 A month after visiting the Venice Biennale the prospect of a night with contemporary art is still not an attractive one.
My natural defence mechanisms that stand against disturbance and shock have still to be repaired. (see previous posts)
The one great beauty of the 2009 Biennale, looked back at now from London, was that of Venice's cemetery at San Michele, visited then as a respite on two consecutive days, each carved stone made calmer by the contrast with the contents of the cultural pavilions in the Giardini.
The aim of finding the grave of Ezra Pound - harder than the guidebook has you believe - enforced a lengthy study of limestone and marble, much homage to the sharply inscribed slabs covering Stravinsky and Diaghilev, before the overgrown ground of the poet became clear.
This was much the most memorable part of the Biennale trip although,as a Biennalista would argue, without the contrast to the Korean air-conditioner installations and Russian video-banquets it might not have been so.
A visit last night to the Thackeray Gallery in Kensington had much of the same eirenic effect as San Michele's island. Everyone else in the street may have been watching the Michael Jackson memorial on TV. But an admiring band of us had instead the alabaster, slate and marble carved by the sculptor, John Joekes, 17 pieces each one of which stood in and for the art of balance.
There were slate words carved in gold, sea scapes in Portland limestone, a soft white 'bone idol' in the alabaster of old churches. For Joekes it is as though all stone is a lightly breathing thing.
The prices were peaceful too.
Anyone close enough to London W8 should go there to find the calm for themselves.
Twenty million hits: or was it twenty two million hits?
The Chief Executive of the British Library,Dame Lynne Brindley, was in justifiably ebullient mood last night as she announced the results of the first day's appearance on-line of the virtual Codex Sinaiticus.
The parchment pages of the Codex, containing one of the earliest bound versions of the New Testament, have been divided for a century between London, Leipzig, St Petersburg and the Sinai Monastery from which they first came. They had been available as a single item on line for only twelve hours.
An astonishing number of web-users had taken the opportunity to look directly into bible history without the need any longer to gain permission from British, German, Russian and Monastic guards.
The Librarian was pleased at the sort of 'outreach success' that is much prized by today's great institutions. When the beaming Archbishop of Sinai spoke, he too thanked the digitisers - and also the British public, who had bought the parchment sheets from Stalin in the 1930s, and the original desert writers who had puzzled over the text, correcting and being corrected, 1600 years ago.
The conventional wisdom is that the new site will not change much since scholars have for a century known what the codex contained.
The differences from both Catholic and Protestant Bibles include the visions and parables of "The Shepherd of Hermas" as well as "The Epistle of Barnabas" with its vivid language about the Christ-killing Jews.
Books which Protestants have dropped from their Bibles include the Old Testament books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Maccabbees 1 and 2 and substantial parts of Daniel and Esther.
The Codex omits the words which Protestants add to the end of The Lord's Prayer, and Catholics omit: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever".
There is no story of the stoning of the adulterous woman, no "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Nor are there Christ's words about his executioners from the cross: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do".
Its Gospel of Mark stops suddenly after Jesus's disciples discover his empty tomb, missing the 12 verses on the appearance of the resurrected Christ.
Perhaps the conventional wisdom is correct and this is an issue of access and outreach alone. The BL is wisely showing too some of the letters from children and unemployed miners in the Great Depression days who gave their 'mites' so that he book could be bought - a pointed message to donors today.
Yet yesterday may end by being more than that.
Twenty million is a very large number, many studying the site, we were told last night, for impressive lengths of time. Whose cause does it most help, Catholics or Protestants, moderates of fundamantalists? There were different answers around the celebratory BL dinner table.
It is hard to believe it will make no difference at all.
 "If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water."
When W. H. Auden wrote those lines he was here in the bay of Naples on the island of Ischia.
In praise of limestone is a meditation on landscape, human life and the twisted layers within both. The 'inconstant ones' are those northern europeans who are so often drawn back to the Italian south in ways that we do not wholly understand but which certainly owe something to the survival here of the ancient and unchanging. And this is the weekend when there are more 'inconstants' on this little island than usual.
Tonight Ischia awards its annual prizes to writers and journalists who, in some way or other, have caught the attention of the judges here. There is the Cuban dissident and human rights campaigner, Armando Valladares,
the Israeli novelist and critic, David Grossman, investigators of horrors in the Congo, creators of oral history for forgotten peoples and the Editor of the TLS who tonight must put on his best Italian accent to give an award to the Editor of La Stampa on prime-time TV.
When we arrive, we are talking about all sorts of things, from Berlusconi's taste for young women to the latest news from Tehran. The prize has its own blog and, like writers everywhere, we wonder where blogging and tweeting will leave the business we are all in. But somehow Ischia itself soon becomes the topic of conversation. This is the thirtieth year that the tradition of Giuseppe Valentino, campaigning Italian writer against the ruin of landscape by uncontrolled modernity, has been celebrated in what is a peculiarly potent place for those who work with words.
To classicists the island of Ischia - and the town of Lacco Ammeno where I am posting now - will always be the first landing place of the Greeks in Italy 2800 years ago, a rocky catalyst for all the Europan culture that followed. The first Greek letters in the West - possibly the first Greek letters anywhere - are scribbled on a tiny cup in the local museum a hundred yards away..
To literary critics this same tiny brown-and-black drinking utensil should also be a shrine, the place of the first quote, the first joking reference from one work to another, a bit of primal mockery and self-disparagement in which the writer around 780 BC compares his little 'Cup of Nestor' to the giant cup refered to in Homer's Iliad.
Auden's work here is hardly easier than these for any successors to match - and I doubt that any of the celebrants gathering today would hope in their wildest fantasies to do so. But Ischia is place which sets magical challenges for anyone who comes.
Some of us have just now been on a cultural pilgrimage, high up in the hills, where no tourist seems to go and not even the most ruthless developer would want to build. We have seen the vertical vineyards of the Casa D'Ambra, paths of old streams etched deep into the rock, up-ended ponds and steep lakes where no water can dissolve any more.
From the highest accessible point there, a Belvedere rock table among the vines, the first Greeks must surely have looked out to sea and seen if any second Greeks were in pursuit. And from that same table, piled high with cheese and vineyard-fed rabbit, we Premio Ischia guests could look back to land and see the rock formations that surely inspired Auden, "the rounded slopes with their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath, a secret system of caves and conduits".
Fancies, you may say. Too many toasts in the liquids which have absorbed so much of that dissolved rock into a wonderful white wine. Maybe. I have no more certain knowledge that Auden stood beneath the Casa Ambra rocks in the 1940s than that the the first quoters of Homer did in the 780s BC.
But this is a potent place of fancies about where words began and how they may be understood..
"From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take."
Many happy returns to Ischia and its Premio.
I am just off to speak at a 'round table' on whether 'with forgotten wars and murdered reporters, international journalism still serves the cause of democracy and human rights'.
There are to be distinguished men and and women around this table - the Cuban campaigner and long-time prisoner of Castro, Armando Valladares, Emma Bonino, Jean Daniel and others.
I am just wondering what to say - and wondering particularly about the word 'still' before the phrase 'serves the cause'.
Editors of The Times get used to talking about the origins of 'international reporting'. Our William Howard Russell pioneered the practice from the Crimea in the 1850s.
There were certainly the rights of humans at issue then but not the kind that human rights campaigners speak most of now. The rights were predominantly those of the wounded British soldiers who were neglected by their officers and government. There was a Times campaign. Enter the Florence Nightingales.
There have been various recent court cases in which, after newspaper pressure, human rights law has been deemed to apply to our ill-equipped soldiers in Iraq too. Maybe we'll talk about that later on.
Generally, at events like the one I'm about to join, the speakers want to talk about the rights of civilians in war or the rights of the fighters for the cause in which they most believe. This is often not that of the British and Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I return to that word 'still'.
Reporters, for all their aims of impartiality, generally want to lean to one side or another in any conflict. They are story-tellers and a story needs a teller witha point of view, shifting sometimes, but a viewpoint none the less.
Sometimes they choose that view point. More often it is dictated by the place from which they are looking. The real-life reporters shown in Waugh's Scoop failed to report the Italian victories in Abyssinia because they were with the losing side, the side of future 'human rights' activists, as it happened, so that will probably be judged today as a 'good try'.
In the First World War, the British contingent lied and deceived their readers about our armies' successes. But if the defeat of the Kaiser can be deemed a victory for human rights, the 'embedded' press helped that too. So another 'good try', even a win, though of an awkwardly different kind.
In a modern air war, like that in Yugoslavia in 1999 where there are no casualties on our own side and every bomber is home for supper, the reporter is thousands of feet from his own side's action and must inevitably seek the story with the victims on the ground. That is wholly regardless of which side in the war is best likely to advance human rights, in that case, I guess, the bombers.
Our conference will probably get on to lies told in the human rights cause by Arthur Koestler and Claud Cockburn in the Spanish Civil War. I hope so.
Journalism was too slow to stop the masacres in Rawanda and too bored to worry about how the victims-turned-victors are abusing the rights of their former killers.
Sometmes international reporters have assuredly helped the cause of human rights. Sometimes they have not. My sense is that this pattern remains still true today.
There must be much more to say. I'm looking forward to listening my colleagues and will report back later.
 Because the TLS lives now in the office where I worked for The Times before 1986 I sometimes see ghosts here of the Thatcher era, men and women who fought for ideas at time when ideas were last the at the heart of political life.
The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is one of them. There is a new book about him by an admirer Mark Dooley which sets out eloquently Roger's positions on politics and art - and explains why there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage.
I don't suppose there will be a Scruton column on Michael Jackson (even as seen here in 1984 with the Reagans). But if there were it would probably be on the following lines, as cited by Dooley, and would give its commissioner no end of grief.
"Pop music, which presents the idealised adolescent as the centre of a collective
ceremony, is an attempt to bend music to this new condition – the condition of
a stagnant crowd, standing always on the brink of adulthood, but never passing
across to it. It shows youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than
a transitional phase which must be cast off once the business of social
reproduction calls. For many young people, therefore, it constitutes an obstacle
to the acquisition of a musical culture. It is the thing that insulates them from the
adult world, and all other uses of music – singing, formation dancing, playing an
instrument, listening – arouse their suspicion."
The second visitor in spirit is David Hart, the businesman, writer, political adviser and activist for Margaret Thatcher in the 1984 miners' strike. I like to remember him as he was then because for the last six years he has looked very different, falling slowly to a form of Motor Neurone Disease which leaves his mind as combative as ever while his muscles inexorably weaken.
Last week he wrote openly about his condition for the first time. I have watched him over these years with admiration and horror but I did not know this piece was coming and have only read it just now. It is writing from a great controversialist, wrought from a struggle by a spirit suddenly and sadly back in mind within these office walls.
The Elgin Marbles?
'Let's not go there', is the regular and very reasonable response.
I have tended to agree. The issue is one of those which make too many people unhappy.
Until yesterday I hadn't written about the Elgin Marbles since I stopped being Editor of The Times in 2002.
Perhaps I should have kept that silence.
But, I was irritated last night by BBC reports of the Parthenon Museum opening.
And I'm now irritating commenters to this blog too.
So a few brief points tonight in response to the commenters, none of them new, all of them explained at greater length in The Parthenon, the book by my famously even-handed colleague, Mary Beard.
Was I displaying the British national characteristic of 'condescension'? Was I saying that in removing parts of the Parthenon frieze from Athens, Elgin had done 'the bloody wogs' a favour?
