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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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.
The plains of Philippi. The camp of Cassius was supposedly on that hill.
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:
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.” (more…)
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… (more…)
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. (more…)
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… (more…)
We have a new cat bed for upstairs, as the one in which Hans passed away last week clearly still smelt of him, and/or death, even after multiple washes, and the surviving two refused to use it. The problem is that it’s a design which Hector can get his teeth into, literally, and drag it off the bed onto the floor – and even down the stairs. We thought he had abandoned this habit, or we would have bought a different type, but clearly he was just waiting for conditions to change to resume his plan. (more…)
I don’t know if I have ever been more glad that it’s Reading Week. It has been quite a slog on the teaching front, with a fair amount of marking (students from courses last term submitting revised/expanded versions of their assessments) and a timetable that gives me four straight hours on a Friday morning, actually an adrenalin buzz but the come-down is substantial. But the main reason is that the last month has been dominated by Hans very gradually deteriorating and fading away, beyond any hope but still hanging on, still purring and happy more or less until the very end; last night he finally slipped away, this morning I was out in the rain burying him, and now I am very happy that I don’t have to make an effort to talk to students or put up a front, but can just stay at home, cleaning – he’s been down in the sitting room for the last week and a half, as he became less capable of managing stairs or the jump up onto the bed, and we didn’t want to disturb him, and now it smells – and occasionally sniffling and sobbing.
A Siamese cat lounging on a hearthrug
In some ways this feels very sudden – he wasn’t that old, and even though he’s largely been confined to his basket for weeks, it still feels incredibly abrupt that there are now only two cats in the house (and I feel this). In other ways it’s not sudden at all, not just because we’ve had nearly a month of knowing it was just a matter of time, and not just in comparison with his sister’s very rapid decline back in November, but because he’s been chronically ill pretty well all his life. Both the twins had a vicious digestive infection as kittens, and lots of antibiotics as a result – and he then suffered from regular chest infections (cue more antibiotics, until a vet suggested it might be asthma) and endless digestive problems (initially tackled with drugs and laxative, until we discovered a special fibre-rich food that largely solved the problem – if only we’d known about it years before). No wonder his whole system was a mess.
It must be admitted that Hans didn’t always endure this stoically – understandably, one might say, given that he obviously felt thoroughly rubbish at times and we (and the vets) completely failed to grasp what was wrong. He gave me years of disturbed nights, prodding me awake or crying, and all I could do was stroke him and try to calm him down in the hope that he wouldn’t also wake A.. He pissed EVERYWHERE – on the rosemary bush just outside the back door (that is now on its last legs), on the kitchen furniture, on the bedroom door, on my chest of drawers, and on the coat of a visitor who had a cat. This provoked our biggest rows about child-rearing methods, so to speak; I argued for a cat psychologist, A. shouted at him and tried to terrify him into obedience. At some point, I suppose, we will have to come to terms with no longer needing to strew mats and puppy pads all round the house to limit the damage.
Certainly he was my cat in the “if we ever divorce, you’re taking that one” sense, but there was a deeper bond. The idea of a ‘spirit animal’ is New Agey, cultural appropriation-y bollocks, but it did feel at times that he was something like that. After a while, it wasn’t that he woke me, but that I simply woke when he needed my attention, and vice versa – and as someone who regularly suffers from raging insomnia, I am desperately going to miss having a cat who would come and cuddle when I needed company at three in the morning. Especially over the last three and a half years of my own chronic fatigue and tendency to phlegm and other flu symptoms, I’ve had a lot more appreciation of his relative stoicism (and no envy of his lack of inhibition in expressing discomfort or insecurity by pissing everywhere, not at all, honest).
For I will consider my cat Hans. For he appreciated every moment of sunshine, if only to go to sleep in it. For he was patient with annoying over-exuberant kittens, and knew when to take himself off on his own rather than squabbling over the cat basket. For he thoroughly appreciated his food. For he defended his territory with a fierce determination, but never to the point of violence. For even when he lost his voice he would purr deafeningly, to express contentment and love. For he was gentle, and patient, and endured. And I honestly don’t know if these final weeks have been trying to teach me a lesson about fortitude, or about the perils of bloody-minded stubbornness.
Sphinx 