Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Book-blogaholica

My blogging friend, Mary Beard, came into the TLS office yesterday, looked around, as usual, to see which new classics books I'd 'borrowed' from her desk and said that that there was something about me in The Independent.

I must have flinched.

Times have changed. The Independent is not my bitter rival as it was in the 1980s and 90s. I am not now the Editor of the newspaper it was attempting to supplant.

But a trace memory of something nasty perhaps remains - particularly in the early office morning. During all those battling-for-circulation 'Times vs Independent' days, any mention of me in the opposition paper was unlikely to be something good.

'No', she said. 'There's a review there of a new book about literary blogs and it's very nice about yours'.

A new book about literary blogs?

Bizarre.

We'll be blogging about books about blogs about books next - a meta-feast for meta-critics everywhere.

Pornography? Bound to be

The naked blond woman, Oothon, chained to the bearded hulk, Bromion, who has raped her, and now ignored by the man she wants, is an iconic image by William Blake.

What is it about?

Originally the frontispiece to Blake's poem 'Daughters of Albion', it appears prominently in the current Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, From Reason to Revolution, as part of the anti-slavery exhibits.

The helpless lover, Theotormon, the Cambridge catalogue tells us, is 'perhaps signifying the powerlessness of the liberals to prevent slavery'.

'Blake certainly', we are told, 'highlights sexual violence, one of the evils of the slave trade, which anticipates sex-trafficking in the modern world'.

'The figures are white rather than black, perhaps because Blake though he might provoke more sympathy from white readers if white people were depicted in shackles'.

Sir Paul gets back

We're staging the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse this week.

Paul McCartney was the big act last night - with strenuous official effort all round to keep the vegetarians happy and the ticket touts not.

Everyone of his many contemporaries there (the women more enthusiastically than the men) said how good Sir Paul looked -  with his bass guitar of old, dark haired and jacketed, slim in waist and necktie.

He sounded much the same too - to anyone who hadn't focussed much on his music for the past couple of decades.

That was most of us, I think.

It was inevitably one of those 'where was I when I last?' evenings.

And maybe not just for the audience.

After only minute or two out on the stage Sir Paul paused, shook his head and looked out with a feint air of puzzlement .

He said that it had been 'a while' since he'd been at the Roundhouse.

A while?

A long while?

What did we think?

Was he thinking of a particular event in the past - as he began his happy way through the Beatles back catalogue casting a nostalgic glow wherever he turned?

Hard to say at the time. But at the TLS you can sometimes find answers even to a question like that.

According to a biography in our shelves (it's amazing what we keep) he was at the Roundhouse in 1966 - dressed in a cloak of flowing Arab robes for a concert of 'screeching feedback effects courtesy of Pink Floyd'.

And last perhaps in 1967 - for  two Roundhouse performances of his 'Carnival of Light, close on fifteen minutes of 'randomised freak-out', with reverse tapes, distorted guitar, a sound like someone gargling and John Lennon's voice shouting Barcelona.

Was he remembering that? Did he specifically recall the robes, the gargling and the reading from the Spanish atlas?

Or, if you're Paul McCartney, is the past just a vast smokey mix of rumour, rubbish and other people's imagined sightings?

Merely things that might be memories when you're singing 'Get Back'?

Ted Hughes and John Carey: a healing

The poet, Ted Hughes, we are told by the editor of his letters, never again spoke to the Sunday Times reviewer and polemical Oxford professor, John Carey, after a row over Hughes's critical work 'Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'.

Carey admired Hughes's poetry but considered his trespassing on to this professorial patch as 'critically worthless'.

There followed one of those acid exchanges of letters in The Sunday Times, much beloved by all literary editors  - and then, it seems, silence.

The newly published selection of Hughes's massive correspondence reveal a touching attempt by the Poet Laureate to put the matter to rest.

Hughes concludes a letter to Carey just before he died: 'Please don't write back. Let's just leave things to heal over as for me they have done'.

Carey did write back, the book's editor Christopher Reid tells us. But Hughes may have been too ill to read what he wrote.

Yesterday in the Sunday Times Carey wrote back in public, powerfully praising Hughes's poetic legacy and touching gently too his somewhat eccentric views on the links between poetry and the body.

