Modern poetry... Who said the creative arts were dying?

 http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2009/11/william-shatner-does-levi-johnston.html

 Having seen last night's episode of Question Time, I am forced more and more to the conclusion that Robert Kilroy-Silk is a wanna-be demagogue rather than a serious politician. At least he's found time to tone the perma-tan down a notch or two because he's clearly been mostly focusing on a new strategy: say the words 'vote' or 'referendum' as many times as possible regardless of what the actual topic of discussion is. If we hold votes about everything, then the general population will probably get even more bored of politics and the political process than they palpably already are. Admittedly, there is a case for a referendum on Europe because it has changed beyond recognition since the 1970s, when Britain last held one; it's probably safe to say, however, that if we did hold a referendum on what for simplicity's sake I shall continue to call the Lisbon Treaty, it would quickly become a question of whether we stay in the EU or leave it. I'll put my cards on the table: I think that for all it's faults, we're better off in the EU than out of it (apologies, Wemyss) because Europe acting together is better able to deal with the Russians, or China, or the US. Just because it's not perfect now doesn't mean it won't become better with time, and, with the world becoming increasingly dangerous, we're better off with Europe than we are alone and dependent on the goodwill of Washington.

As a further point regarding Question Time, as a historian I thought it was very interesting the way Churchill was held up as a paragon of democratic virtue and champion of liberty. Churchill, who is recorded to have said that the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter; Churchill the breaker of the 1926 general strike; Churchill the vehement opponent of Indian nationalism; Churchill, who sang Mussolini's praises; Churchill who wanted Edward VIII to stand firm against the disapproval of the entire country and stay on the throne. Yes, he saw the dangers of Nazi Germany, yes, he eventually realised Mussolini was a threat, and he certainly had no illusions about the state that Lenin and Stalin were building in the USSR, but he had plenty of opinions which we would be a lot less comfortable with as well.

OK, rant over.      

Well, I have now finished my Masters' degree and am back in the Real World. Although teaching finished in May, at about the same time as all the undergraduates, the postgrads had until the end of August to research and write a 15,000 word dissertation. Mine was on the cult of Peter in early mediaeval Northumbria, and involved a great deal of things like Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English People (one of the books which A.W., my special topic supervisor during the term, believes that every house in England) and his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, as well as such things as Stephanus's Life of Bishop Wilfrid. After spending so much time in the company of Wilfrid and his unbelievable sanctimonious self-righteousness I rather wanted to punch Wilfrid, although I may be doing him an injustice - it is surely thanks to Stephanus that Wilfrid is constantly referred to as God's Beloved...

At any rate, I also got to look at such treasures as Codex Amiatinus, the oldest extant manuscript of the complete Latin Bible, and the Leningrad/St Petersburg Bede, one of the oldest manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, and eventually got everything printed off, bound, and handed before the deadline at the end of August. 

Unfortunately, I then had to do two very long shifts at work, where it was the traditional farewell dinner of the physicists' conference (we didn't leave until about 11.30) followed by stripping all the beds and cleaning the rooms the following morning. Then, it was time to clean the flat and move out because the people moving out wouldn't give any leeway in when they wanted to move in. At least I managed to get everything done to everyone's satisfaction and enjoy the enormous party on the actual day of the deadline, and then head home on the train with the remainder of my things. 

I am perpetually astounded by how many times I promise, hand on heart, that I am going to keep posting on here regularly, and then forget all about it for months, however here we are again. Profound apologies to my few Livejournal friends, who are presumably starting to wonder why they agreed to add me in the first place, since I never post...

In particular, I'd like to apologise to Wemyss for not having responded to his very kind voicemail message. Yes, it is bloody freezing in Fife at the moment. However, I'm doing my best to keep the cold out with a little medicinal dram; prevention is very much better than cure... I also seem to be spending most of my time in the nice, warm, library, due to the large amount of work I have on at the moment.  In fact, I had to stop myself from writing a post very similar to this one in the library this afternoon, when I should have been writing the 3,000 word essay which I have due in for Friday. Prioritisation is a wonderful thing, no? That having been said, at least I'm writing about something interesting, that is to say fifth century chronicles. Congratulations to anyone who's managed to get this far, and please don't drop off now - fifth century chronicles are actually very interesting, not least because the authors mostly seem to think that the world is crashing down around their ears. Which given that they're writing about the end of the (Roman) world as they knew it, with Attila the Hun on the rampage across Europe and Arianism, along with various other heresies spreading with the Goths and the Vandals, is actually entirely understandable.  Plenty of blood and thunder...

