friend signed, sealed and delivered his thesis in record time only to board a plane straight back to his Mother Apple. In short, I've never met so many people from so many places who don't want to be here.

Before the University posts this piece on its website to attract new students, it's worth asking: where did the dream go wrong? Surely everyone arrived here raring to imbibe from and contribute to one of the greatest intellectual hubs in the world. You don't suffer through a paper-heavy application process, and in many cases an interview, to scramble for a position in a place where you don't want to be. Something moulders away in the hearts of these Cambridge grad students such that, in the course of three or four years, the epithets turn from 'enchanting', 'stimulating', 'amazing' to 'suffocating', 'claustrophobic', 'stressful'. The place itself stays mercilessly consistent, so it seems that we're talking prisons of the mind. It could just be the blueprint trajectory of the grad student replicated throughout the world's universities: the unbending arc of the PhD necessarily steers you from excitement at the prospect of changing your field, to hopeless disorientation as to what precisely you're changing, to disappointment-tinged indifference to the possibility of changing anything. The psychology of self-directed research definitely plays in somewhere, somehow. I don't have much comparative data to run on here apart from the universal stereotype of the wretched grad student. But even despite this, Cambridge seems to come packaged with a very particular brand of abjection, manifesting regularly in the spring to ejection.

I don't think this is a mere matter of social self-selection. Granted, I may gravitate towards people who consider themselves fuller people than the very flaccid and narrow priorities that Cambridge recycles, and those people will always churn out dissatisfaction with the game; but the pathology feels much more pandemic. I've patted a few friends on the back recently for making it through the remorseless palpitations of Junior Research Fellowship (three-year post-doctoral research-only positions, particular to Oxbridge and highly sought after in said game) applications  and ending up the last candidates standing from pools of up to four hundred applicants. But beam a smile to these people to fire them into acknowledging the magnitude of their achievement and they look back with a sad, empty gaze: all it means to them is three more years in Cambridge, ugh, meh. Even people that jump through electrified hoops to extend their stay here profess not to be so fussed about the goal they've just scored. With a few  glistening exceptions, this is the normal range of relation between grad student and place: grudging tolerance at best, outright loathing at worst. And always respiring on the belief that it will be better outside, once the 80 000 word bond between supervisor and supervised has been dissolved good and proper.

Living in Cambridge (as student) seems to require the rhetoric of discontentment for reasons bigger than 'that's what everyone else says'. The turn also functions as guarantor of sanity and survival. If most people here (including me) keep one foot pointed towards the train station, they are also (including me) insecure about the 'right' they can claim to maintain the other foot squarely planted in such an elite community. I'd wager the two are pretty close siblings. Every student here - even the most talented, even those whose oversupply of confidence more than makes up for whatever talent they lack - is confronted daily with their own inadequacy; there is always a better brain working more smoothly just around the corner. And even when there isn't a better brain, just a complementary brain, or a brain dressed up to look its best, you inevitably invent a better brain. I was pub-chatting with a friend the other night about how easy it would be to wage psychological warfare in this hive of paranoia, should you be so evilly inclined: only go into the library with a big stack of freshly-minted, tightly-footnoted paper and place it just within your coeval and competitor's peripheral vision. The document will actually be a five-part series of instructions on how to turn cow-poo into shower gel, with footnotes such as 'cf. bollocky arse pretentious wank' and 'see the tinia between my second and third toe, p. 74' - but the distant observer's nagging conscience about their own slow progress will squint painfully and turn such fluff into diamond-studded academic prose. Every A4 page in sight is the product of better.

