Tom Roper's Weblog

Career opportunities

I see the Levy Board are looking for a chairman: I could do that. I would be good at taking money away from the bookies and giving it to deserving horsey causes. Indeed, when I ran the library at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, we benefited from some very generous support from the Board.

Today I only take an interest in three races, the Grimthorpe Chase and the bumper at Doncaster and the Gold Cup chase at newbury. I was tempted by Ungaro in the first of these, but settled on Out the Back, and in the bumper I take Nodforms Violet, who is heading for the Festival Bumper at Cheltenham. At Newbury, I go for Nigel Twiston-Davies' progressive The Hollow Bottom.

Speaking of Cheltenham, I have entered the races into an iCal calendar, if anyone finds that useful. Details will follow.

Newbury 305: The Hollow Bottom
Doncaster 325: Out the Back
Donactser 400: Nodforms Violet

Citation in Classical Studies and FRBR

There's a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on the theme Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure in memory of Ross Scaife, the founder of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, with lots of fascinating stuff, but the article that caught my eye is by Neel Smith on citation in the classics. I must admit that all my work and thinking about citation was during my medical librarian days.

Smith draws on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as a way of understanding the hierarchy of texts, and has developed the Canonical Text Services, a system for identifying and retrieving texts by canonical reference.

Smith, Neel
Citation in classical studeies
Digital Humanties Quarterly
Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure
Winter 2009
Volume 3 Number 1 http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000028.html

Dead professors

Today's Times Higher, in a much-needed critique of the poor quality of college and university prospectuses, cites the case of Lampeter, who still quote in theirs a professor of theology who died eight years ago. There's a '..."rich and vigorous programme devoted to the study of religion. You cannot do better in Britain in the field than here. Strong in Islamic studies, in Judaism, in Christianity, it also shines in Buddhism, the Hindu and the Chinese traditions. People from the whole world meet in the heart of Wales, " he says from beyond the other side.

Hampshire library conference

Hampshire County Council, who are no saints when it comes to closing libraries, held a conference yesterday, 24th February, on the future of public libraries.

It was a curious event. The attendees were there by invitation only, and, looking down the list, they were mostly from Tory-controlled authorities. According to the speakers' biographies, only one of the people who run public library services and held forth was in fact a librarian. The others seemed to have drifted into managing libraries from other local government departments. And of course there was no one there to speak for those who use libraries.

In a concession to openness, there was a good Twitter feed from @libconf and sporadic use of the tag #libconf,; most of the presentations went up, only to disappear again this morning and videos will go up early next week. But the speakers refused to take questions from the Twitterverse. At one point Tim Coates, the former Waterstones boss and self-appointed expert on libraries, claimed that half Britain's public libraries close for lunch. Evidence, Tim?

I doubt if this conference will be remembered as one that changed very much. I think Hampshire probably held it for PR reasons as much as anything else.

University Challenge

There's no betting on the result of tonight's University Challenge final between Corpus Christi, Oxford and Manchester. As the programme is recorded and the contestants sworn to secrecy, there'd be an opportunity for the unscrupulous to put pressure on those in the know.

I would back with my shirt, house and the children's tuition fees Corpus to triumph over Manchester. They may be the smaller institution, with 350 undergraduate and postgraduate students to Manchester's 35,441, but their form so far, captained by the impressive Gail Trimble, has been terrific.

See Mary Beard's post on the competition and Ms Trimble

Chepstow, Kempton and Newcastle

The big races this afternoon are the Racing Post Chase at Kempton and the Eider Chase at Newcastle. In the former, though this morning's Racing Post is full of hype for Big Fella Thanks, I prefer Johnjo O'Neill's Fier Normand ; in the latter Kevin Reveley's Jass has raced well so far and should like the ground and, I hope, the four-mile trip.
Kempton 205: Dee Ee Williams
Kempton 235: Herecomesthetruth
Kempton 310: Fier Normand
Chepstow 320: Almydan
Newcastle 330: Jass
Kempton 354: Helium

Public libraries: 'one of the great creations of Victorian culture"

See Joan Bakewell in the Times on the Wirral and Swindon closures and more:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/joan_bakewell/article5767579.ece

More on plays performed in Greek

I held forth on performances of classical Greek drama in the original language a few days ago. I now have more information, for which I'm very grateful to Amanda Wrigley at the Archives of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, based at Oxford, and to Mr D Jones, archivist at the Perse School.

Mr Jones supplied me with the programme and the review from the Pelican, the school magazine, for an English language production of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus which took place in 1970, and in which I played a minor, singing part. My contemporary, Bill Buffery, who played Oedipus, continues his interest in Greek drama. His company in Devon, Multi Story Theatre, have a play in their repertoire based on Medea, and I saw his Backward Glance, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, at the 2008 Brighton Festival.

