thanks, Cicero

Today in 43 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero's luck ran out, and he was caught fleeing down the Italian coast by Octavian's soldiers, and killed.

Cicero is one of my favourite historical figures. I was trying to decide what I should post in memory of him, and I couldn't choose. There's the hilarious speech for the defence of a guy called Caelius, which totally ignored the actual charge against him and instead committed wholesale character assassination of the sister of the guy bringing the charge, who was alleged to be behind it because she was his jilted mistress, and with whom Cicero had a long-standing feud; the story is that it was a feast day, and none of the jurors wanted to be there, but had been dragged in by the insistence of the prosecutor, so Cicero repeated totally salacious gossip about the sister's beach villa toyboy lifestyle and her alleged sexual relationship with her brother until they could all go home.

There's also the brilliantly cranky letter to a friend of Cicero's who was running for office, who wrote to Cicero while he was a provincial governor out in the godforsaken deserts of Bithynia, asking if he could send him some panthers for some games he was putting on. Cicero, basically, tells him he's got better fucking things to do than find him panthers. Then there's the letter where Cicero writes about how bizarre Latin swear-words are, and how annoying is that everyone giggles when you say 'witnesses' (testes) or 'when we...' ('cum nos', which sounds like 'cunnos', which means, uh, guess), on and on through several paragraphs. It is because of Cicero that we know what a number of swear words mean, and that they are swear words. Thank you, Cicero. Or there are the heartbreaking letters he writes after the death of his daughter, and his obsession, that lasts for several months, with building a huge memorial for her, and getting the right kind of marble; there are the perfectly constructed, scathingly acerbic speeches against Mark Antony while he was off having a civil war, and the fantastically understated letter about having dinner with Julius Caesar when he used Cicero's villa as an overnight stop while marching into Rome with his army.

I love Cicero because he was neurotic, ambitious, brilliant, witty and acutely sensitive; he was too clever, maybe, in the end, to win. He could see both sides of the argument too well, and wanted to keep friends too much. He was very proud, prone to depression when he wasn't working 18 hours a day, he hated getting sick. He loved writing, but he also loved people. He was cranky and impatient and arrogant, sometimes, but he wasn't cruel. He loved his family and his friends and his home, even when they betrayed each other.

I also love him because he was there, right there in the middle of it all as one of the most important political and geographical structures in the world was reforged into an entity that would shape Europe into what it is today, and we know about it in literally day-to-day detail because of his letters.

Spare a moment today to think of Cicero, on the Italian coast, on his cart in the rain. He'd been the most powerful man in the Roman Republic, at one point - arguably one of the most powerful men in the world. He survived one power changeover by the skin of his teeth, but he couldn't get through two. He was in his sixties, divorced, his daughter was dead, and he probably knew he'd left it too late to run. RIP, Cicero.

this blew my *mind*

I love talking to people who come at my subject from a different angle completely to me; war gamers, collectors, blacksmiths, costumers, replicators. People who use google maps and an algorithm to work out whether the Persian army could have covered x distance in y days. People who run down beaches naked and then wearing armour to see how fast they can go. People who build swords, who run campaigns in scale, who cook pies. I don't understand objects or things, I like stories. But I've never seen anyone explain to me so clearly how an object can /be/ a story, how one can re-tell an object the same way one can re-tell a story. I have a feeling I'm going to be thinking about this video for a while.

Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on his obsession with the Maltese Falcon -

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/488

Glossa

Glossa - new online Latin dictionary, with extended definitions, related words, usage. Oh, it's so SHINY.

Ian Thompson

Woke up this morning to this.

I'm very shocked and saddened. I often attended services at Kings College Chapel while I was there, although I was not a believer; the unquestioning, undemanding support I received from the people there, including Ian Thompson, is one of my happier memories of Cambridge. He was always kind to me. I don't know anything about the allegations, but, based on what I knew of the man, I'm sorry that this is the epitaph he receives.

Towards an Erotics of Reception: CFP

I am co-running this conference with an awesome colleague at Bristol, and I am VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT. Do not be fooled by my location in Toronto - the conference will be in Bristol, in the UK, next summer.


DESIRING THE TEXT, TOUCHING THE PAST: TOWARDS AN EROTICS OF RECEPTION

A one-day conference co-organized by

The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition & the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

CALL FOR PAPERS

In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me. (Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading - from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom - are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-a-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
* Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
* Hermeneutics and erotics
* Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
* Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
* Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the 'Thinking Reciprocity' series and will follow directly from the conference 'Reception and the Gift of Beauty' (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.
If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:

Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk)
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca)

In defence of historical RPF (real person fiction)

Guy Gavriel Kay speaks out against writing historical RPF.

I actually saw him give this talk several months ago at ICFA, and I meant to make a post about it, so this saves me having to reconstruct his argument from memory and then argue against it. I partially resent his kids-these-days rhetoric:

What is at work today is linked to a general erosion of the ethical value of privacy and a parallel emergence of a widespread sense of entitlement to look at – or to make use of – the lives of others.

