When You Have a Very Specific Question on Social Media...

 ...like say you have a very specific question about a certain sort of widget, so you go to the widgets sub on Reddit cause you figure at least some of the world's leading widget experts must hang out there, and you search first to see if someone else has already asked, but no, so you post with a very specific question, make it clear as day that you came there because you wondered about this very specific thing...

And -- of course -- someone leaves a very long comment about important things about widgets, all of which you already knew, and says nothing about what you asked. So you thank them, but repeat that why you came there was because of the question you already stated very clearly.

So of course they leave an even longer reply full of important things in the history of widgets, still haven't said a thing you didn't already know, still haven't answered your question -- OH! but at the end of this long comment they say something you already suspected: they've never heard of the kind of widget you asked about.

So you express a little mild annoyance. And so then a couple of his friends and admirers chime in, saying things like, "Oh, so you're saying you don't care about all these important things this important man has taken his important time to tell you, you ungrateful worm [...]"

When all you actually said was that Mr Important didn't answer your very specific question, the very specific reason you came to that sub, and no-one else has answered it either, even though you've repeated it four or five times by now and emphasized as clearly as you know how to that it -- your specific question -- is why you came there in the first place.

When you clearly have a specific question, people who don't know the answer DON'T NEED TO COMMENT. 

But they do, don't they. Sure as rain in Oregon. And now it seems very likely that no-one in the sub will ever answer your question, and you're going to be perma-banned from the sub.

Grad school can be like that, unfortunately. That's why I finally dropped out.

Buy The Chaos Machine on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3EaLYYY 

Dream Log: Dogs and Academia

 

I dreamed I was in a dog park in a beautiful wooded hilly area in autumn. There was no COVID-19 in this dream. I had no dogs, but other people didn't seem to mind my playing with their dogs. One grey-haired lady who was there with several dogs (I'm grey-haired irl. That's weird.) tossed me one of her several frisbees and encouraged me to play with one of her dogs. I don't know much about dog breeds, but I'm going to say that this dog was huge and yellow. 

After a little while I threw the frisbee back to the grey-haired lady and said I had to go. She informed me that the big yellow dog was mine now, but I refused to agree to that, although she was rather insistent. I told her that I was sympathetic to the situation of the dog needing a home, but that I was not the best person to provide that home.

I walked a short distance to the campus of an Ivy League university. Which university it was, was not specified in the dream. I do not know whether any of the real-life Ivy League universities is situated in a rural, wooded, hilly region like this. I also do not know whether any Ivy League universities have campuses a long distance from their main campuses. But in the dream, although I did not know exactly where I was, it felt somehow as if I were a long way to the west of the East Coast Ivy League. 

At this point the dream became weird and dreamlike. The university had a walk-in virtual-reality catalog of courses. When you walked toward a course which interested you, the course display expanded to surround you.  Written text and pictures went from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling, and audio description of the course began.

The written texts and the descriptions were in English and Latin. You didn't have the option of switching between languages: there was just one version, part English and part Latin. Both the English and the Latin were very badly written, with many quotations both unattributed and badly chosen, many clumsy original phrases in both languages, and many grammatical mistakes. 

The images were odd also: for every course, from algebra to zoology, there was a big picture of a baroque paintings of fleshy humans struggling with fleshy animals. If there was ever a conscious relationship between a particular course and the painting associated with it, I couldn't see it. I was still puzzling this over when I woke up.

A Medieval Classroom

I've always liked this painting. To a 21st-century academic, it will seem quite authentic because it seems so startling familiar: the students who are paying close attention. The students who may or may not be paying attention. The student in the first row, with a somewhat sarcastic expression on his face, who looks as if either he is speaking or he urgently wants to speak -- a class clown? A young scholar with a mind of his own? Perhaps both at once?

The student in the third row, nearest to us, who appears to be hung over and possibly asleep. The student in the back row, farthest from us, in conversation with someone who doesn't appear to belong in the classroom at all -- why is the teacher putting up with this? Perhaps this student is from a powerful family and the teacher has been made to understand that this student can do as he pleases.