It is some long time, Mr Middleton, since I've heard anyone use the term 'wogs', but let's let that pass. Removing the stones almost certainly saved many of them from being ground down for Turkish lime, being damaged in the Greek war for independence or rotted by industrial pollution. But that was no part of Elgin's motivation. Nor should it be any part of the argument now.
If, on the other hand, spreading Greek culture is a 'favour' to the Greeks (and this is a moot point) Elgin certainly intended that by his acts - alongside aggrandising himself and outdoing the French. The Elgin marbles, by being in London, certainly had a transforming effect on sensibility and taste. If the definition and influence of art objects are issues in this case (and they absolutely should be), the London marbles have their own very special identity and status. They had barely ever been seen or noted in Athens at all. Only after their arrival in London, Michael, were the marbles ever judged as Greek's 'best monuments'.
Was the removal a crime? Surely looting antiquities is a crime?
If you do it now, Mr Giotis and Basil, then certainly. If you did it during a European war 200 years ago, probably not. Many acts now considered great crimes were legal when and where they were committed. Many noble acts were illegal. Many of Elgin's critics - at the time and later - can be seen now as looters outlooted. Not all the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum came from Elgin. Some were part of other collections whose legality or otherwise is equally unknown. The legality or otherwise of the Turkish permissions to Elgin does not now even constitute much of the Greek case that the marbles be given to the new Athens museum.
A crime against humanity, Panos? That's a type of crime that chosen, I suppose, because it can be prosecuted, according to recent diktat, without regard for borders or time. The marbles are extraordinary representations of humanity but let's not carried away.
How do I defend the aesthetic benefit of keeping heads and bodies separate?
If this were an ordinary debate between museums, Mr Giotis again and Dan Asta, there would be every opportunity, through long-term loans, of uniting a number of statues. If there were a plan to put together all the parts of the Parthenon in their original Acropolis places, there would be an aesthetic case for attempting that. Simply to reconstitute parts of the frieze and move it to a different museum closer to where it once was has much less clear an aesthetic benefit, arguably none at all. A powerful part of the Parthenon aesthetic is the very division that Greek politicians so deplore. But we should not blame politicians for failing to appreciate that. It is hardly their role.
Surely the Parthenon should have been left alone in the first place?
Dream on. Elgin did not pillage a neat museum to a particular idea of Greek national identity, the sort of site that visitors see now. All that gleaming whiteness came later.The removal of the marbles by Elgin was one tiny incident in constant changes - militarisation, church building, lime-manufacturing, connoisseurship and other activities of the Acropolis - over 2000 years.
Is this a 'never ending nightmare' for Greeks?
It is not for me to dispute anyone else's nightmares, Michael. But politicians can induce nightmares out of many alleged affronts and fears. If you don't like your dreams, you should look to who is causing them and benefiting from them. If the new museum increases Greek nightmares, that is much to be regretted. Whether it will enrage visitors and intensify pressure on the British Museum, I honestly rather doubt it.
High on tonight's BBC news is the opening of the Parthenon museum in Athens and the 'increased pressure' that this places on Britain to 'return' the Elgin Marbles.
The new museum, which I visited in a construction-site hard-hat with its diplomatic director two years ago, is, as was always planned, a political taunt to the British.
At that time, as I posted here, the plan was to present the Greek part of the Parthenon frieze beside copies of the British parts covered in the grey gauze of mourning.
That absurdity has been now abandoned.
But the central ambition remains - to use the world's most expensive gallery of copies to campaign for the originals to be restored to their homeland.
The BBC takes the bait and delivers the Greek message, a an aggressive taunt, one a long way removed from the subtler language deployed by scholars in recent years.
There are defiant words from a British Museum spokesman too, something along the lines that the frieze originally looked outwards to the world beyond Greece and that it continues to do that best from its London home of the past two centuries. The BM's director, well briefed no doubt on the likely events, is wisely absent.
Today's news bulletins report that the BM has offered a loan of the frieze as long as its British ownership is recognised - with portentous comment from the BBC man that no Greek politician could ever accept such terms and no query as to why not.
My colleague, Mary Beard, has already posted from the festivities. She is a most judicious authority on the issues involved. But let me put them simply.
There is no case for accepting the Greek demands except that the Greek national will to own the marbles is greater than ours.
There is no overall aesthetic case: the marbles are never going to be put back on an even partially complete 5th century Parthenon.
There is no academic case: the marbles can be studied in London - and have been exhaustively.
There is no case relating to the significance of the marbles themselves. Their power and influence over thinkers and artists has been exercised wholly in London.
From London they changed the way that representation of the human body was perceived. In Athens, from the moment they were made to the time they were removed, they were virtually invisible, not even looking outwards to the sea', in the BM spokesman's words tonight, but hidden from all but the most determined and crick-necked observers.
There is no legal case: let us not return to the Napoleonic war between England and France, in which the Greek province of the Ottoman empire was such a very small part. Even the Greek government does not lecture us on 'firmans' any more.
Nor should anyone rest the argument on the fact, well attested by Professor Beard in her blog, that the removal of the Elgin marbles to London preserved them from two further centuries of Greek pollution and neglect. That is hardly relevant now.
There is only one argument worth considering - that those of us who love Greece should agree to give the Greeks something they say they badly want, that their politicians have defined themselves by wanting, and that it is in the British power to give.
It is always pleasant to please a friend. But encouraging politicians in cheap tricks of nationalism is not a good idea. Encouraging other countries to define themselves with bits of absent gold and marble is not a good idea either.
There is nothing sadder about the party in Athens today and the past decades of Greek agitation than that a country we admire should have come to arrange its priorities in so absurd a way.
If Greek politicians had educated (or were to decide to educate) their citizens and their visitors to see the marbles for what they are - as ancient art, as tools of scholarship, as catalysts of humanism and hellensim - the copies in the new museum could be replaced on loan, probably a revolving and extended loan, by the originals.
