I popped over to the wiki I have of notes about Syriac, to find it had been thoroughly vandalised. Thank you, whoever did this — I now have to clean up the mess.
Tag: From my diary
From my diary
I’ve boxed up a few books that I want to send to a colleague in the EU. Weight turns out to be around 7.5 kgs. Prices, tho, seem prohibitive, whoever I go to. I mean … 110 GBP? ($160)
Perhaps the trick is to send a few at a time. Take them out of the box, perhaps, and put them in padded envelops? Meanwhile the box goes back on the side. How silly this.
The installation of Omnipage 10 on my Win7 box had its due reward this morning, when my PC would not boot. Took it off again and all was well. Not sure how I’m going to handle that. I do need to unpack all those old .opd files.
A box arrived from Glasgow with photocopies of Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum vol. 3, plus some replacement pages for those in vol. 2 which were damaged or less than readable. Also an invoice for the copying for vol. 2 — the original price of 24.10 GBP had 20% tax added on — what thieves our masters have become! — and then another 5 GBP postage, making a total of $55 or thereabouts. All that, for one book to go online. Still, there seems no other way to get it online.
One of the CDR’s last night was unreadable, but trying again this morning when the drive is cold, it looks as if it might copy. Most have been copied OK, thankfully. Still more to do, and then I need to unpack the .opd’s. A busy day lies ahead today, perhaps.
Insomnia, old backups to CD, and books to post off
Insomnia. How tiresome. But productive too.
I wandered into my front room where a pile of books, mostly Tertullian-related, sits on the side gathering dust. I intend to donate most of them to a scholar I know who has only limited access to such texts. I sort out a handful which I am pretty sure I have in PDF form.
This leads me to wonder where I might find the image files of books that I scanned long ago. These could be turned into PDF’s, after all.
And so to my cupboard, where piles of backup CDR’s stand. Some are labelled in a truly meaningful way, “only copy of roger_scan 1/4/2” and such like.
Out comes the external hard disk, and I begin the process of copying these disks onto it. I have two such hard disks, mirrors of each other, one of which lives in my house and the other in my car. The second CDR, and one directory is unreadable. Fortunately the rest of the disk is fine. But it’s a warning that CDR is not a permanent medium.
I find a book I remember copying. In the directory are … three .opd files. What on earth are those, I wonder? Memory suggests they must be Omnipage. I hope I have the software for that somewhere!
UPDATE: 00:50 hrs, and I have come across quite a few .opd files. It seems I switched to Finereader some time in 2001. But I still have Omnipage 9 and 10. I install Omnipage 10 on Win7 without problems, and it asks me to do an online registration. The screen that appears carefully explains what “HTTP” is, and offers other options including dial-in. I wonder uneasily whether the server will still be there — Caere, the manufacturer, is long gone. But it does. And it opens the .opd files too.
I know better than to accept the default tif compressed format for the export of the image files — TIF files could be quite chancy in those days, and no two applications could read each other’s compressed formats. But uncompressed tif processes fine on Win7. I soon have Gerlo’s 1940 edition of Tertullian’s De Pallio (in 2 long volumes) in PDF form.
Nothing electronic is permanent. Thank heavens I chose to look into this tonight. Another version of windows, a chance decision to clear out unused software, and that data would be gone for good.
One evening
“Alas, alas!” I cried. For I thought that I had found a treasure, and it was brutally jerked from me at the last moment! I am inconsolable.
The history of Mehmet the conqueror sits in my scanner, and I turn the pages as I type. The library lent it to me today. It is a scarce volume. The author, Kritovoulos, witnessed the fall of Constantinople to the Turk, and their mercy to the fallen city.
Rarely do I sit at my scanner now. Somehow I am more tired in the evenings, than I was even ten years ago. Then I would merrily dedicate a weekend to wrestling with some huge volume. Now a pile sit on the side, that I would rather have in electronic form, and simply gather dust.
