Memorabilia Antonina

BSFA Awards nominations

2012-01-18T22:16:00.003Z

For a number of reasons (largely because we can), the BSFA awards nominations deadline has been extended until 2200 UK time, Thursday 19th January. If you're a BSFA member, please nominate here, or e-mail awards@bsfa.co.uk.

To give you an idea of what's been nominated so far, you can look at this list. Those that get the most nominations will get on the final ballot.

For the record, I've nominated Christopher Priest's The Islanders (Gollancz) in Best Novel. For Best Art I've nominated Anne Sudworth's cover of Liz Williams’ A Glass of Shadow. and in best non-fiction, I've nominated David Seed's Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, Mike Ashley's Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It, and Adam Roberts' introduction to Justina Robson's Heliotrope.

And I'm delighted that the collection I edited with Simon Bradshaw and Graham Sleight, The Unsilent Library, has been nominated, and that the cover by Pete Young has also been nominated.

Royal Holloway Classics Day

2011-11-17T23:26:00.003Z

A few months ago, the Principal of Royal Holloway came up with a wheeze for the Classics Department - amalgamate it with History and lose six of its posts. I was amazed. This was not some minor department with a few staff too busy concentrating on their own navels to produce decent work. This was one of the best-respected departments in the country. The department's success had been recognised in more benign days by the promotion of a number of its staff to chairs.

I was lucky enough to teach a few courses there for a year in 1998-99, and it was the best experience in my teaching life up to that point. At the end of the year one student listed me as one of the best teachers they'd had - I was tremendously honoured, because I knew how good the other staff were there, and to be so considered was extremely flattering.

The College management has since modified considerably their proposals (see http://supportclassicsatrhul.wordpress.com/). But they still need to be reminded how vital the subject is. Tomorrow, there's a Classics day at the college. It kicks off at 10, and has lectures, quizzes, and a version of Aristophanes' Clouds. Unfortunately, I'm off to Germany, so I can't go. But I'll be thinking of my friends and former colleagues.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference in 2013

2011-09-27T14:14:00.002+01:00

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference

At The Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool

Guests of Honour/Plenary Speakers: Edith Hall, Nick Lowe, and Catherynne M. Valente

Website: http://www.sf-foundation.org/conference

Call for papers

The culture of the Classical world continues to shape that of the modern West. Those studying the Fantastika (science fiction, fantasy and horror) know that it has many of its roots in the literature of the Graeco-Roman world (Homer’s Odyssey, Lucian’s True History). At the same time, scholars of Classical Reception are increasingly investigating all aspects of popular culture, and have begun looking at science fiction. However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other. This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which SF and Classical Reception scholars can meet and exchange ideas.

We invite proposals for papers (20 minutes plus discussion) or themed panels of three or four papers from a wide range of disciplines (including Science Fiction, Classical Reception and Literature), from academics, students, fans, and anyone else interested, on any aspect of the interaction between the Classical world of Greece and Rome and science fiction, fantasy and horror. We are looking for papers on Classical elements in modern (post-1800) examples of the Fantastika, and on science fictional or fantastic elements in Classical literature. We are particularly interested in papers addressing literary science fiction or fantasy, where we feel investigations of the interaction with the ancient world are relatively rare. But we also welcome papers on film, television, radio, comics, games, or fan culture.

Please send proposals to conferences@sf-foundation.org, to arrive by 30 September 2012. Paper proposals should be no more than 300 words. Themed panels should also include an introduction to the panel, of no more than 300 words. Please include the name of the author/panel convener, and contact details.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space is organised by the Science Fiction Foundation, with the co- operation of the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

Tony Keen
Chair, 2013 Science Fiction Foundation Conference

Relaunch of FA Online

2011-09-12T22:03:00.003+01:00

One of the things that occupied what turned out to be the last months on Martin Skidmore's life was FA Online, a relaunch of a (or as Martin had it, the) critical comics magazine that Martin had edited in the 1980s. Martin didn't do this simply as a vanity project - he had enough outlets for his writing about comics through Freaky Trigger and his LiveJournal (and if they were Japanese, his Japanese Arts site). But Martin felt that there was a need for a good comics review site to exist, so set about creating it.

Martin could have done something wonderful with FA Online, had he been given the chance. His friends can never do the same, but at least we can stop the site ossifying, and keep it growing as a tribute to Martin's memory - and also because we think there's a need for a good comics review stuff. Which is how Will Morgan, Andrew Moreton and (very much in a junior role) myself have come together as the new editorial team. We've just done the relaunch this evening, with new reviews and features, including an article on Captain America and a review of the new Cap movie by me.

We're also keen to reproduce some of Martin's older comics journalism, back before most of this was done online, and the first of these is up, a treatment of the 'Viet Blues' story of Alack Sinner.

So go read, comment, and if you're so inclined, write for us.

A science fiction bibliography

2011-08-27T16:37:00.006+01:00

I've recently been appointed as an external supervisor for a graduate student working on Greek mythology and science fiction novels. I'm very excited by the project, and having my first graduate student since 1998 (I'd long assumed I wouldn't get any more). As part of the initial work for my student, I prepared a core bibliography of sf academic/critical works, which I thought I would share with you all.

I wouldn't necessarily expect any serious sf academic to have read all of these books cover to cover - I certainly haven't. But I would expect any Ph.D. proposal to make reference to at least two or three of them, and I would hope that a book-length work would make reference to most of them.

They are:

Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Athenaeum, 1986)

Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009)

John Clute, Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Harold Wood: Beccon Publications, 2011)
John Clute, David Langford and Graham Sleight (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third online edition due soon - see http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/; the second edition, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls, London: Orbit, 1993, corrected paperback 1999, is also worth consulting)

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
David Seed (ed), A Companion to Science Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

The following works are not perhaps so essential - some of them are primarily about fantasy, but have useful insights for sf, others are on subsidiary areas of sf. But they do come highly recommended (and not just by me):

Michael Ashley, Out of this World: Science Fiction, but not as we know it (London: British Library, 2011)

John Clute and John Grant (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1997)

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [not yet published])

Paul Kincaid, A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Science Fiction and Fantasy (London: British Science Fiction Association, 1995)

Paul Kincaid, What it Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction (Harold Wood: Beccon Publications, 2008)
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
Farah Mendlesohn, The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009)

I'm open to comments here. Are there any obvious texts I've missed? I won't invite you to argue that there are works I've included that shouldn't be on this list, because I think they all should be.

Martin Skidmore

2011-07-30T11:30:00.000+01:00

My friend Martin Skidmore died last night, at the ridiculously young age of 52. It wasn't unexpected - he'd been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago, and with each examination it became clearer and clearer how aggressive his cancer was. I saw him in hospital yesterday afternoon - he was asleep, and deep down I knew he wasn't going to wake up.

I'd known Martin, at first through correspondence, the best part of twenty-five years. We weren't best friends - we didn't move enough in the same circles for that - but we did like each other and respected each other's opinions. We didn't always agree - he loved the Monkees and didn't love the Beatles, and whilst I do love the Monkees, I love the Beatles more. But Martin's opinions were always backed up by a deep knowledge of whatever it was he was talking about. He was one of the best-read people I knew, but 'best read' doesn't cover it, as his breadth of experience covered music, art, film and television, as well as book and comics (and football and wrestling).

Martin loved pop culture in all its forms, but never uncritically. I knew him through his love of comics; I first became aware of him when he edited his fanzine Worlds Collide. He then became editor of Fantasy Advertiser, at the time the main comics fanzine in the UK. Over the years he was in charge, he transformed the magazine, applying new standards of professionalism in terms of production, hosting a letter column that was more than happy to wander off the subject of comics when it was warranted, and encourging reviews that cut deep below surface impressions. Of course, this met some resistance, and there were some who considered that FA (as Martin officially renamed it) had become too pretentious in leaving behind its former role as primarily a news 'zine and becoming more of a critical magazine. But the contributors (who often disagreed with each other spectacularly in the lettercol) seemed to me tho have been attempting to apply to comics the sort of critical approaches that were being used elsewhere, and why not? If they often seemed negative, that stemmed from a refusal to tolerate the drivel that so many comics publishers thought (and still think) acceptable for the readers. The result was a serious rival, at least in terms of writing quality, for The Comics Journal, with perhaps a better sense that, deep down, the writers did love comics.

Martin himself epitomised that. He was never shy of calling something rubbish if he thought it was rubbish, but his praise for work he liked was effusive. And behind this was the fact that he was basically a kind man, and also modest about his own abilities - the naming of his own column as 'So-Called Critic' illustrates this.

In the late 1980s Martin got what must have been a dream job for him; he got to edit his own line of comics. Trident published early work by such writers as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar (whose first published work was put out by Trident). I'm not going to say that these writers would not have made it without Martin, if only because he would himself scoff at such an extravagant claim. But he did provide opportunities for them to do work they might otherwise not have done, and Morrison's St Swithin's Day remains, in my view, one of the best things he ever wrote.

Sadly, financial issues with the parent company killed Trident in 1991. Martin went away and successfully reinvented himself as a Computer Scientist, and was a Senior Analyst at UCL when he was diagnosed and took medical retirement. But his love of pop culture and comics never left him, and in recent years he was a prolific contributor to Freaky Trigger and The Singles Jukebox. Last October, he restarted FA as an online presence.

I don't think I write much like Martin Skidmore. But I think he was an influence on my writing, above all in teaching me that writing must always have integrity if it is to be worth anything. Martin was incapable of anything less.

Goodbye, Martin.

(And I would like to mention Hazel and Sarah, who were troopers in looking after Martin in his last days.)

Kidbrooke Lysistrata redux

2011-06-27T23:16:00.003+01:00

I raved about this production a couple of months back. Well, it's back, so go and see it if you can.

Conference on "The Influence of Greek and Latin Antiquity in Contemporary Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works", Paris, June 2012

2011-06-26T14:47:00.001+01:00

I've recently become aware of the following Call For Papers.

http://colloque.antiquite-sfff.over-blog.org/pages/Call_for_papers-4933306.html

I stress that I have no connection with this conference, and am merely posting it in case it has been missed by others.

Elisabeth Sladen, 1946-2011

2011-04-19T21:12:00.010+01:00

On Tuesday night I saw a rumour over the Internet that I hoped wasn’t true. It was that Elisabeth Sladen, famous for playing the role of Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and spin-offs, on and off, for over thirty years, had died at the age of 65,* which frankly, is no age at all. A few hours later, it was obviously true. The first thing I could think of to say was “No!” It’s been a long time since a celebrity death upset me to this degree.

Sarah Jane Smith was for me, as she was for David Tennant when he was growing up, the Doctor Who girl. She has long been one of the most popular companions in the show’s history. Part of this is the result of timing; Sarah Jane was a companion in the Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, when the show’s popularity was at its height. Part of it is the length of time Sladen stayed with Who; she first appeared in December 1973, in the first story of Season Eleven (The Time Warrior), and left at the end of 1976, in the middle of Season Fourteen (The Hand of Fear). As a result, Sarah Jane was the companion for a longer time period than any other non-Doctor series regular apart from Tegan Jovanka, if one excludes the various UNIT personnel. (Tegan was companion from February 1981 to March 1984, but only appeared in 69 episodes, as opposed to Sarah’s 80; shifting transmission dates and the fact that Tegan arrived at the end of Season Eighteen and left in the middle of Season Twenty-One meant that her less than three seasons equivalent was stretched out over a longer period than Sarah’s three and a third seasons. Because the first six seasons broadcast almost all year round, Sladen does not have as many episodes to her name as Frazer Hines [113], in the role of Jamie McCrimmon, another popular companion who returned to the show some years after his original departure.) Sladen was even on the show, in terms of actual broadcast period and/or episodes made, longer than some Doctors (e.g. Patrick Troughton and Peter Davison).

And finally, between them producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks came up with an excellent character, an independent woman who, whilst clearly the junior partner in the Doctor’s adventures, was nevertheless a partner. And they then cast, in Sladen, an excellent actress who had obvious onscreen chemistry with Jon Pertwee, and later, even more so with Tom Baker.

Young girls looked to Sarah as a role model, but as Nicholas has said, it wasn’t just young girls. The following is partly a rewritten version of an article published this time last year, in Lilian Edwards’ fanzine The End of Time sorry Fanzines (Part 2), entitled “‘There’s nothing “only” about being a girl’: or, how Doctor Who made me a feminist”.

In one of life’s little ironies, I found myself writing the article the day after International Women’s Day. Actually, as it was early morning, I suppose in some places it still was International Women’s Day – Hawaii, for instance. But I wasn’t in Hawaii; I was in Kent.

I like to think of myself as a feminist. Some may say that, as a man, I can’t be. I don’t accept that. As someone wrote in a Guardian article a couple of years or so ago (and no, I can’t find it now), feminism is an ideological slant, not tied to any particular biological sex. I can be a feminist because I believe in the equality of women with men. This doesn’t mean that I am incapable of saying or doing sexist things. I was brought up as a male in a patriarchal society, so inevitably my ideals and my upbringing are in conflict with one another, and sometimes the latter will win. That isn’t an excuse, by the way – if you see me being a male chauvinist pig, then you have every right to call me on it. I’m just saying that I think it’s easier to deal with my inner sexist if I acknowledge that he’s there – the major thing I learnt from RaceFail ’09 (a massive row across the Internet about the representation of Persons of Colour and other minorities in science fiction) was that an awful lot of problems are caused by white liberals who deceive themselves into thinking that they have set aside their privilege, and get very upset when it’s pointed out that this isn’t so.

(Don’t worry, this will eventually have something to do with Sarah Jane Smith and Doctor Who. Pretty soon now.)

There are a number of factors that brought about my feminism. One is my general opposition to unfairness in all its forms (which I suspect derives ultimately from being bullied at school). One is that the girls were nicer to me at primary school than the boys (see above). One is that, after my father died in 1975, I was in a family environment that was dominated by strong women – my mother, my grandmother, and two aunts (my grandfather kept himself to himself mostly, and my uncle moved away, first to Morecambe and then to the United States). One is reading The Guardian at a very young age, and the “Naked Ape” section that then used to grace the women’s page, where egregious examples of sexism were exposed mercilessly (I wonder sometimes if the fact that The Guardian no longer has this feature is a contributory factor in the slow return of such egregiousness).

And another factor was Doctor Who, and specifically, Sarah Jane Smith (told you).

My mother used to watch Doctor Who with me on her knee, so I can recall a couple of Patrick Troughton episodes (including episode seven of Evil of the Daleks [1968], long since missing from the BBC’s archives). With the Jon Pertwee colour episodes in 1970, Doctor Who became something I watched through my own volition. And in 1973, as my views of the world were starting to form in my nine-year-old head, Doctor Who gave us a new companion. Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen.

Sarah Jane Smith was conceived to reflect the strength of feminism in wider western culture in the 1970s. This was the time of “second-wave feminism”, when the terms “feminist” and “feminism” came into common usage. Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch in 1970, and stories of bra burning (which later turned out to be apocryphal) permeated the news media. It’s not surprising that Doctor Who should reflect those cultural developments.

Despite what is sometimes suggested, early Doctor Who didn’t have that bad a record for presenting capable, independent women, at least in the general context of the times. Barbara Wright was a history teacher, Sara Kingdom a security agent, Zoe Herriot a brilliant mathematician and Liz Shaw a Cambridge Professor. But for every Sara, Zoe or Liz, there was a Susan or a Dodo or a Polly, a girl who stood around, screamed at monsters and didn’t do much useful (and yes, I know that is unfair on all three). Sarah’s immediate predecessor was Jo Grant, who was, frankly, a bit wet. She was a member of UNIT, and supposedly had been trained as an agent – yet she spent a lot of time knocking things over and being sent to make the tea. In fairness, she got better in later stories, producing skeleton keys when the Doctor needed them in Carnival of Monsters (1973), or resisting the Master’s hypnosis in Frontier in Space (1973). But producer Barry Letts recognised that the presentation of the female companions was open to charges of sexism, and took action in an attempt to rectify this.

That action was the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, a freelance investigative journalist, who was very much her own woman, and was not afraid of challenging the imposed gender limitations that she saw around her. Of course, she was a feminist created by men, and subsequently written exclusively by men, at least through the 1970s – so undoubtedly they got things wrong about her. And, as the years went on, she became less impressive, as her role was hemmed in by the essential restrictions of the companion (who has to be someone to whom the Doctor can explain the plot, and who can advance that plot by getting in positions of peril from which the Doctor can rescue her). SF and Fantasy author Kari Sperring has told me that she never liked Sarah.

I thought, and still think, she was brilliant. Take, for example, The Monster of Peladon, a story from Sarah’s first season, broadcast in 1974. This is not a story that has a particularly good reputation. It is generally seen as a poor retread of 1972’s Curse of Peladon, with added unsubtle allegory about the 1973 miners’ dispute, which by the time of broadcast had developed into a full-blown strike, and ridiculous badger wigs for the supporting cast. This is a view that overall I think is justified, but the story does have some wonderful stuff for Sarah. Not so much the lecture about feminism that she delivers to Queen Thalira of Peladon, from which I drew the title quote for the original article; what Sarah says here is rather hectoring and cringe-inducing, and obviously a male view of what a feminist ought to say. But in Part Five, the Doctor is believed killed. Sarah is upset about this, but doesn’t just wander around in a state of shock. There’s still a crisis going on, and Sarah essentially takes over in the Doctor’s absence, leading the good guys, and chivvying them along. It’s Sarah who comes up with a plan. When the Doctor reappears, he doesn’t say that she has done wrong, or make her look foolish. He just picks the reins back up, apparently safe in the knowledge that his deputy has looked after things in his absence. He doesn’t even patronise her. This is quite astonishing for the Pertwee Doctor, who patronises everybody (in one glorious moment in Day of the Daleks [1972], a temporary time loop allows him to patronise himself!). It is indicative of how the dynamic between Doctor and companion changed with Sarah’s arrival. Indeed, all through this story, which I’ve just watched again, Sarah makes it quite clear that she isn’t going to let the Doctor get away with his patriarchal nonsense, and gives as good as she gets.

In the Tom Baker period, Sarah continued to be a trusted partner of the Doctor. She was never in charge, of course (the show is called Doctor Who, after all). But it is, for instance, Sarah that fires the shot to detonate the explosives that should (and eventually do) blow up Sutekh’s rocket in Pyramids of Mars (1975). Pyramids of Mars is actually an excellent showcase for Sarah, for the way she and the Doctor work as a team, for Sladen’s performance and for her chemistry with Tom Baker; and it is, special effects aside, every bit as good as anything that has gone out under the Doctor Who brand since 2005.

I realise I’ve been talking about Sarah Jane Smith here, not Elisabeth Sladen. But then I didn’t know Lis Sladen; I knew Sarah. Of course, Sarah would be nothing without Lis Sladen’s performance. In a very real sense, at least to the viewers, Sladen was Sarah Jane, so much so that it was jarring to see her in anything else, such as playing a shopkeeper in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, as Michael Crawford unfunnily demolished the shop around her. For me, it probably also helped that she was a northerner; under her received pronunciation tones there flowed a foundation of pure Scouse.

Through three and a half years, I found Sarah inspirational. I wanted to know feisty, intelligent, capable women like that. Despite what some friends have assumed, I’ve never, as far as I can recall, had overt romantic or sexual feelings about Sarah Jane Smith (or Lis Sladen). Sex wasn’t part of Sarah’s appeal – the one time she wore a (very modest and proper) two-piece swimsuit, at the beginning of Death to the Daleks, it actually seemed rather incongruous. Sarah was more of a big sister type to me. But I suppose that she has something to do with my attraction in adulthood to intelligent, capable, independent women, one of whom I have since married. (And probably my inclination towards short brunettes - though actually I always thought of Sarah as taller than she was, perhaps because she acted taller, i.e with authority.)

The other thing about Sarah is that her relationship with the Doctor showed me that men and women could be friends, without there having to be Unspoken Sexual Tension. The sort of close, but non-romantic, relationship that the Doctor and Sarah had is rarely seen on television. Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman decided that Steed and Cathy Gale would have a non-romantic relationship in The Avengers (though that didn’t stop viewers wondering if there was anything going on, and later relations between Steed and his female associates had more obvious romantic undertones). Apart from that I can think of few examples, and they are even fewer today. I thought the new Battlestar Galactica missed a trick when, having made Starbuck a woman, the creators then didn’t leave the Starbuck/Apollo relationship as just the same sort of friendship it had been in the first series; they had to introduce a sexual element. I think this is a shame, and doesn’t reflect reality, or at least my reality, where some of my closest friendships have been platonic ones with women. I’ve never been much of one for hanging out with the lads.

I didn’t much care for Leela, Sarah Jane’s replacement. Oh yes, two of her stories, Robots of Death (1977) and Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), are amongst the very best that the show has ever broadcast. But Leela herself annoyed me. Of course, part of the problem was that she wasn’t Sarah. But beyond that, whilst she was another capable strong woman, she seemed to need to express that strength through exposing lots of cleavage and thigh. She always struck me as more of a Red Sonja-style male fantasy character.

Given everything I’ve written above, you can imagine how pleased I was that Sarah was returning to Doctor Who in 2006, in “School Reunion”. And you might have some notion of how disappointed I was when Russell T Davies, who feels that placing a man and a woman on screen together automatically signals a love story, chose to construe the relationship between Sarah and the Doctor in those terms, and to portray her as a woman lessened by the lack of a man and children in her life. Lilian Edwards may be right that this hits an emotional truth about 40-something women who have lived life to the full and then find themselves single and childless, and this does seem to have been what attracted Sladen back to the role, though others would say this is Davies, as he often does, constructing middle-aged women through soap opera cliché. What it certainly wasn’t, as I’ve argued in “Whatever happened to Sarah Jane?”, my chapter in The Unsilent Library, was the Sarah we remembered. That Sarah wouldn’t have moped for thirty years about being abandoned by the one man that was ever good enough for her. It wasn’t that she was averse to emotional attachments; she was quite capable of flirtatious banter with a rugged (if slightly dim) naval officer, or a dashing renaissance nobleman. But that wasn’t the centre of her existence. She was all about the adventures, and she would have carried on having adventures. I know people like that, so I don’t think that’s any less valid an emotional characterisation than the one RTD seems to have fixed upon. (And though “School Reunion” establishes in dialogue that Sarah’s life has been put on hold since the Doctor left her, one has to ask, if that was the case, what was she doing investigating odd goings on at a school in the first place?) Matthew Kilburn has drawn attention to a line Sarah has when she comes back in “Journey’s End”: “I’ve learned how to fight.” As Matthew says, our Sarah always knew, right from the first moment she faced up to a Sontaran. Racheline Maltese writes (http://lettersfromtitan.com/2011/04/19/elisabeth-sladen-1948-2011) about how Sarah embodies the Who theme of being about loss and love after loss. That’s certainly a valid response, but again I think it is more about the post-“School Reunion” Sarah than the one from the 1970s.

Still, “School Reunion” did lead to The Sarah Jane Adventures, the spin-off series that Sarah had always deserved. Indeed, she was the first companion that one could imagine sustaining their own series, and there have been precious few since. This was recognised by John Nathan-Turner in 1981, and I still think that K-9 and Company might have had a better chance had it been promoted as “Sarah Jane Investigates”.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Sarah, and Lis Sladen, changed the role of the companion. The elimination of UNIT furthered the intensification of the one-to-one relationship between the companion and the Doctor that had begun with Jo Grant – but Sarah made it hard for the companion to be a wallflower again (though a few were). Companions such as Leela and Romana are variations on the Sarah Jane Smith theme. The same is true of more recent companions, especially Donna Noble, who seemed consciously modelled in some respects upon Sarah. Amy Pond is a natural descendant of Sarah Jane Smith. Sarah’s influence spread further. I had a student who had been named after her. (I deny suggestions that I took an interest in this student’s career simply to have someone to whom I could say “Come along, Sarah Jane!”) In an episode of The Archers, Lizzie Archer claimed to have been influenced by Sarah (a line which, for complicated reasons I won’t go into here, I suspect was a nod towards something I had written). And I can’t imagine there being any other regular Who actor, apart from a Doctor, whose death would get this sort of coverage in the news media – certainly Jacqueline Hill and Michael Craze didn’t. (Okay, Catherine Tate probably would, but that would be for her non-Who work; similarly I reckon when Peter Purves goes.)

As Russell T Davies said (sometimes he got it right!), the world was lucky to have Elisabeth Sladen, and is poorer for her loss.

* Obituaries originally gave her date of birth as 1948, but it turns out that this was not in fact the case. This is interesting, as it means she is the only Doctor Who female companion demonstrably over thirty in her time on the show since Jacqueline Hill and until Catherine Tate came along (Caroline John may have been, but as no-one seems to know exactly when her birthday was in 1970, it's not certain; and Janet Fielding definitely was, if the birth year given in Wikipedia is correct, but definitely not if that given by the IMDb is right). This also means that if we ever go to a second edition of The Unsilent Library, we’ll have to make some corrections.

Five lies told about AV

2011-04-19T12:12:00.002+01:00

1. "It's too confusing."

No it isn't. It's no more confusing than going into a restaurant, asking for steak pie, being told it's off, and choosing something else from the menu. Eating out would collapse if the British people couldn't handle this level of complexity.

2. "It's ridiculous that the person who came second could win."

The sporting analogies deployed to support this argument are rather simplistic, and take no account of qualifying rounds. What essentially this argument is saying is that it is ridiculous that Lewis Hamilton won the Chinese Grand Prix at the weekend, because Sebastian Vettel had won pole position in the Qualifying.

In any case, it is rank hypocrisy for this argument to be deployed by a man who became leader of the Conservative Party after coming second in the intial round of the leadership election.

3. "Nobody uses AV."

Many more people use AV in some form or other than those against admit, including, as noted, the Conservative Party in its leadership elections.

4. "A vote for a mainstream party gets counted only once, but one for a minority party like the BNP could be counted two or three times."

Nonsense. All individuals' votes are counted an equal number of times, until a result is achieved. If anything, the opposite is true - a vote for the Conservative Party will be counted two or three times, whilst a vote for the BNP may be counted only once, before they are eliminated from the contest.

Minority parties like the BNP in fact have a much better chance of getting in under FPTP than under AV. Under FPTP, an MP could be elected with 20% of the vote, if no-one else polled more. But if that 20% were the only people who would vote for this party under AV, then the MP would be elected on the basis of second place votes.

5. "It breaks the link between MP and consituency."

No it doesn't. If anything, it strengthens that, as an MP has to be responsive to more of their consituency than just the 30% who voted for them as first preference, and constituencies end up with MPs who are at least acceptable to more than 50% of the electorate, as opposed to being preferred by 30% and despised by 70%, as can happen under FPTP.

What it does weaken (and why I think some in the political establishment are so hostile to it) is the link between MP and party. More and more MPs would have to put their constituency's interests ahead of their party's (q.v. Boris Johnson, who regularly puts what he perceives of as Londoners' interests ahead of what the government wants him to do). I'm all for that.

Notes from the world of me

2011-03-14T11:35:00.003Z

It's been quite a good month for me, what with one thing or another. First, the Doctor Who story The Ark was released on DVD. Back in November 2008, I was interviewed for one of the the special features, "All's Wells that ends Wells". A lot of other people were interviewed for it, so there isn't much of me, but I'm happy to say that I haven't been misrepresented, though I'm pretty sure my comment about Brian Aldiss was linked to my saying that his novel Non-Stop was a major influence on The Ark, rather than to Aldiss' being consulted when Doctor Who was being devised. And I'm sorry that there wasn't space for my argument that isn't as firmly in the Wells via Wyndham and Quatermass tradition as it is sometimes thought - more Wells via Asimov and Aldiss. (Though Matthew Sweet does rightly say that it takes a long time for the Quatermass influence to assert itself in Who - I'd argue that there is in the early stages of conception a deliberate distancing from Quatermass). And irritatingly, 2Entertain have misspelt my name ('Antony', not 'Anthony'), though it's only a minor complaint.

The end of February saw publication of the volume I've co-edited, The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the new Doctor Who. I'm very proud of this - it's about a year later than originally planned (but only six months later than what our original plan ought, in retrospect, to have been), but there's a lot of work went in at the editing stage, and there are some good articles, in particular those by Graham Sleight and Clare Parody. One of the better Who collections to have come out in the last couple of years, though I says so as shouldn't.

