Cross Pens

 Dec 10

CNET is the new Consumer Reports, except a lot better. Look at all these reviews: the best cheap wine. Frying pans. They're not just electronics anymore. CNET is where I found these awesome blankets. Check this out: 7 pens, $14 to $575.

I'm surprised there aren't any Cross pens on CNET's list. Maybe that just shows I'm out of date. I got a Cross pen around 2005, about $20 or so I think. I still use it every day. It's basically indestructible. 

So, you know: don't give me a pen for Christmas. I'm set for life, and if a young person inherits my Cross, they're set for life.

 

Dec 31

I told you that I had had my Cross pen for decades and that it was pretty much indestructible. Which was true. So, naturally, about a day or two after that I lost it.

Got a new one from Amazon, but I didn't realize that not all Cross ballpoint pens are identical. Far from it, turns out! So the refills I had for the old one won't fit into this one. Also, the old one rolled open and shut, silently as a ninja. This one clicks.

You're thinking: it clicks. What, is that actually a problem?

Yes it is. A first-world problem.

And now, suddenly, I'm wondering about all sorts of things. There are some very wealthy literary families. People whose great-great-grandparents had Henry James and Turgenev over for dinner. Are their homes filled with veritable piles of Cross ballpoints, the way there were piles of Bic Stics at home when I was a child?

And this thought takes me a step further: would the thought of Cross ballpoints give brain-nausea to some of the economically-elite among the literary, because they still refuse to convert from fountain pens to ballpoints?

Dec 31

I know how important this topic is to you, so I'll be keeping you updated. 

I lost the old Cross pen, the one I'd had for decades, somewhere between Kroger and home. In Kroger I used it to cross items off my shopping list. And when I got home, it was gone.

My best guess is that it slipped out of my right front pants pocket, where I keep the Moleskine notebook, the pen and the phone. Hopefully it's somewhere here on the floor in the house or on the floor of the car, and I'll find it again.

I'm hoping to find it again, not expecting to. More likely it fell on the floor in Kroger, or on the ground in their parking lot, and it's gone.

So I was thinking: would the pen fit into the pocket of the Moleskine notebook?

It does. I wonder whether Bruce Chatwin kept a pen in the pocket of his Moleskine?

Bruce Chatwin was the douchebag over-rated travel writer who is responsible for Moleskines being known as Moleskines.

Moleskines are actually very good notebooks, and the Cross fits right into that pocket, so when I went to Kroger today, I wasn't so worried.

And I know that makes you very happy.

Solar: Utility-Scale vs Rooftop

Headlines tell us of reports which show that utility-scale solar energy is much less expensive than rooftop solar. 

I assume this means that rooftop is more expensive in terms of $ to build the system per watt/hour produced.And I have no reason at all to doubt that this is true.

However, if you compare the cost to the consumer per watt/hour, presumably some people can save with rooftop. And presumably those numbers are not in these reports, nor are numbers to do with net metering.

 

I don't claim to know everything about solar energy, or utilities vs rooftop. Far from it. I'm having a very hard time finding information, and it seems that in the past decade or so, intentionally-confusing jargon to do with solar and utilities has grown at a monstrous rate.

 

I'm sure that utilities which are private and primarily concerned with pleasing their shareholders would much rather sell electricity to a consumer than have that consumer generate his own, or even compete on a level playing field, generating an excess and selling that excess back to the grid at fair rates. I'm also sure that such privately-held utilities would like for people to believe that rooftop is an option only for very wealthy people, and not even try to become better-informed.

 

The word "utility" means "the quality of being useful or helpful," or "Something which is useful or helpful." I am quite certain that some utilities are very different than others. But, the ones who don't even try to serve the common good when they can make greater profits instead: should we even call them "utilities"?

Dream Log: Cats and the Multiverse

 Last night I dreamed I was playing with George, a cat I used to have. I can't seem to find a photo of George, but he looked somewhat like this:

George was being very affectionate and purring a lot, just like he did in real life. But then he went to my laptop, pushed a few keys and showed me how to switch from one to another of the infinite number of universes which exist according to some theories of physics.

In real life he NEVER did that. 

As soon as he touched the keyboard with his paws, we began to communicate telepathically, and I now also understood how to use my laptop to "browse" universes, as it were. 

The universes ranged from horrific to boring to wondrous. We found one in which cats were flying around everywhere in little cat-sized flying cars. The humans were all artists and scientists, and the distinction between artists and scientist which had begun in Earth's Western civilization in late Renaissance did not exist. Finance existed only as the means of equitably providing an abundance to all sentient beings. Burning things as a source of energy, and war, were in the very distant past. It was a lot like "Star Trek"s version of Earth, except with many more cats in tiny flying cars. 

George was understandably eager to try one of those kittycat-cars, and away he zoomed, but he was back again before lunch, more affectionate than ever. The two of us became a well-known sight, mostly together, sometimes with George walking beside me, sometime with him luxuriously stretched out across my shoulders, so relaxed that he often fell asleep there. Before long George was working as an information technologist and I was a well-known poet. 

Neither of us was in any particular hurry to get back to Earth.

To repeat: the science-humanities split so familiar to us did not exist. Exhibitions, lectures, conferences, projects couldn't have been identified as one or the other, as STEM or humanities. The widespread disdain for one half of intellectual and aesthetic achievement, or the other, did not exist. It was as everyday and accepted for a mathematician or physician, in presenting their latest findings, to refer to a famous painting or opera, as for a book of cultural history to include differential equations. George and I, coming from Earth, described Earth's science-humanities split as being as if cats and humans could not telecommunicate with each other.

Medieval Annals

The terms "annals," "chronicle" and "history" are to a certain extent interchangeable, as Tacitus demonstrated around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, by calling one of his major historical works the Historia, and the other one the Annales -- or perhaps it was someone else who gave the titles to Tacitus' works, I don't actually know for sure. 

While conceding, therefore, that all three terms have been applied to any and all types of historical writing, for the purpose of this blog post, I am using the term "annal" to refer only to that form of Medieval historical writing, within the Catholic/Latin sphere, in which the entries are all labelled by year, in which a typical year's entry might contain as little as a sentence or two -- a king or prince is born or dies, or the Emperor rides to Constance to celebrate Christmas, a comet is seen, famine and/or drought is suffered locally -- or a year might not be entered at all, and in which the entry for a year rarely exceed a page in a modern octavio edition. There is typically not more than one entry per year, but it is clear that sometimes the entry for a past year has later been revised or added to. The language is usually Latin. In the 12th century, French and Italian began to appear in some annals. The only early non-Latin annal of which I am aware is the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in the 9th century. But it should be kept in mind that this was just one annal among many Latin annals made in England. Medieval writing in Catholic lands was, overwhelmingly, Latin writing. 

