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rur rur rur
Fishing for links to Greek linguistics blogs on my own Greek linguistics blog, I fell across this Catherine Tate sketch (for the second time) via Λογογράμματα:
Hominid @ Λογογράμματα‘s comment was:
Στους αγγλόφωνους, τουλάχιστον, οι υπόλοιπες γλώσσες δεν ακούγονται μόνο σαν βαρ, βαρ, βαρ…
For Anglophones, at least, other languages don’t just sound like bar bar bar…
I’m sure Greeks have as good ears as Anglophones, but maybe not as much exposure; but I gotta say, this kind of parody of other languages is pretty prevalent in English, but I don’t remember it in Greek. I just remember the very lame substitute (which other languages also seem to do) of speaking Greek with an American accent.
The lame substitute is more often targetted at Greek-Americans than Americans in general; and its lameness (last sighted on the Antenna TV series Lola) is starting to get on my nerves. (I’ve linked to Antenna TV channel: *spits on his lapel*. Good thing I no longer have to watch Greek TV…)
The comment did remind me of what I found out recently from my Italian friend Gregoria: to non-Anglophones, all English sounds like “rur rur rur”. Corroborations: 1, 2, 3.
Pretty damn insightful, actually. (Then again, the Anglophone lampoons haven’t come out of nowhere either.) Two of the most distinctive sounds of English, which are damnably rare in the world’s languages, are [ɹ] and [ə]. Rarer still is their bastard progeny, [ɝ ɚ]. So putting them together in “rur rur rur” shows they’ve been paying attention to the oddities. (They wouldn’t put [θ] in, because it’s not as frequent—unlike the lampoons of Castillian Spanish. The [ð] of “the” should be frequent enough; but being an unstressed clitic, and not a content word, I suspect it’s not salient enough to insert in a two-second lampoon.)
Mr Bach has an off day
The good thing with having a complete collection of an artist’s works is, you get to hear their crap works as well as their masterpieces. In fact the crap works throw their masterpieces into relief. Masterpieces do sprezzatura to excess: they sound effortless and inevitable. It’s only when you see how art can go awry that you realise what has been so well wrought; and it helps if the awful and the awesome has been wrought by the same person.
It also helps if you look at the contemporary context, of the second-ranked beside the first ranked, to see where the masterpieces came out of. That’s why my friend Gert collected 18th century solo violin works—von Westhoff and Guillemain and Telemann—to make better sense of the Bach violin works. It’s also why I read up on Marlowe after my first flush of Shakespeare (back when I used to read.)
So it was that hearing BWV 909 on my Complete Bach set about a month ago, I was moved to blog that here, finally, was a crap Bach piece. Now, that’s unfair; it doesn’t start off that bad; but towards the end of the Fantasia, there’s a clear feeling that he’s gotten lost, paying more attention to cool chromatic progressions and less to having a cogent structure. It’s very early Bach, and quite possibly spurious. (Then again, if it sounds crap, people would say that.) But crap Bach helps you better appreciate good Bach. In fact, with the complete instrumental corpus, I was startled how much I already owned (all but one CD’s worth, I think), and how consistently quality it is.
I recalled I had already heard that kind of chromatic meandering before, on an organ piece in the Walcha complete Organ Works of Bach. Bach on the organ is often boring, but not often shapeless; yet this piece was just marking time going up and down chord progressions. I can remember sitting in the car, must have been last year, with the iPod on, thinking “this is really crook”. And to make a well-balanced blog post, I sat down to listen through the iPod again, with lots of fast forwarding. And then with less fast forwarding. And I couldn’t find the bastard anywhere.
Dunno if I hallucinated it, if the iTunes import skipped it in revulsion, or what. For the record (and in case someone knows their Bach on the organ better than I do), what I recall is something like this:
[EDIT: Found, see comments]
A third instance is the original version of the harpsichord cadenza in the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto (BWV 1050a). No online scores for this one, as it was only published in 1975. The earlier cadenza once again succumbs to Cool Chromatic Chord stuff, and has bits of only the second half of the cadenza as we now know it. Bach is supposed to have expanded the cadenza to impress Mr Brandenburg; but the new cadenza is not impressive by being flashier, but by being more structured, more directed, more integrated into its musical context—resulting in the amazing feeling of a new world being born. I note in the Google Books hit for 1050a (Marissen, Michael. 1999. Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Princeton Unviersity Press. p. 107) that Christopher Hogwood said the original Brandenburg 5 was better, and Richard Taruskin bollocked him for it. Good for Taruskin.
