BOOKS TO GO ...

AM DEBATING WHETHER IT'S NECESSARY to have a Kindle or, alternatively, an iPad. As a frequent buyer of books, Amazon offered me a K with a discount of £10 off.

  Now, technology is not one of my fortes; either would doubtless cause repeated perusals of their 'books of words'. However, do the benefits outweigh the possible negatives?

  I can't, at present, see that the iPad's add-ons would enable it to exceed the laptop's capabilities but, on the other hand, the laptop is heavy, especially when you're lugging a suitcase through an airport. Portability has to be a plus in that respect.

  The Amazon keyboard Kindle 3G is Wi-fi enabled, and a whole lot cheaper, but it doesn't sport all the iPad's capabilities.

  It's very noticeable, buying books, that e~books are on the up and up. But – big 'but' – a Kindle only displays a page of one book at a time. Not a lot of assistance in research, when one's desk / table is covered with various volumes lying open for consultation.

  Investigations are ongoing. Research is required!

Current reading is catholic and wide-ranging. Greeks are largely confined to thesis material, but I picked up Christian Cameron's 'Marathon' at the airport a couple of months ago. It's essentially another of those swords-and-sandals fictions, but – unlike its Roman equivalents (apart from the excellent creator of M. Didius Falco!) – is surprisingly easy to read. The military scenarios are a mite OTT for this lady reader, but thank goodness for a writer on ancient Greece who knows the hoplite carried an aspis (shield) and that designating this as a hoplon displays woeful ignorance of ancient Greek militaria.

  Volume 3 of Chris's Greek chronicle, Poseidon's Spear, is due out in hardback on 13 September, 2012. As I shall be in transit through various frontiers, I'll try and pick up one of those airport soft cover editions, although I'm not, as yet, sufficiently enamoured to read the first volume of the saga, Killer of Men.

  Besides, my reviewing of anything these days has gone the way of all flesh – the practice is RIP, pro tem. No TIME.

   Do these triads of volumes reflect the three book deals as dished out by the modern conglomerate publishers?

Alternative entertainment has been provided by Mary Beard's recent 'All in a Don's Day' (sent by MB, gratis, as one has a comment published therein!) and Marilyn Skinner's 'The Tribune's Sister', on the Roman Clodia Metelli. Maligned by Cicero, the sister of pretty-boy Clodius Pulcher has a meretricious reputation, which Skinner has duly dismantled page by page – and convincingly, too. However, as a sometime legal student (passée), I would say the circumstantial 'evidence' could be easily twisted for the prosecution. Moreover, in those far-off days, what you didn't know you could always invent.

  History's opinions take a lot of shifting. The scandalous and salacious is often preferred over more pedestrian accuracy. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Prowling around Blackwell's and Waterstone's (as I do) I realise many of 'my' authors are considerably less than well-known, and many consigned to the dustbin of history.

  Cecil Lewis (not C.S., although C.S. isn't exactly a non-favourite): little-known; Richard Frere on Scotland: Storm Jameson, PEN littérateur extraordinaire, John Fowles' Aristos (not all his oeuvre: the fiction's very uneven) Freya Stark, pioneering lady of intellectual style and amazing energy; Powell (Dilys, not the Anthony who's surname rhymes with 'pole') ...

  These were all of different ages and stages: you don't re-read books that you read as a 'teen. At least, not habitually, not for a 'new experience', anyway – nostalgia for your past is different.

  Add to these heavy-weights of literature such as Woolf, and a plethora of poets from the Gawain writer on to moderns, Cecil Day-Lewis (what is it with all these C. Lewis's? Must be confusing for foreign students) and T.S. Eliot (of course), leavened with dictionaries and reference volumes, foreign language selections and titles culled from the more literary sections of SF, e.g., Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, it all adds up to a weirdly varied collection.

Booksellers' stores are piled high with books but I rarely find anything I want to read. There is a huge mass of modern authorial offerings on sale, but all the puffery of TV plugs rolls off me like water from the proverbial duck's back. There's just so much stuff – forests'-worth of paper and obviously profitable work for the binderies, but how much of it will still be here a hundred years hence? Physical books last. However, the computer and its varied offspring have virtually replaced man's need for memory. The long-ago oral culture of the Greeks had the whole of Homer off by heart – we have IT and Google instead.

  The sociology of literary taste is well-documented, but the pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap sector of the current market seems oversupplied. And fashions come and go. Freestanding stacks of Twilight vampires replaced the promotions of J. K. Rowling's boy wizard, and now droves of middle-class yummy mummies have been taking Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels to the cash desk. I, personally, could not be brought to review vampires for all the tea in China, nor indeed a cheap melodramatic Mills & Boon-style fantasy saga of sado-masochism. It's even in Tesco, right next door to the children's sections - but O, boy, do these sell! – albeit carefully concealed beneath frozen peas, cat food and the pink-topped gossip mags. (I am an inveterate inspector of other people's supermarket trolleys.)

  Guess selling's what it's all about, innit?

  Well, there's one advantage of the Kindle: no one can readily identify what you're reading!

  Still, I'm attached to the heft of a proper book, and the feel and scent of new purchases.

  Other women buy shoes to indulge themselves: I buy books.

Am finding online research and surfing the 'Net has led to a lack of concentration ability – a sort of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) involving compulsive checking of email accounts and idle time-consuming exercises generally. This is Not a Good Thing.