 

If some reader happens to know the precise boundaries between annals, chronicles and histories, and wishes to assist my readers and damn my astounding ignorance upon this point, I, of course, would be delighted.

While ancient Latin and Greek histories had each been the work of one author, who signed his work, an annal could have many different contributors. Some Medieval authors wrote histories in the style of ancient authors. These were usually members of the clergy, but their works were treated differently than the annals of the monasteries. Whether they were humble monks or Popes, whether they stayed in one abbey or traveled widely, their names, in most of the cases I know, were never hidden from us: Gregory of Tours, the venerable Bede, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris and so forth.

Sometimes the authors of some parts of the annals are known to modern scholars, sometimes they have conjectures as to authorship, and often the authors are unknown. The style of the Latin prose could be quite good, and helpful in identifying its author, or it could be quite ordinary. The annal as a whole was thought of as the product of a monastery or cathedral, in England, France, or Germany, while in Italy some cities also maintained their own annals. An annal may represent as much as several centuries' worth of history recorded on behalf of a particular religious institution or city, and, unsurprisingly, events of local significance are given greater weight than they might be in histories which strive for universal relevance. On the one hand, this may seems to lend to annals a more trivial nature compared to histories. However, the modern historian, while recognizing in the famous Medieval historians forerunners in his own genre, may often make much more day-to-day use of the anonymous annalist, precisely because of the abundance of detailed local information.

Many of the Medieval annals, along with chronicles, histories, letters, decrees, laws, etc, etc, of Medieval Germany and surrounding countries, are collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH); Italian annals are among the works collected in the Rerum Italicorum Scriptorum; and British annals are among the Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series). And there are many more Medieval Latin annals, from Iberia, from Scandinavia, from the Catholic Slavic lands, in other collections. Still more annals from all across Latin Medieval Europe can be found in scholarly journals. And some are still only in manuscripts, still await edition and publication.

Dream Log: "Friends" with Money

Money money money money. Moolah. Skrilla. Cabbage. Cheddar. L'argent. Clams. Lucre. Currency. Simolians. Smackeroonies. You know what I'm talking about.

I dreamed that the characters from "Friends" were real, and that I knew what had happened to them since the show. I was not a friend of theirs. Not really even an acquaintance. More of an observer of the Friends. 

 

Ross and Rachel stayed married for 61 years! What happened then? Divorce? Death? I don't know. But somehow, I do know that they made love to each other 5 times during those 61 years. They made love to OTHER people much MORE than that. For example: on their wedding day, Rachel said something, and Ross, not for the first time, over-reacted. But during their wedding reception was the first time he had a 3-way with Rachel's sisters, played by Reese Witherspoon and Christina Applegate, and Rachel got really mad -- it was sort of like what happened over and over again in the show.

Don't feel too bad for Rachel, though; she had lots of sex, just, not with Ross. They got along pretty well with each other, just, not in that one way. Like in the show.

Chandler quit his job in advertising, and became an actor. Monica was doing better and better as a chef so they didn't need Chandler's income anymore. They never said in the show what sort of business Chandler was in, but in the dream, I knew it was advertising.

In real life, at least in the US, lots of people go from advertising to show business. I don't know why, but I do know why a lot of show business sucks so hard: all those assholes from advertising. You thought you were going to spread your wings, but you're still a weasel. And weasels don't have wings. 

Phoebe stayed on guitar and vocals, but Mike joined her on air piano -- yes: air piano -- and they made it big. Multi-platinum albums all over the world. They became billionaires. Air piano.

You may recall that Joey went out to Hollywood after having been in a huge blockbuster movie with Gary Oldman. In my dream, he kept making blockbusters. He starred in like twenty hugely successful movies in a row, it made him a billionaire. Then he started directing and producing and made some REAL money, and the first thing you know, Joey's head of Paramount Studios.

But he missed his Friends. So he re-located Paramount HQ from Hollywood to Manhattan, bought a huge townhouse in Greenwich Village, just a block away from where Joey and Chandler and Monica and Rachel lived during the show, with Central Perk downstairs. And he gave the townhouse to Chandler and Monica and moved in with them.

Classical and Medieval Latin

I've read a lot of disparaging comments about Medieval Latin lately -- "the average Dark Age scribe" this and "the average Dark Age scribe" that -- and instead of replying directly to one of these stern Ciceronians in some such snarky manner as: "Jeepers, you sure know a lot about Dark Age scribes! Could you cut and paste some especially bad examples of their bad Latin so that we may all together jeer at their ineptitude and utter disregard of vowel quantity?" I thought it might be better to express myself here, to my, hopefully somewhat better-disposed usual readership, and just to mention a few very basic things. 

 

First of all, although it's hard to imagine that any Latinists do not already know this, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that almost every single bit of the Classical Latin corpus which has survived to our time, survived because Medieval monks copied it. Medieval students were taught Latin, not just with the Vulgate (not that that would have been so terrible. Jerome could write), but also with Cicero and Caesar and Vergil, and with all of the other Classical authors. As hard as it seems to be for some to grasp, the Classical authors were copied in order to be taught. Classical Latin rotting on Medieval shelves was the exception, not the rule.

Secondly, something which seems quite obvious to me, but perhaps only because I've brooded upon the subject unusually long: the corpus of Classical Latin is very small. A few million words written by a few hundred authors. The amount of Medieval Latin preserved today is many times greater. The mediocre Classical authors have disappeared, the everyday Medieval schlubs have not. If we're going to compare Classical Latin with Medieval, we should compare like with like: the best Classical authors with the best Medieval authors. Livy with Matthew Paris. Ovid with Alcuin. Cicero with Abelard. But Paris, Alcuin and Abelard, of course, tend not to be read by those who insist that only ancient Latin is Latin at all, let along being the only Latin worth knowing about with the possible exception of a few Renaissance  Italian Ciceronians.

As far the average Medieval scribe is concerned, there is very little average ancient Latin left with which he could be compared: some scraps of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, some graffiti on the walls of Vesuvius, some of the humbler of the ancient Latin inscriptions. Nothing which is conventionally counted in the Classical corpus.

