Posted by Jerry on April 4th, 2004 — Posted in History, Journal
Yes the Edwardians have come to town – an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. It is quite a varied exhibition, including paintings, clothing, and furniture. What was special about this period just prior to the first world war? I’m guessing it is two things:
Firstly, there was an emerging new aesthetic – impressionism was around since the 1880s – and paintings were taking on a new light. Part of this might be ascribed to new paint technologies – paint tubes allowed painting from nature, and watercolours were very portable. But the Victorian period appears to have been quite conservative and resistant to the new aesthetic. When Britain’s Queen Victoria died in 1901 it was like a new birth for the new century, and there was a much more rapid uptake of new ideas in the sciences as well as the arts. The invention of photography meant that painting had to find a new role or be relagated to the dinosaurs. So the sense that painting could capture something more than a photograph was pursued with a passion. Hence much of the exhibition is taken up with portraits of various kinds.
The emergence of Japan on the Western developed world’s stage provided an exoticism that stimulated the Edwardian arts – there are many painted fans in the exhibition and some portraits of Japanese superstars, including the best known of the Geishas. In the decorative arts lacquer work was strongly in vogue, and there was a Japanese influence in the ‘arts and crafts’ movement.
Secondly, and related to the first is a new scientific approach to health – it was considered healthy to spend time on the beach in the fresh air. This was the time of several social experiments with improving working conditions so that workers would be more productive and would be fitter to take on the responsibilities of arms at the peak of the British empire. So there are images of people at the beach, bathing or generally pursuiing healthy outdoor exercise. There are also images of locals who made good as colonial administrators – new wealth and all that. Alongside this was also a sense in which Victorian prudery was being challenged, and the number of nudes attests to a new relationship with the body.
Finally, there are hints of a pre-figuring of later styles of futurism and social realism as seen in the work of Eric Kennington (1888-1960) whose 1914 painting “The costermongers” with its vibrant colours and a flat perspective could have been painted in the 1930s or even the 1960s. And the vibrant geometrics in the Ballet Russes costumes also points the way to the later work of the Bauhaus, such as Kandinsky and Klee.
Overall, this was a good exhibition – well worth taking a look if you happen to be in Canberra 😉
“The Costermongers” – Eric Kennington
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 27th, 2004 — Posted in History, Journal
Friday 25 March 2004: A fascinating talk by Paul Weaver at the Australian National University’s classics program.
He began by talking about an off-hand reference in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus to a person called Herminos travelling to Rome …”and became a freedman under Caeser so he can get official jobs”. This seems to have caused something of a controversy among Classical scholars. After describing the Roman civil service hierarchy, Weaver described the various means by which a person could join the Roman civil service – primarily through being born into Caeser’s household as a slave or acquired as a slave and subsequently freed.
Essentially, where freedmen claimed to have joined the Roman Imperial civil service, it appears most were simply making fraudulent use of the appropriate titles. Basically there were three routes to the civil service:
* be born to an Imperial slave;
* be a slave acquired through bequest or conquest; or
* be a freedman (Pallas appears to be the only known case of a freedman having transferred into the Imperial civil service)
Herminos appears to have been a Roman Egyptian writing home to say he had made good. But it is likely that his claims to be working in various (unspecified) positions in the civil service in Rome seem to be either wishful thinking or big-noting himself to preserve his pride (eg rather than admit to being a garbage collector). In short, this fellow appears unlikely to have made a successful entree into Caeser’s Imperial Civil Service.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 24th, 2004 — Posted in History, Travel
I’ve just watched a fascinating TV program syndicated to Australia by the BBC on the ‘search for El-Dorado’ in the Amazon rainforest. Following Spanish explorer tales, the progam described how the myths of a large civilisation were debunked on the strength of soil fertility – or lack thereof. Rainforests may look fertile, but the amount of rainfall means that nutients are quickly leached from the soil leaving infertile clay substrates. We have a similar problem in Australia – since most of our land mass was once sea bed and hence below a thin layer of sandy top soil we have a layer of salt – which through over-cropping of the soil, quickly rises to the surface, causing ever increasing desertification of our farmlands.
Enter some persistent researchers who allow their curiosity to be drawn to seeming ‘islands’ of rainforest in otherwise barrren land. It turns out that beneath these fertile islands is a huge legacy of pottery shards – of pots that would be far too large for nomadic people scattered thinly across the landscape. The secret? The black soil – which appears to be artificial. Amazonian small-croppers, like those in Malaysia and Indonesia, clear land by slashing and burning. But by burning on the surface, all the nutrients get burnt to ash leaving only a small amount of added fertility value for farming. The difference appears to be that the Amazonian people of the past also felled trees and burnt the vegetation, but they did so by covering it with earth and producing, not ash, but charcoal. Charcoal is highly absorbant and would retain nutrients in the soil. As one researcher has noted, terra preta soil (black soil) enriched with mineral fertiliser gave 880 percent more yield than the same substrate enriched with the fertiliser alone. In other words the fertiliser was not being leached form the soil.
