Amazon is the ultimate marketplace, uniting buyers and sellers across the globe, so you can find whatever you’re looking for, even the most obscure items, or find purchasers for utterly niche and esoteric products. Facebook is a miraculous social space allowing you to keep in touch with family, friends and neighbours and to know what’s going on in your district or in the world, all without having to pay anything. Spotify gives listeners access to a cornucopia of music, and gives artists access to a global audience, for a pittance of a subscription compared with the old days of buying records. Publishers are inspired by the mission of making available the very best material, fiction and non-fiction, to the people who will enjoy and benefit from it the most. Universities are nobly dedicated to the pursuit and dissemination of truth and understanding as an end in itself, and to preparing young people for the rest of their lives. Continue Reading »
I’ve been down another random research rabbit-hole this week, responding to someone posting on Twitter – for reasons I still haven’t entirely grasped – a quotation from the 1741 English translation of a 1739 book, Histoire du ciel considéré selon les idées des poètes, des philosophes et de Moïse, by a man called Abbé Pluche, famous for his subsequent nine-volume work of popular science, Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’Histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l’esprit (1740). I’ve read only the first volume of History of Heaven, which offers a comprehensive rationalising account of all Egyptian deities, and their Greek, Roman and other derivatives, as being originally just symbolic language to mark the passage of the seasons and the coming of the Nile flood. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Abbé Pluche, Egypt, mythology, quotations, religion, Thucydides | 4 Comments »
Puny mortals of the pathetic Higher Education System (HES)! In one hour, from this fearsome orbital battle station, I shall release my legions of AI monkeys to scrutinise the publications of every academic in the world for plagiarism! No one’s reputation is safe! This will destroy you all! Unless you pay me…respect. Mwahaha! Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged plagiarism, students | 8 Comments »
There was an interesting article over the holiday period by the music writer Simon Reynolds, about why he still blogs, and I agreed with more or less every word:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved.
I did have a brief moment, back in January, of wondering whether I should be slightly more responsive to the preferences of my readers as far as post topics and themes were concerned Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged blogging, classics, higher education, historiography, Melian Dialogue, music, politics, quotations, students, teaching, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
Having had an absolutely terrible night’s sleep the night before – yes, Christmas Day indulgence and all, but I’d been reasonably sensible about alcohol, and certainly hadn’t any caffeine after mid-afternoon – slept extremely soundly until half four, albeit with yet more strange dreams (something to do with trying to book a hotel room in a strange town and then get off at the right tram stop). Clearly I then stirred enough for A. – who, it turned out, had been wide awake for at least an hour – to ask if I was awake, which of course woke me up completely. She then put on the radio, which helps her doze off but usually means I can’t, and so it proved; still, I do like the World Service, albeit I’m not enough of a Joni Mitchell fan to want to listen to lots of people talking about how The River spoke to their personal circumstances. World news (miserable as ever), shipping forecast (gales everywhere), UK news, time to get up, do last night’s washing up and make tea. Continue Reading »
Posted in Twelve Days in the Year | Tagged beer, mundanity | Leave a Comment »
I had a fascinating little exchange on Bluesky the other day with Gustav Holmberg (@gustavholmberg.bsky.social); I’d made a passing remark about my continuing efforts on this blog, and he observed that blogs are like the vinyl records of social media, the format that refuses to die, and might even make a comeback. But, as I replied, one less attractive implication of that comparison is that blogs become a niche hipster thing, a private passion, whereas the great thing about records in the past was the communal aspect: talking about old and new records, lending and borrowing them, anticipating new releases together and then the first to get hold of a copy invites everyone else round to hear it. Subscription Substack it wasn’t. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged art, blogs, classical reception, classics, LLMs, music, politics | Leave a Comment »
Some discoveries are huge, significant, epoch-making – the sort of event that gets mythologised, dramatised, reimagined and turned into a Doctor Who Is Trying To Brainwash Our Children With Wokeness social media race row. Others are smaller, more specialised, of little wider interest, but still worth celebrating as the product of graft and flashes of inspiration. And then there are my intermittent investigations into Thucydides misquotations, which might get more attention if I presented them as a bit of performance art, fully inhabiting the character of an obsessive pedant with weird obsessions rather than just flirting with it. But the little rush of endorphins and sense of relieved satisfaction that I occasionally get from them is real. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged quotations, Thucydides, wine | 1 Comment »
As I think I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I most enjoy about my jazz composition class is being given weekly homework: small doable task that brings a sense of satisfaction on doing it to a satisfactory standard, scope for development if I have the energy, possible to treat as a purely technical practice exercise if not feeling inspired – really, the most challenging aspect is suppressing impatience at the retired gentlemen (there used to be only one of them) who take this as a cue to produce sixty-four bar epics with multiple time signatures and at best only a loose connection to the specified task. They do them; I occasionally write affectionate parodies. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | 2 Comments »
One of the trickier things about trying to research the contemporary reception of Thucydides is that Stuff Keeps Happening. If I’d finished my book by the original deadline, it would have been completely upstaged by COVID – I didn’t even have a chapter on the Plague of Athens in the original plan! And, while it’s not the reason why I still haven’t finished, I do feel a definite nervousness about how next year’s US presidential election might spark sudden interest in the oligarchic coup of 411.
This isn’t just a matter of books and their long production times; a piece has just appeared (a review of the new Cambridge Companion to Thucydides, ed. P. Low, as part of a general overview for non-specialists) that I wrote about six weeks ago – and I am now consumed with regret that I missed the opportunity of a short paragraph to the effect that ‘figures like Henry Kissinger regularly invoke Thucydides as support for their view of the world – there’s a quote regularly attributed to Thuc that is actually a young Kissinger badly paraphrasing him – but it’s clear from his work that Thucydides would have loathed the callous, blood-drenched bastard’. Alas. But I have been given an unlimited-free-to-read link to the review, if you can overlook its predictive failure: Here.
Posted in Musings | Tagged Henry Kissinger, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
I spent half an hour this morning, before heading down to the station, digging a grave in the rain. My gorgeous Sophie had been going rapidly downhill since we took her to the vet last week for being generally under the weather – weight loss, enlarged spleen, shadow on the ultrasound. We are just so busy that, heartbreaking as it was to have to assume she wasn’t going to make it, the grave had to be ready. Last night she was weak but still purring, and looking out over the edge of the car basket to check we were still there. This morning she was noticeably weaker and less responsive. This evening when we got home from work she still purred when we cuddled her, but was obviously miserable and in pain, and we knew the time had come for the trip to the vet. She cried at being put into the cat basket and taken outside. She purred and nuzzled me at the end. Her heart kept beating for so long. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »
Sphinx 