The Odyssey was performed in an intimate setting at the bottom of the Norrington Room at Blackwell's bookshop. There was an act for each of the twenty four books of Homer's epic, and at the start of each an audience member drew a potshard from a bucket, which provided a formal constraint the performers had to abide by in telling the story of that book. In one case they had to tell the story with each performer providing one word at a time. In another they had to perform while holding onto rods that linked them all into a giant loop. In another they had to perform in Ancient Greek. And so forth. So every performance was different and a good deal of improvisation was involved.

This all worked surprisingly well, and we really enjoyed the evening. The performance was nearly three hours long but never dragged.

Yesterday we went to see The Story of the Four Minute Mile. This was performed at the Iffley track where Roger Bannister ran the four minute mile, and was told to us as we walked around the track. We were split into three groups and each group got the first three acts in a different order. One storyteller gave a kind of overview of the day, and fragments of the stories of some of the people present. Another gave us the perspective of a modern professional runner inspired by Bannister. And the third gave us a kind of social and cultural snapshot of Britain in 1954. Then there was a choral performance, and finally those in the audience who wanted to got a chance to run one lap (400 metres).

This was a fun idea and it worked quite well - though some of the storytellers were better than others - but it was freezing cold and the whole experience might have been more fun if it had been a bit warmer. (The six of us who went to this warmed up afterwards with dinner at the Red Star noodle bar and drinks at the Black Swan.)

Freakonomics is perhaps the highest-profile example (or in a similar vein something like The Logic of Life) but there are plenty of others: physicists or statisticians shooting-up historical linguistics, for example. Anyone got any favourites?

One big change moving from Sydney to Oxford is the seasonality. At a higher latitude, Oxford has shorter winter days and longer summer ones, and the presence of so much deciduous vegetation - as opposed to the most common Australian flora - makes for bigger changes in appearance. In a university town drawing undergraduate students from all over the UK (and sometimes from further abroad), the cycle of the academic year is also pronounced, since most of the undergraduates go home over the long summer break. They are replaced by tourists, who peak in July and August but can be found in reasonable numbers except in winter.

Sydney has a fair number of students and attracts a lot of tourists, too, but in proportion to its population they were not nearly so significant, even living in central Sydney near a university.

I've been learning German on and off for twenty five years, having done it for one year at school and then as an introductory course in my second year of university, and then having taken up various textbooks and readers over the years. Part of the motivation has come from wanting to follow up the family history, so I can read the letters of my grandparents and other documents. Wolfgang Harich's Autobiographisches Framgent contains information about the resistance group my grandfather and biological grandfather ran in Berlin during World War II, for example, while my great-grandfather wrote a little book Der bunte Alltag of "stories of everyday life" (published in Vienna in 1943).

This time I'm meeting with a tutor weekly, for an hour or so of conversation, in theory around a newspaper article I've read but in practice digressing quite rapidly. So a story about an insect-eating festival in Oxford led me to an attempt to explain the ecology and sociobiology of leafcutter ants, die Blattschneiderameise. Apart from improving my aural/oral skills, usually the slowest part of my language acquisition (having notionally divided the world's languages with my sister when we were children, and ended up with the dead ones), this also provides a regular prod to keep me going.

For grammar, I'm currently using Intermediate German: A Grammar and Workbook, a fairly simple text. When I get through that I plan to move on to Russon's Complete German Course, which is an old A-level textbook and is more in the old-fashioned "solid grounding in grammar" line.

I'm steadily reading through the three volumes of Penguin Parallel Text German Short Stories. A long-term goal here is to be able to read the second and third volumes of Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance, which have not yet been translated into English, but I suspect that's not the easiest of texts.

I have only a little dictionary, and should probably get a better one at some point, but am mostly using dict.leo.org because it's much faster to look up words in a web browser than in a printed book.

For background on German I have read German: A Linguistic Introduction and parts of several similar books.

Something I haven't tried yet is watching German films without the subtitles, or perhaps German news streamed online.

A few years ago I saw the detailed investment advice a friend got from a financial planner from a leading Australian bank. This suggested putting 25% in a "growth" fund, 25% in a "value" fund, 25% in some kind of index fund, and 25% in assorted small cap and international funds. All these funds were, of course, affiliated with the bank in question. They were also quite conservative funds which stuck (for the first three) to ASX 200 companies and didn't deviate from that index in any serious way, so collectively they couldn't conceivably have outperformed the index by more than a percent or so, even if all went well. But the average management fee across the funds was well over 2%! (And Investors in the UK pay twice as much in fund management fees as in the US.)

