Tag: From my diary

From my diary: the evanescent internet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today, at work, I cast around for a web-based form to point a computer program at, for testing purposes.  I recalled my own feedback form, at Tertullian.org, and decided to use that.  I was having one of those days, you know, when everything goes wrong.  But at least my own website wouldn’t let me down, right?

Wrong.  The form didn’t work.

Clearly it hadn’t worked, for quite some time.  Yet I couldn’t see why.  It was a very simple piece of software, and hadn’t changed in, well, probably a decade.

But of course it wasn’t running on the hardware-software platform of 2004 any more.  Somewhere, sometime, my website provider had upgraded.  It happens all the time.

Some software upgrade had broken it, silently.  The form is written in PHP, and clearly one or the other of the PHP upgrades had silently removed features on which it depends.  It emails me in a distinctive format, and, now I come to think of it, I haven’t seen one in quite some time.  A year?  Two?  How time flies…

I spent a less than pleasant hour this evening, rewriting the way it captures variables.  The new version is considerably more baroque than the old.  It’s longer.  It might be more secure, I don’t know.  But it’s not the same form any more.

Of course this makes me wonder what other PHP scripts are lying around on my website, long forgotten.  I can’t even face looking.

This is how the internet dies.  We all know that it is less than permanent.  What we forget is that software less than a decade old, designed to run and be accessible by the world, is probably only sporadically working.

All those eager-beavers, upgrading and improving constantly, are … leaving a trail of wrecked websites behind them.

I wonder how many of us are actually hosting deadware – scripts that once worked and no longer do?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The sales figures for the books have come in.  The Eusebius is still selling, although not in great numbers; the Origen has yet to really get underway, although it may do better once the reviews appear.

I’ve continued to work on the Mithras website.  For the most part this is reactive; e.g. somebody posts an image online somewhere that comes to my attention, and I research the monument and create a web page for it.    I haven’t done any more on the Mithraeum of Santa Prisca this week, but I will resume work on this.  One area that I want to include is whatever is known about the early Christian remains in the same area.  I had intended to go across to Cambridge University Library this week and obtain some articles, but this has not been possible, thanks to some of the “stuff that happens while you are making plans to do other things”.

The translation of Severian of Gabala’s De Spiritu Sancto is progressing.  Interestingly it begins by surveying what the bible says about the Holy Spirit, or so I understand.

My attention has otherwise been distracted by some nuisance at home; this too is part of life, although I endure less of it than most people.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s been a busy 24 hours.  Another chunk of the translation of Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke has appeared – this work now nearly done, thankfully.

As previous posts have indicated, Severian’s De pace came in.  I have commissioned another Severian, and a second gentleman has expressed interest in doing Severian as well.  I’m willing.  In fact there are homilies of Severian extant only in Armenian, and I am willing to pay someone to translate these as well.  But we’ll get there.

I also spent time trying to untangle the account in Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae of the items from Chester; but to some purpose, for I realised that in fact there were four monuments, not three, and that this had confused Vermaseren himself.

Various items scanned during the week had to be processed, OCR’d and stored away.  The British copyright libraries wanted their free copies of Origen, Exegetical works on Ezekiel.  It all takes time…

I also had to finish that translation of Bosio on the grave of Maria; because I had done too much to drop it.  And I noted in the WordPress dashboard a half-written post on Palladas, so felt I’d better finish that off.  Another half-written post on Hippolytus can stay that way!  Another post that I started, on some daft decision-making in US journals, was, I decided, really politics and so I deleted it.  For some reason I seem to have done a lot of starting posts which I don’t finish lately.

Much else that isn’t deserving of mention was done.

But it all ended with a pleasing email from Lightning Source: the Origen book has already sold four paperback copies through Amazon.  And I only made it available about a week ago.  Thank you very much, whoever you are!

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An evening in Cambridge, a strange phrase in a book, and a man who ran away

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Staying in a hotel with nothing to read is not a pleasant experience.  So I decided to drive into Cambridge town centre after work today.