Speaking of obscure heresy, I mentioned to my supervisor, an expert in what is loosely known as 'Sub-Roman Britain' about the petition I mentioned here a while ago by a Spanish group to get a papal pardon for the Knights Templar; he said that he was waiting for the Vatican to apologise for Pelagius... Ah, the pleasures of socialising with early mediaevalists.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/templarios/demandan/Papa/elpepusoc/20080803elpepusoc_2/Tes

A new conspiracy theory is born? For those who don't read Spanish, an organisation which claims to be the heirs of the Knights Templar is requesting that Pope Benedict XVI restore their good name, 600 years after Philip the Fair of France used accusations of heresy (among other  more unsavoury things) to bring the Templars down. With their current, vital, role in many historical conspiracies (and some shocking novels as well), who knows who or what this'll bring out of the woodwork...

Isn't it interesting how popular stories like this still are in this day and age, when we all seem to be rushing headlong into modernity and the future?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080731/tod-uk-australia-rudd-ancestors-cb1d00a.html

As the post title says, it's been a while since my last LiveJournal post, and my, haven't things changed? We've finished our run of the News Quiz on Radio 4, and have cycled back to the Now Show again, which I'm positive used to be funnier than it is at the moment. I reckon it must be the writers, because it's not like they're going to be running out of material any time soon. Boris Johnson has been elected Mayor of London  (maybe not funny in itself, but certainly heady with promise for the days to come); David Cameron has had his bike stolen from outside Tesco; the trial of the Darwins, Mr. and Mrs. Canoe, continues unabated; Gordon Brown is continuing in his quest to be the most unpopular man in Britain (and has chosen to go on holiday in a place where the government has refused to spend any more money on flood defences - good choice).

Of course, the other major issue I want to comment on is the new series of Top Gear. It may seem like I only have opinions on TV and radio shows (although I do want the News Quiz brought back, and with Simon Hoggart, not Sandy Toksvig, described so memorably as she was by Dead Ringers as the love-child of Bilbo Baggins and an Ewok), but bear with me. Apparently, the Germans have their own version of Top Gear - a car programme, with three hosts. And some kind of gauntlet was thrown down. And Messrs Clarkson, Hammond and May were apparently told that the honour of the BBC was at stake, and they were not to mention the war. Imagine how much notice of that they took. I don't deny that I think the three of them are sometimes very funny, and I especially like the races and challenges (not having a driving licence, the car reviews don't do much for me), but you can sometimes take things a bit far. While I'm sure that German viewers will get a rather different view of events, you still have to wonder what the German presenters and film crew thought of our boys' continuing and obviously overwhelming obsession with the war...

I can't deny it; as the heading says, this update has been a long time coming. I've been intending for a while now to write about the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo and the consequences, but for various reasons, I never quite got round to it. Where to begin..? For a start, I think it's safe to say that we've been here before. I remember seeing a cartoon in a Private Eye annual in 1999 (I think) of two Chelsea pensioners sat on a bench, with a newspaper bearing the headline "War in the Balkans". One says to the other: "Well, we might as well end the century as we began it." 
I don't know if we can quite compare Kosovo's breakaway from Serbia to the events that helped kick off the First World War; we can certainly, however, compare it to the events that followed the war in 1918 and 1919. At the Versailles Conference in those two years, Clemenceau, Lloyd-George and Wilson, of course, did far more than impose a peace settlement on Germany. They also largely re-shaped the face of central and eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires. Although Wilson had long preached national self-determination, he and the other leaders found it hard to reconcile this with the situation on the ground, with small enclaves of certain national or ethnic groups surrounded by large numbers of others; a real mish-mash of language and culture. So they made the best of a bad job, creating countries containing significant ethnic minorities who felt (rightly or wrongly) that they had cause to complain about the way things had turned out. In light of what then happened, Poland and Czechoslovakia seem pertinent examples. Both ended up with large ethnic German minorities, whose alleged grievances provided an easy casus belli for Hitler.
While things have obviously changed in Europe since the inter-war years, not least with regard to US interest in European affairs, the precedent still seems ominous. Although there have been various unpleasant incidents following the breakaway of Kosovo, including, of course, the torching of the US Embassy in Belgrade by an angry mob, things are now quiet. The calm before the storm, perhaps? The major cause for concern at the moment would probably be the economy; so far as I can tell, Kosovo doesn't seem to have one. If the Serb minority perceive that their lot is significantly worse than it was when they were part of Serbia (and it probably won't take much persuading  to get them to believe  this), then there will be trouble at the mill. And don't say you weren't warned, either.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
-Those dying generations-at their song,
The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, or dies.
Caught in that sensual music, all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold, and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

For me, a regular feature of Christmas has long been books or book tokens, as the one thing everyone in the family knew, if they were ever stuck for an idea for a present, was that I love to read. This happened to quite the same extent in the last few years, but even so the New Year has brought with it a fresh, new harvest of reading material.