Taruskin was one of the many Americans that went apeshit after 9/11, hence his notorious censorious outburst on John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer. And I’m not going to blanket-condemn the pursuit of musical authenticity. But “ultimate perversion of the idea of authenticity” in his bollocking sounds good to me…
Marissen objects that in the old version, the orchestra at the end has something to say, precisely because the harpsichord has gotten so carried away—whereas it’s just reduced to a formality with the closing ritornello in the final version, and that this undue prominence of the solo is stretching the concept of the concerto to its limits. I don’t think any of that’s a bad thing (after all, the harpsichord shuts up its concertante partners as well as the movement goes on), and I’m not sure Marissen thinks so either…
The other thing about complete works are, they collect together the doodles as well as the sweated over. And with Bach, it’s doesn’t get anymore Doodle than BWV 1072. You’ll see a lot on BWV 1072 online, about how it is an analogy for Newtonian physics, or a profound analogy for the Trinity and the Incarnation, or what an advance over previous trias harmonica canons this was because, woah, it’s got passing notes.
And you know, with all the numerology and symbolism Bach was into, this may all be true. But people, it’s an arpeggio. It’s pretty impossible to stuff up. And it’s over in five seconds. It’s not exactly the St Matthew’s Passion. It may be interesting conceptually; but I was embarrassed to hear it on the recording…
Death of the Library as I knew it
Extended radio silence, dear readers, has been in part because I was putting some work into my Greek linguistics blog, including finally getting round to typing in the various redactions of the Greek verses of Rumi and Sultan Walad.
In part, it was because I spent some library time with theologians (unrelated to the preceding post!) As many of you know, I’ve spent the past, oh, six years lemmatising Greek on the side, and the easy way to improve my stats was to go through all the Indices Nominum of the editions of texts in the library, and add their proper names in to the lexicon. (Lexicographers overall avoid proper names, as way too open-ended. There are dictionaries of Greek proper names out there, but there are reasons why adding names this way makes more sense.)
(Pape-Benseler is online now too? You know, this keeps up, the Internet may end up becoming useful or something…)
After this much time working at two universities, I thought I’d exhausted the available editions, but I’d skipped the Theology section of the B Collection at Melbuni library. (On the web page, that’s the “Open-access and multi-disciplinary Research Collection” incidentally mentioned in a dot point.) So I spent a couple of evenings with Eusebius and Sozomen—or rather, with their indexes. Lots and lots of Egyptian monks. The real catch is trapping minor variations of proper names between authors, so I can avoid entering them as unrelated names; and I’m grateful for the few editors that do this.
It’s a melancholy business, walking into the library these days. Libraries are no longer in the book business; indeed, my day job deals with repositories, which helps libraries not be in the book business (and put Pape-Benseler online). Books get moved out to make room for student lounges. The B collection was already the overflow from the main library collection (all the cool antique stuff); now it’s being broken up further. The Bernhardy Suda (not online) has already been banished to the Old Quad, and thence may well end up in permanent offsite storage—
—where it would join the entire Modern Greek collection of the library: a substantial collection, easily in the thousands, which was taking valuable space up from computers—and which, once Modern Greek was no longer taught at the university, had no advocate. The library has th same books it did 15 years ago; but I’m not convinced I could write now the PhD I did, with all the resources I was able to browse on the shelf available only on piecemeal request.
I know, I know, τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ, campus real estate can’t afford to monumentalise what the university used to be about, my fault for working on Greek outside of Greece, the Greek community’s fault for assimilating, anything worthwhile should already be online anyway (*sigh*). I know that grousing about books making way for computers is not a productive critique of the changing role of the library, the way say Peter Murray-Rust has done. Still, something has died here, to make room for student lounges. And I will not cheer its death.