Och, well – a pile of must-reads is sitting here, glowering at me across the desk. I find research takes so much time because every single obscure reference, every source, must be meticulously documented, and some of mine go back to the 1980s, or earlier pre- Internet days. Chasing down these takes forever. I have an eidetic memory for text, but even when a quote or whatever stays in my head, its author, title or year of publication usually doesn't.  

Book stacks in the JCL

  Some libraries and librarians are vastly superior to others. I don't know what I'd do without the Joint Classical Library at Senate House. The JL's helpful staff are walking miracles of specialist information, far in excess of any online search engine.

  I soon gave up on our local municipal library. It caters for the general public, and readers of popular fiction, and the reference section's always full of local history nuts and people researching genealogical records, as is the National Library of Scotland. I can't see the attraction of hunting down forebears. I know who mine are, anyway – and besides, I have quite enough trouble living this life without bothering overmuch about someone else's way back in time.

  I nicked an ancestor's name as a nom de plume, and am amused to note that although there is an extant record of their birth there's no equivalent date of death. I know where they're buried but obviously the powers-that-be don't, for some unknown reason. These days, when we are tracked from the cradle to the grave, this appears to be an omission on the part of the government's clerks and desk-wallahs.

May was out of the ordinary. There were novel interruptions (aka 'distractions') and une petite crise familiale. Also, a supervisors' team meeting decided what I need to do next in order to prepare for upgrade. It does seem early for this, but I require a) a literature review, b) a further research proposal (ca. 6,000 words in total); c) a skills audit, d) a thesis plan and e) a timetable. On top of that lot, there's an abstract to be written for a 2013 conference, and more.

   Mamma mia! This is combined with daily routines and necessities – or not, as is too often the case. 

   So, better get on with it.

  And I thought Classical research would mean shuttling between the academic specialist libraries of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Athens and Rome, or pleasant meanderings around the Med.'s Greek and Roman ruins clutching Loeb Classic volumes and notepads and clad in becoming drifty dresses ruffled by the winds off ancient seas, like Bettany Hughes in long-shot.

  How wrong can you be?

#1 daughter sent me a link from cat fans' icanhascheezburger.com site – 'There are two types of people in this world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data ...' Perforce, of necessity, one's unquestionably in the same place. These people have delved into Greek epigraphy. I promptly copied and despatched the link around. An Arabist friend in Oxford riposted with: 'Nice! This isn't the same, but rather an Afghan proverb (in Pashto) that describes my current procrastination and inattention:

طالبه خداى كه به ملا سې

په كتاب پروت يې شينكى خالونه

 'Student, damned if you'll become a mullah. You hunch over your book thinking of beauty spots.'

Yep. Got it in one, J.! I ain't aiming to become a mullah (gender-barred, anyway) but hunched over books and thinking of something else entirely is right on the money. 

On the upside, May was also quite fruitful – although mountains were in labour to produce one small mouse. I received a .pdf of a thesis I'd been searching for, from an academic Down Under in NZ. The kindness of some people in the field is amazing. The list of contributors to one's efforts is growing; the bibliography's going to be longer than the work itself.

  She wrote: 'The [...] delaying factor was MS Word, which had kindly rearranged all the margins so that the page numbers bore only a faint resemblance to the table of contents. This seemed to me to be worth getting right, although Word proved surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) reluctant to cooperate.'

  Ah, yes. This is another latter-day problem which looms. People get cross with me, because I don't comply with up-to-the-minute submission tech. Everything, but everything, is online these days. And now there is the Mystery of the E~book to solve. This is all very well but I've been writing a long, long time and am def. a Luddite, a paper sort of a gal. One guy's written:

  'Jane! One does NOT italicise! One emphasises, hence <em> </em>.

  'And why do we do all this [...]?  Quite correct, we are writing for an international audience who have very different character sets, but all use the lowest common denominators. 

  'Very good, pleased I have your rapt attention!'

  The man has chutzpah, tho', makes me smile. At least he's funnier than some. Smart sarcasm and crits often emerge as bitchiness.

  Too much to do, too little time.

  Nevertheless, my fondness for italics remains.

Well, June's upon us – and although the last of May granted us some very hot days, no sign as yet of anything like proper summer; much water in the skies here, not enough down south. There's the usual haar on the hill in the mornings. Not that I see much of the sun when it does shine. There should be a health warning attached to research: studying too much affects health, and uptake of Vit. D, etc. (This is why I decamp to Italy or Greece every year. Not enough sun-manufactured serotonin in Scotland guarantees long grey depressing winters).

I recently ran an all-time check on blog posts. One, and only one, has exceeded the thousand mark:  4 July 2011.Will someone tell me why this is?! (I have a very good idea of the reason, but I do wonder how often, and where, it's been seen, read or forwarded on ... Primarily, it seems, in the US.) 

I'm very tired. I've been burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle, too. One of the contributing factors is being online + America; the time difference is a killer. Hence picture of 'end of semester'. ... 
  Right -  get thee to the university library, girl: sit thyself down and READ!

Per mutations

Roman Odeum, built by emperor Augustus, Troy IX, 

1st century AD ©livius.org

SADLY, PROJECTED EARLY AUTUMN TREK TO TROY is off the agenda, at least for now. Due to tediously boring medical saga I deem it’s safer to opt for a favourite stamping-ground in Italy rather than Turkey. The annual travel insurance covers Turkey - it's considered an honorary part of Europe - but the decision was in light of April conflicts with Syria plus the simple fact that whereas I speak a modicum of Italian I have no Turkish, aside from knowing how to pronounce Troy's hill site (Hissarlık ~ no dot on the 'i') and one place name, Çanakkle. Neither would be a lot of use in even the most minor of emergencies. Shame, really ~ but 'twill possibly have to wait until next year, or even 2014 (PhD finances permitting). Quindi siamo sulla strada per bella Italia ...