Then a week ago Vector 265 came out. This is Niall Harrison's last issue as editor, and is a special on Stephen Baxter. I've contributed "Putting the Past into the Future: The Time’s Tapestry sequence". There is also an edited version of my review of Ian McDonald's The Dervish House. And I also contributed a short introduction to an interview with Robert Holdstock that is in the tribute booklet to Holdstock that was sent out to BSFA members.

Coming up, I have my talk at Eight Years In Babylon. I also have a chapter I'm writing for a volume on cinematic receptions of ancient Egypt, a chapter in a volume on Neil Gaiman, and a paper at the Cinema and Antiquity conference in July. So I'll be busy for the next few months! And someone wants to use a photo of mine as the cover of a book.

Make cakes, not war

2011-03-11T12:34:00.005Z

I've been remiss in blogging the annual UCL and King's Classics Plays this year. Both were enjoyable.

UCL put on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, for the third time in twelve years. Well, it's a good play, with much to laugh at. I saw it on the first performance, and there was clearly a degree of nervousness in the cast. This was particularly apparent in the actress playing Lysistrata (admittedly, a big, tough role to play). But it clearly was just nerves, and the cast was noticeably more confident after the interval. I'm sure they got better as the run progressed. The Cinesias/Myrrhine scene was well done, always a touchstone of the quality of a production. Setting the whole thing in the Peninsular War was interesting, though the idea wasn't taken much further than as a source for costume design. And whilst I am in principle against retaining the references to Aristophanes' contemporaries that mean nothing to a modern audience, this cast did at least manage to convey the impression that such references meant something to them.

I've been quite lukewarm about recent King's productions, feeling that they often looked under-rehearsed. Last year, I was picked up on this, with a commenter arguing that I was expecting too much of the productions. Well, there's probably some truth, but I do think it's important to say when one thought things could have been better. And they can, as this year's play showed. Because it was clear in the performance I saw that King's have considerably upped their game. Georgia Crick Collins as Helen, Ben Donaldson as Menelaus and Anna Perfitt as Theonoe were particularly good, all managing to act rather than just recite. Donaldson in particular gave the audience a Menelaus who retains his nobility, and is not just an idiot, as can sometimes be the case in this play. And the idea of using the Chorus to enact scenes being recounted, tried out last year in Persians, worked really well this year. The best King's Play I've seen since Rhesus in 2005.

But this isn't the production I want to praise most in this entry. Last night I went to see a production of Lysistrata, given by students of Kidbrooke School. I confess that I hadn't gone expecting much, but it was stunningly good, and I laughed more than I have at an Aristophanes production for a few years; it's certainly the best of the three Lysistratas I've seen in the last twelve months (the other being an Actors of Dionysus production). The whole thing was done as a cross-dressing romp, with most of the female parts played by boys, and the male ones by girls. It's actually quite encouraging that a bunch of teenage boys are willing to dress up in women's clothing and camp it up in front of their mates.

The text used was Laurence Houseman's 1911 version (Houseman was the brother of A.E. Houseman, a gay man when that was very illegal, and a supporter of the Suffragette movement). That might not seem to be the best idea to get the humour of the original out, and indeed, there are few actual laughs in the text, which, unsurprisingly, eliminates a lot of the filth from Aristophanes's text. But the humour and some of the filth are put back by the production, costumes and performances of the cast, as well as a fair bit of political engagement.

What I think makes this production work is an understanding that Lysistrata is not a play about sex, or women's rights, but about war. This is underlined at the beginning, in the introduction of a bloodied figure of Peace (in place of Reconciliation), and in an end which ought to be hackneyed, but is in fact astonishing.

As far as I know, this production has not come out of Classical outreach initiatives, and it is extremely heartening that people still turn unprompted to Greek drama. I would be pleased by this production just for that reason. The bonus on the cake is how good it is. I often find myself feeling that I have become an old cynic, and am far too difficult to impress these days. And then something like this comes along, and just blows me away with what can be achieved.

It's still on this evening and tomorrow. If you have a chance, I urge you to see it.

What I am doing next month

2011-02-13T12:55:00.002Z

Burns night and Martial

2011-01-25T15:24:00.007Z

The 25th of January is the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. Since the early nineteenth century this has been celebrated by Burns suppers, at which Haggis is eaten (which is almost certainly much nicer than you imagine), whisky is drunk, and Burns' poetry is read. I am taking students through an older poet tonight, Ovid, so I shan't be partaking of haggis (though a single malt in the pub afterwards will be had). But I went to a Burns supper hosted by friends on Saturday night, and took to read the poems discussed in the following.

In 1782, James Elphinstone, described in the Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen of 1856 as "a miscellaneous writer", published a poetic translation of the Roman epigrammatist and satirist Marcus Valerius Martialis, better-known in English as "Martial". Five years later, Burns published his response to The Epigrams of M. Val. Martial in Twelve Volumes. It's safe to say that he wasn't impressed.

On Elphinstone’s Translation of Martial’s Epigrams (1787)

O Thou whom Poetry abhors,
Whom Prose has turned out of doors,
Heard’st thou yon groan? – proceed no further,
’Twas laurel’d Martial calling murther.

(The last word may have more impact if you pronounce it after the fashion of STV's long-running crime drama series, Taggart.)

Not many people were impressed by Elphinstone. According to the Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, the work was widely ridiculed. Fortunately, through the magic of Google Books, the work is available online, so we can find out what the fuss was about.

Elphinstone has messed around with his materials. His arrangement of Martial into twelve books doesn't match that commonly employed today, which has fifteen books plus On the Spectacles, Martial's collection of epigrams on the opening of the Colosseum. It appears as if Elphinstone has rearranged Martial's work on thematic grounds. This, of course, makes it hard to find the epigram one is looking for, as Elphinstone has only provided a one-way concordance. But it is possible to find what one is looking for with patience.

And so (partly because I'm familiar with it as it gets used for teaching), I lit on Epigram 3.51 (Elphinstone's 6.38) as a means of looking at what Elphinstone did. First, here is the Latin.

Cum faciem laudo, cum miror crura manusque,
dicere, Galla, soles "Nuda placebo magis",
et semper uitas communia balnea nobis.
Numquid, Galla, times ne tibi non placeam?

Galla is a name Martial uses a lot - she appears as an object of desire, as someone who is going through a string of intellectual husbands who turn out to be latent homosexuals and crap in bed, and as a prostitute. But the likelihood is that this is a generic name, and the various Gallas are not meant to be the same person.

And now, Elphinstone:

When, Galla, thy face, hands and legs I admire,
Thou say’st; I, when naked, more pleasing shall be.
Yet, one common bath, I full vainly require:
Dost fear that I shall not be pleasing to thee?

This is about as racy as Elphinstone gets. (Martial gets racier, but Elphinstone sanitizes him.) And, reading this aloud, I can understand why everyone objected so much to Elphinstone's translation.

Here, for something more prosaic (in the literal sense, but perhaps also taking some of the fun out of Martial), is D.R. Shackleton Bailey's 1993 Loeb translation):

When I praise your face and admire your legs and hands, Galla, you are apt to say: "You’ll like me better naked." And yet you always avoid taking a bath with me. Can it be, Galla, that you are afraid you may not like me?

And finally, here is a translation of it by me. Inspired by Roz Kaveney's recent translations of Catullus as Shakespearian sonnets (a few of which I published in the latest issue of CA News), I thought I would see if Martial could be adapted into limericks. I think it works quite well. It's a bit more vulgar than martial is in this poem, but given how vulgar he is elsewhere, I think he'd approve. (Since the etymological derivation of 'Galla' is 'a female Gaul', I have changed the addressee accordingly.)

To Frenchie

When I praise all your visible parts
You say "Nude, I’m a real work of art".
Share a bath to unwind?
That you always decline.
Are you scared that you won’t like my arse?

I have more Martialian limericks. You have been warned.

Placeholding

2010-12-22T19:18:00.003Z

In lieu of proper academic content, here is a link to a review written by me that went online today:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2010/12/the_mammoth_boo.shtml

I hope to get back to proper blogging here in the New Year.

A Letter to my MP

2010-12-08T09:06:00.001Z

Dear Sir John Stanley,

I am writing to you to express my concerns about the Government's plans for Higher Education. The Government wishes to shift the burden of cost from teaching grants to fees paid by students. The increased fees are likely to deter students from poorer backgrounds, and many institutions may not be able to make up the lost grant money through fees.

Every government since the Robbins report has accepted the need to fund Higher Education for the national good. The Government is now turning away from this, and leaving the universities to operate as private sector organizations. The effects of this radical change to the way universities are financed have not been properly considered, but are being rushed into.

Many arts, humanities and social science courses will be entirely dependent upon fees income. The Government's lack of support for such courses suggests that they do not consider them important. This is a serious mistake, which will leave the country lacking in many of the skills it needs, and culturally impoverished.

The Government claims that it wishes to maintain the status of the country's universities as among the best in the world, and that it wishes to widen access, and improve social mobility. Their reforms will achieve none of this. I therefore urge you to vote against the Government on Thursday.

Yours sincerely,

Antony Keen

Marches, riots, and Remembrance

2010-11-11T17:18:00.004Z

I went on the NUS/UCU march yesterday. I could only appear in my lunch hour, so I missed the end where people 'rioted' across London. Well, across one street in London. Well, actually in one building in one street in London. As riots go, this is not really up there with the likes of Brixton, Notting Hill or the Bogside.

I do not, for a moment, condone the violence. But if you make people angry, and then make clear that you've no intention of listening to their grievances, then people will get violent. And students are angry. And not just selfishly - a lot of the people on yesterday's demonstration will have graduated by the time increased fees come in. But they care about education for all. They will not be the last to get angry, as the government introduces new methods of treating the unemployed as workshy. I doubt they will be the last to riot.

Tory MP's aide Simon Renwick apparently twittered that students should "Remember what tomorrow is and put it in context!" All right, I will. People fought and died in the First and Second World War for a lot of reasons, but a very prevalent one was that the world after the war should be a better one. This came up at my grandmother's funeral on Monday, how proud she and her husband were of here children going to University, and how keen they were that the children should take advantage of opportunities they never had. The Coalition government is set on a course that will reduce those opportunities. They are working on an assumption that money cut from teaching budgets is bound to be made up through fees. This assumption is naive. Debt-averse students will not apply for places. I am not convinced that the government will put enough money into the Student Loans Company to support the increased fees - after all, if all they are doing is moving money from teaching grants to the Student Loans Company, where will the short-term savings to government come from? Students will find that courses they want to do get marginalised out of existence by market forces, because that's what market forces do. Institutions will find they cannot survive, and other institutions will not be able to take up the additional burden.

So, I find that there is no contradiction in going on yesterday's march, and going to a Remembrance service today. Yesterday, I marched to defend a better world. Today I honoured those who fought for it.

excitusque hilari die

2010-05-10T23:26:00.003+01:00

I got married on the May Day weekend. I'm not sure that this is necessarily something that I'd discuss on this academic blog for its own sake. But I thought I would reproduce one of the readings, as it is relevant to the sort of material I have here. We decided on a couple of Classical-themed readings. My wife chose an excerpt from Ursula Le Guin's rewriting of Virgil, Lavinia, about which I've written before. I chose a poem of Catullus - not the wedding epithalamium from which I quote the title of this entry (Poem 61), but Poem 5. Being the sort of person that I am, I wasn't going to be satisfied with using any translation that I could find on my bookshelves or on the 'net (the poem has been much translated and imitated, by the likes of Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh, among others).

Instead, I decided to translate it myself. But I also decided not to do a plain prose translation, but to try to render the Latin verse into English verse. This was quite a challenge. I decided any sort of rhyming structure would be beyond me, but I wanted some sort of structure, rather than just free verse, which would make my translation little different from prose. In the end, the iambic tetrameter seemed the correct metre - a pentameter, more typical in English poetry, would make the lines too long to match the content of each Latin line, and so I would not have the line-for-line translation I wanted. So each thirteen-syllable Latin line is rendered, as best I can, into eight English syllables. Technically, not every line is strictly iambic - the third line certainly opens with a trochee (I evidently remember some Latin scansion!). But a pure iambic rendition would be very difficult, and I am told that part of the effect of English poetry comes from the clash between the stresses of the metrical feet and the natural stresses of the English lines.

There remain some bits, especially towards the end, that I'm not entirely happy with (indeed, I've changed the penultimate line from what was read on the day). But I showed it to my OU colleague Paula James, who knows Catullus far better than I do, and it passed muster with her. And some guests recognised the poem from past experience of it, and at least one thanked me for rescuing it from associations with dreadful school experiences.

So here it is, as read on the day by my dear friend Alison Freebairn, who, in the words of another guest, "gilded [the poem] with a gentle Scottish burr".

Catullus, Poems 5, ad Lesbiam

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

Let’s live, my darling, and let’s love.
And let’s not give a monkey’s for
Gossip of mis’rable old men.
The sun sets but can rise again.
But when our brief light fades from view,
We must sleep through an endless night.
Kiss a thousand times, a hundred,
Another thousand, a hundred,
Then yet more thousands, more hundreds.
Then when we’ve kissed many thousands
Of times, let’s lose count, so we won’t
Know how often we’ve kissed, and no
One can harm us with that knowledge.

General Election

2010-05-05T13:57:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow, the UK goes to the polls to elect a new government. Whichever of the main parties wins, the prospects for education, and especially in the Classics, are not good. Both parties are agreed that universities must bear their share of the cuts necessary to take the country out of a recession which was not of the universities' making (nor of the making of most of the sectors of the country that seem to be bearing the brunt of the pain). I did catch Gordon Brown saying how he was dedicated to ensuring that everyone's potential and ambitions in education be fulfilled, but it's pretty clear from the statements of Labour education minister after education minister that if your potential and ambitions lie in the arts or humanities, that doesn't really apply. Nor are the Conservatives likely to be any better, as that sort of narrow-minded utilitarianism is part of Margaret Thatcher's legacy, and too many Conservatives still revere that. I might feel differently were Boris Johnson still Shadow spokesman for Higher Education - for all his buffoonery, he believes in education for its own sake, and the value of the humanities and the necessity for them to be supported. But he isn't.

On a wider scale, I don't really want either of these parties to win. Labour have sunk into the sort of excessive authoritarianism that has ruined many a socialist revolution, whilst the Conservatives remain, under the skin of 'caring Conservatism', dedicated to the self-interest of the rich and powerful. A Labour government will be slightly better than a Tory one, but it is a bit like havoing to decide whether you'd rather have Nero or Caligula as emperor.

The only encouraging thought is that we might be heading towards a hung parliament, and that the Liberal Democrat vote might be sufficient to make the argument for electoral reform unassailable. There is much talk of the danger of a hung parliament, and how it will prevent 'strong government'. Good. Strong government brought us the Poll Tax and the Iraq War. A hung parliament will get us closer to consensus government, rather than the 'elective dictatorship' (Lord Hailsham's phrase, I believe) we have at present. 'Strong government' really only means that a minority of the population can impose its will upon an unwilling majority. If you're wondering why so many people feel disenfranchised, that's why.

In the constituency I live in, only the Liberal Democrat candidate has a hope of displacing the incumbent Tory (who actually is quite a decent bloke). In a proper proportional system, I would probably vote Green (as I do in the Euro elections). As it is, I will vote LibDem, in the hope that this will initiate a change that will allow me to vote Green next time. And I encourage you to do so too.

Classics at Leeds under threat

2010-03-24T07:45:00.004Z

The UK government recently imposed cuts on the overall grants given out to universities, making education shoulder its part of the UK government's need to cut costs. In a time of such cuts, arts and humanities subjects are vulnerable, as short-sighted utilitarians (wrongly) see them as economically unproductive. In that context, Classics is particularly vulnerable, as it is seen as elitist, old-fashioned, irrelevant and boring (all of which are wholly untrue).

We're already seeing the effects of the recession on Classics, even before this latest round of cuts was announced. The Open University has cut its intermediate Greek course, the University of Glasgow advertised for a post in Classics and then cancelled the search, and proposals were made at King's College London that included the loss of the Chair in Palaeography and two posts in Classical Art/Archaeology.

But the biggest threat so far is at Leeds, where one of the proposals being considered is to abolish the department altogether. I am absolutely flabbergasted that a long-standing institution such as Leeds could consider such a closure. On a personal note, when I was a postgraduate in Manchester, I used to visit Leeds regularly for seminars. I found the staff there to be amongst the most welcoming of departments I've ever encountered; I still enjoy catching up with them at conferences.

Members of staff at Leeds have set up a blog that explains the current situation, and there's a petition. If you care at all about Classics in the UK, and tertiary education in general, I urge you to sign it.

An open letter to Ed Balls

2010-03-15T19:25:00.004Z

Rt Hon Ed Balls MP
Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
Sanctuary Buildings
Great Smith Street
London
sw1p 3bt

Dear Mr Balls

I am writing concerning your comments on BBC Radio concerning the teaching of Latin. Unfortunately I did not hear these when broadcast, and am only able to judge them as reported in the media. But I gather that you stated that few businesses are asking for Latin, and that you have never been shown an inspiring Latin class, whereas you have been shown inspiring classes in dance, technology or sport.

I am not surprised that businesses are not asking for Latin, but I doubt many are asking for sport or dance either. In any case, our educational needs should not be geared solely to the needs of business. To do so would reduce our educational establishment to business schools and technology colleges, with only English and foreign languages surviving from the humanities (and even then clearly only for commercial use, and not for reading Voltaire or Tolstoy in the original). Of course we need business schools and technology colleges, but a nation that had nothing else would be intellectually and culturally impoverished.

It does not surprise me that you have never been shown an inspirational Latin lesson. But it is illogical to assume that, because you have not seen any, they do not exist. There is no subject so inherently dull that it cannot be presented to a class in an inspiring fashion by an enthusiastic and motivated teacher. Many, if not most, students able to study Latin will recognise that inspirational Latin lessons certainly exist.

I would suggest two reasons why you have not been shown any. First, the vast majority of state schools, due a number of factors, of which lack of government support is one of the more important, have dropped Latin from the syllabus. So they are not in a positio0n to show you an inspiring Latin lesson, even if they wanted to.

The second reason is that when a government minister comes to visit, a school wants to make a good impression, and so will gear what they present around what they think will contribute to that. For at least twenty years, education ministers from both parties have given the impression, explicitly or implicitly, that they do not look with favour upon Latin as a subject. Hence the school will show the minister a lesson in a subject (such as dance, technology or sport) that the minister does look upon with favour. In other words, you are not shown inspirational Latin lessons because you and most of your predecessors have given the impression that you do not want to be shown inspirational Latin lessons.

So, Mr Balls, I offer you a challenge. Next time you are in a school where Latin is taught, ask to see a Latin lesson. I think you may be surprised.

KCL and UCL Greek Plays 2010

2010-03-08T14:34:00.007Z

Aeschylus, Persians
2010 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre
Performance seen: 11 February 2010

It is, as the programme notes, quite surprising that the King's Greek Play has never tackled Aeschylus' Persians before. It's a regularly studied text, because of its uniqueness as the only surviving tragedy based on historical events (indeed, events within the lifetime of the audience, featuring onstage depiction of at least one person who was still alive when the play premiered in 472 BCE). So this year, King's took on the challenge of that work.

As is often the case with King's productions, it was okay, though nothing that enormously impressed me. One potential problem with Persians is that it can end up looking very static, and in fairness, this was well-dealt with. The Chorus was used to add movement, and to underline the dialogue through their actions. There are some nods towards tradition, notably in the half-masks worn by the cast.

Other aspects were less successful. Breaking the Messenger down into two roles was innovative, but I thought they were rather aggressive towards Atossa, who is, after all, supposed to be their Queen. And having Xerxes come on stage dressed a bloodied armed soldier misses Aeschylus' point, which is made pretty explicitly in the text: Xerxes has run away from the fight before actually seeing combat, has torn his own rich oriental dress, as a woman would do, and has nothing manly about him at all.

The best performer was Petros Boutros-Vallinatos as Darius, who confidently delivered his dialogue. Charlotte Maskell as Atossa, the Persian Queen, was rather more muted, though hers is the largest part, and therefore the hardest to learn in Greek.

As with last year's Lysistrata one felt that a little more rehearsal was needed. Atossa forgot some of her lines, the Chorus were not always in unison, and the surtitles were often badly out of sync with what was actually being said. But, as ever, one must make allowances for student productions - these are not professionals, and delivering a play in a language that is not your own is difficult.

Aeschylus' Oresteia Parts II and III: Choephori and Eumenides
2010 UCL Greek and Latin Classical Play, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre
Performance seen: 12 February 2010

I would extend the same allowances to the UCL Classical Play, if they ever showed any sign of needing them. Not every UCL production is first-rate - Acharnians in 2007 was a bit weak - but it's been a long time since there was a terrible production, and more often than not, the UCL productions get it right. Of course, they do have some advantages. The need to deliver the text in Greek restricts the pool of performers from which King's can draw - UCL, in contrast, can throw a wider net, which brings in people with considerable experience of the amateur, and in some cases professional, stage. And the benefits show. (Tonight I'm off to see a performance by King's students in English, which may be a fairer comparison.)

Following on from the successful Agamemnon of 2008, in 2010 UCL decided to stage the remaining two plays from the Oresteia trilogy. The burden was eased by giving the two plays to different directors.* This ambitious scheme pays off.

Despite featuring the killing of Clytemnestra, Choephori can easily get slightly lost as the middle play, between Agamemnon and Eumenides. This production brings it into focus. Where Lisa Gosbee's Agamemnon had used masks, here she takes a more naturalistic approach (though still not entirely naturalistic). Highlights of this were the opening entrance of the Chorus, to the sound of a single clear, beautiful voice, and a strong Electra. (Though unfortunately there were a couple of times when members of the Chorus forgot their lines.)

Eumenides was done very differently, in a far more stylized approach. The ghost of Clytemnestra is projected on a screen. The Furies are whiteface goths in tutus. But it works, and doesn't jar with the approach in Choephori. I might have hoped for a more menacing Athena when she speaks to the Furies (underneath Athena's consoling words, I always feel, is an implicit message that in any fight, Athena will not be the loser), but that's a personal bee in my bonnet.

Overall then, two different, complementary and both well-done plays from UCL. I look forward to next year's performance.

* Unfortunately, I have mislaid my programme, so can give no names. I will rectify this as soon as I can.

K.J. Dover, RIP

2010-03-07T23:16:00.007Z

News reaches me of the death of Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the great Hellenists of the latter part of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, I was reading one of his books, Aristophanic Comedy, a couple of days ago, as part of my own work on Aristophanes' Frogs (yes, it's a link to Wikipedia), and wondering if he was still alive. I only met him once, very briefly, and he was quite old then.

Dover is, unfortunately, perhaps best known for some slightly silly remarks he wrote in his autobiography, Marginal Comment, about driving his Oxford colleague Trevor Aston to suicide, comments that got blown further out of proportion by the media. Within the Classics community, it is his writings that will be remembered. Greek Homosexuality was a - erm - seminal work, that set the terms of the debate on the subject, projecting a view in which male-male sexual relations were power relations between older and younger men, and not ones of mutual desire. In recent years people have been deconstructing his model of same-sex relations in the Greek world, notably James Davidson in The Greeks and Greek Love. But Dover cannot be discarded.

I've probably in recent years made most use of his work on Aristophanes - the aforementioned Aristophanic Comedy, commentaries on Frogs and Clouds, and the section on Clouds from a companion to the Penguin translation of Acharnians, Lysistrata and Clouds (the writing on Clouds, okay, I haven't used, but may well in the future). I don't always agree with Dover - like many Aristophanic scholars, I sometimes feel he gives more attention to strict philological interpretations of the text, and not enough to what actually works as comic theatre (this is why one of my academic heroes is Gilbert Murray, who knew not just how to go through a text with a fine-toothed comb, but also how to write for the stage, and allowed the latter practice to inform the former). But, again, his contributions remain of major significance. With the death earlier this year of Douglas MacDowell, another scholar whose work I respected but did not always agree with (though I think I have amended some of my opinions since I wrote that review), it's been a bad few months for Aristophanic scholarship.

Dover also made major contributions to scholarship on Thucydides. He wrote school/undergraduate commentaries on Books VI and VII, and, with Anthony Andrewes (not the Brideshead Revisited actor, who doesn't spell his name like that), completed Gomme's classic historical commentary on Thucydides. It was in these works that I first encountered Dover, as a young schoolboy setting out on what would turn out to be an erratic career in the Classics. (Inevitably, the wags at school referred to him as 'Ben' Dover. I suspect this happened in many schools.)

It was also about this time that I saw Dover on television, as part of a BBC series on the Greeks. Dover was sat talking to the documentary maker, Christopher Burstall, in a small boat off the Piraeus. I never quite understood the reason for this seemingly unnecessarily dangerous activity, but a scholar off this importance is allowed his eccentricities. And, though it's sad that he's died, at 89 he had a good and fulfilled life.

How to do your paper ...

2010-02-10T12:43:00.004Z

My friend Liz Gloyn from Rutgers has written a piece on presenting a paper at a conference. It's well worth reading, even if you're not a graduate student (the intended audience). I particularly like the emphasis on the conference paper as a performance. This is something that gets forgotten about by many, but something I try to remember; these days I think of the papers I give as first and foremost entertainments.

Orpheus Down Under

2010-02-08T13:12:00.006Z

So much for my resolution to post to this more regularly ...

Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orphée aux enfers, the source of the most famous music for the Can-Can, has always lent itself to adaptation. I remember seeing some sequences from the 1977 television Orpheus in the Underground, though I don't think I've ever seen it all the way through.

In Unexpected Opera's version, Orpheus Down Under, the action for the second half is relocated to Australia (as the new title rather implies). This had its premiere last night in the Tunbridge Wells Opera House. This building has passed through being a cinema and a bingo hall, and is now, most of the time, a pub. But the interior has been preserved, and it is still capable of putting on shows.

The production itself is rather good. It takes a bit to get going, and the first half is only patchily amusing (though there is a good joke about Venus' husband training for the Paralympics). It's not helped by the fact that the first Act is a bit on the overlong side (which is Offenbach's fault).

But the second half makes up for any problems with the first - funny all the way through, and well-performed. Go and see it - it's on in various venues across the south-east of England until June.

As for the portrayal of the gods and classical mythology - sometimes, there doesn't have to be a deep significance to the way in which a reception is presented. Sometimes it's just fun, and silly, and done for its own sake. And, you know, that's all right.

Some CFPs, etc.

2010-01-04T17:17:00.003Z

It's my intention to be more active on this blog this year. But at the moment, I'm a bit short of content. So in the meantime, here are some notices.

Science Fiction Foundation: SF Criticism Masterclass for 2010

Class Leaders:
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
Roz Kaveney
Justina Robson

The Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) will be holding the fourth annual Masterclass in sf criticism in 2010.

Dates: 11th June to 13th June 2010

Location: Middlesex University, London (the Hendon Campus, nearest underground, Hendon).

Delegate costs will be £180 per person, excluding accommodation.
Accommodation: students are asked to find their own accommodation, but help is available from the administrator (farah.sf@gmail.com)

Applicants should write to Farah Mendlesohn at farah.sf@gmail.com. Applicants will be asked to provide a CV and writing sample; these will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Farah Mendlesohn, Paul Kincaid, Adam Roberts.

Completed applications must be received by 28th February 2010.

Democratic Inflections: Modern Performance of Ancient Drama

The Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance announces a call for papers for APA 2011 (San Antonio) exploring the relationship between democratic ideology and classical tradition in modern performance.

We invite papers that would explore the question of a 'Democratic Turn' in modern reception of classical drama. The word democratic is highly contested, but in our conception it seeks to draw attention the ways in which classical texts have been appropriated by diverse cultural groups and sections of society, both those in dominant positions but more particularly those that define themselves as disenfranchised.