I do hesitate to point this out, I feel I'm being a bit rude, but I feel I have little choice: those who disparage Medieval typically have not just read very little of it, and what little they have read, they have treated very unfairly by condemning it because it is different in style than Cicero. Very few people judge contemporary English, I believe, by firmly insisting that if it doesn't sound just exactly like Shakespeare, it's crap. It's also quite rare, I believe, to insist that that which is called 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, 20th or 21st-century English is not English at all, if it does not very closely resemble Shakespeare, and nevermind that Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Joyce and I had all read Shakespeare.

That would be to ignore the fact, if one had ever learned it all, that languages change.

I don't delude myself that I'm going to change the mind of a single Ciceronian, anti-Medievalist Latinist. And I certainly don't dispute that Classical Latin is wonderful and offers more than an entire career's worth of scope for study -- any more than any of those Medieval scribes would have disputed it, who copied it, and are the only reason we still have it. 

But perhaps I've given a smile to a Medieval Latinist or two, who, like me, grows a bit weary now and then of the way their field is denigrated by some.

Matthew Paris

Matthew Paris (ca 1200-1259), a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of St Albans from 1217 until his death, was an historian whose writings constitute one of the major sources of information of mid-13th century Europe. Although he never rose above the rank of monk, he apparently was treated as a person of great distinction, making frequent visits to the English royal court, for example, and making a journey to Norway to oversee reform of the Abbey of St Benet Holm. He had personal friendships with King Haakon IV of Norway, and, most significant for his historical writings, with King Henry III of England and the King 's brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall. 

Paris' greatest work as an historian is the Chronica Maijora. This work was, up until the year 1235, a re-working of the Flores Historiarum, the chronicle of Roger of Wendover. At that point, Matthew himself, with his personal access to royalty and thus his remarkable nearness to great events of his time, is the primary source. 

A condensation of the Chronica for the period from 1067 to 1235, with some revisions, forms Paris' other famous historical work, the Historia Minor. 

Paris' reputation as an historian has always been controversial. Some call him England's greatest Medieval historian and one of the best historians of Medieval Europe. Others opine that patriotism blinds him and that prejudice and enthusiasm greatly mar his work.

On the one hand, almost no-one would dispute that his writing style is engaging and lively. And his friendships with Henry and Richard gave him access to a range of documents relevant to the history of his own time such as no other historian of the time could match. Some have said that his prejudices greatly detract from the historical value of his writing. And it has been pointed out that Paris sometimes alters the important historical documents he quotes so voluminously in his work. Then again, whether such alterations constitute lying on Paris' part, or an honest attempt to correct mistakes in the documents, is controversial. The conventions of precise citation which are so essential to history-writing today were still unknown in the 13th century. And what looks like prejudicial blindness to some in Paris' writing, has struck others as refreshing directness and sincerity and a direct record of Paris' own convictions.

Whatever one thinks of him as an historian, Paris was more than an historian. He was also one of the most celebrated visual artists of his day. One of the greatest of the mappamundi, those Medieval world-maps with Jerusalem in the center, crammed with illustrations of the local sights and wonders of the parts of the world known to the artists, and those imagined in those parts unknown to him, was made by Matthew Paris. 

Also, many, or perhaps all, of the illuminations in the earliest manuscripts of his work were drawn and colored by him. It is not certain whether Paris singlehandedly wrote out the clean copies of his works, or whether copyists and artists aided him in this process. In any case, these manuscripts made under his care are magnificent, and we are fortunate enough that some examples have survived.

Henry Richards Luard made a highly-regarded edition of the Chronica Maijora for the Rolls Edition, in 7 volumes published from 1872 to 1880. The principal points of what was known of Paris' life is gathered in the prefaces and notes of those 7 volumes.

An Open Letter to Bono

So you've published an autobiography. That's great! The world needs more memoirs by rock stars the way it needs more self-help books by movie stars and crime thrillers by politicians. No, I haven't read your book, I'm not going to, and this isn't even about your book, it's about Achtung Baby. And about the fact, which I and the world learned during all the publicity for your book, without even trying to learn anything about you, because that's how outsized the publicity has been, filling every nook and cranny, that you've been married for 40 years. To a woman you've been with since you joined U2. Hey congratulations.

You're very old -- you're actually a year older than I am! Wow! That's old! -- so I  may have to remind you: in 1991, U2 released an album called Achtung Baby, in which you wailed and screamed about your broken heart. Out here in the general public, millions of us thought we could relate, because we've all been dumped at least once. We listened to you agonizing through songs like "The Fly," "One" and "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," and from the way you carried on, we all thought: Wow, that guy has been dumped like a bag of dirty laundry! Like a dump truck's worth of garbage! Like a very large block of BST, late in the movie Wall Street!

 

But, apparently, no. Since you've been married since 1982, to a woman you've been with since several years before that -- hey, congratulations again, well done -- that means that what sounded, to any normal person listening in 1991, like you getting dumped, was you having a rough patch! Sleeping on the sofa for a night -- maybe for two nights in a row!

You let all of us out here in the real world believe that you understood. We heard you sing lines like "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief/ All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief," and, especially if we were artistic types, we staggered around in agony, clutching out heads and screaming, "No! No! What have I done?!" when what we had done was destroy a beautiful relationship and then attempt to write a novel about it. Maybe with a happy ending unlike real life. But we never finished it. Because all we were doing was trying to hang on to the most wonderful thing that had happened to us, although it was gone. That was why we could never finish that novel. Because finishing would mean letting go That was why why had to stop trying to finish it, and let go.

And we thought you had done something similar. Now it's not at all clear what you did. Got your wife to stop speaking to you for an entire afternoon, something like that, apparently. 

I got the one word "ONE" tattooed onto my freaking forearm, you humongous jerk!

All the best. I'm glad you're so happily married. Really.

Yr pal,

The Wrong Monkey

Happy Birthday, Julian Schnabel!

 In 1996... I was about to write this other painter's name, but why do that?

In 1996, another painter, famous, interesting, but a very unpleasant human being, told me about a recent auction he had attended, where one of Schnabel's plate paintings came up for sale. Nobody bid on it. Then one of the plates fell off.

Then, as the interesting, unpleasant painter told it, a ripple of laughter began, which soon became riotous.

The way he told the story, Schnabel, in 1996, was already a has-been, a joke.

