All in a Don's Day Read Online Free Page A

of the nation’s pedagogy. One of my friends has just published a book (
World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context
) which, among other things, aims to help teachers with ways of teaching literary analysis in all kinds of different genres. There’s all sorts of stuff in it: Wordsworth, Eliot, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Julian Barnes and … well … of all the unlikely things … me. To be precise, there’s an old blog posting called ‘Self-promotion?’ It was written when my book
The Roman Triumph
came out and talked about publicity drives (‘I started the week with
Start the Week
. It gets 2 million listeners, so is probably the biggest audience who’ll ever get to hear about the book’) and launch parties (‘one in a really great location in Greek St – perfect place to have a
Triumph
party … geddit?’). And it went on to fess up to the terror and anticipation of the first reviews. ‘So far I’ve done pretty well, and luckily. There was a great piece in the
Sunday Times
… But don’t worry it hasn’t gone to my head! Partly because of the little torrent of bile poured over me by Freddy Raphael in the
Spectator
’.
    The other writers collected in
World and Time
(those that are still with us, that is) may be well used to people dissecting their poetry and prose, but I have never seen anyone having a go at mine before. I expected to think that they had got it all wrong, or that they pointed to clever little stylistic features that were entirely unintentional. But not a bit of it. The book put its finger instantly on the chummy yet crafted familiar tone of the blog (the ‘geddit’ and the ‘
Freddy
Raphael’), the insistent addresses direct to the reader (‘Don’t worry’) and the (trying hard to be) casual repetitions (‘I started the week with
Start
the Week
’). It also rightly picked me up on some inelegant repetitions of the not very pretty word ‘pretty’.
    And at the end of the section there were some topics and questions to be tried on the pupils: ‘Can a blog really claim to be taken seriously as a literary text?’ or ‘Do we read blogs on-screen differently from the way we read essays on a page?’
    I think I’m really quite happy at a few kids dipping into my blog and wondering about writing and literature in the electronic age. (Well, I would be quite happy, wouldn’t I?) But the idea that the whole of the school population should be
forced
to hone their literary skills on ‘A Don’s Life’ – even I think that’s a nightmare vision of pedagogy.
Comments
    Businesses used to be telegraphic addresses, in order to save telegram senders money on words. Blackwell′s was BOOKS OXFORD (which seemed a little hard on its neighbour, which was simply BODOX). The Oxford Union Society was ACME OXFORD – one sometimes wondered if the M was a misprint for an N. The notes that come with a passport (sometimes the only thing to read on a Turkish bus journey) recorded that the telegraphic address of all British consulates was BRITAIN followed by the name of the city and of High Commissions was UKREP followed by the name of the city, which made sense. More mysterious was the information that the telegraphic address of all British embassies was PRODROME followed by the name of the city – what had Her Britannic Majesty to do with St John the Baptist?
    OLIVER NICHOLSON
    The on-line dictionary of protocol gives this definition of PRODROME and its use in British telegraphy:
    PRODROME. The telegraphic address of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first registered in 1884. Taken from the Greek
prodromos
meaning ′precursor′, it was probably chosen on the assumption that most telegrams were precursors of longer and more informative despatches. In 1911, following the Italian invasion of the Ottoman province of Tripoli, it was allegedly mistaken by