   On the plus side, umpteenth trip to la bella Roma, caput mundi, and accompanied by #2 daughter and Aberdeen cousin, will supply the necessary annual top-up of sunlight. I don't mind travelling solo but prefer company. It's much more fun. We've plumped for a small previously-visited spa town 550 metres above sea level in the middle of Italy (Tuscany) and within easy reach of both Roma and Firenze (Florence). 

©agriturismo.agraria.org (approach road to Iris Origo's Tuscan villa.)

  Despite having been a classical career musician all her professional life, a member of an internationally renowned orchestra which travelled the world, my cousin's never been to either Rome or Florence. Everyone should visit both at least once in their lifetime ~ along with Athens, Istanbul Venice ...    

  Rome in September's usually quite hot, even if the blazing Lazio summer's on the way out. Hopefully the zanzara tigre mosquito won't be at large (previously experienced nella città di Roma). This Asian species is as fierce as its name. Its favourite breeding spot is piles of discarded rubber tyres; these collect rainwater which then stagnates. A des res for the tigre, which can transmit the Chikungunya virus to humans. Deet (N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide) is about the only repellent that really works against 'em.

April was almost totally taken up with sorting out an accumulating mass of research material. Having trashed the previous case study I began anew with cut-ups of docs and relevant background notes collected on two USB memory sticks. (Who invented the USB flash disk? An IT blessing be upon his head!)

  Dismantling previous effort wasn't all bad. It got rid of a lot of extraneous 'filler' and winnowed the wheat from the chaff. And there was a lot of chaff.

A new regimen was imposed. Working hours per diem are 10am to 5pm, max., ~ and two and a half days writing a week, no more. In addition, a rescue was attempted of that fugitive concept, le weekend. Not a good idea to pile pressure on, believing the project is ultra-urgent when it's manifestly not. It matters to oneself, personally, but little to anyone else: all that happened was I was overtired. Tiredness leads to feeling low and miserable and this general mood's projected onto thesis, supervisors and anything or anyone else within range ~ even the resident feline.

  There's no embargo on reading around the field, scribbling notes on yellow PostIts, etc. The resolve is to reduce the hours spent welded to this computer, to free up time to spend outside in May's sunshine and the bluebell-bright spring woods. 
  (On the upside, an offer of grant monies was received ~ O, the relief!)

THERE'S MORE TO LIFE THAN A PhD, and my thesis ain't gonna set the heather alight. I'm not researching anything important to world medicine, or astrophysics or bio-chemistry. I'm writing some 100,000 words on athanasia (immortality) in the ancient Greek world, and how the concept has descended down to us. The reason I settled on a science fiction 'mirror' was because whereas death and dying is largely a taboo subject in day-to-day life it is not so in art or literature. SF in particular starkly reflects dying, in many forms and guises, from Hollywood movies to computer war games as well as in novels and comic books. One essential angle on the research is that in both generic spheres ~ the ancient Greek world and SF ~ concepts betray the attitudes of the times, especially in regard to man's basic fears of, and questions of survival of, death.

  Art and literature generally constitute vehicles to convey ideas. What those ideas are, whether they are naive assurances like the romans faux of chick lit., the facile literature of the marketplace, or polemics in regard to the state of man, the world, the planet's eco-system or whatever issue obsesses the writer or artist, is not significant. Ideally, ideas shouldn’t be censored – but then, what do we do about the likes of Abu Qatada or Anders Behring Breivik?

  In regard to SF, there’s a brutally specious casuistry in many of the visions, or, as in the case of films or the games industry, a clever but unsound moral simplicity attached to killing. However, we might say the same about Homer’s Iliad, where many characters are brought into the narrative only to be summarily despatched in the aristeia of an Achilles, Diomedes or Hector. Even Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors infesting his homestead is cast as an aristeia, although I tend to see the unpleasant episode as wholesale murder.

I’ve come to the conclusion that active supervision should not equate to conflict; supervisors are there to tell one the ‘how’, not the ‘what’. The ‘what’ is the bit I’ve invested in, and where I’m happiest. These are my theories, my field of enquiry, and by splitting them off from the prosaic necessities of the ‘how’ I felt much better about the processes of the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

  The symbolic complexities of Greek religious and social function and experiential practices have been foci of archaeological and anthropological studies, but there has been relatively little focus on the concept of immortality. What sort of construct was it? How and why, in creating their ideas, did the Greeks modify the infinite possibilities?

  Having duly completed the case study, and then debating what came next, I’ve been preoccupied with the ontology of ancient Greek mythologies and Twentieth century Science Fiction. How the separate worlds were made, the nature of their constituents, is part of exploring the differing spheres.

©Promotional film poster for Dune

  The three SF writers I decided on deal with individual 'takes' on immortality. In chronological order of writing, Herbert depicted cycles of life and metamorphosis on planets hostile to survival, whereas Wolfe has painted a future scenario where homo sapiens must exist in a post-technological world. Morgan's cyber punk trilogy, set in the Twenty-sixth century, creates alternatives where science is forced to its outer limits and tested to destruction. I wonder how the Hollywood entertainment machine will cope with the grim and bloody noir angles of Altered Carbon? Or how, indeed, it will choose to depict Tak Kovacs' diverse digitised 'incarnations'. I’m hoping the upcoming Hollywood treatment of AC won’t turn out to be a negative vision that affects perceptions. ...

