Just one head ... on the loose in London

Dear Reader,

Today has been wonderful for this writer on the loose!

Inside the Guardian!

I spent the morning and afternoon at seminars about blogging (twitter #bloglikeapro) in the Guardian building near Kings Cross. I learned a whole raft of ways in which your experience of my blog can be made more pleasant and useful. You will see some (gradual) changes as the months go by and I learn how to put them into practice. I also talked to other interested writers about The Boy with Two Heads and Trifolium Books. And I handed out some flyers. This always feels good!

Once the seminars finished, I set off into London via Kings Cross Station - my first visit since it was renovated. How could I resist taking photos?

And I found Platform Nine and Three-Quarters ...  It has a shop, too. I hadn't realised it was a permanent fixture.

Later, over a Greek meal near Regents Park, I read part of Louis de Bernieres' ImaginingAlexandria. ‘To the Scandal of Poets’ made me laugh out loud (which disconcerted the Greek waiter – older woman on her own enjoying herself?) and ‘The Man who Travelled the World’ made me want to cry. De Bernieres says his poems are a tribute to the Alexandrian Greek poet, C P Cavafy, but they have other dimensions, too.

On the way home I once again enjoyed the view of the London Eye from Charing Cross. 

So for me this day had all the elements of the perfect writer's day – lots of research, other writers for company, beautiful things to see and be inspired by, good food for stomach and mind, and a glass of good wine.

Just one thing: I didn't write anything!

But I have re-organised the blog a bit. Please let me know what you think – addresses below.

Oxford Street at sunset, Dec 31st 2013

P. S.

Sorry if my title led you to expect tales of debauchery and forbidden pleasures (and/or shopping?). You might find more excitement (though I doubt debauchery) on the Time Out in London blog run by our midday speaker today, Sonya Barber. The whole city is there!

You can contact me via:

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@JuliaMNewsome on Twitter

'J M Newsome, author' on Facebook

All photos my own (sorry about the Platform Nine and Three-Quarters quality) except the cover of Imagining Alexandria, which is from Amazon's relevant page.

Who was The (real) Boy with Two Heads?

Someone asked me the other day where the main character in The Boy with Two Heads comes from, and whether I made him up. We were talking about a new review that has appeared on the Amazon page for The Boy, for which I am very grateful. It is short and to the point:

Good Plot in ancient greece
This was a very engaging read. Lovers of the Grecian era will find it interesting, and the blog is a good twist. Should appeal to teens.
(by Prudence, who gives it five stars)

   Thank you, Prudence! 
   I was very glad to see your last sentence. I specifically wrote The Boy with Two Heads for today's teenagers, because it seems to me that their only contact with Greek gods and heroes these days is through exciting fantasies like those about Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan in which the gods and heroes are active characters. 

    In museums all over the world, there are thousands of representations of Apollo and Hermes and Poseidon (and Herakles and Athena, and so on) on vases or sculpted in stone, wood, or other precious materials, as if they were real people who walked the streets with the ordinary populace. They may have been based on memories of real heroes or explanations for strange historical happenings, but from the literature we have from 700 BC onwards, we know it was generally accepted that you were unlikely to meet any of them in the flesh, though they influenced all aspects of life.

Apollo.
Olympia Museum.

 Hermes and baby Dionysos
Olympia Museum

Athena
 Metropolitan Museum
New York City, USA

Poseidon or Zeus
National Archaeological
Museum, Athens

Herakles and the Stymphalean Birds.
British Museum, London.

   I wanted to answer the question "What was it really like to live in Athens in the 5th century BC?" - partly because I spent more than 20 years of my own life there in the 20th century AD!  I wanted to write a story about a link between now and then. It was to involve only real people and could happen to you or me at any time. 

   For years I've been reading (in small doses, I must admit) what was actually written by the writers of those times. I've read about wars and theatres and laws and gods and myths, all translated from the ancient Greek texts. Repeatedly I come across the ancient Olympic Games. These are held up, among other things, as the ultimate way to worship Zeus the father of the gods, as motivation for young men to train hard, and as the framework for the calendar in some parts of Greece with their four-year cycle. They were very important.