One good trick to swerve around the meetings with one's own inadequacy is precisely the pose of partial loathing and detachment that so many good souls employ here. If Cambridge is bought into wholesale, these meetings become more and more frequent, more and more corrosive; but interpose a judicious distance between Cambridge's values and your own, and whammy, you have a healthy buffer against potential failure. Didn't want your recognition anyway, whatever.  I feel like I'm erecting these ridiculously simple (and perhaps flimsy) psychological fortifications more and more nowadays. But, like heroin I suppose, it's astounding how effective they are in the short term. And I think resort to them will only become more regular as I gear up for the inevitable barrage of rejection that is the job application process. Indeed, it's already begun. After puffing out the cushions in preparation to go somewhere else, laying the justificatory groundwork for leaving Cambridge by turning necessity into volition, cursing this spiritually emaciating place...I suddenly swivelled in the shape of an embarrassing volte-face when a temporary (two-year) teaching post came up in the faculty. Yeah, why not apply? Cambridge ain't that bad. Ain't that bad, pfft, what am I talking about, it's actually the best place in the world! My mind let down its makeshift floodgates and allowed me to swim in the milky prospects of being here another two years. And then, predictably, I got a letter containing a politely worded 'thanks but no thanks'. Within seconds, my heart sank, but only fell a couple of millimetres into the safety net I immediately re-installed. Bah, it's for the best. I really need to finish my PhD. It would have been an enervating slog. And did I really want to prolong my sojourn in this parochial English village? One door closes and all that. The speed and efficiency with which the self-contradictory self-defences kicked in was nothing short of comical.

Petty manoeuvres of self-protection aside, the pose of detachment that Cambridge so prolifically generates must also serve an apotropaic purpose, to ward off the evil eye: for deep in the recesses of our detachable and detaching minds, most of us know how privileged we are to be marinating in this quaint bubble of verdant lawns, iced Pimms and tidy hors d'oeuvres. And I predict that this will only become fully apparent when the outside becomes permanent, and I peer back into the bubble from afar. Just as utopias can only be imagined from the outside, so this wonder-town will only sharpen when surveyed from an ever-increasing, and increasingly unbridgeable, distance. I can tell how focal this place will one day become for those uncontrollable rays of nostalgia. For now, I have to keep saying that I could take it or leave it.

My Date with 7/11 (It's Not a Date)

I was reminded yesterday by my time-conscious diary - who seems to contain so much blank space at the turn of the year that you need to pencil in 'breakfast' every morning just to feel its unscripted glare hold a future for you - that it is February 2012. Not even mid-February 2012. Pushing late February 2012. We're at the point where it's no longer valid to wish people happy new year without them calling you premature rather than late. Since I've been hibernating, I wrote 'Happy New Year!' in my diary, just to see what it would say. It asked me whether I had any hot cross buns. A calendar will always be one step ahead.

It also told me in no uncertain terms that I was well overdue for a blog post - so here's the offering in appeasement, the poor substitute for buns. Despite the relatively chaste life of work and worship I've been leading in the last few weeks (good for thinking, bad for generating blog material), the Christmas break was overfull with the blogworthy. Especially given my street level standards of what constitutes the blogworthy. So, dear reader, I ask you to accompany me to the land of the spree - both shopping and shooting: The United States of America. Please purchase a visa waiver for $14 before you start reading. We must ensure readers are poor before they begin, as well as the requisite tired and hungry.

Purpose of the trip was the world's biggest annual congregation of classicists, the APA in Philadelphia (cf. dread in previous post) - or so I told the immigration man, and, hang on, so I should have, because it was true. You can always recognise authority by the way it makes a simple honest statement feel like the baldest, most transparent lie. This titanic congress of social awkwardness took place in salubrious Philadelphia: one time capital of this fine nation, now a proud advertisement for liberal gun laws and robust homicide rates. I have to declare that I'd already accumulated twenty six years worth of negative filters with which to view this vast pile of capitalism. But as we politely descended towards that international airport, I was supercharged by the brown rivers, the heavy iron bridges, the factories belching fire from their crudely oiled bellies. Not that it was beautiful - even though I can be the worst offender when it comes to that particularly middle class habit of 'appreciating' gritty urban decay, experiencing waves for the aestheticised dignity of dilapidation. It was more that this was terrifyingly close to my expectations. I realised that travelling to the States is an inherently sui generis activity precisely because it is so familiar even before you hail that first cab; it's a country of hyper-representation, both in the sense of its disproportionate influence in world affairs, and the ever-ramifying images of itself that are propagated around the world every day. Of course anticipation is always at play, whatever the new place in question. But for most tourists, the flesh-presence of being there and seeing something always releases a gap between imagination and reality: 'I never imagined those pyramids were so big.' The bizarre thing about spying a big American city for the first time in eight years, though, was precisely the lack of gap. Comparing that out there with my mental collection of snapshots, films and television series, it all looked very much in order.