Those familiar with the city will know that such a decision is not idly taken.  The hopeless congestion, caused by two decades of mingled spite and negligence on the part of the city council, means that a traveller risks being stuck in gridlock for an hour.  However I was more fortunate, and 20 minutes later managed to park in the Park Street car park.

It seems that Cambridge does not stop in the evening.  My first port of call was Heffers bookshop, which I was gratified to learn was open until 6pm.  Surely they could sell me a book?

A look in the detective fiction aisle produced nothing.  John Maddox Roberts appears to have ceased producing his “SPQR” novels – the only series on my shelves where I have thrown away the first two volumes but bought all the rest.  Lindsay Davis may still produce her “Falco” novels, but sadly she forgot how to write some years ago now, so they aren’t worth reading.  Stephen Saylor’s “Gordianus the Finder” are too low-life for my taste.

The sci-fi/fantasy aisle was no more productive.  What happened to the books full of vision and aspiration, of struggles that were not wholly vain?  The category has merged with horror, and I have no desire to read the results.

Perhaps something classical will do?  A search in the basement led me to the Loebs, and on display next to them was a curious volume: Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, about the lives of ordinary people in ancient Rome.

On the face of it, this was interesting, so I opened the book at random and found myself – inevitably – reading about the woes of a slave’s life.  My eye fell on a familiar quotation, given slightly differently from how I recall it:

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Unchastity is a disgrace for the freeborn, a necessity in a slave, and a duty for the freedman.

This was presented as evidence of normal practice; but of course it isn’t.  Seneca (properly referenced, thankfully) gives it as an example of exaggeration, of over-statement to the point of producing mirth among the hearer.

Well, it’s a minor point, and I carried on.  But then (p.137) I read a paragraph describing the routine rape of slaves by their owners which contained the extraordinary sentence:

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Nothing in the New Testament speaks out against this sexual abuse.

My first thought was that it must be some time since Mr Knapp has read the New Testament.   But on closer examination I realised that this was awfully like a lawyer’s phrase: something that leaves the reader with the idea that the NT endorses such evil, while providing deniability, to any accusation that this is a lie, by carefully using the words “speak out” instead of “endorse”.   I’d rather not read books that engage in that sort of thing, and so back on the shelf it went.

But while I was attempting to look at the book, another chap wandered up into the same little bay.  After a little while, getting silently in each others’ way, in that embarassed way you do, I murmured apologetically, “Rather small, these bays.”

“Yes they are.  Right, got my three books,” he snapped, and almost ran away, so quickly did he leave!  Poor chap.  Perhaps it isn’t done to speak to strangers in Heffers.

Anyway, I left Heffers empty-handed.   In Waterstones I was https://www.snyderchildcare.com/xanax-alprazolam/ luckier – a magazine and a volume of verse fit the bill.  Indeed Waterstones seemed to have better stock, while their unobtrusive air-conditioning was very welcome on what was becoming a very warm evening indeed.  A sandwich from a Subway and I was all set.

But I shall always wonder what that poor chap in Heffers thought I wanted!

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A time to hold and a time to give – when to pass on old books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I made a decision to do something necessary, yet it was a wrench.  I decided to give away my copy of the 1608 Commelin edition of Tertullian’s works.

I bought it over the internet, years ago.  In those days we had no PDFs online.  The only way to get hold of the detailed apparatus, found in early editions, of the works of Tertullian was to venture onto the market and buy copies.

Indeed most Tertullian scholars have little collections of early editions; the 1539 of Rhenanus, the 1545 Paris edition, the 1550 of Gelenius – if they could find one – and the 1583 Pamelius edition, high-point of the counter-reformation scholarship.

My Commelin is a reprint of the Pamelius.  It is still bound in the original ornate white leather binding, a bit battered after the centuries but perfectly sound.  The book itself has clearly seen little use.

I got it from a German book dealer.  It arrived in a big yellow Deutsche Post box – for it is a folio volume, and some two inches thick.  And in that box it has remained; for, like most people, I live in a little house and I have no bookshelves suitable for folio-sized volumes.  There seemed no point in taking it out, merely to expose it to dust.

