Eureka Moment piece for The Guardian: Homer's Iliad

I've written a piece for The Guardian's Eureka Moment series, about Homer's Iliad. Here it is.

Memory and the curriculum

Homer: He knew things by heart

As usual, there has been a lot of hoohah about Michael Gove's new curriculum. He wants to get rid of coursework and return to single exams, marking a return to apparently "oldfashioned" practices.

And why not? There was a predictable reaction on Twitter, including a remark from one writer who sputtered angrily that there was no such thing as a profession that required remembering and "regurgitating" facts. I think that use of the word "regurgitating" is key, because it suggests a misunderstanding of what remembering is.

Memory is the key to knowledge, which in turn leads to wisdom. You cannot know a subject unless you have memorised certain facts about it. I remember being at law school - you cannot absorb case law and statutes by accident. The only way to do it is to sit down and learn them, by rote. And why shouldn't pupils be taught how to do this? It only puts more unfair advantages onto the products of schools where rote learning is encouraged - ie, the public schools. There is a reason why private school children are over-represented in the legal profession - and it's not just because of parental background and encouragement. It's also because from the very beginning pupils are encouraged to memorise, to learn, to absorb, to be tested.

You can only truly know something if you have memorised it. I remember the heady days of my final exams, when I knew Virgil, Shakespeare, Homer, inside out. The Aeneid came alive inside my head: a vast, echoing chamber of beautiful imagery and striking scenes, linking together with all the other things that I'd had to con by heart. Things collide: you see shapes and patterns, you become aware of greater structures. You know things. A poem, learned by heart, is a poem understood.

We've forgotten what it is to be learned - learned in the law, learned in a subject. That means memorising things. It means being able to know, without looking it up, where to find something. If I didn't know Latin grammar off by heart, I wouldn't be a very good Latin teacher.

It's true if you're a doctor or a teacher or a taxi driver. All jobs contain a certain amount of memorising, whether it's a technique or a protocol or whatever. To suggest that memorising leads to "regurgitation" is simply wrong. It leads to broader, deeper understanding; to insight; and within your chosen field, to success. That's why I think Michael Gove is right. We should return to unlocking the potential of things that are greater than any computer, any search engine: that is, our own human minds.

***UPDATE: A rejigged version of this piece is now on the Telegraph website, here.****

A Homeric simile

At some point in my life I want to do (amongst many other things) an in depth study of Homer's similes. I've been dipping (re-dipping?) into the epic recently; the other day I was mightily struck (as if by a spear) by this example:

“But the son of Atreus kept plying his attack along the rest of the Trojan line, with spear and sword and huge stones, as long as the blood still gushed warm from his wound. But when the wound started to dry and the flow ceased, then sharp pains began to overcome his strength of spirit. As when a woman in labour is taken with the sharp stab of piercing pain sent by the Eileithyiai, daughters of Hera, who bring the bitter pangs of childbirth, so sharp pains began to overcome the son of Atreus’ strength.”

This is Agamemnon, King of the Achaeans, having been stabbed by Koön in the middle of battle; it’s a superimposition of the domestic onto the warlike, a reminder that the mightiest fighter is woman-born and also that women endure perhaps greater pain than that on the field; Agamemnon is the father of his people, so it seems apt that he is compared to a mother in the bloody throes of birth, as death is all around him and blood feeds the ground for a different reason. Homer is so good at showing us inversions of what's going on; always reminding us of other worlds, other lives, and of the endless cycle of generation and death.

(The translation is Martin Hammond’s fine 1987 version, published in a nifty Penguin paperback which I own that is sadly lacking a few pages from Book VI.) 

From the Book Mountain: City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt

A while ago I reported the problem of "book lag", something which everyone whose professional duty it is to read books suffers from (and, I imagine, a lot of people whose duty it isn't). This means that perfectly interesting and enjoyable books get forgotten about; you get half way through them before, suddenly you are called upon to review three 900 page novels by the day after yesterday, or similar. Inevitably, the books on my Book Mountain (rapidly becoming a Book Himalayas) turn out to be worth it. One such was Gardner Botsford's A Life of Privilege, Mostly, which memorably featured a tiger-skinned lady chasing its unsuspecting hero with a whip.

This time it's a star turn for Peter Parson's City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). This charming, entertaining and informative book is not only easy to read, it also delights with its clear-sighted analysis of the papyrus fragments found at the site of the Egyptian city of Oxyrhyncos. Here, in the early twentieth century, the archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt stumbled upon a classicist's dream - mounds and mounds of intact papyroi.

