Cold Rome and Kippers

Sometimes at the reference library, I accidentally order history books meant for children or adolescents, but these are perfectly fine for writer’s research ( creative research opposed to academic research.) I saw a picture of a Roman manicure set in one children’s book on Roman Britain I wouldn’t have otherwise. Instead of Ancient Egypt as planned, I just got obsessed with Roman Britain the last month. All my neural pathways lead back to Rome I guess, I was obsessed with Rome when writing my first collection of short stories. I am going to do some bus trips down to Tritomonium and Hadrian’s wall. I have such a blood curdling anxiety about the state of anglo publishing right now (The Ai novel and so forth) I just want to submerge myself into a terracotta pot of smelly Roman fish sauce and think about Roman engineering. Perhaps it’s the Solvej Balle effect, because Tara, the protagonist of the Calculation of Volume series immerses herself in research about the Roman Empire.

I’ve been enjoying Everyday Life in Ancient Rome by Lionel Casson because it has a lot about the tourist industry and travel in Ancient Rome, with great descriptions of Romans viewing Greece with tour guides (and complaining about the tour guides being long winded) , Homeric Troy and Egypt to see the pyramids and novelty acts involving crocodiles (priests brushing their teeth) and of course stuff about sewage systems, religious practices ( I heart idolatry and Roman gods) and great engineering feats, their fire brigades and public gardens, apartment buildings and baths. Lionel Casson also was according to his wikipedia a member of a weird male only dining club called the trap door spiders, mostly made up of science fiction writers.

There is a good amount of Roman stuff found in Scotland in the basement of the national museum of scotland in Edinburgh, but the way it is curated is just bizarre, the Romans constantly referred to as ‘aliens’ against the natives, and a weird resentment for bringing over red wine ( too fancy) and civil servants. (???) The museum text uses the phrase ‘crushed by the imperial boot’ and puts a large Roman foot beside it for metaphorical thumpiness.

The Romans didn’t conquer and settle in what is now Scotland the way they did what is now England ( Roman Britain was a land of country villas, I imagine not unlike in Jane Austen, but people probably smelled better because of the Roman tendency to bathe and sex lives I imagine were more interesting and of course they imported over lots of olive oil so things were tasty) but had military forts and even brought bears back to fight in the gladiator games. People litter excessively in Britain because there are no bears, I can say that as a Canadian:Bring back Bears to Britain! ( poor bears. The one thing I really dislike about the Romans is their use of exotic animals in gladiator games.. Though sometimes when I am feeling extra delusional I daydream I am a Roman empress thumbs downing my enemies in the colosseum whilst drinking chilled red wine, jangling my jangly gold earrings, Ludwig a pet lion at my side who subsists on a diet of flamingos and infants. I also really enjoy when in one of my exercise classes, we have to kick along to the Gladiator soundtrack.)

I don’t know, I felt almost offended by the placement of all this archaeological treasure in the basement (under the name ‘early peoples’). Is it because I have a Roman name and I love to eat snails? Am I a Roman Empire apologist despite growing up on Asterix? I suppose I always loved the gluttonous, wine filled Roman scenes in those comics. , the Romans chowing down some sort of pinkish goo with their hands where the gauls just looked too straw blond, trousered and moustached for my taste. Is it my current phase of having the intellectual interests of a rich 12 year old Victorian boy, like I really loved the gore in Titus Andronicus as I make my way through Shakespeare’s ‘classical world’ plays and love thinking about the 9th legion. One of the reasons I moved to Edinburgh is I saw it as a cold version of Rome, with its seven hills and plentiful council saunas. Every time I see a moustache I feel the same bafflement and distress the Romans must have felt in 55 bc, landing upon the shores of this island and seeing the local fashion for facial hair. ( Their conquering wasn’t so dramatic, there was already trade with Briton tribes ie not as ‘alien’ as thought ) I wonder where the Mithras alter, discovered in East Lothian, will be placed in the museum, and what the tone of the exhibition based around it, opening in November will be.

Here is a water pipe and water system strainer. A few posts ago I noted how when the Victorians first built a sewage system (obviously based off the Roman ones) they didn’t put filters and eels and whatnot came through the drains. The Romans of course, knew what to do. They also used old bathhouse water to flush their toilets, and we, stupid people of the modern age use fresh drinking water. Mary Beard’s new podcast ‘Instant Classics’ has two really good episodes on Roman food where I learned this, which of course talks about Roman effluence too because the best way to see what they really ate is studying ancient cesspits under apartment blocks. Anyway, thanks beautiful Romans for the gorgeous archeology in these damp dark lands!

