you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So my long-awaited Cambridge Companions to Tacitus and to Roman Historiography arrived today. At least one person in the Tacitus one is saying stupid and overly-simplistic things about Tacitus and senatorial martyrs -- NOT THAT I'M SURPRISED.

More to the point, there is an astoundingly angry essay by J.E. Lendon about how "Woodman and Wiseman and people like them [i.e. scholars who approach ancient historians from a literary/rhetorical/theoretical perspective] are hacks and self-serving careerists enamored of sketchy ~French~ ideas who have utterly destroyed the noble discipline of ancient history." So...yeah. To be fair, a large portion of the article is making legitimate arguments about Cicero's discussion of historiography. But the opening and last portions basically consist of: "the following people and their namby-pamby ~theory~ suck..."

(Full disclosure: I stand (pretty) firmly on the literary/rhetorical side of the literary-historical divide, and I have even been known to be pretty scornful of the "well first we can delete the speeches, because obviously those were made up, and these elaborate descriptions and digressions are also obviously the creation of the author so we can remove them, too: okay no we know what happened" school of approach to ancient historians.)

But the point of bringing contemporary theory to bear on non-contemporary texts is NOT that some ancient author is amazingly anticipating the theoretical frameworks of Zizek or Foucault or Derrida. It's that there are observations about the way texts function and the way social pressures function that are -- surprise! -- visible in pre-modern texts as well as modern ones. No one seems to be upset that, e.g., Eastern European scholars have been using the experience of the intellectual dissident under a Soviet regime to think about Tacitus... (which is not to say that some very "theory-heavy" classics can get out-there and can get very far from plausible reality -- John Henderson is amazing and brilliant and ridiculously clever, but he may have extra gimmicks that don't really add to his argument.)

Also: quotes like this? "The result is like the diary of a fat teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none." Was that adjective really necessary, Professor Henderson?

And: "But historians too have not answered as vigorously as they ought. Unconquerable love of ease is no doubt part of the reason for this long neglect, but more powerful is the admirable inclination of most historians simply to get on with it and not worry too much about the theoretical basis of what they are doing: theirs is the hard-skulled practical habit of mind that simply ignored Hayden White, and preserved academic history from the squalls of nonsense from France that overwhelmed the modern languages" (Italics mine). SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY? Are we self-important, much?

I really don't like airports, or airlines, and I think it's because I am not used to be powerless. You have to stand in lines, and deal with all sorts of stupid bureaucracy and inefficiencies and your time is completely in their hands, and you can't make a scene, because you might get kicked off the plane/arrested/shot. (I'm either an entitled Generation-Whatever brat, or a red-blooded American who doesn't hold with the Soviet-Style opacity because in America the customer is always right, damn it!)

I'm actually not talking about security. Going through Security is kind of a pain, and occasionly the TSA people are cranky old ladies and make your life more difficulty, but I can see the point, and, I can see why the time is being taken up: getting all those people through the scanner. What really annoys me is the way that planes get delayed, and more delayed, and then lose their runway slots, so get more delayed, and then, "oops, we forgot to take the jet-stream into account, so the flying time will actually be about an hour longer than we said." And then, THEN they have the nerve to tell you to "have a nice day and we hope you fly with us again."

And, of course, flying with a cello makes things so much more entertaining. I got the airport early. Fortunately, as it turns out, because at the check-in counter, although the gentleman who has helping me initially had no problem, the woman next to him exclaimed that she loves seeing instruments with tickets, because "see, it's so cute that its boarding pass says "Cello [Last Name]". Which brought another woman over, who announced that this was Not Okay. Cello cannot have boarding passes. It had to be changed into a single boarding pass for me with an extra card giving me an extra seat. Never mind that Cello and I have flown before, and it always has its own boarding pass, and this is NEVER a problem. Except at Little Provincial Airport, of course.

"If we let it go like this, then its in the computer that the cello is a person." There is no way to note that it is, in fact, not a person? Apparently, not. Now, in principle, although it is stupid to make a big deal about it, I wouldn't really care what form the boarding passes took, as long as I had one, and had proof that my cello got a seat. But no one could figure out how to make this change. At one point, someone was on two telephones at once, calling the airline's central HQ to try to get told how to do it. FORTY-FIVE minutes I had to wait.

After that, security was no big deal, and because the TSA woman was too busy yelling at the man in front of me to "take your coat out of that tray!" and "push your bag onto the belt, Sir!" I don't think she even noticed that I was putting a cello through. Or if she did, she didn't care.

They always make the cello sit in the bulkhead (I fly an open-seating airline), but the rest of the seats are usually taken by handicapped/elderly/very tall or large people, so I was sitting a few rows back. Which led to much confusion when there was a crew change at the stop-over, when the flight attendants asked for "Lydia", and I raised my hand, only to be told "not you, a different Lydia." Whom of course they didn't find, because, as I was later told, they were looking for the "person of size"** who had two seats, since, of course, they had no record of a cello, thanks to the stupidity of the check-in agent who took away its boarding pass.

At least we both got there, I suppose.

**I really hate this phrase. I understand that some euphemism is in order, but "person of size" is so obviously euphemistic that it has completely the opposite effect. Why not say "a large person"?