1.05 Public Transport and Calamity

I shouldn't be posting this from work, perhaps doubly so, but I need an outlet or I will start re-living the events over and over again in my head. I've stuffed up....

I never stuff things up. I take my red pen of righteousness to them, and I draw a soft and noble line through the things that other people stuff up.

I was catching the bus to Lyneham to visit Booklore. I'd heard from a friend that they occasionally carried the Loeb series, and I was thinking of reading another Greek text. This man, and here I must commend Canberra for its' population of long-haired men as I think I have seen two blondes and three brunettes just in the last few days, sat down beside me and began to strike up a conversation.

I wish I could remember it, because he seemed reasonably lucid and coherent, but I was occupied with much more important plans. I am not sure if any of you in Melbourne or my new online contacts have encountered the amusing text of A.E. Waite, but I had a copy of his book that I should not have removed from my workplace, and I was holding this in both hands to both remind me of what fun I would have with a red marker in Photoshop that night, and to ward off the effervescently giggling teens. The pink ones, as these were, tend to flee at the sight of anything beyond the mundane.

I think that I am digressing in my panic right now. It's only a stupid, nearly worthless book, but if it is discovered missing I could lose this job.

I talked to the man about something, in the way that I do when I am not paying attention. A spiel on grammar, or Akhilleus versus Achilles, or perhaps the taste of coffee in this city. He seemed to be incredibly bored or incredibly interested. I kept thinking of my scanning and dastardly corrections as an aside to the cataloguing of the images I was set to do, and watching the trees of the huge and grid-like parks of Canberra amble past the bus.

When I saw the street I had to disembark on, I must have begun to gather up my work bag and drink bottle and other sundries while still talking, because I don't think I ever did say goodbye to him. I just had this moment of fear when he didn't seem to realise that I was trying to get to the door, and I could see the shops slowly trickling towards us.

And then (try to contest my use of "and", and I shall wave my kai and de, and explain how Greek grammar works. As it is a part of our language, I am allowed to use their rules.) I hurried down the aisle, dismebarked, and spent more money than I should have on books.

I have a copy of a series of papers on the Athenian theatre, called "Nothing to do with Dionysos." It looks very interesting. But when I had sat reading the first article in it at home for an hour I realised that I wasn't reading the Waite book. I must have left it with the man. I can't think of anywhere else I could have.

I didn't fancy riding the buses until he appeared again, so I searched. After all, if I have a blog, and others have blogs, perhaps someone had posted. I didn't even begin to look at those, though, because Google books has a copy. I feel like I did when I first translated "moira" as "deadly fate", and felt the weight of Hektor's future heavy upon my heart. I am a fool, I am absolutely dim! I didn't need to take the book at all.

And now it is gone, and I have no idea where. If anyone knows a generic guy, or perhaps more specifically one who has a copy of "The Book of Black Magic" by Arthur Edward Waite that is not his own (who lives within Canberra, preferably), please push him in my direction.

1.04 Books, Life Often Overrides Desperate Yearning. Hopelessness of Tepidity

I haven't really established a base of friends or acquaintances here. Cal expounded upon the virtues of comradeship and company earlier this evening when he called me, but I have never felt the need to connect with new people. When I do meet somebody, it is always meaningful; I have read their book or seen their artwork or discovered their company when attending a conference either in the flesh or on the electric waves of my machine. I meet individuals as people that I would enjoy spending time with to the exclusion of others; I don't cleave to others in a strange desparation to prevent my own exclusion.

I highly doubt that I could meet anyone outside of my workplace here that could be eligible. I don't want to sound snobbish, but if there is one true thing about this town, it is that Canberrans keep to themselves. The intellectuals at the think-tanks here keep within their own faculties, within their own disciplines, sometimes even within their own sub-specialisation. Their are clubs and societies for every known interest and personality... provided that you have the fortune to meet one of their members at the right time.

But that merely brings me back to the manner in which I enjoy making company; either by serendipitous accidents of space and time, or by a lucky coincidence of interest.

Do I indeed sound standoffish? I apologise. Cal has made me feel in an entirely illogical way that somehow my habit of not visiting dance clubs - although I have heard that in Canberra they are merely drink-and-stumble clubs - is antisocial. Bah. Bah Humbug! We all know that the true connections of the human spirit lie in abstract ideas and not in physical realities. We wouldn't be using this medium as a point of contact if we did not.

I think that this hot weather is making me irritable. I'm going back to my book; it will distract me from the weather and draw me back into a world which is, surprisingly enough, all about guns, germs, and steel. I am enjoying it, though I feel that a deeper look into anthropological and prehistorical journals would expand greatly beyond the content that Diamond has seen fit to include in his work. After all, it is a popular science book. Popular biological anthropology, of all things. It can't be well researched or thought out. Perhaps I have merely become disillusioned under the effects of all the others I have read, and this book will be a salvation of faith in some small way.

1.03 Veritably Foul Day

Most of today was long and tedious. Cataloguing can only hold one's interest for so long when one reaches a series. Collection of inscriptions in Attic Greek, volume this, number that, series such.

It rained yesterday. No, now it rained the day before yesterday.