   So, when I found the long description of Ancient Olympia, written in 160 AD (in Pausanias' Guide to Greece, translated by Peter Levi), I was entranced by the descriptions of the temples with their glorious and gaudy treasures and statues of gods and goddesses, even though they were written 500 years after the period I was researching. 

Altis of Olympia, in 2000
Temple of Zeus centre front, stadium top right.

   Pausanias also lists in detail the numerous altars outside the temples, among the trees in the holy precinct known as the Altis. And then he begins on the portrait statues dedicated by Olympic winners, also in the Altis. And there are nearly 50 pages of them! He describes and names each one, telling us what the athlete won and when, sometimes with extra details. Where possible, he attributes the statue to its sculptor, and even tells us of the sculptor's teacher. 

   However, after ten pages or so, I was beginning to feel grateful that, as he says, "not all Olympic winners have their statues standing at Olympia". One long paragraph about all-in wrestlers who won by bending their opponents' fingers until they broke (or the other man gave in), made me feel I had had enough for one sitting. 

   But my eye strayed to the beginning of the next paragraph. "For the sake of Pheidias and his genius as a sculptor, I must introduce here the boy tying a ribbon round his head, although we have no idea whose portrait Pheidias's statue is." 

   And there he was...
   I had a real hero, his story already half-made in my imagination.

   Thus, through Pausanias, I met a real person (not a hero or a god), sculpted by a real sculptor, but without a name or history. He had stood for 500 years in the precinct at Olympia until at least 160 AD, although now there is no sign of him.
   So I kidnapped him. I called him Themistokles, son of Kallistos of Diomea in Athens, and later in the story he became known as The Boy with Two Heads, (although only one was visible!) ...

The statue we used to represent Themis is described earlier in this blog: on February 5th 2012,
and on February 8th 2013.

The vase paintings above are from http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/M1

The picture of the statue of Poseidon or Zeus is from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemision_Bronze

Ancient Greek vase paintings that move?

Attic pelike, ca 440 BC. Lecce Museum

As part of my research lately I've been looking at lots of ancient Greek vase paintings. For instance, in October, I spent a wonderful rainy afternoon at the Museo Provinciale Sigismondo Castromediano in Lecce in Southern Italy. They have a wide variety of painted and sculpted vases from about 550 BC onwards. 

Attic skyphos, ca 500 BC. Lecce Museum

I was entranced by the detail and beautiful compositions of these two. But there are many, many more wonderful things to see ...

Lecce Museum. Picture from Trip advisor.

In The Boy with Two Heads, my hero, Themis, painted on pots and terra cotta tiles. He may not have been able to remember much of his childhood, but he didn't lose his ability to draw when he suffered his accident. 

"He remembered painting a pot ... and then smashing it because it was not good enough. Ariphron had mended it because he liked the picture on it of goats reaching up to eat olive leaves."

I spent a long time the other day looking for a picture of a pot with olive trees and a goat to illustrate something I was writing about Themis. I was sure I had seen one at some point, but in the end I gave up.

However, I did come across this site: http://www.panoply.org.uk, which pleased me immensely. It has ancient Greek vase paintings that have been animated! They are done by experts but with input from local school children near Reading in Berkshire, west of London. They chose vase paintings from the Ure Museum at Reading University and made very short, but often amusing, little movies.

Also, there is a YouTube clip made by Oxford University for Christmas which includes brief moments of animated vase paintings among other wonders of the Ashmolean Museum that come alive here …

These charming ideas reminded me that, when I was at university studying drama (more than 40 years ago), I wrote a storyboard for a short movie of a myth. It was to be animated drawings in the style of red figure vases (like those in the first picture above). In those days there was no chance of making such a film without a huge movie-making process and thousands of pounds, so it just stayed as an idea. My story was to be that of Hermes stealing Apollo's cattle. 

When, out of curiosity, I checked out that particular myth on-line, look what I found ...

from a hydra in the Louvre, Paris. ca 520 BC.

Can you see the goat in the olive tree? 

The mind works in mysterious ways. 

Happy New Year!

Dr Who meets the Antikythera Mechanism?

Did anyone else who saw the 50th anniversary edition of Dr Who on Saturday at 19.50 on BBC One notice that the ultimate Gallifreyan super weapon looked a bit like the Antikythera Mechanism (AM), but in a shinier box? I wrote a blog post back in March mentioning this 1st century BC astrolabe/cosmic movement monitor, which was found among the debris of a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in southern Greece. 

