between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Books 2010: 55

nonfiction

55. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Harvard, 2007.

Beard has written an elegantly comprehensive book about all the things we don't know about the triumph, and why it is unlikely we can ever know them. She outlines the theories of others both about what the triumph was, and what it was for, and why these are implausible, logically inconsistent, or overly optimistic in their reconstructions.

Sadly, despite Beard's skilled survey of both evidence and arguments, she falls rather short of elucidating her own argument in clear terms: her statement that the institution of the 'triumph' constituted a space - a not uncontested space - for the working-out of the Roman construction of the desirability of martial success and the tension between glory and mortality, success and humiliation, is a statement which despite its prominence in the opening pages comes to seem less than central - indeed, even tangental - to the book as a whole.

A work that points out with keen-eyed scholarship how fleeting and how much based on shifting sands are our views - our tendentious certainties - about the triumph in representation and in actuality is a fine achievement. But in claiming that the truth of the past is largely unknowable, Beard has sidestepped rather neatly putting her own theories to the test.

We know the past is a constructed thing, an arguable narrative full of not enough hard evidence, claimed 'facts', suppositions, imaginative leaps and twisty implausible logic. In the end, though, you have to take the leap of "I think" and build your own narrative from the handful of broken jigsaw pieces that remain. As Peter Jones wrote in the Telegraph, shortly after the book's publication: I must admit that I wish Beard had not played scholarly hard-to-get and had had a stab (fingers crossed, perhaps) at what she thought triumphs were all about. That is what professors are for, isn’t it?

But an interesting book, nonetheless.

Books 2010: 54

nonfiction

54. James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Honosexuality in Ancient Greece, London, 2007.


"After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them - being the sections of entire men or women - and clung to that...

"...Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and ...they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths." [from Aristophanes' "Love Speech" in Plato's Symposium]


"For Cupid is not consummation, the thwack of an arrow in a target, genital acts. He thrives on distances. He's the arrow's trajectory, the climber straining for the summit. He is forever swooping over the highest mountains, the lowest valleys, and rivers not quite wide enough. He's the force you can feel in a piece of elastic. He's essentially an intermediary, says Socrates. He's like an angel between loving heaven and beloved earth. He's the force that shrinks the distance in between." [Davidson, 2007: 31]


This book is, quite literally, a joy to read.

Davidson has a friendly, accessible style, a breathtakingly enthusiastic lightness that in no way conceals the depth and breadth of his scholarly chops. This is a book that dances from philology through historiography and archaeology to modern and postmodern work in the field of Greek loving and back again, not once, but many times.

The acccepted "dominance" and "submission" narrative regarding the older erastes and the younger eromenos, the focus on the question of penetration and sexual acts - what Davidson terms, with a humour characteristic of the book, "Sodomania" - is here first questioned, and then overturned. His discussion of the 'age-class' structure of Greek polis society and what this means for our understanding of relations between the classes is illuminating, and several times his imaginative reconstruction - his exercise of imaginative empathy - succeeded in cracking my head open and letting in new ways of viewing the evidence.

It is, as the subtitle implies, a radical reappraisal. Kenneth Dover's landmark work in the 1970s set the tone, and it is of course very easy to project one's own cultural, social, and personal prejudices and preferences back into the past, particularly onto such uneasily defined cultural constructs as homo(and gyno-)social and sexual relations. Four modern reviews reflect the reactions to it, one in the BMCR, and three here by Oswyn Murray (who appears to have read parts of it which seem to be strikingly different to the ones I was reading, and whose own aversion to 'hipness' is painfully obvious to every undergraduate who has ever read one of his works, but I have a grudge on the account of the Fontana edition of Early Greece), Peter Jones (who upholds the orthodoxy of Dover), and Duncan Followell.

Davidson's primary chronological focus is the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with some digressions both forward and back. It's more exploration than argument, more discussion than conclusion, and - more to the point - more concerned with upholding the potential for human pleasure and dignity in the past than it is with scoring points of "nasty, brutish, and short." The latter we already know: the former is frequently underemphasised, though anyone who has read Sappho or Plato has room to argue.

It need hardly be said I'm a priori far more sympathetic to Davidson's view of things than Dover's: the focus on penetrating acts and the equation of penetration with dominance is one of those modern assumptions that lead you into murky waters, I think, when you project them back onto the past. And I'm inclined to share his views of the episodes in Xenophon which he discusses in depth, Xenophon being the only of the ancient authors he uses I've actually read in any detail.

All that aside: it's an incredibly erudite, thought-provoking, and intelligible work. If you're going to read any book on the ancient Greeks this year?