The panel aims to engage in the international debate on the notion of a 'Democratic Turn' in classical reception, initiated by The Reception of Classical Texts Research Project at the Open University (UK). Papers may pertain to all aspects of the history of performance of ancient drama, as well as to performances of modern works drawing upon the classical tradition (e.g., Gide, Sartre, O’Neill), but should make clear how democratic discourse is central to their analysis. The element of performance heightens the challenge to the use of drama for political ends because in performance a director must decide to how to represent issues and acts that can be deliberately left ambiguous in the interpretation of texts (e.g. rape). Therefore, we especially welcome papers that explore how modern performances deal with the social inequalities inscribed in classical plays; we are interested in the question of how modern directors represent ancient phenomena that cannot be reconciled with modern democratic ideologies (such as slavery).

Papers could offer case studies of politically- or socially-engaged performances of classical drama (e.g. the Lysistrata project), analyze the implications of the transmission of classical drama (including translation and the place of classics in school and university curricula), or consider whether staging ancient plays can still raise those questions essential to modern democracies.

For the 2011 meeting, abstracts must be submitted electronically by February 1, 2010 to Nancy S. Rabinowitz (nrabinow@hamilton.edu) or Dorota Dutsch (ddutsch@classics.ucsb.edu).

Presentations will normally be limited to 20 minutes. Please follow the guidelines for abstracts in the Program Guide (one page in 11-point type; 1.25 to 1.5 line spacing; top and right margins 0.8", bottom 1", left 1.2"; title in upper right-hand corner in 12-point, Times New Roman font). Your name should not be on the abstract, which should be an attachment in Word. Also indicate whether you expect to need audio-visual equipment. Acceptance for the program requires that one be a paid-up member of the APA. Anonymous referees for the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance will review the abstracts.

Call for Papers: 2011 APA Outreach panel on classical reception and musical texts

The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts

The musical qualities of classical poetry, from the epic and lyric of Homer and Sappho to the hymns of Venantius Fortunatus, and the affective power of music described by ancient theorists, have inspired adaptations and innovations since the Renaissance, In Florence, Caccini and Peri invented operas with the poetry of Rinuccini on the subject of Orpheus. Monteverdi wrote madrigals on sonnets adapted from Ovidian elegy, and Henry Purcell composed incidental music for Dryden's Amphitryon.

Art songs such as Brahms' Sapphische Ode and Schubert's Lied des Orpheus set texts inspired by ancient literature and mythology, Orff's cantatas Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Aphrodite set the texts of Catullus and Sappho, and Xenakis' Oresteia employs Aeschylus' Greek. Stephen Sondheim composed the scores for adaptations of Aristophanes and Plautus. In popular music, Led Zeppelin's "Achilles' Last Stand" and Bob Dylan's "Temporary Like Achilles" reference the heroes of epic.

The American Philological Association's Outreach Panel for the 2011 Annual Meeting in San Antonio invites papers that discuss texts set to music from 1400 to the presnt that are based on, or influenced by, ancient Greek or Latin literature, and analyze how their creators engaged with these texts through direct setting, adaptation, translation, or alteration. Subjects might include, but are not limited to, song-cycles, operas, oratorios, cantatas, hymns, film scores, or popular music.

This panel, organized by Professor Robert Ketterer of the University of Iowa and Professor Andres Simpson of the Catholic University of America, particularly encourages papers that discuss the structure or style of musical scores and texts in relation to their ancient sources, with the social, historical, or political conditions surrounding the creation of these works as secondary considerations.

Papers might productively ask such questions as:

To what extent--and with what significance--has the adaptation of the ancient work been altered to meet the requirements of its contemporary audience?

How do contemporary motivations--artistic, political, or otherwise--influence the musical works' structure and content as they interpret the ancient work?

Has the translation of a classical text into modern language and music impacted our interpretation of the ancient source?

Papers are to be no more than 20 minutes in length; presentations with strong aural and visual components are encouraged.

Anonymous abstracts of 500 words or less, should be submitted, by no later than January 26, 2010 to Judith P.Hallett, jeph@umd.edu. Please do not indicate your name on the abstract itself.

NOTE: the panel on Phi Beta Kappa and Classics originally announced as the 2011 APA Outreach panel will be taking place later in 2011, at another academic venue. If you are interested in taking part, please contact Professor Hallett at jeph@umd.edu before February 1, 2010.

Robert Holdstock, 1948-2009

2009-11-30T20:01:00.005Z

After a day visiting various relatives, I came home to the news that Rob Holdstock had died.

I didn't really know Rob, having only met him a couple of times. And I haven't read all his novels - I've read neither Mythago Wood or Lavondyss, though the latter has sat on my shelves for a long time.

But Rob was my first guest when I officially took over as London Meetings Officer of the British Science Fiction Association. He was an excellent guest, interviewed by Paul Kincaid. We had a packed room, and everyone enjoyed it.

In preparation for this meeting, I had read Rob's then most recent series, The Merlin Codex. In this series, he mixes up two distinct legendary stories, those of Jason and Merlin. This brings a brilliant new twist to the often overly familiar Arthurian mythos, though Rob told me that this wasn't why he wrote the series - his original intention was to explore Jason and Medea, and Merlin was added later.

One should also mention Rob's non-fiction writing and his fan activity. Back in the 1970s he was a regular fixture at sf conventions. And one of my prize finds in my local bookshop was a copy of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for the princely sum of 50p. Rob was consulting editor, which essentially meant he edited it. Overshadowed nowadays by the more famous Nicholls/Clute Encyclopedia, it's worth getting hold of, if you can. There's some excellent contributors, including Brian Stableford, Chris Priest, Harry Harrison and Malcolm Edwards.

I should have got Rob to sign it.

Nero's rotating room

2009-10-01T15:42:00.006+01:00

I'm usually pretty cynical about the excessive PR associated with some archaeological finds, that sometimes bends over backwards to make a link between a discovery and some known historical figure. I am not convinced that a young girl's body is that of Cleopatra's sister, because the arguments that it is are thin, and the evidence that it can't be rather compelling. I don't buy the identification of a portrait bust as Julius Caesar merely on the grounds that it looks a bit like other ones we have (though sufficiently unlike that a reason for this unlikeness has to be found).

So my first reaction when I heard that the rotating dining room of Nero's Golden House (Domus Aurea), as described by Suetonius (Life of Nero 31.2), had been found, was that of Mary Beard, to wonder if everyone had got carried away again.

But, on studying more closely the Associated Press report (here reposted on CLASSICS-L), and some good photographs, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what the archaeologists say it is.

For a start, the location suggests that it's part of Nero's Domus Aurea. The bit of this that tourists visit (when it's safe to be opened, which has been rare in recent years) is on the Oppian Hill, north-east of the Colosseum, the amphitheatre that Vespasian built on the site of the lake that formed the centrepiece of Nero's park.* But it's clear that this is just one part of the complex, a self-standing pavilion above the lake. The Golden House as a whole was probably many inter-linked buildings, and from Suetonius' account ranged from the Palatine Hill, where Domitian later built his palace, which still survives, across to the Esquiline Hill, of which the Oppian is the southern cusp. This new discovery comes from the eastern slopes of the Palatine. It seems pretty likely that a buried high-status building in that area would be part of the Domus Aurea.

Then there's what has actually be found. The chief feature of the room excavated is an enormous round brick-faced pillar, from the top of which buttresses emerge like spokes of a wheel. The pillar has a row of holes, that look like sockets for wooden beams. If that's the case, then this could be an enormous capstan, similar, if much larger, to what the Museum of London has driving their reconstruction of a Roman water wheel. [But see Edit below.]

It's very odd. Why would one need a room with a pillar in like this? To be honest, I find it hard to imagine what this could be for, if not for supporting a rotating platform above. Unfortunately, the photos don't show whether the pillar is bonded in to the floor, but I presume not.

It's certainly a better candidate for Nero's dining room than that previously advanced, the Octagonal Room in the Oppian pavilion. Until now, that's been as good a suggestion as any. But the trouble is, nothing in that room rotates, and one has to assume that there was a rotating false ceiling in the room. That there was a false ceiling seems probable, but that it rotated is not supported in the archaeology. And Suetonius says that the whole of the main dining room rotated, not just the ceiling.

cenationes laqueatae tabulis eburneis versatilibus, ut flores, fistulatis, ut unguenta desuper spargerentur; praecipua cenationum rotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur

The dining rooms had pannelled ceilings, with versatile ivory slats, so that flowers could be showered from above, and pipes, so that the same could be done with perfume. The principal dining room was round, so that it might revolve perpetually, day and night, like the world.

Suetonius seems to be contrasting the ceilings of the other dining rooms with the whole of the main dining room. This would suggest that identifying the Octagonal Room with the main dining room is wrong, as the whole room can't possibly rotate (though it may well have had the ceiling devices Suetonius says the other dining rooms had). This hasn't stopped generations of scholars writing notes correcting Suetonius, and saying that it was only the ceiling that rotated (Robert Graves in his Penguin translation even adds the word 'roof' into Suetonius' text). But, though it is true that, by the time Suetonius wrote, all of the Golden House had been demolished or buried, he was much nearer the events, and in this case I think scholarship is wrong and the ancient source right.

So yes, I believe this one. And it's a fantastic piece of technology.

A final anecdote: a few years back, I was lucky enough to get in the Domus Aurea in the brief period between its reopening and its closing again. My partner and I were looking away from the remains of the building, out towards what once would have been the view down to the lake, but is now the under-vault of the Baths of Trajan. My partner asked me where the earth had come from that now filled Trajan's substructures. To my surprise, I realized that I was able to answer her. For the Baths of Trajan were built at the same time as the Forum of Trajan was being built a few hundred yards away. And for the latter, a hill was removed, the height of which is indicated by the height of Trajan's column. That earth had to go somewhere, and I think a lot of it must have ended up on top of the Oppian pavilion.

* As an aside, I've always been partial to the suggestion, made I think by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, that the part of Nero's Golden House was like the Royal Parks of London; owned by the monarch, but an area to which public access was granted by the grace of that monarch, rather than shut off from all public use.

Edit: I should say that I thinking aloud here. And also I am not an engineer. So I may not 100% know what I'm talking about. And so the notion of the giant capstan probably doesn't work. Moreover, it's not what the archaeologists are saying, as quoted in a comment on Mary Beard's blog. They are suggesting the the pillar supported a wooden rotating floor, and are waiting to look inside the pillar (presumably hoping to find that it acted as a sheath for the mechanism). I still think they've found what they say they've found.

Lavinia

2009-09-10T09:52:00.003+01:00

I've just this week finished and sent off to Vector, the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal, a review of Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. Almost immediately, a large online discussion of the novel, conducted by Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, Abigail Nussbaum, Nic Clarke and Jo Coleman, has appeared, in four parts spread across four separate blogs:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

There are a couple of other links that will be relevant: Adam Roberts' original review on Strange Horizons, and another interesting discussion of the book by Andries du Toit.

Rather than respond on the individual blogs, I've chosen to write my response up here. I'm not going to print my review here, though inevitably my response to the discussion will end up covering some of the same ground. (But I've left aside, largely, my comments about Lavinia being a feminist novel, in giving a voice to a character pretty much treated in Virgil - if not so much in Livy - as a piece of meat.)

The problem with coming late to a book that has garnered almost universal praise is that one's expectations are set very high, so high, in fact, that usually the actuality cannot possibly meet them. As with Geoff Ryman's Air I was prepared for a transformative book, and as with Air, I was slightly disappointed when it turned out merely to be very good. (And that then leaves me wondering if the problem isn't simply that I'm too dumb to pick up on why the novel is so great ...)

Lavinia has moments of brilliance. I love the function of the shield (something taken directly out of Virgil), and the way different people see different things in this, frankly impossible, object. I like the way Le Guin creates a Bronze Age Latium that has yet to fully anthropomorphize its gods, and how that interacts with the arrival of a Trojan culture that does (whether this actually represents how people in the Bronze Age thought about their gods is, I suspect, unknowable). But I agree with Abigail Nussbaum that the last third of the book isn't anything like as effective as the earlier bit. The earlier sections have a complex structure, akin to what Adam identifies as one of the strengths of the Aeneid. But then it becomes, as Abigail says, rather a straight narrative: 'this happened, then this happened ...'

There's some discussion about whether one needs to have read the Aeneid to appreciate Lavinia, and what is the effect if you haven't. Certainly, it's inescapable that this is a novel in dialogue with the Aeneid (or as Cheryl Morgan puts it, it's 'Virgil fanfic'), just as much as (so John Clute tells us) Greg Bear's City at the End of Time is in dialogue with William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, or Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships is with Wells' The Time Machine. So yes, if one is not familiar with the Aeneid, part of the conversation will be missed. What interests me is that, where the source text lies within the sf canon, this is seen as less problematic than when the book lies outside science fiction. (Also, everybody should read the Aeneid anyway.) And one of the things I like about Lavinia is that Le Guin chooses to have that dialogue with the second part of the epic, rather than the better-known first half (escape from Troy, Dido, etc.).

Abigail comments that she finds the existential moments a bit heavy-handed. For me, those moments are one of the points of the novel. At its best, when Lavinia meets the spirit of Virgil in some timeless zone, this work seems to me to be a musing on the nature of fiction. Once our lives are written about, are they any longer our own? What is the nature of the relationship between the 'real person' and the person that exists in stories? Le Guin raises these questions, but doesn't answer them. Can anyone? It's this postmodernist metafiction that intrigues me most about the book. This doesn't get much coverage in the discussion, with Niall even suggesting that he thought Virgil could be removed. I think Virgil is what the novel is about (and du Toit seems to follow this line of thinking as well).

Is Lavinia a fantasy novel? Perhaps another question that can't be answered. What I note, however, is that it does not read like a typical heroic fantasy novel, translated into a Graeco-Roman (semi-)mythological context. There have been quite a few of these recently, such as David Gemmell's Troy trilogy, or Jo Graham's Black Ships. These are both, for the most part, historical novels, yet written in the idiom familiar from the quasi-mediaeval fantasy. This is not necessarily to knock these books - Gemmell's is quite an interesting treatment, Graham's less so. But Lavinia doesn't follow that road - in this it is perhaps more like Gene Wolfe's Soldier series, which works in a fantasy mode that owes little to the traditions of north-west Europe.

Cheryl makes an interesting comment about the gender roles portrayed, and the apparent hostility to gay men. There are several points to be made here: (1) To think of things in terms of 'gay men' is probably to impose twenty-first century categories on Bronze Age sexual behaviour; (2) a writer should never be held to the opinions of their characters; (3) Lavinia comes from a time when gender roles were different from how they are now, and in some ways quite rigid, and one shouldn't expect Le Guin to write her with more modern attitudes. That said, Le Guin's portrayal of Ascanius as a man who behaves in an unseemly fashion with his male lover, and grieves excessively after his death, whilst reflecting Roman attitudes to this sort of behaviour, does seem oddly hostile, and doesn't seem to be based on anything drawn from ancient sources (though I'm prepared to be proved wrong on this). I think Le Guin is turning on its head Roman legend that portrayed Lavinia as, in her later years, an evil crone that worked against her stepson, and is seeking a motivation for Ascanius.

All this discussion has made me think again about this novel, and want to reread it. Sadly, there are other things I must do.

A Hadrian's Wall shout-out

2009-09-09T08:24:00.002+01:00

Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, presenters of my favourite music radio programme, are walking Hadrian's Wall this week. You can go here to find their Twitter photos, and links to the programmes they've broadcast so far (going back to Thursday, the day before they set off).

It's a shame that they did a lot of the really interesting bits of the Wall over the weekend, when they don't broadcast - by Sunday night they'd already got to Twice Brewed. But this is a product of them wanting to finish in Newcastle for their Thursday night show. They're also only giving themselves a week. I took slightly over two when I did it in 2006, but I wanted to give myself more time to see stuff around the Wall. What they are doing, which I also did when I went, is go west to east. This supposedly means the wind is at your back, but all the guidebooks are written as if you're going east to west, so it can get a bit confusing at time.

For my 50th birthday I have a plan to walk the whole of the frontier, not just Hadrian's Wall, starting in South Shields and ending in Ravenglass. That should be fun.

Publications news from me

2009-08-17T12:29:00.008+01:00

One of the side-effects of my prolonged hiatus from this blog is that I've been quite bad about blowing my own trumpet. So, I didn't mention when my review of Greg Bear's City at the End of Time appeared. Nor did I blog the publication of a revision of my piece on Claudius and Nero and the imperial succession.

In fact, 2009 has seemed more a year of abandoning, or at least postponing, projects rather than bringing them to fruition. So it's nice to be reminded that I have actually managed to finish some things this year. One such popped through the letterbox last week. The new issue of the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal, Vector, contains two pieces that at least partly came from me. One is a piece on the way fantasy author Hal Duncan intertwines Greek tragedy into his novels Vellum and Ink. I'm quite pleased with this piece, as is Niall Harrison, the editor, though it's probably not theoretical enough for some. There's also an interview with Duncan conducted by me. When I was transcribing this (which I will never do again - far too time-consuming), I thought that I had asked sensible questions, which rather decided me to choose myself to interview Ian McDonald when he comes to the BSFA London meeting in October.

This issue of Vector has other stuff, of course. Most interesting for the readers of this blog, perhaps, is a piece by Paul Kincaid on the novels of Robert Holdstock, including Holdstock's recent Merlin Codex series, in which Jason and Medea are central characters.

Now, off to finish a few more projects.

Blogging against racism

2009-07-30T12:18:00.009+01:00

This week is International Blog Against Racism Week. I'd first like to point to a couple of sensible and interesting posts that I've seen. Mary Robinette Kowal makes some salient points about why we should all care. The History News Network has a post about how the Obama administration is overlooking issues of race, and pointing out that Obama's election does not mean, as some commentators said at the time, that Martin Luther King's dream has been fulfilled, and racism is a thing of the past (which I never believed in the first place). And there's an excellent post by Ika Willis at Now and Rome. I don't want to address Ika's post directly - you should go and read it instead - but it inspired the following.

In the early part of this year, there was a great debate in the science fiction fan/online community, which has gained the name of RaceFail 09. I didn't get involved, as I was busy with other things, and by the time I became aware of it, there was a great deal of discussion, and I felt unable to comment fairly. I'm not really going to engage with the core argument here either (there's a starting point with links here if you want to find out more). What I want to write about, at the risk of starting up an emotive debate that has gone quiet, is what I learnt from RaceFail, how I have changed my way of thinking as a result.

I was brought up in a liberal tradition, one of the core values of which is that one has to be fair to everyone. If one sees someone being attacked unfairly, especially if it is a friend, one wants to defend them - indeed, one can sometimes feel obliged to do so. What I now understand better is how that approach can look to someone from an oppressed minority (and whilst this post is about racism, much of what I say applies equally in terms of sexism). If I leap in to defend a white friend from what I perceive to be an attack made by a person of colour, untempered by any awareness of my own white (and male) privilege, it looks like the whites closing ranks. Suggesting that a polite and respectful tone be employed looks like white folks finding ways of shutting up uppity POCs. [Edit, 03/08/09: Ika Willis points out below that this looks like white folks finding ways of shutting up uppity POCs because it is white folks finding ways of shutting up uppity POCs.]

It's that lack of awareness of privilege which is the problem. A lot of the problem of RaceFail (and I may be wrong here, and if so, I apologize) seemed to be people getting very upset about having their behaviour described as racist. The response (and I may be caricaturing here, so again I apologize) was often "I am not and never have been a racist, and how dare you call me one!" What has happened here, I think, is the polarization of the term "racist", such that it is assumed to refer only to hooded KKK types with burning crosses and lynchings. Most white people reject that position, and are proud of dealing with people in a wholly colourblind fashion. Before RaceFail, this a view I'd have signed up to myself.

Which is all well and to the good, at least on the surface. But dig a little deeper, and I think that it's a bit naive and self-deluding. Sure, we may not go along with the British National Party's wearisome nonsense about English whites being discriminated against in their own country. But that doesn't mean that we're not capable of unthinking racism. Indeed, given that we whites (especially educated elite whites) are brought up in an implicitly racist society, whose wealth is at least partially based on profits made out of the eighteenth-century slave trade, it would be a miracle if any one of us were wholly devoid of some racist attitudes.

Here are three examples. When watching the 2006 television adaptation of Ruby in the Smoke, I remember being surprised that one role, apparently of a Victorian gentleman, was played by a black actor. My natural assumption was that Victorian gentlemen were white. I don't think that's based on exhaustive research into the period, but on the way the period has been portrayed in the culture to which I've been exposed. It is therefore a racist assumption.

Second example - my first reaction on hearing the rumour that Patterson Joseph would be the next Doctor was to think that there was something not right about that. Fortunately, I rapidly changed my mind, and realized that there was no good (i.e. non-racist) reason to object to this casting, and indeed that it was an idea whose time had more than come (and I now think it's a shame that this isn't what actually happened). But my first response was a racist one.

Finally, by coincidence, yesterday I read the section of Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy, that deals with Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, where the point is made that the central character, Ged, is a person of colour, but that readers hardly ever notice this. I am among those readers. Intellectually I know better, and have for some years, but this is not what I saw in my mind when I first read the novel (influenced by various covers, and illustrations for a reading of the story on Jackanory, none of which made Ged's skin colour clear), and even now it is hard for me to imagine Ged as non-white.

Now, I don't think it makes me an evil person that I have these responses. I think it just means that I'm a product of my environment. And I think it's a good thing that I recognize these responses for what they are, and reject them as guidance for my conscious actions. But it does mean that I cannot claim that I am entirely devoid of racism, and I would be a fool if I asserted that there are not responses that I do not recognize as such.

It is only through awareness, acknowledgment and addressing of our own failings in this respect that we can progress. Of course, behaving in a colourblind fashion is an ideal to which we should all aspire. But behaving in a colourblind fashion in a society which is not itself colourblind can contribute to the problem as much as to the solution. It encourages the notion that racism is in the past, and that we no longer need anti-racist legal measures (an argument often put forward by those who wish to reassert white privilege). But whilst Obama in the White House shows that things have improved, it does not demonstrate that there is no further room for improvement. This is a process that I don't expect to be completed in my lifetime, or for that matter, in the millennium.

So where does that leave the liberal concept of being fair to everyone? Still there, but slightly modified. I'm certainly not advocating placing POCs on a pedestal where their colour makes them immune from criticism. If anti-racism is about anything, it is about trying where possible to disregard race and treat someone as a human being.* (This is the mistake the Republicans made when appointing Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate - they assumed that feminists would support her because she was a woman, whereas what feminism is about, in my view at least, is disregarding the fact that someone is a woman, and assessing them as a person, on which assessment Palin came up short for many.) Human beings are sometimes wrong and sometimes unfair, and it is legitimate to call them out for it when they are. But if one is engaging as a privileged white with a POC on these grounds, one must be aware of one's own privilege. Because if one isn't, then the fairness one aspires to is spurious, because it doesn't take the full picture into account.

* And I know I've said that's not always possible, and sometimes counter-productive. Life is complicated. Get over it. [Edit, 03/08/09: an anonymous commentator rightly points out that talking about 'disregarding' race is not actually helpful. Given what I said about the colourblind approach, I should have seen this myself.]

Further things I've seen

2009-07-24T13:43:00.007+01:00

~~Carnivalesque, the pre-modern history carnival, is searching for a host for August (ancient/mediaeval). Contact carnivalesque AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk if you're interested.~~ Now sorted.

Also, I saw another CFP on Wormtalk and Slugspeed:

We are issuing a call for papers for a proposed volume of scholarly essays on J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Papers should address any aspect of the work, but the editors are especially interested in works which make connections among disciplines, demonstrating the richness of the trilogy as well as its continuing widespread appeal.
Papers should be between 20 - 30 pages, note key words, and include a 250 word abstract.

The deadline for papers is 15 September 2009; decisions will be announced by 1 November 2009.

Papers should be submitted to
Prof. Kathleen Dubs
Angol Intézet
Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem
2087 Piliscsaba
Egyetem utca 1.
Hungary
kedubs AT axelero DOT hu

Dr. Janka Kaščáková
Katedra Anglického Jayzka A Literatury
Katolícka Univerzita v Ružomberku
Hrabovská cesta 1
023 01 Ružomberok
Slovakia
janka.kascakova AT fphil DOT ku DOT sk

CFP: Antiquity in Film – Gender on Screen

2009-07-24T09:46:00.005+01:00

The following just popped into my inbox. Unfortunately, I'm trying to shed projects at the moment rather than add new ones, and I don't think I can afford the time or money to go to Berlin, so I shan't be doing an abstract myself; but it looks very interesting, and there might be people reading this who would want to be aware of it.

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Call for Papers

Conference: “Antiquity in Film – Gender on Screen”
December 10-12 2009 at the Freie Universitaet, Berlin, Germany

Contact: AntikfilmGender AT gmx DOT de

Prof. Dr. Almut-Barbara Renger
Department of History and Cultural Sciences
Institute for Religious Studies
Chair in Ancient Religion, Culture and the History of their Reception
Gosslerstr. 2-4, 14195 Berlin

This conference shall explore reception(s) of antiquity in film – from the silent era through to sound film and to present-day blockbusters. Film adaptations of ancient figures and material and what they have to say about the present, about culture and society will be examined in light of the specific significance of gender. Aside from the return of antiquity in cinema, we can also see an increasing interest in antiquity on television, in the form of miniseries or fantasy series.
“Gender” here is an analytic category that will serve as our methodological basis. This thus assumes that “femininity” and “masculinity” are not biologically determined, transhistorical constants. As this project is based primarily on the body and sexuality and their representations and reproductions in film, they will be examined as parts of gender constructs in the sense of nature as cultural text.
Approaches in recent film and gender theory look at the performance and negotiation not only of gender, but also of cultural background and national identities, using concepts such as “bricolage” to bring their various facets in contemporary film into sharper focus. The body’s boundaries and the transgression of these boundaries, e.g. in scenes of excessive violence, are often dominant motifs. In the last few years, the literature of antiquity has been adapted to film and turned into blockbuster Hollywood films, yet this has rarely been discussed. It is therefore all the more important to examine the significance of these films and their socio-political function, and thus develop interpretations that reach beyond what has been considered analytical common sense for the past several years.
To date, a few Classics scholars have written articles dealing with this topic area. These have touched on the historical figure of Cleopatra as film heroine and symbol of oriental culture, and the mythical figure of Helen in film history, as well as the connection between gender on one hand and domination, barbarism and slavery on the other. With this in mind, we will also look at gendered codes of representations of state sovereignty, (post-) colonial power relations and expressions of cultural superiority.
The goal of this conference is to attract papers that demonstrate to what degree the representations – constructions, destructions and reconstructions – of gender and gender roles have changed along with the changes in film (and societal structures).

We particularly welcome projects from the following fields:
– History, Classics and Modern Languages and Literature
– Cultural Studies, Religious Studies
– Theatre, Film and Media Studies, Art History
– Philosophy, Theology and Political Science

In addition to issues in gender theory, we also want to address:
– analyses of films based on media theories
– the Production Code, a mode of self-censorship current in film studios as a response to pressures from social and religious lobbyists
– the effects of the Cold War and the end of it on antiquity in film
– new approaches in Gender Studies such as Postcolonial Theory, Critical Orientalism and Critical Racism

We aim to publish representative results of the conference’s profile in an anthology.
Abstracts should not exceed 1 page and should be submitted together with a short biography of a few lines by 1 August 2009.

We are looking forward to an inspiring conference and lively discussion!

Predictive dreams, or why many historical novels are science fiction really

2009-07-22T08:55:00.004+01:00

This is the first of a couple of planned blog posts that fall out of the Asterisks and Obelisks conference I went to earlier this month, and that got me all enthused for writing blog posts again (and maybe even, God help you all, fiction).

Anyway, one of the invited speakers at the conference was Caroline Lawrence, author of the Roman Mysteries series (I confess to being not too familiar with her books, though I've seen a couple of the tv adaptations). In her talk, she mentioned that in one of the later novels, a character dreams of his future. This got the interest of Juliette Harrisson*, as she's interested in dreams (I think it's her thesis topic, though I'm sure she'll put me straight on that). Which in turn led to a conversation about how prophetic dreams and other sorts of accurate prophecy still occur in historical novels set in the ancient world.

