Only two days to go until the next Carnivalesque, and yes it will be here.

I’ve had some interesting submissions, but I couldn’t exactly say they’ve been flooding in, so please don’t be shy: nominate yourself for a little glory now – enhance your dignitas and auctoritas in the blogsphere. (Yes I have been in ancient Rome for a few days now.)

Submissions of blog posts on any early modern history subject under the sun should be sent to natalieben at journ.freeserve.co.uk as soon as possible. If you’re thinking “Carnivalesque?”, there’s an explanation of this gathering of early modernists here. (For these purposes “early modern” is defined as covering the period between c.1450-1850. Anything posted in the past two months – more or less – is most welcome.)

And to get in the mood, check out History Carnival No 3; no ancient Romans, but Rastafarian visitations to Ethiopia, women during the Meiji Restoration and lots of other fascinating stuff.

P.S. I note that while I’ve been away my auctoritas has so risen that on the TTLB Ecosystem I’ve been promoted from a “Flappy Bird” to an “Adorable Little Rodent” – not sure how that came about, but perhaps I should loll around reading for days on end and not posting more often.

Apologies for being away longer than planned; it was a horrible cold, so I had five of those most frustrating days when you have endless hours to read but neither the concentration nor energy to read anything in the serious stacks. Instead, when I’m in this state I just want to read “escape” books – ones in which you disappear into another world for hours at a time, only emerging when the cough gets too pressing or the fever decides to have a spike.

So I dedicated myself to rereading Colleen McCullough’s six-volume ancient Rome series. (They’re about 800 pages each, so there’s plenty of escape.)

And although these are page-turners rather than “great literature”, and of course you know how it all comes out in the end (for those unfamiliar, they cover the fall of the Republic, from the rise of Marius to Octavius’s defeat of Mark Anthony), they are meticulously researched and well put together – no jarring anachronisms.

Reading the second-last, simply entitled Caesar, which starts with his Gallic Wars, I was reminded that I should have already known about the European headhunters on which I posted recently, since they feature quite prominently. I also learnt that they particularly terrified the Romans since a headless body would have no means of carrying a coin (which was put in the mouth) to pay for the ride across the River Styx into the underworld, so instead all that remained of the person would wander as a demented shade across the earth.

I read the series also musing about the possibility of a historical novelist actually getting inside the head of a character from another time, prompted in part by an interesting recent post on the problems of historical mysteries by The Little Professor and in part by my small role as a research subject on the handling of ancient objects that I do at the British Museum.

I sometimes there share my question – one without an answer, but I find it fascinating nonetheless: if you could jump in your time machine and go back to meet the person who made this hand-axe you are now holding 350,000 years ago, or even further back, to the person making this chopper 1.8 million years ago, would you be able to communicate with them?

Obviously you wouldn’t be able to talk to them, but would they understand the body language that communicates peaceful intentions, or a desire for food or water, or other things that I’ve found can be communicated very well without language in farflung parts of the world today?

I’ve never come across a discussion of this, but I wonder at what point a grimace – the drawing back of teeth to show threat or anger – became a smile? (Have to be careful with that in the time machine.)

So does McCullough manage it with a far easier subject, on a time from which considerable contemporary writings survive?

In some ways yes, and in the ways you might expect the sources to allow her. She’s excellent on dignitas and auctoritas, I think, and not bad on issues of patron-client relationships – overall on the whole way Roman politics worked, not just the theory of it.

How can I judge? Oddly, the place where I’ve seen something fairly close to what she describes is Thailand; its modern “democracy” bears remarkably resemblances to ancient Rome’s, including the centrality of patron-client relationships, the concept of “face” being all-important and broad scale bribery of voters.

It is on the domestic stuff, on really getting inside how people think, that she fails, or perhaps necessarily swerves into the modern. Her Romans are, I think, far too humane, too nice to their slaves, too kind to their relatives, in a society that regarded such behaviour as a weakness and a folly. (Except those characters who are out-and-out villains.)

Her Marius proscribes only when senile dementia has taken hold, her Sulla only for the necessity of state, and Caesar only while being sickened at the need to take action to prevent further bloodshed in the long term.

But then, if her main characters weren’t like this, would we not be repulsed by them, or at least insufficiently seduced (and her Caesar in particular is very seductive) to stick with them for 800 or more pages?

Probably not. She is caught like the historical mystery writer by the demands and conventions of her readers. It is perhaps we rather than she who can only go so far into the head of an ancient Roman.

I’ve got the office lurgy, feeling like hell (if the first person who got it didn’t come in but just kept it safely at home how much better the world would be!) so I might not be back for a day or so.