Now, if only we in Australia could apply that kind of process to our own soil – how much more productive could our land be?
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 21st, 2004 — Posted in History, Journal, Writing
On Thursday (18 March) I went to a Classics seminar at the Australian National University – Robert Barnes was talking on the old Library at Alexandria.
It was a revisit/work-in-progress of a paper he published in a collection to recognise the opening of the new Alexandria Library that opened about 18 months ago.
Barnes described the original, set up by Ptolemy I in terms that seemed a cross between a ‘salon’ and a think-tank devoted to the study of (primarily) Greek literature and writing.
The Library appeared to enjoy royal patronage for an extended period, covering at least the period of the first three Ptolemys. Barnes also spoke of the controversy over the library’s destruction, with varying claims of accidental or deliberate burning by Julius Caeser, by Augustus Caeser, or successive versions of destruction or sacking including by Caliph Omar’s Moslem invaders – the latter largely discounted. What is interesting in all this is two things: firstly that there was more than one campus of the Alexandrine library – with a ‘daughter’ library being located in the temple of Serapis. Moreover, when books were obtained (through copying, theft, gifting or purchase) they were first stored in warehouses by the docks – and so the destruction by fire story in which fire spread from the fleet to the surrounding buildings, may have destroyed the ‘new books section’ of the library. At any rate it seems unlikely that the library was totally destroyed all at once. Good commentarys along the lines of Barnes’ paper can be found at the following links:
* James Hannum
* Preston Chesser
The second thing that is interesting is that the location of the major Library remains unknown to this day, although the ‘daughter’ library at the Serapium has been well excavated.
It is thought to be somewhere near the intersection between Rue El-Horreya and Rue Nebi Daniell. [I would like to acknowledge the source of this map, but after stumbling across it on the web I have been unable to relocate the site – so if you recognise it, could you let me know please and I’ll put in the appropriate acknowledgement and link – Cheers, Jerry]
Why a library of Greek writings? Perhaps it has something to do with the Ptolemys representing a ruling but essentially Greek minority being faced with a well established and longstanding Egyption civilisation. So they would have perhaps held a kind of ‘cultural cringe’ that drove them to be like many expatriates to become more Greek than the Greeks (in the same way that many English in Australia become more English than the English) – so they may have had an interest in building a name or reputation for themselves as sophisticated scholars of Greek culture. Moreover, the Library may have served to attract ‘star’ scholars to Alexandria to help keep up the standard of debate in this outpost on the margins of Greek civilisation. And finally, the library may have been a means to assert the dominance of Greek culture in the face of the well-establised Egyptian civilisation.
One questioner at the end of the seminar seemed concerned that the library may have been somewhat devalued by not necessarily having all the scrolls that make up any given ‘work’ – given that each work required multiple scrolls. But to make such an assertion implies that the same primacy of a whole work was assumed by the users of the Library. But perhaps it may have been the case that if all a great scholar’s work was considered worthwhile then it would be no shame to have even fragments of that scholar’s work – and that such fragments, perhaps single scrolls from a work of seven or more – would have been sufficient for many purposes. Certainly art galleries today typically only have a small selection of any given artist’s work, and that even one work might suffice to study elements of an artist’s style or brushwork. Could it not have been much the same in Ancient Egypt?
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 21st, 2004 — Posted in History, Writing
I’ve just picked up a copy of Apuleius – The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) – Penguin classics edition translated by Robert Graves. A precursor to Kafka’s ‘metamorphosis, the Cinderella folk tale, and a host of other works through the ages, this book is a great read! It is a kind of magic realist tale of lust, loss and transformation. Although quite lyrical, Robert Graves does appear to have cleaned up some of the more earthy language found in earlier editions, such as the translation by Adlington in 1566. And for the purists there is also a complete latin edition online. If you are unfamiliar with this book it is worth checking out Benjamin Slade’s Review: “The best piece of asse in Ancient Rome”.
Apuleius himself appears to have been a roman living in North Africa, which possibly explains the down-to-earth lustiness of this set of tales. He was a platonist and some of the Platonic duality comes through in his latin writings, including the Metamorphoses. The “Metamorphoses” was one of the first complete Roman latin novels to come down to us and it provides satyrical descrptions of all walks of Roman life from Senators to shepherds.
I think it is also possible to apply a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading to this work as an allegory of the divided self in the process of individuation (see Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” and “The Agency of the Letter” in Ecrits. In this case the protagonist, Lucius, becoming self aware through his sense of difference (expressed in his transformation into an ass – classic Mirror stage), then filling the ‘lack’ of unity with the world/m/Other with semiotic practice: language – the tales and adventures – until achieving mythic union in his retranformation back into a man. So Apuleius’ Metamorphoses can be seen as metaphoric of the emergence of the ego-self into language. What do you think?
Cheers
Jerry
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