Dreams are, of course, an important feature in ancient literature. Zeus sends a lying dream to Agamemnon in Book 2 of the Iliad. In Aeschylus' Persians, Atossa, Queen of Persia, has a symbolic dream demonstrating that Asia and Greece can never be joined together in one empire. And, of course, Cassandra is the ultimate prophetess, always right, but never believed (I always wondered about that - you'd have thought that someone might notice her 100% accuracy rate ...). There are dreams to be found in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Accurate predictive dreams are also found in historiography. Herodotus has them (note the symbolic dreams in Book 1 predicting Cyrus the Great's conquest of Asia). This continues into Roman and Romano-Christian writings; in particular, Lactantius' account of a dream that instructs Constantine to fight under the sign of Jesus Christ (presumably promising victory, though Lactantius is not explicit). The Old and New Testaments also have prophetic and symbolic dreams (e.g. the vision of Jacob's ladder in Genesis, or Peter's dream encouraging him to preach to the Gentiles in Acts).

This, however, is not the place for a study of dreams in Graeco-Roman literature, of which there is at least one book-length study, and no doubt more. What I'm interested in here is the persistence of the prophetic dream, and other forms of accurate prophecy, in modern historical novels.

On one level, it seems slightly odd. Post-Enlightenment, 'realism' has become the dominant mode of the novel, and accurate prophetic dreams fall very much into the mode of the fantastic. Yet they are still to be found. Robert Graves' I, Claudius, for instance, begins with a sybilline prophecy, which not only predicts the length of the reign of Claudius, but also in which century his autobiography shall be rediscovered and published. This is picked up in the television version, where, in the final episode, Claudius has a turn in the Senate and allusively names both Graves and Jack Pullman, the adapter of the novel for the screen. A similarly prophetic Sybil is to be found in Sophia McDougall's alternate history novel Romanitas.

Why is this? It's one thing to have characters in a novel who, because of the religious and cultural background, believe in the power of prophecy and dreams. It would be perfectly within the parameters of a realist novel for Claudius to report a prophecy of events from a perspective of writing after the prophesied events have taken place (Claudius is, after all, not necessarily a wholly reliable narrator). It's quite another for the reported prophecy to relate to events that the novel's readership know, because they have happened, but which happen millennia after Claudius' death.

I wonder if it is because the notion of prophecy is hardwired into the ancient-set novel right from its origins in the Roman imperial period. Of course, the best-known of the Greek and Latin novels, Apuleius' Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), is very much in the fantastic mode. But prophecy is also found elsewhere in the ancient novel. The troubles ahead for the lead characters in the Ephesiaka of Xenophon are accurately predicted by a soothsayer, and predictive dreams feature in Achilles Tatius.

A special case for the modern ancient historical novel are those works dealing with the Trojan War. As has been observed by many, modern retellings of the matter of Troy tend to eliminate most elements of the fantastic, removing the gods from the field of play, and turning the mythological narrative of Homer into a historical novel. But one element of the fantastic often still survives; Cassandra's predictions of the fall of Troy, either through dreams or another method of prophecy. This is the case for David Gemmell's Troy trilogy. It is also the case for Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, and also for the Doctor Who story The Myth Makers, where otherwise the only fantastic element is the TARDIS crew.

What I don't know about is prophetic dreams in other historical novels. I don't remember anything, for instance, in the mediaeval novels of Jean Plaidy, which I read a lot of in my youth. Are there, indeed, prophetic dreams in mediaeval historiography? Or what about the novels of Dickens, a man certainly open to the possibilities of the fantastic (e.g. A Christmas Carol)? Are there dreams in any of the other novels.

Please leave any further examples you can think of in comments, and I will add them in edits.

* Yes, that is how she spells her name. I've been misspelling more traditional Harrisons for the past couple of weeks.

The end of the school visit? Hardly.

2009-07-16T19:42:00.006+01:00

Today there has been a lot of discussion in the papers about authors declaring that they will boycott school visits if new regulations are brought in. You can read it about it in The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. What the authors, who include the likes of Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz, say, is that the new Vetting and Barring Scheme will require them to pay £64 to register themselves on a database and undergo a check that they are not a danger to children, should they want to do any school visit. This is, apparently, demeaning, and why should authors have to prove that they are not paedophiles?

There's a lot of hyperbolic outrage here. One is tempted to suggest that some people should get over themselves. What, after all, is more important - protecting an author from being affronted that somebody might want to check that they are not a danger to children before allowing them to work closely with them, or protecting children from people who might be a threat? Pullman mentions authors who depend on the income from school visits, who would now lose that money - but if the income is that important, I'd expect them to stump up the £64. Anthony Browne's views seem rather less hysterical.

However, there are implications here, not just for writers, but for people like me. Last October I gave a talk to my niece's primary school about Romans. In November I gave a talk in a school in Oxford. I was scheduled to do another schools conference in May (though that fell through), and have an invitation to go to another school sometime in the autumn. At no point did anyone mention that I might need a Criminal Records Bureau check before doing that. Today's stories would suggest that this is no longer the case, which has implications not just for me, but for any university doing Outreach activities in schools.

The thing is, the story's broadly not true. Because I'm the sort of person who likes to back his opinions up with evidence, I went on to the website of the Independent Safeguard Authority. Several pages have interesting things to say. This page, for instance, says "In England and Wales, the requirement to refer and criteria for referrals remain the same from 20 January 2009. From 13 March 2009, the requirement to refer and the criteria for referral are unchanged in Northern Ireland." To me, that implies that no-one who didn't need registering before will need registering now. This page talks about what constitutes regulated or controlled activity, and talks a lot about frequent or intensive activity. I wouldn't immediately interpret that as applying to a single visit into a school supervised by a teacher.

Finally, the BBC story carries an official refutation of the authors' position. It's a bit buried, and the story gives more weight to the authors' point of view. But the Department of Children, Schools and Families say that the regulations have been misinterpreted. They only apply to someone who goes into schools more than once a month (the official definition of 'frequent'). Moreover, they say, "visitors to schools, even if they are supervised by a teacher at all times, are being placed in a unique position of trust where they can easily become deeply liked and trusted by pupils. We therefore need to be sure that this trust is well placed in case pupils bump into them out of school where a teacher is not present." From which I infer that the intention of the regulations is that only people who go more than once a month into the same school need register. That, to me, would eliminate most authors from needing to register, and it certainly means I don't need to worry. Some Outreach programmes may have to be careful, but even then, it is also the case that if someone isn't being paid for the visit, then, whilst they need to be registered, they don't have to pay for it.

So in the end, this story appears to be a bunch of authors getting the wrong end of the stick and then getting rather overly upset about it, exacerbated by journalism that could have been rather more through. None of the newspaper sites mention what is on the ISA's website. Instead, they chose to print what the authors said without question. Because that makes a better story ...

Random playing of the Classical Receptions card

2009-07-11T14:22:00.003+01:00

Just watching the end of Fire Down Below (Robert Parrish, 1957), and I note that the ship that Jack Lemmon gets trapped in towards the end is called the Ulysses. Not sure that this is particularly significant ...

Readers (if there are any left) forgive me, for I have sinned ...

2009-07-08T16:05:00.004+01:00

... it has been nearly four months since I last posted anything here. As ever, in the middle of the year, other things appear which are more urgent, like teaching, and trying to finish research papers, and my spare time for anything else decreases dramatically. So apologies if I have not given full coverage to everything I should have this year. In particular, I owe an apology to Hugh Viney, director of this year's UCL Classics Play, who was expecting a review to appear here sometime. A full review, I am afraid, is not going to happen now. Which I do feel bad about, as it was an excellent production, with exactly the right level of irreverence towards text and audience. In particular, the use of music meant that this was one of the most imaginative Frog choruses that I've seen. I really enjoyed it, and I should have said so before now.

However, my blog has now been mentioned in CA News, in relation to my taking over as editor of that publication. So I probably need to provide some content again.

Right now I'm taking advantage of the Internet facilities at the University of Wales, Lampeter, where I'm attending a convention of Classical receptions in Children's literature. It's been an interesting conference so far - I particularly enjoyed a session this morning on fiction set in Roman Britain, which will help me finesse my own views on the tensions inherent in writing about the Roman occupation (basically, which side is the reader on, the Britons or the Romans?). My own paper went okay. I was talking about the Roman empire in the boys' adventure comic. I hadn't had time to do all the research I wanted to, but when I came to write the piece I realized that anything more than a short introduction to the subject wasn't possible in twenty minutes anyway. I may report again after the end of the conference.

Some liberties have been taken with Cleopatra

2009-03-25T09:56:00.010Z

One of my friends likened Neil Oliver to Michael Wood. Both have that same handsome (dare I say, sexy) archaeologist vibe going on. But there is one crucial difference. Wood almost always writes his own material. Oliver very often doesn't. This is important. If you speak your own words, you can ensure that what you say is what you want to say (Marc Morris, who lives just round the corner from me, wrote a very sensible article about this). Act as a mouthpiece, and you are at the mercy of a script concocted by a committee of researchers, producers and executives, some or all of whom may put sensationalism, not confusing the viewer and 'telling a good story' before actual adherence to facts and rules of evidence.

Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer (and yes, I know you've got less than twelve hours to watch this - I should have posted this last week - but if you have HD it's on again on April 6th) was, I regret to say, a particularly bad example. Towards the end, the programme was full of assertions such as "experts are now convinced", "archaeologists believe", and "beyond doubt", with reference to their theory that the bones of Cleopatra VII's sister Arsinoë have been found in Ephesus. But one has to point out that not all experts are convinced. And I would hope that anyone who was trained in evaluating evidence would see how tissue-thin was the argument presented here.

The programme had two threads. One looked at the relations of Cleopatra with her siblings, portraying her as a murderer. I don't have much to say about this, which didn't have anything significantly new. Anyone who's seen the 1963 Liz Taylor Cleopatra will know that Cleopatra didn't get on with her older brother. The only point worth commenting on is the programme's assertion that Cleopatra's actions resulted in the wiping out of her father's line. In fact, Cleopatra had a daughter by Mark Antony who grew to adulthood. She did not rule in Egypt, but was married to a king a Mauretania, and her son ruled in Mauretania until AD 40, when he was killed by another descendant of Antony, the emperor Gaius.

I will address here the issue of the identification of a body buried in Ephesus with Cleopatra's younger sister Arsinoë. This suggestion was first made by Hilke Thür in 1990, in an article which I have not read and is not online ("Arsinoë IV, eine Schwester Kleopatras VII, Grabinhaberin des Oktogons von Ephesos? Ein Vorschlag", Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts, vol. 60, 1990, pp.43–56). At this point the argument was presumably based entirely around the Octagon tomb from Ephesus, so I will tackle that first.

The tomb dates to the middle of the first century BC. It is ornate, and, unusually, positioned within the city boundaries. This indicates that whoever was buried there was an important figure. The most prominent person known to have died in Ephesus at this period was Arsinoë, killed in 41 BC in Ephesus on the orders of Antony, at the request of Cleopatra. The tomb is decorated with carved papyrus leaves, indicating Egyptian influence on the iconography. It was in octagonal, which is interpreted as a reference to the octagonal Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria. All these are taken as further support of the identification of the tomb's occupant with Arsinoë.

As I said, I haven't read the article, so I don't know how Thür addresses the questions I'm going to raise now. I can only speak about the original programme, which overlooked them.

First of all, why should the occupant of the tomb be someone otherwise known to us? It's a very antiquarian approach to link archaeological evidence with names from the historical record, but it's not often sound unless the archaeological evidence is unequivocal. There are cases where that applies. The tomb of Gaius Julius Classicianus from London, for instance, is almost certainly that of the man mentioned in Tacitus' Annals (but even that was only true once the part of the inscription that named him as Procurator of Britain was found). But the Octagon tomb itself (leaving aside the evidence from the body, which I will get to later) provides no such firm evidence. The presence of clearly Egyptian iconography on the tomb, in the form of papyrus leaves, proves nothing about the ethnicity of the occupant. Egyptian iconography is found on tombs all over the Mediterranean (for example, in a tomb from the early second century BC from Thugga in Numidia). In the latter part of the first century BC there was a particular trend for Egyptianizing monuments, such as the pyramid-shaped tomb of Gaius Cestius in Rome.

As for the alleged reference to the Pharos in the tomb, the programme never addresses the basic question of 'why?' The Pharos is stated to be both symbol of Arsinoë's greatest victory, when she drove Caesar's forces out of the Pharos, and of her greatest humiliation, when a model of the Pharos was carried in Caesar's triumph at Rome, where Arsinoë was exhibited as a prisoner of war. Which is it supposed to be for the Octagon? If an emblem of her humiliation, thus indicating that the tomb was created by her enemies, why allow her to have a rich ornate tomb at all? If the tomb was the work of Arsinoë's friends, would they be allowed to have such an overt reference to her triumph over Roman forces in a city in a Roman province, ruled over by the man who had ordered her death?

Of course, if the forensic evidence can prove that this is Arsinoë, these questions become curiosities. But can it? Let's look at this passage from The Times:

Fabian Kanz, an anthropologist, was sceptical when he began this task two years ago. “We tried to exclude her from being Arsinöe [sic],” he said. “We used all the methods we have to find anything that can say, ‘Okay, this can’t be Arsinöe because of this and this.’”

After using carbon dating, which dated the skeleton from 200 BC-20 BC, Kanz, who had examined more than 500 other skeletons taken from the ruins of Ephesus, found Thür’s theory gained credibility.

He said he was certain the bones were female and placed the age of the woman at 15-18. Although Arsinöe’s date of birth is not known, she was certainly younger than Cleopatra, who was about 27 at the time of her sister’s demise.

The lack of any sign of illness or malnutrition also indicated a sudden death, said Kanz. Evidence of the skeleton’s north African ethnicity provided the final clue.

We'll leave aside the ethnicity issue, as that's a circular argument (this body has North African ancestry, therefore it's likely to be Arsinoë, therefore Arsinoë's family were of North African ancestry). As for the other arguments: the body is female - so was Arsinoë; the dead woman was young - so was Arsinoë; she was slim - so might have been Arsinoë (tenuously argued on the basis that her sister got herself smuggled into Caesar's quarters in a bag); the body is carbon-dated to a range the lower end of which covers the date of Arsinoë's death; the dead woman had had not had a physically hard life - neither had Arsinoë; the woman died suddenly, and not from any disease - such was Arsinoë's fate.

All these arguments seem to indicate that the body could be Arsinoë. But none of them conclusively prove that the body is Arsinoë - the description could possibly cover dozens of young women from the first century BC.

Moreover, I think that the forensic evidence as presented rather points away from the body being Arsinoë. The age is given in the programme as 15-17, possibly 18. With a death date of 41 BC, that would mean that she was born between 59 and 55 BC. This would mean, at the time of the Alexandrian War in 48 BC, she was between 8 and 11.

Yet Arsinoë played an active role in this war. It's generally considered that she was older than her brother, Ptolemy XIII, who is constantly said to have had all his decisions made for him by his advisors. He is known to have been thirteen in 48 BC. (There's a good summation of the issues here.) Certainly the dramatic reconstruction in the programme takes the line that Arsinoë was, if young, older than her brother, and so at least fourteen in 48 BC. That would make her a minimum of twenty-one when she died, older than the forensic evidence allows. (It's always a bad sign when a programme doesn't notice that it's contradicting itself.)

So, to me, the identification of the body with Arsinoë can only be accepted if one fudges both the forensic evidence for the body, stretching it to the top of the age range, and the historical evidence for Arsinoë's age. This is at least one fudge too much for me, and I must conclude that, whilst it's not completely impossible, the evidence makes it very unlikely that this body belongs to Cleopatra's sister.

Given that, the issue that got highlighted in a lot of the coverage, that this skeleton demonstrated that Cleopatra had North African ancestry, becomes irrelevant. There were a lot of caveats anyway; for a start, the forensic study of the skull, as reconstructed from photos taken in the 1920s, only suggested that there were possible indications of North African ancestry in the body, not that this was definite, and also we don't know who the mother of either Cleopatra or Arsinoë was (complicated by the fact that Cleopatra V, most likely candidate to be mother of both, disappears from the historical record about the time of Cleopatra VII's birth), so they might not have been full sisters (though they probably were). But these become moot points if this body is not Arsinoë.

Lest I be accused of Eurocentrically trying to prove that Cleopatra VII was pure-white European, I should add that none of the above proves that Cleopatra did not have North African ancestry. Given the poor state of the sources about the parentage of various Ptolemaic figures, it's not impossible that there was some local blood in her veins (though I would be very careful about eliding the possibility of North African ancestry into a possibility of ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa, which is a different and less likely issue), even if predominantly they considered themselves as belonging to Macedonian Greek culture (Cleopatra was reputedly the first to actually learn the Egyptian language). But this body from Ephesus is emphatically not the conclusive evidence for this theory that this programme alleges it to be.

Meanwhile, over at BBC4, where they still consider that their audiences can think, Waldemar Januszczak's series Baroque! takes an audience through his material without the need from drama-documentary, and not trying to assert that his view is shared by everyone (indeed, he spends a fair time making oblique by identifiable criticisms of Simon Schama's Power of Art). Of course, I don't know the material so well, and it may be that this programme is as weak as Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer. But I don't think so.

Edit 31/03/09: Rogueclassicism links to an abstract from the forensic team that opens: "Arsinoe IV of Egypt, the younger sister of Cleopatra, was murdered between the ages of 16 and 18 on the order of Marc Antony in 41 BC while living in political asylum at the Artemision in Ephesus (Turkey)." Looks fine, doesn't it? Arsinoë was murdered between 16 and 18, the body is aged between 15 and 18, therefore it all fits. Except that there is nothing in the sources to say how old Arsinoë was when she died. The only reason for assuming that age is because it fits with the age of the skeleton. This is a circular argument.

Afternoon Play

2009-03-17T19:37:00.003Z

A quick mention of BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Play from Monday, an adaptation by Salley Vickers of her own novel, Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus story from the Canongate Myth series. It wasn't publicized much, but it's worth catching. You have until next Monday afternoon to listen to it.

University Challenge

2009-02-23T13:15:00.007Z

I've been a fan of University Challenge for ages. It's something of a Monday night ritual, to try to answer the starter questions before the contestants do, to shout at the students as they struggle to come up with an answer that is, to me, blatantly obvious. But this year's competition has something a little extra. Not since the OU won in 1999, prompting accusations from some quarters that it was unfair, because the OU students were so much more experienced, have I known the programme to get so much press coverage.

The reason is the team from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and their captain, Gail Trimble. There's an article in Sunday's Observer all about her.

And she (and her team) are very good. They trounced Exeter in the quarter-finals 350 points to 15, the lowest losing score since 1972, and a lot of that was down to Trimble answering starter questions (it was also partly due to Exeter panicking towards the end, and interrupting with incorrect answers, thus incurring penalties). After that, I expected them to be series winners without much difficulty. (Though this is a view I've slightly revised - I'll return to this later.)

There are noteworthy things about the press and blog coverage. Leaving aside comments on her attractiveness, which really is neither here nor there, I find it interesting that the Observer article focuses on her cleverness and breadth of knowledge. To me, that's not what makes her such a good University Challenge contestant. It isn't just that she knows the right answer so often. I'm sure others on her team and their opponents also know the right answer (even poor Exeter, who after all had beaten two other teams to get to the quarter-finals). What sets Trimble apart is her self-confidence - she doesn't just know the right answer, she knows that she knows the right answer, and so doesn't hesitate to buzz in. She gets her points not so much through knowing things, but through getting in first. I wonder if the reason this isn't played up is because the media is much happier praising women for their cleverness than for their assertiveness. The comments that focus on the latter quality are the negative ones, the ones that label her as 'cocky' (comments often flavoured with a good old dollop of rampant British anti-intellectualism, also manifested in a piece in The Sun where she failed to know the answers to the sort of questions that Sun journalists think are important, such as who won Celebrity Big Brother or who the 13-year old father splashed all over the tabloids was).

Of course, as a Classicist, I find it intriguing that Trimble is reading for a D.Phil. in Latin literature, and that one of her colleagues, Lauren Schwartzmann, is reading for a D.Phil. in Ancient History. These are people who I'm quite likely to encounter at conferences in the future.*

The Classics angle leads me to mention a comment of Jeremy Paxman's highlighted in the Observer piece. He said at one point in the quarter-final (and I remember it) "You're laughing because they're so easy". In the Observer this is made out to be a general comment on Trimble's cleverness. But the remark was made in the context of a bonus round, and whilst I can't recall the exact topic, I do know that it was Classics-based. Corpus certainly used to have a reputation for being one of the best Oxford Colleges for Classics, and this team, as well as the D.Phil.s, also has an undergraduate doing Ancient and Modern History. If a Corpus team like that can't sail through a Classics-based bonus round, there's something wrong with the world. Trimble was laughing because her team had just been gifted 15 points (as they were in the semi-final where they had to give the meaning of phrases from Horace), and Paxman knew it.

Finally, in all the focus on Trimble, one thing has been overlooked - their opponents in the final, the University of Manchester. Because they are also very good. They went through the first two rounds with scores of 285 to 70, 280 to 80, and if they wobbled against LSE in the quarter-finals, with a score of 210 to 165, they then beat Lincoln College, Oxford 345 to 30. Corpus only managed 260 to St John's Cambridge's score of 160, and Trimble's own performance was a notch less effective in the semis than in the quarter-final. The assumption of some commentators that Corpus are bound to beat Manchester seems, if not wholly unfounded, at least premature.

I think tonight's final could be very close and hard-fought (or could have been - I believe it's pre-recorded, so presumably Trimble and her teammates already know whether they've won or not). I shall certainly be watching. And, because it is, after all, my old institution, I shall be rooting for Manchester. Sorry, Corpus.

* I'm doubly interested, because she's done a paper on Catullus 64 and C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which sits close to my own research interests.

Edit at 20:47:Corpus 275, Manchester 190. Well, I think I called that about right. I'd said in a comment I'd left on one of the Guardian web pages that I expected a close and hard-fought contest between two well-matched teams, in which Corpus possibly would have a slight edge. and so it proved. It was much closer than many people had predicted, with Manchester still in the lead until after the second picture round.

And despite the way the Guardian is already spinning it, it wasn't Gail Trimble's single-handed victory. Only once they actually got into the lead, did Trimble, in the last five minutes or so, suddenly start performing the way she had in the previous rounds. Up until then, it was her teammates who were getting the starters, and they as much as she deserve the credit for keeping Corpus in the match and the last-quarter overtaking of Manchester's lead.

Dr Who Call for papers

2009-01-13T22:41:00.002Z

http://www.sf-foundation.org/publications/drwho.html

The Unsilent Library: Adventures in new Doctor Who

Published by the Science Fiction Foundation
edited by Simon Bradshaw, Antony Keen, and Graham Sleight

The Science Fiction Foundation, which has published a number of books on sf (including The Parliament of Dreams: Conferring on Babylon 5 and Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature) is now seeking contributions for a new book, proposed for publication in 2010, on Doctor Who. This book will focus on the series' revival since 2005. Contributions are invited on all aspects of the new series, including its scripting, production, and reception, as well as links to the "classic" series. A variety of critical approaches/viewpoints will be encouraged.

Potential authors are asked to submit brief proposals (max. 250 words) for chapters by 1st March 2009. Final chapters (max. 6,000 words) will be due by 1st August 2009. Please send proposals to sjbradshaw@mac.com.

Contributions should follow the style guide at http://www.sf-foundation.org/publications/styleguide.html

Please pass on to anyone else who might be interested.

(You can blame me for the title.)

A history of Scotland

2009-01-04T22:05:00.006Z

A new year, a new blog post (maybe I'll keep it up this year), and a new documentary series on the BBC.

A couple of years ago, the last broadcast took place on the BBC of an Open University course programme. A few people nostalgically bewailed the loss of those late-night programmes, but the truth is they had long since ceased to meet the needs of students. The spread of video and DVD machines made it more appropriate to supply materials to students directly, which could be tailored to the appropriate length for the material concerned, rather than expecting students to watch the television broadcasts. Most courses had been delivering their material that way for years.

Some people felt that the end of broadcasts meant the loss of tasters for the OU that would pull people into doing their courses. But in fact, this event did not represent the end of the OU's relationship with the BBC - instead the OU has developed this partnership, and is now more visible on prime-time television than ever before. The OU had recognized, and quite rightly, that a better way of pulling in the punters is popular documentary shows that won't just be seen by insomniacs.

The OU has gone into partnership with the BBC on recognized brands such as Timewatch and The Money Programme, and developed new series. Coast is a product of this.

And now, Coast's lead presenter, Neil Oliver, brings us A History of Scotland.* Its title aligns it with common academic practice. It's a history of Scotland - other histories can be told. There are a lot of good signs - Oliver proclaims from the start that he intends to demythologize Scotland's history, and so he does with Calgacus and Saint Columba, both figures we are told about by writers who had their own agendas, and are not necessarily to be relied upon. The recognition of academic debate, such as when he acknowledges (though rejects) a recent trend to re-evaluate the Vikings, is also good.

But I worry when he states categorically that Calgacus survived the battle of Mons Graupius (actually, we just aren't told one way or the other, and I've seen it just as confidently asserted that he died), suggests that the Caledonians/Picts "helped drive the Romans out of Britain" as mythologized an interpretation of the end of Roman Britain as anything he rejects, or whitewashes the Antonine Wall out of the story of Roman Scotland altogether. And on the periods I don't really know, he asserts that the battle of Brunanburh took place on the Wirral - yet this is only one possibility for a vaguely located battle, and other suggestions, such as Bamburgh in Northumberland, have been made, and may be more plausible (other suggestions, such as Axminster in Devon, seem less plausible).

So sometimes this programme does oversimplify, as all historical programmes do, and perhaps must, to a degree. Still, overall this looks like a good thing, and I will watch future episodes, if not necessarily believing all the hype.

* It's not entirely clear who wrote the programme. Oliver is listed as presenter, and there are then various consultants in the credits.

Reception Theory: some preliminary thoughts

2009-01-04T18:53:00.019Z

I’ve had a project for a while to educate myself more thoroughly in reception theory and methodology, rather than just doing articles on individual instances of reception. I’m always aware (not least because it comes up a lot in readers’ comments on papers I submit) that I am a bit on the theory-light side, and I would like to correct that. Recently, a number of circumstances combined to actually get me started on some of the reading. So, over the past couple of months I have read or reread Lorna Hardwick’s two books Reception Studies (you’ll have to scroll down, I’m afraid, but if you’re going to get a copy I’d rather you got one directly from the Classical Association) and Translating Worlds, Translating Cultures, the collection Classics and the Uses of Reception, edited by Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas, and Martindale’s seminal Redeeming the Text, which set the terms for the debate on reception theory back in 1993, as well as large chunks of the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray. I’ve also read a number of related articles, such as Martindale’s entry on ‘reception’ in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the BMCR reviews of the Martindale/Thomas and Hardwick/Stray volumes (the latter, by John Henderson, is in his usual idiosyncratic style), and one work, Mary Beard and John Henderson’s Very Short Introduction to Classics, that doesn’t mention reception once, but is widely (and rightly) recognized to be a key text on the subject. If I was pointing someone to a quick introduction to the subject, I would recommend Reception Studies, followed by cherry-picking the Blackwell Companion, which includes, among other delights, an excellent article on film by Joanna Paul.

As a result of this reading (and with a memory of other texts I have looked at in the past, such as Goldhill’s Love, Sex & Tragedy), I feel able to present the following, which is a preliminary statement of my response to the theoretical approaches. It is likely to be modified as the project proceeds.

An attitude to theory

I’m a lot less suspicious of theoretical approaches than I used to be. There was a time when I shared what remains outside academic circles (and quite often inside) a common suspicion of theory, ready to write it off as pretentious rubbish. I now recognize that theory can be a useful tool. It doesn’t necessarily lead me to say things that I otherwise wouldn’t say, but it does help me to say them more effectively.

Similarly, I am no longer afraid of jargon. I recognize that technical language can be useful. In this I differ from some Classicists, who can be resistant to the appropriation of terminology from literary theory. There was a debate about this in the pages of CA News back in 2005/2006, including an article by Gideon Nisbet, and a set of letters in the following issue. The letter-writers objected strenuously to Nisbet’s suggestion that classicists should be more open to jargon,[1] but what I feel they were really objecting to was bad use of jargon, when it is used to obfuscate rather than clarify, or when a term like ‘hermeneutics’ is used by people who don’t really know what it means (I’m not too sure myself, which is why I rarely employ it). I’m against that as well.

