Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
This image from Rogue Classicism:
A book arrived at my local library today, and I have spent a couple of hours turning it into a PDF. After all, it cost me $8 to borrow, and I must return it in two weeks. Also my command of the language in question is not great, so a machine translator will be necessary. The OCR is running at the moment.
Not so long ago I spent most Saturday afternoons scanning and proofing. In those days Google Books did not exist, nor Archive.org, and it was the only way to get things online. The equipment I have today is far better than I had then, but I am quite glad that I don’t have to do it now! All those books on Google books must have taken enormous labour.
I thought that I would record my impressions of the current weather, which is the most extreme that I can remember. I myself am fortunate in many ways, but not unaffected by it. If I were older, I think it would be a terrible season.
I need hardly tell anyone in the Eastern Counties what a cold winter this has been. Snow began to fall and settle in the middle of December. I do not recall a year in which we had snow on the ground before Christmas, but so it was this winter. The roads then were impassible for a day or two. I ended up at home, which was not unwelcome then. Over Christmas it was dull, as it usually is. Then January brought another lengthy spell of snow on the ground and impassible roads. More dull cold days followed, and then this week another covering has arrived. Perhaps tomorrow there will be more.
It is now almost two months since we began to have bitter cold and snowfalls. Someone said to me ironically, “Ah, that’ll be the ‘global warming’, then”.
In my office, almost everyone is ill. All of us have had several days off work with a cold. The symptoms begin with congestion of a quite fantastic intensity, thankfully short-lived, and then the usual symptoms. I think I used about 6 boxes of tissues in a week. But although we have all returned to work, we all cough incessantly. All of us feel ill, and enervated and listless. Cold seems to worsen the coughing.
The mainly foreign-owned “big six” gas and electricity companies have raised prices over the last couple of years whenever the wholesale price of oil rose, but not reduced them when it fell. They are widely suspected of running a cartel. Many a poor household must be afraid to turn on the heating, and afraid not to.
I have had great difficulty keeping my own house warm, for the first time I can remember. At times I have resorted to leaving the heating on all day while I go off to work, because I don’t want to return to a cold house. Probably I feel the cold more, because I’m not well. Every night I have an electric heater on in my room, because otherwise I cough and cough. But all this means I must pay for more heating, and most of us must be in the same position. The price of such energy use must be heavy, and is yet to come. Even I am somewhat worried about the power bill that must be coming in. If I were 20 years older, and on a restricted income, I think I would be very afraid indeed.
Prices of everyday things rise every day. The government has been printing money — “quantitative easing” they call it — which becomes visibly the devaluation that it always was. To get enough food, again you need money. Those on fixed incomes must know fear.
I do not know whether they still keep bills of mortality, but the death-toll this winter must be heavy. To the well and the young, it is perhaps just a nuisance. But this is the weather that kills the old and the sick, the poor and the vulnerable. There will be many children who lose their grandparents this winter.
We do not deserve it; but may God have mercy on us.
The first chunk of the translation of the Coptic portions of Eusebius on the Gospels has arrived! This is very good news. The translator is asking ab0ut how I formatted the rest of the work — a very good question — and asking to see the rest. I must progress this.
An email came back from Claudio Zamagni; when he sent his Greek/French text to the publisher, he supplied the Greek and the French in separate files. This is why, he says, the Greek page has the same page number as the French page. This is very useful info, of course.
The chap who is going through the files turning the Greek into unicode is doing a splendid job, and has done the second file also (of four).
I have started to put out feelers to see if I can find a freelance editor to take on the book. I just know so little about the process of book production.
I also emailed Sebastian Brock about the possibility of finding the lost mss. of Seert. His response was to discourage investigation because of the sensitive politics around the massacres that led to the books being lost/hidden. Some parties locally might prefer to destroy the books, rather than recover them.
I’ve also remembered who I asked to translate all of Sbath treatise 20, and sent them a reminder.
Andrew Eastbourne has now translated into English the Latin preface to De Lagarde’s Coptic catena, and this has arrived today. I’ve passed it over to the lady translating excerpts from Eusebius from the Coptic in that catena, who requested it. There will be probably be some tweaking as it contains fragments of Coptic. With luck, this will bring forth the translation of the Coptic materials which I have been awaiting.
A little card on the doormat tells me that the postman has a book for me that he couldn’t get through the letter box. This must be vol. 1 part 1 of Harnack’s Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, in a cheap reprint. Even that reprint is not simple to find; but part 2 was so full of useful information that I feel obliged to obtain a copy.