Obelix: "These Egyptians are crazy!"

A few of them gave up texts of Homer; there was a lost play of Euripides, Hypsipyle, (which it is thought concerns the cursing of a group of women by Aphrodite for neglecting her shrine; her curse was to give them all extreme body odour. Perhaps that's why it was lost.) There were songs of Sappho (who features in a Ronald Firbank novel, Vainglory, in which a professor reads out, proudly, the fragment to assembled high society: "Could not (he wagged a finger) Could not, for the fury of her feet!") and other Greek lyricists. But most were prosaic, and as such add a huge amount to our knowledge and understanding of life at the height of the Roman Empire, just before Christianity.

There are many, shall we say, odoriferous anecdotes, but my favourite is this: Kallirhoe writes to a friend: "I make obeisance on your behalf every day before the Lord God Serapis. From the day you left we miss your turds, wishing to see you." It seems that those Egyptians had slightly different priorities. Then there's a "joke billet doux": "Apion and Epimas say to their very dear Epaphroditos: 'If you let us bugger you and it's OK with you, we shall stop thrashing you - if you let us bugger you.' Keep well! Keep well!'" As Obelix might say: "These Egyptians are crazy."

Spicy and engaging, Peter Parsons makes a knowing Hermes in this, his guide to a world that we can build up from the tiniest of particles into a whole, bustling, human universe.

 

Alice Oswald at the Southbank Centre

Oswald: vatic

Hello hello, I've written a short piece about the poet Alice Oswald at the Southbank Centre for The Daily Telegraph, available here. She read her latest book, Memorial, in its entirety. Some of you may remember that I reviewed Memorial for the same paper when it came out, and was blown away by its luminous magnificence.

Books of the Year, Day One: Classics

Merry Christmas to you, and God Bless You, One and All! (Flings away crutches, downs eggnog, kisses unsuitable person under mistletoe, passes out with paper crown over one eye.) Well I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas. Mine was distinctly unbookish (apart from dipping into Samuel Pepys); to rectify the matter I am returning to my books of the year round ups, which I hope will become a tradition as Yuleish as weeping over the Doctor Who special. (What? I didn't do that! Not me, guvn'or.) To start with, here are my Classics of the Year.

1. Vathek by William Beckford 

Published by Oxford Classics, this is insane, terrifying and brilliant, concerning the Caliph Vathek, who meets an ugly stranger; said stranger promises him untold power and the knowledge of the pre-Adamite sultans; meanwhile, his Satanic mother Carathis gloats and commits various atrocities with her mute negresses. It veers from extreme farce (when Vathek shoves, one by one, fifty of the most beautiful of his subjects' children off a cliff) to madness (Koran-quoting dwarfs, anyone?). It's, basically, totally cool. Beckford was 20 when he wrote it, and it's my Classic of the Year for its complete and utter disregard for narrative and, well, anything, but yet managing to be scintillating. The bit where the mute negresses run into the marsh looking for poisonous weeds; the bit where Carathis storms around hell; the bit where people are being tortured for eternity with their hearts set on fire - just go and read it, you won't regret it.

2. The Iliad by Homer (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Some thought this new version (see comment below) too colloquial - would Achilles, asked The Economist drily, really say "I don't give a damn about that man?" I think he probably would. Mitchell retained the grandeur of the original, whilst injecting it with some zest and spice - an excellent version for those who haven't yet been introduced to the wonders of Homer.

3. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

"The moving toyshop of the heart..." A fabulous little satirical epyllion, ordered yet chaotic, lovely, shocking, sharp and warm all at the same time, it left me longing for a twenty-first century Pope.

4. Eline Vere by Louis Couperus

Printed by the stalwart Pushkin Press, the cover of this beautiful edition shows a woman draped in a kimono, made inert by ennui, as is Eline Vere herself. The Dutch Couperus was revered in his time; his highly realistic novels drip with detail, as gorgeously and tightly rendered as a painting of his countryman's. The riotous characters and scenes in this book seemed to be so close to us in spirit and temperament, so much more so than the aristocrats of War and Peace, or the WASPs of Edith Wharton; there is a naughtiness, an impishness in his prose which I found very touching. Eline Vere herself is a complicated heroine (if one can call her that), and reading this you sometimes feel as if you've overdone it on the cherry brandy, but it's entirely worth it to become wholly immersed in a world both familiar and strange. There is a Dutch film, but if anyone knows if there's one with English subtitles (my Dutch being, er, non-existent), I'd be grateful.