So, I wish to be theory-aware in my work. But I don’t want to be theory-heavy or dogmatic. Models must fit the evidence – evidence must not be bent to fit models. My original training as a historian makes me primarily an empiricist, and I remain an evidence-led scholar. And theory must not be allowed to get in the way of having something interesting to say.

Reception theory in Classics and elsewhere

Nick Lowe has on a number of recent occasions (most notably at a one-day seminar on Teaching Reception Studies in the Institute for Classical Studies in November 2007) said that Classicists don’t use ‘reception’ in the same way as other academic fields. I felt I ought to check this out, and I did, focussing on film studies, solely because, since I am about embark on a film history course, I have quite a few theoretical works lying about (I consulted in particular Maltby, pp.549-53, and King). I did also look up ‘reception theory’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, pp.282-3.

And Lowe is right. In most fields, reception theory is about reader-responses, and concerns itself with how a particular text (using ‘texts’ in the broad manner employed by Roland Barthes, to mean not just written accounts, but any item to be studied) has been received. Classical receptions almost always focus upon a receiving text, and how that has received an originary text. To a degree, it is true, as has been pointed out to me, that this is a natural product of the field. Classicists cannot produce a meaningful study of the original audience of the Aeneid, and so we are forced to looking at other forms of response. Nevertheless, it does mean that Classical reception studies operate differently to other forms.

It’s also probably the case that many early examples of Classical reception studies thought little about theoretical approaches. This has clearly changed, as those working on reception studies have felt the need to be more rigorous and self-critical in their approaches (an observation made by Joanna Paul in the abstract for a paper delivered in 2007).

Martindale’s theory of reception

As I said earlier, Charles Martindale set the terms for reception theory about a decade before reception became all the rage in Classical Studies. And though most people don’t do reception in the way Martindale recommends, there isn’t really a counter-theory other there (I’m channelling Nick Lowe again here). I therefore need to engage with Martindale’s works. This is not easy. I have read most of the Martindale pieces listed in ‘Works cited’ below (with the exception of the Arion article); a number of them I have read repeatedly. And I’m still not sure if I understand the argument fully.

The problem is that Martindale, unlike many Classicists (and certainly unlike the majority of Classicists when he began publishing this material in the early 1990s) is well-read in literary theory. His take on reception, laid out in the various pieces listed, draws heavily on Hans Robert Jauss, and through him on Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on Wolfgang Iser. I have read almost none of these writers (just one article by Jauss). As a result, I don’t find it easy to follow Martindale’s argument. I suspect this is shared by many in Classics, which as a field has always been reluctant to embrace theoretical approaches – indeed, anecdotal evidence would suggest that some (unfairly, I think) reject what Martindale has to say because of what is perceived as an excessive amount of literary theory contained in what he said. I witnessed the debate at the Classical Association Conference in Reading in 2005 between Martindale and Christopher Rowe, recorded in the two pieces from the CUCD Bulletin listed in ‘Works Cited’; there seemed something of a perception that Rowe had won, and I would say that was partly because Martindale seemed to be putting forward a post-modernist argument about which many in the audience were highly suspicious. (On paper, it seems more balanced – in particular I think Rowe goes too far in asserting that he has uncovered the correct reading of Plato’s Lysis, as opposed to a reading.)

Martindale’s argument is most fully expressed in Redeeming the Text, especially Chapter 1, and the introduction to Classics and the Uses of Reception (an abridged version of which is here). My reading of it is as follows (and I suspect Martindale himself would argue that, even if my reading differs from his, that doesn’t make my reading invalid):

The traditional approach to study of Classical texts aims to approach the text in its original context, and establish its meaning. This cannot be done. It is impossible to read any ancient text devoid of the cultural associations built up around it since it was created, no matter how hard we try. The traditional approach is excessively positivist. We should reject this, and instead of ignoring later receptions of the texts in which we are interested, use them to formulate new approaches to the texts.

There’s quite a lot in what Martindale says with which I agree. I share his distaste for the overly positivist approach. Positivism in its purest form rests on assumptions about the unproblematic ‘knowability’ of ‘objective’ ‘facts’. There are no absolutely knowable facts. The post-modernists are right that everything we know is only partially known, and influenced by the means in which we receive the information, and the people generating that information. No witness is wholly unbiased. This doesn’t mean that we can believe what we like, and that all views are equally valid. That’s a misuse of the post-modernist view. What post-modernism is saying (in my understanding) is that we should think about how we know what we think we know.

However, once we have done that, I don’t see why we can’t carry on as literary critics or historians, doing much the same thing as have done before, but with a full cognisance of our limitations. We know that we can never establish fully what happened in the past, or what an author intended in their work – but we do know that events happened in the past, and that authors had intentions when writing. Even though we cannot ever fully achieve our objective, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make the attempt. When talking about establishing the text of an ancient author, Beard and Henderson write (p.57; p.61 of the repaginated 2000 printing): ‘there is no alternative to taking the risk and trying, at least, to reach as accurate a view as possible of what ancient authors wrote’ (their italics). I think that applies across the board in study, to historical events and authorial intent. I don’t buy the ‘death of the author’ concept or the intentional fallacy, at least not as fully expressed – every text that we study was created by a human being, and that human being had an object in mind when they wrote. Moreover, the context in which a work is produced is a factor that shapes it, for all that the New Criticism attempts to reject such an approach. Properly qualified, I think that this is a valid way to tackle antiquity.

Moreover, rejecting this strikes me as an unwarranted limit on human imagination. To say that a critic cannot try to imagine their way into the mindset of someone in first century ce Rome is like suggesting that an author of fiction cannot write a black person if they are white, or a woman if they are a man. One can never fully get inside the head even of the person one knows best in the world besides oneself. But we can still try. And as long as the nature of this imaginative exercise is made explicit, I think the exercise can be performed.

I don’t think Martindale would agree, and would probably view my approach as still positivistic, for all my attempts to dress it with some sops to a more post-modern approach. But I’m not sure what he offers in its place. Taken to its logical extent, the reception process as described by Martindale becomes potentially excessively solipsistic, and it would become hard to say anything meaningful about any text whatsoever. I should add that Martindale himself doesn’t take it to that extreme.

In any case, there is, for me, value in Martindale’s approach, even for more traditional textual commentary. Yes, one can never strip away entirely the expectations arising out of subsequent receptions. But if one were to identify the effect of those receptions, as best as one can, then it is possible to get someway towards how that text might seem without the influence of the later receptions. Of course, what one is left with would be one’s personal response to a text, which might, or might not be the response the author intended to create. Looked at in this way, it seems potentially a rather spurious way of approaching the text. But I’m not sure what else one can do.

This does all mean that the study of a text’s reception is crucial to understanding a text, so Martindale’s theoretical approaches are important. But one cannot only study Virgil through Dante, or Ovid through Titian. A complete view of a work’s reception must include how the work was received by its very first readers, which brings us back (though perhaps by a different route) to the sort of looking at the text in its original context that Martindale seems to disapprove of.

And, as I said, most people working in reception don’t go as far as Martindale. He criticizes a lot of reception studies as positivistic. Here again I think he has a point. There are certainly cases where people seem too eager to find Classical receptions where they perhaps don’t exist – I would cite attempts to interpret 2001: A Space Odyssey as a full-blown reworking of Homer, rather than something which occasionally alludes to ancient epic.

Introspection in reception

One thing I have noticed of late is a tendency for reception studies to get quite reflexive. Lorna Hardwick rightly identifies redirecting our attention back on the original source as a key element of reception studies (Reception Studies, p.4). I agree that a reading of a receiving text can certainly bring new insights to the originary text, though one must be careful not to give way to anachronism. When one says, e.g., that T.S. Eliot reconfigures Virgil, one must be clear what that means. We must always remember that, whilst Eliot read Virgil, Virgil never read Eliot.

But I have seen Hardwick’s comment reformulated as ‘the key element’, and that to me is wrong. Yet often the first question that gets asked in theoretical studies is ‘what does the reception tell us about the original text?’ That is implicit in the title of the Martindale/Thomas volume. Martindale makes a valid criticism (in the Blackwell Companion to the Classical Tradition, p.303): ‘The assumption is that such receptions tell us only about the receiving culture, little or nothing about the work received.’ It is certainly incorrect to assume that this would be the only way of doing reception. It would be equally incorrect to assert that the only way of doing reception studies is to treat the receiving object as a mere adjunct to the received text.

I can see various reasons why this might appeal. For a start, most research proposals have to get past a committee of Classicists, so emphasizing the originary texts is natural. Also, some reception theory has been developed in the context of staging of Greek and Roman drama, where the original text and what the staging reveals about it is an important issue.

In an ideal world, of course, every reception study would do both, and have something interesting to say about both receiving and originary text. But that’s not always going to be the case. An examination of the brilliant way in which O Brother Where Art Thou? reconfigures the visit to the Underworld into its cinema scene tells you an awful lot about the Coen Brothers, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you that much about the Odyssey. But that doesn’t make it an invalid approach. To act as if it does works against truly cross-disciplinary studies, and in the end will alienate those to whom the originary texts are important in their own right. (Martindale is on the money here: ‘research on, say, the Victorians must be credible to Victorianists as well as classicists’, Classics and the Uses of Reception, p.9.)

I should say that a great many instances of reception actually in practice do say interesting things about the receiving text. Such instances can be found throughout the Blackwell Companion, and even in the Martindale/Thomas volume.

An élitist approach?

Another problem, particularly with the sort of reception I do, is that it can fall foul of an élitist agenda. It’s very easy to dismiss study of popular culture as not really being serious scholarship, and from there it’s a short step to tarring all or reception studies with the same brush. One reaction to this is to concentrate upon ‘high culture’ receptions. In the introduction to Classics and the Uses of Reception (p.11), Martindale writes:

if we abandon a serious commitment to the value of the texts we choose for our attention and those of our students, we may end by trivialising reception within the discipline; already a classics student is far more likely to spend time analysing Gladiator than the Commedia of Dante. I find that worrying. This is not to decry the study of a wide range of cultural artefacts (there are many more good things in the world than the canon knows), and certainly not to criticize the study of film or of popular culture; it is simply to say that we form ourselves by the company that we keep, and that in general material of high quality is better company for our intellects and hearts than the banal or the quotidian (often we use the latter, archly and somewhat cheaply, merely to celebrate our own cultural superiority).

In reading, he added a verbal aside that he didn’t think Gladiator was important. The problem is, this is judging the importance of Gladiator solely on its artistic merit. But Gladiator and films like it are important, because for a great many people, these films their only experience of Classical culture. By dismissing the film in this much criticized statement (by, e.g., Rowe, and Paul in her film article, pp.304-5), Martindale is saying that those people’s experiences of Classical culture don’t really count. Instead of demonstrating cultural superiority through mocking popular culture (granted, best avoided), Martindale attempts to demonstrate cultural superiority through ignoring popular culture. And indeed the volume goes on to largely eschew engaging with the media through which most people experience Graeco-Roman antiquity.

This won’t do. We need to understand everyone’s experiences, not just those of an élite. A theme that has just started to appear in recent work is that of the ‘democratic turn’ (see the introduction to the Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions, pp.3-4). This identifies a movement that takes Classical culture away from the élites, and reconfigures is a vehicle for dissent. For myself, I wonder if the manifestation of the democratic turn is a product of the development, and increased visibility, of mass culture in the twentieth century, rather than any actual change in attitudes. Whilst élite culture certainly drew heavily upon the Classical past, did it ever have exclusive ownership of the Classical tradition? There is a case for saying that non-élite receptions of the Classics always took place, but were until recently largely invisible (or at least not examined); there are good articles on this by Siobhán McElduff and Edith Hall, and Hall at least plans more in this respect.

I’d like to cite here a recent example from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), the well-known scene where Brian (Graham Chapman) is painting on a wall ‘Romans go home’ in very poor Latin, and is put through his grammar paces by John Cleese’s centurion. This is a sketch written by people who went to posh schools where they were taught Latin, and had encountered teachers who took this sort of approach. I and my immediate companions were laughing our heads off when we first saw it because we were going to a posh school where we were taught Latin, and recognized our teachers in Cleese’s portrayal. But the rest of the cinema were also laughing their heads off, and I doubt they had all gone to posh schools where they were taught Latin. And the scene remains funny. What is it that allows most audiences to connect with that scene? This is something I don’t think has been fully investigated, and it ought to be.

My kind of reception

This is the point where I get solipsistic. But there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the personal voice where appropriate.[2] So, where do I see my own research fitting within this theoretical framework? I addressed this in a paper given at the Classical Association Conference in Birmingham back in 2007 (I am preparing the ms. for a revised version of this paper, but this passage has been removed from that). Paula James had asked in the abstract for her paper in the same panel a ‘so what?’ question; why were we bothering with this material, could we bring anything to the popular culture material that anyone wanted to hear, and what can it tell us about the Classical texts? My response was:

there remains the question Paula posed – ‘so what?’ Can we as Classicists bring something new to the study of this material? I believe we can. I don’t just give papers at CA conferences or in university departments. I also give talks at sf and comics conventions. And the audiences there are fascinated. They want to hear the different perspective that we have to offer.

As for the other part of Paula’s question, how does study of this material enrich our own study of the original Classical culture, perhaps in this case, it doesn’t much. You’ve probably learnt far more about superhero comics than you have about the Roman god Mercury, and I’ve been speaking more about receptions of themes developed initially against a classical background and then moved into other contexts than I have been about direct classical receptions. But, so what? Lorna Hardwick rightly identifies redirecting our attention back on the original source as a key element of reception studies. But does that mean that every paper written about Classical receptions must fulfil that purpose, and if it does not, then that paper has failed? I don’t think so. I looked into the subject matter of this paper because I was interested in it. I wrote the paper because I hope that you might be interested as well, and I want to communicate what I’ve discovered to you. And, for all the concerns about Research Assessment Exercises, and postgraduates wanting to further their careers through presenting papers, ultimately, research is about finding out things because you’re interested, and telling other people because you think they’ll be interested too. For myself, that’s all the justification I need.

This remains my view. My approach is, I think, dictated by the sort of scholar that I am. I am not just a Classicist with an interest in reception studies, who happens to have picked science fiction as my area of interest. I am a Classicist with an interest in reception studies, but at the same time I am a critic of science fiction, and get published in the sf critical journals. Most of the time my work in each field overlaps (for reasons of time if for nothing else). So I am interested in both originary and receiving texts. This isn’t to say that there is anything wrong with coming into a field of reception purely from a Classics background. But that’s not who I am, and who I am shapes how I want to do reception.

The sort of reception works I am interested in are those that are as useful for those concerned with the receiving text as with the received. I point to works like Maria Wyke’s Projecting the Past, or Gideon Nisbet’s Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (I focus on popular culture only because that’s what I know – similar pieces on opera, or painting, or whatever, can be found in the Blackwell Companion, or even in the Martindale/Thomas collection). Significantly, both authors have backgrounds that take them outside a pure classics approach – Wyke has an M.A. in Film and Television Studies as well as her Classics Ph.D., and Nisbet is a long-standing comics and sf fan who I first met at an Eastercon (British National SF Convention). I haven’t read Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses fully yet, but from what I’ve skimmed it looks to be another example of the sort of treatment I like; it’s worth noting that the publisher has a long background in cultural studies, and is not a traditional Classical studies publisher. The sort of conferences I enjoy are the likes of Classics Hell: Re-Presenting Antiquity in Mass Cultural Media, which took place in Reading in April 2007 (the proceedings will soon be published), or the schools conference in Oxford last November, with many of the same speakers, and at which I was invited to speak.

When I write, I am aware that I am often writing for two audiences, one of Classicists and one of sf readers – this will be especially the case when (and it remains when, not if) I finally write the book on the subject that I want to. One result of this is that I have to include a lot of explanation of things that one audience would take for granted, but of which the other audience is ignorant. But it also works against a theory-heavy approach. If I write a theory-heavy book, many of the sf readers won’t look at it. There are people in the sf community who do get deeply involved with theory – mostly people in academic institutions. But there are a lot of respectable sf critics and scholars who operate outside academia, and they are as theory-resistant as Classicists.

So my approach is theory-aware, but theory-light, at least in terms of what gets onto the page, and aimed at saying something interesting to both Classicists and sf readers. Given the papers I’m having accepted, and now often invited, and the responses I’m getting, this seems to be working.

But as I say, this is all provisional. My attitude to theory has evolved a lot over the past fifteen years, and I have absolutely no doubt that it will evolve again in the future.

Edited 16/01/09: Coincidentally, there is some very interesting discussion on theory in the context of sf criticism going on here and here.

Works cited

Baldick, Chris (2008) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd edn., Oxford, Oxford University Press (1st edn. 1990, 2nd edn. 2001).

Beard, Mary, and Henderson, John (1995) Classics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press (repaginated edn. 2000).

Goldhill, Simon (2004) Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, London, John Murray (paperback edn. Love, Sex & Tragedy: Why Classics Matters, 2005).

Hall, Edith (2008) The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey, London, I.B. Tauris.

Hall, Edith (2008) ‘Putting the class into Classical reception’, in Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp.386-97. [Online] Available from http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Research/CRGR/files/Classics_and_Class.pdf (Accessed 12 January 2009).

Hallett, Judith P., and Van Nortwick, Thomas (eds.) (1996) Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, London, Routledge.

Hardwick, Lorna (2003) Reception Studies (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 33), Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Hardwick, Lorna (2004) Translating Worlds, Translating Cultures, London, Duckworth.

Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher (eds.) (2008) A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher (2008) ‘Introduction: making connections’, in Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp.1-9.

Henderson, John (2008), review of Lorna Hardwick, Christopher Stray (ed.), A Companion to Classical Receptions, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.08.38 [Online]. Available from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-08-38.html (Accessed 6 January 2009).

James, Paula (2007) ‘Delapsa per Auras or Bat out of Hell? – comparing and contrasting Glorificus (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Five) with gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon’, Birmingham, April 13 2007, Classical Association Annual Conference.

Jauss, Hans Robert (1970) ‘Literary history as a challenge to literary theory’, New Literary History 2.1, pp.7-37 (translated by Elizabeth Benzinger).

Keen, Antony G. (2007) ‘A Flash of Quicksilver: mythology and anti-Nazism in Jack Kirby’s Mercury’, Birmingham, April 13 2007, Classical Association Annual Conference.

King, Noel (1998) ‘Hermeneutics, reception aesthetics, and film interpretation’, in Hill, John, and Gibson, Pamela Church (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp.212-23.

Lowe, Nick (2007) ‘What Classicists do when they do reception’, Teaching Reception Studies, London, November 21 2007, Institute of Classical Studies.

Maltby, Richard (2003) Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, 2nd edn., Oxford, Blackwell Publishing (1st edn. 1995).

Martindale, Charles Anthony (1992) ‘Redeeming the text: the validity of comparisons of Classical and post-Classical literature. A view from Britain’, Arion (3rd series) 1.3, pp.45-75.

Martindale, Charles Anthony (1993) Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Martindale, Charles Anthony (2003) ‘Reception’, in Hornblower, Simon, and Spawforth, Anthony (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn., Oxford, Oxford University Press, first published 1996, corrected paperback edn. 2003, pp.1294-5. [Online] Available from http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t111.e5507 (Accessed 6 January 2009; requires login). Reprinted without bibliography in Hornblower, Simon, and Spawforth, Anthony (eds.) (1998) The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p.586 ([Online] Available from http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t133.e538 (Accessed 6 January 2009; requires login)).

Martindale, Charles Anthony (2005) ‘Reception and the Classics of the future’, Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin 34 [Online]. Available from http://www.rhul.ac.uk/classics/cucd/martindale05.html (Accessed 11 January 2009).

Martindale, Charles Anthony (2006) ‘Introduction: thinking through reception’, in Martindale, Charles Anthony, and Thomas, Richard F. (eds.) (2006) Classics and the uses of reception, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp.1-13.

Martindale, Charles Anthony (2006) ‘Reception’, in Kallendorf, Craig W. (ed.) A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp.297-311.

Martindale, Charles Anthony, and Thomas, Richard F. (eds.) (2006) Classics and the uses of reception, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

McElduff, Siobhán (2006) ‘Fractured understandings: towards a history of Classical reception among non-elite groups’, in Martindale, Charles Anthony, and Thomas, Richard F. (eds.) (2006) Classics and the uses of reception, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 180-91.

Murnaghan, Sheila (2007), review of Charles Martindale, Richard F. Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.07.19 [Online]. Available from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-07-19.html (Accessed 6 January 2009).

Nisbet, Gideon (2005) ‘Argos and the Jargonauts’, CA News 33 (December), p.17.

Nisbet, Gideon (2008) Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, 2nd edn., Exeter, Bristol Phoenix Press (1st edn. 2006).

Paul, Joanna (2007) ‘Pompeii: towards an alternative model of Classical receptions’, Current Debates in Classical Reception Studies, Milton Keynes, May 18-20 2007, Open University. [Abstract Online] Available from http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/Conf2007/abstracts.htm (Accessed 11 January 2009).

Paul, Joanna (2008) ‘Working with film: theories and methodologies’, in Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp.303-14.

Rowe, Christopher (2005) ‘Reply to Charles Martindale’, Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin 34 [Online]. Available from http://www.rhul.ac.uk/classics/cucd/rowe05.html (Accessed 11 January 2009).

Wiseman, Peter, Bulley, Michael, and Miller, David (2006) ‘Argos and the Jargonauts’, CA News 34 (June), p.5.

Wyke, Maria (1997) Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History, London, Routledge.

[1] Sometimes, I feel, going over the top. Michael Bulley, for example, asserted that classicists had no need of technical language, which begs the question of how one classifies such terms as ‘anapaests’ and ‘hexameter’, as well as the usages classicists put to such terms as ‘tragedy’ or ‘satire’.

[2] The personal voice was much promoted as an alternative to dry ‘objective’ scholarship about a decade ago (Compromising Traditions being a key text), but seems rather to have been subsumed into reception studies, at least in Classics.

May I borrow your teacup please? I have a storm.

2008-11-04T08:21:00.006Z

The Daily Telegraph reports that certain councils are banning the use of certain Latin phrases, such as ad hoc or ex officio in official documents (it's also been reported in the Daily Mail, but since (a) their article plagiarizes the Telegraph, and (b) it's the Mail, I shan't provide a link). Mary Beard describes such a policy as "ethnic cleansing applied to language."

It may surprise some of you that I'm on the side of the councils. Yes, of course, Latin enriches the English language, and it is true, as Harry Mount says, that these Latin tags express certain concepts far more neatly than equivalent English circumlocutions. But, crucially, only if the reader already knows the meaning of the phrase. If not, then use of such terms becomes a bar to communication. Peter Jones complains that "This sort of thing sends out the message that language is about nothing more than the communication of very basic information." But communicating basic information is precisely what council documents are supposed to do. They don't have literary aspirations, and need to be written in a language comprehensible to their readership. Terms like ad hoc or ex officio may be part of the common vocabulary of educated middle-class people who read the Telegraph or take Classical subjects in prestigious universities. But they're not part of the language of EastEnders, and that is the language council documents must be written in. Yes, of course it's a good thing to encourage immigrants to aspire to a vocabulary that includes Latinisms. But you don't do that by including them in basic council documents.

We all adjust our language according to the audience. I would happily use terms like this in documents for the Open University. But in my day job, I produce process documentation. I would never put terms like ad hoc or ex officio in those, because the readers wouldn't know what they meant. All the councils have done is suggest that certain terms be avoided (not, incidentally 'banning' them).

This doesn't, of course, mean that I or the councils are advocating the expunging of all Latin derivations from English, or those derived from other languages. Words like 'virtue' or 'cul-de-sac' are commonly understood, so there is no need to find alternatives. To move the argument onto such vocabulary is setting up a straw man, unrelated to what the councils are actually doing. Referring to "ethnic cleansing" seems a bit silly.

At worst, the councils have been overzealous in the terms they have excluded. Most people probably understand 'etc.' or 'N.B.' (which are terms I've used in process documentation). But even the most obvious terms aren't always as broadly understood as you might expect - I've lost count of the number of reasonably intelligent and educated OU students I've had who don't know the difference between 'e.g.' and 'i.e.', so I can see the argument for using 'for example' and 'that is' instead.

The bottom line is that councils have a responsibility to communicate clearly to all people likely to be using their documents. It may be regrettable that this means many Latin phrases are no longer appropriate for use. But it's unfair to blame councils for acknowledging reality.

Camelot! Camelot! (It's only a CGI effect.)

2008-09-21T14:19:00.006+01:00

Yes, I watched the BBC's new fantasy series, Merlin.

Good things about Merlin:

Unlike the last two screen examples of Arthuriana, I've seen, King Arthur and The Last Legion, there is no attempt here to do a 'historical Arthur'. Instead, it's all set in a timeless quasi-mediaeval fantasy world (seemingly using leftover sets and costumes from Robin Hood). In general, I approve. When Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes wrote down these stories, the main fonts from which all subsequent versions come, they set them in a timeless mediaeval fantasy world. Doing a historical Arthur strikes me as slightly missing the point.

Gwen from Torchwood! Actually showing more acting skills than she's ever displayed in that role.

Bad things:

Richard Wilson's frightwig is rather unsettling.

The music, overly dependent on Howard Shore, and over-emphasizing the emotional content of each scene, which seems to be the fashion these days.

And there's not much of a sense of otherness about Camelot. Everyone talks, behaves, even to a degree dresses as if this is 2008 London. Roll that up with a bunch of cliches (the bullying prince, the servant who saves everyone but can't tell), and, though this is not bad, it doesn't climb much above most other semi-competent Arthur versions.

Forthcoming films?

2008-09-16T21:40:00.005+01:00

There's a Facebook group for people interested in Classical reception studies. I don't look at it as often as I should, though it's pretty quiet most of the time. When I looked today, there was a news item with a list of Greek and Roman themed films that we can look forward to, nine in total (and that list leaves out John Boorman's Memoirs of Hadrian, and I, Claudius, which has just leapt back to life with Jim Sheridan supposedly attached). And I found myself wondering, how many of these films will ever get made. I may be cynical, but I'd be surprised if more than ten percent actually appear in a cinema.

All these projects are in 'pre-production'. What this means is that people have talked about maybe making a movie. Perhaps some actors have been sounded out. Maybe even a script is being laboured over somewhere. But only a small proportion of films that get announced as in pre-production ever actually get made. As Gideon Nisbet says, advance publicity is 'so much hot air until someone starts nailing a set together'. So, Variety may announce that Zak Penn, writer of X-Men 3 and The Incredible Hulk, has signed with Twentieth-Century Fox as writer and producer of The Argonauts, but that doesn't mean that they are committed to putting serious money behind it, however much the publicity department may talk as if this is the case. Reading between the lines, it looks like this is a pet project of Penn's, that he's got some money out of Fox to write a script for. What will become of it depends on a variety of different, and unpredictable factors, not all of them relating to quality.

Last year, for instance, there was much talk of a film of Robert Harris' novel Pompeii, to be directed by Roman Polanski. Plans were afoot to begin filming in Italy, with Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson 'in talks' (another term which, like 'pre-production', covers a multitude of sins) to star. Then the project was delayed due to the possibility of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild, Polanski couldn't commit to the revised schedule, and various distributors pulled out. No new director has been assigned since Polanski left, and though the film still appears on the Internet Movie Database, it seems to me not unreasonable to assume that the project is dead in the water.

What's happening at the moment is that the success of 300 last year has encouraged studios to look at more similar ideas, in the hope of repeating that film's success. The present vogue for films adapted from comic books is also a factor; Hercules: The Thracian Wars is a comic that has been optioned. But this is just a cycle that comes and goes. People talked up the epic when Gladiator was a hit, then talked it down again when Alexander flopped. If Watchmen tanks, comic book films may go out of fashion.

So, I don't expect to see most of the films that have been announced. Some I'm sure will never happen. Vin Diesel has been trying to get his Hannibal the Conqueror since at least 2002. No-one seems interested (Gideon Nisbet has an interesting examination of why this might be in Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture), and I certainly don't believe IMDb's suggestion that it will get a release in 2009, when not a frame of film seems to have yet been shot. Even the animated prequel, which at one point had its own webpage, suggesting it might really happen, seems to have gone into limbo.