  This does happen. It happened to Herbert’s Dune (1984). Loved the poster, loathed the film.

One aspect of all three of my selections is the normative meanings of the terms ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ do not preserve their primary connotations. They are all basically creative concepts of the unknown (as were the Greeks' ancient mythologies). Some of the bleak futuristic visions are made bleaker by mass violence, where modes of distortion and any number of war-like Iliads and far-flung Odysseys over space and time inflict protean changes. Since several protagonists metamorphose into different forms or other meta-existences, or are alternatively resurrected after having been slain, the dividing barrier between life and death is made irrelevant.

I've also come to the conclusion that computers & I will never see eye-to-eye. I accept that both the 'Net and I have our slow days, but this machine is sitting here like a dull troglodyte or semi-automatic robot and persists in either not implementing keyboard input or going off on its own track, invariably irrelevant or ~ worse ~ smugly informing me that there's no response. This last always seems to coincide with muttering noises from inside the box, as if it's being underhand and computing something else entirely.

  Both my machines occasionally have covert assistance from my live-in amanuensis: she is definitely Cait Sidhe, the black fairy cat from Celtic mythology, but ‘A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.’  ~ John Updike.
  As do I! 

Spring into action

  APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding   

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

Memory and desire, stirring 

Dull roots with spring rain. 

— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

NEEDLESS TO SAY, one’s own lilac looks nothing like this superlative display. ... 

  Not only is spring later in Scotland but the tree has suffered from a lack of judicious pruning in recent years.  The garden’s on the up & up; the snowdrops have gone over, and the daffodils were decimated by workmen. The blue-tattoo’d young man, who’s just repaired and repainted the damaged side gate and patio fence, opined the precincts ‘could do with a tidy-up’! I know, but saving a miracle in cash or kind ... Tattoo’d young men don’t come free of charge.

March was a bit of a curate's egg, as months go. First, there was the tale of the homeless cat. He's been hanging about our property for years, existing paw to mouth, but one morning I noticed he was limping and, coaxing him with a plateful of tuna cat-food, saw an enormous raw growth on his left front paw. I called the SSPCA who, having failed to catch the tom, returned with a trap. Nothing doing: the wily feline had doubtless seen one of these before. He was a sorry specimen; dirty matted coat, lame, very small for a male and thin (inadequate nutrition since kitten-hood). Then I had to go away for a few days, and on return found a note from the SSPCA inspector. He'd managed to catch the cat in someone's coal bunker, where the stray had holed-up. (He had been lying out all winter, under fir trees at the foot of our back garden ~ you'd see him curled up there on frosty mornings, poor thing.) Anyway, I telephoned the charity to arrange to return the unused trap, and found out the feral had been put to sleep. I was rather upset ~ he was a doughty little fellow. But his teeth were all broken or gone, he was at least fifteen years old and, because of his condition, his heart and lungs would not have survived the general anaesthetic necessary to operate on that paw. He was also as fierce as a Scottish wild cat, and would never have been suitable for re-homing. He didn't trust humans, and I don't blame him.

  I miss his silent presence. He used to curl up and doze on the outside mat on the back doorstep, his spine wedged firmly against the sun-warmed concrete of the doorsill to the kitchen.

  I figure he was probably abandoned early in life, or his mother was. You'd think, with age and experience, one would be used to the world and its cruelties, and perhaps a homeless cat doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things, but people who discard a cat probably neglect human beings just as easily.   

Aside from unpleasant medicals (still ongoing this month: you really, really don't want details) there were complicated logistics to be tackled vis-à-vis the generic research conference one was compelled to attend. A necessary condition of being allowed to remain registered, this exercise took a great deal of energy and time. Neither of which I have in abundance.

  I survived. Meetings with supervisors went fine (I think!) but there’s a long list of Work Wot Must Be Done. No. 1 ~ An abstract has to be cobbled together by end August this year in time for the 'call for papers' in regard to a conference, summer 2013: 300 words, ASAP. Do handouts, they say ~ don't have to do PowerPoint if I don't want to (and I don't). There are also some 2000 words of a 'presentation' to be done on the research.

  No. 2: Reprise recent drafts and send to supervisors. This constitutes a WIP ~ evidence one's doing summat concrete.

  No. 3 ~ Re-read the SF in tandem with the Greek research approach. Highly possible, given thesis word count, one of the authors will have to be dropped, so we agreed on which one it should be (the most difficult one) but with a strategy for re-assessment later on. Eighty to 100,000 words is not a lot, not when you divide it by number of chapters, in-line citations and Harvard references, necessary add-on material, appendices and so on. I figure a four to 5 year time-frame is do-able (just) as it takes me 10 years (min.) to write a quarter of a million words.

  I’m encouraged to invent my own critical language, if I wish to (within reason!) and have to tell supervisors what I'm doing. Creativity, credibility and coherence are important ~ but the three points above must be done as priorities.

Since visitation to the hallowed halls, I've been sweating blood over re-jigging the case study and the Orphic corpora, and getting absolutely nowhere. I faithfully followed instructions and comments, but all that happened was the sense was completely altered. The case study was utterly de-natured of all felicitous phrasing and its style was consequently as dull and boring as a set of instructions for a washing machine.

