Tag: From my diary

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tomorrow is Christmas day.  But it is also Sunday and so, of course, I shall not be using my computer.  Allow me to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas today, therefore.

I’ve just been pottering around today.

It’s also the season to think about trips.  For a couple of years I have felt that I would like to go to see the Northern Lights.  You have to do these things, before you get to the age when everything is too much trouble.  But it is remarkably difficult to find decent tours online.  Icelandair do something, but it looks very much like a flight plus a room plus a local tour, which, if you travel alone, means that you will spend most of your time alone.  I gather that it is best to go at the New Moon when there is as little moonlight as possible.  This will mean going in late January, which risks conflicting with the start of a new contract.

Earlier today I discovered that I had little more than 1 Gb of free space remaining on my hard disk.  A quick check of the Ibn Abi Usaibia directories revealed that these were taking up around 80 Gb — not bad going, when you consider that all the images fitted onto a DVD originally.  It turns out that the Abbyy Finereader 10 directory takes up nearly all of  that.  Quite why Finereader now requires so much space I do not know.

Fortunately I have the answer: my two 1,000 Gb back-up drives have more than enough space, so I am placing a copy of the directory on each of these, and removing it from my hard disk.  Suddenly I shall be back in business!

I’m rather missing Ibn Abi Usaibia.  Without that to OCR, I’m at something of a loss!  And I can’t quite face grappling with the Origen book just yet.

Sales of the Eusebius book are still doing well.  Indeed I have had enough orders directly that today I was forced to set up a spreadsheet to keep track of them, after I started to think that I must have sent a hardback twice to one bookseller.  Another bookseller, LICOSA, from Italy, have not troubled to pay for the book that I sent them, I find.  Italian booksellers seem slow to pay.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Up to page 840 with correcting the OCR of Ibn Abi Usaibia.

I also got my Christmas cards done and posted today, complete with financial enclosures for teenage nephews.  The latter is important — an uncle is not expected to send goodies, but to relieve the financial strain.

It took me three goes before I was happy with my circular letter.  It’s a hard thing to write, as you mustn’t just regurgitate whatever you did with last year.

Obviously it’s probably best to omit things like the period under observation in Broadmoor, that you were sacked recently for being useless at your job, or your recent exciting discovery that you like Barry Manilow’s music.  People don’t need to know these things.  “Restraining order” can be such an unpleasant phrase.  So humour them.

You know it will be read at Christmas, so it ought to be positive.  Do you want to be thought of as the chap whose letter is left until last?

You know it may be read by people facing difficulties themselves, so you probably don’t want to remind them of things they may also face, and which may worry them — like whether any of us will ever be able to afford to retire.

You know that some of those reading it may be suffering financially — which means you don’t moan about (e.g.) how difficult you find it to park your new Ferrari in the garage.  Nor, I should add, do you advise them helpfully that getting the butler to do it is the answer.  Why provoke resentment among the ever-shrinking number of people who will send you a card at Christmas?

No, be bright, be positive, and try to leave people with a smile!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A major, major answer to prayer came through today.  It was something that affects my ability to get work, so it could make quite a difference to the Pearse household finances over the next few months.   The diet coke will flow tonight!

When my mobile rang with the news, I was walking on a path through a churchyard in Norwich city centre, and I found it hard to refrain from a jig of joy.  (Passers-by, however, no doubt edged noticeably away from this capering, heavily muffled, manically grinning figure.)

I’d written this prayer off, you know.  I’d written “rejected” against it.  Literally written, in fact.

You see, I have a notepad by my bed, in case I think of something that I want to remember, and the prayer was on that.  I’d realised that I needed to pray for it one evening when in bed, and scribbled it in there.   Because there’s nothing worse than trying to fall asleep while trying to make sure you remember something, and many of my best ideas come to me in bed, or in the middle of the night, and I think of things  that I need to pray about.

After all, God does not answer all our prayers.  I didn’t hold it against Him, of course.  In many cases the things that we ask for would be bad for us.

But on this one, little did I know that matters were in hand.  Tonight I shall cross out “rejected” and write “fulfilled”.

I think that it is a good habit to write down what we have prayed for, and to tick them off as they are answered. God answers many more of our prayers than we realise, yet how many of us fire off a prayer and never think of Him again in that respect?  It builds confidence, once we realise that God is listening, and doing, much more for us than we might otherwise notice.