"He could tell, just from reading the plays, that Shakespeare “obviously” suffered from irregular heart rhythm. Poetry, like the “magnetism” of a faith healer, could repair damaged cells, whereas prose could do the opposite.

After being diagnosed with cancer, he came to think that writing his prose treatise Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being had destroyed his immune system.

Ever since the 17th century, English society had, he believed, mounted a systematic campaign of censorship and prohibition to stamp out truths like these, and to impose its puritanical restrictions on sexuality, which alone “carries the seeds of humanity and joy”.

He knew his beliefs exposed him to ridicule, but his letters make us see how vital they were for his poetry".

Carey does not mention his own part in this late-life drama for Hughes. But the passion of it comes through all the same.

Curiously, I had thought of mentioning the row in the review of the Letters I wrote the day before in The Times.

I'm very pleased I did not.

A healing over?

Yes, a very elegant healing.

Who is the most irritating politician of them all?

In the letters of Ted Hughes, which I've reviewed in The Times this morning, there is a description which is already getting me into trouble.

It is not one of the late Poet Laureate's 'tributes' to his fellow writers.

No one has complained of my citing Hughes on an evening of Harold Pinter, “the stuffed head of a white walrus mounted on the tail of a bad herring”;

Nor the one of  the author Donald Davie, “a kind of parasite in the crutch and armpit of poetry”.

Or even of Philip Larkin: “spermicide”.

I have allegedly been mean in picking out Hughes's 1986 description of the all-purpose Tory politician, John Gummer, in his time as fisheries minister.

In the poet's letter to his fish-scientist son, Nicholas,  the sometime party chairman and cabinet minister “ looks somehow like a paper clip, a bit like a going-out tray loosely jammed into a coming-in tray, a bit like a cold cup of instant coffee at 10-20”.

Greeks vs Romans: the result

In the end the chairman called yesterday's close-fought TLS debate for the Greeks. Listen here if you want to hear it.

At the start of the event a show of hands from the 400 in the Everyman Theatre revealed a small and unexpected Roman majority.

The Romans, it seemed, had done more for us - or at least for Cheltenham - than the Greeks had.

But at the end of a high-impact hour of gladiatorial argument, our Hellenist champion, Edith Hall, had turned round enough men and women voters to scrape home.

Mary Beard fought as hard as any legionary, defending the beer-drinking soldiers of Hadrian's Wall against a high-minded Hall assault on their poor spelling and restricted vocabulary.

But Beard's countering of pure Greek science with applied Roman skills,Greek logical philosophy with Roman running water, did not play as strongly with the audience as one might have expected.

Too complacent about their comfort perhaps in this Gloucestershire spa town.

The bloody bouts of the arena - raised by an early questioner - also played against the Roman case.

The Beard strategy was to claim that both Roman and Greek societies operated equal-opportunities-for-cruelty.

This worked with the slavery argument. Both were accepted as bad on that score.

But the idea of Greek gladiators and beast-fights never caught on. Not enough movie exposure, I guess.

The Beard case that much less Roman Colosseum activity took place than we think (just too expensive) was also not quite believed.

Does nothing fail to happen in Cheltenham just because it's too expensive?

The pace of argument was furious - with one lady audience-member asking for a little less adrenalin ten minutes into the first half.

The Roman side did well on war and terrorism-control, on the secret ballot and the multiculturalist skills of running big cities and empires.

But again the gentle town of Cheltenham was perhaps not quite right for that. War was bad anyway. Science and philosophy were good. The purer the better.

Professor Beard accused Professor Hall of using Greek sophistry - of choosing different bits of the Greek world to support different arguments.

Professor Hall smiled and continued. Protagoras and his sophist friends would have been proud.

The TLS chairman was proud of them both - and of everyone else who turned out at 10 am on a Saturday morning for such an educative scrap.

One for the Greeks

It is a very short list.

Six plays alone should settle the Greeks' superiority over the Romans. (See previous post)

Agamemnon, Eumenides, King Oedipus, Electra, Bacchae, Medea.

A mere two titles each from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides must be enough to prove that that we will be wasting our time at the TLS debate at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday.

The playwrights of 5th century Athens have to win it for the Greeks - or so claimed the man beside me in the bar before the opening of the 'Cambridge Greek play' last night.

He was maybe a little biased.

He had a brown scholarly edition of Medea in his hand.

