Tom Roper's Weblog

Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work

The library at the University of East Anglia has won the RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) in Libraries Award. I intend no disrespect to UEA library or anyone who works there, but giving prizes for using RFID seems to me much the same as giving a prize for innovative uses of sellotape or post-it notes in libraries. In my will, if I have not spent my heirs' patrimony on gin, slow horses and fast women by then, I may leave a legacy for a pointless award to embarrass the profession. Suggestions in the comments box please.
Note: the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work was a prize at the fictional St Custards school in the Molesworth tetralogy. It was always won by Grabber,  head boy, captain of everything and son of nouveau-riche parents. Grabber could, the narrator-hero Molesworth says,  'win a brownies knitting badge for the ushual amount'.

Tanya Harrod: Hilary and Joanna Bourne lecture

Hilary and Joanna Bourne lecture: The Arts and Crafts Movements in England and Japan: Ditchling in Context.

Tanya Harrod:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/ceramics/points_of_view/people/harrod/
http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/study/dr_tanya_harrod_652.html

The Hilary and Joanna Bourne lecture is held annually on the Sunday nearest to Hilary’s birthday, November 27, to celebrate the remarkable lives of the founders of the museum.
Introduced by Roger Broadbent, one of the trustees of the Ditchling Museum, and nephew of the weaver Hilary Bourne and her sister Joanna Bourne, who founded the museum in 1985, in whose honour the lecture is held annually, Tanya began by saying that she had had the privilege of meeting Hilary Bourne, interviewing her in 1999 for the British Library’s Crafts Lives project.

Her lecture, she said, would discuss the geographies of the Arts and Crafts movement, how places like Ditchling came to be so important, and the relationship at that time between English and Japanese craftsmen.

What can this mean?

'Britain's shoppers have increased the amount spent on bacon to more than £1bn in the past year, figures show'
Guardian News in Brief

Mary Beard triumphs at the LRB Bookshop

I heard Mary Beard speak about her new book the Roman Triumph at the London Review of Books Bookshop on Thursday, in conversation with Christopher Clark, an expert in Prussian nineteenth century history.

She was entertaining and erudite, as I expected, having first heard her on Radio 3 a few years ago talking about her book on the Colosseum.
Christopher started by describing how the book works in three ways, firstly as an account of how triumphs worked, secondly as a study of their contradictory meanings, and thirdly as an investigation of how scholars have understood triumphs since, and thereby what we can and cannot know about the past.
The triumph was, said Mary, a celebration of a significant military victory., The successful general would be conveyed, dressed as the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in a chariot through the streets of Rome. Before him went prisoners and the spoils of his campaign, behind the chariot followed his soldiers, signing ribald songs about him. Our best source for descriptions of triumphs is Ovid, but Ovid's mind may not have been entirely on the triumph itself, for he recommends them as a chance for seduction. The route was probably from the Campus Martius, past the Colosseum, through the Arch of Titus, ending at the Capitol.
Triumphs could be ambiguous: there was real danger that the general could be upstaged by the captives, which makes us wonder about the nature of victory. A modern equivalent, Mary suggested, might be the execution of Saddam Hussein. The choreographed nature of the triumph, akin to Bush's 'mission accomplished' television stunt, which in fact took place off the coast of California, though intended to appear as if the aircraft carrier was in the theatre of war, could reach ridiculous lengths, as when Caligula is supposed to have taken Gaulish captives, dyed their hair blonde and taught them a Germanic language, in order that they might be taken for German prisoners.
What was the last triumph? Mary mentioned the triumph of Ras Tafari, later to become Haile Selaisse, as witnessed by Wilfred Thesinger and his father in 1916. It could be said have been in the reign of Constantine, though the tradition did continue in Byzantium. Then again, a renaissance author traced a direct line of triumphs from Romulus to Charles V. The triumph persisted in various forms. Napoleon paraded looted works of art through the streets of Paris, Hitler spent much of his time drawing triumphal arches. Mary reminded us of disagreement about the commemoration of the end of the Falklands/Malvinas war, between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who had taught classics, and the Thatcher government, which wanted a jingoistic celebration of military success.
The origins of the triumph are obscure. Some tried to attribute the practice to the Etruscans, others to the god Dionysus returning form the Orient.
Someone asked, as I wished to, how triumphs were regulated and granted. Though Roman lawyers tried to lay down criteria, such as the general had to have killed at least 5,000, the Senate had to approve the triumph, and so on, in practice generals might well take a triumph if they thought they could get away with. On the related question of who paid, if the Senate did ratify the triumph, the public purse would then meet the costs. Someone else asked about the similarities with funeral processions, someone who was making a translation of the Aeneid wondered if Helen was going back to a triumph. It was a fascinating evening.

There's a podcast of an interview with Mary here: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/audio/BEAROT.mp3

Technorati Tags: marybeard, romantriumphs

Hail, bright Cecilia

It was only when a student asked me the date that I remembered that today is St Cecilia's day

Lolinator

I should use this blog to give the world my opinions on the great issues of the day, such as the Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton controversy, the twenty-first century version of  C.P. Snow versus F.R.Leavis confrontation of my childhood,  or the government's mislaying of child benefit data
Instead of this I have been amusing myself with mangling my institution's home page with Lolinator: http://lolinator.com/lol/www.sussex.ac.uk/

Cheltenham

Thank heavens there is racing at Cheltenham this afternoon. It is grey, windy, and spotting with rain, but if there is horses run under Cleeve Hill, the world cannot be truly bad.
So I choose:
200 Saint Kadette
235: Granit Jack
310: Sonnyanjoe
340: Bob Bob Bobbin

THES: boomers in thrall to a wiki universe

There's a curious article in the latest THES:
Brabazon, Tara
Boomers in thrall to a wiki universe
THES, 16 November 2007, 1820:14
It doesn't yet appear in the electronic version, either in the free area or the subscribers section.
Brabazon who, it seems, is Professor of Media in that  institution that lies the other side of a railway line and a main road to mine, is complimentary about librarians, but dismissive of bloggers: writing about recent library conferences, and I wish she would say which she means, she concludes that we promote 'right-wing populism' and replicate 'colonial structures of the 19th century'.
I think she is wrong to set librarians against bloggers. I belong to both groups, and I think I and others are trying, as the best librarians always have, to use new technologies to make our services to scholars better.
She thinks that we have lost 'the capacity to value the particular, the unique, the ephemeral and the transitory. I could cite several blogs whose sole function is to present particularity, uniqueness, ephemera and transitoriness. I hope some of my posts may have those qualities too.
Professor Brabazon rightly inveighs against male consultants who leech off a predominantly female profession. May I proudly point out that I am a male librarian, but I am emphatically not a consultant?  Indeed my only attempt to be one, during an unfortunate period of unemployment, ended horribly.

'...meanwhile I neither write my diary nor read my Greek'

Thus wrote Virginia Woolf on 13 February 1920. I too have been poor at keeping this blog up, and just as poor at Greek, the reason being that my blogging energies are consumed by the campaign blog to keep the sixth form at my childrens' school.
In any case, I do not see this blog as a diary, much more a commonplace book. See the Digital Medievalist for more on these. I hope to write more frequently soon.

Technorati Tags: virginiawoolf

Ascot, Down Royal and Wetherby

1.10 Ascot: The Wicket Keeper
1.40 Ascot: Cloone River
2.10 Ascot: Hoo La Baloo
2.30 Down Royal: Taranis
330 Wetherby: State of Play