When the news came through, I promised two people on the other end a bottle of something as a solid form of thanks.  This led me to think that I need to thank God also.  Which means a donation to some useful charity.  There’s always the Salvation Army, or the London City Mission.

But I wish that I knew of a charity that helps people like me, rather than the poverty-stricken working class types.  The latter have many charities to help  them.  But I fear that a goodly number of university educated people need help and find it not.

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Less of a YODEL, more of a scream

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I do wish Amazon wouldn’t use courier company YODEL to deliver books.  I ordered two on Wednesday.  Neither arrived; instead I came home today to find a snippy little card inviting me to negotiate with a robot at the YODEL site for delivery, and sit at home and wait.  I’ve just cancelled both orders, and placed one with BookDepository instead.  The other might conceivably arrive tomorrow; if it does, I’ll accept it, and ring up and pay again; if it doesn’t, BD will get my order.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A busy day.  Up early, and an email brings an enquiry as  to whether the cult of Mithras may have arisen in Commagene — we have no evidence for this –, and invoking the name of Roger Beck.  This obliges me to read Beck’s paper, and write a reply, and then I am disturbed by my cleaning lady who has come in and, finding the curtains still drawn and everything silent and in disarray, wonders if I am lying dead upstairs or something.

Out then to the library to return Ulansey’s book, and to do some tiresome banking chores.  Then back this afternoon, and I do some more proofing on Ibn Abi Usaibia.  Page 767 passes my eye.

Then I notice the date; it is the 8th of December, which means that Christmas cards will need to be sent, and a Christmas letter composed to go with them.  I start writing an account of what I have done this year.  After three pages I become conscious of just how many heavy tasks I have undertaken this year.  In fact it gets a bit depressing, and, not wishing to write a letter of moans and groans, I stop and go down the supermarket.

This time of year is hard on us all.  The days are short, the sun is low, and there isn’t enough light.  The fresh air helps, and I reflect on the amount I have had to do, and the amount I have had to spend on various dull, stressful but necessary tasks, and the way that I tend to fill spare time with tasks.  Time to load-shed, perhaps.

Do you know what?  I think I shall bunk off, and just do nothing for a while.  I don’t commit even to a blog post tomorrow or Saturday.  I suspect that I need some downtime!

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Rage and fury

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s all very well having the cloud as your editor.  But what happens when it all stops working, bit by bit?

I’ve been writing a review of David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries this afternoon.  I’d done two chapters of it.  I’d chosen to use WordPress to edit the article, here in this blog.

I closed up the editor and went off to make a call.  When I came back, I opened it up again to find … most of my work had vanished.  Somehow it hadn’t been saved.  I’d saved it … but the connection had not processed the save.

I am so angry!  I don’t particularly want to dissect Ulansey’s work; but to do it, to do all that work, and all of it in vain … it is utterly infuriating.

I’ve had erratic results from IE for a day or so now.  I’ve just turned off Kaspersky anti-virus, and firewall, and suddenly everything works again.  I wonder if that is the problem?

Why can’t we have reliable technology?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A reader kindly purchased a CD of my collection of the Fathers in English (available here).  Since this collections is something that I work on continuously, I don’t keep a stock.  So the order meant that I had to produce one.

I spent most of the morning trying to do so, and having baffling difficulties.  This was my own fault entirely.  What I did was to use Windows 7’s built-in facility to burn CDROM’s. When you pop a blank CDR disk into your drive, Windows pops up a menu asking if you want to burn data to CD.  I tried doing this, and it failed with “not enough space”.  Plainly the facility wasn’t familiar with the 700Mb CD-R format.  But …

What I did not realise was that Windows does not clean up after itself.  It leaves the files to be burned sitting in a temporary directory, and it leaves some kind of lock on the drive.

I learned this the hard way.  I realised that Windows wouldn’t serve my purpose, so I fired up the software I usually use to do this.  And the burn failed, mysteriously, wasting a blank disk.  And the next one did the same.  And then I rebooted, and, on reboot, got a message about files waiting to be burned to disk.  I cleaned these out, tried again, and … failed again.

In the end I got a fresh blank disk, and a small Word file, and did a burn using Windows 7 of that.  It worked perfectly, ran to end, and … reset whatever lock was messing up the other software.