The book of which I'm most fond right now is The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. I normally don't really like historical detective-type stories, of which this is definitely be one, but The Historian is somehow different. For me, what makes it different is the sheer quality of the writing, which makes you feel like you're really there, and really really feeling the chill.

At the moment, I'm working my way through John Julius Norwich's Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean. A truly wonderful piece of writing, all in all. Being a  Mediaeval History graduate, I already knew about a fair chunk of the material covered, but it's always interesting to read about events you know quite well from another point of view. John Julius Norwich seems to be a dyed-in-the-wool Byzantinist, so on certain events (the Fourth Crusade, the foundation of Constantinople), you can already guess what his opinion is likely to be, but his approval of Theoderic the Ostrogoth was rather surprising. Of course, Norwich paints a wider canvas than this, and some of it is truly fascinating: Herodotus, Homer, Mycenae, Knossos, Troy, Mehmed the Conqueror, Suleyman the Magnificent etc. All in all, a fascinating, well-written book which I'm sure I'm going to be coming back to, again and again.

Speaking of this line-up of royal and aristocratic people, I read with some interest Wemyss' recent pair of essays on class and social and intellectual capital. When reading discussions of class and the various ways one goes about delineating the upper classes in various places, I always think about the start of the western European aristocracy. In a society based on a warrior aristocracy, the way to get rewarded and become a member of the upper classes is to be an exceptionally good warrior, which means doing things people today would think are unspeakable. That today the aristocracy is supposed to be guardian of good manners, taste etc only makes their blood-thirsty origins all the more interesting. If we had the time to take a very long view of the situation, it is entirely possible that everybody today who is derided for having money without class will develop in the same way. Of course, the opposite is also possible... I think it was Jacques Chirac who was supposed to have commented "After 200 years, even a yoghurt will have culture."


     

Once again, I find myself annoyed that I have so completely forgotten to update my LiveJournal recently. I had thought that I would post regularly, but this hasn't really come to pass. Thinking back, most of it is probably related to my job, working in the sales section of the glass company. I don't particularly like sales, it must be said; however, it's a steady job, and most of the other people who work there are decent enough.  Doing a 9 to 5 office job is a lot more tiring than I expected, though, particularly when my supervisor, the Sales and Marketing Manager, is feeling in a demanding mood, as she often is. And, of course, slip-ups occur. Thus far, I've been fairly lucky in that most of my slip-ups have been fairly minor, and other people have also been slipping up, but this time I goofed up properly, and the boss wasn't happy.   The thing that annoyed me the most about the whole thing wasn't my own annoyance at having made such a stupid mistake, but rather the "I'm so disappointed" tone in which I was lectured afterwards. So I now find myself having to get organised. Not organised enough to produce a half-decent essay every now and again organised. No, this time I'm going to have to get seriously organised. Which can only be a good thing, I suppose, although I suspect it's likely to be a rather painful process. With the motherly eye of the Sales and Marketing Manager on me all day, though, there's really no other choice.

Of course, the other thing about working in an office (other than the inevitable slip-ups) is the discovery that Scott Adams is a genius, and the Dilbert cartoons and real life in a company are almost identical. I always thought Catbert, the Evil Director of Human Resources was a particularly wonderful creation, but only now do I truly appreciate the character.

It's not so much the unprincipled and devious opportunism of the whole thing that gets me; that's part of the job description for a politician these days. It's just the fact that they're being so blatantly obvious about the whole business...

         I have now gone and done something that I promised myself I wouldn't do: I have practically abandoned my LiveJournal. I'd like to think I have a good excuse, but it really just comes down to laziness, pure and simple. Well, the laziness that comes of working a 9 'til 5 job (what a way to make a living...)  and then coming home and wanting to do nothing beyond slob around every spare hour that comes around. My wonderful office sales job has been extended, so I'm now there until February. While this means I get a regular pay cheque until then, it means I also have to turn up to the office every day.

         I'm exaggerating slightly, though. It's not really that bad. Except for the fact that it's repetitive (what's new, I suppose...) and my supervisor is one of those people who, while very nice are really rather wearing in anything other than small doses. I will be eternally grateful that I didn't have to go to the Birmingham NEC with her for the Grand Designs home improvement show last weekend. At the risk of dragging out a truly ancient joke, it would probably have been a fete worse than death.