Read this one.

Books 2010: 51-52


51. Anthony Price, Tomorrow's Ghost.

I'm not quite sure how to categorise this book. And the conclusion is fairly crushing, speaking emotionally: one does not necessarily expect a happy ending, but, well.

On the other hand, I think, technically speaking, it might be a minor masterpiece.


nonfiction


52. Sarah B. Pomeroy, The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Once again I'm going to point to someone else who's done the heavy lifting of analysing Pomeroy's scholarship in this work for us.

Pomeroy has more than won her spurs over the decades as a historian of women and the family in antiquity, particularly in Greek antiquity. But even Pomeroy's scholarly chops cannot make mountains where only molehills of evidence survive, and sadly, when it comes to the Roman Regilla, married to the Roman Greek Herodes Atticus and alleged to have been murdered by him, the molehills do not add up to a very clear picture at all.

The Murder of Regilla is in many ways a fascinating book, and an imaginative reconstruction of how the life of one particular wealthy Roman matron might have been. Yet, equally, to me it feels surprisingly lightweight, especially from a scholar with Pomeroy's track record. The Roman woman in general is far more of a ghost in the historical record than one might really prefer, and this most likely accounts for my impression. Anyway. A good book, accessible and enjoyable - and nothing to do with healing sanctuaries, which I'm supposed to be reading about.

Books 2010: 49-50


49. Anthony Price, The '44 Vintage.

Second Lieutenant David Audley and Corporal Butler ride through 1944 France in the company of corrupted British officers, honourable Germans, competent Americans, and French communists. There's something hidden in a chateau - something valuable - and it's all down to who can get to it first.

I didn't enjoy this book half as much as I enjoy the 1970s ones. But it's not half bad.

non-fiction

50. Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: the Ancient Greek Experience, California, 2004.

I found this piece from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review that's already done the hard slog of breaking down what this book is about. I'm not as convinced as the reviewer of the essential coherence of Cole's work, but it is certainly a detailed and well-thought-out book, with a focused and scholarly command of the evidence.

Cole here has set out to chart the liminal spaces of ritual practice and ritual context, relating both of these to the organisation of the polis, the construction of gender and gendered bodies, and the role of landscape. I was particularly impressed - and intrigued - by her chapter on pollution and purity, which laid out in a more clear fashion than I had heretofore encountered precisely why questions of purity and pollution were important in ancient Greek ritual contexts. Her discussion of reproductive anxieties and their relation to cult and ritual is also illuminating.

It gave me some things to think about, which is useful.

---

Today, I ran a mile in under ten minutes, and two miles in twenty-two. Not exactly brilliant, and I'm going to have to do better than this if I want to start running 10Ks, but it's better than last week.

I may have overdone it with the twenty minutes' rowing, though, after climbing and karate yesterday. The band of muscle across my shoulderblades is freaking painful.

Books 2010: 46-47


46. Anthony Price, Our Man in Camelot.

One of the sadly long out of print David Audley books. Published in the 1970s, with all the Cold War preconceptions, but very good. Price has a very British - very old-school British - sensibility, and an appreciation for the labyrinthine intrigues of the civil and intelligence services only matched by his sense of history. In Camelot it is Badon Hill which forms the historical focus, and despite the logic holes forming from the aforementioned labyrinthine intrigues, it's quite brilliant, although not on the same level as Other Paths to Glory, which is possibly Great Literature in its own right.

Unfortunately, Price's attitude to race is even more dated and distasteful than his attitude to women: 'negro' and 'n*****' as off-handed descriptors are pretty appalling, and I'm pretty sure I smelled a dash of anti-Semitism to boot. Without such things, I could like these books wholeheartedly, but as it stands, I have to find them somewhat problematic.


non-fiction

47. Adrian Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London, London, 2003.

Exactly what it says on the tin. As popular - and when I say popular, of course, I mean written for a non-specialist audience (like in this instance, for example, me) - scholarship goes, it's definitely decent. There is solid context for London before the Fire, an attention to developments after the Fire, and a day by day breakdown, with maps, of the Fire itself.

Tinniswood makes use of eye-witness accounts, post-Fire literature, and government documents to reconstruct the London of the Great Fire and its immediate aftermath. It is... interesting, to consider how much effect the trauma of this event may or may not have had on the events of the remainder of the seventeenth century: twenty years later, more or less, sees the Orange Revolution, in which, I believe I recall, one of the key factors was the lack of support for James II in London - a London which is still not yet fully rebuilt.