There’s still books left in the B Collection, glory be; I got the proper names I was looking for.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: Catechetical sermon on Easter
Leafing through the Holy Synopsis (the summary of movable feast services), I find that in leaving on the dot when John Damascene’s Canon started for offal and eggs, I had also been missing out on a lovely sermon by John Chrysostom, wedged in after the bible readings. The Synopsis groused that the sermon was intended to prepare the faithful for communion, so it should have been before Mass proper, but Tradition had moved it up too close after the readings. The point of Orthodoxy is tradition, of course: it cuts both ways.
The sermon is, I’ve gotta say, surprisingly… Christian for its liturgical context: it’s closer to Jesus’ commensality than I’m used to from the Orthodox mass. (To put it less eruditely: more Christian love and charity and acceptance of human frailty than I’m used to from the mass. Especially when “Christ is risen from the dead”, an hour or so before, wished that sinners would melt away before God like wax from a candle.)
The text is in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 59.721-724, with some slightly different wording from what I found in the Synopsis. The two sources are about as reliable as each other, but I’ll stick with the Migne, because it’s in the TLG (2062.259). The work is spurious, which is no surprise: Chrysostom was a famous orator (hence the nickname, Goldmouth); so many an anonymous Byzantine sermomiser would guarantee their work would be transmitted by attributing it to him. That’s how Chrysostom ends up the most prolific author in the TLG corpus, with something like 4 million words. Which is close to all the literary output we have from Classical Athens…
I’ll indulge myself with attaching my translation here. Happy Easter, ye people!
If anyone is pious and God-loving, let them enjoy this beautiful festival. If anyone is a grateful servant, let them enter gladly into their Lord’s celebration. If anyone is tired from fasting, let them now receive their coin of payment. If anyone has been working since 7 in the morning, let them accept today what is justly owed them. If anyone came to work after 10, let them gratefully celebrate. If anyone arrived after 1, let them not doubt: they’ll suffer no harm. If anyone showed up late at 4, let them approach, and not hesitate. If anyone has arrived even at 6, let them not fear for their tardiness. The Master is generous, and he will receive the last just like the first. He will rest the one from 6 in the evening, just like the one working since 7 in the morning. He will have mercy on the last, and restoration for the first. He will give to the one, and gift to the other. He honours good works, and praises good intentions.
So everyone, enter into our Lord’s celebration. Both first-ranked and second-ranked, receive your payment. Rich and poor, dance with each other. Both disciplined and lazy, honour the day. Both fasting and not fasting, rejoice today. The table is full, everyone indulge. There’s plenty of calf, none will leave hungry. Everyone enjoy the riches of wholesomeness. Noone lament their poverty; for the common Kingdom has appeared. Noone bemoan their misdeeds; for forgiveness has shone out of the tomb. Noone fear death; for the Saviour has freed us from death. He has extinguished Death while possessed by Death. He has punished Hell by descending into Hell. He has left Hell embittered, when Hell tasted his flesh.
Anticipating this, Isaiah cried out: “Hell is embittered“. Hell met You down below, and was embittered, for he was abolished. He was embittered, for he was mocked. He took in a corpse, and happened upon God. He took in earth, and met Heaven. He took in what he could see, and fell from what he could not see. “Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory?” Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and demons fall away. Christ is risen, and angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and no dead are in the tombs. “For when Christ arose from the dead, he became the firstfruits for those who slept.” To Him glory and power, world without end. Amen.
