It's a Don's Life (24 page)

I was, at first, a reluctant blogger. Now, after three years ‘on the blog’, blogging has become part of my life. It would,
in fact, be hard to imagine life without it.

In early 2006, I was one of those writers scooped up by newspapers and magazines (in my case,
The Times Literary Supplement
) and invited to contribute blogs to their new on-line editions. The deal was that, for a modest recompense, I was to provide
two posts per week on subjects that would include university life at Cambridge and the ancient Greeks and Romans – though
books, arts, modern politics and the occasional rant were welcome too.

The title was to be
A Don’s Life
and, as I soon discovered, I was to be billed as ‘a wickedly subversive commenter on both the modern and the ancient world’.
Three years on, I would happily shed the ‘wickedly subversive’ label. (How could anyone who appears to describe
themselves
as ‘subversive’ really be so? And how could anyone go on being ‘subversive’ year after year?) But I am afraid that the label
has stuck. That is how I am now regularly introduced when I give lectures and talks, even when the sober topic of Roman history
I am addressing has nothing subversive about it whatsoever.

At the time I was made the offer, I had never knowingly read a blog – but this didn’t stop me having predictable academic
prejudices about the whole genre. I thought that blogs were too immediate, too thoughtless and often too short to have anything
serious to contribute to the world; they were another step in the downward spiral of British journalism and comment. I also
suspected that having a blog was the literary equivalent of tourism with a camera. Like the tourist in search of the photo
rather than the experience, I was afraid that I would start to see life in terms of blogging opportunities. (Wrong, said the
TLS
editor, when I raised the problem; blogging would become a good excuse to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have done.)

But within a few weeks, when I had most of the technical issues mastered (though posting pictures, I must confess, took a
bit longer), I was really enjoying it. For a start, I found that I was quite wrong about the dumbing down. What I had not
understood, before I actually experimented, was just how important the ‘links’ on a blog were – and how they gave a blog a
distinct advantage over even the most learned article in the most upmarket broadsheet. Imagine, for example, that you want
to refer in a newspaper to a newly discovered poem of the Greek poetess Sappho, or to the
Res Gestae
of the Roman emperor Augustus (an autobiographical account of his reign, preserved by being carved into a Roman temple wall
in Ankara). The chances are you will not be able to. Only a few of your readers will know what you are talking about, and
you won’t have the space to explain it to the others. In a blog it is different. You can put in a link not only to background
information, but to the whole text in Latin, Greek or English, if you want to. Far from dumbing down, this was raising the
game of journalism. For the first time, I found I could refer casually to all sorts of aspects of my own academic specialism
without excluding the vast majority of potential readers. To borrow a phrase from Sarah Boxer in the
New York Review of Books
, giving your readers a link is even better than giving them footnotes; it’s more like giving them ‘3-D glasses’.

Then I quickly found the pleasure of using the blog to give some glimpse, from the inside, of what academic life is like –
and, even more to the point, to dispel a few of the myths about our long holidays, the useless topics of our research or (in
Oxford and Cambridge especially) the socially biased techniques we use to select our students. It was good to find, for example,
that some sixth-formers were reading
my
account of what an interview for admission to my college might be like, rather than – or, at least, as well as – all those
scare stories about the ridiculous questions we are rumoured to ask just to trip up the state school kids. On occasion, too,
it was satisfying to right a few classical wrongs. Every classicist knows the frustration of reading the media hype over a
range of non-discoveries: ‘Cleopatra was not beautiful – shock’; ‘Cave of Romulus discovered’; ‘Bust of Julius Caesar dragged
from river’; ‘Socrates may have been gay’. I soon found that the blog was a place where I could respond to these travesties,
and that the outside world just occasionally took notice. In fact, my responses were all the better and more powerful, not
the worse, for being instant and a bit off the cuff. Another fear assuaged.