Antikythera Mechanism from Wikipedia

I don't often watch Dr Who (though perhaps I shall in future), so I have probably got hold of the wrong ends of various sticks. But if I understood correctly, in this Dr Who episode (and in a previously unrecorded incarnation played by John Hurt) the Doctor 'watches Gallifrey [his home planet] falling to a Dalek invasion and decides to trigger an ancient Time Lord weapon of mass destruction called "The Moment", which is described as a "galaxy eater" and will destroy both races completely'* including something over 200 billion innocent children (forgive me, numbers with more than three digits go over my head). "The Moment" has a conscience/interface which manifests in the shape of Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), making actually setting it off even more difficult, as she asks "Are you sure?"

Antikythera model front panel 

Mogi Vicentini 2007

I can't find a picture of "The Moment", but it is a very neat cube of wood and brass about 40cm square. It has intricate wheels and cogs on at least one of its sides and reminded me irresistibly of the Antikythera Mechanism. It looks sturdier than this AM reconstruction and has no handles (so Rose/The Interface can sit on it comfortably), but "The Moment" is definitely visually reminiscent of the Mechanism. 

Of course, there's a big difference between the ultimate weapon and a machine that predicts eclipses and other cosmic occurrences - or is there? Were Steven Moffat and the Dr Who script researchers suggesting that it would be a similar mechanism that in fact would change the movements of the planets and stars (not just predict them) and therefore eclipse parts of our universe altogether? 

No wonder children (and others) are fascinated by such questions as "If our galaxy was sucked into a black hole, where would it come out?" or "If time were cyclical, would I meet myself coming the other way?" 


Even I enjoy examining the consequences of personal time slips ...






*Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Doctor

Is the guitar descended from the Ancient Greek kithara?

In my novel, The Boy with Two Heads, the hero, Themis, travels to

Olympia around the Peloponnese in a small cargo ship with his uncle Panainos and his personal slave, Frog. There is one other passenger, Molon. Journeys like this (see Map 2) were usually made by sailing during the day and camping on land at night. On the second evening of the four-day voyage, they sit round the camp fire as night comes down and the captain tells them a story. (Story-telling was, of course, a highly valued skill at the time.) Themis comes to sit by the fire ...

   ‘Arion overheard the sailors,’ Captain Stomio was saying. ‘They had just broken into his travel trunk and found his hoard of gold. They were deciding when to throw him overboard.’ 

   ‘Not a good advertisement for your colleagues, dear Captain,’ said Panainos, one eyebrow raised.

   ‘They were Corinthians,’ said the captain. ‘What d’you expect?’ 

   Molon looked shocked, but Panainos and Frog laughed.
The captain went on. ‘Arion was a famous musician and had become rich from his profession. But there was little he could do. He offered to give them all his gold if they would spare his life. But the sailors just jeered at him. So he dressed himself in his richest performance robes and, standing on the bow of the ship, he played his best kithara and sang his favourite song as an offering to Poseidon.
   ‘The sailors enjoyed the song, but showed no mercy. So, rather than let them stab him with their daggers, Arion leapt off the ship into the sea, kithara and all.’ 

professional singer, ?450BC

   Captain Stomio stood up to kick the fire and drink some water. ‘Dolphins like music,’ he said, as he sat down again. ‘The ship sailed away, but a group of dolphins had gathered to listen to Arion’s song. They carried him with them on their backs for two or three days. They chattered and clicked at him to show they wanted him to play for them, and so he did, all the time hoping they would take him nearer to land. At last they understood he needed food and fresh water, and they brought him in to the west port at Tainaron still wearing his magnificent costume and carrying his kithara. He stood on the end of the quay and gave them one last song. Then, when he’d drunk and eaten, he set off for Corinth to find and punish his would-be murderers!’ 

   ‘And did he get his gold back?’ asked Panainos. 

silver two drachma coin, about 300 BC

   ‘Who knows?’ answered the captain. ‘But he may have, because he had a bronze statue of a man on a dolphin cast, and set it on the quay-side in Tainaron as a thank offering.’