Yes, yes, and children don't listen to their elders, and the Greeks are clogging up the Tiber. For God's sake, speculative biography is hardly a new genre. And yes, no doubt the internet and reality TV have changed the way we think about the individual, but he talks as though Facebook and Twitter and Myspace were only ways of looking at others, rather than ways of constructing oneself as a textual being in a new arena of communication. He fails to understand that people consciously make textual simulacra of themselves on these sites - they don't open up windows to their souls, even if they think they're doing that. They are not victims of technology. They join these sites, they volunteer what personal information they like, and they allow who they wish to see it. People use reality TV shows - with varying degrees of expertness, true - as ways to further their careers, and build their public image in a certain way, just as Ovid circulated his poems and Augustus his statues. This is an age of mass autobiography, not of the erosion of the privacy of the individual.

I also dislike his pretensions in claiming to be striking a blow for ETHICS in his books, when a nasty part of me wants to note that changing the names of the (very recognisable) characters in your historical fiction to make it fantasy is a nice dodge for avoiding the other annoyances of writing historical fiction, like research*, or (as he himself notes) avoiding offending people with your portrayal of national icons (especially as, with the life of El Cid, it's the national icon of a culture not his own). And I dislike that he's using his own books as a platform to trumpet his views about a modern phenomenon which I really don't think is comparable to writing books about the emperor Justinian and changing the names, actually.

*Although I should note that by all accounts, he does a lot of research, and I do enjoy his books.

My personal reactions aside, it's an interesting point he's raising, but I think the thing is that he has pulled together long-dead historical figures and people who have died within living memory as being ontologically the same. He writes about long-dead historical figures, and claims to be defending them by changing the names, but note that he doesn't protest against Mary Renault's Alexander books, or the TV series Rome, or I, Claudius - possibly because the latter is a rewrite of Tacitus, which might explode Kay's claim that the world has started falling since Facebook. He claims that Justinian and Eleanor of Aquitaine and El Cid are the same as people like Wittgenstein and Marilyn Monroe, people who are still remembered as real people by others who are alive today, who have living relatives. But, realistically, Monroe and Wittgenstein are dead; speculation on what they thought and how they acted is not going to hurt them, unless you believe in an aware afterlife, which isn't under discussion here. But it's true that fiction written about the recently-dead claiming to 'know' their real selves (if anyone really does that) has the potential to hurt the living who loved them and remember them. Whether or not writers should be allowed to do that is a different issue.

But for people who don't exist in any way now except in text - and history is text - what's the difference between writing stories about them, and fanfiction? I've long been fascinated by the way RPF and RPS, fanfiction about 'real people' (boybands, actors, even politicians), reads the public constructs of stars - their publicity photos, their interviews, their twitters - as texts to be plundered and expanded upon. Fandom knows, as Kay doesn't, that when people carry themselves a certain way in the public eye, when they tell their friends, subjects and biographers about themselves, when they have statues placed of themselves in the forum and write lawcodes, they're writing stories about themselves. And authors writing stories based in those pre-existing worlds, about those pre-created characters, is fanfiction. Perhaps he's against fanfiction too, I don't know. But the interesting thing about Kay's argument is that he puts his finger on where fanfiction and historical RPF and history start to blur into each other - if you take his argument to its logical conclusion, you also start to argue that it's unethical to write history about historical figures, because we can't claim to understand their motivations, and shouldn't try.

But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

When Peter Brown wrote his biography of St. Augustine, was he doing with him as he would? Perhaps historians should acknowledge their educated guesswork, invention and fantasy more clearly. That's a serious point, but again, I think Kay is being facetious in his conflation of the textual construct of a person with the real person. A book does not manipulate a person's physical being; it may alter and taint others' memories of them, but that's something different, and he has not made that distinction.

I also notice that Kay only cites major historical figures - El Cid, J Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Wittgenstein. These are (even if you forget the enormous historical gap and the difference in the nature of the sources we have for these figures, as Kay seems to want to do) all people with voices. They can speak for themselves - people can go back and read what they wrote, or read reports about what they did and said. Writing stories about them doesn't change that. If Kay is really concerned about the invasion of privacy of people of the past, why doesn't he talk about the historical novels about people without speaking parts in history? What about Bagoas the eunuch, or Pullo and Vorenus, or the girl with the pearl earring? Kunta Kinte?

The Wikipedia article on 'Roots' sets the book/series' lack of historical truth against its social impact in modern America, and quotes Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."

There are ways of doing history that involve more leaps of the imagination than others, and they end up on the fiction shelves, but I don't think they're any less valuable. Perhaps it is entitlement to think one can write the story of a person who lived centuries ago, worked as a cleaner or a prostitute or a common soldier, and died; but there's a value in it, too. If we're talking about respect for the dead, isn't that a fitting memorial? If we're talking about the value of these stories for the living, isn't it important to help people find a way into history through ordinary lives that remind us that there were real people in the past? That the history of western Europe isn't a sea of dead white men?