---

It struck me today, after I finished the Tinniswood book, that I've read at least three works of English 17th-century history in the last year. I have a context for 17th-century England, to some extent, which is not matched by my context for 17th-century Ireland.

I read the English books because of their availability at bargain-basement prices. (Most of my non-ancient history comes from the bargain basement, after all: I can - just about, on occasion - justify spending nearly thirty euro on an ancient history book on the grounds that it represents a potential investment, but this is much less true outside my area of specialisation.) There is sufficient popular scholarship on various periods of English history that reasonably decent works are both widely available and relatively affordable. They do have the population edge, after all.

Contrariwise, very few works of Irish history end up in the bargain basement. I suspect as a consequence of smaller publication runs, a smaller market for popular scholarship, and - often enough - smaller academic presses. The selection on the shelves is also smaller, and generally both more specialised and more expensive: I've been making eyes at the A New History of Ireland series when I pass them on the shelves, but thirty-six quid for one volume of a six-volume comprehensive history just isn't all that affordable, you know?

I'm just bitching, I suppose, but there're a couple of things floating around in my head about culture and identity that this bitching falls in with, and the way in which popular perception, popular knowledge, shapes attitudes towards past, and thus present, identities.

Maybe sometime when I'm less sleepy I'll manage to articulate that particular argument. It's a thought I'm thinking on, anyway.

Books 2010: 44

non-fiction

44. Edward Vallance, The Glorious Revolution: 1688 - Britain's Fight for Liberty, London, 2006.

The title would lead you to believe this book is a work of sectarian history of the worst kind: that this might be a book about "how William of Orange saved good Protestant England from that nasty Catholic tyrant James."

It's not. It's a surprisingly well researched, well balanced discussion of the circumstances surrounding the so-called "Glorious Revolution" and the installation of William and Mary as joint monarchs, and how that "revolution" was then framed in political and historical discourse. For context, it discusses in brief the exclusion crisis in the reign of Charles II, and the whole of James' reign. Vallance is also careful to discuss the "revolution" in Ireland and Scotland, where its myth as a bloodless, Parliamentary achievement is shamefully false. (I direct your attention to, in Ireland, the actions of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, and in Scotland, the treatment of Iain MacIain of Glencoe and his people.)

It's very interesting: I found it put in context, for me, the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the continuing Jacobite feeling in Scotland, as well as the increasing parliamentary limits placed on royal prerogative even before the first Hanoverian George ascended to the British crown. (Leading to the party politics of the 18th centuries, where eventually a leading Whig or Tory could exert as much or more influence over affairs of state as could the monarch.)

I enjoyed it, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is interested in the fall of the Stuarts.

---

Climbed tonight. I'm out of practice, and damn, I hurt. Mandating that one cannot stop en route without being lowered back to the ground makes it necessary to exert that much more effort and concentration. And on a first day back after nearly two weeks?

Ouch, says I. Ouch.

"-and the fiery bulk of the further wall across the great valley".

Books 2010: 31-42

non-fiction

31. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, London, 1935. (Wordsworth Classics Edition, 1997.)

"Lawrence of Arabia" is made famous, of course, by the film of the same name. The Lawrence of this memoir is a man at odds with himself, filled it seems with a horror of his own and female bodies, conflicted between his duty to his superiors and his attachment to the Arab movement, self-loathing, introspective, and self-reflective.

The work itself is less a war memoir than a paean to landscape. Lawrence has an eye for vast and impressive places, and a keen ability to evoke their vastness and beauty on the page. The desert, in its blazing, freezing extremes, its suffering hardness, and striking rock - dolerite, granite, basalt, sand flats, valleys, peaks, oases - is brought to life.

Hard life, in a war of movement that has more to do with cutting railway tracks and telegraph lines than the bloody murder of the trenches on the killing fields of France and Germany, but there is sufficient savagery of war even here to appall the reader, and, it seems, Lawrence himself. It ends in the horror of a Turkish hospital in Damascus, where all the horror of war that has been passed over more lightly in preceding pages is brought home to roost.

Lawrence's racism and sexism is unavoidable and discomforting. On the other hand, the book is justly a classic, and many of its passages have a sweeping beauty and an almost epic scope. (And humour: one Arab woman says of Lawrence's blue eyes that they were like the sky shining through the sockets of an empty skull.)


32. John Man, The Great Wall, London, 2008.

This isn't as good a book as his Genghis Khan. It is, however, a reasonable overview of the history of the Great Wall (or "Long Wall" or "Long City" in other translations), with an understandable focus, given Man's primary interests, in the 'barbarians' from beyond the wall.

