Invading, with elephants.

As part of the far too random reading I’ve been doing for my dissertation I stumbled on a fascinating detail of ancient history:  apparently* elephants took part in the siege of Colchester in AD43.  Somewhere outside the town, the Roman Army were kicking their heels, unable to get on with taking the town until the main man, the Emperor Claudius rocked up, and then, with elephants the town was taken and Emperor Claudius went off back to Rome to collect his triumph, leaving the Roman Army to continue the invasion.  Nothing further is said about the elephants.

Perhaps the elephants should be considered merely an enlivening detail that makes entertaining an otherwise serious yarn about the Roman conquest, a detail that historians perhaps ought to scorn as frivolously popular in a discipline which must be dull to be worthwhile. But why?  I am intrigued.  Elephants.  In Colchester.  How utterly unlikely. I imagine them, unhappy monsters brought from hot climes far away to a bloody end in Britain.  But questions tumble at random through my head. Which ‘hot climes’?  How were they brought – did they come mostly by sea or by land, and by which route?  Did they march North through Africa and progress up through the Italian provinces, or wind their way along the trade routes from the East? Were they a spectacle meant on the way to impress Romans and conquered peoples alike, these powerful beasts a symbol of imperial power, a display like the wild beast shows at Rome?   Did they need expert keepers, slaves perhaps, to accompany them and make sure they survived until they were needed?  Did they get seasick, even? And what happened afterwards?  Were there survivors, simply shipped back to Rome to end their days in an arena – not the Colosseum for sure, as that was built later, but in the type of shows for which the Colosseum was needed? Was there even more than one elephant? Or perhaps just the one, a diva with a whole entourage anxious for its survival until the battle and depending on it.

So many questions to try to answer, even if many claims about the elephants have been overtrumpeted. I thought it might be too much to hope for that we may dig up elephant bones near Colchester, but yet. And perhaps we could look at the rubbish heaps near Rome, where the bones of exotic animals might help say which type of elephants were used in shows at that time. They must have been kept somewhere, in one of the marching camps and what about the ships.  If there really were elephants, perhaps there were not, Cassius Dio wrote much later.  But why say so then?  Someone or something must have suggested to him that here be elephants.

And the questions go on and on unanswered, a skein of questions glistening in in the dark, a lead that can take us deeper into the unknowable labyrinth of our past.  Entertaining perhaps, but there seems nothing frivolous seeking real answers to tell a true story about Colchester’s elephants.

*According to Cassius Dio

Phone a desk friend at the library

I was late to the library yesterday and was lucky to find my favourite desk still available. Now I love this desk, despite the implied nerdiness and even if it doesn’t, strictly, count as a desk, being as it is, a mere table, a long thin strip of book-sprawl potential jammed across the end of a real desk-carrel, with lamps and demarcations ready for serious students. No matter, it’s perfect, sited as it is in a cubby of numismatic catalogues, sunlight spilling over it through iron-framed glass doors, a light-filled oubliette where I can commit the heinous transgression known as using a phone in the library.

Now this phone is strictly forbidden and strictly necessary as it is fine-tuned for library time-saving. I have a mortgage-paying full-time job that cuts library hours to, at most, three each on Tues-Thurs evenings, and seven on a Saturday, 16 hours maximum each week. Worse, the library closes in the evenings and on Saturdays during academic and bank holidays but, as I study though the OU whose timetable’s different, it’s open to me least when my deadlines are closest.

So, first off on my phone there is Dropbox. All my notes, proposals, downloaded-from-JSTOR-papers, maps of the library with shelf number locations, all are filed with the rigour of an OCD accountant. And even before I get there, I search the library catalogue, sometimes even during a break at work, and splat the references straight through to my phone. Then I can in the shortest possible time pull from the shelves all the books, papers or whatever else I need.

Simply finding the books is another problem, as I’ve dyslexia*, which makes the library more than usually labyrinthine. Even simply remembering shelf references for the length of time it takes to check if it I’m looking at the right shelf is nigh on impossible. But lo, on my phone is a map to help me steer round, and on screen too in a convenient manner, are all those oh so forgettable numbers and names that I need to check repeatedly as I quest for the books.