I need to write to Sebastian Brock, the Syriac scholar, and ask him about the report I read in an article from the 1960’s suggesting that some of the lost Syriac mss. from Seert might yet be found, buried in the ground in 1915. If no-one has ever followed that up, I ought to write to the Time Team TV programme, suggesting it. Their use of geophysical search technology might well recover the lost books, if they are still there.
One task that I was not relishing was changing the Greek in footnotes in the Eusebius volume that I have commissioned into unicode. I’ve passed that out to someone, for money. Blessedly, he’s done the first chunk, and made a very nice job of it. I am very grateful — my lingering cold leaves me too weak to do much, leaving me feeling like an old man (!), and I can earn the money to pay for such work more easily than I can do the work myself. If only I could hire someone to edit the book for me!
I’ve also written to Claudio Zamagni asking about how he formatted his manuscript of the Greek/French Eusebius, to submit it. Did he, I asked, set it up with facing Greek and French pages, at that stage? I really know so little about this side of things that it is hard to get started with setting up the book to be typeset. I wish, I wish, that I didn’t have to print a text as well as a translation.
One thing I discovered this week is that the Luxor Hilton hotel has reopened. First reports from TripAdvisor are positive. In fact it was open before Christmas, but I didn’t know about it. I think I might stay there for a week next winter, just before Christmas. I have truly missed the heat of Egypt this winter! More snow here today, which is very trying.
Someone owes me a transcription and translation of some bits of Christian Arabic from Sbath’s Vingt traites. I must try to remember who, and prompt them.
The cold that I have had over the last couple of weeks has fairly thoroughly disrupted my work schedule on editing the Eusebius. We all take the energy we have for granted; until it vanishes under the onslaught of a virus.
Now I have the translation of everything, aside from the Coptic; but it all needs licking into shape. I need someone to retype the bits of Greek in the footnotes into unicode, and generally work it all together. I am reluctantly concluding that I will not have the time to do this.
Is there anyone out there with editorial skills (and familiarity with Greek letters!) willing to help me, for money? If so, please get in touch!
I’ve also had a contract for use of the Greek text of part of the work from the Sources Chretiennes, which I have managed to read and is really quite sensible. I need to get onto that too.
When I feel under the weather, and I can’t face anything heavy, I tend to resort to reading old favourites. Often these include the old Loeb’s of Juvenal and Martial. This week, attacked by a heavy cold, it has been Martial.
I was reading book 3, epigram 19. This describes a place of “a hundred columns”, where there were statues of wild beasts in bronze. The Loeb footnote says this was called the Hecastylon. It seems to have been a portico. The epigram describes how a boy thrust his hand into the mouth of a bronze bear, only to disturb a nesting viper, be bitten, and die.
A Google search on Hecastylon revealed almost nothing. The only reference was to a map, which gave a location and said that some of the building is still standing, and placed it next to the Largo Argentina, where the emperors handed out donatives. A Google books search identified it as a portico.
And that was it.
We are so very used to finding material online, that it comes as rather a shock to find almost none. Perhaps the building had some other name, or spelling; but even so, it is surprising.
UPDATE: Apparently it should be “Hecatostylon”!
Nothing to do with normal topics on this blog, but I came across http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/. Sometimes I am glad that I work as a freelancer!
I’m still too unwell to go back to work, which is a pain because I only get paid when I’m in the office. I thought I was well enough to go in tomorrow, but a walk to a shop this frosty evening speedily taught me otherwise. So … another day at home, in which I can probably read but not much else. Maybe I should have ordered some novels and some cartoon books!
But I have discovered Karo and Lietzmann’s catalogue of Greek catenas. Now how do I get it in a form in which I can actually use it? I need something printed, in the hand.
At the moment I am trying to turn it into a Lulu.com book. I downloaded the Lulu settings for Adobe and I printed the PDF to PDF, thereby changing the page size and preparing it for Lulu. (It also made the PDF 10 times larger!) If I can just print this Google Books PDF in book form, then that would do. I can then slump on the sofa with a coke and a pencil and work through it.
If not, I need to power up the laser printer and just print selected bits of it. It’s 189 pages, after all!
UPDATE: I have created a book-form of K&L, which is available here. It’s £7.60, or about $10, if you want one. I’ve ordered one for me, so it will be interesting to see what the print quality is like.
Ill at home today with a horrible cold, and unable to read much. I picked up the translation by Frank Williams of the Panarion of Epiphanius, that great late 4th century catalogue of ancient heresies. It is indeed a blessing to have this material in English.
But I found myself looking for footnotes, of the kind that we see in Victorian editions. In these ample discussions, many an interesting point can be found. In general, modern footnoting tends to be references, rather than disgressions, expansions, or clarifications. This is a shame, in a way.
Let’s hear it for the prolix footnote!