That cost me a morning of my life.  The moral is not to use Windows to burn data CD’s.

After lunch, I came back and worked some more on proofing Ibn Abi Usaibia.  I reached page 750.  Only 200 pages remain.  I subdivided the remaining files into 40-page “projects”, as this gives a reasonable sense of achievement on a regular basis.  Anyone who sets out with a single project and 950 pages to proof is likely to give up, out of sheer exhaustion!  But break it up into smaller chunks, and the inner man is much happier.  Know thyself, as the man said.

I’m still reading Grant’s Greek and Roman authors.  It is a book that would be far better in chronological order.  But I’m still getting value out of reading it, cover to cover.  I realise from this how many classical Greek dramatic authors there are.  I learn how little I know about this literature!  But candidly, I acquired a set of the Loeb editions of the plays of the Latin dramatist Plautus, and I really couldn’t get into them at all.  Eventually I disposed of them.  I don’t have a single volume of ancient plays (or any other, come to that) on my shelves.  I just don’t care for drama, I think.

Last night I also read through Hinnells paper on Cautes and Cautopates.  It was very dry, consisting of solid statistical information.  What I did NOT see in it, however, was any reference whatsoever to the two attendants of Mithras carrying shepherd’s crooks.  This particular legend bubbles under on the web.  Vermaseren claims (in Mithras: the secret god) that some relief shows this; but I am very doubtful.  The image he gives looks dubious to me, and there is no indication of provenance.  It is entirely possible for authors to read into reliefs the things that they expect to see!  The Cumontian authors were terrible in just this respect. But I hope to acquire some PDF’s of Vermaseren’s real scholarly opus, the CIMRM, and so perhaps I can see precisely what there is to support his claims.   I suspect it is a phantom.

A bunch of  pages translated from the German of Methodius, “De Lepra”, has arrived.  This is a relief, because I had begun to wonder if that project was dead.  I’ve had no chance to look at these yet.  The translator also sent me a sample of a translation of the first chunk of embedded Greek.  I’ve passed it over to a trusted friend to check it over.  I don’t know whether the Greek is very good, tho.  My suspicions are roused because it doesn’t make that much sense in English.  The translator subcontracted that bit, and I have no idea whether the person responsible is up to the job.  We will see, in due course.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In to town, to hand back Vermaseren’s Mithras: the secret god.  No sign yet of two British Library loans of other Mithras books.  I was relieved to discover that the local library was open, as I had feared that it might not be — there is a public sector workers strike today.

I am still reading Grant’s book on Greek and Roman authors, one entry at a time.  I am learning things from it, that’s for sure.

Not everything in such books is sound.  In the entry for Athanasius, for instance, he refers to the existence of a possible autograph letter of Athanasius to the monk Paphnutius.  It seems that this was published in 1924 by H. I. Bell in Jews and Christians in Egypt, and bears the shelfmark Papyrus London 1929.  But a Google search revealed that Tim Barnes, for instance, in his Constantius and Athanasius, considered that there was no evidence that the “Athanasius” of this letter was the same as the famous archbishop.  The letter was found together with others which suggested that Paphnutius may have been a Meletian.  It is slightly frustrating that I was unable to locate Bell’s work online.

A chance visit to Wikipedia yesterday revealed another poor soul there being bullied and harassed there by a gang of other users, and being treated with little respect or mercy.  (I didn’t agree with his edits, but I could see what was being done to him).  The ploy seemed to be to bully him until he left, and then, if he returned under another name, block him for “sock puppeting”.  I suspect that bullying is endemic in Wikipedia, in truth, and that it is concealed merely because Google doesn’t make it easily possible to search the endless pages in which it is taking place.  It’s not a safe place to visit, and it needs to be placed under proper management, and scrutiny.

Meanwhile the task of OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia grinds on.  I’ve now passed page 700; only another 250 pages to go!  The low light conditions at this time of year, and the short days, leave me feeling very sleepy much of the time, and it’s not that easy to gather the energy to buckle down and do things.

So … what shall I do this afternoon?

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Something to dip into

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few days ago I came across a bargain online.  It was a copy of Michael Grant’s “Greek and Latin Authors: 800 B.C.-A.D.1000”, which, including postage, came to a princely $6.  It arrived this morning, a big heavy book, ex-library.