Reading matter collected, I return to the desk where my phone acts as an aural mask, a stream of white noise** screening out the Saturday-happy academics chatter from the room beyond, helping me stay study-focussed after a full-already week. Before I finish for the day, the phone becomes a portable photocopier, camera snapping appendices and bibliographies, recording frontispieces ready and accurate for citation, capturing whole pages of books for later reading.

Hopefully, if my phone is noted, noted also will be the absence of noise or calls. Still, whilst the ‘no phones’ notice persists, I shall continue to attempt some kind of discretion.

* Or something like it; a years-ago assessment suggested dyscalcula or dysxpraxia might be a better description.
** Through headphones, of course. Yes, they are non-sound-leaky ones.

One tomato two tomato three tomato four

Been struggling this past week to fit in both day job and dissertation and still have time for sleep and sanity. So I thought I’d give the Pomodoro technique a go. Like many shiny new things it was designed by an IT student in his spare time and it supposedly helps you focus and time manage as well as also being so simple that even non-nerds like me might be able to use it. Plus it’s free.

It works like this: you write a to-do list, have a bit of paper to write down the urgent procrastinations that amazingly appear just when you start to study, and have a timer. One of those tomato-ey kitchen ones, the eponymous pomodoro, which times you 24 minutes of work and 3-5 minutes of break. You set the timer and start, and just work to it. Rinse, repeat, with longer breaks every 4 tomatoes. Part tomatoes don’t count; your aim is to stack up nice globs of focussed time, rather like collecting Super Mario coins. Or pomodoros. Or tomatoes, the creator lives in Berlin so why didn’t he just call it the tomato technique or what’s the German for tomato you see how easily I drift and maybe SOME FOCUS might help my studies?

Of utmost necessity then I was faffing around on iTunes last night, reading the app reviews, the free vs. the 69p vs. the whaddya think I’m made of £3.99 versions, so that I could visit the library without an unwelcomely ticking tomato to throw me from my stride or out of the building. More footling, and lo and raptures, I found Chrome browser also has a pomodoro add-on! In fake-California-speak, I was psyched!

In fact I’d was so psyched and ready I was back today in record time to attempt a 4-tomatoes worth of evening study. In fact I was back home right in time for the phone to ring.

“Hello,” said Regular Phil*, as I picked it up. “I’m setting off from work now.”
“No worries, just getting myself something to eat early, need to get on with study stuff.”
“OK, there’s an Ocado delivery tonight.”

Pause. Followed by a slightly crappy and entirely subtextual discussion around study vs. the paid work that pays the mortgage, which neither of us really pursues in case the other side wins or loses, and we hang up.

I change into something not entirely comfortable, due to the expected arrival of the delivery man, and decide at least one tomato may first be attempted, and that despite my headphones I can probably still hear the doorbell ring as I finally get my head down. But do I need to mark as an interruption each time I hoof the cat from the keyboard or just once? And can I really hear the doorbell or did I miss it already? And does the Pomodoro finding that most urgent external interruptions can wait for half an hour applies to insistent cats, deliveries and late-arriving husbands or only for students and the socially skill-less?

By the time the delivery was done and dinner eaten, I only managed three proper tomatoes, not counting the squashed one that I started before the interruptions. In fact, I rather suspect the success of those using il pomodoro may owe more to being able to say no to life’s ordinary exigencies, than it does to their magic tomatoes. I did quite like it though, and have a sneaking suspicion that measuring how much time I actually do study for and marking off the procrastinations will make me do more and better. Which can only be A Good Thing.

*If you are a regular reader have a smartie and skip the rest of the footnote. If not, Regular Phil is my OH. And a psyeudonym. Obviously.

In your own words, please…

Today I shall do as I am paid and write words for other people to claim that they said. Even though we allegedly take great care, marking words off carefully with speech marks to denote what, exactly, someone actually said, and what it is merely reported they did. It’s a nice distinction and one to get right to avoid the accusation of ‘misquoting’ someone, or worse, plagiarism.