Of all these films, Boorman's Hadrian has the most chance of actually appearing. It's got a name director, a big name star in talks (Daniel Craig, or is is Antonio Banderas? Personally I'd like to see Peirce Brosnan in the role, but that's just me, I guess), and a schedule to start filming next spring. But it's currently no more solid a prospect than Pompeii was this time last year, just before it all fell apart. For a film to get made requires not just the allocation of a budget, but some serious spending of it, not just on rights and scripts (relatively cheap in the overall scheme of things), but on locations, and sets and actors.

Once that investment starts, a film can survive all sorts of disasters, and usually (though not always) will make it to the screen. Gladiator's second script got thrown out just before filming started, and Oliver Reed died before completing his scenes, and that still got to the multiplexes. Of course, sometimes it takes a while, if the execs are worried that their project isn't any good; The Last Legion was delayed by over a year.

I'd love to be able to see a classically-based film in the cinema about every other month over the next two years. The Hadrian and Claudius pics have the potential to be classy pieces of work. But until the cameras start rolling, I'm not holding my breath.

The matter of Troy

2008-09-05T10:45:00.006+01:00

By coincidence, my last trip to the comics shop I patronize produced the last issue of Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad, and the latest issue of Age of Bronze. Which gives an opportunity to compare two completely different approaches to reinterpreting the Trojan War.

When people retell the tales of Troy, there are four aspects that I think are always worth looking at (these are notions I've developed partly out of conversations I've had with the likes of Nick Lowe, Paula James and Lynn Fotheringham, so they deserve credit). First, there's the issue of the 'canon'. Most of us know these stories in their most famous versions, and this can sometimes lead to imagining that they are fixed in that form. This tends to manifest itself in attacks by some classicists on retellings for 'changing things', which was the fate of Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy. Other treatments stick pretty closely to the received version, such as Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton's version of The Iliad, which, as I recall (it's a while since I saw it), only deviates in certain minor details (and even this received criticism from some quarters). In fact, the 'canon' is a mirage. Euripides, Chaucer and Shakespeare did not feel themselves bound by Homer, and it is unfair to expect modern writers to be (see here for a fuller discussion of this in relation to Petersen's film).

Then there's the scope of the retelling. Most versions choose to tell 'the story of the Trojan War', from the rape of Helen to the Wooden Horse; Petersen's Troy fits into this, as does Lindsay Clarke's The War At Troy, and indeed Morden and Lupton's work. But Greek and Latin versions don't do this (as far as I'm aware - I may have missed something minor on this point). For an ancient author, the Trojan War was like World War II is to modern writers, a background against which to tell stories, rather than a story in its own right.

Thirdly, the attitude to the gods. Most modern treatments don't like the gods - they don't know how to cope with them. So they get removed, along with most other elements of the fantastic, leaving little more than prophetic dreams. Again, Troy is a good example of this.

Finally, there's homosexuality. Homer does not emphasize a sexual side to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and it can be argued that he did not intend one to be read into his writings. Nevertheless, people have done so, ever since the fifth century BC at the latest, and it is a potential nightmare for anyone coming to the story in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Play the relationship up, and conservative critics will attack the work - but play it down, and activists will comment on the removal of a gay subtext. This happened to Troy, though I have suggested (in a piece for CA News in June 2006) that, whilst the film plays the gay relationship down in the dialogue, it is restored in the visual semiotics.

So how do these comics stack up against these points? Marvel's Iliad is part of a line of retellings of well-known literature, taking up the mission of the Classics Illustrated line. So it is the Iliad, not the tale of Troy. A prelude explains the background, but writer Roy Thomas sees no reason to add a postscript describing the final fall of Troy - the comic ends where Homer ends, with the funeral of Hector. In terms of the Homeric canon, obviously there are no conflicts. There is much omitted, as you'd expect when compressing twenty-four books of poetry into eight issues of a comic, but no changes.

And the gods are present. When you actually think about it, this is hardly unexpected, even were it not for the requirement to tell the Iliad, in which the gods are crucial. Roy Thomas has been writing superhero comics since 1965, in which gods like Hercules and Thor have regularly featured. So it's not too surprising that he has no issue with writing the gods here. If anything, they come across as better rounded characters - Thomas seems to have enjoyed writing the gods more than writing the heroes.

Pity about the art by Miguel Angel Sepulveda. It's serviceable, and at least it's not ugly in the way a lot of superhero art is these days. But all the women look like Californian porn stars, and Athena is dressed up like an Amazon from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Eric Shanower's award-winning Age of Bronze is a different matter entirely. Shanower is very definitely telling the story of Troy, according to the ancient accounts, except carefully writing out the gods, beyond the dreams of Cassandra and other prophets. Key events of divine intervention, such as the Judgment of Paris or Iphigenia being spirited away from the sacrificial altar, are reported, by people who may not be telling the truth. It's meticulously drawn and meticulously researched. Shanower makes sure to set the War against the geopolitical background of the twelfth century B.C., so far as that is known. Everyone is clothed in Bronze Age outfits, in contrast to Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad, where the arms and armour of historical Greece are depicted.

The trouble is, it's also very slow. Shanower is determined to get every part of the 'Trojan story', so we have seen the stories of Telephus, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the story of Palamedes. Every possible author, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to obscure Latin playwrights like Accius, is drawn upon. As a result, ten years and twenty-seven years down the line, and we're only just getting to the first Greek attack on Troy. This amount of characters makes it difficult to keep track of who's who (especially on the Trojan side, where many of the main characters look alike). And combining so many different stories means that, as a whole, Age of Bronze lacks dramatic shape.

Besides, setting the story in an authentic historical background may seem like a good idea, but I can't help but feeling that, like 'historical' King Arthur stories, it's ever so slightly missing the point. These are timeless legends, that have become unshackled, at least to a degree, from whatever historical origins they may have had, and exist in an invented time that never truly was. In that respect, Sepulveda's Corinthian helmets, and the like, which look right to the general reader, are perhaps truer to the spirit of Homer, who happily mixed up elements remembered from the past and from his own time, than are Shanower's boar's-tusk helmets, which are right for the Late Bronze Age.

Shanower does make explicit a sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, something Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad doesn't really engage with (but then neither does Homer, so you can see why). But Shanower does this in a very twenty-first century way. Achilles meets Patroclus, falls in love with him, and immediately loses all interest in his wife Deidamia. To me, this doesn't really accord with Greek attitudes.

I feel quite bad about my reaction to Shanower's work. It's beautifully drawn, an obvious labour of love, and unquestionably, it's a more serious piece of art than Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad. But the latter seems in some respects a little more successful.

Tutankhamun at the O2

2008-08-30T16:59:00.006+01:00

Last Monday, I finally got around to seeing Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, and, incidentally, making my first ever visit inside the Millennium Dome. Seeing this has made me appreciate the British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict rather better than in my somewhat lukewarm write-up. I'm not saying that Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is a bad exhibition - it isn't. But it's nothing like as good as Hadrian.

Let's start with the things I did like. I was a little concerned that it would be overly theatrical, but after an opening video (90 seconds of Omar Sharif), and despite the fact that some of the staff are expected to wear Pharaonic headdress, there is very little overtly contrived in the presentation. The objects are laid out in reasonably spacious and well-enough lit galleries, and the numbers admitted kept to reasonable levels. So there aren't many jams (except at the beginning, where they keep you waiting before admitting you and letting you watch the video), it's never impossible to get up close to a case, if you're prepared to wait, and only occasionally is there not a clear route through the exhibits, leading to confusion as people try to go in different directions. I particularly appreciated the repetition of labels in large print on the tops and sides of cases, allowing one to read about the contents even when there's a crowd in front; other exhibitions could learn from this. Those labels seemed to me concise, and informative (though my companion thought they were dumbing down).

I liked the opening galleries, that set Tutankhamun in context, by displaying objects and images associated with his predecessors in the Egyptian royal family, to whom the boy-king was clearly related (though the exhibition makes clear that exactly how is still up for debate). And it was a bit of an eye-opener how many of Tutankhamun's own objects emphasize military prowess, and victories over the Nubians to the south.

That said, the exhibition is slightly disappointing. None of the really famous Tut objects have travelled from Cairo - no chariots, no couches, no sarcophagi, no death mask (the image used to promote the exhibition is actually a miniature coffin for the Pharaoh's viscera). Contrast this with the impressive centrepieces of Hadrian - the Sagalassos head, the Beth Shean bronze. And there's less than Hadrian - I got round in an hour, whereas I'd allow two for Hadrian (the first time I went it took three, but that was reading everything and listening to all the audio guide).

And there's a certain lack of purpose. Hadrian categorically sets out to educate the visitor about Hadrian, and to change their mind about some things they may have believed. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs doesn't have much more of a purpose than showing off some nice (if minor) objects from Tut's tomb. The labels convey concise information, but there's not as much to get your teeth into as in Hadrian.

All of which might not matter so much were Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs not significantly more expensive than Hadrian. I'm still glad I went, but it's far from being the most impressive exhibition I've seen.

Marking an anniversary

2008-08-24T19:05:00.004+01:00

On the morning of 24th August AD 79, the long-dormant volcano of Vesuvius blew its top. The events of the next forty-eight hours resulted in the provision of a unique insight into daily life in Campania in the first century AD, through the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae, and other sites, such as the villas in Boscoreale and Oplontis. I've been to Pompeii four times over the past twenty-two years, and to Herculaneum three times, and there's lots still to explore. I will go again.

I've only written a few posts about Pompeii, and it's not my area of expertise, though I have taught the material quite often. There are many books, of course. The Electa Guides to Pompeii and Herculaneum are excellent, as is only to be expected. I'd definitely recommend Alex Butterworth & Ray Laurence, Pompeii: The Living City. I haven't looked inside Joanne Berry, The Complete Pompeii, but it seems likely to be impressive, and has been favourably reviewed. And there's a new book on the city from Mary Beard.

Anyway, I don't have much to say on this, but thought the date should be marked.

What's the message here?

2008-08-19T08:25:00.006+01:00

I've just read a review in the Wall Street Journal by Sir Peter Stothard of Maria Wyke's Caesar: A Life in Western Culture. I haven't actually read the book myself, though I know I really need to at some point. And I'm not going to do more than note the slightly sniffy tone Sir Peter takes towards the field of reception studies.

What drives me to comment is the following sentence:

Ms. Wyke, however, is a sophisticated practitioner of her craft, a professor of Latin at University College London and a graduate of the British Film Institute.

For me, this raises the question: if Sir Peter knows Wyke is a professor, then why not refer to her as "Prof. Wyke"? Instead, Sir Peter uses "Ms. Wyke" throughout. This looks, on the face of it, an instance of diminishing the status of female academics, by not using the same courtesy title as one would grant to a male. It's more common than you'd think. As a male myself, I've largely been insulated from it, but a Ph.D.-qualified friend of mine described receiving an e-mail from a female student that correctly referred to two of the academic's male colleagues as 'Dr', but addressed her as 'Miss'. And this wasn't the first time something like this had happened to her.

But perhaps I'm being unfair to Sir Peter. I'm fairly sure this is Sir Peter's choice, rather than something imposed by a WSJ sub-editor, as it's repeated in his blog entry referring to the review. Now, as far as I recall, the practice in Oxbridge colleges used to be to refer to members of staff as 'Mr' or 'Ms', regardless of doctorates or chairs. Sir Peter is a Trinity, Oxford, man, so perhaps he's following that practice.

Well, no. Glancing over Sir Peter's blog, his practice appears to be to refer to male writers by surname alone, without title. Perhaps Sir Peter feels he's being polite and courteous by using 'Ms.' for a woman, but actually it strikes me as rather patronizing. I'm not for a moment accusing Sir Peter of being deliberately misogynist or sexist. But it remains all too easy for males (and not for a moment do I except myself here) to slip without thinking into unexamined chauvinist attitudes.

There's still a long way to go before women are treated equally for doing the same work as men. But we can certainly make a step in the right direction if we remember to refer to, e.g., Maria Wyke as "Prof. Wyke", or "Wyke", but never "Ms Wyke".

I, Hadrian

2008-08-18T19:40:00.004+01:00

Well, I've now seen the exhibition three times, read both the books, heard an introductory lecture from the curator, seen the DVD, and read a lot of press coverage. So what did I think?

The first thing to say is that the space in the Reading Room is well-used. It's certainly a lot better than that used for the Persian Empire exhibition a few years back, and possibly they've laid things out more effectively than for The First Emperor. There are points at which the crowds clog up (Vindolanda Tablets, Cave of the Letters material), but by and large I didn't find this oppressive. I was a little concerned that the floor wasn't as solid as it might be beneath my feet, especially as I watched the Beth Shean bronze Hadrian wobble as people walked by.

I've already posted some preliminary comments on what I thought the BM was trying to do with this exhibition, capitalize on the name recognition whilst drawing in people who don't actually know much about the emperor's life, but want to learn. And there's definitely a sense that they want to overturn some myths.

First target is Hadrian as the philosophically-minded philhellene. The recent revelation that the statue of Hadrian in Greek dress is a Victorian composite of Hadrian's head and someone else's body helps this. The notion that the emperor grew his beard in imitation of Greek practice is rather pooh-poohed - soldiers grew beards on campaign, and Hadrian probably picked the habit up in the army. For a British audience, this, I think, is somewhat pushing at an open door - I was introduced to Hadrian the soldier long before I read about Hadrian the philhellene. But it's worth remembering (as, of course, the curators of this exhibition know) that the philhellenic Hadrian is not entirely dependent upon a single statue - rather the statue was composed to reinforce what was already believed of the emperor, though the works of Philostratus and Hadrian's donations in Athens (little touched on in this exhibition). It's also worth bearing in mind what a radical departure Hadrian's portrait was in terms of imperial iconography. Up until Hadrian imperial portraits had, to one degree or another, followed the lead of Augustus, and been clean-shaven, with straight hair, close-dropped in a fringe. Hadrian's full beard and mop of curls was something new.

The other myth attacked is Hadrian the peacemaker. Hadrian's Wall (which from the illustrations one might almost think only survives from slightly west of Housesteads to slightly east of Housesteads) is presented not as a peaceful demarcation, but a symbol of power intended to divide an humiliate the locals, with more than a little in common with the Israeli Wall in Gaza and the planned fence along the Mexican border. There's not much new in this for anyone who's been teaching or studying Hadrian's Wall recently, but the general public perhaps haven't kept up.

Emphasizing Hadrian as a war leader, there is a large section on the Bar Kokhba rebellion in Judaea, which ended with the expulsion of Jews from the province, an act that we are still dealing with the consequences of. At moments one feels the despair of the last of the rebels, trapped in small caves above the Dead Sea, unable to escape, or even get out in the light very often. But one of my students noted a tendency in the labelling to distance Hadrian from direct responsibility.

And that fits in with the general tenor of the exhibition. For all the questioning of certain aspects of his image, I emerged from this exhibition with the feeling that almost all involved (with the exception of the Jewish archaeologists who brought the Bar Kokhba material) retain an enormous amount of admiration for Hadrian. Little controversies are swept under the rug. Hadrian's birth in Rome is taken as a given fact, not, as some have argued, something Hadrian made up in his autobiography to make him seem more authentically Roman. The deathbed adoption of Hadrian by Trajan is only said to lead to rumours and uncertainties - little space is given to the notion that the adoption might have been concocted by Trajan's wife Plotina and the Praetorian prefect Attianus.

My own relationship to Hadrian is very ambivalent. I was brought up to admire him as one of Gibbon's Five Good Emperors, but the more I read about him, the more I feel that we let Hadrian get away with stuff that the likes of Nero would be pilloried for. Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli is every bit as grandiose and indulgent at Nero's Golden House or Tiberius' Villa Jovis at Capri, but Hadrian's does not have the same bad associations, perhaps because it was not in the centre of Rome, taking up people's home's as Nero's was, or inaccessible from the capital as the Villa Jovis.

But I don't want to come across as having a go at the exhibition. It's a good exhibition, with a good collection of material. I'm not sure how much I learnt from it, but then I'm probably spoilt for a lot of this material. I hear people around me being surprised at the notion that Hadrian was from Spain, not Italy, which is something I've known for decades. I'm clearly not the target audience. Nevertheless, there were some things I hadn't seen before. The busts of young Hadrian show him looking like nothing so much as a European prince of the 1830s (and also bearing a resemblance to some portraits of Nero). And it was nice to see Gismondi's model of Hadrian's Villa. And the Mondragone head of Antinous is as sexuality-transcending as it ever was.

And through all of this, the face of the emperor follows you. There are fourteen statues or portrait busts (plus one headless, and a few coin portraits), and you are presented with the image repeated in photographic form throughout the exhibition. And that is the impression I will take away with me - the face of the emperor, and perhaps a sense that I know the complicated man behind that face a little bit better.

A couple of discoveries

2008-08-16T09:45:00.004+01:00

It's been a week for archaeological discoveries. and for once I'm not blogging them because I disagree with something that's been said about them,* simply because they're interesting.

First of all, a colossal head of a Roman imperial woman was found in Sagalassos in southern Turkey, in the same baths complex where last year the remains of a statue of Hadrian were found. My first thought was that this might be Hadrian's wife, Vibia Sabina. This also was the first thought of the excavators, but they soon realized that this doesn't look like most portraits of Sabina (that's a statue from Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, like the Sagalassos head of Hadrian, currently in the British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition, which I will blog about - I'm going again tomorrow). Instead, they now think it's Faustina, wife of Hadrian's successor Antoninus Pius. David Meadows on Rogueclassicism kindly provides another example for comparison. I'm not absolutely sure I buy the ID, but it certainly isn't Sabina.

Accepting that it is Faustina, this doesn't mean it's not connected with the statue of Hadrian. Sagalassos was an important centre for the imperial cult (Hadrian had made it so), and what one could have here is part of a group of statues from the Antonine period, with the emperor's deified (adoptive) father, and his deified wife. The excavators suggest that the statues come from a Kaisersaal ('emperor's room') from within the baths complex. There's no word in the reports as to whether the female toes found last year, and thought at the time to be part of a stature of Sabina, go with the head, but it's surely plausible.

The other discovery, again with a Hadrianic connection, comes from Newcastle, where two Roman sarcophagi have been found. What's refreshing about this are some of the comments made by Richard Annis, in charge of the dig. I can't now find where these comments were made, so you'll have to take my word for it, but instead of saying "this completely changes our picture of Roman Newcastle", what he said was that the dig confirms what had always been thought to be the case. Just about every fort along Hadrian's Wall has produced evidence for a vicus or civilian settlement, with Vindolanda, Housesteads and Birdoswald merely being amongst the best known. It stands to reason, then, that the Roman fort at Pons Aelius (now under Newcastle Castle Keep) should have had something similar. These excavations, with the discovery of buildings and roads as well as the cemetery, now prove it.

* Well, apart from a comment about Vibia Sabina being "forced into a marriage with the homosexual emperor [Hadrian] at the age of 14", which is calculated to make the readers view the marriage of Sabina in twenty-first century cultural terms.

A Roman Tombstone

2008-07-30T21:29:00.007+01:00

This is the tombstone of Insus, son of Vodullus. It was found in Lancaster in 2005, and a BBC news report last week (from which I have taken the photo) talked about plans for it to go on display in the Museum of Lancashire by the end of the year. The inscription reads:

DIS MANIBVS INSVS VODVLLI [ ]IVS CIVE TREVER EQVES ALAE AVG [ ] VICTORIS CVRATOR DOMITIA [ ]*

which means (filling in the gaps):

To the spirits of the departed. Insus, son of Vodullus, citizen of the Treveri, cavalryman of the Ala Augusta, curator [a junior officer] of the troop of Victor. Domitia [made this?].

But what I want to talk about is a comment by Stephen Bull, the Museum's curator of Military History and Archaeology. He says:

To depict him in such a dramatic and war-like position, when none of the other tombstones of this period show such a thing, makes it very likely that we are looking at something either real, or very similar to an event that happened.

I find that a very curious thing to say. Because this sort of image, of a cavalryman riding down a barbarian, is not uncommon on Roman tombstones. As it happens, I've been making student assignments on this sort of image over the weekend. This, for example, is the tombstone of Flavinus from Hexham Abbey:

Other examples I can think of are those of Longinus Sdapeze from Colchester, Rufus Sita from Gloucester, and Sextus Valerius Genialis from Cirencester. It's also found in non-funerary contexts. This is a detail from a distance slab put up by the II Legion Augusta on the Antonine Wall, found in Bridgeness and now in the National Museum of Scotland, where I was admiring it on Saturday:

According to this report, there are a dozen such reliefs that have been found in the UK. The beheading shown on the tombstone of Insus does appear to be unique. But is there any need to see this as anything more than a variation on a theme? Is it even necessary to connect it with Celtic head cults, as David Shotter does? Real events were sometimes depicted on tombstones, as, for example, when Tiberius Claudius Maximus depicted his encounter with the dying Dacian king Decebalus. But he also added a detailed text explaining the event. This is not the case with Insus.

Some of Bull's other comments (e.g. "The carving and inscription will add detail to what we know about the Roman auxiliary cavalry and its equipment.") seem perfectly sensible. What I think has happened here is that he has succumbed to the temptation to 'sex the story up' by suggesting that there is an actual event being depicted, rather than just generic imagery. It's the same motivation, to make things more concrete, that is behind suggesting that a Roman bust is of Julius Caesar when there isn't really any evidence.

But perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps Bull (an expert in 20th century military history and that of the English Civil War) has addressed these issues. He has written a pamphlet on the tombstone, which I'll be following up. If nothing else, I want to know what he thinks about Domitia. A lot of tombstones have text at the end suggesting that the soldier's heirs (usually fellow soldiers) set the tombstone up. Sometimes it's someone else. Here it's Domitia. Who was she? soldiers weren't officially allowed to marry, but often had common law wives. Is that who Domitia was?

* There's a nice picture of the inscription on this webpage, though their translation is a bit odd.

They found Boudicca's brain!

2008-07-22T21:02:00.005+01:00

Bonekickers is a show that seems to divide people. The division is between those who think it's utter nonsense, and those who think it's utter nonsense but enjoy it anyway.

This week's seemed more nonsensical than usual, but perhaps because I know the history that's being abused more than in previous episodes. But maybe it's the arsenal of live Roman napalm grenades. It's almost not worth listing all the lunacies in this. Mosaics on walls? Well, perhaps. The Life of Marcus Quintanus is, of course, completely made up - but can you really imagine that if they'd been researching this they wouldn't know that there were other more complete copies? And palimpsests made out of printed pages? Do what, guv'nor? And why does Professor Parton wear his hat at night?

It might have been interesting to spin off this into a discussion of the attitudes towards Boudicca that the programme shows, especially Boudicca as British queen, sheltered by villagers in the West Country, when there's no evidence that she cared about them or that they cared about her. But really, this is so bonkers and bears so little relationship to history that it's hardly worth it. (If you want to read what I think about Boudicca, it's all here.)

But yes, I'll be watching next week.

Hadrian

2008-07-20T16:28:00.007+01:00

Hadrian is probably emperor of whom people in Britain are most likely to have heard, through his association with the Wall that runs across Northumberland and Cumbria. But not many people will know much more than that about him. His biography has not really seeped into the public consciousness. I can't, for instance, think of a single screen portrayal of Hadrian off the top of my head, whereas I can immediately think of at least two or three for the likes of Augustus, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, and other first century AD rulers. I'm sure such portrayals of Hadrian exist, and if anyone wants to point them out I'll be happy to hear of them, but it doesn't change my point. The fact that I can't think of any shows how little Hadrian is known in this respect.

The British Museum's new exhibition clearly means to change that. I'll be talking about the exhibition itself after I go on August 3rd. What I want to write about now is the media commentary that's appeared in advance of the opening. There have been articles in The Guardian, The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, Times and Sunday Times. The BBC repeated a somewhat superficial Timewatch programme on Hadrian's Wall, featured the exhibition on Newsnight Review, and showed a not-too bad, if occasionally overheated, documentary by Dan Snow (all of which are still available, if you're in the UK, on the BBC's iPlayer page, though they'll gradually disappear over the next week). And that no doubt only scratches the surface.

What strikes me is how pro-Hadrian almost all of this coverage has been. A good example is this Guardian editorial; faults are noted, but overall he's seen as a good thing. Snow, though not ignoring such things as the suppression of Jewish identity, in an event as traumatic as the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in AD 70, cannot hide his admiration of the man. Articles talk admiringly of how Hadrian pulled out of a war in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq (take heed, America's new president, seems to be the message).

But are these pieces all treating him as too modern, too much the benevolent dictator, too much someone we can identify with? After all, this was a man who was so hated by the Senate that only the threat of civil war forced through approval of his deification. His relationship with Antinoos always seems accompanied in these modern reports by a comment to the effect that such a liaison would not raise an eyebrow in the Roman world. Well, yes the ancients had different attitudes to sex between men than those we have, but, as Dan Snow reveals as he reads a passage from Aurelius Victor (De Caesaribus 14), reporting rumours attacking Hadrian for his lasciviousness, there were some Romans who though Hadrian went too far in this respect. I don't particularly want to go on about this, not least because I've already written on the subject, but I do wonder if we still can't see this emperor clearly.

Fortunately, we still have Mary Beard. She concludes a lengthy piece in The Guardian by pointing out how Hadrian's image is something that we have invented for ourselves, the modern version going back I would say to when he was canonized by Gibbon (whom Beard does not mention) as one of the good emperors. She points out how the goalposts are moved, partly because of the state of the evidence. Where Nero can only be seen as a tyrant, she says, if Hadrian does the same thing, it gets a much more favourable spin put on it. She's absolutely right.

Historical consultants

2008-07-17T13:32:00.004+01:00

UK TV History are currently repeating Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, the BBC's 2006 drama-documentary series. On an internet conference I frequent, someone said that it should be all right, because Mary Beard was the historical consultant on some of them.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that.

Mary Beard is undoubtedly a fine scholar. But the role of historical consultant in these sort of programmes is an advisory one. They are someone that the programme-makers turn to for ideas, but they do not write the scripts, or dictate how the programme should be made. They do not have the final say, and one suspects that they are often overruled. As a for instance, Mark Horton is the archaeological consultant on Bonekickers. Now, he may well have told the creators that anyone using a magnetometer must ensure that they have no metal about their person. He may even have said that this includes underwiring on bras. But I doubt he explicitly endorsed a scene where students are told by a member of staff to remove their bras, making that instruction in front of another, male, member of staff (something that I would expect to lead to a complaint of sexual harassment in any university I've ever been associated with).

The power is with the programme and film-makers. The historians only know how to write books; the directors and producers are (they will argue) the ones who know what will work on the screen. And sometimes they will be right - good history does not always make good drama. Just look at Oliver Stone's Alexander, a film that (in my view) is dramatically weak because it pays too much respect to history. But sometimes decisions seem to me to be symptomatic of a lack of faith in their audience.

Beard's post about her involvement with Ancient Rome is interesting. At a seminar, the producers explained that their prime objective was to prevent people changing channel. A lot of careful research has been done into people's viewing habits, and this is used to shape programmes. So complexity is avoided, for fear that people will change channel to something less taxing. If they want to get more of the story, the idea seems to be, they can always buy the accompanying book (I've certainly had that argument put to me, though not by a programme-maker).

This seems unethical to me. History programmes should not be in the business of falsifying history. It's not enough to say that the true story is in the book - most viewers won't read the book. And the BBC's reputation as a maker of historical documentaries was not built on catering to the lowest common denominator. Programmes like Civilisation assumed an interested, intelligent audience, who might not know the subject being discussed, but didn't need patronizing.