I had rather hoped, from the title, that authors would be listed in chronological order, but not so. Instead they are appear in name order.  This is unfortunate, for it means that the book cannot easily be read through.  At least if authors are in chronological order, you can read the whole as a story.

But it does mean that the book is ideal to dip into.  Indeed I propose to consume it in just such a manner.   It might be a valuable resource to read on the loo, for instance.

I have forgotten the author who recommended the purchase of small page, cheap editions of the Latin poets, for use in such a circumstance.  Each page would be a poem or two, and a man with normal innards would read and absorb a few poems at a sitting.  After that, it was suggested, the pages just read could be torn out and, in this, pre-toilet-paper age, devoted to a different but convenient purpose.  Certainly editions of that period were printed on absorbent paper.  In this way, he advised, a great store of learning could be acquired during a portion of the day otherwise wasted.  Was it, perhaps, Lord Chesterfield who advised thus?

Grant’s book consists of short entries on authors, plus a list of works and short bibliography.  It’s the kind of work that has been superceded by Wikipedia, in many ways; and yet Kiddipedia, as we might equally call it — “the encyclopedia that any child can edit!” — is not nearly as good.  The labour in compiling the book must have been considerable, but Grant makes a good job of it.

I had never heard of the book, in truth, but came across it accidentally, mentioned on some website.  I got it, because I love handbooks of solid information.  They can be valuable companions at bed-time as well, for again, that is an occasion in which to read a few pages, and then drift off.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A dull Saturday morning, and I went into town and visited the local library, in search of my book order from Tuesday.  On entering my ears were assailed with music, from some device stationed on the enquiries desk, and there were stalls filling the main library area.  Apparently the library had been turned into a tatty-looking craft fair for the day.  Want to read and study?  Well, tough.

The book I ordered had arrived.  I’d ordered it online, and given my email address so that they could tell me if it had arrived, but I never got an email.  Possibly it arrived yesterday, and I simply didn’t know?

Back home with it, and I found that some spotty-faced youth had taken his pencil to it, and filled it with underlinings and marginal notes and symbols, evidently in preparation for some college essay.  But who wants their attention distracted by that when reading?  So I had to spend half an hour with the rubber.

The book, of course, is Vermaseren’s Mithras, the secret god, 1963.  It’s an interesting but infuriating book from so many points of view, because the great man didn’t feel the need for any footnotes.  Even the sources for illustrations of monuments are not identified.  The book starts as follows:

In Rome, about A.D. 400, a number of Christians, armed with axes, forced their way into a Mithraic temple on the Aventine, where they smashed the sculptures and cut gaping holes in the paintings. Once the persecuted, they were now the persecutors, and to their ever-growing numbers Mithras and his followers were regarded as deadly rivals.

What a vivid picture!

But there are no footnotes.  So … on what is this based?  Depressingly, this is fiction.  Vermaseren is talking about the Mithraeum of Santa Prica, which he excavated.  In the scholarly publication he identifies damage, and speculates that it might have been done at the fall of paganism by Christians.  Well, so indeed it might; but we have no actual evidence for this, and surely we should not state as fact that which is only a theory?  But in this popular version, the attack has become a fact.

Still, Vermaseren really did have all the data about Mithras at his fingertips, although the Cumontian theory blinded him as to its real impact.  So the book is bound to contain a great deal of hard data, interwoven with fancy like this.  I shall be reading it over the weekend, I think!

Meanwhile I still have a great deal to do.  I need to finish up a page on the works of Hero of Alexandria, and write another on the manuscript tradition of his artillery manuals.  Then I need to get back to Methodius and the Russian  version that I acquired yesterday, and translate some of that.

I’m becoming rather disappointed with progress on the translation from German of Methodius De lepra.  Since last week, only a handful of lines have been done, and those only after prompting.  Total time spent on those can only have been 10 minutes or so.  The translator is not re-reading what he writes, which means that some of the sentences are gibberish.  In some cases the gibberish reflects an Old Testament quotation, and becomes clear if you look it up in one of the online English translations of the bible.  The PDF that I gave the man signals biblical references at the foot of each page, but, although in difficulty, he doesn’t trouble to look them up — I have to do that.  When I do, and send back a file with comments, I get no response.   We’ll see.  But I think this is clearly going pear-shaped.  I’ve had to chase twice now, in a total of 6 pages, and I’m tired of it.

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