One rule in medieval universities which was violated extremely rarely was that women were not allowed to participate. I've heard of exactly one exception to this rule: a woman known as Nawojka disguised herself as a boy and studied at the university of Krakov for two years before being discovered to be a woman. She was put on trial, but no-one from the university could be found who would say a bad word about her. Her record as a student was excellent. The authorities didn't know what to do with her, until she asked to be sent to a convent; they agreed. She taught at the convent and eventually became its abbess.

Or perhaps not: there seems to be some disagreement about whether the story of Nawojka is an historical account or a legend.

Some people have said that there are women in the picture above, which was painted on a wall in a German university in the 14th century. (I'm sorry, I don't know which university it was in, or who painted it. It's in a museum in Berlin now. Sorry, I don't know which museum. Not much help. am I?) Maybe they got this impression because some men's and boys' clothing and hats and hairstyles of 14th-century central Europe may seem feminine to us today. Also, some of the boys studying at universities in the 14th century were very young, by today's standards. Perhaps even pre-pubescent in some cases.

Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions

In my recent blog post entitled Manuscripts, I wrote:

"[...]several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

"He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with."

In Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich & Leipzig, 2000, p 87, M L West writes that, as the Egypt Exploration Society wished, he did not give any details of the 850 unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri (Correction: 827 unpublished papyri used by West in his edition, plus 23 first published in Manfrdi et al, Papiri dell'Iliade, Florence, 2000. I think. Much of what I write in CI and about Classics on my blog should be proofread by experts before anyone thinks of taking it seriously, because of things I don't know and full-time academics do know.) used in his edition of the Iliad, 1998--2000, and he thanks them for their permission to now include their inventory numbers and summary details in his catalog of papyri of the Iliad, which contains a total of 1569 items.

Because of those details, I can see that those 850 papyri which in 2000 were either unpublished or published for the first time, are certainly not inconsequential little scraps. They seem generally to be about as big as most of the Homeric papyri already published. This does not give the impression that the Oxyrhynchus project is almost all out of significant papyri. I need to try to find out how many more have been published in the last 18 years, and discovered in that time, if the existence of those latter have been made known to the public.

To judge from West's pointed expression of thanks to the Egypt Exploration Society for their permission to divulge details about unpublished papyri, maybe the reason that neither the above-mentioned distinguished scholar nor anyone else from the EES has yet gotten back to me with details about unpublished papyri is that such details are conventionally thought of as proprietary secret knowledge of the EES, only rarely made public in extraordinary circumstances, such as when a scholar of West's stature is involved. I'm ignorant of the ways in which things are usually done in Classical Studies and papyrology, Perhaps I've been making making requests for information which are generally considered impolite at best. Consultation with some Classicists and papyrologists about mores and conventions, learning a little about the way things are usually done, certainly would do me no harm, and might save both myself and some scholars a great deal of future embarrassment.

Dream Log: Big Honkin' Library, Long Hair On Me

Very often I dream about walking around on university campuses, often within buildings on those campuses which are unrealistically large, often getting lost in those huge buildings, walking past row after row after row of offices and laboratories and archives and lounges and so forth, unable to find an exit, with an ambivalent feeling: on the one hand, I feel very comfortable in such surroundings, and I'm very appreciative of the work which is done there, but on the other hand, I'm lost and I can't find an exit.

And on the 3rd hand, I don't belong there, and if I asked directions it might become clear that I didn't belong there, and that might be awkward. In real life, I haven't been a paid, official member of academia since 1992, and I'm not officially an academic in these dreams either, which, when I pause and consider it, is somewhat strange inasmuch as I was an actual academic once, and I quite frequently dream about having all sorts of jobs I've never had in real life.

In real life, I have browsed the stacks in many a university library. In many of those libraries, it was against the rules for me to be there. I know of one university library in which anyone can come and browse, and one more where the general public can not only come in and look around, but also anyone with a library card from the city's public library can check out books from the university library as well.