That same hyper-reality, and over-recognition, hit me over and over in the first few hours: big gestures and loud accents made you feel like you had finally realised the childhood fantasy by being sucked from your seat into the screen. Yes, this was the kind of reality where anything extraordinary could happen at the blink of an eye. No more tea and biscuits clattering on a tray beneath a gentle clock ticking in a cosy dark room. Border guards were calling on helicopter back-up to intercept that hundred kilo shipment of pure Colombian strapped to the hairy anuses of ten regular-looking Hispanics. Arnie was about to crash through the airport roof on some kind of large vehicle, lots of anonymous people would be massacred, then he would be driven to lunch in an oversize cadillac to meet the Mayor of Philadelphia and discuss strategies for emission reduction. Not that there was any external evidence for any of these impending events. I just felt all of this would make perverse since in this land's lawless filmic logic. My nipples began twinging towards the nearest plastic surgeon, for suddenly my breasts did not seem big enough.

In the end I was cast as an extra in 2012's American Philological Association Annual Meeting - a big-budget blockbuster requiring four days of on-location presence amid the generic carpets and low light of the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott. As far as academic conferences go, this is the big time of unwieldy, amorphous hustle and bustle. Pick up your name tag and it's all on: try detaining that Professor as she sprints between her panel on Ancient Attitudes to Groping and her important keynote address on The Imagery of Fingernails in Athens and Rome. Collapse on the floor as she palms you off, only to be trampled on by stressed job applicants who can no longer see past their copy of Greek Metre, borrowed in a rush when they began to apprehend the full range of interview horrors and decided that they would better spend their time learning to scan complex lyric metre than grappling with forgotten Greek syntax. We humble paper-givers had it easy by contrast. I turned up at 8.30 on the last morning of the conference, bleared from the free Gin and Tonics of the night past, and read my lines to an audience of seven (four of them were Cambridge pals). The one woman I had hoped to chat to - one of a handful of world experts in the crap bit of Juvenal, and the organiser of my panel - was a no show from sickness. So I walked out of that hallowed Conference Room No. 3 with head held high, thinking that there could have been no greater microcosm of what classics is about, a good chunk of the time: talking at the top of your voice to an empty room, or sitting in an audience so small that you can never be secure in your passivity - maybe you are the one supposed to be talking when that silence inevitably settles. So the classical world keeps turning, one unnoticed allusion to Virgil at a time.