Also it would need to rest on its side.  I knew better than to stand it on end, thereby placing the whole weight of this heavy volume on its ancient stitching.  Where to put it?

This has been the question for many years.  I have seldom opened it.  Once it sat in a cupboard, inside its box.  For the last couple of years, or maybe more — how quickly the years pass these days, without my being aware of them — it has sat, big and obtrusive, atop a set of bookshelves that I constructed myself in younger days.

No more.  Today I decided that it was time for us to part.  I can’t sell it.  I don’t know the rare books market, and I don’t live near any dealers.  I could post it, and get it back, and do all that; but I do not care to, and I should certainly be taken advantage of.

Instead I have agreed with a fellow Tertullian scholar to donate it to him.  He will treasure it, I am sure.  Tomorrow I shall take it to the post office and send it on its way.

It has long been my policy not to keep a book unless I believe that I will read it again, or, in the case of reference books, have use of it in future.  This is particularly essential for novels, for which most of us have a tyrannous appetite.  Unless you have some similar policy, you will quickly find your book cases, and then your house, filled with books which you have no appetite to read.  I have a pile in the corner of one room, to which I assign books that I believe I will not read again; and, if after a suitable period, a book is still there then I dispose of it.  I took two bags full of books to a charity shop yesterday, in fact.

It is harder to know what to do with scholarly books that we no longer need.  Some have donated their books to libraries; yet I know too much about libraries and their practices to suppose that any such donation would be more than temporary.

Let us accept the fact that one day they must go on, and let us donate them freely to our fellow workers.  They will value them; and we need not grieve at their departure, knowing that they go to serve another as they have served us.

For one day all of our books will pass into the hands of others.  Rough hands will pull at our shelves and throw our treasures into boxes, most of which will perhaps end up in some second-hand shop.  The little paperbacks we bought at college, once fresh and bright as we ourselves then were, now foxed and yellowed, and which have accompanied us through life, and are almost friends to us, will end up in some second-hand shop.  If they are lucky they will pass into the hands of one whom we might have been pleased to call friend.

Sic transit gloria.  For the world and all that is in it are always passing away.

But the Christian has hopes of more than this from life!  He can thank God for Good Friday.  And so can all of us, if we sign up with them.

NOTE: Annoyingly WordPress deleted a large section of this post when I posted it.  I will try to recover it from memory.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working away on the Mithras site.  This week I’ve been dealing with the find of statues and inscriptions at Merida in 1902-3, when a bull ring was constructed.  No archaeological investigation was undertaken, and details are very hazy.

Meanwhile I have discovered some time-consuming problems with the footnotes in the Origen book, in the section devoted to the Greek fragments.  Whenever the text goes into two columns the footnote numbering in the text goes wrong.

This is fiddly and I need to give a very specific list of corrections to the typesetter.  But I have no time!  Not enough hours in the day!

So … too busy to blog!

UPDATE: I wrote that post through the WordPress Android app.  Well that was a disaster, wasn’t it?  And posted twice for good measure.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m very busy with the Mithras site, uploading more data about monuments.  Last night I worked on the page on the Caernarvon Mithraeum, adding information from the excavation report.  It was discovered in 1959, during preparatory work by a jerry-builder developer, and is now a set of rather dreary-looking 50’s houses.  Today I’ve been looking for images of the finds, and failing.

On my last visit to Wales – to Swansea – I stopped at Caerleon, and was very sad at the obvious poverty there.  Judging from Google Street View, north Wales is the same.  There used to be a purpose-built museum at the site of Segontium, the Roman fort at Caernarvon.  The council handed over responsibility for running it to a local trust, and then, a few years later, removed the council funding.  The museum is now closed.

I have been trying to find out what became of the finds from the dig.  This itself is not easy.  That the council anticipated the final outcome seems obvious to me; the trust was merely a patsy, to take the blame for the inevitable council-driven closure.  It is very sad to find a town with so little civic pride that it closes its museums.  Shame on the town council.  I doubt the cost was much.  Other councils are playing the same game and closing down public libraries.

