Tag: From my diary

The calendar of Antiochus is not online, it seems.  It forms part of the Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse — part of volume 1 (1910), in fact.  Like most out-of-copyright German academic publications, these are online only if places like Harvard contributed them to Google Books.  But I want to access it.  Apparently it refers to 25 Dec. as a solar festival, just like the Chronography of 354 does.

Nothing for it.  I’ll have to do this the old fashioned way.  The way we used to do it, as recently as five years ago.  Yep — into the car and a 60 mile journey to my nearest academic library.  This process is already becoming history, and I suppose it’s worth documenting here for the future what it involved. 

Firstly you have to have a reader’s card for the library.  Well, I have one, but it had expired.  So I need to renew it.  This means filling out a form, and going and queueing in the admissions office.  That’s a bit of a pain if you want one article.  They also want £10 for another 6 months access.  I need my passport, a utility bill to prove my address, and my letter of introduction for access to manuscripts.  I fill in the form online on Thursday night, and email to ask for an appointment at 10am on Saturday so I can get my card.  By lunchtime on Friday there has been no reply, so I telephone.  I’m allotted 9:50am.

Up I get this morning.  I drive 60 miles, at a cost of some £40 in petrol.  When I get there I am early, so I lose a few minutes having something to eat.  Then into the office.  My card gets renewed, slowly and inefficiently.  Someone sticks their head in as the process is completing, which causes the clerk to hand me the card and dismiss me. 

Then into the library. I’ve consulted the catalogue online, so I know that the book is in the North Front, third floor — that’s the room in which the book is.  It has a shelfmark of P500.c.170.1.  P says it is a periodical; the room is split into periodicals and non-periodicals.  Both look like bound books, of course.  So at least I’m in the right part of the room.  ‘c’ is the size.  The periodical section is split into four areas, in order of decreasing size, a, b, c and d.  Mine is normal size.  Then I look through that section until I find 170, which is the Sitzungsberichte that I wanted.  Then I look for volume 1 and … there is a gap on the shelf.  In fact the first two volumes seem to be missing. 

Drat.  Where can they be?  It’s not likely that a reader checked them out.  Perhaps they’re at a desk being read.  But no-one is reading in that room today.  Maybe they’re in the photocopying room.  Down the stairs, along the corridor.  Nope.

I go to the enquiry desk.  The girl can’t tell from the system whether they are out of not, as individual volumes are entered haphazardly.  She comes up and we both look at the space.  “Maybe someone has taken them out” she offers, helpfully.  Eventually she suggests that I talk to the people in periodicals.   I wonder if the book is out for binding or something.  Along there I go.  Lots of kerfuffle, staff consulting experts who do not appear.  Eventually it turns out that my guess was correct, and after another delay I get the book.

Then off to the photocopier.  I quickly make some copies.  Then I try to get the copier to scan the pages and email them to me.  But it’s too badly designed — after a dozen pages I give up and make do with the paper copies.  As I leave, I hear the sound of steady cursing from another copier, where a reader even less familiar with the devices than myself is having trouble even getting paper copies out.

And … it is mid-day.  A whole morning has passed, and I now have the article.  It will appear online in due course, trust me!  But for the moment I’m just a wee bit weary.

We take so much for granted.  It’s worth remembering that the above exercise had to be gone through for every academic paper I have ever read, in days gone by.  It’s vanishing now, that cumbersome, expensive and inefficient process.  But it is also a link to the remote past.  Physical libraries like Alexandria were equally difficult to use, unless you happened to live nearby.  There is a chain of people trying to acquire knowledge from these repositories, stretching all the way back to antiquity.  When it finally disappears, will the customs of ancient libraries suddenly become unintelligible to students who have never had to do more than point and click to get a book?

A hard frost here last night, and I find myself coughing and coughing, just from the cold.  Then I see this:

Why am I living here again!?

There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph — soon to vanish behind a paywall, alas — by Boris Johnson (or his ghostwriter) on Useless Anger.  I recommend it. 

…as I held that thought in my head the full difficulties of all these projects became clear, and depression set in — the depression that always follows Useless Anger.

It is beyond my current powers either to declare war or to abolish Fifa or to set up a rival football federation or to train England to win the next World Cup. So the trick of managing that rage — and the subject of the next chapter of my business self-help book – is to find another frustration, and solve that one instead. Is there anything quite as irritating as Fifa?

Is there anything that sends you up the wall like Sepp Blatter? Is there anything else that is so inscrutable and mindless and illogical? There is.

Let’s talk roadworks. There is a marvellous newspaper interview in which my friend Philip Hammond, Transport Secretary, describes his fury as he is held in a traffic jam. There he is, in the heart of London, the greatest city on earth, unable to get to his meeting because of the orange-and-white cones blocking the road. …

An email arrives today asking about Artemidorus Daldianus.  “Who?” I hear  you ask?  It seems that he lived in the 2nd century A.D., and he was a professional “diviner”.  A work of his survives “On the interpretation of dreams”, in five books.  Interestingly it was translated into Arabic by no less than Hunain ibn Ishaq.  My correspondent is doing a thesis on the work at Cairo university and asks if a Syriac version is extant.

Remarkably an English version by Robert J. White does exist, although I can’t imagine why; and likewise a French version.  A search on Google books reveals a slew of older editions, and a 1644 translation into English.

N. G. Wilson is perhaps the dean of studies on the transmission of Greek literature.  By chance I found online a paper of his, in PDF form, here, dealing with ancient commentaries.  A little known subject, being discussed by a master — recommended.

I had to telephone my business bank today, so it was a good opportunity to ask about getting my “Chieftain Publishing” trading name set up as a “trading as” name on the account, so I can take cheques and payments under that name.  All I have to do, I learn, is write a letter telling them, and that’s done.  One more box ticked.

Also Lightning Source have finally, after a dozen emails, three forms, and month of to- and fro-ing, opened my account.  So once the book is ready, it can be printed.

I haven’t started in on the Coptic corrections, but I have scanned the pages into a PDF.  At this time of year you have to allow for the fact that everyone is full of flu and colds, and feeling depressed and mildly jet-lagged as the days get shorter in a rush as we approach the shortest day.  So not a lot really gets done. 

Someone has written and asked me to translate some more of Dionysius of Tell-Mahre.  Maybe I will.  Or I might just curl up on the sofa.