Do you need a second pair of eyes on that book, paper, or project report? I have been editing business and academic writing since 2013. Aside from ancient world studies and medieval studies, I have experience creating software documentation and a background in academic computer science. Because of my time living in Austria, I have experience with the challenges of writing in a second language or a new field.
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An anonymous Tumblr account called Xenophon is Sad used to collect quotes where researchers disrespected or erased Xenophon the Athenian adventurer. Although Xenophon was a friend of Socrates and an extremely successful writer in many genres, his words leave many academics cold. The Tumblr has not been updated since 2021 but I found two more quotes which belong on it.
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In my home office I am packed between what feels like half the output of Eisenbrauns and Dover Books, dust-jacketed hardcover books on Aelian the Tactician, self-published softcovers with the study notes of renaissance tailors, and the black brick-shaped bulk of Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander. My hard drive and bookmarks folder are crammed with thousands more PDFs and links. Databases of medieval wills, Attic Red Figure pottery, and small finds are a click of my browser away. But even then, I believe that the choice to print a book makes sense today.
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Two weird and wonderful conferences have come through my inbox in the past few weeks. I thought some of my gentle readers might be interested. There is a face-to-face conference on the f word in France, and an online conference on the medieval world in computer games in Vienna. Linguists are where historians are going (nobody but other linguists knows what they do) but they have fun! These involve Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and James Baillie the British specialist in medieval Georgia.
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BC had a slightly more exciting than ordinary election, in which the party which had the second most seats and formed government from 2002 to 2017 changed its name and dissolved itself, a party which got less than 2% of the vote and no Members of the Legislative Assembly in the last election came three seats short of a majority, the former head of the Green Party said he would vote for someone whose party is not sure that climate change is real and worth taking action to reduce, and there were bomb threats and hangings in effigy. Amidst that, party politician Kareem Allam is talking about why he changed parties, and he says:
we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.
Now, its hard to be eloquent in an interview, especially when you are trying carefully not to offend former or current allies. But that makes me think about the history of the Salish Sea about 150 years ago.
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Low-tech people tend to be good at preserving commons. They have to be, because they don’t have a global supply chain to save them if they wreck their environment. And so for thousands of years people have conserved the cedar forest on Mount Lebanon and saved its wood for special purposes. Ancient inscriptions tell the story.
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In July and August I was working on a life of my father Kelly Bert Manning who died in 2020. His sickness and death affected many people. Some other things reminded me of how other people’s lives have been derailed by the death of someone close to them.
Read moreNews outlets such as the BBC have been retelling a story about a failed business hit in Nanning, China.
A group of hitmen have been jailed after repeatedly trying to subcontract a job to each other in Guangxi, China.
Businessman Tan Youhui hired a hitman to “take out” his competitor for $282,000 (£218,000), a court heard.
But the hitman hired another man to do the job, offering $141,000. That man hired another hitman, who hired another hitman, who hired another hitman.
The plan crumbled when the final hitman met the man, named only as Wei, in a cafe and proposed faking his death.
All six men – the five hitmen and Tan – were convicted of attempted murder by the court in Nanning, Guangxi, following a trial that lasted three years.
Some people might see this as a story about outsourcing, neoliberal capitalism, or the rough-and-tumble nature of some things in China. I have a classical education so this made me think of the fall of the Bacchidae of Corinth in the seventh century BCE. The story was told by Herodotus two centuries later, and he puts it in the mouth of someone telling the Spartans that it is terrible to be ruled by a monarch or tyrant, so beware:
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Over on his website and social media, Roland Warzecha has been talking about how to hold European swords of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the so-called Naue type II. These swords have a broad flat blade, a broad tang with scales riveted to the sides, and usually a mushroom-shaped pommel. If you are at all interested in swords, these are worth studying, because they are the earliest swords that we can understand really well. Iron tends to shrink or expand in the ground or water, and especially after it is excavated, so the remains of iron or steel swords tend to be ugly misshapen things. Bronze swords can emerge from the ground looking like they just left a cutler’s shop, and sometimes they have bronze grips and pommels so all parts of the sword are preserved. In the worst case the handle and the area where the handle joins the blade are usually preserved. In most of Bronze Age Europe it was not customary to make detailed images of human beings. Nor was it customary to write things down. But the swords, spears, and shields in museums speak to us and tell us how they want to be used if we can learn to hear them. They were carefully designed by sophisticated people for sophisticated people.
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My father died four years and three months ago after a struggle with cancer. None of us had the heart to write an obituary in the early days of the COVID epidemic. This is my attempt to tell the story of his life and describe what a person he was. Any one person’s life is tangled up with other people and other stories. I have chosen to leave specific living people out of this story as far as possible.
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About sixty years ago, L. Sprague de Camp discovered a list of ancient magic tricks and stagecraft.
Read moreMost of the tricks employed by the witch Saphanbaal to awe her clients (in my novel) are described by Bishop Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies. In the early third century, the bishop constituted himself a one-man Society for Psychical Research. He exposed the deceptions of magicians, such as putting lumps of alum in the fire and gluing fish scales to the ceiling. Of course, this was six hundred years after the time of my story. But, since some of the methods Hippolytus describes have been used by mediums right down to modern times, we may assume for the purposes of fiction that these sleights were already old when he revealed them.
“Author’s note,” L. Sprague de Camp, The Arrrows of Hercules (1965)
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