It would've been much improved by the inclusion of more specific academic - at least archaeological - information regarding the Wall(s), and just a little less travelogue. As it is, the travelogue, rather than the history, is the more detailed part of the work.

Still. It's an easy read, and worth the reading.


33. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics, London, 1979.

I'd been working my way through Polybius for very nearly three months by the time I finished it, on a train leaving New York city. It's hard going, because Polybius is a stickler for detail - the kind of historical detail that is a boon for researchers, and makes simply reading the book a wearisome chore.

Still, it's packed full with interesting historial episodes about the Punic Wars and contemporary happenings in Greece, and I am very happy to have finally managed to read it through to the end.


fiction


34. Matthew Stover, Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor.

Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels were my introduction to science fiction, and from nostalgia, I think, I kept reading SW novels long after I should've given up the ghost. Sometimes, though, it leads to good things, and Stover is one of them. He takes the pulp material that is Star Wars and gives it refreshing power and depth.

I liked this one. Quite a lot.


35. E.E. Knight, Fall with Honour.

Seventh novel featuring David Valentine, set in a post-apocalyptic US where alien vampire-like beings - the Kurians - hold sway and an armed resistance is attempting to push back against them. Entertaining, if occasional brutal and disgusting.


36. Patricia Briggs, Hunting Ground.

Werewolf romance with an established relationship and some political capers. Not terrible, but my enthusiasm for supernatural romance is, shall we say, not of the highest.


37. J. A. Pitts, Black Blade Blues.

This book, I read courtesy of matociquala's generosity. It is urban fantasy with Norse mythology, dragons, dwarves, and blacksmiths. The heroine is a little bit too competent at kicking ass to be readily believable, the pacing is somewhat uneven, and the relationship drama made me want to grab the main character and kick her brain back up between her ears.

On the other hand, the flaws are forgivable, and the Norse mythology is eminently refreshing in urban fantasy. It's not half bad.


38. Lynn Flewelling, The White Road.

A new Alec and Seregil novel is a good thing in the world. On the other hand, there are next to no women playing major roles in this book, a thing which I am grown more and more sensitive to as time goes on.

It does have capers, disguises, infiltrations, and daring escapes, though.


39-40. Timothy Zahn, The Third Lynx and Odd Girl Out.

Odd Girl Out has been on my bookshelf for months, waiting for me to find a copy of The Third Lynx so I could read them in order. They stand alone pretty well, though, but I like to line my ducks up neatly when I can.

These are the second and third books featuring Frank Compton, a former intelligence agent co-opted into a secret war against the galaxy-spanning hivemind called the Modhri. A lot of Compton's time is spent aboard the Quadrail, the interstellar train that's the only means of FTL transport, controlled by the pacifist Spiders.

Train travel! Spies! Plots! Daring capers and double-crosses!

Compton is an unreliable narrator who keeps things from the audience to heighten suspense, which is a dirty trick but one that Zahn just about pulls off by using maybe only once or twice a book. The Modhri is both terrifying and alien, and the relationship between Compton and his partner, the not-quite-human Bayta, is believable if a little one-sided.

I like these books. I like them a lot.


41. Violette Malan, The Soldier King.

Good, solid, standalone fantasy in a traditional mode, featuring two mercenaries, Dhulyn and Parno, who get caught up in an affair featuring a lost prince, a mage, and some nasty politics. Also featuring disguises, travelling players, and various alarms and excursions.

It's significantly better than the previous book, The Sleeping God, since the fate of the world is not notably at stake. I'm not a fan of Fate of the World Resting on Our Heroes' Shoulders books, since that's a cheap way to raise the stakes. This one's a little predictable, but remarkably engaging.


42. Lisa Shearin, The Trouble With Demons.

The previous Raine Benares novels read like an adaptation of someone's RPG campaign, with elves, goblins, and magical artifacts all crammed into cities with tunnels and caverns. So does this one, but on the other hand, they're very engaging, light, and quick.

This one has demons.

---

I'm hoping, in the next little while, to finally make a significant dent in my 'unread books' shelves. On the other hand, tomorrow I should - finally! - get my postgrad application all squared away and sent off (I have been waiting on my last academic reference, so I can put it in the package), and when that's done, I need to talk to some people about reading recommendations for the research, and to someone about this Thessalonica thing.

And find a job, but, well. That doesn't seem likely.

Anyway. How are you all, internets?