The scan is for my own reference. A PDF shall be created, and sit on my hard disk.
But as I sat, and scanned, and surfed, I noted that the translation was made in 1954. A glimmer of hope crept into my heart. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps they did not renew the copyright? Perhaps it is out of copyright? Perhaps it could go online?
So I thought, and hoped and reasoned. And I surfed around, searching for the copyright renewals. I found that renewals for 1982 — when such a book must be renewed or become public domain — were accessible and searchable at www.copyright.gov. And a search for “mehmed the conqueror” in the title brought nothing back!
Alas! I rejoiced too soon. A closer inspection of the search page revealed curious features of the title search. So I searched again on keyword. And … woe … a record appeared. A copyright claimant, a Sarah R. MacNeal, appeared, claiming to be the child of Charles Riggs the translator, and her claim was allowed.
Of course in 1982 the web was not thought of. All that Mrs MacNeal wanted was to ensure that she got a share of whatever was going. But now the work will be in copyright until 2049, when I shall be in my grave. Not that this profits anyone.
But in the meantime, I consoled myself with a volume of poems by R. C. Lehmann. He wrote light verse, and charms. But in his portrait of a village, he gave this shrewd picture of the local squire, written in days when the class hatred and political spite of these days were unknown. Read it aloud, so that you can hear the melody of the words.
He talked of his rights as one who knew
That the pick of the earth to him was due:
The right to this and the right to that,
To the humble look and the lifted hat;
The right to scold or evict a peasant,
The right to partridge and hare and pheasant;
The right to encourage discontent
By raising a hard-worked farmer’s rent;
The manifest right to ride to hounds
Through his own or anyone else’s grounds;
The right to eat of the best by day
And to snore the whole of the night away;
For his motto, as often he explained,
Was “A Darville holds what a Darville gained.”
He tried to be just, but that may be
Small merit in one who has most things free; …
My favourite among his verses is the Ramshackle Room, about remembering his college days. My eyes too grow dim as I read it, for his thoughts are mine.
Meanwhile the last page is done, and the scanner is silent. I must unplug it and place it back in my cupboard. 9 minutes, it took me. Now to make my PDF. Alas, that I cannot share it with you all!
The library copy had marginalia written in pencil, in Arabic. A first, that!
From my diary
Two parcels this morning from Amazon. The first one contained a print-off version of Baumstark’s handbook on Syriac literature. I ordered this while I was working on the Encyclopedia of Syriac Literature wiki, although I had a PDF. But I can’t read a book in a PDF. This one will get marginal notes that help me to find my way around.
The other was Aelian’s Varia Historia.
The Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum vol. 2 PDF that I uploaded to Archive.org on Thursday is defective; the pages are in the wrong order! I’ve made a new one and it is uploading as we speak. Apologies to the 15 people who have already downloaded it.
From my diary
I heard about elance last week, and decided to invite proposals for typesetting. The site was not very friendly. It demanded that I create a “job” in order to see what sort of people were available, whereas I would rather have done the opposite. Anyway I did so. When I started to get replies, I tried to look at them only for them to demand my credit card details, although they promised not to debit it. Today I try to login; and they start demanding personal information, “for security”. Can’t say I recommend this site so far. The problem with all these sites is whether the people bidding are at all serious about doing the job well. My experience with studentgems was that few were.
On to more useful things.
I ordered the Loeb of Aelian’s Varia Historia yesterday. Apparently it’s quite an interesting read of miscellaneous subjects. I also hunted around for an English translation of Solinus, but it seems there has been none since the 16th century.
Sisters of Sinai, and other snippets
Yesterday and today I have been reading Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice, which I bought in Heffers in Cambridge on Saturday. This is a biography of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, the two sisters who discovered the Old Syriac palimpsest of the gospels at Mount Sinai back in the late 19th century, in company with figures such as Rendel Harris and F.C.Burkitt. It’s a lively, readable volume, thankfully slim on childhood and heavy on the many journeys to the East, and the search for manuscripts.