  I can't be doing with this. It took me years to find my writing 'voice' and now it's flattened and almost monosyllabic. And I like unusual words, some of which I'm childishly fond of, e.g., autochthonic, homomorphic, theanthropic or traducian (all in my OED). However, there's a perceived lack of line-by-line references (practically every word!) but these are where something is my own idea, my own concept or construct (even, or especially, in Greek).
  Heigh~ho, Jane: this is PhD-land.

  I junked somewhere between seven and 10,000 words into the desktop 'recycle bin' and punched 'empty' as soon as ...

  I know this was self-defeating, but that's what I felt like doing! Why didn't I settle on an acceptable no-brainer, e.g., lit. crit or a Greek vase painting? ...

  Dead simple, and no academic wrangling.

'Presentation' is a required constituent of one's probation assessment (yep ~ they're thinking about this already). We were also warned about the isolation of writing a PhD thesis, and how much worse it is for part-timers.

  For a probation report you need to know your position, where your thesis is situated in the field, and how much you are prepared to change your position / focus as the research material piles up. Everyone apparently lives with uncertainties, and no one expects us to know exactly where we are at the end of the probationary period. More and more questions surface, and it's recommended that we just learn to live with the ambiguities.

  As to one’s supervisory team it seems we speak the same language (so far). We shall see what develops.
  Writer's angst. Feeling nostalgic for erstwhile Eng. lit. studies. I know where I am in that particular country of the mind. Maybe it's coloured by the nostalgia, but jumping out of the box was encouraged. My English tutor was a complete maverick.
  On 29 March an e~mail landed in the Inbox, asking if I'd like a 'professional copywriter' to write additions to the blog. What?  Why?!  'In return for an ad. ...' Aha. Doth the woman believe me to be a total nitwit? Strange place, the blogosphere.

  On the research front, progress remains slow and plodding. Two steps for'ard, one back. One academic declares it's not necessary to read every single book cover to cover, but I find I have to, in case I miss something glaringly vital. I need every little sidelight on my field, every obscure archaic Greek concept term.

  'Thanatology' is the field I'm working in. The term's from the Greek, thanatos ~ death, and in epic poetry thanatos is 'man's lot' or portion, rather than a personified agent. It includes the noun which Homer used: Thanatos stalks The Iliad. His brother is Hypnos, the shadowy sire of Morpheus, ancient god of morphai, the shapes of dreams. I am puzzling over ancient Greek cult, aetiology and the symbolic complexities of social function and experiential practices, which have been foci of widespread archaeological and anthropological studies, but there's been relatively little focus on the concept of immortality per se. What sort of construct was it? Where did it come from, and how or why, in creating their ideas, did the Greeks modify the infinite possibilities?

Still, there are upsides to any travelling, enforced or not. There is a benefit in leaving this village, even for a few days. OK, in spring it's a tolerable place to be, with the cherry trees in bloom, and the surrounding hills and fields make for a pleasant aspect. However, I don't see much of these, cooped-up in the study with nose glued to the grindstone (aka PC or laptop screen).

  The cherry trees always bring to mind A.E. Housman: the faint chime of time's chariot moving ever closer ...

Last month also brought one of those dreaded Computer Events which remind of the fragilities of technology. The PC’s back-lit 17½” flatscreen monitor packed up; its inner power something-or-other burned out, and the thing was done for. Cue mega-anxiety, in case the hard disk was affected, but as ever IT-man Geoff came to the rescue, bless him, and immediately sourced a replacement monitor, f.o.c., from the stocks of equipment he keeps in his workshop. He suggests a web link credit in the thesis acknowledgements for keeping me afloat. I promise to do this ~ the man's a hardware genius, whatever one's problem may be.

 Nevertheless, am debating utilising my one remaining grant source for an application for a new desktop, except that such will be ®Windows 7 or even 8, and I'm not keen on anything after XP.

  Bit of a Luddite, I guess.

  And such will further reduce the Book Fund's parlous prospects. The BF's already been raided for assorted necessities.

  Who'd be a student?!

© Louvre: Eos pursues Tithonos, ca. 470-460BC

When the ‘formidable Mr Eliot’ (so dubbed by Vita Sackville-West in the Radio Times dated 30 November 1928) wrote 'April is the cruellest month’ his Latin and Greek epigraph was culled from Petronius: ‘For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro’. In Eliot's day Americans were familiar with Classics, but when I spoke on the telephone to a young Californian woman last week she didn't even know where Scotland is.
  The mythical Cumaean Sibyl negotiated with Apollo for as many years of life as the grains of sand she could hold in her hand. Crucially, in common with Eos, the dawn goddess who petitioned Zeus for eternal life for her lover, Tithonos, the Sibyl neglected to ask for eternal youth as a corollary and so she gradually wasted away.

  Moral: must always remember to ask for perpetual youth! 

 

The epigraph actually reflects the opposite; Eliot's 'dull roots' spring back to life in the annual cycle of nature, which is one conception I'm teasing out of the tangle that is ancient Greek mythic immortality.        

  The idea refuses to die. Myth is linked to memory, both oral and written, and an aide-mémoire in the gift of the Greek Muse, Mnemosyne. I thought it would be a simple enough topos to research but 'tis no easy task. There's definitely more to eternal life than meets the eye, but keeping track of it in all its separations and disguises is challenging. The era I'm researching was 500 years before the advent of Christ so it’s necessary to ignore the Christian gloss the term now wears. Until Plato's theories, there was no moral overtone of immortality as reward for a 'good life'. The SF authors in whose works I find correlates also eschew 'reward' angles in their themes of post-human, life extensions and / or transmutations.  