In Sydney Pollack's documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, Schnabel calls Gehry's critics "fleas buzzing around the head of a lion." That's exactly how I think of that other painter now in relation to someone as great as Schnabel. That other famous painter, that unpleasant, cruel man who for a time had me somewhat under his sway, could only relate to others in terms of dominance, conflict, sneering laughter and degradation. Great artists such as Schnabel have a completely different spirit, a spirit which overflows with generosity. I believe that this sense of generosity comes from an awe felt at some things which religious people have been explaining for thousands of years, and which we atheists often have a very hard time describing, let alone explaining, but which exist.

I've never met Julian Schnabel, but I've felt those things through his work. Don't put too much stock in meeting your artistic heroes, be they painters, musicians, actors or what have you. If they're good at their jobs, they've already given you the important things. You don't need to meet them, and if they're famous, there aren't enough tiny little pieces of them for all of their fans. Give them a break, leave them alone, let them work. 

In 1997 I parted ways with that other painter. He's passed away since then. I can only hope, for his sake, that he got some soul before he departed. Like I said, this is hard for atheists to talk about coherently. I hope he was touched by some of the grace that flows from great artworks, such as Schnabel's paintings, but to which he had been blind because of a pre-occupation with dross such as in-crowd reputations, the buzz of the fleas.

Latin After the Classics

I'm writing this post for very much the same reason I've written several earlier posts: because I encounter people who equate Latin with ancient Latin and seem unaware of how much Latin literature has survived which was written after the ancient era ended around AD 450, the date of the latest "pagan" Latin texts.

There are some other people, who seem to believe that ancient Latin is the only WORTHWHILE Latin ever written, the only Latin worth reading. On that subject, I would ask you to consider this: only a tiny fraction of what was written by pre-Christian Latin authors has survived to the present. What we have now, to a great extent, is what people considered to be most worth preserving. No doubt much was written in ancient Latin which was of much lower quality. Much more of the writing of lower quality has survived from the Medieval, Renaissance and more recent eras. If you compare ancient Latin to more recent Latin, it's only fair to compare the best to the best.

 

But --  must you compare? I doubt that I will be able to stop anyone who is so disposed from disparaging Latin from post-ancient eras. But perhaps I can encourage others to read what they like, without allowing snobs to ruin things for them.

So: I am not comparing the following Latin works to ancient Latin. Plenty of others do that full-time, and find the newer stuff wanting. Such comparisons don't interest me. 

Boethius wrote in the earliest post-"pagan" period. He lived from ca AD 480 to 524. His magnum opus de consolatione philosophiae is well-known. In addition to that, many of his writings on music and mathematics have survived.

Isidore of Seville, ca AD 560 to 636, is also known for one work above all, his Etymologiae. Many others of his work survive, some on physics, some theological, some historical.

Gregory of Tours, c538-594, wrote an Historia Francorum which is one of our few written sources of information about the Merovingian dynasty down to Gregory's time.

Alcuin of York, born around 735, died 804, was the chief architect of Charlemagne's massive program of educational reform. Like Charlemagne, Alcuin seems to have been very charismatic and persuasive. He would debate with Charlemagne over matters of policy, often daring to chide and contradict the Emperor. Many of his written works survive. His poems, while not always masterpieces, are very expressive and winning.

Matthew Paris, died 1259, an English Benedictine monk, besides being one of the very best of Medieval historians, was also a gifted drawers of pictures, as can be seen in some of the manuscripts of his works which he himself made, as well as in maps which are considered some of the finest of the Middle Ages. I would heartily recommend all of his historical writings, but above all the Chronica majora. 

The examples could be endless. Reading some Medieval or later Latin works will tend to lead you to others.

It seems that often, people these days read translations from the Latin without realizing that they are translations. Bacon and Hobbes wrote about as much in Latin as they did in English. As did John Milton. No, I'm not talking about Paradise Lost, that was written in English, but Milton's Defense of the English People, for example, was originally Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Romain Rolland all published works in Latin. Prefaces to works of classical Greek and Latin are routinely written in Latin to this day. And if you say you are studying Medieval history, and you don't read Latin, then I have to risk sounding like one of the snobs I began this essay by denouncing, and wonder exactly what you are studying.

Amateur and Professional Sports

Chess has existed for well over 1000 years. Tennis has been around for at least 600 years, golf for at least 500. In western Europe, all three of these sports were originally exclusive pastimes of the aristocracy. Playing golf has continued to be primarily the preserve of what Veblen called the leisure class, a status symbol affordable only by a small portion of the population. Tennis, by comparison, has become somewhat less exclusive, and chess is now a mass phenomenon.

 

All three of these sports, as well as other Medieval aristocratic pastimes such as tournaments (jousting) and horse racing, are individual sports. The most popular team sports of the present day did not become popular until the 19th century: baseball, rugby, what Americans call football, what the rest of the world calls football and Americans call soccer, basketball, handball and so forth.

These team sports grew simultaneously in two categories: amateur sports for the upper class, as sports had been, and, something new, professional sports which were much more open to the entire society, and which, indeed, were often looked down upon by the aristocrats and the rich middle class wishing to join the upper classes. And large-scale amateur sports persist to this day in the US in the form of school sports, including college sports.

And perhaps it is better to call them "amateur" sports, in quotation marks, because, right from the start, university football and baseball and basketball teams cheated, and included players who were not really university students. 

Back in the mid-19th century in the US, attendance at universities was still mostly confined to relatively wealthy white men. It was a status symbol of the upper classes, as sports traditionally had been. However, as team sports grew explosively in popularity, and they began to generate huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, and as college sports began to gain fans who had never been to college, the code of exclusivity was regularly broken, and the pool of players expanded far beyond the upper classes, in order to find the very best players. 

And from the mid-19th century until today, most people have known that the claim that most of a college's athletes are actually students, is untrue. 

In the rest of the world, many sports -- above all soccer, by far the most popular sport in the world -- developed in an entirely different way, with none of this pretense of amateurism. The revenues are openly shared with the athletes, not just in the "major leagues" as is the case in the US, but in all leagues. 

Baseball still has its minor leagues, although these have been mostly replaced by college baseball. Each major league team owns or is closely and exclusively associated with teams in several minor leagues, which form a pool of young talent for the major leagues to pick from. 

Most of the soccer teams outside of the US are independent entities. Typically, a country will have many soccer leagues, and a team can move up to a higher, more prosperous league by leading the league below it, while the team which did worst in the higher league moves to the lower league.