My standard moans about the nitpicking of academia have particular relevance (they always have general relevance) here because the nitpicking helped intensify, indeed formed one end of, the seizure of cognitive dissonance that is travel through the States. One minute I was giving ground over a difficult question on the precise nature of synecdoche in Juvenal; the next I was on the Chinatown bus to New York City, receiving the slobber of tiny children who had escaped their mother's supervision while she blared hip-hop through a tinny smartphone and chimed along with the odd rhyme. This bus was perhaps my favourite more-American-than-America moment of the trip. Revelling in our sacred right to choose from the full range of quality transport options, we chose to neglect the overpriced privatised rail option and opt instead - what exhiliration to opt! - for the only option we could afford: the Chinatown bus, a mode of transport so named because it connects the Chinatowns of the nation's big cities. As I tried to tune out and follow the contours of the New Jersey landscape, flicking eyes back and forth between the fast moving motorway and slow moving factories coughing up phlegm in the dusk of biting winter, I kept feeling sharp, elastic snaps back to my immediate reality. The aforementioned mother, a big black woman who had to economise by booking just one seat for her three small children, would periodically try to restore order in her universe by screaming at her squirming little'uns: 'Shut the FUCK UP!' The outbursts had no discernible relation to the childrens' behaviour: whether they were silent or clamorous, the random interventions came once every few minutes. At one point, the middle-sized boy somehow obstructed her view of her smartphone, and she promptly gave him a hard slap on the face. The most disturbing thing again, however, was the inconsistency and schizophrenia of the situation: now she was tellin' y'all to shut the fuck up, now she was lavishing affection on the youngest and calling him the cutest boy in the world. But what really made things horrible and apocalyptic was the reaction, both mine and that of others. To pass the time between screams and recapture command of reality by digital means, I started writing notes in my iPhone. I looked to the left of me and my neighbour was texting on his own smartphone, writing to invite the sympathy of some distant person: 'One ghetto-ass woman screaming at her kids sure can ruin your trip to New York.' What kind of people were we that this poor woman's predicament impacted on us only enough to seek out thumb exercises and screen deflections? We, all three figures, self-atomised in our backlit realms. The finale of this grim comedy came as the mother signed off a phone conversation with her partner: 'I love you too asshole.' Then, the end-call button pressed, she sat back and chuckled to herself: 'Hehe...muthafucka call me a dickwad.' I remember so clearly because I - self-hating modern man - transcribed the quotation into my iPhone. That domestic drama is now the raw data of the blog post you are reading - feel the implication burn your eyes!

The Big Apple itself was more inviting: its anonymous bosom could be felt out and mapped immediately, based as it was on grids and numbers (two of my favourite things). I spent the usual time taken to acquaint myself with the geometry of a new place in marvelling at the strange sensation of not having to do this. Walking with complete, instant orientation, pinpointing E 85 and 3rd in the mind's eye immediately, Empire State always in the peripheral vision at wide vantage points - it was impossible to get lost! I've never been one for the romanticisation of losing oneself - discovering novel things, cool, but what's wrong with knowing your gps co-ordinates while you do it? So in that respect, NYC was the ideal town for me: freeing the mind of the fear of derailment, sorting you out for other, funner forms of irregularity. If Martin will permit me the use of a weak jazz metaphor to speak of jazz's birthplace, NYC built in the regular changes over which I could improvise. Of course, like my jazz days, this was so humdrumly executed that no one even recognised I was playing a solo. But that didn't matter. I just kept on walking...man.

For all the performance culture comparisons panting through this post, I ended up cashing out some literal time in the limelight during a play we watched at an East Village (? - can't get lost ey?) theatre one night. The friend with whom I was staying happened to have a happening mum in touch with the experimental theatre side of town, and we scored ourselves some tickets to the show on everyone's collagen-injected lips. The play was a loose 'version' of the Antigone set in Athens 2008, during the aftermath of the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a young man shot by police and turned martyr for a generation of sold-out young Greeks. The central point of connection was burial and mourning as radical act in the midst of an establishment bent on sweeping the inconvenient death clear. One of the play's urgent battle cries was for the expression of outrage, protest, resistance - and one of the ways it sought to galvanise the audience was through direct participation. Everyone was invited on stage to join the unchoreographed chorus of angry kicks and jolts - a dance that anyone with working legs could do. After waiting cautiously for other braver souls to get down there first, I too added my small contribution of ungainly thrashes. Whether I'm more politicised since, I couldn't say. Which fact is probably a dead giveaway that I'm not. But it's certainly stuck in my mind as a vivid demonstration of how stupid a feeling embarrassment is, and how easily it dissipates when you start kicking up some air.

So I played a minor role in a modern tragedy - and it would be too easy to write that up as the governing summary for My Time in America. This, both because that behemoth of a nation has so many products in its gigantic supermarket that it defies my classical impulse to stuff it into a good synecdoche; and because when it comes to America, the trip never ends. Next week I'll watch Terminator II for the seventh time and think, fondly: 'Yeah. It really is like that.'

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.