Otherwise, as far as I know, if you're not a student or a member of the faculty or staff of the university, you're not supposed to be in their library. In some cases, this is effectively enforced by security checkpoints at all library entrances, where university ID's are scanned. Other libraries do not have such checkpoints, and although de jure only those officially associated with the university may enter, in practice, anyone who doesn't cause a disturbance is generally tolerated.

Last night's dream's unrealistically large academic building in which I got lost was the main library of an unspecified university. The lobby of the library was quite particularly unrealistically huge. In particular, the lobby's ceiling was unrealistically high, well over 50 feet high.

At the back of the lobby were huge staircases leading to the stacks and offices and special collections and archives and so forth, and all of these looked like their real-life counterparts in university libraries, except that, as often happens in my dreams, there were very, very many of them, and soon I was lost. Many of the doors of the offices etc which I passed were wooden with glass in their top halves, and after a while I noticed my reflection, and that my hair was very long. I had tied it up to some extent in one big braid, but some locks had come loose and were hanging as low as the middle of my back, while others stood out at odd angles. After a while I just gave up on trying to get my hair tied back up again, and shook it all loose, and it was very unruly and pointing it all sorts of directions. And in the dream I liked the way my hair looked and felt. (In real life my hair is very unruly except when it is very short, and at the moment, as it happens, it's less than a quarter-inch long. I've had a very great variety of hairstyles, from very short to very long, from very conventional to downright Cubist.)

That's pretty much the whole dream: being in a huge university library, finding the surroundings pleasant except that I was lost, and having very long hair. (And enjoying having my hair so long.)

The Terms "Dark Ages" And "Renaissance"

In this post, and on this blog in general, I use (and fully intend to continue to use) the term "Dark Ages" to denote the period between AD 476 and 800 in Western, Latin-Speaking Europe -- the period between the abdication of the Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus and the crowning of the Western Emperor Charlemagne. I use the term "Middle Ages" to designate the entire period between the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the (for lack of a better term. See below) "Renaissance."

But apparently, if I were taking an exam or writing a dissertation, my grade might suffer if I were to use the term "Dark Ages" instead of "Early Middle Ages," and I might be accused of Eurocentrism.

PC academic fashion be damned, I think it's ridiculous to call the term "Dark Ages" Eurocentric. The term isn't used to refer to any region except Latin Europe, and doesn't imply that darkness had sunk upon any other parts of the world.

Now the term "Renaissance" is quite Eurocentric, and centered not even on all of Europe but only Western Europe. Saying that Classical Greek culture was "reborn" because it was noticed again in Western Europe ignores the fact that it was never forgotten by the Greeks themselves, and also flourished in parts of the Islamic world. That's the height of Eurocentricism, which one also sees whenever someone says "Christendom" and is referring only to the Catholic/Protestant part of Christendom, as if Orthodox and Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Ethiopic and other branches of Christianity had never existed.

Typically, Western historians somehow manage to continue to ignore the direct impetus given to the Western re-discovery of Greece by Greek scholars fleeing to Italy from the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. Reading histories of Renaissance Europe, it seems as if Greek were somehow revived entirely by Westerners from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus, and the contributions of Greeks like Demetrius Chalcondyles and John Argyropoulos are rarely mentioned. It's utterly (Western-)Eurocentric, and downright rude.

One doesn't frequently encounter an outcry, here at the Western world, against such usage of terms like "Renaissance" and "Christendom," unless one reads top-notch stuff like the works of Runciman, and this blog.

So far I haven't heard of any trends toward abolishing or improving upon the term "Renaissance" in academia.

But then, I haven't attended grad school since 1992. (There are times when I'm very glad I haven't.)

Academia And Genius

If we're going to go strictly by academic records, then Einstein's records before 1905 don't show all that much. Academic records may be a good general indicator of talent, and there have always been non-academics who ridicule academics (or academics who ridicule whole other academic disciplines, cough cough New Atheists Postmodernists cough cough) and are, you know -- wrong; but on the other hand there are a few people whose relationship to academia is unconventional. Like Einstein going so quickly from the patent office to a professorship. Like William Gaddis and Cormac McCarthy, neither of whom ever graduated from college.