A wry reflection on the research angle is 'A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.' (Rick Morgan, 2003: Broken Angels. ...)

  I trust this doesn't turn out to be true!

  Ahimé, alas!... ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

            mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita’

  –Dante, Inferno, I: 1-3 ~ (cf. Vergil on Aeneas’ katabasis, Aeneid, vi.)

The costs attendant on studying ...

 An expensive business, postgrad ~ or rather, writing a thesis. I'm not much good at Excel, so set to with calculator, pencil and paper and cast a cash flow projection for the academic year, autumn 2011 to October 2012.

  It does not make for reassuring reading.

  It seems the demand for higher education has largely maintained its wonted level, despite the challenge of steep tuition fees. Nevertheless, recent UCAS figures (30/01/12) noted mature students have fallen by the wayside and, being of this company, can understand why.

  A lack of employment prospects is concentrating minds. A&H and social sciences are attracting fewer applicants (but I'm willing to bet the ubiquitous MBA is on the up and up). Although student debt appears every bit as affordable as any weasel ad where minuscule small print informs you you'll lose your home if you don't keep up the payments, student loans are ridiculously cheap and they should not be. The figures make dismal reading: thirty or forty per cent of present lending will not likely be repaid. If this shortfall continues, year on year, you can work it out. Unredeemed SL debts mean less to plough back into the system.   

  I applaud the cutting back of Mickey Mouse degrees and nonsense such as horse care being equal to however many GCSEs. You want to work with horses? Pursue your vocation through the British Horse Society; 'vocation' is a euphemism for low pay.

  However, back to current efforts in the field of Classical studies. Mature students return to learning for a variety of reasons, e.g., a mid-life career change. There has been a reduction in that group, but many of us are – or were – purely hobbyists, having a desire to learn for the love of it, or in hope of keeping the grey matter fit. But this mature student's now looking very carefully at ever-increasing demands on income and wondering if the luxury can be afforded.  

  No. 1: Go part time and the cash-flow is manageable. But fees, like the outlay of purchasing a horse, are only the start of it. No. 2: Classics books are hugely expensive. They're generally limited print runs: the more arcane or obscure the topic the more costly they are. If I rely solely on the university library what I want is often out to another student and will require a week to be returned on recall, has been shifted into the HUB (high-use books) or gone AWOL and probably won't be replaced. Universities are feeling the pinch, too. With fuel hikes having a not-inconsiderable impact, it's cost-effective to buy rather than borrow; many volumes are available second-hand from Amazon or Abe. And I have generous friends, who loan valuable books and even send me their unwanted green Loeb Greek classics f.o.c., simply for the price of p&p. 
  No. 3: I don't feel as intelligent as I used to. The synapses aren't crackling the way they once did. The difficulty may be something to do with PhD techniques. It's not a book, where ingredients are controlled (or, in my case, uncontrolled!) products of creativity, imagination or a narrative arc. And it's not undergrad work, where essays reflect what one has absorbed to date. It's also a major leap upwards from Masters. The necessary requirements of scholarly detachment, and almost line-by-line referencing, do not allow for either originality or replication of learned material, but something in between. And here on the limen there is a marked lack of that magical conjuring of ideas which can happen with tutorials (or in the pub afterwards). You're on your own. I really do miss 'interlocutory discourse'; dialogue can spark oblique sidelights or direct illumination of slants not thought of before, incidental to a particular gathering ~ conversations are impossible to duplicate in any academic volume. However, I guess this angle is aimed-for in No. 4: the perceived necessity to attend seminars and conferences here, there and everywhere, UK-wide, which includes concomitant travel expenses (pricey) and sometimes overnight accommodation (even more pricey). Plus there's an increase in computer peripherals, library or specialised society subscriptions ... 
  You name it, it has to be paid for. (I have reason now to recall the rueful remark of one don from Ireland, who said to be a Classicist you need a private income.)    

  The final item is being time-poor. I try for 10am until 5.00pm, but in reality it's more like 5am to 10pm. If only the expenditures could be matched by employing someone to clean the domestic sphere, do the washing and ironing or cook the meals, let alone take care of the woefully neglected garden.   

  Actually, glancing out of the window, I don't have a garden any longer. After a decade of Classical studies I have a patch of rough weed-infested grass that looks as if it's transplanted itself from the nearby fields. You can tell it needs mowing; it overtops the woodpigeons waddling through its forest height. A happy hunting ground for the cat, it's surrounded by overgrown hedges worthy of Sleeping Beauty and populated by birds, amphibians and voles.

 Now, if there was a diamond tiara lying about in the brambles ... A better long-term asset in the bank than a stray prince (or frog) in the undergrowth! Diamonds are forever ~ or so they say.

Are diamonds a girl's best friend? (Nah: a dishwasher is.)

  In fact, the phrase is grammatically incorrect ~ either the diamonds should be singular or the friend plural, but don't suppose the writers of that specific Hollywood lyric cared! The song is from the 1953 film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe.  

  I was reflecting on the axiom recently (the word stems from the Greek adamas, unbreakable). You can't eat jewellery if you're starving. OK, you might take it to a pawnshop and realise temporary cash against its market value but, basically, outside industrial uses, diamonds are beautiful, expensive, enduring as gold but of no practical utility as anything bar pretty or triumphal decoration. Is this why they're prized?

  Anyhow, was suddenly put in mind of one of those bizarre episodes which happen in a life.