Instead, there is to be an amplified and continuing error, a museum of synthetic national symbolism, self-defeating in its vaunted aims.
At the beginning of the week, I wondered if it wouldn't be fun to be in Athens right now. I'm glad I stayed at home.
 The part of Robinson Crusoe, as scripted by the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is no easy part for even the most responsive actor to play.
In her monologue of old age, Crusoe in England, Bishop created a hero who is as imprisoned in the hallucinatory recollections of his 'cloud-dump' island as he ever was on the island itself.
Always a writer of distorted visions, this is her masterpiece of shifting sights, memories and dissatisfaction.
The tone is querulous: "none of the books has ever got it right", says the aged survivor who was so long lost at sea.
This Crusoe had been desperate in his vicious volcanic exile among hissing hills and turtles: "'Pity should begin at home.' So the more / pity I felt, the more I felt at home."
He is no less trapped and desperate in his English retirement.
He had some sorts of good times on the island: "Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy."
And many sorts of bad times: "But then I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands ..."
Crusoe in England was performed at the British Library last night by Charles Dance - drily, thoughtfully, threateningly as though the audience, most of all, should never know the next act of his mind and eye. This was a cruelly lucid Crusoe, played as part of the latest Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a project now in its fifth year of commitment to the need for poetry to be heard on stage from great actors as well as read on pages.
This was one of the most ambitious and successful proofs of that truth.
 What does a deroga tree have in common with a gopher tree?
Once upon a time - in student days before Wikipedia -that was a challenging question.
This morning it drifted back into my mind while I was trying to avoid the Reith lectures on the car radio. I have enjoyed reading Michael Sandels in the New Republic and am fascinated to learn that this Harvard philosopher was the model for Mr Burns in The Simpsons. But lectures on the immorality of markets in traffic at 9 am? No thanks.
The poem on another part of the radio was one I hadn't heard for decades. It is called Pressed Rat and Warthog and it is spoken (and co-written, I discover) by the jazz drummer, Ginger Baker, on a record made by the once very famous rock band, Cream.
It is a sad piece about two animal characters - part Wind in the Willows, part dirty Scottish canal life - who are forced to leave their shop by an immoral marketeer of recessions in the past.
The pair have to abandon their beloved career 'selling atonal apples and amplified heat and Pressed Rat's collection of dog legs and feet'.
'The bad captain madman', had ordered their fate.
He laughed and stomped off with a nautical gait.
The gate turned into a deroga tree
And his pegleg got woodworm and broke into three.'
 All this is accompanied by mournful, trumpets, some relentlessy, nostalgic drumming by Baker, and a brief burst of the guitar-playing that made Eric Clapton the God of those days.
But what was a deroga tree?
The answer - eventually given to me by an enthusiastic teacher trying to make classical issues relevant to his pupils - was that it was a hapax.
What was a hapax?
A hapax was a word that only ever appeared once - in a language or a body of writing.
So it was often very difficult to say what any hapax meant.
The gopher tree, which appears only once in the bible, is also a hapax.
The oldest Greek has many hapaxes, names for forgotten farming instruments and sexual instruments that early scholars thought were more suitably translated as sea creatures. Classics and critical theory can take the hapax a long way. I wrote a piece about this once which, by the magic of search engines, I have just been able to read again.
The deroga tree seems to be a joke spelling of derogatory. Captain Madman's walking gait turns into a wooden gate and then into an adjective and then back into a woodwormy, wooden leg.
In the days before Wikipedia it was not so easy to discover a fact like that. How many books on trees did you need to read in order to be sure that a deroga or a gopher did not exist except as members of that exclusive linguistic hapax band?
 What do Biennalers do when they hate what's in front of them?
Criticise? Protest? Walk out? Not even walk in?
I'm phrasing the question like that because I see that the bass guitarist Hugh Hopper has just died. His band, Soft Machine, was the first act that I ever saw booed, shouted, pelted and abused offstage.
That was at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange in around 1967, a scene about as far from Venice 2009 as anyone could imagine, a nasty incident when an audience expecting Gino Washington's Ram Jam Band had to watch instead the most 'avant garde art-rock act' of their time.
It is not an incident that figures in Hopper's obituary. Probably it happened all the time. But it made a big impact on me. I went on to collect Soft Machine albums for years.
 At a Biennale the biggest way to show offence is to walk through quickly with a smile and a yawn. The Swiss pavilion offers good examples. So does the Scottish, where grey slabs of stone, plastic autumn leaves and a few rooms of metal furniture do not even earn the smile.
Alternatively you can shout - at the presence of Berlusconi or at assorted images of artists' priapic parts.
The veteran journalist, Anthony Haden-Guest, whom I hadn't seen for many years till the Daily Beast's Biennale party, gives the Beast the best and fullest account so far of what's been going on, including a range of answers to the questions above.
I have not seen all of the Danish pavilion that he talks about, only the dead man
outside in the swimming pool (see previous post). There is an excellent Art Beast account of this too.
What am I applauding? What would get from me the Gino Washington rather than the Soft Machine response of Chelmsford forty years ago?
If clapping were an option in the artworld, which it seem not to be, top of my list would be Fiona Tan in the pavilion of the Dutch.
If I can find an expert appreciation of her I'll post it here before I give up the world of blogging Venice and return to books and a bit more sanity.
 What is the theme of this Venice Biennale?
People who ought to know that better than I do are asking me.
The official theme is 'Making Worlds', the idea (I hesitate whether to put quote marks round the word) that artists do not make objects, they make worlds.
I cannot argue with that. I cannot see any meaning in it either. 'Making Worlds' is Biennale language, demanding admiration but resisting argument. That is certainly a theme of a kind.
This is also supposed to the 'retro' Biennale. The Italians are celebrating their Futurists. Among the 90 artists selected by curator, Daniel Birnbaum, there are the old and even the dead, a choice that seems to have surprised regular attenders.