To return to my point about consultants - why do programme-makers make such a play of using consultants, if they will overrule them where necessary? Because consultants lend authority, to give the impression that their programmes are unquestionably historically accurate. This is important to programme-makers - a lack of perceived authenticity will hit their audiences. By hiring Mark Horton, the makers of Bonekickers hope to promote the notion that the show displays an authentic version of life in an archaeology department (which it isn't, of course). The hiring of Mary Beard and others allows the makers of Ancient Rome to back up their opening caption that the programme is dealing with real people and events, based on ancient accounts (as if those weren't problematic), and with the collaboration of modern historians. So what you see is true. Personally, I worry about the pernicious affect of such statements, and the way that the drama-documentary actualizes a particular version as The Way It Happened. Take, for instance, the programme on Tiberius Gracchus. Not only does the version show excise Tiberius' brother Gracchus from the account (too complicated, one presumes), but at the start brings together two pieces of evidence in a way that may not be sustainable. We know that Gracchus was present at the fall of Carthage in 146 BC. We also know that he won acclaim for being the first onto an enemy city's wall in the African campaign. But we don't know what the programme postulates, that the city concerned was Carthage. Indeed, one might suggest that it probably wasn't Carthage, as if it was, our source, Plutarch, might have been expected to tell us. Television drama strips this from the accounts. So, remember, don't consume the packaging. The quality of historical consultant is not necessarily a guide to the historical integrity of a programme.

So why do historians still serve as consultants on these programmes? Obviously, I can't speak for anyone. And I shall put aside the notion of sheer ego-boost from being connected to the telly, though were I ever to be offered such a role (which is highly unlikely) it would be an influential factor for my decision. I think many get involved because they see an opportunity to do some good, at the very least to stop some mistakes being made. Bonekickers has its clearly 'educational' moments, such as the mini-lecture on how Bristol, though built on the profits of the slave trade, never actually had slaves in its ports. And Mark Horton has a series of mini-films on the website on the background. So those interested in learning more about the history can be directed. Maybe that's the right attitude, as long as your ambitions aren't too lofty - in which case you'll be disappointed, as Kathleen Coleman was when she worked on Gladiator. But maybe it's appeasing the enemy? Will Bonekickers have the same effect as Time Team, in encouraging a false view of what life in an archaeology department is like? I'm not sure I know the answer to that one.

Edit (23/07): There's a good article here by Paul Cartledge, talking about his involvement in The Greeks, why he did it, and why he'd do it again (as indeed he did, for The Spartans).

Bonekickers

2008-07-09T23:02:00.004+01:00

There was a time when, whenever Time Team started, I'd turn the sound down and hum the theme to The Avengers, because I thought sometimes that this was the feel Time Team was going for. For Bonekickers, the new BBC1 action-drama about a team of dedicated archaeologists, I guess it should be the music from Torchwood (if it was more memorable).

And that's basically what Bonekickers is - Time Team meets Torchwood. There are plenty of visual references to both shows. In terms of archaeology, there are a few authentic touches - points are scored early for telling people not to stand at the edge of the trench. This and other similar moments are no doubt down to archaeological adviser Mark Horton, who has lent the show the authority of his name, and apparently his wardrobe, to judge from how Hugh Bonneville is dressed.

But anyone whose had any contact with real archaeology departments will soon notice the differences. For a start, the show promulgates the Time Team myth that all archaeologists have limitless supplies of top-of-the-range equipment. And I've never been to a black tie do-cum-book signing-cum-professorial welcome do. And certainly archaeologists, even on rescue digs, don't work round the clock unless there's a really good reason to do so, and never have their labs open all night.

And they don't have silly adventures either. But then Bonekickers wouldn't be much of a drama otherwise, I suppose. It's not that it's particularly bad - it's no worse than Torchwood. It's just not particularly good. And there is a problem with shows like this, or Channel 4's unlamented Extreme Archaeology, that try to make archaeology breathlessly exciting. Archaeology's excitement is not of the adrenaline-rush variety; it's much more cerebral. You can communicate this through television - just ask Mortimer Wheeler, or (since Sir Mortimer's dead) Julian Richards. But I can't see Bonekickers succeeding, or getting a second season.

Help?

2008-07-08T18:28:00.003+01:00

I found this image in the Bridgeman Education database.

The database tells me that it is of Mercury, from Pompeii, now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, is in the Fourth Style of Pompeian wall-painting, and dates to the first century AD. What it doesn't tell me is which house in Pompeii it's from, and I can't find this painting illustrated in any of my books on Pompeii. Googling isn't producing anything. Anyone out there know?

What sort of emergency?

2008-07-07T13:26:00.004+01:00

You may well have read over the weekend about a 'state of emergency' being declared at Pompeii. To anyone with an interest in Roman history, this will not exactly be a surprise. One regularly sees papers, or chapters, or news items, about how Pompeii and Herculaneum are about to be lost for ever. From personal experience, I can tell you how much less of the site (particularly in the private houses) was open in 2007 as compared to 1999 or 1986. It's not too surprising. Pompeii was never meant to last as long as it has. The bright colours of the graffiti on the walls was only meant to last for a short period, weeks, or moths at the most - it's not surprising that after two hundred and fifty years of being exposed to the Italian summer, it's all faded. The interior decoration was mostly repainted every decade. The houses were probably meant to be more robust, but most of them lost their roofs, and hence their structural integrity.

What interests me is some radical differences in how the story had been reported. The BBC report is much as you'd expect - statistics about how much is being lost every year through lack of funds. The Guardian has a rather different approach. Hardly a word there about the threat to the archaeology. Instead, the report is all about the poverty of the tourist experience:

The daily Corriere della Sera this week deplored the squalid conditions at Pompeii, where visitors run a gauntlet of hawkers and self-appointed car park wardens to a vast and poorly signposted complex with no restaurants and just three toilet facilities.

For a start, this seems a bit unfair. There aren't many toilets, but it's five, rather than three, and, unless it's closed in the past year, there is a restaurant in the shell of the Forum Baths. There are free maps given out at the entrance, and the official guides published by Electa Napoli in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei are as good as any other Electa publication (i.e. an exemplary model of how to do an archaeological guide).

The real question, though, is which report represents the intent behind the move to appoint a special commissioner. If he is to be led by the need to protect the archaeology above any other considerations, then that's by and large a good thing (though giving his salary directly to the Soprintendenza would be better). But if the initiative is to be tourist-led, then I rather share some of the qualms of Mary Beard (who, of course, blogged this before I got around to it). There are no toilets except by the exits and entrances because there's no running water on the site. Do we really want the roads of Pompeii ripped up to lay water pipes? Or Portaloos outside the amphitheatre? And where would one put further restaurants? In some of the houses? In one of the large gardens at the eastern end of the site?

So what is this all about? Protecting the site, or (as is mentioned in the video accompanying the BBC report) exploiting a cash cow?

Judea AD 33. Saturday afternoon. About tea time.

2008-07-04T14:41:00.005+01:00

When I see a headline stating 'Doubt over date for Brit invasion' (original press release, and another report), I expect to find a dramatic change, redating it to 56 BC, or AD 54. Instead, it turns out that the date is being shifted by a mere four days, from August 26/27 to August 22/23.

So it's not really that significant. In any case, what do either of these dates mean? I can tell you what they definitely don't mean - they don't mean the 22nd/23rd or 26th/27th days of the month Sextilis (not renamed August until 8 BC) in the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus (yes that Pompey and that Crassus). The Roman civic calendar was in a mess by the first century BC. A failure to apply intercalary months properly meant that the Roman civic year was about three months ahead of the solar year, something that Caesar had to rectify in 46 BC. So the last week of 'August' would have the conditions that would now be expected in May. This is certainly not when Caesar invaded Britain. He clearly states in De Bello Gallico 4.20, that the invasion was launched when there was little of the summer left (exigua parte aestatis reliqua). So 'August 22/23' actually means 'the equivalent of August 22/23 if the Roman civic calendar and the solar year were properly aligned' (i.e. on the Julian calendar). At which point the dates become, for me, rather meaningless.

I'm not even sure that the event can be dated to where August would have been. Apart from the reference to the summer, the only other dating evidence is that the landing took place four days before a full moon. I'm not sure why September is ruled out - in 1940 the Germans were certainly contemplating invasion in late September. Perhaps the astrological work and the studying of the tides demonstrates that the invasion cannot have been four days before a full moon, but eight or nine days (a textual correction proposed by R.G. Collingwood in 1937). But even this may be open to possible objections (as raised by others) that changes to the coastline over two thousand years have altered the currents. In any case, neither the 'traditional' date nor the new one seem to me to be terribly helpful.

At least these dates are less meaningless than the recent attempt to date the return of Odysseus (full article) to April 16, 1178 BC, on the basis of astronomical evidence from the text. Now, I'm happy with the notion that genuine astronomical phenomena are described in the Odyssey. It may be that the reference to the obliteration of the sun at Odyssey 20.356 is meant to be an eclipse. What I find far less plausible is the notion that Homer is able to insert consistent astronomical data into his imaginative account, that point to an eclipse five centuries before he wrote. Even the authors concede that their theory only works if one assumes that Zeus sending Hermes to Ogygia represents movement of the planet Mercury. Given that there are perfectly good dramatic reasons in the framework of the Odyssey for this trip (he's been sent by Zeus to tell Calypso to release Odysseus, and who else would Zeus send than the messenger god?), I don't see the need for an allegorical interpretation.

What both these items share, it seems to me, is a positivist outlook on the ancient world. Caesar invaded Britain on a particular day. Odysseus returned on a particular day. Since these are facts (an arguable proposition for Odysseus' return), then, the idea seems to be, it must be possible, with enough investigation, to discover those facts. With my own little post-modernist toolkit, I conclude that some facts simply aren't recoverable.

The title of this post, by the way, is a quotation from Monty Python's Life of Brian a series of captions that satirizes exactly this sort of attempt to advance precise dates.

Me vs. Wikipedia

2008-06-27T11:06:00.004+01:00

Shortly before writing this post, I went to Wikipedia to correct the entry. I've just found that those changes got reverted almost immediately, by someone citing Lofficier, Pixley, and the Discontinuity Guide. To be fair, I hadn't added comments to the effect that my edit was based on the actual episodes (which trump anything in secondary sources). I have now restored my changes, and added an explanation. I've also edited the Doctor Who Wiki. let's see how long those changes last.

Bust of Caesar?

2008-05-15T08:59:00.000+01:00

You may have seen reports (e.g. here, here, here or here) that a bust of Julius Caesar has been found, that dates to the last five years of his life. Mary Beard fairly comprehensively demolishes most of the claims made for it; in short, there's no evidence that it's Caesar (though it might be, with the eye of faith), none that it dates to the early 40s BC, and none that it was thrown in the river in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination (which is intrinsically unlikely). The best we can say for sure is that it's Roman.

It all reminds me of an edition of Hidden Treasure, BBC's rather breathless archaeology programme of a few years back, when they talked about the quality of the torc from the Winchester hoard, and concluded that it was 'very likely' a gift from Julius Caesar to a British chieftain, on the flimsiest of evidence.

Science Fiction as a Literary Genre

2008-05-10T14:39:00.002+01:00

I went to a one-day symposium on this on Thursday. But rather than write it up, I'll point you towards this report.

Four pieces on Watchmen: #4

2008-04-28T23:54:00.002+01:00

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

And finally, here’s something new on the subject.

It’s been noticed that the first season of Heroes lifts a main feature of its plot from Watchmen, specifically the conspiracy that sees the destruction of New York as a means of promoting a better world. By killing millions in New York, they will be able to save billions throughout the world. The difference is, where Watchmen is ambiguous about whether Veidt is doing the right thing, Heroes is clear that Linderman and his associates are wrong, and must be opposed. They are nutters, and their plan won’t work; in fact, it will make things worse. The show establishes through another steal from comics history, the ‘Days of Future Past’ story from Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s X-Men. Hiro and Ando travel forward in time, and learn the consequences following from the successful implementation of Linderman’s plan.

And that’s helped me to see one of the problems I have with Watchmen. It’s that, by not having a similar moment, Watchmen is a morally compromised work. It leaves the reader with what I referred to in 1988 as The Big Moral Dilemma – six million New Yorkers or the world? But if you are thinking that’s your choice, then you’re already lost. The true moral choice is to reject the terms of the dilemma, to say that mass murder cannot be justified on such mathematical grounds, because what if you’re not right? Even Veidt is not infallible or omniscient. The moral choice is, like the Petrellis, Hiro and the rest, to find another way.

Four pieces on Watchmen: #3

2008-04-28T23:48:00.005+01:00

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 4 here

Thirdly, we have a letter I wrote last year to Foundation, and which appeared in issue 101, pp. 5-9. My thanks to current editor Graham Sleight for permission to reproduce it here. Looking back at this letter, I now think it’s rather grumpy, but never mind.

I read with interest Elizabeth Rosen’s article on Watchmen in Foundation 98 (“‘What’s that you smell of?’ – Twenty years of Watchmen nostalgia”, pp. 85-98). Whilst I have always been less convinced than most that Watchmen is an unalloyed triumph, it is not on these grounds that I wish to comment on Rosen’s piece. And I find her reading of Watchmen as both a critique and an example of nostalgia for the superhero comic, and her view that the development of superhero comics since Watchmen brings a new resonance to that nostalgia, interesting, and I don’t disagree with either point. However, a number of observations occur to me.

If Watchmen is all about nostalgia, then one of the most important aspects of the comic is its origins in a commission to rework the Charlton heroes, characters from the late 1960s, fondly-remembered by many comics fans. Yet Rose delays mention of this until p. 93, three-quarters of the way through the article. This seems odd, given that the original Charlton characters dictated the characteristics, to one degree or another, of the leading players in Watchmen, especially Rorschach.

This seems symptomatic of a lack of context provided in Rosen’s paper. Watchmen did not spring out of nothing. Alan Moore had already been deconstructing the notion of the superhero for some years, most notably in Marvelman (later retitled Miracleman) from 1982, and then in some of his earlier work for DC, especially ‘Roots’, the story in Saga of the Swamp Thing #24 (1984) that guest-starred the Justice League of America. Of these Rosen only mentions Miracleman, and then only very briefly. More time is given to a comic contemporary with Watchmen, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight, as the other foundation stone of revisionist superhero comics (though for all its revisionist gloss, Dark Knight is fundamentally true to the character as established by Bob Kane and Bill Finger). Again, context would help. Though Moore would not have read Dark Knight before starting on Watchmen, Miller was working with themes he had first drawn out in his work on Daredevil (1979-1983). Moore was an avowed fan of this, and wrote a text piece for Marvel UK’s The Daredevils #1 (1983) on Miller.

In general, the atmosphere in superhero comics in the early 1980s was conducive to the development of more ‘relevant’ and ‘realistic’ stories. This was especially true at DC, who had a taken a creative lead by building upon the sort of sophisticated storylines that Chris Claremont had developed in his popular run on X-Men over at Marvel (beginning in 1975). Stories like Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s two-part ‘Runaways’ (The New Teen Titans # 26-27, 1982-1983) and their later stories dealing with drug abuse may seem naïve now, but at the time they were groundbreaking and hard-hitting. Of DC’s output in these years, Rosen only mentions (in a footnote) Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986), without giving a date, and in such a way that an unwary reader might not realize that it preceded Watchmen and Dark Knight.

One could further suggest that the notion of the ‘realistic’ superhero comic actually goes back to Denny O’Neill and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories from 1970-1972. Or it could be traced back further to birth of the ‘Marvel Age’ in the 1960s, driven by Stan Lee and his collaborators, in particular Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four (1961 onwards), which Rosen mentions in a footnote, and Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man (1962 onwards). These would be comics that Moore and Dave Gibbons would have read as youngsters, but though Rosen comments in a general way about their nostalgia for old superhero comics, she doesn’t mention them, leading me to wonder if she has read much of 1960s superhero comics herself. Many of these are now, through Marvel’s Essentials and DC’s Showcase lines, more easily available than they’ve ever been since first publication, allowing the reader to see the influence of, for instance, John Broome and Gil Kane’s Green Lantern (1959 onwards) upon Gibbons’ art and Moore’s sf stylings.

This lack of context means that when Rosen talks of the ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Silver Age’, a reader ignorant of comics might come away unsure of what the terms actually mean. I’m sure Rosen knows. But I think that the terms need explaining for the non-expert, with clear discussion of the collapse of the market for superheroes at the end of the 1940s, that ended the Golden Age, and the revival of that market in the late 1950s that began the Silver. (And surely the start of the Silver Age is more clearly datable than the ‘roughly’ 1959 she suggests – the first appearance of the second Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956 is usually, and I feel rightly, held as the first Silver Age superhero.)

A similar lack of context appears when discussing what came after Watchmen. Moore’s complaints about post-Watchmen imitators are noted, but no examples put forth. There is no shortage. Just staying at the quality end of the genre, there are John Smith and Jim Baikie’s New Statesmen (1988-1990), the various comics in the Stormwatch and Authority series (1993 onwards), and Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates (2002 onwards). As an example of what Moore calls ‘any poor wretched innocent Golden Age character … re-imagined’, one could point to Grant Morrison and Duncan Fedrego’s Kid Eternity [which I didn’t date in the original letter – it’s 1991]. John Byrne’s 1986 revamp of Superman is too early to be post-Watchmen (though the influence of Watchmen and Dark Knight is clearly felt in the 1992-1993 ‘Death and Return of Superman’ sequence), but is worth mentioning here as it was preceded by a two-part Moore story, ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?’ (Superman #423, Action Comics #583), that features the nostalgia for superheroes that characterized Moore’s work when he returned to the genre in 1993. Even when Rosen does mention later comics, such as Marvels, Astro City and Kingdom Come, in the context of a return to nostalgia, no dates are given, so the reader cannot see how they relate to Watchmen (they are 1994, 1995-2000, and 1996).

There are also two points at which I think Rosen misreads the characters. It is true that Rorschach’s world view and rigid morality is often undercut by Moore, and that Moore does not intend the reader to accept it uncritically. But it’s not that simple. Rorschach is the only one of the main characters who emerges from the story with his moral integrity intact and uncompromised, even if this gets him killed. (It may be worth noting that the two deaths Rosen focuses upon, those of the original Nite Owl and Rorschach, are among the events that appear to me most jarringly imposed upon the narrative, rather than arising out of it naturally.)

In the first issue of Watchmen we see one 1940s hero, the first Silk Spectre, being sexually assaulted by another, the Comedian. As the story develops, it transpires that the two subsequently developed a relationship, and that the Comedian is the father of the Silk Spectre's daughter. For Rosen, this is problematic, and she says in a note that ‘[f]or a writer who has, in the main, been sensitive and outspoken in his work in his support of women, gay rights and other minority issues, [Moore’s] depiction of Sally [the Silk Spectre] falling in love with her rapist seems an incredible misstep.’ This appears dogmatic to me, as if a feminist writer cannot depict attempted rape (and, whilst not wishing to excuse the Comedian, his assault is interrupted before it becomes actual rape) and its consequences in any but the most black-and-white condemnatory terms. Moore is many things, but dogmatic is not one of them. He has always been interested in understanding what motivates people, even where their actions may not appear admirable. We all know that women stay with and continue to feel affection towards partners who sexually abuse them, however much we might wish it wasn’t so – is Moore wrong to depict that? Moreover, it seems strange to draw such attention to the way Moore presents attempted rape, whilst passing over the way in which the villain apparently gets away with murdering three million people, with no more consequence than vague hints that his plan might come unstuck. (I think in the final panel Moore is making a nod towards the 1950 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, but the difference is that the audience there knows that Dennis Price’s confession to murdering his family will undoubtedly be found, whilst there is every chance that Rorschach’s journal won’t be.)

One aspect of nostalgia that Rosen overlooks is the political nostalgia of Watchmen. In this world, Richard Nixon is still President in 1985. Gerald Ford is still Vice-President. Henry Kissinger is still Secretary of State. G. Gordon Liddy is still a presidential aide. The implication is that the entire 1973 Nixon administration is still in place. Moore would say that the presence of the near-omnipotent Dr Manhattan as a weapon in America’s arsenal has distorted US politics, but what he actually presents is a world in which politics has simply stopped. Alan Moore was twenty when Nixon resigned in 1974, and his motivation here seems to be a desire to play with the characters from when he first became politically aware.

Rosen’s piece seems insufficiently grounded in the history of superhero comics as a genre. I wonder if this might be because she has largely experienced superheroes through collections. One might deduce this from the title she uses for Miller’s Batman work – The Dark Knight Returns was originally the title of the first issue alone, though it has since been canonised as the title of the whole work. She certainly has only read Watchmen in the later collection. This is shown by her comment that Moore ends the work with Juvenal’s quis custodiet ipsos custodies. Though the source of the comic’s name, this quotation is nowhere to be found in the twelve original issues, which end with a line from John Cale’s ‘Santies’. The Juvenal was added when the work was collected. A better knowledge of the superhero genre might have meant that she would notice that the names mentioned in the Tales of the Black Freighter text piece are not just people who worked for EC comics, but more importantly were major figures in the development of DC Comics and their superhero lines – Moore’s point being that the existence of real superheroes killed off the market for superhero comics.

As I said, Rosen makes interesting points – but they would be so much better if they were grounded in a broader knowledge than the few creators she addresses.

Four pieces on Watchmen: #2

2008-04-28T23:43:00.005+01:00

Part 1 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

The second piece is much more recent, a brief write up from 2006 on another blog after reading the comics again, together with responses to comments people left me. I’ve modified this to make it into a more coherent whole, but inevitably it looks like a bit of a cut-and-paste job. I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time smoothing out the joins.

I’m afraid my reaction to Watchmen is much the same as it was nineteen years ago. It is on the surface erudite and skillful – but at the core is a pulp sf plot which is really pretty stupid, and wouldn’t be tolerated in a novel or a film. So why should it be acceptable in what is supposed to be the best comics have to offer?

Of course Watchmen is better than most of the dreck that comes out of comics publishers, but I don’t think that means we should be blind to its faults. And I’m not for a moment suggesting that books and films don’t have stupid plots – but that the body of criticism would identify those plots as stupid in a way that hasn’t happened for Watchmen. I suspect that part of the reason it’s been let off the hook is that some of the critics have such low expectations of the medium that they will praise anything that’s half-decent.

I agree that much of Watchmen is very nicely put together. A lot of my frustration with reading it comes from the fact that the bits that don’t make sense spoil my enjoyment of the bits that do. And if Moore hadn’t made such a fuss about Watchmen being ‘superheroes in a real world’, I wouldn’t have minded so much.

I may be giving the impression that I think Watchmen is the suckiest thing ever. I certainly don’t. But it does have its flaws, and it is not the best comic ever, or even the best superhero comic ever, or even the best Alan Moore superhero comic ever, and it wasn’t any of these things when published.

I do still think that the core plot is dumb. A mad genius drops a giant squid on New York, killing millions, and persuades people that it’s an alien invasion, and everyone decides to be nice to each other. It seemed naive in 1987, and post-9/11 you couldn’t get away with it – we now know that the reaction to such an atrocity would be anger, and a need to collectively do something, a need that would be exploited by politicians for their own ends.

Signalling that the plot comes from an old Outer Limits episode does indeed say to the readers that it’s a ridiculous plot device. But it also says. “Remember everything I said about this being superheroes in the real world? Well, I lied.”

Now, you can say “it’s just a superhero comic”, but I don’t think that’s a legitimate defence. For one thing, Moore ostentatiously proclaimed the whole thing as “what if superheroes were real”, so it has to be judged on the more realistic standards to which it allegedly aspires. And secondly, I don’t think it works as a genre piece, because of the resolution, where the villain gets away with it.

Veidt gets away with his scheme, with nothing more than some odd nightmares. The heroes find out about it, but can then do nothing about it. it all leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. It’s interesting that the recent article in Foundation [see next piece for details] commented on the problematic depiction of rape, but has nothing on the problematic depiction of mass murder. And yes, I know Moore’s asking his audience the question about how far do you take the good of the many vs. the good of the few, but for such a question to have meaning, it has to be couched in sensible terms. Which I don’t think it is in Watchmen.

I am told that Moore’s response to criticism of the plot was “You don’t think it would work. Veidt thinks it would, and Veidt is smarter than you.” That’s a clever response, but it’s not really an answer. And I’d be more convinced in Veidt as the most intelligent man in the world if he didn’t name his top secret holding companies after Egyptian things, when everyone knows he’s obsessed with Egypt.

My problem with Veidt’s plan is not answered by hints that it may not work in the long term. It really shouldn’t work at all, and certainly not in the short time scale that it is shown working in.

I don’t think “the villain might not get away with it if [Rorschach’s] journal gets picked for publication and they read it all and the editors believe what it says and they make the connection with the attack on New York and anyone believes what New Frontiersman publishes” is a satisfactory end for a genre piece. You couldn’t get away with it in a James Bond novel, for instance. You could pull it off in a John le Carré novel, but then le Carré breaks free of the genre restrictions in a way that Watchmen never quite manages.

I agree that Watchmen is about what would happen if people really did dress up in capes to fight crime, and if there was someone on the planet with superpowers. But in those terms, I feel the squid is a cheat. It crosses the line into “oh well, we can have anything we want happen”, and then Watchmen becomes just another superhero comic. A good one, it must be said, but one which fails in what it is setting out to do.

It’s partly because comics can be so much more than superheroes that I have issues with the praise lavished upon Watchmen. But I think there are better superhero comics – Dark Knight for one, because Dark Knight knows its limitations. The problem with Watchmen is that it sets itself up as “what if superheroes were real”. If you’re going to do that, then you have to be rigorous in the plotting – but Watchmen fails that test rather too often.

There is an essential contradiction between writing a superhero story and a realistic story. It’s a contradiction Watchmen never successfully solves.

And in the end, I feel that Moore can either have his open, morally ambiguous ending (which he wants because he’s still in his deconstructionist phase which he has, fortunately, subsequently grown out of), or he can have his ridiculous plot device. What makes Watchmen a failure in my view is Moore’s attempt to have his cake and eat it. Saying that of course it’s a ridiculous plot device and Moore knows this is really making my point for me.

The whole Nixon thing is another aspect I have a problem with. I can readily believe that the existence of Dr Manhattan and the way the US government uses him might change the course of American politics. But by having not just Nixon, but also Ford, and Kissinger, and Liddy, Moore is implying not that politics have changed, but that they stopped in 1971. And that I find implausible.

As Alan Jeffrey said, if you read Watchmen as a book, then the absurdity at the end isn’t too bad. One of the things that seemed a lot better on the reread was the pirate story. If, on the other hand, you have been reading chapters a month at a time, in the light of a flurry of interviews at the start talking about how realistic it was all going to be, the sudden appearance of a giant exploding telepathic mutant squid in issue #11 is a huge disappointment.

I think Watchmen is a bit like Babylon 5. Both are well-written and clever, and both definitely raised the bar in their respective fields. But I think both have structural problems at the end, and can’t be accepted as flawless works.

Four pieces on Watchmen: #1

2008-04-28T23:29:00.005+01:00

[I promise, I will get back to classics-related stuff eventually ...]

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

This is the first of four pieces of writing about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic Watchmen, reproduced to provide background for some things I will say in an upcoming review of Roz Kaveney’s Superheroes! I’m afraid you’ll find that some of the pieces go over the same ground. And there’s a lot of it all told, so I don’t really expect anyone to read it all.

The first article had a somewhat protracted genesis. It was originally written in 1987 as a Letter of Comment to Fantasy Advertiser, the premier UK comics fanzine, at that time coming out of a long hiatus. It wasn’t printed, for reasons of space (though editor Martin Skidmore said it would have been had he received it earlier). I then rewrote it for the first issue of my fanzine Halo of Flies, which came out in 1988, along the way blatantly stealing a number of points from an article written by Alan Jeffrey for another fanzine (the title of which I don’t recall, and neither does Alan). It was so long in gestation that I ended up adding a short postscript once it finally saw the light of day. It’s quite an angry article, trying to articulate the sense of betrayal I felt when Watchmen concluded. I’d probably be more reasoned about it now, and I don't necessarily stand by everything in the piece below,but I’ve decided to leave the text largely untouched (though with some annotations). I didn’t put proper references at the time for which issues of Escape and The Comics Journal I refer to, and am not sure that I possess the issues concerned anymore (I know I gave away many of my back issues of TCJ).

Geniuses and Fools

“Stupendous genius! damned fool.” – Lord Byron of William Wordsworth.

In 1987 the mainstream [2008: i.e. superhero] comics world was dominated by a comic called Watchmen. You may have heard about it (indeed, this article assumes that you’ve read it – if you haven’t, and don’t want the plot spoilt, stop here). It’s now nearly a year since the last issue came out, but that was followed by the trade paperback, and no doubt the damn thing will sweep the Eagles this year. So at this point I’d like to voice my opinion on “1987’s most talked about graphic novel”. Watchmen 11 & 12 constitute one of the most ill-conceived and appalling endings for a story that I have read in a long time.

Let me expand on this. In these issues, everything that you thought you knew about Watchmen is proved to be wrong, and every effect that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have built up during the previous ten issues comes crashing down. At the centre of this collapse is the character of Adrian Veidt.

Veidt isn’t like anyone else in Watchmen. He doesn’t have to obey the same rules as the other characters. Where everyone else’s background is told through flashback, Veidt gives his origin (which reads like something out of Stan Lee’s worst nightmares) in a long expository monologue, cunningly delivered to dead people so that he won’t be interrupted. He quotes that great sage of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler. He takes on Nite Owl and Rorschach, who have previously dealt with muggers, SWAT teams and prison guards en masse, and soundly thrashes them (actually, he doesn’t; he just hits them a couple of times and they are so overawed by his presence that they give up). And not for him the messy brutal fighting style seen elsewhere; no, his movements are graceful and balletic, and allow him to conduct conversations at the same time. (“Another thing you’ll know if you’ve been in a fight is: you don’t wisecrack whilst you’re doing it” – Dave Gibbons. Well, nothing Ozymandias says is actually funny …) For all I know Veidt also leaps tall buildings and sings four-part harmony. And he catches bullets.

Now this might not seem so incredible at first glance. After all, this is a superhero comic. Elektra catches bullets in Elektra: Assassin. Well, yes, but for all the gritty realism Frank Miller uses, she exists in a world where men stick to ceilings, and exposure to gamma radiation hardly ever actually kills you. In the supposedly realistic world of Watchmen, where there are no Eastern mystics dispensing paranormal powers (or if there are, nobody’s bothered telling the reader) something like this begs quite a few questions. Like, how does he see the bullet, when it’s moving so fast? How did he practise this? (“Okay guys, is the ambulance handy? Right, start shooting!”) How come, when the impact of the bullet is sufficient to knock him off his feet, his hand gets nothing worse than a scratch? What would he have done if the Silk Spectre had emptied the whole gun into him? (Good job she didn’t find a machine gun, eh?)

It’s not as if it’s necessary for him to catch the bullet. He’s wearing body armour anyway, and the bullet catching scene is nothing more than a clever trick Moore thought up one day. He believes it can actually be done, if one trains oneself hard enough. I don’t.

The point is that where the other main characters are inversions or refutations of superhero cliches, Veidt is a glorification of them, hardly developing much beyond the Charlton character Pete Cannon–Thunderbolt, on whom he is based. Moore seems to be aware that the character might be seen as this, and gives him such seemingly clever dialogue as “I’m not a Republic serial villain”, implying that there’s more to Veidt than the cardboard image presented (to be fair, he isn’t a Republic villain; he’s a DC ’50s villain, which means he behaves in exactly the same manner, but has a more colourful dress sense). It has been put to me that Veidt’s characterisation is just a big joke at the expense of supervillainry; if this is so, then it is a joke that completely backfires, ruining the effect of the previous issues – rather like if Stanley Kubrick had gone ahead with the pie-fight ending for Dr Strangelove.

The real meat of the ending is of course, The Big Moral Dilemma; is murdering six million people justifiable if it saves the world? Well, I’ve yet to see anybody come up with circumstances that might justify such action, though Mein Kampf might have something to say on the matter. As far as Watchmen is concerned (in case anyone still has sleepless nights about it), Veidt’s plan cannot be justified, because it is the conception of a madman, and only succeeds through some aberrant behaviour on the part of world politicians. As he relates his scheme, the reader is forced to agree with Nite Owl; it makes no logical sense whatsoever, and nobody in their right mind could really believe that this con-trick would work. Adolf Hitler may have said that any lie will be believed if it is big enough, but he also said it would be a really great idea to round up all the Jews and make toast out of them, and I don’t see that being held up a valid philosophy by many people.

Think about Veidt’s plan for a moment; an aged President, in a world that aggressive American foreign policy has made more full of nuclear paranoia than our own, is in his bunker awaiting Armageddon. Suddenly there is some sort of massive explosion in New York. This could be the first strike; more Soviet missiles could be in the air at that very moment. Does he launch the retaliatory strike? No, he delays, potentially allowing the Russians to wipe out the USA, just on the off-chance that it might be a giant squid that got lost. Then, within an hour of the news, the Russians decide that they’re going to do the decent thing and not take advantage of America’s distress. They’ll even end the war in Afghanistan, to show how nice they are. And does anybody in the White House get suspicious about the speed with which the Russians react, almost as if they knew what was going to happen? No, they’re all too busy discovering peace and harmony and sticking flowers in their rifles. Moore tries to pave the way for Nixon’s behaviour in issue 10 with his refusal to go to Defcon 1, but it doesn’t wash. Much though we might desire it, the real world simply doesn’t work like this. The pressures on Nixon to launch would be too great. I might be more convinced if there was any evidence for a general willingness to believe in aliens, but none is presented (unless we’re meant to take for granted a higher level of belief in such things due to the existence of Dr Manhattan – which doesn’t follow logically at all). Nor is the ‘alien’ any real threat to the world; after all, the fact that this is the first recorded lost alien to explode on Earth might reasonably lead one to the conclusion that this isn’t going to start happening every second Tuesday. On television we hear, “Could further attacks be imminent?” Answer: “We think not”. Then what’s all the fuss about?

In the end Veidt is like his role model Alexander the Great; he has changed the world briefly, but his creation is impermanent, and will disappear rapidly (this irony has probably escaped Moore, who clearly knows more of the myth of Alexander than the historical personage). [2008: That’s almost certainly unfair. Moore does his research, and I doubt he was as ignorant of Alexander as smug classics Ph.D. me assumed in 1988.] Veidt has done little more than push international tensions aside for a while; to erode them would require a lot more manipulation of people’s viewpoints, over a long period. Veidt’s Millennium promotion might have been seen as this, but it looks more like a reaction to events rather than an initiative. When Veidt says “Next, I’ll help (Earth) towards Utopia”, in effect he’s saying, “Hey, I’ve just had this really great idea what I can do next!” He clearly hadn’t put any thought to what he was going to do after he pulled his party trick. Only now does the idea occur to him, and only, it seems. because he’s got nothing better to do. And let us not forget that the crisis point from which Veidt has magnanimously saved the world, was in fact caused in the first place by Veidt’s manipulation of Dr Manhattan (indeed, someone wishing to start World War III in the world of Watchmen could do worse than adopting Veidt’s plan). And what happens when some NASA scientist examines the creature, and discovers its brain is cloned from a human? Well, the Americans will immediately start accusing the Russians of being responsible, and consider retaliation (after all, they can hardly let the murder of six million citizens go unpunished). Once that happens, then the world had better hope that Rorschach’s journal is published; exposure of Veidt will be the only way out of Armageddon.

Are we then to praise Veidt for sorting out his own mess, particularly when it costs six million lives, and is poised to go wrong at any moment? Moore certainly thinks so (“Veidt is the hero of Watchmen. You can’t take that away from him.” – Alan Moore). This is actually far more fascistic writing than the more easily-accused Dark Knight, yet Veidt is supposedly some sort of liberal. I don’t doubt that he sees himself that way, and probably so does Moore. He seems to have been seduced by the attractiveness of the benevolent dictator (and as writer of V For Vendetta, he ought to know better), and has failed to think through the implications of what he’s writing.

And therein lies the problem. Moore’s greatest weakness as a writer, usually generalised as weak plotting, is a regrettable habit of making use of what he sees as good ideas, without considering them properly. This tends to restrict the conclusions of his stories, so that they seem not as the original object of the story, but something reached as an inescapable consequence of the ideas flowing earlier in the narrative; in other words, he is led by his ideas, rather than the other way round. Moore’s endings have often been weak, as ‘American Gothic’ in Swamp Thing demonstrated. (Gosh, so good and evil are different sides of the same coin, are they? I never knew that.) Remember that his reputation in this country was built on Marvelman and V For Vendetta, neither of which have yet reached their conclusions. [2008: At the time of writing, of course. Both eventually finished, V reasonably successfully, Marvelman, or Miracleman as it became, slightly less so.]

Watchmen is merely a classic example of this. Read with a sceptical eye, it becomes apparent that there are many occasions where logic and sense are sacrificed to effect. For instance, a question which always nagged was “Why is Nixon still President?” The usual answer was that the Republicans rode on a surge of nationalism, though in pre-Reagan America patriotism was not the exclusive preserve of the Republicans in the way that it is for the Conservative party over here.

In any case, this doesn’t answer the question. Why is Nixon still President? Is he such a megalomaniac as to hang on to power for twenty years? Are the rest of his party such sycophants as to go along? Has Nixon got the stamina to do the toughest job in the world for so long? Evidently so, and not only Nixon, but also Ford and Kissinger have lasted the pace, and God knows who else. The only reason is that Moore wants to play with the political icons of his youth; it would be like writing a story set in 2000, yet still having Reagan and Thatcher in charge (only less likely). As a second instance, a street gang learns of Rorschach’s being sprung by Nite Owl. “Hey, that’s that old guy who lives over a garage! Must be the same guy!” they all shout, and then jog a couple of blocks, without getting at all tired, to Hollis Mason’s place, no doubt passing dozens of derelicts, women walking alone, and other easy victims for muggers, and beat him to death, just because they were really angry. Mob psychology for the under-fives. Great. Well, Mason had to get killed somehow, didn’t he? Actually, he doesn’t, as his death contributes very little to the story, other than giving Nite Owl a chance for a tantrum. [2008: I possibly overdo this paragraph.]

And so finally we are presented with an ending which makes no sense at all, having been contrived solely to put the Big Moral Dilemma to us. Sadly, once you spot the contrivance, the dilemma becomes meaningless.

This is not to say that Watchmen is totally devoid of good points. The portrayal of a world is, in the main, highly convincing. The artwork is beautiful and finely rendered. John Higgins’ colouring, after a few initial hitches, developed a style of its own (which unfortunately means that everything he has done since looks like Watchmen). And there is some fine writing. Where it reflects Moore’s strengths as a writer, in characterization and dialogue, the script is very good indeed, as good as anything in mainstream comics in the past decade, and is (apart from the first episode) mercifully devoid of Moore’s usual dramatic devices. Yet it magnifies both Moore’s strengths and weaknesses, and in the end the weaknesses drag it down. Dave Gibbons, in response to some people’s complaints about the end, said, as an analogy, that he had heard a lot of really good jokes which had terrible punch lines; that didn’t stop them being good jokes. But he seems to have missed the point the terrible ending is the point of certain jokes. In a story, if the conclusion doesn’t make sense within the terms that have been established earlier, then the whole story collapses. All the fine dialogue and detailed artwork in the run-up is merely gloss. It’s what the story is about that matters. Watchmen is such a story.

Take, for instance, the detective story angle. Moore said once that, beyond all the costumes and the world view, Watchmen functions as a detective story, but in the event it isn’t a particularly good one, because Moore has confused genre conventions, which tend to be restrictive, and lead to cliché-ridden material, with genre requirements, which are necessary for the story to work properly. In Watchmen, once the characters have sifted through the deceits and got to the truth, they are told, “Ha, ha, there’s nothing you can do about it …” Most of the characters walk out on the situation. It never seems to occur to them that, since Veidt has killed everybody else with any idea what was going on, he might just try to kill them as well. Nor does it occur to them that, even if they can’t expose Veidt’s plot, they can kill him [2008: This was one of the points I stole from Alan]. Now this would be fair enough, except that giving up is presented as the right thing to do. Rorschach, the archetypal detective figure, refuses to go along. He thinks himself the only moral man in the world, and in the end turns out to be that, rather like Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s novels. Unlike Marlowe, however, he walks off and, giving up in the end, allows himself to be killed by Dr Manhattan. Imagine a version of The Maltese Falcon in which the fat man gets away with the bird, which turns out to be real, and Sam Spade is killed by Miss Wonderly in the same way she killed his partner. That would be a very depressing novel, for the requirement of the detective novel is that some form of justice must be seen to be done. There is no justice in Watchmen. The basic message is “You can’t win”.

Ultimately Watchmen fails [2008: I would now have the humility to add “in my opinion”] because it breaks every promise made to us. All the cliches we thought banished were merely being saved to the end. Led to believe that we were getting a real-world comic with superheroes, what we in fact got was a superhero comic with a real-world gloss. Moore still thinks that Watchmen upset the traditions of superhero comics, but it does so only on the surface. The only basic convention really done away with is that of the good guys winning. It also insults the reader’s intelligence, presenting a simplistic solution to a complicated problem (I don’t know what’s going to bale the world out, but I’m damn sure it’s not going to be an exploding squid). Of course, much of the outrage the last issues generate is because it did try to achieve so much. If it was just another hack job nobody would give a shit. But much of Watchmen is very good, yet ultimately it is a great disappointment. This makes it in some senses a noble failure, as if you set out to ascend great heights you always risk a long fall, and establishing the right to fail is important in any medium, but it is none the less a failure.

Which leads us to the most astonishing thing about all this; it took ages for anybody to notice that Watchmen had any flaws at all! For six months after the release of issue 12, I saw hardly an unkind word spoken of Watchmen; the nearest to a negative comment was in Speakeasy, and that dealt merely with some of the trappings, and not with the central theme. In Escape, whose writers really out to know better, it was praised to the skies as “the first great humane act in superhero comics” (whatever the hell that means), whilst over the page Marshall Law, which subverts the superhero genre far more than Watchmen, is slagged off. Not until The Comics Journal published a review that cut right through to the chief flaws of the story did a truly negative view appear [2008: This was probably in TCJ #114]. Admittedly Watchmen had the advantage of appearing during a remarkably quiet period for British comics fandom, brought on by Fantasy Advertiser‘s suspension of publication (now that FA is back, quite a few letter writers have expressed their displeasure at the book), but that doesn’t wholly explain the uncritical praise thrown around, especially that from non-specialist critics, who should surely be less tolerant of the clichés of the superhero.

Is Alan Moore held in such esteem that he can do no wrong? Well, he certainly is at DC Comics, as are many other top-rank creators, such as John Byrne and Howard Chaykin. [2008: Byrne was revamping Superman, in a manner I felt at the time to be over-written and often missing the point of what the character was about, but probably wasn’t really as bad as all that. Chaykin had just done his Shadow and Blackhawk revivals, in which the leads looked and behaved not that much differently from previous characters Chaykin had written and drawn, such a Reuben Flagg.]. This allows them to produce rubbish without anyone actually daring to tell them so. This is a dangerous situation, as constructive editing, rather than simple interference for its own sake, can be an important part of the creative process, whilst allowing creators full rein to indulge their excesses can be a very bad idea. Dave Sim might not agree, but in any case Len Wein and Barbara Randall certainly did nothing to merit their editors’ payments. [2008: That’s below the belt, and I don’t stand by it.]

As for the reaction among comic fans, I think what has happened is this; Watchmen was, as it has been accused of being, the ultimate fanboy comic, the great hope for the superhero fan who wants to be treated as a grown-up, and to whom Dark Knight was just a sick joke. It was to be conclusive proof that you could write adult and mature stories about guys in long underwear. What in fact it does is prove how difficult it is to match mature writing with the basic absurdity of superheroes, and should act not as a sign to new areas to explore, but a dreadful warning to anyone following this path that it’s a blind alley (as well a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting superstar creators get out of control). Nevertheless, the fact that Watchmen is not a new beginning for superhero comics has not prevented people from praising it as if it is, fearing perhaps the end of the genre’s stranglehold on the medium; people trying to grow up and stay kids at the same time. If this is the case, then Watchmen’s failure, if it is accepted, is probably a good thing, if it does loosen the superheroic grip on comics.

Comics are beginning to break out of the ghetto they have been in, but the only way to win true mass appeal is to put the costumes aside, and produce genuinely adult stories (some thing Alan Moore knows very well). I’m afraid that the new readers Dark Knight and Watchmen have attracted to comics are not going to stay around if they enter a comics store to be confronted by Total Eclipse (a fanboy comic if ever there was one), when they should be being shown Maus or The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I’m not advocating the death of the superhero comic, merely that it should be put in its proper place. If the fans don’t like it, then that’s their funeral. If they are allowed by the companies to hold the medium back with superheroes (and the American companies have a depressing habit of sticking with an established but shrinking market, rather than taking a risk on a potentially much larger market), then it’s the comic medium’s.

[2008: What a self-righteous prig I was back in 1988! My only excuse is that many of us at the time believed that the future for comics lay in breaking away from superheroes, and were rather embarrassed by the genre. I’m a lot less embarrassed about it now. I also have no recollection of what Total Eclipse was, but looking it up, I see it is the sort of ‘event’ cross-over comic Roz Kaveney, Michael Abbott and I discussed on a panel at Eastercon.]

The quotes in this article were taken from an interview in FA 100.

[1988 postscript: After reading the Alan Moore interview in FA 105, it occurs to me that some of the points made in the above article are less than fair on Moore (in particular, the accusations of crypto-fascism). Nevertheless, I stand by most of the points, especially the sheer ludicrousness of the dénouement.]

[2008 postscript: Looking at this again twenty years on, one thing I didn’t get at the time was how much Watchmen is a joke at the expense of the superhero comic. It takes various elements, tropes and clichés, and then mocks them. The trouble is, this isn’t what we were led to expect in 1987 by what Moore and Gibbons said while talking the story up – hence the disappointment that fuels the above piece. Oh, and I don’t much like The Killing Joke either.]

Arthur C Clarke Shortlist

2008-04-28T08:39:00.004+01:00

For once, I've read the whole shortlist for The Arthur C. Clarke Award before the Award is announced (on Wednesday). The nearest I've got before to this was in 2004, where I'd managed to read all but two (which, as it turned out, included the winner). It would have been nice if I'd managed to do this before appearing on the Not the Clarkes panel at Eastercon, but at least I'd read a substantial proportion of all the novels by then, even if I hadn't finished three.

As usual, the shortlist has created controversy, with impositions of narratives upon the jury process on flimsy evidence, and noted omissions. I remain surprised at the absence of Ian McDonald's terrific Brasyl. I haven't read the other notable absentee, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, so can't really comment; but my partner has read it, and didn't like it much. But as I said on the panel, one of the things to note is that 2007 was a great year for science fiction, and picking just six novels must have been a hard task for the jury.

Matthew de Abaitua, The Red Men. I read the first hundred pages of this at a rush, and as a result, did the novel a bit of a disservice. I couldn't see what it was trying to say, or what the point of the exercise was. It is a little better than that. But, unfortunately, not much. That Snowbooks are too cheap to employ copy editors should not be held against the novel, but in the end its tale of AI copies of people and robots is the sort of thing Charlie Stross does in his sleep. There's nothing The Red Men does that other books on the shortlist don't do better. It most deserves the charge Abigail Nussbaum hurls (unfairly, I think) at the shortlist as a whole, of being not very interesting. I can't see why this is on the shortlist and Brasyl isn't. And I have no idea what the cover quote, "Makes Michel Houellebecq seem like Enid Blyton", actually means.

Steven Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl. There has been a lot of talk about this as a Young Adult novel. I have to say, thinking about it, I'm not sure whether it will connect that well with Young Adults, because they might not understand the world it depicts. I wasn't alive at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I did live at a time when two heavily-armed superpowers were staring at each other across Europe, and with a feeling that, sooner or later, things would deteriorate to such a point that nuclear war would happen. This was how people saw the world at the time of the TV film Threads (which has heavily influenced Baxter's picture of a post-nuclear Britain), and how the world was until Mikhail Gorbachev's meeting with Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik in late 1986. I'm not sure anyone under 30 can connect with that. But let's leave that aside. This is the best writing from Baxter that I've read since Voyage (admittedly, I've not read everything he's written in that period, but I have seen a representative sample). Everything that annoys me about the use of history in the Time's Tapestry series he gets right here. I'm not even irritated by John Lennon, resistance hero. It helps enormously that Baxter, if not actually writing about his own teenage years, is writing about a time he lived through, and where he grew up. I enjoyed this enormously.

Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army. This has been often compared to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and one can see why. There is the same notion of an anti-feminist dystopia, in which women have no rights over their own reproductive processes. But it's very English as well. It has the same sense of place as to be found in Alan Garner (I could easily picture where the novel is set). There's also more than a hint of John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophes". I also admire the way Hall constructs her narrative presentation in order to skip over the boring bits (and I have realized from a comment somewhere else in the blogosphere that the framing device employed is, like the historical section at the end of 1984, a means of signalling that this oppression will not last). It's very well-written (and refreshingly short), but in the end it's just not quite as good as two other novels on the shortlist.

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. I quite liked this. As with The Red Men, it reads like a mainstream author toying with sf tropes (and that'll get me in trouble again, no doubt). But it's interesting, if perhaps inconsequential. There 's a definite sense of menace, even if a lot of it comes from slyly-acknowledged lifts from Jaws. And just when the length is getting a bit much, there's a fifty page flipbook.

Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. This begins as the novel one might expect from MacLeod, a direct response to the War on Terror and contemporary politics. As such it is well-written and passionate, picking up themes that have been in his writing ever since the first Fall Revolution novel. Then, halfway through, he pulls the rug out from under the reader, with a section that shows this is not quite the novel that was expected. Then, at the end, he does it again, with a spectacular sf twist. When you think back, your realize that all the pieces to accomplish this trick have been in plain sight all the time; we were just misdirected. This is what makes a good novel into a glorious novel.

Richard Morgan, Black Man. My heart sank when I picked this up and realized it was 600-plus pages long. There is a certain point at which sheer length can become oppressive in itself, and, as Mark Plummer wrote in a recent Banana Wings of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, any judgment of the quality of the novel is lost under a sheer desire for it to be over. In truth, Black Man is okay. But it's a technothriller in the Tom Clancy mould (and I bet I get in trouble again for saying that as well); a good example of the genre, beyond doubt, but I don't get much real sense of pushing back the boundaries, except in one section where a Hollywood action version of this plot would have copped out, and Morgan, to his credit, doesn't. But does this outweigh what Graham Sleight identified as being Morgan having his cake and eating it; the hero and his ilk are genetically-modified throwbacks to traits that were eliminated to allow us to live in civilized communities, and everyone in the novel says we should be glad those traits have gone - yet he is the hero, gets all the girls, and is generally presented as admirable.

Two of these novels I found highly enjoyable experiences, rather than just reasonably good, the Baxter and the MacLeod. Of those, I would like to see The Execution Channel win. And that, I must emphasize, would be my opinion even if Brasyl was on the shortlist. But the ending of MacLeod's novel divides its readers - some love it (such as me), some hate it. So I can see, if role-playing a jury (as we did at Eastercon), that a compromise candidate might emerge, in which case I would expect it to be the Baxter, which few people can object to (though Abigail Nussbaum does). I wouldn't be unhappy with that. I'd be less happy if The Carhullan Army won, but could live with it. If The Red Men wins I will be at the head of the queue to call the jury wrongheads.

Ahem!

2008-04-16T10:34:00.001+01:00

This entry is approved of by Mary Beard.

Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'

2008-04-12T22:14:00.009+01:00

It's been forty-three years since a broadcast story of Doctor Who was set in the period of the Roman empire. The length of time between 'The Romans' and 'The Fires of Pompeii' has got a lot to do with the show's abandonment in the mid-sixties of the original plan to feature stories set in Earth's history. Part of the problem was, as Kim Newman has observed, the issue that Donna confronts the Doctor with in this episode. The Doctor saves people - that's what he does. But place him among well-known historical events, and his freedom to save people on a global scale, as opposed to on a personal one, is very much circumscribed. He can defeat the Daleks every time he encounters them, but he cannot, to take three examples from the show's first four years, prevent the Great Fire of Rome, stop the Greeks sacking Troy, or prevent Cumberland's butchers hunting down fugitive Highlanders. As a result, between 1966 and 1989, on the occasions when the Doctor did venture into the past (and they were relatively rare: Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee's Doctors only did so twice each, Tom Baker's five times), the stories were what has become known as 'pseudo-historicals', sf stories set in the past (usually some alien invasion). Often these stories took place against a historical background, rather than interacting directly with major historical events - if major events were used, they were often presented as being necessary evils to protect the planet as a whole (e.g. the Great Fire of London being presented in 'The Visitation' as a result of the Doctor defeating the Terileptils).

Under Russell T Davies' revamp of the programme, there has been a deliberate avoidance of stories set on far-off alien worlds. Inevitably, this leads to an increase of stories set in Earth's history. So it's no surprise that they finally got around to the Romans again.

All the stories set in the past since the revamp have been pseudo-historicals, and 'The Fires of Pompeii' is no different. There is an alien invasion, and in order to save the planet, the Doctor has not just to allow Pompeii to be destroyed, but to cause it to happen. In the end, this is actually a cheat as far as answering Donna's question goes. But the show's never really found a better answer to 'why can't the Doctor change history?' over the past forty-five years.

On the subject of cheating, the episode chooses to take a particularly apocalyptic view of Pompeii's destruction. This is probably the way most people think it happened, but the evidence actually suggests that the eruption of Vesuvius took the best part of a day, and, whilst accurate figures are impossible to calculate, a portion of the population will have escaped. It wasn't quite the complete extermination of a whole city that this episode implies. And as for the Romans not having a word for a volcano - well, strictly speaking that's true, but only because what they had was a three-word phrase. They were certainly aware of volcanoes - Etna was active at the time, and there are suggestions in some writers that Vesuvius was suspected to have had a volcanic past.

But this episode isn't a history lesson. Rather, it's a very knowing manipulation of lots of things that people know about the Romans, stuffed full of jokes. It won me over right at the beginning with a comment on how long it's been since the show went into Roman times, and then a direct reference to that particular story. It followed that up with a joke about Mary Beard's dormouse test, and then the best Spartacus joke since Life of Brian. And that's before we point out (as Davies freely confesses in Doctor Who Confidential) that all the character names for Peter Capaldi's family are lifted from the Cambridge Latin Course.

Another point at which I suspect the script is being deliberately knowing is in the opening scene. The Doctor thinks he has arrived in Rome, and only after seeing Vesuvius does he realize he's in Pompeii (why doesn't he consider the possibility that he might be in Herculaneum?). But of course, the sets he has been walking around are Rome, in a way. These are the sets that were originally built for the HBO/BBC series Rome. Credit must go to the production designers and director, who have dressed and shot these sets so that it's isn't immediately obvious that they are the same sets (this becomes plain when you watch Doctor Who Confidential, where the more obvious buildings are not hidden). Production values are high, and it certainly doesn't look like they only actually had 48 hours to film in Cinecitta.

It's interesting to compare this story with the audio adventure 'The Fires of Vulcan', produced in 2000, which was also set in Pompeii at the time of the eruption. It's not unknown for the new series to borrow from audios (Rise of the Cybermen' takes elements from 'Spare Parts', for instance), and the title of the later story is almost certainly an acknowledgment of the earlier one. But beyond that and the setting, the two stories share little. 'The Fires of Vulcan' is an actual historical, and uses historical characters (if sometimes anachronistically). It owes a great deal in terms of structure and scenes to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. In 'The Fires of Vulcan', the Doctor again can do nothing for Pompeii - but he does not try himself to escape, instead believing that he himself is fated to die in the eruption.

Overall, 'The Fires of Pompeii' is an extremely interesting piece of classical reception, and a pretty good episode of Doctor Who to boot. Though I could have done without the stunt casting of Phil Cornwell. And the last shot is utter nonsense.

The things I do for scholarship ...

2008-04-06T11:58:00.002+01:00

Working in Reception Studies is often fun. You get to load up a boxed set of Battlestar Galactica and call it 'research'. But sometimes you have to go and see Meet The Spartans.

Sorry, you want more than that? Okay, this film has two, and two only, redeeming features, and they're both under Carmen Electra's top. And that, my friends, is a joke both funnier and more subtle than anything you will find in Meet The Spartans.

I suppose one might concede a word of praise for the production designers, who imitated the look of 300 very effectively (assuming they didn't just reuse the sets, as I suspect they might have). A pity none of that care was taken by the scriptwriters.

Final thought: poor, poor Kevin Sorbo.