5. Electra by Sophocles, The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus, Philoctetes by Sophocles 

This was the year I returned to Greek tragedy. There is something in the searing purity of Sophocles that cannot be garnered anywhere else; and the cosmic otherworldliness of Aeschylus feels like looking into a clouded mirror, back into the depths of our civilisation from which spring these extraordinary tales. The Philoctetes in particular I have been enjoying, finding in its tale of isolation, friendship and civilisation something that resonates widely, it being perhaps the most 'modern' of Sophocles' plays (containing, as it does, a meta-textual play directed by Odysseus). But lurking behind its resolution lies the future fall of Troy - and in that is the genius of Sophocles. I also highly recommend the version of Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney: The Cure at Troy, which adds an eeriness.

6. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Every time I read this I find it more savage. The murder of Mr Prendergast by the lunatic! The deaths of onlookers at the wedding of Paul and Margot! Almost every paragraph is laced with venom and wit, and it never gets any less fresh. I also read The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold again this year, but found it hasn't lasted nearly as much - I think because its "trick" seems so outdated. It's something you need to look at in the context of its time, whereas Decline and Fall stretches its black limbs across the centuries, settling in for good.

7. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

This occupies a special place in my mental furniture, much like an old rockinghorse, having responded warmly to it as a child: its tale of young clairvoyants terrified of being found out for fear of death is both thrilling and poignant. And God I wish I was a mind-reader. It would make writing novels so much easier.

8. How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnston

A little-known, and overlooked, novella, about the friendship between an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and a labourer on his lands; they come together in the trenches of the First World War, but their friendship does little but tear them apart as others misconstrue it. Written in sometimes quite oblique prose, it nevertheless manages to sear its imagery onto the brain.

9. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

The first Fitzgerald I've read - and why don't people read her more? This is a slim book but it contains within it more intelligence, wit, vividness and awareness of humanity than most. It concerns the lives of a group of houseboaters and is often quite nightmarish in its piercing lyricism.


10. A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford

Published by Daunt Books, this deserves a mention both because Daunts are doing a great job of bringing out neglected books, and also because you can see what a great writer Bedford would become. This novel is very curate's-eggish; the opening chapter is peerless, but the bits in between can be remarkably stilted. However, it is worth persevering with just to see how a writer forms herself.

Pip pip, then, till tomorrow...

Did Achilles have Asperger's? And what's Marilyn Monroe got to do with it?

There is a simile in the Aeneid, in Book I, where the busy Carthaginians are seen by our hero (conveniently clad in a cloud spun by his mother Venus) building their new city. They rush here and there, laying out walls, marking out houses, all intent upon their business. Virgil compares them to bees, something I have always found slightly sinister - bees are, after all, relatively mindless. But that is how I have felt, over the last week or so: rather like a bee, perhaps not filling its cell with honey, but at least attempting to do so.

As I have buzzed through the city, I have had the discordant pleasure of my iPod throwing up first Ted Hughes' Prometheus, followed by 'Eurodisco', a song by the little known and much reviled band Bis. From the sublime to the ridiculous, and then to the fall and beyond: I saw Arthur Miller's play, 'After the Fall', a thinly disguised account of his life with Marilyn Monroe, a brittle, heroic, doomed character. In it Pandora McCormick particularly shone as Marilyn, or rather the Marilyn character, clothed in red and pouting on a bed. It is a hard play to pull off, but I think the Oxford Drama School did it well, with strong performances from all.

I've also been reading (after a marvellous review in the New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn, I was sent straight back to the source material) the Iliad, and a couple of things struck me: first, what was the actual shape of the Trojan horse? It can't have been anything more than a barrel, really, or perhaps an upturned skiff on a couple of logs. I would like to know more about this: if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do. And the second thing was, perhaps Achilles (another brittle, heroic, doomed character: the Marilyn of his day?) was suffering from some variant of Asperger's syndrome: selfish, ritualistic, and unable to see the views of anyone apart from himself. I wonder if this explains the wrath (menin) of Achilles: Sing, Muse, of the Autistic Spectrum Disorder of Achilles.

Which brings me, in a round-about way, to a film I saw recently advertised: 'Agora'! Now there's a name for a film. 'Meeting-place!' It is, apparently, about the mathematician Hypatia, who as far as I remember was ripped apart by an angry mob using seashells, for one reason or another, I think for attempting to explain calculus or some such. It stars Rachel Weisz. I know nothing more of this film. What next? 'Pythagoras!' We can but live in hope.