Birnbaum is an enthusiast for the idea (no quote marks needed here) that the old looks different after consideration of the new, that 'Cezanne is another artist after Picasso, that Picasso retroactively made Cezanne into what he is'. Fine.
And 'isn't Gordon Matta-Clark a little bit of a different artist after Rirkrit Tiravanija?' I'm sure he is.
Birnbaum says that he is is not in thrall to youth. 'Not every artist who is new or doing something fresh or interesting is 27 years old' he says. 'Art is not like ice hockey'. Excellent.
And Retro, it should be added, is also comforting in troubled economic times. Old artists have, at least, proved their value once.
Amongst the more than a thousand objects there is perhaps one other strong comfort for this year's Venice visitors.
With no bathing facilities for the Biennale unless we want to risk the canals, there are refreshing images of men in water everywhere, on video, in installations and on paper.
True, the very popular bather outside the Danish pavilion is definitely dead. Only his shoes and socks are by the poolside. He himself is floating face downwards to the bottom of the deep end and his watch and pack of Marlboro.
But the swimming man in Jan Fabre's set of massive stage states next to Trimalchio's Feast (see first post) is stronger, a muscled black man rather than an hedonist Dane, floating on a peacock green sea under a matching chandelier. He seems probably to be alive, unlike the owner of the giant head which an archaelogist is excavating with a spade a few yards away. He still has all his limbs, unlike the urinating corpses in the delicate frieze of images which surround the walls.
If I had to pick a Biennale theme at the moment, it would be Fabre's swimmer.
 It is not easy for a newcomer to see the jokes at the Venice Biennale.
Take that gondola floating in the canal by the Arsenale, the one sliced in half below the waterline and covered in white paper, the one whose gondolier is waving a red paper fish at the end of a rod. Is it a piece of art or a satire upon the world's biggest art-fest or even both?
Or the pile of books by the Biennale shop door? Surely the editor of the TLS should be on securer ground here. Is a wall of the self-help best-seller It's Not How Good You Are But How Good You Want To Be a witty comment on artistic pretension, a practical guide to exhibitors or a better way than art books of making money for the shop?
Aleksandra Mir's A Million Free Postcards From Venice (see previous post) is an excellent joke. I hope the Private-Viewers of the past three days, who've stuffed their free bags with pictures of big game and icebergs stamped as a gift from Venice, have left a few behind for the paying punters.
Richard Wentworth's hanging mobile of dictionaries pierced by wires also produced a few appreciative smiles. Stand underneath it, like a baby in a cot beneath a set of pink rabbits, and you can read the titles, Finnish by A.H.Whitney, Learn Teluga in 30 Days, Collins Italian Dictionary, A Dictionary of Current American Usage. Each one is strung out below a dark iron frame and secured by a steel knot.
Apart from art catalogues (about which more maybe later) there are not so many books at the Biennale that a TLS editor can pass quickly by a show like that one.
Wentworth, one of the leading British exhibitors, has an additional claim on fame. He is said to have once lent a bicycle to Yoko Ono who included it in a sculpture of her own and never paid him for a new one.
Since John Lennon's widow has been awarded a Golden Lion life-time achievement award at the 2009 Biennale, there will be the perfect opportunity here to ask her again.
 Next week the world's biggest art party will be open to the public. For holidaying visitors to Venice it will be their first chance to see what thousands of museum curators, critics and gallery owners are glorying in right now, modest metal tables from Scotland, hardly-moving movies from Holland, massive Japanese breasts, Korean views of condensation and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms (from the USA, I think), everything that makes up the Venice Biennale.
This is my first time here. Even for a veteran of political conventions, literary fairs and other press-fests, the mass of bombast and bullshit in search of beauty takes some serious personal adjustment. Over the next week I may come to make some sense of it.
For the moment, the three-day 'private-view' is almost over. All the highest-rolling Biennalistas are moving on - to their business home in Basel where they hope to buy and sell to each other rather than to whoop it up at each other's expense. Next week, for the professionals, it will be back to the doom-laden trade of finding the big customers of 2009. For this Biennale amateur there is merely the task in the next few days of trying to understand something of all this.
So far, I seem to be at loose among free-flowing Bellini-drinkers and feverishly fierce competitors for who gets the most desirable free canvas bag. FYI to next week's visitors: if you find the one that says 'it's so easy to fuck up but I'm too fucking old now to care' you have got the one that most people want. I have already failed that test for myself, ending up with only a much lesser collection to carry my books through the rest of the summer, totemic-energy-dragons, lobsters and designer-carrots.
But there is a lot of other free stuff to be had, some of it exhibits themselves, like a million holiday postcards from different places around the world, all stamped VENEZIA - elephant packs from Venice, ice flows from Venice, Westminsters from Venice. One of the themes this year is that everywhere in the world is more or less the same place.
The private-viewers very much like the free stuff. Throughout the official and unofficial sites that dot the city there are free iced coffees (from the Illy company that sees its product as essential to fine art), free art books each one of a weight that could kill a man, not to mention again the city's peach-and-prosecco cocktails upon which any art lover can become an instant connoisseur. Of course, if you want to drink a free Bellini on Roman Abramovic's yacht, you may be unlucky. That is an invite of even greater rarity than a 'too fucking old to care bag'. But anyone less fussy is fine.
I have just been to a splendid Russian event. In a brick warehouse in the Arsenale there were tall women in gladiator shoes and killer stilettoes taking canapes and peach drinks from black-suited waiters while watching a giant circular screen on which actors, with only a mildly more malevolent gaze, were doing much the same. It was wonderful, the 'world premiere' of a video installation with the title - unusually comforting for a classicist at the Biennale - of Trimalchio's Feast.