I had incorrectly ascribed the music to Graham Sudbury, the Director of Music at the school. In fact I see it was by Robin Orr, for piano, cymbals, timpani and male voices. With me among the singers were David Tang who later made a considerable name for himself, and Roger Blayney, with whom I'm still in touch, played the timpani.

This was a performance in translation, but the best I could offer from the Perse to the Archives' database. Amanda Wrigley, the researcher at the archive, kindly supplied me with a print-out from their database of 160 productions since 1950 in Britain in Greek. There follows some rudimentary analysis.

The most popular plays overall were Sophocles Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, with fourteen performances each, followed by Euripides the Bacchae with twelve. The most performed comedies, by Aristophanes, were the Birds and the Frogs, with five performances each.

As for numbers of performances universities with traditions of performance of Greek plays dominate the list, with Kings College London in the lead with 55 shows, with Oxford and Cambridge following, with 18 and 21 respectively. The occasional alfresco production crops up among these, usually in the agreeable surroundings of a college's fellows' garden

I was particularly interested to see if a tradition of regular performances in Greek could be maintained in English schools. The Bradfield College does best, their most recent in the database being in 2006. In Newcastle too, joint productions between the Royal Grammar and Central Newcastle have been a regular fixture. Honourable mentions go to the Perse School for Girls, Bryanston School in Dorset and Whitgift School in Croydon who managed one-off productions.

I do not offer any scholarly commentary. Having missed this year's Kings production of Lysistrata, and last year's Oxford staging of Agamemnon, I am now determined not to let a production pass without seeing it.

On the classification and shelving of superstitious materials in public libraries

Some newspapers' interpretations of the Museums Libraries and Arts Commission's (MLA) report on Handling Controversial Material in Libraries, published yesterday after a consultation period, claim that the MLA is instructing public libraries to shelve copies of the Koran on the top shelf. The report says nothing of the sort; it include in an appendix, without comment, an incident in Leicester where a few Muslims complained about the book being shelved in its proper place, some taking it on themselves to move copies, with the result, perhaps at odds with their aim, that readers would not find it. The example seems to me to have been included as an illustration of the ways in which special interest groups may try to exert undue influence over library policy and practice. I have heard in my career anecdotes of Muslims who have objected to female library staff handling copies of the Koran.

The shelving of religious books, as with any other type of material in public libraries is usually determined by the classification system used which, though not its primary purpose, provides a logical shelf arrangement. The privileged place of religion in the Dewey Decimal Classification reflects the classification's historical and geographical origins in nineteenth century America: a whole class, the 200s is devoted to religion, subdivided, which seems to me, in this most secular and rational of countries, to be overstating the place of religion in modern life. I much prefer the approach of the Soviet classification, developed at the Lenin Library, which relegated religion to a much more logical place, with superstition and folklore. But, if we're stuck with Dewey, as I suppose public libraries are for the foreseeable, then there is no justification for taking material out of sequence to pacify vociferous god-botherers, and I very much doubt if any of my colleagues would give any such request the time of day.

Read the report here (PDF): http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/press/releases/2009/~/media/Files/pdf/2009/ControversialMaterialReport

Edward Upward 1903-2009

I saw the Guardian's obituary of Edward Upward this afternoon, written by Alan Walker, who complied the definitive bibliography of Upward's work. He died on Friday, aged 105. I first discovered his early work, Journey to the Border and the short stories of the 1930s, then the great anti-revisionist trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, which, I was shocked to learn from the obituary is out of print, and then his late works.

For other obituaries, see the Times, the Telegraph and the Morning Star

He was a great influence and inspiration. No writer has ever understood and interpreted dialectics as well as Upward.

I first read the Railway Accident in 1970 or thereabouts, in a grey covered Penguin classics edition, with Magritte's Time Transfixed on the cover. For some reason, The Rotten Elements was available in paperback when the other two volumes were not, so I read the middle volume of the Sprial Ascent before the others. This made sense: having understood the Sebrills' fight in the CPGB against the draft of the British Road to Socialism, it was then easy to read the back-story of Alan's political development in the 1930s, from apolitical teacher to anti-fascist and communist, and then to the final volume. I believe I then found the whole trilogy in Cambridge public library in a yellow covered edition.

I was sorry to see his library for sale by Maggs a few years ago. The well-illustrated catalogue survives (PDF): http://www.maggs.com/catalogues/pdfcatalogues/upward.pdf . I hope the books went to good homes.

Postscript: an interesting appreciation of Upward by Guillermo Parra may be read at Venepoetics and also in a magazine new to me, The Can.