Victor Davis Hanson has lived at least three lives: one as a small-town grape farmer from Selma, California who discovered that it was almost impossible to make a living running a human-sized farm (1980-1984), one as a classics professor who taught large classes and published some very important but flawed work (1985-2004), and one as what Americans politely call a pundit or political commentator (beginning around 2001). At some point he retired from his position at California State University, Fresno, to focus on his third life. However, his biographies online have been scrubbed as clean as the ones which Robert A. Heinlein used to let them print in the back of his books, and they very carefully do not say when he retired. California State University Fresno has the usual gushing lists of honours, publications, and awards; Wikipedia is as useless as you would expect; and the pages announcing his talks and fellowships usually draw on them.
Back in 2004, Rone Tempest at the Los Angeles Times published a piece on him which gives the key dates. He was hired to launch the classics program in 1985 and retired with emeritus status (so he has library privileges, probably a pension, and maybe an office) in the summer of 2004 after only 20 years of teaching. That seems to be the year that he launched his weekly columns in several papers. He received an advance of $500,000 for A War Like No Other around 2003.
Looking south along the Universitätstraße, Innsbruck Mud brick has fallen out of fashion, so cities no longer rise ever higher on the jumbled bones of dead houses. When the Flood or the Umman-Manda next come, perhaps we will regret that, for there is nothing like a good tell for persuading nasty... Continue reading: Innsbruck’s Tell
Even in sleepy Innsbruck with its fixed book prices, all is not well in any end of publishing. The Wagner’sche in the Museumstraße, Innsbruck (they own the first two storeys of the white building, and the second storey of the brown one).
One of my jobs is as a freelance writer, and it is a hard time for us. Advances and royalties are falling, and professional writers in a rich country earn an average of 10k a year from their writing (CAD, USD, GBP, EUR … the currencies vary but the numbers are similar). Elaine Dewar has seen a study that only 7% of the revenues of the Canadian publishing industry are paid to authors; I hope she names it in the print version of ‘The Handover’ and puts it next to how much goes to the publisher and how much to retailers, printers, server farms, and other middlemen and service providers, because another source estimates 10% to the writer, 10% to the publisher, 10% to production, and 70% to various middlemen. Chart writers’ incomes from their writing and you find a hockey stick: the top 5% of authors in the UK earned 42% of the income. If you follow novelists you will hear about the death of short fiction as a paying proposition in the 1970s, the midlist death spiral in the 2000s, or changes in search rules on Amazon or Facebook which devastate creative people’s sales. The central problems are, probably, that they keep inventing other forms of entertainment, and that so many people want to be writers even if the pay is bad. These days if you are interested in history you can watch YouTube or read blogs about books and swords instead of opening a book that someone paid for. (That said, I would really like to see some data on book sales over the last 10 or 20 years … right now all I have is anecdotes).
Now, people like Kris Rusch or Dean Wesley Smith will remind you that many writers change pen names as casually as some people change their clothes, and that surveys of writers are often answered by wannabes who do not write, do not finish what they write, do not put it on the market, and do not keep it on the market until someone buys it. If a favourite writer vanishes or only publishes a book now and then, they may well have switched to a new pen name or be spending time writing a different genre. However, I don’t see any reason to think that there were more wannabe writers in 2014 than 2005 to drive down the average income, and pay rates for short fiction have not increased much since the middle of the last century, while the value of a dollar or a pound has collapsed (the Science Fiction Writers of America, for example, count works paid at least 6 cents a word as professionally published … back in 1940 a penny a word was typical, but the penny was worth 17 times more). If rates are falling, clearly writers have to publish more to earn the same.
Talking about the publishing recalls the fable of the blind man and the elephant: everyone assumes that their little corner of the industry is the model for the whole. So in this post, I would like to talk about the situation in some kinds of publishing which are not as famous as novels.