I wonder how long the one in my own town will survive such maneouverings?  The running of the library has already been outsourced.  How long before the council funding is chopped?  A volume on Roman Koln awaits me there this weekend.

I’ve also been looking at an entry in the CIMRM, on a tauroctony from Fala castle, in what is now Slovenia.  No trace of this item, or of any museum in the area, to be found online!  It is remarkable how archaeology just disappears!

The National Library of Wales is digitising Welsh publications – well done.  Among these, according to Wikipedia, is Archaeologia Cambrensis, in which the Segontium Mithraeum was published.  But … it is not on the website.  I do hope that journal owners are not being obscurantist.

I have been impressed again today with how easy it is to find older publications online.  Despite the barriers of copyright!

The Origen book has a load of formatting errors, and needs rework.  I shall print it off on sheets of A4, and mark up the sheets in red ink, very precisely.  Otherwise we will be at this in a year’s time!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m mainly busy with the Mithras site at the moment.

I’ve been working through a list of new finds since 1960 made by John W. Brandt, together with a list by Szabo Csaba.  In each case I do a web search for pictures or sites.  I did the Riegel Mithraeum on Friday night.  It’s slow, but useful.

I wish I could find a picture of the curious sword found at Riegel.  This had a semi-circle in the middle of the blade, as wide as a man’s neck.  If put on, it would look as if a sword had been driven through the neck.  Undoubtedly it featured in some initiation ceremony.

Today I collected a curious volume from the library – Al. N. Oikonomides, Mithraic art: a search for unpublished and unidentified monuments.  It’s only a little book, with monochrome photos of a few such.  But it’s still very interesting, if not very scholarly.  It’s basically a set of random notes typed up.

The Origen volume has come back from the typesetter with the latest set of corrections, and I have now produced a proof copy for the translator, and another for me.  I think that I will allow one set of corrections from this, and then go to print.  Somewhere there has to be an end to this task.  The typesetter, Simon Hartshorne, has been very good about this indeed, but I am embarassed to trespass on his generosity much more.

I’m probably doing some other things as well: just can’t think of them tonight!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The only useful thing I did today was to add the Inveresk Mithraeum to the Mithras website.

I did a little work on the Origen book.  I tried to find out what size the thumbnail of the cover should be — for Amazon.com purposes.  In the process I discovered that I could no longer log in to the “author central” account that I use.  An email to Amazon asking for help has yet to get a reply.

I also spent some time looking at the sales figures of the Eusebius book.  This sold 33 copies in 2013; quite a lot less than 2012, but something.  The actual revenue from the book is not enormous, but the sales are enough, anyway, that I intend to keep the book in print for another year.  Most interesting, however, is the clear evidence that paperback sales make up the majority of sales.

Another chunk of a translation of Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke arrived a day or so ago.  There are only a handful left to do.

Otherwise I’ve spent today on chores.  Chores is the name we give to those mundane tasks which God gives us to balance out our lives, and so prevent our brains exploding from over-excitement.  Let us, by all means, give thanks for chores.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

‘Twas Christmas Eve in the workhouse …  and I’m still busy even as late as this.

I’ve been reading John Carey’s “Down with dons” (PDF) with great enjoyment this evening.  Written in 1975, it accurately predicts many of the disasters of the coming decades.  I love the way that it depicts the Oxford University establishment.  Indeed I shall think of his words every time I get a copy of the dismal university magazine, “Oxford Today”, replete as it is with self-satisfaction and infantile “rebelliousness” from some of the most establishment people in the land.  I need to remember to write to him and thank him for making the article available online.

I’ve also been taking a look at Metaphrastes’ (10th c.) Life of Nicholas of Myra — our Santa! — in the Patrologia Graeca edition, PG 116, 317-356.  This prints the Latin text of Surius against a Greek text from a manuscript.  The Latin is rather harder than the stuff I’ve been translating lately, and I don’t feel like straining my brains on Christmas Eve.  It opens with prologue, and, after a paragraph or two about our Nicholas’ upbringing, moves straight into the story of how he provided dowries for three girls otherwise to be forced into prostitution.  This fills quite a number of chapters.  Somewhat later Nicholas goes to the Holy Land; and then to the Council of Nicaea, where he opposes Arianism.  I didn’t see any mention of him thumping Arius, however, and the account is only a single chapter.  I found myself wondering … why has nobody translated this into English?