A slightly mixed index fund, something like the Vanguard Australia High Growth Fund, would give pretty much the same result, probably with slightly lower volatility, but with management costs of only 0.6%, dropping to 0.35% on amounts over $100,000. In the UK, the Fidelity Moneybuilder UK Index fund has a total expense ratio of 0.3% and the Vanguard UK Equity Index Fund (PDF) has a TER of only 0.15%.

There are an extraordinary number of share funds that do no more than tweak their weightings from an index — overweight BHP and CBA, maybe, and underweight RIO and NAB, or one of a million variants on this — and take a big chunk of the assets under management in exchange. Every major bank has a full set of such funds, just for starters. It boggles the mind that so much money — many of these funds are quite large — can be invested so badly, but that's what happens when people trust "free" advice provided by their banks.

Fortunately, starting in July this year, Australia at least is clamping down on commissions and other conflicts of interest by financial planners. If this sees all those gouging funds closed down and the finance sector shrunk a little, that would be great.

Usual disclaimer: this is completely generic commentary, not intended as advice to anyone.

Having now used the Kindle on a six week trip, including a week in Thailand, I am enamoured of it for travelling. For a long plane flight and a holiday in a non-English-speaking country, I'd once have carried six or more books and had to rely on some luck finding new books while travelling. With the Kindle, this is simply not a concern. (Though I did always carry one printed book with me, just in case the Kindle stopped working or was stolen.)

My Kindle is kept slaved to the Calibre library on my desktop, with the "Kindle Collections" plugin so I can keep documents in collections. I have registered the Kindle, but using a brand new Amazon account with no payment information attached to it, so if I need to I can email documents to it but I know I'm never going to get any bills for doing that. That's also a barrier against any temptation to buy Kindle items.

I have over a hundred books on the device already. Most of those are novels and other classics downloaded from ebooks@Adelaide (one of many such repositories). I've also started getting review copies from publishers in PDF and ebook format - not as much fun as getting boks in the post, but some small publishers have baulked at postage in the past. And if I own print copies of titles (in the 60 boxes under my mother's house) I don't feel bad about torrenting de-DRMed copies of them.

Comments on having the smaller Kindle:
* I don't really miss the keyboard - once I got my 128 bit WPA2 wireless key onto the device!
* the battery life is fine, even travelling to Australia and back.

My biggest beef is a simple problem with the user interface: the Kindle remembers where you're up to for each book, but doesn't remember the device orientation. I read most ebooks in portrait mode, since that's how the device was designed to be used. But PDFs are mostly too small to read with that orientation (where the Kindle has "fit to page" as an option but not "fit to width"), so I read them in landscape mode (where the Kindle does "fit to width"). But I have to manually switch orientations everytime I move from a PDF book to a mobi one.

In that vein, multi-column PDFs really don't work well at all. I've tried a few scientific papers and it's just too painful.

Just in case anyone's worried, I've bought a pile of print books since acquiring the Kindle.

Korea has always been overshadowed for me, as for most Westerners, by
its larger neighbours China and Japan, but I'm not completely ignorant
about the country — if you include translated fiction, I've read
maybe twenty books about it. Three days in Seoul as a tourist has not
necessarily done that much to improve on this, however, or rather has
has done so orthogonally.

The visit gave me something of a feel for the layout of central Seoul
and its immediate setting. The bus trips from Incheon airport into
and out of the city centre, with views of the Han river, helped here,
as did some nice scale models in the Seoul Museum of History, which also
has exhibits on the development and recent history of the city.

The centres of capital cities are not always a guide to the rest
of the country, but Seoul at least is clearly an affluent city.
(South Korea's GDP is about the same as Australia's, albeit it with
twice the population.)

Visiting palaces and museums helped flesh out my Korean history with
a better grasp of architecture and material goods. And I have a much
better feel for Korean food in its natural setting. We didn't visit the
war museum, or do a day tour to the demilitarised zone, but that would
have connected with my reading about the Korean War.