Good Saturday Tomato Soup
So yes, I don’t know what the Anglo-Catholic for Good Saturday is. It’s simpler in Orthodoxy, where each day of Holy Week is Great: Great Monday, Great Tuesday, Great Wednesday. And each day of Holy Week matters: Orthodoxy has a well-ordered liturgical calendar around Holy Week. The Office of the Bridegroom on Great Monday, the hymn of Kassiane Great Tuesday, the Blessed Oil Great Wednesday. The Twelve Gospels on Great Thursday, each marked off on a candelabra, with candles signalling the flow of the Passion narrative: just like a menorah, but quicker, and on the opposite side ideologically. After Simon of Cyrene lifts the cross (Mt 27:32) in the Fifth Gospel, the priest lifts the cross around the church—
Σήμερον κρεμᾶται ἐπὶ ξύλου
ὁ τὴν γῆν τοῖς ὕδασι κρεμάσας.Στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν περιτίθεται
ὁ τῶν ἀγγέλων βασιλεύς.Ψευδῆ πορφύραν περιβάλλεται
ὁ περιβάλλων τὸν οὐρανὸν ἐν νεφέλαις.Today He is hanged from a tree
Who hanged the earth on the waters.He is placed with a crown of thorns
the King of angels.He is surrounded with false purple
Who surrounded the heavens with clouds.
The funeral of Christ comes on Great Friday, with the Canon “By a wave of the sea”, running through all nine minus one odes, each with its own Old Testament reference. (The canon was a very strict poetic form—its intertextuality is regimented—though now more allusively, since the Old Testament canticles it is based on are nowadays left out. And its structure is odd: the second ode only gets used on Lent weekdays, and there are numerous digressions and recaps. But at its best it is effective poetry.)
The canon is followed by the Encomia, lamenting Christ (surprisingly, composed only in the Ottoman period, but the highlights of the liturgical year), followed by the Epitaphios, the funeral procession of Christ, taking over the streets around the church.
Easter Matins, which are Saturday midnight, launch pretty quickly into the victorious anthem, “Christ is Risen from the dead”, followed soon after by John Damascene’s joyous canon,
Ἀναστάσεως ἡμέρα, λαμπρυνθῶμεν λαοί.
Πάσχα, Κύριου Πάσχα.Day of resurrection: shine ye people!
Easter, the Lord’s Easter.
In Greece, Damascene is intoned to a mostly empty church, despite the priest’s annual request to “please stay, it is a lovely Mass”. The canon is the exit queue for the congregation, who have offal soup and hardboiled eggs to get back to: the problem with the point of Orthodoxy being tradition is, the laity have their traditions too. I forced my folks to stick to the end one Easter, so I could find out what the Mass was like; I think they were happier to stay back in theory than in practice. Though when I was in Easter services in the States, I found not a soul budged when Damascene started. In the US, people are Orthodox first in Church, and Greek only incidentally—it’s been one more generation of assimilation than here. So the laity’s traditions take a back seat: you’ll get your offal soup when the Mass is good and over.
(Can’t stomach the offal soup btw.)
But it’s Good Saturday that I wanted to reminisce on after all that. When a community is overtly religious, as a Greek village is, religion impinges on daily life, even if you yourself are not going to all the masses. When we’d go to the village for Easter, Orthodox dietary restrictions were in place at my grandmother’s house. Lent abstained meat and dairy, of course: we didn’t stick to all 42 days, but Holy Week in the village, it was hard to sneak out and get a cheeseburger. (Much easier here; in fact, my sister and I instituted a tradition of going to McDonald’s after Good Saturday morning communion, as preemptive breaking the fast. Latterly, it’s ended up the only time I set foot in Macca’s.)
Fasting meat and dairy is not as big a deal in a pre-modern agricultural society, when meat is pretty scarce to begin with. So Orthodoxy has a way to enforce fasting on even the perforce vegan peasantry: no oil. The strict rules on fasting, which banned oil on all but a feast day coinciding with a fast day, had been relaxed by 1980 in the village; but in Holy Week, Good Saturday was still a day with No Oil. With No Oil, your culinary options get very limited very fast. In fact, all we ended up eating was a thin watery tomato soup, and boiled potatoes. With all the salt and pepper I could muster to make them palatable. It made Good Saturday pretty bleak. Which of course was the idea.
The other striking thing about Good Saturday was Good Saturday Vespers, the one time I went to them in the village. The Passion services are somewhat out of sync, because the Orthodox liturgical day starts at sundown. So the Twelve Gospels, Thursday 8 PM, are actually Good Friday Matins, fitting the Passion narrative. The Good Friday evening mass is actually Good Saturday Matins; hence Christ is buried.