One of the sources for Santa suggested that a lot was borrowed from the 6th century Nicholas of Sion.  This Nicholas is mentioned as a contemporary of Nicholas of Myra in Metaphrastes’ Life, I note.  I went to look for the English translation of this.  Then I swallowed hard; the price was eye-watering!  Maybe not yet.

Today Amazon decided suddenly that I had earned a gift card.  It was only a few dollars, and only usable at Amazon.com, rather than Amazon.co.uk which I must presently prefer.  I found that I had a previous gift card also sitting there, unused.  A letter from the library informed me that Berger’s English translation of the Patria – medieval accounts – of Constantinople could not be borrowed by inter-library loan, as it was only published in November this year.  I decided, therefore, to use the Amazon.com funds and buy it, and have it shipped to the UK.  Doubtless it will arrive sometime next year, if the seas remain calm.  No rush.

On the Mithras site, I had my first troll today.  A munchkin turned up, informing me that Mithras had pre-Roman roots.  He didn’t justify his statement of course, but it was enough to cause me to add a couple of sections to the FAQ, and politely inform him otherwise.  His response was to down-vote my reply – imprudent of him – and to post a link to a strange and very ignorant web-page, at Counter-Punch.org, here, entitled “Happy Birthday Mithras!”.  He also posted a two-word insult on another page, and earned his blacklisting on Discus in one easy click of the mouse.

The “Counter-punch” page is full of crude mistakes of fact, yet professes to be written by a certain Gary Leupp, “Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion.”  But it reads like the production of a student.  I feel an obligation to the reputation of the academy, and so I have drafted an email to Dr Leupp, whom I find does exist, if not with that role, querying whether he has been the victim of identity theft.  It’s not an easy email to draft, of course; for all I know he may really be the author, six years ago!  Not so easy to tell someone that their academic reputation is endorsing a bunch of obscurantist nonsense.  Anyway I have tried.

On twitter I have been following the misadventures of Dr Sophia Hay, who has been attempting to travel from Rome to London for the last two days, and hasn’t slept in that time.  The flight was diverted last night to Amsterdam, and when she finally arrived at Gatwick airport, the British authorities had conveniently decided not to run any trains or buses from the airport into London, thereby stranding all the passengers in the wilds of Surrey.  Doubtless the richly rewarded officials are safe at home, and the job they are paid to do can go hang.  “If it feels good, do it” was the slogan of the current generation, and the inevitable selfishness and indifference to others riddles British society.  So it will be a profitable night for the taxi firms; but hardly a stress-free one for driver or passengers.

It’s Christmas Eve.  I want to translate some more of Severus of Antioch.  Maybe I will.  But maybe there is something on the television.  Although this is less likely, it must be said.

Yesterday British Telecom did a repair to one of my telephone sockets.  For reasons best known to himself, he also interfered with the main socket through which my broadband runs.  It has been falling out every quarter of an hour since.

Maybe I will hit “post” now, while I am ahead.

It’s Christmas Eve.  Let us think of those less fortunate than ourselves.  The permissive society has left an awful lot of people sitting alone at home tonight.  Some will be sitting there with a bottle, holding back the loneliness.  Shortage of money is rife in many households too.  These may be divorced, whose loneliness has been contrived by successive pieces of “progressive” legislation, or just the unwed, of whom there seem to be a very large number.

Bookish folks like us can’t do much for these people.  But Christian folk can pray for any known to us.  If you know someone like that, pray for them now.  Pray against the isolation, that they may feel something of the spirit of Christmas; of the Light of the World.

If anyone is reading this, in this situation, here’s a thought.  Maybe a local church is running a midnight service?  It will probably be on Google, if it is.  Maybe it might be fun to go there and get a mince-pie afterwards, even if they don’t know anyone?

Enough.  I feel a definite need to swig a diet coke and watch the news for a bit.  Maybe I’ll be back later!

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