I am reading Pliny the Younger’s letters again, I think my favourite work of Roman writing ( my version translated by Betty Radice and published as a Penguin Classic) My grandiose thing to quote from it is ‘ you will find that Minerva walks the hills no less than Diana’ a fancy way of saying going for a walk is good for thinking, honestly some of the oldest and best writing advice, so simple it isn’t thought of. I grandly said this while doing an event at the London Library the other week, but think I redeemed myself by then talking about sewage systems. It was very fun to speak with Amber Medland, Mark Haddon and Tom Conaghan of Scratch Books for the release of Magic and Mechanics, about the art of the short story. I love the Casaubon vibes of the London Library, I arrived before the library closed before the event and there were some magnificent skullets and the faintest whiff of kippers. In another delusional dream life, I fantasise about going there to work on my novellas every morning with a giant box of violet creams from Fortnum and Mason for my lunch, leaving bits of my rotting teeth ( in real life exceptionally not rotten according to the NHS Leith dentist) in books about Victorian bouquets or Caligula. Thank you to everyone who came to event, I was in a slight fugue state because I always take the earliest train from Edinburgh so that I am sat reading in the British library before lunchtime. As my train home was on the weekend before st Patricks day, I saw lots of drunk people trying to get home from Newcastle accidentally end up in Scotland at 10pm, bewildered perhaps as those ancient legions on Hadrian’s wall. ( The detail that a lot of the soldiers wrote home from the fort for warm socks that a friend told me last week because all I talk about is the Romans right now, and the way leather Roman shoes discovered on archeological digs now at the museum are so rotten and withered they look like sheep’s droppings makes my heart swell)

I am just so charmed by the Pliny family. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is a favourite too, my dream is to own the Loeb edition of it . I think i’ve posted it before, but my favourite part of Natural History is about a friendly dolphin the Romans swam with and to express how much they loved it, anointed it with perfumed oils, but of course it didn’t like that and swam away never to return. Pliny the younger’s letters have lots of details like ‘thank you for sending me some excellent dates’ that make the Romans feel so close and intimate. There is also a description of wine with honey chilled with snow, and I wonder whether it was just cold wine (something we take for granted) or a kind of snow cone with red wine and honey in an angry letter to someone who didn’t turn up to a party.

is Coriolanus the least thought about Shakespeare play? I love the sentiment below, don’t wait around for someone! It will only fester moths, but I am also giggling a lot at the phrase ‘ the buttock of the night’ made by Menenius. (2.1, 50 in the Arden)

After being on the library waiting list for 5 months, I finally got 1 of 28 copies of David Szalays Flesh. It says both that people love to read (optimism!) and that successive governments love to make cuts to and underfund libraries. I divide my reading into worlds I like to be immersed in (Pliny the Younger’s, 1960s Japan, Nabokov’s Russia ) and worlds I don’t but which still give me satisfaction on a sentence and structural level, and Flesh is one of those.

In the Telegraph I reviewed ‘Lázár, by a 23 year old Swiss writer. I quite liked it, and it made me feel optimistic, having someone that age be really into reading and writing books, the novel is full of references to classic works of German language literature including a kind of Robert Walser cameo. In fact, a lot of people I meet around that age are all incredibly clever and well-read. There is quite a lot of pressure to publish really young I felt too, I don’t think is necessary (Muriel Spark published her first novel at 39, Penelope Fitzgerald 61 etc etc) though I also don’t like when people are sour towards the young for getting published. The book I really want to read is the one Nelio Biedermann writes when he is 40, and I really hope the publishing industry doesn’t spit him out before then (I think in Europe there is less of a chance of that than here) but it also seems kind of arbitrary chance whether you will write and publish your best book at 23 like Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) or 79 like Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower!) . Last year I saw an older, well established Swiss writer speak who was horribly embarrassed by the book he published when quite young, and he wished he hadn’t written it, but some people at the event had come specifically to the event because they loved that books so much… I do think however, it’s generally healthy for a writer to hate their previous books as you should always be working against and challenging yourself instead of settling into your ways like a lukewarm basin of self soup.

I have a new story in upcoming issue of The Little Review. You can buy a physical copy or as a pdf. It's one of my favourite stories I have written in a while and set in a museum. I also highly recommend the pieces the editor of The Little Review has written on their submission process!