This was nothing too excessive, quite a gentle introduction to the big event. Neither in the audience nor on screen was there anything hard-core, nothing even like the sort of exoticism that excited Petronius, the original Roman author of the Feast in the age of Nero: I neither saw, nor was offered, any hot dinner dish from which live birds flew. There were only eery scenes of seaside decadence, understated sadism with golf clubs and a narrative of what might happen if a tsunami hit the the wrong rich holiday makers at the wrong time.
The audience seemed to like it alot, not just because of the piles of free badges declaring 'Unconditional Love', nor even because the alternative video show was of an interrogator repeatedly banging a young woman's head into a barrel of water. Trimalchio's Feast, with its Gatsby echoes, glossy sex and flying saucers, seems to me an excellent way to have started my Biennale.
The video makers are offering their own free bags here too. A New Zealander who thought (wrongly, I suspect) that this one was the true 'best bag', leant heavily over a table of drinks to see if he could get his prize, bringing upon himself only a hard stare from one of the women in black behind the bar.
'Could I buy one?', he then asked desperately, uttering words more alien here than almost any he could have chosen.
'Sorry, I don't know', she replied not very sweetly.
'I'm just the artist'.
Exit stout visitor, without gift but still fit to fight another day.
(More blogging from Venice will follow here later, perhaps something more serious, certainly with pictures when a little technical difficulty of the not very high-end-art kind has been overcome.)
 I wrote last week about which Shakespeare plays might appeal to Guantanamo Bay detainees who can now read them in Arabic in the camp library.
But which plays would it do them good to read? That is the question posed by TLS reader, Michael Jenning of Van Nuys California.
He is not concerned that inmates find comforting scenes of wrongful imprisonment (Measure for Measure) or sleep deprivation (Taming of the Shrew) - more that they should see in Shakespeare the error of their own worst ways.
So it's Romeo and Juliet, whose hero and heroine are shown here on 'their first anniversary'.
"Given the tendencies of many of the inmates at Guantanamo, it's likely they'd be aggravated by a family whose daughter's affections have been captured by a member of a group of which they don't approve.
It might make them long for the days of cutting the throats of wayward daughters, or tossing acid in their faces, or stoning them to death."
Or alternatively, they might see the benefit in that benign peace-bringer who makes everything alright in Verona in the end. That's the beauty of Shakespeare.You can never be sure.
 The 'travel issue' of the TLS that goes to press tomorrow is, as you'd expect, not the normal summer holiday guide. Our TLS-travellers fabricate absurd histories for other peoples (Arthur Evans in Crete); or they love Florence but hate the Florentines (almost every nothern European in 1900); or they visit Mauritius and kill all the dodos; and many more tales of bad trips besides.
The dodo is sometimes seen as an especially baleful example of travelling man's destruction of non-travelling non-man. But this famously extinct creature, whose last relics are pored at every day by Alice-in-Wonderland tourists in Oxford's Natural History Museum, is, instead, one of very many.
Most holidaying bird-lovers have their own favourites on their lists - or rather no longer on their lists. A decade ago OUP published a miserably titled and magnificently illustrated book, Extinct Birds, in which Errol Fuller set out the full picture of the destruction, including one of the most horrific and absurd losses, one that has always stuck in my own mind and which occurred in the last thirty years.
The Atitlan Grebe can only be imagined now. It was part of my imaginings this morning because I woke up to a particularly magnificent display on the Thames by its more sucessful Great Crested cousin.
The black-and-white flightless Aitilan was last seen in 1987. It was extinguished by Pan Am (now, appropriately enough, an extinct airline), holidaying fishermen who wanted bigger fish, holidaying souvenir-seekers who wanted more rush mats and, as is so often the way, by flying grebe tourists who saw a better life on a high Guatemalan lake than they had at home.
All grebes are amazing creatures, as I once tried to explain in the TLS myself. They have more feathers than any other birds. Many of them eat their feathers so that their stomachs can be constantly scoured of the disgusting other stuff they eat. Both sexes carry their young on their back. Indeed both sexes share almost all child-care functions - as is vigorously visible on the Thames.
The Atitlán Grebe was first described in 1929 by the American ornithilogist Ludlow Griscom. The population seems never to have been high and dropped from about 200 to 80 as a result of competition and predation by large-mouth bass introduced into the lake in 1960 to attract Pan Am's frequent flying fishermen.
Atitlan numbers recovered to a high of 232 in 1975 when the bass, which fed off the grebes' favourite crabs, were themselves reduced by rod and line. But the loss of breeding sites to mat-making reed-cutters and other tourism development set them back. So did the murder of a government game warden in 1982 and falling lake levels following an earthquake.
Both man and nature, it seemed, were against the Atitlan Grebe. Its pied-bill cousins, smaller but able to fly, arrived for a campaign of vigorous inter-breeding. In 1980 there were fifty left on the mile-high Lake Atitlan which gave the bird its name. In 1983 there were 32. In 1987 another name was added to the Dodo-list.
Some eighty bird species have expired since the seventeenth century when the Mauritius remains headed off for Oxford and a few travellers started noticing. I don't suppose tourism can be blamed for every loss. Before I read further into OUP's Extinct Birds, there are just a few more details to be fixed on the TLS travel issue that will be winging its way to subscribers on Wednesday.
 Seven years before Waugh published Scoop, A. A. Milne wrote his own novel of a country writer caught up in city ways - complete with a proto-Lord Copper, a spiv reviewer, a thieving agent and an assortment of other delightful literary types.
Two People is the story of a marriage between a beautiful woman who loves the high life and an unexpectedly successful writer who loves bee-keeping. It is not often read - though compared with Milne's stories of Pooh Bear almost nothing is 'often read' - and, when referred to at all, it is in relation to Milne's own marriage and the difficult family life of the genius who gave Christopher Robin his Tigger and Eeyore.
