Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘politics’

2023 on The Sphinx

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

There was an interesting article over the holiday period by the music writer Simon Reynolds, about why he still blogs, and I agreed with more or less every word:

I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved.

I did have a brief moment, back in January, of wondering whether I should be slightly more responsive to the preferences of my readers as far as post topics and themes were concerned (more…)

Read Full Post »

Holiday Reading: Blogs of the Year 2023

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , on December 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I had a fascinating little exchange on Bluesky the other day with Gustav Holmberg (@gustavholmberg.bsky.social); I’d made a passing remark about my continuing efforts on this blog, and he observed that blogs are like the vinyl records of social media, the format that refuses to die, and might even make a comeback. But, as I replied, one less attractive implication of that comparison is that blogs become a niche hipster thing, a private passion, whereas the great thing about records in the past was the communal aspect: talking about old and new records, lending and borrowing them, anticipating new releases together and then the first to get hold of a copy invites everyone else round to hear it. Subscription Substack it wasn’t. (more…)

Read Full Post »

I Don’t Want To Talk About It

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on November 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

As I commented last month, the thing that has made an otherwise pretty dreadful term bearable has been the enthusiasm and engagement of the students. Yes, attendance has got patchier in recent weeks, presumably through a combination of accumulated exhaustion and impending coursework deadlines; yes, there are a couple with serious chronic health issues (but who are great when they do make it); and yes, there are a couple who have never showed up – I’ve established that they’re alive, and that this is their choice, and there’s not a lot more I can do other than dread what their essays are going to look like. But overall I’m getting well over 50% attendance in every class, with the majority missing only one or two over the course of the term – a stark contrast with the same time last year when I think the majority of students attended less than half the time. And the discussion is great, intelligent and well-informed; some minor tweaks to my approach (a bit more direction, a bit more chatting in small groups before general discussion) has led to pretty well everyone having lots to contribute. This makes life so much easier. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Naked Truth

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on November 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Very powerful concert on Tuesday, the Avishai Cohen (the Trumpet) Quartet at the Cadogan Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival. He’s been high on my ‘must see’ list for a while – one of the many downsides of Brexit is that a lot of the artists I love, especially on labels like ECM, appear to do non-UK European tours a lot more than they used to. Musically, an astonishing mixture of technical brilliance, raw emotion and telepathic understanding within the group – the first piece was a 25-minute reworking of most of last year’s Naked Truth album, which I know well enough to hear how much it’s being reimagined in the moment; not least, a much more obvious klezmer element in some of the faster sections. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Happy Talk

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on October 19, 2023| 2 Comments »

As P.G. Wodehouse almost remarked, it is never difficult to distinguish between Neville and a ray of sunshine. I am Wednesday’s child; my family nickname, still used by my father and brothers, is ‘Marvs’, for Marvin. Yes, I have a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left-hand side, especially when sitting on a damp, chilly station platform because my train is delayed or cancelled (at least at the time of writing it’s due to bad weather, rather than lack of train crew or engine failure or signalling problems, so I can spare some sympathy for the railway staff). Given that so far this term I’ve been going onto the ‘Delay Repay’ website on average twice a week, it’s difficult to avoid a sense that things really are falling apart day by day, even on days without two-hour meetings when I didn’t wake up at ten to five with a crushing sense of anxiety and failing to cope.

And yet, the title of this post is not sarcastic or ironic, (more…)

Read Full Post »

Ten Years After

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , on September 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »

What is this blog? Meticulous compilation and analysis of misattributed Thucydides quotes, repository of research too niche and/or random to consider publishing properly, collection of miscellaneous bits of snark and parody, chronicle of an ongoing academic mid-life crisis? Hard to believe that it’s been ten years; it feels longer. Technically, of course, it is longer: the first post on the original Bristol Classics collective blog was in November 2011, but just over ten years ago, September 26th 2013 – if it wasn’t for train cancellation issues and the impact of six hours of meetings and teaching in a row, this would have been posted yesterday – the department officially agreed to abandon any hope of regular contributions from a wider range of people, and this actually became ‘Neville’s blog’ rather than everyone simply assuming that it was. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Scheisskopf

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on September 21, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Rishi Sunak has dramatically announced the cancellation of a series of policies intended to get the UK to Net Zero by 2050, including taxes on eating meat and compulsory car sharing, that neither the government nor the Labour opposition had ever adopted or proposed. There’s a name for this: the Scheisskopf Strategy. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Political World

Posted in Musings, tagged on July 9, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Whenever I teach Greek Political Thought – which has now been for the last three years running – the opening discussion has always been on the meaning of ‘political’, and the emotions and values bound up with it. The aim, of course, is to highlight both the connection to antiquity and the significant differences in attitudes; could we imagine classical Greek politai objecting to the idea of making an issue political, or complaining that someone has politicised a debate? The modern drive is to push the political into a small, closely-defined box, limited to the formal mechanisms of voting and the activities of a small number of professionals, to insulate multiple areas of life from its influence and then to lament general disengagement. (more…)

Read Full Post »

2022 on The Sphinx

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the previous twelve months of blogging and wonder why I bother. Levels of interest and engagement, on every single measure, continue their inexorable decline – the fact that it’s only a 20-25% fall from the already-feeble figures of 2021 is due almost entirely to December, with the combination of my regular Blogs of the Year post piggy-backing on other people’s talent and popularity and a bit of gratuitous snark about #Receptiogate (now removed after a take-down notice from the alpaca whose image I used without permission). Maybe the blog post as a genre will make a come-back as a result of the immolation of Twitter; more plausibly, I should be thinking about how to re-tool my prolix ramblings for the world of TikTok… (more…)

Read Full Post »

Weaponised Parochialism

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on September 16, 2021| 1 Comment »

This week I shall mostly be suffering from a filthy cold just when I wanted to be finishing my teaching prep for next week and getting various other things out of the way before term starts. Just after I’d returned from a refreshing break, too… But if I was going to have to come down with something, I suppose it’s better this week than next. And I’m taking the optimistic view that underlying the current floods of snot and phlegm I am actually in a better place, mentally speaking, than I have been for a while, because despite the thickness of my head I have actually come up with an Idea this morning, or if not an idea then a pithy phrase that encapsulates a particular kind of contemporary political discourse. Googling suggests that no one has previously proposed this characterisation, so I might at some point develop it further, but for the moment I just wanted to scribble it down for the record… (more…)

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »