Getting ready

Because it's a mere fifteen hours before I have to leave home for the airport, and because I have had a whole month in which to do the work, I am only now compiling Mac and Windows versions of my database to be released for download from our website. This is an utterly idiotic thing to be doing, I know, because I shall be unavailable for the first week after releasing them. Any problems that might arise will go unpatched, to the great joy of our customers as you can imagine, until after my return. I should really stop this nonsense and get on to more useful things like cleaning and packing. [Updated: the new version has indeed been put on hold.]

Booked flights on a last-minute website again, and once again the cheapest route to London was via Zurich. I'll be landing this time in the new-to-me City Airport in the Docklands, which will be quite exciting. I hope there will be a reasonably convenient bus route from there to the centre, rather than having to take the Tube in.

(Just spent half an hour browsing around satellite photos of London (page titles are all wrong, just ignore them), quite fascinating. I wish that this resource had been available when I lived there, I would have seen — and explored and inhabited — the city quit differently.)

I shall have my laptop with me, e-mail for the answering of, but whether I can get online often and long enough to blog or visit your websites remains to be seen — to say nothing of logging into Second Life. In case I cannot get online, I wish you all a pleasant week, and hope to be back in contact on my return to Stuttgart on Friday the Thirteenth.

But first parallel to all the above, I've been reading a review by Daniel Mendelsohn in a recent "New Yorker" of a new edition of Herodotus' 2500-year-old "Histories" of the Greco-Persian wars, which I have been reading for several weeks now. It's a great review of a wonderful book (though I am reading not the edition in question but an older Penguin translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt), and I recommend both to your attention. Here are Mendelsohn's penultimate paragraphs:

All of which is to say that while Herodotus may or may not have anticipated hypertext, he certainly anticipated the novel. Or at least one kind of novel. Something about the Histories, indeed, feels eerily familiar. Think of a novel, written fifty years after a cataclysmic encounter between Europe and Asia, containing both real and imagined characters, and expressing a grand vision of the way history works in a highly tendentious, but quite plausible, narrative of epic verve and sweep. Add an irresistible anti-hero eager for a conquest that eludes him precisely because he understands nothing, in the end, about the people he dreams of subduing; a hapless yet winning indigenous population that, almost by accident, successfully resists him; and digressions powerfully evoking the cultures whose fates are at stake in these grand conflicts. Whatever its debt to the Ionian scientists of the sixth century B.C. and to Athenian tragedy of the fifth, the work that the Histories may most remind you of is "War and Peace."

And so, in the end, the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Indeed. Go read. But don't buy the particular edition being reviewed: the translation is said by Mendelsohn to be awful.

Busy doing nothing

Somehow a week has flashed past since I last blogged, though it hardly seems possible. I've been running fast just to stand still, it seems, going flat-out to little visible effect.

I am surprised by how little I have been eating since returning from Canada. My mother fed us four or five times a day, some of those were snacks but there were always at least two multi-course meals. Well, I get through the day on a small breakfast, a moderate lunch and a few cookies with tea in the evening, and cannot say that I feel hungry or deprived. On the contrary, I still feel that I am eating slightly too much of slightly the wrong things.

The Münsters presented a contract for my fulltime employment, which had a few oddities. The pay, for one: 23% more than I am currently getting, for 100% more hours per week (though that would include health insurance, pension and unemployment insurance). For a second, the statement that "up to 5 hours unpaid overtime per week" may be required—without limit in frequency or total. Well, I've been there before, and that means that every week would be 45 hours long, i.e. that I would get 23% more money for 125% more hours: quite unacceptable. So I made a counterproposal, which they are considering.

G and U went through the phases of denial and unreasoning rage and are now trying to negotiate. They presented a suggestion whereby they would pay me half of what the Münsters are offering, for not-quite-half-time permanent work in their office (based on the presumption that the office will soon have work). This is kind and flattering and very sweet, but leaves me exactly where I was last year when I advertised my services and ended up at the Münsters: I would still need to find some other work to fill those hours here, because I cannot live on that half-time job. It would be grand if the Münsters would agree to keeping me on part-time for the remaining hours, even at a lower rate of pay, but given the Münstermeister's expressed desire to have my colleague and I in his physical offices I very much doubt that they would agree to it.

On top of that, it's almost summer here. I ate a salad for lunch at an extremely un-chic restaurant with outdoor terrace by the Feuersee, and found that quite wonderfully refreshing. I have decided to do that once a week for the rest of my time here, or the rest of the summer, whichever ends first.

I am also spending too much time, too late at night, in Second Life. Much of that is doing good deeds: helping friends set up a shop, writing scripts and advising them on merchandise, but the rest has been just faffing about, talk and dancing and timewastery.

That's all for now, the weather is breaking and I am tired. Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Idle

Took a 90-minute lunchbreak today, walked downtown and had salmon steak and Bratkartoffel with a glass of French white wine at a semi-fastfood place, and very nice it was too. Trees are leafing out all over — and the dandelions are up!

After such a lovely break, I am now finding it very difficult to get back to work. Be strong! I only need another 1.5 hours to make my weekly target. Spent the whole of yesterday plus an hour Tuesday working on a single page of the Münsters' Wiki, the longest and most complicated piece yet. I was absolutely exhausted at the end of it, I found myself yestereve sitting around in SL lost for words. Imagine that: moi, unable to find le mot juste.

I've now spent a week back at Rose Street (and for that matter back at work) after the better part of three weeks off, what with London and bronchitis, and have come to a conclusion. At least some of my discomfort and annoyance here has a biochemical basis: too much caffeine and sugar. It makes me irritable and unconcentrated and vaguely queasy. I am considering making a thermos of Yogi Tea to bring with me each morning, to cut down on my coffee consumption. As for the sugar, I could simply stop going to the local bakery every single morning (and most afternoons too).

Enough. Onwards and upwards, get those damned 90 minutes done.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I wish you all a delightful and Springlike weekend.