Capuchin Classics has just reissued this cautionary tale for writers and their relatives, Milne's first attempt at an adult novel, written when the pleasure of Pooh-celebrity was beginning to pall. It is charming always and chilling sometimes too.
There is also a reference I'd never seen before to the thrill of awaking to receive the first six copies of one's novel and one's first review in the TLS, drawing "attention in a kindly way to the superficial area of the book, seven and a half by five and a half".
"This was news to Reginald who had never measured it. He measured it now and found that The Times, as usual, was right. He wondered idly if there was a man in the office who did this, and nothing but this. An interesting job which brought one into contact with good literature, yet made no unfair demand on the intellect . Vaguely he sketched out in his mind an application for the post".
Such a fine satirist, that A.A.Milne.
TLS readers are beginning to respond to my short piece at the front of the paper this week noting that Shakespeare in Arabic is available in the Guantanamo prison library (see official picture above) and wondering which plays would be most popular there.
My first thought was Measure for Measure, which begins with what might be an encouraging scene, a hero locked up for something that he did not know was illegal.
The Tempest provides escapist fantasies for reluctant island dwellers: though any inmate expecting repentance from the bad duke who imprisoned Prospero in the first place will be disappointed.
Students of Taming of the Shrew may see some unexpected sources for the use of surveillance, hunger and sleep deprivation: "She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat; / Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not . . . / And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl, / And with the clamour keep her still awake". An attentive guard may, however, have censored Petruchio’s plans for his wife.
But much the favourite among the new suggestions is the prison scene in Twelfth Night and Feste's inventive means of persuading Malvolio that he is mad.
Note: others of our topical Page Three images are from today available as a slideshow on our website.
Thanks to the comments of Alex Drace-Francis I am warming to the seminar-room -politics of Africa - the chance to get away from the TLS shelves from time to time, away even from the excitement of Westminster expenses and to discuss the end of civil wars, the problem of putting armies back to peaceful purpose, to meet men whose private planes attract bombs and bullets not media outrage. For an editor steeped in Roman history and just a bit bored now by the British politics of tax-payer funded duck-islands, could anything be better than a quick session on the Cote d'Ivoire?
 Last week it was a seminar on Sudan that encouraged the comment here that I should get out from behind the bookshelves a bit more. So, yesterday there was the chance to see a little known Prime Minister selling his wares - ostensibly cocoa but probably more than that - who has just led an army into an interim government, who is not himself a candidate in the Cote d'Ivoire presidential election, but who promised his London audience that everything, while he kept his severe eye on the vote, would be just fine.
I haven't seen any media coverage of Guillaume Soro's trip to London. The seminar was on Chatham House rules which prevent direct quotation - but probably allow the reflection that the blue baize table, and matching uniform for a single, tea-pouring aide-de-camp seemed to suit the wary warrior. If you have fought your way to power - and for various reasons - are not putting yourself before voters this next time, St James's Square is the place you need to be. You can meet the influential seminarians who may support you on another occasion - or even your cocoa-selling campaign.
Some of the electoral difficulties are similar to the Sudan's - the registration of voters (the country appears to allow a very restricted franchise, less than half the population, but the casual seminar attender should be careful of too much detail), the discouragement of armed men manipulating the vote (Mr Soro spoke confidently of how he could do that), the fundamental problem of replacing war with peace quickly and by somewhat unaccustomed democratic means.
A student seminar attender would at this point have to reprise the recent history of Cote d'Ivoire (as it likes to be called) or Ivory Coast (as it's more often called). Personally, I haven't called it anything for years. But I will point the reader to Wikipedia with the confidence that its assessment, on this bit of West Africa, will be better than anything I can do.
It is a fascinating and complex story. I'd certainly take away a reading list.
Perhaps the TLS will receive some future hard-back account of this man who, in a mildly Caesarian way, seems to control elections he can't stand in, whose soldiers are almost out of politics but, in an equally Roman way, not quite. Prime Minister Soro has survived one Ides of March already.
He commanded the close attention of his hearers on the blue-leather, baize-and-uniform-matching chairs, including this one. In the best seminar spirit, I ended up wishing him well - before slipping next door into the London Library for the latest news from the more elderly years of a democratic process, those outrageous claims for wisteria-cutting, TV-viewing and a decent home for ducks to sleep safe from foxes.
Alex Drace-Francis is a historian of Romania whose views have to be considered with respect and care. He judges it 'Amazing!' that I 'finally went to a university seminar and learnt something'. I reported 'well', he says, on an evening last week at SOAS when distinguished observers of the electoral processes of Sudan told Londoners what was going on in that very strange country. He wants 'more, please'.
Bloggers need to be ever conscious of those who post them comments. So I am wondering which university seminar I might report on next. All suggestions welcome.
Traditionally, a TLS editor reads and writes about books, most recently, in my case, an unusual trilogy of Greek tragedies published by the Canadian poet, Anne Carson. Perhaps this bias has to change. So, in the meantime:
Imagine an Old Testament movie epic in which only the Genesis part is filmed by Cecil B. DeMille, Exodus goes to Alfred Hitchcock and Deuteronomy to Quentin Tarantino. The laws of Israel would still arise from the birth of the world and the lives of Abraham and Moses. But the differences in the storytelling would be stark, striking, revelatory maybe, but with the ever-present peril of lapse into an extended overstatement, an educational aid, a film-school history project.
An Oresteia is Anne Carson's application of this technique to the bible of the Ancient Greeks, the central tragic story of King Agamemnon's victorious return from the Trojan War, how his wife murdered him in his bath and how his children, Orestes and Electra, avenged that murder.
Aeschylus, the grand originator of Greek tragedy, told the whole story in his own Oresteia trilogy. But Carson translates only Act One from him; Acts Two and Three come from her previously composed versions of later plays by Sophocles and Euripides, allowing the Canadian modern poet and University of Michigan classics professor to display the history of early theatre in a single theatrical event.