Riding around Stellenbosch © adventureshop.co.za

 Once upon a long time ago, while living in South Africa, I had a friend who worked as a mining engineer up on the Witswatersrand as well as in Botswana. He frequently came down to Cape Town and we'd ride horses through Stellenbosch vineyards, or along the Cape beaches, and then return to drink tea in the plush surroundings of the Mount Nelson Hotel in the Gardens.

  Knowing my love of geological specimens he sometimes brought things like agate for me, and once told how he'd smuggled emeralds back to the UK, taped to one of his ankles. (He wouldn't get away with it these days.) On one occasion he handed over what appeared to be a small grubby quartz pebble.  'Here, this is for you. Diamonds are a girl's best friend!'

  It wasn't much bigger than a small sugar lump, misshapen and dully opaque.

  I protested he shouldn't be handing over diamonds, uncut or not, but he assured me it wasn't valuable, a Top Wesselton or a Top Cape. Less than the poorest industrial quality, it had a marked fault line through it – a lattice defect. Anyone bar the most expert cleaver in Antwerp would probably shatter it into useless slivers, worthless for anything except making diamond-dust nail files.

  I kept it for ages in my jewellery case ~ a hard, waxen-pale milky little pebble. Then I took it out and left it on the dressing table, meaning to transfer it to a wooden box which holds malachite, tiger's eye, fool's gold (iron pyrites), vitrified volcanic lava and other mineral samples. Other people collect souvenir mementos like local craft work from their travels ~ I accumulate stones and shells.  

  Anyway, an unforeseen upshot was pebbles were suddenly fashionable – the varieties you put in glass flower vases for decoration or weight. One fine spring morning someone (!?) cleared up a display of past-it narcissus or daffodils and absent-mindedly picked up the diamond as well. It did resemble one of those garden centre pebbles you use for flower arranging, and the clouded quartz in the vase was similar. You can tell where I'm going with this, can't you! Throwing the faded blooms into the compost bin, I chucked the water into the Sleeping Beauty shrubbery.   

  And the stones.             

  I've never found it. One day a future archaeologist may dig it up, puzzle over how a South African rough diamond got here, and construct some marvellous 'Time Team'-style explanation for its alien presence in the cold clay of an overgrown Scottish back garden.

Pas l'temps pour plus d'écriture. Back to the grindstone. Currently making a list of Things NOT to Do, inc. long e~mails, blogging, Facebook checking and online student forums ... 
  The rate this neophyte's PhD isn't progressing perhaps one ought to excise eating and sleeping as well. However, on the research front I think I know where I'm going ~ standing at alpha, can vaguely distinguish omega. It's the route between 'em I need a road map for. 

Myths, heroes & anti-heroes

I'm still slaving over Orpheus, going round in ever-decreasing circles, and finding this PhD exercise a less than encouraging experience. Not one single positive comment on one's efforts has been vouchsafed by the faculty. I'm very uneasy now about the topic, my approach and indeed the whole raison d'être, both as regards aspirations and the project as it stands. I'm not sure whether the thesis can be written ~ or, if it can, that I am the person to research or write it. In short, the wheels have come off the wagon.

  However, in spite of everything militating against me on the research front, the past is still fascinating. As Paul Cartledge says, it's 'neither dead nor certain', ('Playing with the truth', TLS 31.12.93). He goes on to remind us the ancient Greek word for truth, Mnemosyne, literally meant 'not-forgetting'. If the diegesis of any narrative is its entire created world, Orpheus' function was to relate his knowledge of phenomena which the heroes could not be aware of. On the other hand, he's a very slippery character, and I'm having trouble getting a handle on him. He seems to mean something different to everyone, whether it's Apollonius of Rhodes, the Fifth century Athenian philosopher Plato or the poet Rilke. In addition, he even appears to cast a spell on modern-day authors.

  I admit to a strong personal dislike of Plato, but the myth of Er is full of Orphic-Pythagorean references. It gives the impression Plato was groping towards a pictorial representation of an 'other world', albeit with occasional levity (Symposium). Some interpreters have argued for a subterranean setting for Plato's supra-rational virtual reality, but even if kata meson to phos simply denotes nothing more than 'in the light' then surely these souls are nevertheless progressing to some other-worldly region. Whatever has a beginning has an end, and this was the goal of the teletai.

  It would seem the keyword must be 'memory' ~ without it, or the opposite (a total lack of recall) the 'other life' cannot make sense.

  Immortality as a thesis concept has divided into several different threads. The first division here, between body and soul, death of the first but a rewarding immortality for the second, is in sharp contrast to Homer’s picture of the afterlife, where the shade of Achilles strides about in fields of asphodel and regrets the price of his everlasting kleos (glory).

Brad Pitt as Achilles in

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy

© Helena Productions Ltd, 2004

  In stark contrast to the world of being above, this 'un-being' appears to be less desirable to those experiencing it than to those who, while still alive, only contemplate a future prospect. For Achilles, the 'emptiness of Hades' has been described in Orphic language as mega chasma – a great gulf which contrasts the power of earthly fame with the incorporeal drifting revenants below. The cost of Achilles' glory was too high: he would give his eternal reputation for another living dawn or afternoon, but now it's his lot to endlessly trace the circles of the barren desolation of Hades, a place of non-being – famous indeed but condemned to perpetual memory: his and the upper world’s. A byword for the combat soldier nonpareil, ‘Wars even will repeat themselves and great Achilles be despatched to Troy once more’ (P. Vergilius Maro, Eclogues, IV, trans. Rieu, 1949) ~ let alone to Hollywood!