It's a much more sensible way of doing things. The American system is much more like a battle royal, with millions of children competing for a few thousand positions in which their financial compensation may begin to reflect the revenue they generate for others. There are only a very few, very impoverished and unsuccessful independent minor leagues in American football and basketball. Quite a few American athletes have figured out that they will be better treated in other countries, where basketball and baseball leagues and leagues in still other sports are modeled upon the soccer model.

And so, ironically, in the US, which supposedly was founded upon a rejection of things like aristocracy -- although that's a pretense about as transparent as that in which college athletes are supposed to be students -- amateur sports has become a very cruel exploitation of young poor people. 

Perhaps even more ironically, one of the few other parts of the world who indulged in a lie about amateur sports was -- the former Soviet bloc. Were they doing this in order to compete with their great rival and enemy, the US? I don't know.

Michigan Wine

Stop laughing, this isn't a joke: there is some good wine being made in Michigan. Although I can't blame you you if you didn't know. I didn't know until very recently that some Michigan wine is world-class, and I've lived in the general vicinity of Detroit for 14 years. Maybe Michigan's PR isn't as good as, for instance, its wine. 

Most of the very best wine in the state is made up north, on the north shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The Lower Peninsula is the mitten-shaped land mass which many of you may think is the entire state of Michigan. But no! There is also an Upper Peninsula, which is fabulous in many ways. Serious vineyards are popping up here in significant numbers. 

But for now, most of truly world-class Michigan wine is made near Traverse City, on the north shore of the mitten. Left Foot Charley, which would probably have to be called the best of the best in the state, is actually IN Traverse City. It's a little unusual for a vineyard to actually be in a city. Bryan Ulbrich, 

 owner and winemaker of Left Foot Charlie, is gaining a serious reputation as a white-wine genius. 

Among the celebrated wineries of Sutton's Bay, just a few miles from Traverse City, is Mawby Wine, which specializes in sparkling wine. You want a quote? Okay, let me quote from page 631 of The New Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia: "Mawby is making wines as good or better than any other sparkling wine in the country."

Yeah that's a pretty good quote! You thought I was fooling around here! *LOUD BUZZER SOUND* Wrong!

Black Star Farms, also on Sutton's Bay, makes some serious pinot noir.

How about a local specialty?  Ice wine is made from grapes harvested when they are frozen on the vine. Ice wine is sweet and syrupy, a nice dessert wine. Canada, Germany, Austria and China are known for their ice wine, and, increasingly, so is Michigan.

The second-largest clustering of top-tier Michigan wineries, apart the Traverse City-Suttons Bay cluster and a scattering here and there, are in southwest Michigan, an hour or two's drive from Chicago. St Julian Winery of Paw Paw is perhaps the best of this bunch. They're known for their cream sherry and Riesling.

But these are just a few of the highlights. To cite the Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia again, Michigan ranks 6th among the 50 states in acreage devoted to wine grapes, and there were 160 wineries here as of 2019. 

And all the signs I can see say that the number is growing fast. You know that feeling people sometimes get, when they know that something around them is about to become world-famous?

If you're a wine connoisseur, when you think of wine from the US, maybe you think of California, Oregon, Washington state, New York state and the Finger Lakes, and Virginia, and Texas and the Hill country. As well you should, all those regions, and still others, make very fine wine. But Michigan should be on your radar, too. I know, these days, all 50 states, or at least the contiguous 48, want to be wine-growers, everyone's clamoring Look at me! Look at me!. But I'm telling you. We're well above-average.

Old High German

Old High German (Althochdeutsch) is the name given to the language in which some texts were written from AD 750 to 1050, including the earliest known written texts in German. 

"German" refers to the language spoken today in Germany, Austria, a large part of Switzerland, and in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, and by about a million people each in France, Italy and the United States -- by about 100 million people worldwide. "Germanic," however, is a much broader term: in addition to German, the Germanic languages spoken today include English, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and others. 

As I said, the earliest written German texts are Old High German. But they are not the earliest written Germanic texts. In the 4th century, Bishop Ulfilas translated the Bible, or least large parts of it, into his native Gothic language. Also in the 4th century, a few other documents were written in Gothic by Ulfilas and/or someone else. And that is all that is known. For whatever reasons, written Gothic did not thrive. 

About a century earlier than Old High German, the earliest known writing in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, appeared, the poem called "Caedmon" after its supposed author.

Now, about the "High" in Old High German. To this day there are High German and Low German (Plattdeutsch). High German is the standard version of the language usually spoken on TV and radio, written by journalists and authors and so forth. Out of the huge number of local German dialects, High German has come to be standard German. But "High" is not a value judgment. It does not connote anything cultural or social at all. Rather, High German is a purely geographical term: it is so called because it comes from mountainous areas, and Low German from regions where the land is flatter and the elevation is lower. 

The earliest Old High German texts are glosses, German synonyms written in the margins of Latin manuscripts, and lists of Latin-synonyms. Then come actual translations, of gospels, of Psalms, of earlier Christian writers, occasionally even of "pagan" Latin Classics. There are official pronouncements of Frankish rulers, pieces of the liturgy, passion plays, magical formulas. There is the Hildebrandslied, a tragic story of a battle between a father and son, a survival of Germanic oral literature.

Old High German was strongly supported by Charlemagne and his successors. Then, as the Saxons took control in German, there was a century, roughly from AD 900 to 1000, when written German virtually disappeared. Latin had been the dominant written language the entire time, but under the Saxons, Latin's status returned from dominant to exclusive. 

And then, in the first half of the 11th century, in the period of transition from Old High German to Middle High German, the dominant figure in literary German was Notker, also called Notker the German, to distinguish him from the 9th-century Notker the Stutterer, known for his German additions to the liturgy. In addition to purely German works, Notker the German wrote distinctive mixed works, part Latin, part German.

After Notker, beginning around AD 1050 and lasting until about 1350, is the period of the literature referred to as Middle High German, with authors much more well-known and widely-read than anyone in Old High German: for example, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and, perhaps the most prominent Medieval German work, the anonymous Nibelungenlied. Old High German is more foreign, more difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend, often comparatively primitive. Still, it offers fascinating glimpses into the life of the times and places where it was made.

Forgeries, From Antiquity to the Present

Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown. 

Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.

 

In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch. 