The central figures illustrate the story rather than dominate it. I owe all my interest in patristics to T.R.Glover’s translation of Tertullian’s Apologeticum, so it is nice to see him step out of the shadows. Harris and Burkitt likewise become people rather than editors. I had not known that the two sisters were based in Cambridge; nor that they were instrumental in the discovery of the Cairo Geniza manuscripts.
One passage has stayed with me, quoted on p.65 from Agnes Lewis. She brings the Areopagus before our eyes, the marvellous creations of Greek art and philosophy — the highest civilisation then known to man. And then she reminds us that a wandering Jew named Paul appeared before that high tribunal, and told them of an unknown god.
His words fell on scornful ears; yet their echo has caused the Parthenon to crumble.
The book is well worth its price.
The new Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea 2009 is out, and a copy has reached me thanks to the generosity of the French Tertullian scholar, Pierre Petitmengin. This is an annual section in the Revue des Etudes Augustinennes, which lists all the publications of the year, on Tertullian, Cyprian, and generally on the subject of the Latin Fathers up to the death of Cyprian. Each is listed and reviewed in detail. This year there is comparatively little Tertullianea, in truth, and so the publication is a little dull for me. I will review it in detail on the Tertullian Project site in due course.
I’ve placed an advertisment for typesetters on eLance. I’ve had several replies, although I don’t know about quality. Since I will need to typeset the Origen book soon, it seemed timely to start the process of finding someone who could do it.
I’ve also written to the translator of Michael the Syrian, which I hope to publish, again asking questions about layout and typesetting. Michael’s World Chronicle has quite a few features which will make it a challenge — i.e. expensive — to typeset, and it is as well to enquire.
Today has been a good day, I have to say. It is remarkable how much difference it makes, whether we have a good day at work or not. Mine has been good, and I have reached the end of the day in good shape, for once. An email reaches me from an old colleague, currently working in the City of London for HSBC as a programmer. He’s leaving; the pressure put on the employees there is too much for him. Is it just me, or do employers generally demand more and more these days?
The critical marks of Aristarchus in Andronicus of Alexandria
A comment on my post from Diogenes Laertius, listing the critical marks in use in the 3rd century, drew my attention to the work of the Augustan grammarian Aristonicus of Alexandria. Apparently Friedlander in 1853 published the remains of his work on the critical signs used for the Iliad and Odyssey (Peri Semeion).
Friedlander is online, and the corresponding work on the Odyssey also here. But I couldn’t make head or tail of his edition! Some things are beyond me, and evidently this is one.
This is a pity — a statement of what the critical marks were and how they were used would be nice to have in English.
From my diary
A kind correspondent has sent me the translation of Galen’s Peri Alupias from Early Christianity. It seems that the latter journal is not very widely subscribed to, which is curious since it seems to be of a high standard.
Mind you, they need to think about that charge of $33 for downloading a copy of an article. At $3 a copy, I would have just downloaded it. But at $33, I ended up pestering my friends to see if any of them had a subscription. It’s morally wrong to charge ten or twenty times the cost of a photocopy for something that costs them nothing.
Looking forward to reading the articles. But first … a pile of paperwork that has to be done. Groan. What I need is a secretary.
In fact I could use assistance — even paid assistance — with the running around and proof reading etc for the books that I am publishing. I’ve thought that for some time. Not sure where such a person might be found. But there just don’t seem to be enough hours for me to do it.
From my diary
I’m in Cambridge University Library. I’m looking for articles in Early Christianity, a new journal. There is a translation of Galen’s Peri Alupias in it. But it seems that CUL does not subscribe. To access it means $33 (plus tax). There’s no sign of a paper subscription.
Why, I wonder, do we pay taxes for scholarship when we cannot access the results?
UPDATE: On the other hand I have discovered that the CRAI articles — a journal CUL don’t subscribe to — are all online at Persee.fr, as late as 2006. Bless them! The Galen stuff is here.