Since we only had tourist-functional exchanges with Koreans, however,
I never got much of a feel for what it's like to be Korean or to live
in Korea. In contrast, in Turkey and Mongolia and Kenya, I talked with
English-speaking locals, which gave a much richer perspective.

The only Korean novel I'd read set in contemporary Seoul was Kim
Young-Ha's I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, which has
a dark ambience rather distant from a brief stop-over in a three-star hotel.

"I realise the inclusion of works on areas outside Europe and
West Asia in a 'medieval history' category is problematic."

Recently I read two books which apply the term 'medieval' to Japanese
history, but using quite different periodisations and definitions.
And then I went to a talk on Chinese history that was included in a
medieval history seminar series. So I have taken another look at this.

What happens when we try to extend the term 'medieval' to other regions?

One classic analysis is "Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?" (Timothy
Reuter, The Medieval History Journal, April 1998, vol. 1, no. 1, 25-45),
which concludes:

"the term is too conventionalised to be of much use in any
dialogue between medievalists of different parts of the globe:
it does not clearly define either a social formation or a stage
of development".

A more recent statement along similar lines can be found in in Christopher
Tyerman's "Expansion and the Crusades" (a chapter in A Companion to
the Medieval World, edited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English,
Wiley 2009).

"The idea of a 'medieval world' is a peculiarly West European
construct, even if it has been embraced by other historical
traditions, such as the Japanese. The idea of medieval China,
medieval India, let alone medieval America, medieval sub-Saharan
Africa, or medieval Australia makes no sense. In a global context
the term 'medieval' is vague, if not suspect, with no necessary
agreed or unambiguous material or intellectual substance."

And even with Japan there are clearly problems, as the two books I
mentioned above show. François Souyri's The World Turned Upside Down:
Medieval Japanese Society (1998) defines a medieval Japan, running
from 1185 to 1573, in terms of social structures, using 'feudalism'
and associated terminology quite freely, along with many comparisons
with other aspects of European history. William LaFleur in The
Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan
(1983) suggests a Japanese medieval period starting in the 9th or
even 8th century, defined by the ideological hegemony of Buddhism,
but doesn't make any comparisons with Christianity in medieval Europe.
The 'indigenous' Japanese notion of chūsei didn't appear till
the late 19th century, has a complex relationship to European models, and
has shifted in the last thirty years. Tom Keirstead's "Medieval Japan:
Taking the Middle Ages Outside Europe" (History Compass 2 (2004) AS 110,
1–14), a history of the Japanese idea of a Middle Age, concludes: "the
upshot of [Amino Yoshihiko's] idea that Japan experienced revolutionary
change over the course of the fourteenth century may well be a Japanese
history that has no place for a medieval era". Which all seems to
support Tyerman's "vague, if not suspect, with no necessary agreed or
unambiguous material or intellectual substance".

This view does not, however, reflect either popular or scholarly use.
Here are the counts from some searches on Google and Google scholar
(in thousands of hits, or kGh to use LanguageLog terminology):


'medieval Europe' - 3200 - 85
'medieval England' - 2400 - 39
'medieval Germany' - 680 - 4
'medieval China' - 730 - 5
'medieval France' - 400 - 8
'medieval Japan' - 370 - 4
'medieval India' - 330 - 7
'medieval Africa' - 110 - 0.2
'medieval Java' - 7 - 0.05
'medieval Australia' - 2 - 0.002


Now the absolute numbers here aren't terribly meaningful, but their
relative values suggest that the application of the term 'medieval'
to at least China, Japan and India is as widespread as its application
to parts of Western Europe.

And here is a graph from Google Ngram viewer showing the changing
popularity of four of these terms.

(Interestingly, this seems to show a decline in the application of 'medieval'
to France and Germany, starting around the publication of the 1998 Reuter
article quoted from above.)

Also, there are plenty of eminent Sinologists who happily use the term
"medieval". Can European historians really tell them that "the idea
of medieval China ... makes no sense"?

The reason European medievalists are prepared to do this is that they've
stripped their own use of the term of any generalisable foundation.
My impression is that in European history the most common approach now is
to define 'medieval' by extension — by pointing at a (or, in fact,
the) historical instance — rather than by intension. So the term
can be used quite freely, without explanation or analysis, for Europe in
the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD, for any period roughly corresponding
to that, or when appropriately qualified for any subdivision thereof.
But, whatever the exact period and whatever the topic, the application of
'medieval' does not allow the assumption either of continuity throughout
the period or of discontinuity at its ends. It is a convenient label,
not an explanatory schema.