More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.

Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.

The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,

Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open. 

It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus. 

The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.

Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island. 

As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.

So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.

Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake. 

Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.

Will Musk Destroy His Own Success?

The thing about Musk is, he's always talking about himself, and he's always lying.

And -- now this is significant -- he's not even particularly good at lying. The thing he does all day long  every day, and he's not good at it. So people notice.

 

He keeps alienating one significant demographic after another. He refers to himself as an engineering genius, but any actual engineer can easily see that he's faking being an engineer, and taking the credit for the work of many engineers who've worked for him. How many engineers are there in the world? A job at Tesla used to be a dream destination for many engineering students. It surely is much less so than it once was. Less than outstanding pay, a boss who takes credit for everything you do, the risk of being rage-fired at any moment for no good reason...

He claims he's autistic, and we autistic people can easily see he's not. So can psychologists who specialize in the autistic spectrum, and family members and friends of autistic people. As one of those psychologists recently put it, we're not saying that autistic people can't be assholes. We can be. But even the assholes among us tend to care very much about improving our situation through accurate understanding of our condition. Musk trying to piggy-back on us, why? So people will feel sorry for him and more inclined to forgive his bad behavior? It's deeply annoying on several levels, even before we get to those of his fans who are trying the same thing.

Ha says he was bullied as a child. I imagine that people who actually were bullied as children, or who care about children whom have been or are being being bullied, can see pretty easily that he's a bully.

He says he was poor when he was young, saying, for example, that he had to live on a dollar a day as a undergrad, and that he often had nothing to eat but ramen noodles, but it's come out that his family owned an emerald mine. He has also talked publicly about the private plane his family owned when he was a child.

If you want people to believe you were poor as a child, and you're a good liar, or even a very mediocre liar, you don't talk about things like the family's private plane.

So let's see. So far we've got engineers, autistic people, victims of bullying and poor people, all of of whom Musk has given reason to take a particular personal dislike toward him. And how many more groups has he alienated in exactly the same way, just by unnecessary lies about himself? It's adding up. That's even before we get to his spectacularly bad behavior as an employer, executive and businessman. 

Saxo Grammaticus

Saxo Grammaticus finished the Gesta Danorum, the history of the Danes, early in the 13th century. He says at the beginning of the preface to this work that is was written to satisfy the wish of Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, who saw how other nations had glorified their ancestors in written histories, and very much wished for the same to be done for the Danes.

Other than the Gesta Danorum itself, and a mention from 1185 from another Danish historian, Svend Aggesen, that Saxo was writing it, we have no sources of biographical information about him. From his history, we may infer that Saxo's forebears were of the high Danish nobility, that they were warriors by profession, in the retinue of kings, and that Saxo himself was a cleric in Bishop Absalon's inner circle.

For a long time, the name "Saxo" confused me. I thought that it might have denoted that Saxo, or perhaps his recent ancestors, were foreigners in Denmark, from Saxony. I also wondered whether it might be connected to the Latin word "saxum," which means "rock." But whatever its origin, apparently Saxo is a very common male name in Denmark, or at least it was in the Middle Ages. The epithet Grammaticus was added to the name of our historian centuries later, because of the ornate style of his Latin prose, which borrows turns of phrase from a fairly impressive range of ancient authors including Sallust, Martianus Capella, Justin and Vergil, but in the great majority of cases from Valerius Maximus, the 1st century compiler of anecdotes. There can be little doubt that Maximus was the favorite author of Grammaticus.

Saxo divides his history into 16 books. The first 9 deal with the legendary past of Denmark, and are often the sole source for episodes from that legendary past. Saxo draws on sagas, he translates old Danish poems into Latin verse, he makes frequent mentions of runes. After the first 9 books, the legend becomes mixed more with the historical, covering the period from the middle of the 10th to the late 12th century. 

Today, it is above all the legends which move people to consult Saxo. And some of these legends have spread out from Saxo's accounts into the wider world long before our own time. In book 3 there appears a Prince Amleth of Denmark, the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the 10th book there is an archer, Toko, who a few centuries later had become William Tell, the national hero of Switzerland.

Saxo himself has become something of a hero in Denmark, but for a long time after his own life, he was little known and little read. No complete manuscripts of the Gesta Danorum are extant. The first edition of the history was printed in Paris in 1514, from a manuscript which has since been lost. A critical edition appeared already in 1644, by Stephanus Johannes Stephanius. Several other critical editions have followed since then. In 2015 a critical edition by Karsten Friis-Jensen, with a facing-page English translation by Peter Fisher, was published in the Oxford Medieval Texts series in 2015. Friis-Jensen's Latin text had previously appeared with a Danish translation by Peter Zeeburg, published in 2005.

Dream Log: Climate Activism in a Billionaire's Mansion

I dreamed that a billionaire had donated his mansion to be used as offices by an organization fighting climate change. I was one of the many volunteers working there. All around me people were bustling, appearing to be working very efficiently and effectively, but I was distracted by the house. It was very fancy. I kept staring at the floors, which had a very great variety of surfaces. I was especially fascinated by some granite squares bordered by strips of matte-finished metal which appeared to be a nickel-copper alloy.

 

Eventually I shook myself into somewhat greater alertness to the task at hand. Someone pointed out an impressive-looking white-haired gentleman in a very handsome suit, and suggested I offer to join his team. I walked up to the white-haired man and said I wanted to work with him. Right away he asked me whether I had been in the military. I said no, and he waved me off, dismissively, clearly considered the question settled.

I walked away, but then a moment later I approached him again, and told him that the reason I had not served in the military was that I had been raised in a very strictly pacifist Pietist Protestant denomination, and that although I was no longer strictly pacifist, the Pietists among whom I had been raised had for centuries bravely faced various forms of persecution for sticking to their beliefs, and that it was a heritage I could be proud of. I said that it his business who he wanted in his crew, but that he shouldn't get the idea that I was some sort of coward.

The old guy thought for a minute, then smiled, nodded, shook my hand and welcomed me aboard.

I followed the boss around the mansion as he busily networked with others. He and I and most of the other volunteers were wearing suits. I could see that the boss' suit and his shoes and watch were all much more expensive than mine. Likewise, the others in this particular crew, and most of the people we were meeting with, were very expensively dressed. I felt self-conscious. I wondered what the others thought about my appearance.