I forget that we're living in a drought here; I spend most of my days indoors in one place or another, and it only really strikes me when I go outside with friends or have oddly exciting thoughts such as the elation of rain. I love the sound of rain, its thuds and shudders on open glass windows. How it dances a staccato beat on a rooftop while simultaneously collapsing exhausted with soft yawns on the grass; how it laughs at the solid and stagnant man-made lakes of this city and throws handfuls of confetti-like drops down at them.

I've finished The Historian, which has highly improved my opinion of at least one dark and gloomy creature of the night. That he had to enlist someone else to catalogue the stuff, in the end, was a bit less awesome.

I've started reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond as a workmate who studied anthropology and classics reccomended it. I have to say that his ideas of our society - at its most base level concerning our complete impossibilty of being - are striking a chord within me. I haven't read enough to determine whether his theories are what I would consider solid, but the tone of his prose and his views on religion are bringing out wry sympathetic laughter from my mouth.

He does misuse the word "history", however in the prologue. By definition, History is a term used for the human past that has been recorded in some form of text. When he addresses the lack of attention to prehistory, he should have known enough to call it prehistory rather than "History before the emergence of writing". He also claims that not enough attention has been shown to prehistoric societies, where any archaeology or anthropology student will vehemently argue that there are nowhere near enough records or physical evidence to argue for any prehistoric social organisation; it is all extrapolation.

Aside from that, I think that I will be able to read this book at least without cringing nearly as much as I do with most.

I wonder why our literate society keeps evolving culturally away from competent editors. Why, when science fiction was young and novels were still novel, any editor worth his or her water content would be cutting whole passages and shifting chapters and paragraphs around; in essence rewriting the entire text. Today we're luck if they convert the document to Word and run it through the American spellchecking program, with its horrific attempt at grammar analysis.

I'm going to see if I make it to the renaissance in this book before I have to close it in anguish. I hope that everyone else enjoys their "let's-put-a-holiday-between-Christmas-and-Valentine's-day" weekend.

1.02 Connected and Disconnected

I never did really explain myself in that last post. My first post, really. I'm posting here now so that all of my old friends in Melbourne can keep track of my rants and ravings as if I had never left. Lurkers may, of couse, lurk as they wish; I will expend no effort on you, but feel free to read a little now and then.

It's so abysmally hot here. I drip. I dribble off of my chair. I tried to sleep, but found the darkness suffocating in this weather; I tried to phone Cal, but there was some out of service error. After weather checks, news site checks and many sleepily panicked text messages, I was left without anything else to do. He is fine, despite the mass blackouts and hysteria that has ensued from a day without The Simpsons or even a taste of the duplicitous joys of the internet within his general area.

I wish I had been there, with a megaphone of justice. "Go and read a BLOODY BOOOK!" I would have screamed, standing on a cardboard box of academic seconds - I don't think I could stand on a soapbox and maintain my sense of personal pride. Honestly, this dependance on television and electronic amusement is causing more hair loss from personal removal than Bush's tantrum in Iraq and the film "Troy" have (and that is a considerable amount).

Even so, I feel a similar dependance. Under my self-imposed rule, without which I might never stir from my bookshelves, I have another three hours of "sleep time" in which I cannot read. But I can't call Cal.
I think that I should try lying in the dark and waiting for the dawn.

1.01 And My First Post Will Be About...

Hold that thought.

[edit]

I was initially intending to post verbosely and eloquently about the prose and content of "The Historian", which I am currently lost within, but I found an article on women in the oikos in Athenian texts, and I had to run for Perseus to check the original greek in Medea. I do feel slightly heartbroken that I am still saving up for hard copies of most greek texts, and ashamed that the only Homer I have (in the flesh, as it were) is that ungraceful collection of pages in the J.A.C.T book I used as an undergraduate.

I wonder why we humans - or perhaps just us scholars - have such a rabid desire to possess ideas (for that is all that books and poems and essays truly are) in a physical form. Is it truly more efficient to print and pay and bind for what is merely an afterthought not hours after we have turned the final page?

Given the databases that we can create and consume and distribute much easier in an electronic form, what draws us back and back again to the solid page?

A friend of mine, a History student I think, talked to me one day long ago about the sudden advancement of trades, science and literature through the development of rudimentary literacy. Almost in a logical progression, the Roman occupation of Britain brought in higher literacy and thus greater transferral of knowledge; better bridges, better mills, more efficient copies of forging techniques.
With the loss of this literacy came the time we call "the dark ages". It seems to me as if we were on the edge of an age of light, of complete transparency of ideas and near absolute equality of mind. Pushing, almost bursting through into an entirely new format of words and visions.

I don't think that I can stand that thought. Let transcendancy lie in the bosom of spiritual thinkers, and let me lie down in my bed to sleep if I can. It is flanked currently by Haruki Murakami and Susannah Clarke, who sit on top of my constant companions, Euripides and Homer. I need the comforting feel of their rough old pages, and the scent of a hundred past readers, to truly settle into a good day's reading. Yes, even if Perseus is so accessible and useful, I think that I feel safer, perhaps, looking at the printed word.