Myth (Greek muthos) is defined in my English Oxford Dictionary as a noun; 'a traditional narrative usually involving supernatural or fancied (imaginary) persons etc., and embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena, etc; allegory (Platonic myth); fictitious person or thing or idea'. This is as good a definition as any.

  However, all is not as simple as it once may have appeared. Considering individuals or their actions in isolation, divorced from their context or connections (or, worse, diluting them into stories for children in the style of Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales) not only emasculates their archetypal significance but, in removing the essential mythopoeic thought underpinning these characters to render them 'safe' or sanitised, misses the whole point.  The old heroes, let alone their gods, were frequently mad, bad or dangerous to know. In spite of this, if their myths aided cultural memory or practice during the aeons when histories were conveyed orally, they would be a vital constituent of the group imagination and capital of tribe or polis.

  In our later age, academic theories regarding the ancient Greeks, and their gods and heroes, have evolved into more detailed explications of interwoven strands, taking in not just myth but anthropology, exchange, religion and ritual. At the risk of digressing, within the parameters of the thesis, it was therefore important to put forward a statement of policy. The ancient Greek hero is likely to fall into one of three basic camps. He may well have had his roots in the fictive group imagination of a simpler age, conceivably a personification of a meteorological phenomenon, a travelling stranger or the creation of an unusually talented warrior or a bard, e.g., Homer. He may be an demoted god, relegated by time to the lesser heroic plane, or even a real but half-forgotten individual from a pre-literate history to whose wider reputation legends and myths have accrued. The old tales told of him might well be sub-divided into further threads or classifications but, whether he took his existence from created narrative fictions or, conversely, stepped into them from the real world or, as a mythical figure, was even 'borrowed' and widely taken possession of, as in the case of Herakles, does not matter. He existed in his world, the world of the texts or the earlier generally accepted aetiological mythic constructions. The point is he was there.  

  Somewhere. Sometime.  

Another 'myth' concerning me at present is the looming question of Scotland's soi-disant 'independence'. A friend mailed me the results of a Telegraph survey. The Telegraph's a Tory newspaper, but the result was the Scots said 'No' – the English 'Yes'. There's also been a suggestion if independence goes ahead the Shetland Isles will opt for their own self-determination, either to stay with Westminster or even go back to Norway, taking what remains of the North Sea oil with them. I know people in the off-shore northern isles, so was already aware they fiercely dislike Edinburgh, much preferring London. It seems many Scots don’t realise we would probably have to join the Eurozone, because the English won't want any truck with us ~ not a good prospect, if at all.

  It would be a different kettle of kippers if the English, like the Romans, shoved the Caledonians back over the Wall and declared 'independence' for England.

X ~ hazard warning!

  Plus, I get the impression from all the hot air floating around at Holyrood any vote will divide down educational / social lines. The less well-off, young and / or poorly educated will vote for separation. The remainder, thinking about it properly, will be far less enthusiastic, without the weighted bias of nationalistic prejudices and class envy. Salmond wants his 'devo-max' option to split the 'No' vote. Of course, in his cunning plan to go down in immortal memory as the man who wrested Scotland from the hated English after hundreds of years of history, he hopes to by-pass the 'No's by such devious means. Maybe England should have a referendum of its own: shall we get rid of Scotland? 'Yes' or 'No'? Put your cross in the box ...

  Alas, I do not believe reason or debate will cut it. How can you reason with people who permit a sandstone statue of Mel Gibson to be erected at the foot of the Wallace memorial? It's been removed, thank heavens, but it sure pointed up a bloc of opinion. That film did so much damage; historically inaccurate, it passed into 'history' as 'fact' because the myth-makers wanted it to be 'true'.

  The proposal to allow sixteen and 17 year olds to vote is also a cynical ploy. Not legally of age to drink alcohol or buy cigarettes (although they take no notice) but deemed capable of exercising 'democratic rights' ~ that's if they know what these words mean.

  The referendum scheme is causing bemusement in England; no one's sure what Scotland might actually gain, although likely a beneficial arrangement for the English. But undiluted political control is never good (ask the demos of ancient Athens!). Jeremy Paxman recently compared Salmond to Mugabe, which was then Tweeted as 'Paxman compared Scotland to Zimbabwe'. Mugabe pulled the same stunt, of course ~ create an 'enemy' and then persuade the people to 'vote for ME!' as the nation's 'saviour'. But the English don’t really understand how much the Scots are encouraged to loathe them. It starts in primary school, chanting that dismal dirge, 'Flower of Scotland'. Hatred will win over liking or tolerance any day. 

  I’m not convinced it will come to pass – but you never know with politicians.

A step into the past, present and future of Scottish SF writing: from the Nat. Library of Scotland (for which I now have a research ticket) comes news of an upcoming display of science fiction 'treasures' ~ not quite what one is used to at this venerable institution (which now has the Murray Archive, at one time right next door to my little London basement office at John M.'s in Albemarle Street) but the SF is on show at NLS as part of the annual Edinburgh International Science Festival. From the end of March, the display will reveal how for many years Scottish writers have explored galaxies far, far away .

March's post may be late. In regard to an unidentified problem in the oesophagus, after three months on a waiting list one's finally to see a consultant early next Monday. Health issues come lower down the NHS agenda than their staff pensions.

  'The past is neither dead nor certain', according to Cartledge, but the present, for all it is live, ain't that certain, either.