The boss got handed many pieces of paper. He handed some of them to me. Soon the stack of papers I was carrying was so big that I needed a backpack to carry them. Getting that backpack was as simple as calling out, "Hey, anybody got a backpack I can use? Big and roomy would be perfect." And just like that, a big and roomy backpack was tossed my way. 

Was the entire organization, everyone in the mansion, wired that tight? I wondered. Or just this boss' crew of a half dozen men and women quite a bit younger than he and I?

Most of the pieces of paper I was carrying contained color photos of people. "Hey Boss," I asked, waving some of the paper at him, "who are all these people?"

The boss laughed and replied, "Few people would recognize them. Few people have heard their names."

I took a guess: "So these are the 'fools' names and fools' faces' crowd?"

"That's right. They pull strings behind the scenes. And the ones in those pictures are profiteering from pollution. They're death merchants, no two ways about it. And we're going to take them public in a big way."

Rangeman Talks to Some Kids

 Rangeman continued to walk all over NYC, wearing the watch which gave him superpowers,

swimming across the rivers, climbing trees and fire escapes and other structures to rescue cats, and spreading his superhero message: "Be nice!"

One day, in Brooklyn, he heard a bunch of small children yelling, "Rangeman! Rangeman!" He ran in the direction of the voices, trying to see what the emergency was which called for his superpowers. The children were pressed up inside a playground fence, jumping up and down and shouting his name. 

Eventually Rangeman figured out that there was no emergency, and that the children were just excited to meet him. "Okay, children," he said, "have you been being nice?"

The kids talked excitedly all at once about how being nice had accomplished so many amazing things in their lives. 

"It's great being nice, isn't it?" Rangeman asked, and the little kids jumped up and own and yelled their agreement. 

Then Rangeman noticed another group of kids inside the playground fence, a little way away, watching quietly. Nervous smiles, hands in pockets, a few pimples. These kids were older. Looked like junior high, maybe. Rangeman had already had some experience with kids in this age group. He knew they could be skittish. He knew that occasionally, kids in the junior high age group got the notion that being nice was uncool -- somewhat like Tony Stark, it suddenly occurred to him. Rangeman called over to the bigger kids, "And how about you? Have you been being nice?"

One of the older kids yelled back, "Did you really choke Tony Stark?" This question occasioned a ripple of nervous laughter among the bigger kids.

Rangeman sighed. "Yes, I really did choke Tony, a little bit. A couple of minutes after I met him. It was wrong for me to do that. Completely wrong."

Another one of the bigger kids yelled, "So why did you do it?"

"He was being a dick. A real dick. But that's no excuse! Tony has a lot of problems. Some people think billionaires don't have problems. But the truth is, Tony's parents both died when he was a kid, his dad had put a lot of pressure on him before that, he has a radioactive thing in his chest and he'll die if it comes out -- in short, children, he has a lot of exactly the same kinds of problems everybody else has. 

"None of that is any excuse for him being a dick. But him being a dick is also no excuse for me, or anyone else, to choke him. It's important to be nice even when it's very hard to be nice." 

After a short silence, the older kids all began shouting excitedly, about how he was right, about all of the problems which had been solved by their being nice, how awesome it was to be nice...

They fell silent again. One of the older kids asked, "Hey, Rangeman. Are you crying?"

"Yeff. I'm crying," Rangeman said, the fluids having turned the s in yes to an ff. Somebody tossed a package of Kleenexes over the fence. Rangeman said thank you, turned away to blow his nose, then faced the kids and said thank you again.

"Why are you crying?" one of the smaller children asked. "Are you unhappy?"

"No," Rangeman replied. "I'm crying because I'm very happy." He sensed that maybe the children didn't understand, so he explained: "Sometimes you get so happy that it's overwhelming, and it makes you cry. But it's not a bad thing. Not at all. You kids here -- all of you," he added, and waved his arms to include both groups, "are so awesome, that it makes me very happy."

A teacher had noticed that a grown man was talking to some children through the fence and approached to shoo him away, but as he got close he realized who it was. "Hey, Rangeman!" he shouted.

"Hi," Rangeman said back. "Outstanding bunch of children you have here."

"You got that right!" the teacher emphatically agreed.

"You got any cats need to be rescued?"

"No," the teacher said, "as far as I know, for now, all of our cats are good."

Rangeman walked away, and called over his shoulder, "Well, if that ever changes, you know how to contact me."

"That's right, Rangeman!" the teacher called back. But after a while he realized that, actually, he had no idea how to contact Rangeman.

Dream Log: Cats are Aliens From Outer Space

I dreamed that cats were aliens from outer space. Most people didn't suspect anything. They just continued to treat cats as nothing more than beloved pets and companions, while the cats continued their scientific observations of Earth. 

I was allowed onto one of the cats' concealed spacecraft. I was one of the few humans who so far had been allowed to come aboard and look around. 

On board the spacecraft, the cats weren't dressed in white lab coats and speaking scientifically-inflected English. They still looked and sounded and acted exactly like cats, except that now it was a bit more obvious that they were interacting with the machinery.

I looked around and around and was unable to understand anything about the equipment, until, to my great surprise, I saw a familiar-looking computer terminal, with the number 448,000 in big numerals on a screen. 

The cats were mostly communicating with each other with silent psychic messages, and I felt them silently urging me to sit at this terminal and work on a problem.

I could see easily enough that 448,000 is 7 times powers of 2 times powers of 10. I thought maybe I should just keep multiplying by 2 and by 10. So I typed 896,000 on the keyboard, 896,000 appeared in big numerals under 448,000, and I got strong psychic messages that I was doing well, that I was being helpful. 

So I entered 8,960,000, and it also appeared on the screen, and I felt clearly that the cats were doing the equivalent of losing their straight faces and laughing at me. The whole thing had been a practical joke which had amused the cats cats very much. I wasn't angry, and even if I had been, several of them jumped up onto me and began to snuggle and purr.

The rest of my visit was very pleasant, with lots and lots of conventional Earthling-cat interaction. As I was getting ready to leave the spacecraft, I felt bad that I had been so utterly unable to figure out what the cats were doing and thinking, but I got a very strong positive psychic message that I had done just fine, and had no reason to feel inadequate. Several of the cats reinforced this message of positively and goodwill by jumping up onto me and patting my chest above my heart with their paws.