Perhaps the key event here was the debate over 'feudalism' that followed
Susan Reynold's Fiefs and Vassals (1994) and the acceptance that
this, the leading candidate for an definition of 'medieval' in terms of
social structure, simply couldn't carry that weight.

Such an approach raises obvious problems with generalisation to other
parts of the world.

If the whole of Eurasia had sufficiently strong internal links to give
it a common history, that would support a shared 'medieval' label across
the continent, while disallowing 'medieval Java' and suchlike. This is
the approach taken by e.g. Christopher Beckwith, who uses terms such
as "early medieval history" as part of a Eurasian-wide periodisation. I
think it's fair to say that Beckwith is in a small minority here, however.

One could simply apply the same 500 to 1500 period worldwide. But this
doesn't reflect local traditions — in the sense that 476 and
1517 are important symbolic dates in Europe — and even with
flexibility isn't necessarily compatible with any regional periodisation.
Also,this would allow terms such as 'medieval Australia' which seem
clearly confused.

One possibility is that regional specialists could use 'medieval'
in the same way as European historians, but completely independently,
with no generalisation or comparison implied. It would become simply a
convenient way to avoid having to write "period of Buddhist ideological
hegemony" or "in the millennium from 200 to 1200 AD" repeatedly, not an
explanatory scheme required to carry any inferential weight. This seems
more than a little confusing, however: certainly for lay readers, but
probably for historians themselves.

The broad popular use of 'medieval' — based on some or all
of a 'feudal' social structure, particular technologies (especially
military), and a Catholic religious and intellectual hegemony —
is not going to go away. And the term carries such power, and has such
resonance, that its application to other parts of the world will continue.
I remain convinced, however, that historians are better off avoiding it:
the danger of unwanted and unpredictable associations with European
history seems to me to outweigh any convenience.

The Bodleian is a wonderful library system, but as an external reader
there are two major limitations: I can't actually borrow books and I
can't use Oxford University's online journal subscriptions.

This is less of a problem in the sciences, where preprints
are often (though not always) available, either through something like
arkiv.org or informally through author web sites. But this culture
doesn't seem to have reached very far into the humanities, where I
find most of the research I want to read is not so accessible.
Fortunately I know enough people who do work at universities that this
is not a problem, but the possibility of losing access to all of this
is disturbing.

More abstractly, every time someone hits a "this article will cost you
$35" web page and (as they mostly will) gives up, that's a deadweight
loss (as the economists call it) and a setback, however small, for human
scientific and intellectual progress. My initial exposure to copyright
and patent issues came through free software, but for me the arguments
for open access research and science are actually more compelling.

As with software, for me the moral and political arguments here seem as
important as the economic or technical ones

• "the economic case for open access in academic publishing"
• The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access (PDF, a book)
• Laurence Lessig on open access to science (video)

At the Radcliffe Science library I asked for a map at the information
desk and was sitting at a comfortable desk with my laptop and the book
I was after (David Archer's The Long Thaw) within five minutes.

And today I visited the Radcliffe Camera (to look up some definitions of
"medieval") and the Gladstone Link (where I read Glen Dudbridge's Lost
Books of Medieval China).

Somehow I've hit yet another book the Bodleian doesn't have a copy of, in
this case Hyman Minsky's Can "It" Happen Again? Essays on Instability
and Finance. But I emailed the Social Sciences Library with a brief
explanation of why this was an important book, especially since 2007,
and got a response within a day saying they would purchase a copy and
asking if I would like to be emailed when it arrived!

With that coming on top of a librarian turning up on this blog in person
and offering to help me solve a problem, I can hardly complain about the
Bodleian service so far. Especially since I'm a lowly external reader,
right at the bottom of the hierarchy of users.

The facilities overall are pretty impressive, too. They remind me a bit
of the Science and Technology library at Sydney Uni, which opened
not long before we left. One big plus over the library at Sydney is
that external library users here get access to the wireless network.

I'm wondering now if I could try not just to visit every library in
the Bodleian system — more than fifty, even excluding the college
libraries — but to read a book from each one. It wouldn't be much
of a pub crawl if one didn't drink anything, would it?