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The Style Council

May 1, 2024 by NevilleMorley

Henry Farrell – who has been on a storming run of insights so far this year, and if you don’t already follow his Substack you need to start forthwith – posted an especially interesting piece at the beginning of last month, considering the relationship between developments in contemporary SF (Hari Kunzru’s account of the Apocalyptic Systems Thriller such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future) and non-fiction accounts of complex systems such as Farrell’s own Underground Empire (with Abraham Newman).

We live in an enormously, terrifyingly complex world. We need new narrative techniques to make sense of it, and even more importantly to begin to articulate ways in which human beings can collectively respond to it… Rather than emphasizing the one-way passage from non-fiction to fiction, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as intertwined like twin helices, generating and regenerating new possibilities. Continue Reading »

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Twelve Days in the Year: 27th April 2024

April 30, 2024 by NevilleMorley

Woke around half six; a reasonably good night with only mildly peculiar dreams, but as we’d been up past eleven the previous evening experiencing a Plovdiv jazz club and then walking back over the river to the flat we’re renting, still feeling rather tired. A. hasn’t slept at all well, so is immediately disturbed when I reach for my glass of water, and puts on Radio 4 via the iPad. Time difference means a lot of World Service for an hour, a rather banal science-y programme but with some amiable-sounding contributors, followed by the shipping forecast and the news. Summary of the headlines in the papers suggests that the entire UK is thinking of nothing but the health of the King. Continue Reading »

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Holidays in the Sun

April 22, 2024 by NevilleMorley

It is not actually the case that I cannot think of anything more ghastly than going on a holiday tour with a group; spending any time on board one of those gigantic cruise ships would be substantially worse. But it is very much not my thing for multiple reasons. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t understand their attractions for some people who are not me, and I can certainly admire the business thinking behind them. Continue Reading »

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No More Drama

April 21, 2024 by NevilleMorley

I’ve spent the weekend in Krinides in northern Greece (south of Drama, to explain the particularly tenuous post title), next to the site of ancient Philippi and the plains on which the Roman Republic was finally euthanased. Actually staying here, rather than being bussed in for a couple of hours like 97%+ of the other people touring the ancient remains, has been wonderful, and not just for the magnificent breakfast (shout-out to the Hotel Philippeio); a chance for some close observation of local horticultural practice, fascinating wild flowers and a lot of wildlife – a surprising shortage of bats, given the numbers I detected in the streets of Thessaloniki last week, but lots of strange nocturnal noises (Scops owls among them, I think), and fireflies, and today a hoopoe as well as stork, swallows, Western Rock nuthatch, calandra larks and a lot of things I haven’t firmly identified yet.

Landscape: trees in the near distance, then a large plain with a few small hills, and much higher hills beyond.

The plains of Philippi. The camp of Cassius was supposedly on that hill.

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Eclipse

April 8, 2024 by NevilleMorley

Thucydides knows everything about everything, Part 1283. It’s not enough that he recorded eclipses of both sun and moon, without directly attributing them to divine action – okay, he does claim an increased number of eclipses as grounds for recognising the unprecedented greatness of the Peloponnesian War, but he also notes that the eclipse of 431 occurred in the moon’s first phase, implying a natural event. No, he has to have anticipated all our modern concerns as well:

A screenshot of a tweet, noting that Thucydides described an eclipse at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, observed that it turned people blind and advised them to stay indoors. Continue Reading »

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A Different Point of View

March 30, 2024 by NevilleMorley

I was never entirely convinced by Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex. The idea – I’m taking this from the original radio series, which I could once recite by heart, so variations in the books are non-canonical and therefore irrelevant – is that every piece of matter is connected to every other piece of matter, and therefore it is possible to extrapolate the entire universe from a small fairy cake. One scientist used this principle to annoy his wife; “Have some sense of proportion”, she would say to him constantly, and so he plugged her into the extrapolated universe so that she saw herself in relation to the entirety of creation, an invisible dot on an invisible dot, and it annihilated her brain. In a minor rewrite of Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear too much reality”, The Book concludes that “if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense for proportion.” Continue Reading »

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Twelve Days in the Year: 27th March 2024

March 28, 2024 by NevilleMorley

Woken by a powerful, disturbing dream, in which I have had to organise some sort of awayday for graduate students, arrive at the venue to unpack everything and take over the room from the previous group punctually at half past six ready for dinner – only for the leader of that group, unmistakeably Prof. Pat Porter of the University of Birmingham, to say “Thanks for the food, Nev, we’ll see you at six thirty tomorrow morning.” I am positive that I haven’t misbooked this session, but there’s nothing I can do; A. is now berating me for letting everyone down – I have no idea what she’s doing here – and so I rush downstairs to catch up with everyone to apologise, and can’t find anyone. The strangest thing is that the logo for the Porter group is a dove of peace, which doesn’t seem very Realist at all… Continue Reading »

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Second Coming

March 25, 2024 by NevilleMorley

I wouldn’t say that it’s been the highlight of this academic year – that would be my lovely Thucydides seminar, for whose final class I spent yesterday morning baking shortbread and brownies – but the most unexpectedly memorable thing, both exhausting and rewarding, has been teaching Greek Historiography to first and second years. It’s not a new module, even if it’s the first time that I’ve taught it, so there hasn’t been a lot of extra time for preparing new material – but the previous lecturer had a unique style (hi, Irene!) that doesn’t suit me at all, so I’ve had to start from scratch anyway. Above all, this has involved revisiting the range of authors covered… Continue Reading »

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Just An Illusion

March 11, 2024 by NevilleMorley

Update from the Thucydiocy Bot: Ex-Twitter is now really, really boring. Yes, there are still a few people posting the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote to make the same old points about jacked librarians, and a fair amount of boilerplate ‘strong do what they want’ Realism, but there hasn’t been anything interesting – a decent argument, let alone a new misquotation – for six months or more. When someone posted the old image of three students in random graduation outfits, it actually created a little warm feeling, thinking of the old days when the Thucydides musattributions seemed never-ending. Continue Reading »

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Message Personnel

March 7, 2024 by NevilleMorley

As someone expensively educated in an imperialist state recklessly convinced of its innate superiority and entitlement, whose once-promising career was derailed by embarrassing failure, I have a far better instinct for Thucydides’ ethos and political sensibilities than do most moderns. I was once regularly threatened with violence by a member of the school’s Combined Cadet Force to extort the nicer elements of my packed lunch, so can personally attest to the prevalence of the mentality depicted in the Melian Dialogue within the officer class. And I visited Amphipolis once, gaining a powerful sense of quite how long it takes to get there… Continue Reading »

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