Like me. I'm staggeringly brilliant -- let's face it -- and I graduated from college with high honors, and I managed to do that in the very same university where McCarthy failed to graduate at all, but I did it when I was nearly 28, and I had never graduated from high school (got a GED instead) and my graduate school record, all in all, would have to be called a disaster, spanning 3 universities in 3 years and resulting in no graduate degrees.

And all of that led me to be well-inclined, at first, to people who sneered at academics, until I got to know those people and realized that they were mostly just idiots. On the one hand there's Gaddis and McCarthy and RB Morris and Pynchon and Schopenhauer and me -- just 6 of us -- and on the other hand there's a bazillion non-academic morons who are basically all just a bunch of damn Fredo Corleones who insist that they're smart! not like everybody says, like -- stupid! They're smart and they want some damn respect!

Well, they're not smart. (Although, unfortunately, they do get some respect sometimes. On shows about ancient aliens and the Grail in Amurrka, for example.) The thing about Gaddis and McCarthy and RB and Pynchon and and Schopenhauer and me is that there ain't too many of us. And we don't generally get called stupid. Unless somebody loses their patience with us and yells at us that we're "the smartest and the dumbest person I've ever met!" the way Mandy Patinkin screamed that at Carrie Mathison and threw up his hands and pulled his hair. We get called that, but not because we're stupid, but because we're brilliant and unconventional, and someone loses his or her temper because we're not using our genius the way they'd expected. Just like Einstein, working at the patent office and completing his doctorate, and the papers that would make him world-famous, at the same time. That's unconventional. The same way that it was very unconventional that Saul Bellow spent decades in the 2nd half of the 20th century as a professor at the University of Chicago, and the only doctorates he ever got in his life were honorary.

Did Bellow teach English? No, of course not! He taught a course on Rousseau. McCarthy hangs with academics -- but mostly scientists.

We draw outside the lines, some of us, and sometimes that means that we don't do the academic thing conventionally, if at all. There's only a very few like us, but there are many geniuses in academia, in the places designed specifically for them, just where you'd expect geniuses to be. Conversely, among the genius full professors there are a few fully-professorial morons, like Hegel and Robert Price, but they too are anomalies. We anomalous geniuses don't go around proclaiming that we're going to "rip the cover off of what academia doesn't want you to know!" because, generally speaking, the academics want you to know the real deal. Generally speaking. Theologians, maybe not always so much.

Don't Show Me Your Credentials, Please!

Your academic credentials, that is. Just speak your piece. What you say won't become more impressive than it was by your informing me that you are a Full and Distinguished Professor with several long titles, appointments, fellowships, etc, etc. In fact it might actually become less impressive to me. It seems to me that people tend to trot out their creds at points in debates where they are losing. When they have run out of actual substantive things to say. "I'm a bigshot, dammit! Listen to me!" Your creds might work at that point with someone who has had no idea what you've been talking about. Or who has had very little contact with higher education and therefore has an inflated estimation of everyone connected with it. (Or who him- or herself has a long list of imposing-sounding academic credentials and very little of interest to say.)

It's a tricky thing with such credentials. Lord (Settle down. It's just an expression.) knows I'm no anti-intellectual. It appalls me to learn how many Amurrkins would not vote for someone for President of the United States because he or she had a PhD. In fact, I'm very similar to an academic. Most of the people I feel most comfortable talking with have PhD's. My reading habits are very similar to those of an academic, an historian or a philosopher. It's mostly due to my autism, I think, that I don't have a PhD myself. I once had thought that there was a substantial group of autodidacts who resembled academics as much as I do, except for the lack of advanced degrees and jobs in academia. Apparently not. There are some disputes currently raging with mostly academics on one side and mostly autodidacts on the other (*cough* New Atheism *cough* *cough*) and although the academics haven't convinced me that Jesus existed, they have convinced me that the autodidacts are mostly more uneducated than self-educated.

Still, let me be convinced, or not, by what you have to say, and not by your credentials. Of course, this is all the more the case if we know each other only as pseudonyms on the Internet, and I don't even know for sure if you really are the PhD, or employed chemist, or professor who you claim to be. Hopefully I won't shock anyone when I say that I'm pretty sure some people make up some things about themselves when they're anonymous Internet pseudonyms.