But perhaps the most positive thing for me was the interaction that began to develop with those who commented on my posts.
The Times
Online site, where
A Don’s Life
is based, gives the blogger free rein to edit, publish or ignore the comments that are submitted. I decided very early on
not to exercise that power any more than was absolutely necessary. I aimed to publish all the comments I received, unedited,
except for those that might be actionable, were trying to sell something, were grossly irrelevant, or were personal attacks
on fellow commenters (personal attacks on me were, I thought, within the rules). Even so, I started off very wary of commenters
as a breed. I had by now taken a look at other blogs and had observed the rants and aggression directed towards the blogger,
as if the main pleasure of contributing was to prove the blogger not only wrong but stupid. There was something akin, I reflected,
to the rhetorical style adopted by callers to radio phone-in programmes.

But for the most part the comments and objections have been witty, learned, entertaining, informative, sometimes moving and
occasionally multi-lingual or even in verse. The commenters are, it turns out (for I have, by now, met or corresponded with
a good number of them), a far-flung crowd – posting not only from Britain and the USA, but China, Swaziland, India, France
and Germany (to name only a few). They include academics, museum curators, students, writers, teachers, lawyers, journalists,
musicians, retired tax inspectors, health professionals, an ex-cabinet minister and (so I strongly suspect) some of my own
family in thinly veiled disguise. And contrary to the image of the web as being a young person’s medium, many of them are
my age (that’s mid 50s) or older. True, a
TLS
blog may not be the obvious first hit for the under 20s, but the age range is none the less reassuring.

Over the last few years there have been all kinds of articles on the web, and in print, about the role of blogging in politics
and culture in general – from the contribution of the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, who posted his own view from the front line during
the Iraq war, to that of the blogging detective ‘Night Jack’, the winner of the first George Orwell Blogging Prize for his
posts about the reality of front line policing in Britain. (As I write, the future of Night Jack’s blog, and of his career,
remains in the balance, his anonymity having recently been broken by
The Times
.) Blogging has changed the shape and movement of political information and protest all over the world.

Even among academics, it has been the subject of some intense debate. Not simply, to blog or not to blog? But what to blog
about and what authority should blogs have? Does a blog count, in academic terms, as a publication? Is it wise for disgruntled
doctoral students looking for their first university post to blog about the humiliations of the job market? Probably not.
But is it wise for doctoral students looking for an academic job to blog
at all
? Not according to ‘Ivan Tribble’, an American academic writing pseudonymously in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
some years ago. He had looked up the blogs of three young candidates for a job at his own university, and what he found played
a major part in their not being hired (‘... the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger’s life was not
academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware and other tech exotica’). I should say at this point
that, although I have not always taken my own university’s side in my blog, and although occasionally my posts have stimulated
not wholly favourable publicity, there has been no attempt at all to stop me posting as I want. But then Cambridge is a place
where academic freedom still means something.

Even more intriguing is the information on what the punters had typed into Google to arrive at
A Don’s Life
. Some sad tales of disappointment lurk just under the surface of this data. I do not for one moment imagine that the several
hundred (10-year-old boys?) who typed ‘pissing’ into Google expected to arrive at my post on ‘Pissing in the Pyramids’. And
I strongly suspect that the hundreds who every year type in ‘Where is your spleen’ have just returned from a visit to the
doctor (and a spleen-related diagnosis). They are not likely to be satisfied with my ‘Where is your spleen?’ post – which
was really about Classics undergraduates not being able to mark Athens or Sparta on a map.

So why the book? Blogs-into-books have had their critics. Thomas Jones once attacked the whole enterprise in the
London Review of Books
:

There is a fair point here. Books and blogs are certainly very different.
It’s A Don’s Life
in book form is similar to, but not the same as,
A Don’s Life
the blog. There have been losses in the metamorphosis – particularly in the chains of links that lie behind the blog text
(in fact, those posts most dependant on ‘linkage’ have not been included). But there have, I believe, been gains, too – particularly
in the material form of the book itself. Here you can browse more easily, and flip from one post to another, backwards and
forwards. The book is also a convenient and portable commodity. No one I know reads their laptop on the Underground, in bed
or in the loo.

So here we have
A Don’s Life
for the journey to work, for going to sleep – or for the smallest room in the house.

This little book would not have been possible without Peter Stothard, who first suggested I do the blog, and the online team
at
The Times
and
TLS
(especially Michael Caines, Lucy Dallas, Dan Leonard, Toby Lichtig, Michael Moran, Tom Whitwell and Rose Wild).