Claudian

Claudius Claudianus (c 370-c 404) belongs, along with Symmachus, Ausonius and Macrobius, to the last generation of "pagan" men of letters who resisted, in vain, the victory of Christianity in the dissolving western Roman Empire. (I've taken to writing "pagan" in quotation marks more and more often since I discovered that it originally was a disparaging adjective meaning something like "rustic" or "bumpkin," which, agree with them or not, was just about the last thing the four above-listed "pagans" were. Nor is it at all accurate in describing non-Christians of the period generally. Insult people if you must, but please, try to do it with at least some relation to reality.) 

 Born in Alexandria, Claudian abandoned his native language Greek in favor of Latin. Arriving in the West in the early 390's, he quickly made a name for himself with panegyrics, speeches praising powerful men. He soon won a high position at the court of the western Emperor Honorius, where he is assumed to lived until his death. 

The works of Claudius which survive to our time are mostly panegyrics favoring Honorius and Stilicho, who was the commander in chief of the armed forces and the effective ruler of the west in the stead of the feckless Emperor, and their allies, and invectives against their enemies. In addition we have some poems of his on mythological themes. One of the latter, the unfinished Raptus Proserpinae in three books, is by far the most well-known of his works, and won him a wide readership all throughout the Middle Ages. 

All agree that Claudian's verse is elegant and polished to a very high degree. Perhaps his most-praised quality as a poet is the intensity and unreserved expression of hatred and contempt in his invective, which has greatly entertained readers from his own time to ours.

John B Hall, in his 1985 Teubner edition of Claudian, lists 23 previous editions, from 1482 to 1933.

He also lists around 300 manuscripts of Claudian in that same 1985 edition, or, I believe, every single manuscript he was able to study. And he seems to have them all, or at the very least very, very many of them, in the apparatus criticus. This puzzles me. Does Hall completely reject stemmatics?

Stemmatics is the determination of which manuscripts were copied from which others. If it can be proven that manuscript B was copied from manuscript A, then, according to stemmatics, B may be disregard when making an edition of the text, unless A has been damaged and therefore lacks portions of the text which survive in B, or for some other extraordinary reason, such as B containing extremely good conjectures. There are some other ancient Latin authors of whose works hundreds of manuscripts survive, but typically, and editions of their works relies on a couple dozen or less, because of stemmatics.

I'll just cut right to the chase here: I don't know why Hall based his edition on all of the manuscripts. Maybe he doesn't believe that stemmatics is valid. Perhaps he doesn't believe that it can proven that one manuscript was copied from another. I don't know why someone would not believe that. If Hall or someone similarly-minded tried to explain it to me, I don't know whether I would understand. 

I do like big long comprehensive lists of manuscripts though, even if I don't not share the compiler's views on what the list is good for.

Ancient Greek and Latin Novels

I hope that not all of the nonsense I was taught in school is still being taught to schoolchildren. I learned that the literary genre of the novel was invented in England in the 18th century. In the Signet Classic edition of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, copyright 1963, the highly-respected critic Frank Kermode asserts that "Tom Jones, published in 1749, was the second great novel. The first, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, preceeded it only by a year." 

Fielding himself knew better. On the title page of his earlier novel Joseph Andrews Fielding acknowledges that he is imitating Cervantes -- Don Quixote, anyone? And before Cervantes -- and his clear mockery of earlier Spanish novels -- came Rabelais with Gargantua et Pantagreul, which in turn was preceded by Medieval novels in Latin and Greek, and, to cut right to the chase, ancient Greeks wrote novels beginning in the first century BC at the latest, imitated by two Latin authors, Petronius with his Satyricon and Apuleius with the Golden Ass (stop giggling, it means donkey). 

 

Aside from ancient Greek novels which exist only in fragments, there are five entire ones: one each by Chariton in the 1st century AD, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus in the 2nd century, and Heliodorus of Emesa in the 3rd.

Lucian, a much more skilled writer, lived in the 2nd century AD and wrote in many genres including the novel, although none of his novels has survived entire. Lucian made fun of absolutely everything, including the gods. (Is this why we don't have the complete text of any of his novels?)

Many fragments of previously-lost ancient Greek novels are among the papyri unearthed, primarily at Oxyrhynchus, since the late 19th century. In 1995 Susan Stephens and John Winkler collected all of the known fragments in their volume Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, which includes texts, translations and commentaries; since 1995, however, still more new fragments have come to light, primarily from Oxyrhynchus.

We know that the ancient novel was more a Greek and a Latin phenomenon; however, the two finest examples of the ancient novel which survive are both Latin. In the first century AD, Petronius, generally believed to have been the official of the same name who served under the Emperor Nero, published a huge novel, the Satyricon, which only survives in fragments; however, the fragments add up to several hundred pages. Petronius relentlessly lampoons the decadence and tastelessness of Rome's newly-rich, a favorite literary pastime of ancient Romans whose families had been rich for a little longer. Although a rich and varied pageant of life is related by the narrator, he himself, distanced from the author's intended audience by a thick layer of irony, cares for little besides his comically unsuccessful attempts to prevent others from making love with his beloved, the young, beautiful, perpetually-available man Giton. 

Perhaps the greatest surviving novel of Greek or Latin antiquity, until the possible unearthing of a complete masterpiece by Lucian, is the 2nd-century Golden Ass by Apuleius. 

Apuleius' novel is beloved, but linguistically, it is strange. Apuleius himself apologizes at the beginning of the work, in case his Latin should offend native speakers. But he says that it is right that his tale should be told in strange speech, for it has to do with the transformation of a man into a donkey and back again, and is itself the transformation of a Greek novel into Latin. 

It was once believed, but no more, that the Greek novel on which Apuleius based his work was written by Lucian. Certainly the world views of the two authors are far, far apart: Lucian mocks everything, even the gods, while Aouleius is a very pious pagan. The protoganist of his novel is turned into a donkey accidentally, because he had too much curiosity and too little awe before supernatural things. And he is rescued and turned back into a man by praying to the Goddess of Heaven -- we generally know her as Isis, but as the pleading donkey says to Her, She is known by many names, and he lists many of them -- and then he becomes a very pious monk of Her cult.

The hilarious, rollicking story (with its very serious pagan religious underpinnings) is full of bad people doing bad things. However, they often interrupt their various bad deeds to tell each other stories, the longest of which, the story of Cupid and Psyche, takes up nearly a quarter of the entire novel, and has often been published separately, and has inspired many, many painters and sculptors.  Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is based partly on the Golden Ass, which appeared in a very popular English translation by William Adlington in 1566.