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; D.T. Potts “Cataphractus and Kamāndar: Some Thoughts on the Dynamic Evolution of Heavy Cavalry and Mounted Archers in Iran and Central Asia”; James C. Scott The Art of Not Being Governed;... Continue reading: One Last Pile of Thesis Fuel (and a Bit of Fun)
Taking a break from academic blogging is not as simple as it seems (meme from The Godfather, Part III courtesy of memegenerator.net)
In November 2016 I expressed a desire to read Fernando González de León’s article “Spanish Military Power and the Military Revolution.” As I found the citation in a forum post from 2011, it occurred to me that I might as well order the book instead of spending another five years wishing and hoping. González challenges Maurice of Nassau’s claim that after reading Aelian’s tactical manual he invented a drill where soldiers fired one rank at a time and then countermarched to get out of the way while they reloaded their cumbersome weapons. (The original letter in which Maurice makes this claim survives, and photos of his sketch of the new tactic have been reprinted in, if I remember correctly, Parker’s Military Revolution). González thinks this was already practised in Hapsburg armies. I wrote this post back in 2017, and decided to post it after listening to the Ancient Warfare Podcast on Ancient Military Manuals in June 2018.
This drill was developed to meet the needs of a particular time and place. In the 16th and 17th centuries, soldiers loaded their matchlock muskets and arquebuses with loose powder and balls and defended themselves with swords and daggers. Manipulating all of this equipment and a lit match without setting oneself on fire or shooting a neighbour was a slow process, and there was a danger that infantry who fired all at once would be over-run by enemies before they could reload. Clubbed muskets or cheap swords were no match for pikes or lances, and when more than two or three ranks of soldiers tried to fire at once, they tended to shoot, deafen, or ignite each other. Ordering the front rank to fire and then countermarch (march to the rear between their file and its neighbour) was a convenient way to get them out of the way while they reloaded. Famously, soldiers in Europe and Japan took to this drill, while soldiers in India and most of the Moslem world rejected it. By the 18th century, infantry were armed with bayonets and issued with pre-made paper cartridges and muskets which made their own fire, and other drills were developed to suit new conditions. Having defined what we are looking for, let see how González’ argument holds up:
Tobias Capwell, the armour scholar who jousts, has a book out on his favourite sport. I wish there were people with a similar combination of skills writing about ancient armour! Tobias Capwell, Arms and Armour of the Joust. Arms and Armour Series. Royal Armouries, Leeds, 2018. 96 pages, ISBN-13 978-0948092831. You can find a copy... Continue reading: Cross-Post: New Tobias Capwell Book on Jousting
Oxbow Books, fine publisher and bookseller, has a book sale on. I flipped through their leaflet and picked out some things which my readers might be interested in. Anastasius Antonaras, Fire and Sand (Yale University Press, 2013) {509 glass objects from Preislamic times in an American collection} Beltrame (ed.), Sveti Pavao Shipwreck: a 16th Century... Continue reading: Sale at Oxbow Books
One of the graves of the kings of Elam at Tschoga Zanbil in Iran. If you haven’t invented any new mathematics, and are thinking of rounding up a gang of forced labourers to build a fancy tomb to give you immortal fame, keep in mind that the Assyrians may come around and dig up your... Continue reading: The Ancient Story of Stephen Hawking’s Tombstone
The cover of the Ace edition of The Cosmic Computer by Michael Whelan c/o http://www.zarthani.net/ Say what you like about the 1970s, but their oil painters could do cover art!
On Canada Day 2017 I finished re-reading the project Gutenberg text of Piper’s Cosmic Computer (my paperback copy with the wonderful red-and-purple cover is back in Canada). I read this novel every few years, and I always learn something new. Quite a few people who grew up on the American science fiction of the 1940s through 1970s have been reading the news, finding something uncomfortably familiar, and looking back to those Silver Age writers to understand some current madness (Phil Paine reread Revolt in 2100 for the same reason). I can’t talk about that here, but I want to talk about some of the things which I found valuable in this novel.
One would think that someone coming this way on a cycle with headlights and reflectors would need to watch out to the right and bear a little bit left, since cyclists coming from the left can see you coming and slow down if they want to make the turn onto the... Continue reading: A Tag from the Bard