And Good Saturday Vespers, which somehow end up on Saturday afternoon, do something Orthodox masses don’t do a lot of; halfway through the Vespers, there’s a sizeable chunk of the Old Testament. There are bits of the Prophets and Psalms in the mass through the year, but they’re not highlighted, and the Old Testament has not captured popular imagination. The only Greek Abrahams and Solomons I know of are Cypriot; the only Greek Davids I know of are Pontian; and the only Greek Daniel I know of is Jewish. So it came as a surprise to me to hear, Saturday afternoon in a Greek church, Genesis 1, Jonah 1, and Daniel 3.
Jonah 1 and Daniel 3 are a quite straightforward metaphor: Jesus is harrowing hell, and is compared to Jonah in the whale and the three boys in the furnace explicitly in the canons; the bible readings reiterate the comparison. Genesis 1 is a more clever intertextuality: the church calendar of movable feasts comes to an end on Good Saturday, and Jesus’ mission on earth is concluded. Genesis looks back to the start of everything, at the end of everything. I find that moving.
What I did not remember from the two or three times I’ve stayed past John Damascene on Easter midnight mass, is that the bible readings do the same thing after “Shine ye people!” The readings that I missed by going home to crack eggs and avoid offal soup are Acts 1 and John 1. Every mass has an Apostle reading (Acts or Epistles), and a Gospel reading. Easter is the start of the movable church calendar (the fixed calendar starts September 1, Byzantine New Year), and both the Apostle and Gospel readings go back to the beginning.
I’ll wrap this up tomorrow, before heading to the Easter Festival Of Meat, with a sermon from John Chrysostom. We’ll resume normal godless broadcasting after that…
Western Orthodoxy
It struck me, as a Greek-Australian kid reading Shakespeare, that English used to be a more Mediterranean language than it is now. Which is to say, the society reflected in the language of Shakespeare had more in common with the traditional Greek culture I caught the very tail end of, than did the Australia I now found myself in. In large part, that was a matter of both having been traditional cultures, less individualistic, more land-bound, and more tribal. Both were caught up in marital loyalty, so both made ample reference to cuckolding. Both cared about appropriate politeness addressing—although the Tu/Vous system in both was breaking down (and the Greek Tu/Vous with singular/plural was an urban veneer on top of the native expressions, like μωρέ vs. του λόγου σου.)
And both were still religious societies. More to the point, Greece has a pre-Lutheran culture; and although Mary Queen of Scots was already executed, and Shakespeare’s father had to hide Catholic literature in his attic, English was still a Catholic language. “Marry” was still an oath to the Virgin Mary, the Puritans had not yet gotten rid of “God’s Wounds”.
English is now not a Catholic language—which is a very well-thought out thing to say, since English is now the language of still quite Catholic Ireland (and Irishdom). But a lot of the institutions that had made cosy homes for themselves in Middle English are now awkward to express; and the secularisation of Anglo culture makes them even more awkward. English knows of compadres via Spanish, so there is a hook for the Greek cognate (via Venetian) κουμπάρος to hook up to. But Middle English godsib is long gone, surviving only in the telling fossil word gossip. The feast of Υπαπαντή (which my village church was dedicated to) does correspond to Candlemas; but outside of old Scottish lawyers, who’s heard of Candlemas? And as much because of secularisation as Protestantism, I never quite got the English days of Holy Week. Good Friday, uh, Maundy Thursday, um, Good Saturday?
So translating Greek Orthodox references is easier with Early Modern English than contemporary English. (That’s why I made a point of speaking of rood screens previous post.) Of course, if you wind the clock back on English, you don’t get Mediaeval English Orthodoxy: you get Mediaeval English Catholicism, which is not the same thing. But if you do some Creative Anachronism, you can come up with an alternative universe in which Galicia or Britain stayed in communion with Constantinople.
