It’s half past seven, and this is already one of those days that are probably best forgotten as soon as possible. Slept okay until about four, and then managed to doze fitfully, fighting off panicky thoughts of work (and, for some reason, a persistent earworm of Adele’s version of To Make You Feel My Love), until A. goes to the bathroom about half five. Get up to make tea. Outside it’s pouring with rain, with the latest storm blowing in overnight. Feeling rubbish – tired despite sleep, brain fog, rising panic at thought of trying to get any work done but at the same time feeling time slipping away (how has January been such a long month, and yet how is it the end of January already?) Continue Reading »
Once upon a time, the internet was all about hyperlinks. My first webpage, back in 1994-5, was roughly 40% links to other people’s pages about stuff I liked (if I recall correctly, an eclectic mixture of topics like chocolate, chillis and the lyrics of Bob Dylan), and other people linked to my musings on those topics. That webpage fell by the wayside quite early on, as my budding html skills were diverted towards developing a departmental webpage instead (and the start of a long process of annoyance and disillusionment, as universities implemented ever more restrictive content management systems and centralised control of webpages), but when I discovered blogging, rather late on, there was a similar feel; one blogged about other people’s blogs, engaged with their responses, linked to their ideas, and at least to some extent felt part of a community – or at any rate a network of alliances, semi-serious feuds and even friendships. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged blogging, Deborah Cameron | 1 Comment »
Once again we find Thucydides at the heart of tangled questions of war, diplomacy and politics, power, life and death. I’m not thinking of Trump’s claim to Greenland/Iceland/Saarland/Greendale/delete as appropriate, or Mark Carney’s bid to claim the (currently dormant) title of Most Thucydides-Quoting Premier from Malcolm Turnbull, but rather of more pressing issues: the conclusion of The Dominion War. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Funeral Oration, quotations, Star Trek, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
Despite any scurrilous rumours you may have heard, I do not in fact advocate for everyone to be compelled to read Thucydides. On the contrary, I’d be more easily persuaded of the need to introduce a short proficiency test as a prequisite for being allowed to read it – though clearly, given the rash of vacuous social media commentary over the last couple of weeks, the priority for our political energies must be the creation of a compulsory licensing scheme such that you’re not allowed to quote Thucydides unless you can demonstrate that you’ve read it. So, the news that Thucydides (extract thereof) appears as one of only three classical texts on the draft ‘Literary Works List’ proposed by the Texas Education Agency to the State Board of Education as a ‘minimum common literary canon’ that all schools in the state should cover is less cause for cracking open the champagne in this household than some might assume. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Death, education, Texas, Thucydides, United States | 4 Comments »
I am a little surprised at the more or less total lack of discussion amongst classical reception folks on here of the third episode of the new series of Fallout, given that one of the major plot strands involves the appearance of Caesar’s Legion as one of the various violent factions hanging around the Mojave Desert in the post-apocalypse 23rd century. Am I the only person watching? Has everyone just been too busy heading off to the New California Republic? Or is it the case, as Jordan Christopher argued in his article on ‘Caesar’s Legion in Fallout: New Vegas’ in Classical Receptions Journal last year*, that this is simply a very embarrassing bit of reception, offering a critique both of the historical Roman Empire and of any attempted revival in the present, so people would rather not talk about it? If so, it probably doesn’t help that we’re now presented with the added twist that, whereas Caesar’s Legion in F:NV was terrifyingly powerful and effective, in the tv series it has (appropriately) been reduced to internal squabbling over the succession and endless civil war, leaving it vulnerable to attack from outside… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged classical reception, Fallout, Roman Empire | 1 Comment »
There’s nothing like a would-be strongman with poor impulse control throwing his weight (and, more significantly, his country’s weight) around on the international stage to bring out the Thucydides quoters on social media. 80% Melian Dialogue – the ‘gangstas rule, suckas suffer’ line, obviously, rather than any of the rest of it, usually decontextualised but with a few people trying to push back with the point that T. really wasn’t endorsing the Athenian claim that the Strong can do what they like – and 20% ‘Thucydides Trap’, though without any clarity as to how this is relevant to anything. What I did enjoy was the scattering of accounts on Ex-Twitter quoting ‘the original Greek’ in order to enhance the authority of their opinions – with a hit rate of only one third actually getting the Greek correct. Google Translate and/or GenAI, one assumes – with the latter definitely being to blame for this magnificent creation: 
Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Melian Dialogue, politics, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
And now the end is near – of the blogging year, of course. It’s traditional for me to shake my head despairingly at this point, wondering whether it’s all worth it, but actually I feel in a pretty good place at the moment as far as the blog is concerned. Viewing and visitor figures have hit a five-year high – though since there have been a couple of days in the course of the year when suddenly hundreds of new visitors appeared, each looking at a single different post, I’m inclined to be suspicious as to whether they were all real people. More concretely and authentically, however, the fact that a few people clicked on the donations button – not enough to pay all the hosting and ‘ad-free’ costs, but certainly enough to buy a couple of coffees – did help me feel warm and appreciated. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings, Publications | Tagged 2025, blogging | 2 Comments »
As ever, one of the fun aspects of end-of-year reflection is revisiting the blog posts, articles and other internet things that I noted down in the course of the year as worth revisiting – sorry, I had another bad night and my sentence-writing gland is sluggish. This is of course a completely subjective exercise, based on whether the thing I’m reading catches my fancy enough at the time to remember to do the cut’n’paste of the URL, which doesn’t have any necessary relationship to its quality or interest; I suppose there is an unconscious distinction between ‘piece I appreciated reading at the time’ and ‘piece I immediately want to recommend to others’. And of course there is far too much about GenAI, and university teaching, as I can’t escape the thought that I’m going to have to start thinking about this again properly… Continue Reading »
Posted in Reviews | Tagged blogging, blogs | Leave a Comment »
Dreadful night; dropped off fine, then after an hour or so the cats started – to be strictly accurate, Hector and Olga started, running around the house like mad things and dropping the rubber ball down the stairs in order to chase it and then bring it back to the top to start again. This was all, one suspects, because they wanted wet food rather than just the plentiful supply of dried food available. For me, it was as if a switch went click in my brain, suddenly I was as awake and unable to switch off or relax as if I’d had several espressos before bed. Probably I dozed off eventually, but in that way when you feel wide awake even if you’re asleep. None of this was helped by being penned in by Buddy, curled up next to me as usual and gradually stretching out to expand his share of the duvet. Continue Reading »
Posted in Twelve Days in the Year | 5 Comments »
One of the minor unexpected consequences of having a playlist of gentle, mostly piano trio jazz tracks designed to help me relax and drop off to sleep, that sometimes gets left on all night, is that it completely skews end-of-year listening stats. The number of quiet piano trio pieces on which Paul Motian is playing drums is indeed remarkable, but the claim that I’ve listened to him twice as much as any other artist doesn’t reflect the artists or albums I’ve actually listened to this year. Continue Reading »
Posted in music | Tagged 2025, music | 2 Comments »
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