Not that the ancients shared our qualms, recording what might or ought to have been, as they saw fit. Did Tacitus really get down the words of Calgacus, without dictaphone or amanuensis, ahead of a battle at which he was not present? Thucydides, writing earlier, makes plain his method: “while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were acually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” Or something like that, translations differ.

At some point the little double curls cut in to say, “yes really, that is what was said,” and their use became convention, a fact no doubt duly debated in dusty papers in the passive tense. Papers that themselves do not speak, quoting only the carefully refined and polished words of others, preserved as if exact for posterity.

So we are back – almost – to where we started, with words written for others recitation, handed out with a ‘check against delivery’ warning that the speaker may depart from his script. What I write is humbler, my position more akin to Rita Skeeter’s ‘quick-quotes’ pen, turning out nifty little quotes that can be sliced into a journalist’s story.

Unlike Rita and her pen, the speakers ask me to write the words they will say, and I take great care that they approve and can change what I am to claim they said. Still, like Thucydides, I think that readers should also know how the process works.

In praise of study cats

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There is something oddly insulting about the term ‘cat blog,’ which I understand to mean the kind of scribbling rant which could only be written by a woman, as raving and decrepit as the animals whose odor pervades her solitary … Continue reading →

Missa accomplished

Lunch over, our house-guest packed and off, finally I made a nice cup of tea and settled down, the afternoon blocked out for a good patch of study. Immediately the phone rang. Against the background din of a bus, my friends informed me that the supposed 7pm Prom I’d booked would, in fact, start in half an hour and would I still be able to make it? I downed tea and scrammed, arriving just in time for our cheap seats to be upgraded to a box, the Albert Hall being only part full.

Odd, we thought, it had been sold out the first time I tried to get tickets. Looking at a programme, the reason became apparent: Bach, Escaich, Reger, Franck, Liszt. Yes but where was the anticipated Beethoven Mass, today’s big draw? It couldn’t be. It was. This was the wrong Prom. I sat, wondering whether my friends might not notice. Bach. That must be Choral? Maybe the rest too, maybe they might not know the difference, I thought, wildly scrutinising the small print. An organ recital. Something I have never knowingly booked. “Erm,” I said, and pointed to the programme notes.

“I like organ music,” one friend was gallant, the other also polite, although I knew she’d been looking forwards to the big choral sound of the Beethoven. Thierry Escaich started to play, an improvised medley around Baroque ideas. I relaxed slightly. This, wasn’t all bad. Not Beethoven. But not bad. Too accustomed to the groans from instruments whose cries for maintenance fall on the deaf ears of church roof funding committees, I was forced to admit that perhaps I had judged organs unfairly. And that not all organ music was Widor’s Toccata from Symphony No. 5 as overplayed by the under talented. The Bach was…really good. I was enjoying this. I did miss the visceral sense of a symphony orchestra, the chest bone vibrating roar, but there was no stumble stoppered blur of notes that, somehow despite the top flight player, instrument and acoustics, I had expected. Deftly the programme pirouetted us through the ages and afternoon. “There might even be evening tickets left,” I said, study forgotten and lingering after the final applause.

The world according to Gove

I’m not persuaded by the ‘one history of one little island’ that Michael Gove appears to be pushing. Not least in that anything so appealingly simple must appeal only to the simple-minded; technology is pulling the threads of the world ever closer together and if we’re not to get in a great tangle we had better understand its myriad of viewpoints, like it or not.

Not to mention that historical facts are, in fact, as slippery as any opinion. Take genocide. Holocaust, certainly that was one. But do you look at the proportion of people killed (meaning the Roma perhaps come out worse than the Jews, it’s very hard to tell or know), define it as racial or religious, require only those that were killed in concentration camps be counted, and what about the later events which also count. And earlier ones? Selection and definition are inherent to historical facts; if you want something more scientific, why then, you’ve found your subject; go, bask in its certainties.