Books 2010: 7

non-fiction

7. Janusz Bardach and Katherine Gleeson, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.

In the handful of accounts by gulag survivors I've read, the thing that stands out most is just how much luck played a part in their survival. And just how much the system seemed designed to reduce human beings to barbarity, starvation and death in relatively short order.

Janusz Bardach, a Polish Jew conscripted into the Soviet army after the partition of Poland, and sentenced to ten years in the gulag on foot of an accident with a tank, was one of the fortunate ones. If such a term can ever be applied. He survived Kolyma by dint of - after a year in a mining camp - lying himself into a spot as a medical assistant, and after the war ended, his brother, a colonel in the Polish army, succeeded in arranging for his early release. (He went on to become a pioneering reconstructive surgeon, in charge of reconstructive surgery at the School of Medicine in Lodz and, from the 1970s, chair of a plastic surgery division at the University of Iowa. Really a remarkable achievement. He died in 2002, at the age of eighty-three.)

His account of his journey from Woldzimierz-Wolynski to Kolyma - and, more amazingly, back - is harrowing. And I use that word advisedly. Bardach - like many other memoirists of the gulag - is remarkably matter-of-fact about his personal sufferings: but it impossible to escape the awareness that he was one of, over the lifetime of the gulag, millions, and the impossible thing that went by the acronym GULAG is too vast and too terrible to really comprehend. The ubiquity of torture, rape, disease, starvation, suffering, death: the fantastical whims of the Soviet state whereby interrogator and NKVD man might end up sleeping next to someone whom they had tortured and arrested only months before - Bardach (and his co-author) don't shy from being explicit, but still, the sheer enormity of the thing only emerges by implication.

I don't really have words for how this book makes me feel. It makes me remember why I stopped reading gulag memoirs after I read Ginsberg: even though human beings find grace in the farthest extremity of suffering and existence, it makes me feel sick to my stomach and helpless and enraged to read about it. Even though these things happened far away and years ago. Perhaps even because of that.

Books 2010: 5

non-fiction

5. Miron Dolot, Execution By Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, Norton, London & New York, 1985.

I've had this book for about four years. I started reading it three years ago, put it down when I went with college on the Genocide Tour of Poland 2007, and only picked it up again in the last week. (After spending five days touring cemetaries and Auschwitz, I found it very hard to read about mass murder as a tool of policy for a long time.)

It's as much memoir as anything else: Dolot's recollection of the harrowing four years of 1929-1933 in his village in the Ukraine, when the Communist Party enforced collectivisation and created the conditions in which an estimated seven million people starved to death and others were executed, forcibly relocated, and condemned to the gulag system.

It is very hard to read. Dolot is succinct and matter-of-fact, writing about finding neighbours starved to death in their houses, passing piles of corpses by the side of the road, seeing neighbours turn to cannibalism, but after a while the sheer extent of suffering becomes overwhelming. Farmers were condemned to death by starvation for being farmers. There is even less logic in it than the Final Solution of Nazi Germany.

I remember, when I was still in school, finding Anne Applebaum's GULAG: A History and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in the local library, and reading them one after the other, horrified and fascinated and awed by the survivors. But for all the brutal illogic of the gulag system and the reasons for which people were sent there, there was at the base of it some reason: bad reasons, but nevertheless, reasons.

Enforced collectivisation, as it comes across in Dolot's account, defies reason.

Yeah. That kind of book.

---

The Zombie Cold has regrouped and is fighting it out in the trenches. I'm in college, but I'm not sure how much work I'm going to get done: I feel decidedly strange right now.

But I'm going to try to write something about the epithets of Isis, and thus justify my existence for one more day.

Books 2010: 4

non-fiction

4. Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714, Penguin, London, 1996.

A history of the Stuart dynasty in England. Cogent, readable, and fascinating.

Of course, I'm even less inclined to like any of the Stuarts or the major players of the English Revolution now than I was before (the nationalist propaganda of my childhood actually rather downplayed, if anything, the effects and atrocities of the religious and political conflicts of England upon Ireland, I am shocked to discover) but at least I'm disliking them from a position of greater information.

Points to note: it doesn't treat of developments in Ireland or Scotland except in how they affected the English centre, and it is a rather court-centred history. On the other hand, considering the ins and outs of Stuart politics, any attempt to discuss Stuart England without first seriously grounding oneself in the machinations of the court is probably doomed to failure, so I account it a good book.

---

Yesterday, I made it as far as the train station, burst into tears, and went home to bed. (A seriously depressing day, yesterday, and all due to the weather.) But today I'm typing at you from the heart of TCD library, and I shall do work and thus justify my existence. I hope.