Every three years since the Second World War - and iregularly before that since 1882 - there has been a production of an ancient Greek play in Cambridge, in the original ancient Greek language.

And it is useful for even the finest scholars - the strongest supporters of Greek supremacy over the big issues of all time - to refresh themslves with a Sauvignon Blanc and the more difficult choral odes before the show begins.

Greeks vs Romans: YOU DECIDE

Outside a party of the great-and-good by the Thames last night I met an old friend, a great-and-good Greek.

He had noticed not only the TLS's latest classics issue -

and the beginings of what will doubtless be a lengthy row in our letters page over sex in ancient temples and theatres -

but the choice of subject for our TLS debate at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday.

Greeks vs Romans.

That's what we are going to consider.

What has each civilisation done for us?

What is each still doing?

Before our audience at Cheltenham, the distinguished scholar and TLS contributor, Edith Hall, will speak for the Greeks.

Birthplace of democracy, tragedy, philosophy, k.t.l. (as we say in Greek when we mean etcetera).

Need she say more? And I'm sure she will be clearer than the image of her book-cover that I've found - and can't quite improve.

My colleague, and fellow blogger, Mary Beard, will wave a spear (and her excellent new book on the Roman Triumph) for the Romans.

Warfare, roads, aqueducts, the secret ballot et cetera (as we more normally say).

She will doubtless list much more. And her books on sale will have the title visible - unlike the closest image of it that I can find right now.

My Greek friend last night was appalled that we should even ask the question.

Obviously it was the Greeks.

The Thameside party was to celebrate a new list of the 1000 most influential people in London today.

'Influential', he spluttered.

We don't even know the meaning of the word.

The thousand people who've had most influence on London today were all Greeks.

Well, perhaps a very few Romans.

It's 'a point of view' - as we chairmen of events at literary festivals say when we have run out of polite excuses to move on.

If any reader of this blog is in the Cheltenham, area on Saturday morning, why not join us.

Will it be a cold winter?

Without the 'pig spleen prognosticator'  how will we ever know?

It may seem a long haul from a new Greco-Roman history book on the TLS table to a Saskatchewan weather forecaster with a taste for unusual animal parts.

But that is the journey for today.

Daryn Lehoux's new examination of ancient weather predictions begins not with Aristotle but with Gus Wickstrom, a Canadian farmer, who, readers are told, 'predicts how cold the coming winter will be. .by looking at the thickness and texture of pig spleens'.

Sometimes 'he also chews on the spleen, raw'.

As a TLS rationalist I should have just bypassed this introduction and continued with the book - which looks to be a fasinating account of the ideas and machinery used by the ancients to forecast the weather.

But, instead,  I googled for Mr Wickstrom's prediction

I wanted to know how my newly planted trees might fare in the coming months,.

What's his favourite chewy porcine body bit saying for 2007/8?

The webmessage from Mr Wickstrom is, sadly, clearer and more unequivocal than most forecasts ever are.

The great man is no more.

The Youtube clip seems to prove it.

The renowned 'pig spleen prognosticator' died of pneumonia - but after Mr Lehoux's book went to press.

So I am going straight to Chaper Two and the predictive charms of the Parapegma, an ancient stone (see one above) with holes for pegs and labels for cities, moons and planets.

On which, more later.

Times Square TLS

I have long thought that the name of the Times Literary Supplement should be up in Times Square lights.

And once about every fifteen minutes -  thanks to our good friends in NewYork - it now is.

OK. We're not there all the time.

You have to be patient.

OK. If you're not feeling patient, we're up there at about 5, 19, 39 and 52 minutes past the hour.

Subscribe today. That's the idea of it all.

Subscribe today.

As we used to say in mere words - before we were illuminated.

Happy Burma

Owing to their gay and lively disposition the Burmese have sometimes been called 'the Irish of the East'.

And, like the Irish, they are somewhat inclined to laziness.

So judged the expert on this 'province of British India' in that always wonderful work of reference, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

At that time the British had the right not only to patronise the Burmese - whose children were said to be 'the happpiest and merriest children in the world' - but the responsibility to  govern them too.

We had taken over the place some fifty or so years before.

True, this was more to spite the French and protect our India than from any interest in Burma itself.

There might have been some late ninteenth century 'scramble for China' to match the 'scramble for Africa' - and we couldn't be too careful.

But Burma was still our show just the same.