And I thank John Cowan in comments for pointing out to me the existence of Western Orthodoxy, which I had never come across—and which attempts exactly that. As John was astute to point out, Western Orthodoxy reconstructs an Orthodox Galicia or Britain, which allowed it to marry Eastern dogma to Western tradition: that’s why the Western Orthodox care about St Dunstan. The point of Orthodoxy, after all, is tradition. But it is an invented tradition (actually, several invented traditions, hence the six different reconstructed liturgies); which is why John compared it to the Christianities of the fictional world of Ill Bethisad, in which Britain stayed Celtic. (You achieve enlightenment when you realise that all traditions are invented, and all are manipulated in their practitioners’ interest.)
And that in turn is why the Eastern Orthodox are so suspicious of the experiment. The point of Orthodoxy, after all, is *their* tradition. I was somewhat shocked to see the arguments against Western Orthodoxy in Wikipedia made by the Eastern Orthodox, me being culturally Western and all (“But they’re doctrinally identical!”) But I’m not that surprised, and John was more right than I’d realised in his etymological argument—the Orthodox haven’t been as tolerant of ritual difference as the Catholic hierarchy, at least, has been:
If your church calls itself with a name beginning with “O”, you expect them to want everyone to believe and do the same things. If their name for themselves starts with “C”, you expect them to want to include as many varieties of practice as they can, short of compromising on real dogma. Sapir-Whorf strikes again.
Nick makes the local paper
‘Twas two weeks ago, or maybe three, that as I made my daily walk to Oakleigh Railway Station, to go to work for the day, I saw three people arrayed at the entrance of the station. There was a girl, standing and smiling awkwardly; a woman, holding a clipboard and looking officious; and a man, holding a whopping big camera, and who seemed to me to be photographing the girl’s feet.
“Odd location to pick to stage a fashion shoot for shoes”, I pondered, walked around them, and went about my business.
And so it was that my pondering on locations for photographing shoes was immortalised in the April 7 Oakleigh Monash Leader:
Yea, ’tis I.
Didn’t realise the UCI backpack made me look quite so fat…
Return of the Chantry
I’m still here; I had the ill luck to fall… ill last week (abed Wednesday and Thursday), and spent the long weekend either doing Greek lemmatisation, or socialising. I’ve tried combining the two, it doesn’t work.
I’ve opened up my Greek linguistics blog, in reaction to a post my friend George forwarded me. I don’t think I’ll post there anywhere near as much as I should to relieve my conscience; but it’s something.
A post that’s been waiting to be written a very long time: h/t Steve Benen at Washington Monthly (I’ve remained addicted to American politics after my three years living there; everything was so much larger than life about politics Stateside), I too note the arrival of Information Age Prayer, A New And Exciting Way To Connect With God:
Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.
We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.
…
Yeah. Of course, having read a history of the Reformation once, I immediately realised that we’ve seen thing kind of thing before. That fine institution in Western Europe that eventually gave rise to the University, but started out as the Chantry college. Where state of the art monastic prayer consultants were used to voice prayers for noblemen as a subvention service, giving them the satisfaction of knowing that their time in purgatory would keep getting shortened even if they woke up dead—but not forgotten.
Assorted wisdom of the interwebs, has any wayfarer before me made the connection between Information Age Prayer and Chantries? Why yes. Someone has:
Ah, it’s like the Reformation never happened – let’s open up the chantries and get some serious industrial praying going!
Also, I want my dog-saint back.
posted by jb at 12:46AM UTC on March 26, 2009
Le Woof. Speaking of the Catholic Church, I went to a christening Sunday (at a time of year which that moiety of Christendom which does not stick to a 2000 year old system to calculate its lunar calendar calls Easter Sunday, and the moiety which does calls Palm Sunday). Not having been to a lot of Catholic services, and not really having gotten the Vatican II memo, I was surprised at how, well, relaxed the whole service was. Hippy guitar songs in the voice of Jesus (1st person), congregants in shorts and T-shirts, lay ministers, no incense or bell, no rood screen. (I told you I didn’t get the Vatican II memo; in fact, not even the Council of Trent memo, since that’s how long ago the Catholics did away with them.) If the priest wasn’t wearing an alb (and the Powerpoint with the Hippy guitar song lyrics hadn’t spelled הַלְלוּיָהּ as Allelulia), I wouldn’t have clicked that the service was Catholic. I didn’t know that there was diversity of liturgic practice in Australian Catholicism; I assumed it was as top-down as the moiety I grew up in…
I wasn’t the target audience of course, and the congregation were very happy with how welcoming and friendly the Mass was. Me, I was missing the sense of awe that comes from having a priest who’s not on speaking terms with the congregation. But that’s neither an unalloyed good, nor an inevitable outcome. (And again, I’m not the target audience, so I don’t get a vote.)