It's also worth noting that on the social networking sites that Kay dislikes so much, people who haven't had voices in the past, who haven't been able to write their own biographies, are doing so. Sure, it's threatening to suddenly be faced with people claiming the right to write their own stories, when previously the subgroups of the silent majority could be written about with impunity. And it should make us think twice about what, exactly, we're doing when we write other people's stories for them and claim their authority. But Kay's problem seems to be based on the belief that to write the history of a long, long-dead person is to affect them in some fundamental way; to do something to them. But those long-dead people he's talking about, all of whom left writings or writings about themselves, they were all intelligent, powerful people who manipulated their own press, maybe with more skill than people on Facebook, but it's basically the same. They knew what they were doing. We don't have access to their real selves, but only the stories they wrote about themselves. I'm a fan and a historian, and I don't see any problem with writing stories about their stories. I do see problems with writing stories about people who are alive today, or who just died and whose families are alive, or who are national icons and are important to people, but those are for other reasons, and Kay doesn't mention those things as part of his argument.

The questions I think we should be asking aren't whether it's the same thing to write a story about Julius Caesar or Princess Diana. I think it's fairly clear that it isn't. What we should be asking is, to what extent is academic history different from historical RPF? If we changed the names and added an extra moon in the sky as Kay does, would it be fantasy, and if so, should we acknowledge that? Is it morally right to write the stories of long-dead people who didn't get the chance to write their own? Is it morally right to not?

Jerusalem syndrome

Today I went to the John Soane Museum in Central London. It's a house designed and built by this famous late 18th/early 19th century architect and collector, stuffed to the gills (or the eaves?) with bits and pieces of antiquity. It's quite extraordinary bit of historiography in spatial form. It made me realize how displays in modern museums serve to space out, categorize and map history in a way that gives the false impression that the past is easy to understand. There's something much more true, somehow, about stolen bits of history piled indiscriminately on top of each other, going up beyond your eyeline, hidden in secret rooms and suddenly leaping out at you from around a corner. The website says that Soane meant his museum for 'amateurs and students'. It seems to me that the most important thing I learned from my undergrad is that the past is extremely impressive, very present and totally incomprehensible. Bring back Victorian curatorship, that's what I say.

It's an amazing place, really worth a visit (and apparently they're going to do some major renovations soon, so get there fast); it's very interesting, architecturally, too, full of invisible skylights you can't quite see, all yellow glass and mirrors. There's also a small exhibition there right now of photographs of Rome taken by a Scottish priest in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, there's a lot of curatorial (is that a word?) comment on those; they explain in detail what each ruin is, when it was destroyed post-photograph, etc. They also provide a lot of cuttings from contemporary historians and guidebook writers describing the ruins as they are photographed; a recurring theme was that the ruins looked far nicer before the Italian government stripped all the flowers and trees off them and left them bare hunks of rock. It's funny, I don't think of ruins as being part of the landscape in that way. One thinks of them just sort of existing outside of nature, as if only humans could take away bits of marble or build over foundations, and only pollution could erode stone. I'd love to see the Roman forum the way this historian described it, all shaded by trees and full of flowers.

*

Today I also learned about Jerusalem Syndrome - did you know that there is a recognized medical phenomenon of people, sometimes with no previous history of mental illness, becoming psychotic on entering Jerusalem? Symptoms of Type 3 (uncompounded by previous mental illness), which tour guides are told to watch out for, include (lifted from Wikipedia):

1. Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
2. Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone. Tourist guides aware of the Jerusalem syndrome and of the significance of such declarations may at this point refer the tourist to an institution for psychiatric evaluation in an attempt to preempt the subsequent stages of the syndrome. If unattended, these stages are usually unavoidable.
3. A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
4. Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white.
5. The need to shout psalms or verses from the Bible, or to sing religious hymns or spirituals loudly. Manifestations of this type serve as a warning to hotel personnel and tourist guides, who should then attempt to have the tourist taken for professional treatment. Failing this, the two last stages will develop.
6. A procession or march to one of Jerusalem's holy places.
7. Delivery of a sermon in a holy place. The sermon is usually very confusing and based on a plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.

The article cites the Book of Margery Kempe as evidence that this existed in the past. I think that pathologising in that way is a totally pointless way of shutting down discussion about texts, but it's interesting that this is a recorded phenomenon. It makes one wonder about the physical power of mental associations with places. Apparently it's discussed in relation to Stendahl Syndrome, a mental effect that can happen when people are exposed to immense or overwhelming beauty in art or nature. Multiple recorded cases of dizziness, confusion and hallucinations in Florence in the nineteenth century, apparently.