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Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category

Write Here, Write Now

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on July 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to this new epidemic of the after-effects of the plague. It’s full of striking and memorable phrases (“cosplaying normality”!), and you simply need to go and read it, and reflect.

I found it quite uncomfortable, to be honest. (more…)

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Was It Worth It?

Posted in Musings, Podcasts, tagged , , on June 28, 2022| 2 Comments »

And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom once posted positive feedback… Wait a minute! There is a faint pulse! It lives, to be largely ignored for another day! (more…)

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Blank Space

Posted in Musings, Publications, Research in Progress, tagged , on June 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »

I am not, I would like to think, an unreasonable Luddite. I suppose it could be said that what I am is at best inconsistent; sometimes not a Luddite at all, indeed sometimes the sort of middle-aged man who desperately strives to keep up with odd bits of the technological Zeitgeist, enjoying catch-up TV while wondering what happened to car CD players, and sometimes an entirely reasonable Luddite. I can see, for example, why my favoured approach to constructing an index – creating a simple Word table by working methodically through page proofs, and then doing an A-Z sort – is clearly unsuited to the world of eBooks and online publication. And so I didn’t whine too much when asked to provide a list of index terms when submitting the manuscript of a forthcoming edited volume. (more…)

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Broken English

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on June 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month, but us provincial types have more modest horizons. This month, I’ve actually had it twice. Someone liked an obscure thing I wrote on ‘historiography as trauma’ in Thucydides and has done the hard yards of a proper analysis of the theme in relation to the Sicilian Expedition rather than just tossing out a few random ideas on the topic – so, watch out for the new piece by Bernd Steinbock. And then I heard about what may prove to be my greatest, if rather unsung, contribution to the world of learning… (more…)

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Everything’s Fine

Posted in Musings on May 31, 2022| 1 Comment »

There is a small, rather marginal community, struggling to survive in the face of the pressures of the modern world, heavily dependent on attracting tourists. There is a series of odd and sometimes alarming occurrences, which most people ignore – but a few argue that there is a pattern to them and actually they are signs that the community is faced with an existential threat. The music becomes ominous. (more…)

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Public Image

Posted in Musings on May 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Ah, the brand. The backbone of all that we do, the foundation of international success, the very heart of the institution. It’s not enough to produce excellent teaching and research if your logo fails to communicate your core values in just the wrong shade of green.

But things could be worse. (more…)

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Caught Out There

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on May 19, 2022| Leave a Comment »

This weekend, there’s a fabulous-looking conference at Cornell on Thucydides and Aristophanes in honour of the great and wonderful Jeff Rusten. The advertising on the Twitter is slightly less wonderful…

Now, if this were my colleagues organising a conference in my honour, this would be deliberate trolling; (more…)

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Half The Man I Used To Be

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on May 10, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The glass-half-full position is that a problem I didn’t know I had has been solved by the very thing that raised it in the first place. It had simply not occurred to me to wonder whether the still-lingering after-effects of the plague – aka Long COVID – mean that I am now someone with a disability, or someone who is disabled. It’s certainly true that my ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities – and, like, do my job properly, especially the research-and-writing bits – has been substantially impaired, to a greater degree than can be explained by simple old age and uselessness, but surely that’s not the same as being disabled? Well, no need to worry; the Equality and Human Rights Commission has declared that it isn’t. True, the EHRC’s recent record on racism doesn’t promote complete confidence in its judgements, but like other British institutions I can choose to believe in my recent problems being a matter of a few bad apples rather than a systemic issue… (more…)

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We All Stand Together

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on May 5, 2022| 2 Comments »

I have just bottled my new Ukrainian-style stout, brewed as part of the Brew Ukraine initiative; at the beginning of the invasion, the Pravda craft brewery in Lviv had to stop brewing and switch to a war footing, so they made their recipes and label artwork freely available for other brewers – including home brewers – to produce their beer and help raise funds. I haven’t, unfortunately, found any proper UK breweries doing this, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have had an idea in advance what I was aiming for, but what I’ve got is dark and luscious with a hint of smokiness. Now available for a donation of £2 per 330ml bottle, all proceeds to humanitarian relief – with postage and packing on top if anyone beyond the immediate locality wants to try it, I’m afraid, as I suspect that might be a bit pricy. Cheers! Onwards Ukraine! Putin is a dick, as one of their other beers has it.

(more…)

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The Clowns

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on April 15, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Two blog posts in less than a fortnight? It’s probably obvious that I’ve had a bit of a holiday, caught up on some sleep and generally recharged; Berlin and Potsdam for a long weekend, returning to my favourite city after three years of plague and chaos (one of my more elaborate jazz compositions is called ‘I Still Walk Those Streets in my Dreams’, as during lockdown I regularly found myself walking down Unter den Linden or, more commonly, through familiar places in Zehlendorf and Friedenau). Kaffee und Kuchen, Königsberger Klopse, Kindl*, KaDeWe (which has reorganised its food hall to focus on actually serving food, downsizing the cake section and greatly reducing the beer offering, so may not actually be going back in future…) and Kulturhaus Dussmann… (more…)

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