There's been one striking case recently in which one anonymous Internet handle has been claiming over and over again that he is a scientist, while not sounding very familiar at all with even very basic tenets of science, logic or math, while debating with several other people who sound very much like professional scientists and/or mathematicians. It also strikes me as suspicious that he keeps saying, "I'm a scientist." That's just odd. Actual academics I've know, when asked about their occupations or backgrounds, usually say something like "I'm a biologist" or "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a mathematician." If, that is, they're not even more specific than that and say, "I'm a molecular biologist," or "I'm a theoretical physicist," or something like that. And they generally don't repeatedly state their real or imagined qualifications, they just talk to you, like regular folks, but more science-y. "I'm a scientist," just flatly stated without anyone having asked what he is, sounds very unusual indeed. Special, as it were. And as he sounds so very far from scientifically literate, I've been asking myself just what sort of scientist he could be, what his field is.

And then I remembered that some theologians actually still refer to theology as science. 800 years ago, not only was theology still referred to as a science: in Western universities, which were all run by theologians, theology was referred to as the primary science, and all the other fields of study -- grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, philosophy -- were called the "handmaids" of theology, the "queen of the sciences." I would have to guess that this guy is either a pathological liar, making up a biography for himself out of whole cloth, or one of those theologians who regards theology as a science, and whose worldview generally is about 800 years old. (Like science, theology has something which they call peer review, but, of course, it bears scant resemblance to scientific peer review. Google "peer review in theology," in quotes.)

Nota bene: I said that 800 years ago, in Western Europe, people "referred to" theology as the primary science, to which all other fields of study were subordinate. I did not say that people "believed that" theology was the highest science, or even a real science at all. No doubt some people believed this, including some professors and rectors of universities with doctorates and long and imposing-sounding lists of other titles. But in times when conformity of expression and speculation was so rigidly enforced with the aid of torture -- the "good old days," to apologists -- who knows what the mass of people actually believed, or said in private, away from the damning evidence of the writing which has come down to us?

They Come in Huge Throngs to Tell Us That They Don't Care

Another day, another flat assertion in Huffington Post that Jesus existed, that the question is settled except among kooks. Still, Kudos to Craig S Keener for giving a more straightforward title to his article than Bart Ehrman gave to his latest book.

Another huge load of readers' comments saying flatly that Jesus' existence or non-existence is completely unimportant, what matters are all the silly theological questions.

The supposed unimportance of whether or not Jesus existed is important enough to an amazing number of people for them to take the time to speak up about it.

Did they happen to notice that the article by Dr Keener also did not address anything supernatural? Although he sometimes writes on theological subjects, this particular article has a strictly historical orientation.

I started to participate in debates over whether or not Jesus existed only a couple of years ago. I had been raised in a Protestantism I found rather oppressive, became an atheist in the 1970's, before I was full grown, and although since then I have studied history with great interest, I tended to avoid Jesus as an historical subject.

That changed a couple of years ago, in part because so many people discuss whether or not Jesus existed. Discussions on this topic can be struck up all over the place. All in all I'd rather talk about Livy or Charlemagne, but it's much harder for an autodidact to find a group of people interested in one of them.

On the other hand, when there is a discussion going on started by an article written by an academic who studies Livy or Charlemagne or theoretical math or metallurgy or the history of soccer or horology, it's relatively rare for someone to pop in just to say, "I find the subject of your work to be unimportant." Can you see how that would be kind of jarring to people who just wanted to talk about Livy, because they're fascinated by Livy? (He was an ancient Roman historian, in case anyone's wondering who I'm talking about.)