But I take back all the negative things I’ve said about bureaucracy, at least temporarily, since my application for British citizenship was approved in about a month, the mail this morning told me, when the website says it takes nine months!

Bark, bark. (That’s my burning throat, not a dog) – off to bed with The First Man in Rome …

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the 18th-century German playwright Friedrich Schiller. (Yes, very belatedly.)

Having loved the production of his Don Carlos now in London, I went on Saturday night to the other end of the theatre world to see his Maria Stuart at a fringe venue in Southwark, the Union Theatre.

The friend with whom I went wasn’t entirely convinced by the idea, and almost tried to persuade me to see The History Boys instead, but in the end, after some doubtful moments, she was glad she hadn’t.

The acting was surprisingly good, in places excellent, particularly by the actress in the lead role, and if Queen Elizabeth at first seemed a bit of an odd presentation, it grew on you.

The trains rattled overhead (the theatre is in the railway arches), they should to do something to stop the CD player on the stage manager’s computer whirring all the time, but this is the fringe. What really could be done is to rein in the director’s flights of fancy that has the players occasionally moving into arty slow motion dances between scenes, and quite why a telephone suddenly appears at the start of the second act, when the rest is more or less an original-setting production, is utterly beyond me.

But overall it is well worth ten quid if you can get to see it. (The curious “leave a message on the tape if you want tickets” method of booking seems to work.)

And if Maria Stuart appears anyway in the world near you go to see it; this is a spectacularly fine piece of drama.

P.S. I can also recommend the nearby Baltic “vodka shot” bar – very good fun (and the music is at a volume that makes conversation possible!) The ginger vodka is dangerous delicious, and the plum brandy not bad at all.

A tag: [theatre]

I’ve been doing lots of blog browsing – checking up for my host role in Carnivalesque, so it counts as work, really!

I’m saving the historical gems for the carnival, but three other glittering posts to share:

1. A joke to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever had any contact with “consultants”. (And in my UN development days I was one, at least part-time, which involved in one instance my advising a woman on a country about which I knew nothing, and she’d been doing a PhD in Sydney when I was in nappies – I’m afraid I didn’t “value-add” much there, and probably picked out a few “dogs”.)

2. Dr Charles muses on the potential medical risks of thongs. (I mean the underwear sort, not the rubber flip-flop sort, for Australian readers.)

3. The serious one. MGK was visiting a Microsoft project trying to realise Vannevar Bush’s truly revolutionary post-WWII vision of information management and pointing out some potential hitches in the plans. I find this fascinating because it is something I have wanted ever ince the internet started, and indeed before.

I was one of those odd children who wanted to collect facts and figures and never to forget them – the wall above my desk when I was 11 or so was a sea of nails with folders of facts hang on them, and ever since I’ve been battling to keep track of everything I want to know. And as I said in my most recent thesis, it is what the internet really needs. (Search for Vannevar to get to the relevant bit.)

On that line, I was interested to read Clioweb’s post on the “Scribe” notetaking programme, apparently specifically designed for historians, and a commenter’s reference to Endnotes.

Some time soon, and yes I do mean pretty soon, I hope to create a lot more space in my life for historical research, and I will need to move on from my undergraduate-acquired method of research – photocopying everything that doesn’t move and scribbling all over it, and filling books with Stick-it notes. Any comments or recommendations would be most welcome.

There’s been much talk of the usefulness of the web in research, and it certainly is invaluable in making easily accessible many forms of texts previously rare or hard to reach, but in many ways I can’t help feeling we’re still about the stage they were on radio when they read out the newspapers for “news” bulletins. Our habitus, to use Bourdieu’s invaluable concept, has yet to catch up with our technology.

So I was interested to see a site on research into the effects of the reservations for women of seats in India’s local government, the panchayats. The authors say: We seek your inputs regarding the sort of questions we need to ask: Perspectives; Any research studies that may have been done; Questionnaires; Experience at the field level; Anything………”

I can’t imagine that too many of the women on the panchayats would have internet access – although I bet there would be a few – but it is easy to see how this model might be used to encourage participation by the subjects of studies in the design of the studies on them, potentially a revolution.

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If you are at all interested in science, then you have to read a physics professor’s argument for radical science, which addresses, if does not answer, the fascinating question: Where do hypotheses come from?

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Iraq as the new Iran? This excellent Washington Post article on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has some frightening input into this possibility, although is scrupulously fair. And it points out that you can see for yourself at Sistani.org, with his writings available in English, French, Urdu and Arabic. A sample:

Question:I want to ask about talking to ones fiancee on telephone, is it permissible or not?
Answer:If talking is free of provocative words and if there is no fear of falling in sin, there is no objection.

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And if you need to find hope for sanity in that other great fundamentalist state, read this account of how to bring up an atheist child in America.