The art of Greek tragedy, like that of 20th-century cinema, grew fast when it was young. Aeschylus, writing in the middle of the fifth century BC, after Athens had first established its strength in the Persian Wars, set out a confident saga of man resolving problems of divine law. Should children avenge a father's murder, or was the act of killing a mother a crime far worse?
Aeschylus's answer, reached after hours of grand high drama, was to hand the decision to a popular court, helped by a suitably progressive representative from Mount Olympus. The cycle of violence is ended by the judicious application of democracy.
Carson's selection from Aeschylus, which covers Agamemnon's homecoming and murder, not their consequences, conveys powerfully the playwright's struggle to bend a language to the new demands of a young art, his compounding of words into a "griefremembering pain" and "purplepaved, redsaturated path."
Sophocles saw both what Aeschylus had achieved — and not achieved. As a politician and general, he was as committed as Aeschylus to the advance of the Athenian empire; he himself fought in its battles. As a theatre writer, he cared more about the possibilities of individual character that accompanied power. His tragedy, Electra, the second in Carson's An Oresteia (and which she renders as Elektra), is for most of its length an obsessive expression of personal grief from a daughter about her father's murder, Western literature's first great delineation of one woman's mind.
Carson's own poetic range, proved over the years by novel renderings of Simonides and Sappho, allows her to vary and invigorate the rolling metaphors of Electra's assault on Clytemnestra and her lover: "You are some sort of punishment cage/ locked around my life./ Evils from you, evils from him/ are the air I breathe."
Euripides, the third of the men who defined Greek tragedy, is represented in this modern trilogy by his Orestes, a subversive farce that stands far from the courtroom finale to the story that Aeschylus had offered 50 years before. Euripides was a contemporary of Sophocles but not a politician himself; he was an occasional diplomat and elegist of the glorious dead, but his dyspeptic feelings about the world — during a war against Sparta that Athens was beginning to lose — are clear from all his plays, not least this last of Carson's trilogy. This is the story of how Orestes and Electra, brother and sister in the crime of mother-killing, are on the run in central Greece, contemplating kidnap, further murder and blackmail. Orestes is the only one of these plays where Tarantino would feel at home.
The god Apollo brings Euripides's play — and this whole modern show — to an end, just as he did for Aeschylus, this time not by a cliff-hanger casting vote in a courtroom but by forcing Orestes to marry his kidnapped cousin. The trial verdict is already fixed, nothing to worry about, with just a few small details to be tied up, as Carson has it: "Then go to Athens and stand trial for matricide./ Trust me. You'll win. And this girl whose throat is being grazed/ by your sword,/ Hermione, you'll marry./ I know she's supposed to marry somebody/ else (Neoptolemos, I think)/ but I'll see to it he dies."
This is a level of bathos — after what would probably be some five hours in the theatre — that a modern director determined on the decline of imperialist adventurism, in Athens and everywhere else, could deploy to full effect. Carson credits the commissioning of An Oresteia to the director of New York's Classic Stage Company, Brian Kulick. Reports of its opening last month, which I did not see, were mixed — with some disquiet expressed over an excess of political direction and a lack of unity in the tragic whole. It is not hard to see that happening.
For all the three tragedians' differences — and for all the artistic developments in their approach that have been analyzed by critics for 2,400 years — there was a sure and common expression of awe in Greek theatre, a sense that man and god, however their dealings might be revered, sidelined or mocked, were part of a true mystery, presented by rituals which, whoever was writing the script, remained largely unchanged. Carson understands and communicates that truth to her readers. It would not be surprising if directors found that task much more difficult — even with the elegant tools that this fine modern translator has given them.
Until 7.30 last night the sum of my knowledge of the politics of Sudan could have been written on a Khartoum postage stamp or the place on a pocket atlas that might or might not be Chad.
Thanks to an excellent discussion at SOAS, just around the corner from the TLS office, I now have a clear view of the upcoming Sudanese elections next year and the referendum on the future of the place (one country or two?) which is planned for 2011.
Anyone who wants to get up to speed with me can check out the Rift Valley Institute website and read Professor Woodward's, Atta al-Battahani's and Justin Willis's report. The general prognosis seemed, however, so gloomy (a voting sytem that even political scientists find taxing, vastly illiterate voters, utterly uneven access to campaign finance, one civil war that at least for a while has ended, another that has added Darfur to the international lexicon of horror) that the enthusiasm of the participants seemed almost a miracle.
Attempting to increase my knowledge to enough for a postcard not just its stamp, or for the huge area of an African atlas covered by Sudan itself, I tried to find out over a glass of SOAS white wine what the election was going to be about, who were the big figures, what were the decisive national issues.
Even to ask those questions, it transpires, reveals one's Chad-sized, second-class-postage understanding of Sudan. The place does not, apparently, have national politicians or national debates or leaders who want to argue for votes. If I didn't know that, I didn't know anything.
Quite.
I was still left wondering quite where my friends' careful analysis could now go. What sort of democracy are you going to get when all the normal journalistic questions are met with a 'not really a Sudanese thing'.
What's going to happen there?
Search me. Search the SOAS folk too.
By the second glass of wine, I'd worked out that a 'one-country-two-cultures' solution would be good - a kind of massive Belgium with sand.
A 'two-countries-one-peace-accord' would be OK too. A sort of EU after a few centuries of false starts.
A 'one-country-military-repression' was now very hard to see: that sounded promising.
A 'two-countries-sporadic-warfare' solution seemed more likely. Think Ethiopia and Eritrea, said my fellow wine-sipper. And I did, trying to remember just how bad that had been.
Everyone agreed that the coming elections were of real importance, deserving of much more international oversight and support,
But, however it works out, we can be confident that our best democratic processes, first-past-the-posts, party-lists, all-women-lists, proportional representation, all applied at once without political leaders to make life complicated, will have played their full and proper part.
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