For me, aside from a purely historical perspective -- as an atheist I do not actually participate in theological discussions so much as sneer at them and study them from an anthropological perspective and wonder how much longer people will continue to go for such deadly-dull hooey -- the question of the historicity of Jesus is very interesting to me because of what it reveals about Christianity's continuing influence over academic fields which supposedly these days are secularized and objective and dedicated to free and open inquiry. Because it seems to me that the view which continues to dominate -- well represented by Keener above -- is, "It's settled, even if you're completely secular it's settled, Jesus existed, period, move along folks, nothing to see here..." The dominant position is still an unwillingness to actually debate the question. If there were such willingness, then such an article as Keener's would address the positions of people like Robert Price and Thomas Thompson and the other actual bona fide, non-kooky academics [PS, 18. July 2016: Since writing this I've come to regard Price as kooky, and I still don't actually know Thompson well enough to have a legitimate opinion about whether or not he's kooky. Be that as it may, I'm still not at all convinced that Jesus existed.] who are not at all convinced that Jesus existed -- because while dominant, the view that it's settled is not nearly so unanimous among experts as Keener or Ehrman would have you believe. Typically, Keener doesn't even mention any of their names, but merely claims that are very few such people, and suggests, as have Ehrman and Crossan, to name but the most prominent two, that people who are not sure that Jesus existed are either nuts or have been led astray by nuts. They're avoiding a debate.

But hey, look at all the people who don't care one way or the other, so they say.

Wolff and Academic Vernaculars

It's been 18 years since the last time I dropped out of graduate school, but a lot of the things I read are similar to things that grad students would read. I've spent a significant portion of my life in university libraries and used-book stores; I did that before I was a university student, and between the periods when I was enrolled in one university or another, and when I was enrolled I spent a lot of time in such places researching a lot of things which did not have to do with the courses I was taking at the time. At the moment I'm waiting for a volume of letters between Leibniz and Wolffto arrive via UPS, a title whose audience, I'm guessing, consists mostly of professional academics; the tracking information indicates it should arrive today.

Latin letters: the German title of the book is Briefwechsel (in lateinischer Sprache), Correspondence (in the Latin Language). I suspect that the subtitle in parentheses may be meant to indicate that Leibniz and Wolff also corresponded in other languages, but the present volume presents only the Latin letters. I ordered the book because of my interest in Leibniz, with Wolff's name ringing only the faintest of bells; after I ordered it I checked the Wikipedia article on Wolff -- Christian von Wolff -- and it says that he was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant, and that it was he who introduced the use of German as a language of scholarly instruction and research. (So, it was him! He's the one!) Wolff lived from 1679 to 1754. There was still a lot of German scholarly writing in Latin after him -- see for instance this collection of articles by August Boeckh,written between the 1810's and the 1840's, or the two pieces in Latin written by Nietzsche in the 1860's included in this collection;but both the Boeckh and the Nietzsche are articles having to do with Classical literature, where it's only to be expected that the use of Latin as a vernacular would persist longer than in other fields.

Also, it seems to me, although as yet I have no way at all of proving it, that academic papers and lectures must have been written and read in German at least now and again before Wolff.

Still, I don't see any particular reason to doubt that Wolff at least greatly popularized the use of German and the partial abandonment of Latin in German universities. It seems to me that there must have been some controversy over this; I'm picturing polemics published for and against the use of German in academia. I'm picturing most or all of them written in Latin, on both sides of the question. Reader, you may consider me to be already actively looking for those polemics exchanged between 18th-century academics. I'm on the side that lost, and I'm annoyed with those earlier scholars who lost the cause. I'm picturing pro-Latin polemics full of faulty reasoning, ad hominem attacks, reactionary politics, contempt for the lower classes, and a pronounced lack of charm in general: with some exceptions, a good cause badly argued, and on the other side, very bright and good men, and perhaps even some ladies, holders of salons perhaps, arguing brilliantly and movingly on the wrong side. Cheered on by horses' asses like Rousseau and Paine.

Now the cause of the revival of Latin is a positively Quixotic one, argued by a few weirdos such as myself. I don't think it's impossible that Latin will one day once again be a widespread common language of academia, re-establishing a international, non-nationalistic Latin culture, and not just in Classical studies and related disciplines, either, or even in wider circles than academia; but that's mainly because I think it's logically unsound to make predictions about human behavior using the term "impossible." Even I admit that it's extremely unlikely.