Dates are perhaps the archetype of a historical fact. Yet taken at face value they can mislead; for example, repealing a law has a fixed date yet this tells you little about how widely was it enforced prior to its abolition, and why was it abolished and why exactly then? Still dates do provide a framework that lets you know how very long ago things were so unimaginably different – or not. Take this snip from today’s Sunday Times: “as recently as 1967 — it was illegal for a black man to marry a white woman in many states.” Or, as the author notes, in his lifetime. Or the date when UK women were granted the vote (on equal terms to men, later than you might think). Progress? It’s now we narrate it. Perhaps how others do too. Facts are important, although maybe not for the reasons Gove seems to think. Certainly perhaps, the things that seem unthinkable come to pass since the world is not always as we imagine it.

A heartbreaking dot of staggering genius

I was trying to concentrate on an MA assignment I’ve to write on Greek tragedy and a quatrain started woodpeckering round my brain in that way, procrastination, deadline, or no, you just have to go google it. The lines were:

And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

So far, so straightforward and widely pasted across the internet for extra measure. But. There’s a big but. A ruddy great full-stop of a but, if you put the lines back in the stanza they come from. Read all of it, the effect works better that way:

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

You almost don’t notice it, there’s such a lead-in as a pageant of images unwinds like history in your mind’s eye, but that full stop after slaves. Even as your mind half-takes it in, it seems almost mistaken, a grit-bump that the force of the line going forwards carries you over so you ‘think of of the slaves and how one can imagine oneself among them’. Then confusion; ‘I do not know,’ a short line slyly tucked almost back from notice but it jolts your secure imaginings and the full stop, contrary to the direction of the line, reins you back. Can you really imagine yourself as a slave in such a different time? Can you really? The question is evenly balanced and can equally be understood either way. In fact, as the poem points out, this whole event is happening in your imagination; you are a slave to your thoughts. And the slaves you are wondering if you can even really imagine are dead, as you were told at the start but had already forgotten, and can you imagine what death is like? All questions which this poem asks before ending on that deliberately too neat and soothing little homily, so often cut and pasted.

The pivot for this sleight of mind is the full stop after slaves. One little dot on the page, mere ‘punctuation’. Sure, the line lengths and repeated ‘and’ at the line-starts; first 5 lines apart, then 3, then 2, these hasten you on in your picturings. And the semi-colon after ‘know’ seems to emphasis the second clause, the ‘unimaginable difference’. But it’s the not-knowing, that full stop that acts as a pivot sending your mind back and forth as you try to work it out, that understated full-stop that is doing so much of the work.

As a non-sequitur, I found out that the poet was Louis MacNeice, and there was a connection to my MA; I happened to be reading his Agamemnon translation when these lines went whirring round my head. Funny old things, human minds.

How Dewey we categorise, there are so many ways

Books are my vice, I read and hoard and hope to read and maybe will one day have the time to read, the yards that stretch, lining up in wait on bookcases.

Like my time, my shelves are not endless and this morning once again I try to collect them into order. But I remember colour, themes, style and characters; authors names and titles are far harder to recall, and library systems unlovely. So how to categorise?

It’s a problem that has been struggled with at least since Aristotle, and I’m fascinated by analyses of people such as Paul Cartledge, that suggest categories define and shape how we think, with binaries – usually us and them – prevalent in several cultures.

Back to my shelves and ‘themes’ seems the way to go. First though, must depart the books I’ve read and I think will no longer speak to me in a future re-reading. I’m disquieted by the amount left that are ‘colonial’ but, put them alongside those of ‘pioneers’, writing of travel and the wide open spaces, and they become something else. Alongside migrant stories of ‘London’ they shift again, an attempt to traverse the ways of this new world and connect the peoples in it.

A thoroughly modern Lysistrata?

Went to see UCL student’s production of Lysistrata tonight. It was good – their opening night and it felt as though it still needed to gel a little (it’s a three-night run so hope that it does). No masks, some of the chorus spoken, some sung. Characterization was in large part great – and there was some fab comedy with swords doing duty for the phalluses that would have been…prominent…in the original. Not sure which text they were using however some of the rhythms felt ‘authentic’ enough, and there was some dance and singing. It came alive at those points.

The performance struck me as seeming very much of modern times, which is how we’re not supposed to understand it, from what I understand of the scholarship. I do wonder if it says something about our modern age that something written by men, for men, and of women, can still seem to have so much to say to us.