Scythians
From the Suda On-Line project I contribute to, a cloyingly heartwarming anecdote from the historian Phylarchus:
The Scythians, when they were about to lie down to sleep, brought the quiver, and if they happened to have passed that day unharmed, they placed a white pebble on the quiver, but if [things had gone] troublesomely, [they placed] a black one. Accordingly, in the case of men who were dying, they brought out their quivers and counted the pebbles; and if many white ones were found, they declared the departed fortunate.
When I relayed this anecdote to my long-suffering colleagues (who have to endure every randomness that strikes me online when I should be working, and may well keep a mental stock of black pebbles for when I do), one wondered that that quiver might get pretty damn heavy after a while. The other pointed out that with pre-Classical average lifespans of 30 (especially for warriors), and entering into service at 18, they wouldn’t get that heavy.
Hand me my back of an envelope: 12 years, 365 days, 1 g a day: 4.4 kg. Quite doable. More realistic for pebbles, 20 g a day: 87.6 kg. There may be some implementation issues to address with the anecdote. Could the Scythians have pebbles on credit perhaps?
He also suggested this would make for a good white-pebble applet. If anyone out there feels like warming the hearts of their fellow human beings, I claim no copyright (especially since it was my colleague’s idea anyway).
(I see Phylarchus has already been blogged… Ah sod, the hippies have already gotten to the notion…)
Late-Night Work Bender
The past few days at work, I’ve been doing one of my favourite work things (information modelling) under my least favourite work circumstances (four-day deadline for what was truly a four-month job)—with all the back history and negotiations and frustrations and blinding insights and occasional outbursts of singing that authoring by committee brings with it.
Today, I was on the phone at eight, off the phone at ten, in to work at twelve, getting somewhere by two. Alone in the office by six, with the occasional status update interstate. By nine, Interstate and I had declared what I like to call the Optimal Iraq Strategy: “Declare Whatever The Hell Happened A Victory, And Go Home.” Maybe on a global scale the work wasn’t done, but the door on this phase of work had creaked shut.
Save, Post, Done. I IM’d my goodbyes; I checked a couple of links for tomorrow’s tasks. I turned off the harpsichord Goldberg Variations: too preoccupied to have been listening anyway, and interrupted too often for them to run their course. I unplugged the laptop, one peripheral at the time: Keyboard, Screen, Network, Power. I shrugged on my coat, I pocketed my mobile; I switched off the light. Door Release, Staircase, Passageway, Door Release. Night lights in Parkville.
As I paced into the street, and followed students onto the tram, I was hit by a wave that occasionally swells at the end of an occasional twelve-hour work day, or a nighttime lecture. Night and yellow street lights summon it, and bleary eyes host it. It’s bleak and spent and slightly peeved; it’s envious of those walking past, surely having more of a life than it does; it’s subdued. It needs a coffee or a beer or a game of charades; more than that, it needs someone to share it with, and it’s not going to get it. It’s going home to crash; it’s done. And yet, there’s the corner of a smile about it. Not joyful, God no; not really even happy. Relieved, I guess. Relieved with a soupçon of potentiality. A memory of future expectation, a still awareness: “Now, now that’s over. Now… now I can do something else.”
Which is to go home to crash, yes; but still. Now I can do something else.
Twenty years ago, this would have been a poem, every bit as self-conscious as this post is. Ten years ago, this would have been a brewski, because I had a colleague who worked late too. Ten years hence… well, who knows where any of us will be, ten years hence. Right now, this post, too, is over. Now I can write something else.