Christina Katseli plays Cretan lyre, Angelos Kyriakos plays Steriano lute,
and Dimitris Zaharis plays bendir (hand drum)

I was reminded of the above story while on a flying trip to Athens last week. During a catch-up session with old friends, we remembered a wonderful musical evening we spent in the depths of winter in the cozy basement of a taverna, listening to traditional songs played on instruments which seemed to have changed little in thousands of years. 


There is an ongoing and intriguing academic argument about the origins of stringed musical instruments. One Greek myth records that the first stringed musical instrument with a soundbox was made by Apollo from the shell of a tortoise, with strings of cow hide stretched over a frame made from the cow's horns. The hypothesis goes that this original instrument (very similar to even older depictions of stringed instruments in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere) evolved in two different directions: one was the modern guitar and the other was lyres and lutes. The kithara as illustrated in the 5th century BC is neither of these. The main reason to believe that the modern guitar evolved from a kithara like Arion's seems to be the similarity in the name ...

Anyway, the instruments we listened to back in January on that Epiphany evening seemed to me to be almost the same as their ancient counterparts - but what do I know? The drum, at least, has changed not at all, though our modern musician was wearing a few more clothes than this ecstatic player ...

Whatever their origin, the instruments and music took us back to the days of bards singing while audiences ate and drank and joined in the choruses ... Christina and friends represent the many who still love and practice music played on lyres - it is very much alive and well, so we can still guess what Arion sounded like to his audience of dolphins.



The Boy with Two Heads is published by Trifolium Books UK, and is available from all good bookshops and on Amazon both as a traditional paperback and as an e-book.

E-book authors' royalties on the rise?

As you may have gathered, dear reader, I have been busy on a variety of projects lately that leave me little time for blogging. However, something rather fine happened last week which made me think more general thoughts about the book-publishing world ...

It was confirmed to me a few days ago by Cambridge University Press (CUP) that my royalties on the e-versions of my Cambridge English Reader titles would be 20% rather than 15% of receipts, as originally agreed.

This feels very much like a step in the right direction, though a few more steps would be welcome! My other publisher, Trifolium Books UK, pays me a much larger percentage of the receipts from e-books, and I hope that, as publishers come to grips with new e-markets, this practice will become more widespread.

 

Long ago (!), when books were only paper, I worked in publishing and experienced all the steps in the procedure as a commissioning editor, a publisher, and a writer. I know that book budgets were then based on the estimated sales receipts. Development costs of the content had to be within a certain proportion of the overall projected receipts. This budgeting model must by now have changed, as the number of e-copies grows and the number of paper copies, upon whose price the budget was based, shrinks.

And yet many e-books cost the same as the paper version. The development section of any book budget will still be necessary, but the paper, printing, transport and warehousing of the paper books must be a far lower part of the overall costs for most books by now. With this in mind, it is strange that the e-version of so many novels is the same price to the consumer as the paper version, and that the authors are still getting such low royalties.

From my experience in the independent publishing sector, this is unjust. If the e-book is priced logically (i.e. lower), far more copies sell. The receipts rise and the profits with them. There’s more for the publisher and more for the author. Why are so many mainstream publishers still not adjusting their prices to the e-book market?

It seems that, as part of their huge internal re-organisation, CUP and their collaborators have in fact been working on this and begun to adjust. I thank all those concerned for this, and hope it is just the beginning of a general trend…

Thought walks for writers?

Trying to write while living in the country is not always ideal, even in this amazing weather. (Sometimes because of this amazing weather. The garden’s siren call is at every window.) 

But a few days ago, there were so many plots and characters in my mind that I couldn’t focus sensibly on anything. So I set off on a walk to help me sort them out – what I call a thought walk.

As you can see, the paths between the fields were clogged with rampant weeds (like my brain!) but the hedgerows were full of flowers. One field was a mass of oxe-eye daisies, while in others the barley rippled and rustled like fine silk.

Five fledgling swallows – maybe they were martins – sat motionless near the top of a hedge. Now and again they opened their beaks into yellow, baby-bird squares, but they didn’t make a sound or move from their perches in spite of the skittish breeze.

I met no one (except a few sheep), and in the end, rather than helping me think, my walk removed most of my thoughts, and life became much simpler. A no-thought walk!

These are some more of the photos I took:

(full extent of the zoom)