         At any rate, leaving my complaints about my job aside for a little while. I have been doing other things as well. Catching up on a bit of reading online, I chanced across Wemyss' blog entry about the death of the Duke of Buccleugh (a name the pronunciation of which has long confused me, but that's by the by). I was reminded of the introduction by Evelyn Waugh to an old edition of Brideshead Revisited in which he said that after the war, the National Trust would have taken over Marchmain House and Brideshead and not allowed the Flyte family to run them into the ground. While this is undoubtedly true, and has quite probably helped shepherd the remnants of the British aristocracy through some rather trying times (and isn't it amazing how aristocrats always manage to hang on, no matter what?), the transition sounds pretty painful. It must be said, though, that while I am a historian, social history was never really my thing. In the immortal words of a good friend of mine, "I don't do peasants." While I know that mass social change is important, I prefer to focus on personalities. Which is why an incidental remark in that same post intrigued me: the death of Dominique de Grunne. Having looked up his obituary, I was, frankly astounded. While I knew that scholarship was practically the entire reason for the existence of such orders as the Dominicans and the Jesuits, I was unsure of what they might be doing these days. Given that I've read some articles and books published by such organisations as The Benedictine Review and Cistercian Publications, I suppose I shouldn't really be surprised, but I really can't imagine that the tradition of the scholar-monk will last much longer. If I thought it would last, I think I would strongly consider joining up...

Hello, everybody. This is the first part of the new prologue of my Founder's Fic. Any constructive comments are greatly appreciated, and indeed, encouraged. Enjoy.

       It's a beautiful Sunday evening here in London, although it feels a lot like Saturday for some reason. This is, at least partly, because I went into the local shopping centre to meet an old school friend that I hadn't seen in ages. He said a coffee would probably be best because he doesn't drink (an unusual stance in the Britain of today), and so we made arrangements and eventually managed to meet. I was fairly shocked to see how he had changed since I last saw him. It wasn't a change in attitude or mindset (I'm surprised by how many of my school friends sound the same as they did back then, only more so) but of physical appearance. On one level, I'm not surprised because he was never particularly sporty at school (quite the opposite, in fact) and has always been fond of video and computer games and watching cable TV.  Similarly, I myself was never that sporty at school either, and I know full well that I'll never be a male model, so I'm probably not in that much of a position to criticise, but even so...

        In other news, my Founders fic is coming along; I've got the first few chapters arranged quite neatly in my head, but the others are beginning to prove more of a problem, as usual. Since I have a job through one of the temping agencies I'm registered with, I don't have as much time to think and plot as usual, so that might be part of it.  However, when I was looking through some files on the computer, I came across the story posted below. I began writing it (or re-writing, I should say) a while ago, long before Deathly Hallows came out, and decided on a whim that I would finish it and post it here for any constructive criticism that may be forthcoming.

 

Life has been very quiet recently. The search for some kind of gainful employment continues, but without apparent success. I've got applications in for a couple of library jobs in various London universities; however, the one which I think I had the best chance of actually getting had probably the worst-written application. While I suppose that I might need a bit of time to get back into the swing of writing job applications, knowing that I could have phrased it so much better really isn't very comforting.

I suspect, however, that life isn't going to remain quiet for very much longer. My brother is coming back. My brother who has a real talent for being irritating and knows it. Oh, well.

I should take this opportunity to comment on the lack of progress on my Founders story. When I originally wrote the introduction that I posted here, I had a vague idea of how I wanted the story to progress. I've now had a considerably better idea, which means that I have to effectively start anew. At the moment I have plenty of spare time, so I expect I'll soon have my idea fleshed out enough to re-start writing and posting on LiveJournal. The main problem is that I feel like I'm spending forever trying to work things that I really want to write into the story, before realising that it was simply not possible. For example, the Battle of Clontarf, which was fought in 1014 between the Irish High King, Brian Boru, and an alliance between the king of Leinster and Norsemen from Dublin and the Orkney Islands. There's a passage describing the battle in Njals saga which ends with a chilling description of a man who looks into a burial mound and sees the Norns, the Norse version of the classical Fates, weaving the course of the battle on a loom made of human body parts. A wonderful piece of writing, if in need of rating, and I spent longer than I'd care to admit trying to find a way to include it in the story before realising that the battle happened at least 50 years before my fic is supposed to be set. That having been said, where there's a will, there's a way.

 

I am back in the Youth Hostel in Copenhagen, after having spent two exciting weeks in Aarhus learning about the Icelandic Sagas. Unfortunately, while Aarhus university is very good at doing summer schools in the Icelandic sagas, the evidence suggests that they are less good at organising internet access for students attending said summer schools. The wireless access that we were promised in the classroom was a distinctly dodgy connection that would fade in and out when more than one person tried to use it. In fairness to the university, I suspect this is because they've powered down their system for the summer, but even so it was spectacularly irritating. 
However, I now have a day of sightseeing in Copenhagen, and then I'm off back to the UK. I have a list of recommendeed things to see given to me by two Danish friends, and the Little Mermaid was firmly left off. I was a little surprised by this, given that the Little Mermaid statue is effectively the symbol of Copenhagen, but relieved as wel;l, because it's a very twee symbol for a capital city.  

Happy Birthday to Penhaligonblue for tomorrow!