No posts till Saturday

At least not by me. Richard Hinckley Allen is good till Saturday.

I’m away in Oxford for the week where’ll I’ll be in the Sackler Library with my laptop and scanner and possibly a second keyboard*. What I won’t have is internet access. I could register the laptop for wireless access, but that seems like a remarkably stupid thing to do. The whole point of holing up in the library is to avoid distractions – which will be difficult as they have shelves of fascinating but irrelevant books. The plan is to come out with a large block of PhD done, a seminar prepared and one or two papers.

On the subject of papers, I’ll engage in a little bit of auto-trumpet blowing. The post Introducing Damasus has been re-written as Increased Joy through Delegated Reading and will appear in December’s edition of ACN. The only major change is a reference to Mike Heyworth’s paper Feed the World in Internet Archaeology – but seeing as that’s not Open Access, there’d be no real added value in producing an OA version for this site. Damasus will be upgraded to check feeds on a daily basis when I get back. This would seem to be an argument Tribble’s comments, which I haven’t got round to writing about after a month, though I agree with some of them. Sharon Howard is less enthusiastic and you can catch her thoughts and links into other discussions of Tribble at her site.

Of course it’s easy for her to dismiss Tribble, her site does reflect well on her. I might be job hunting soon, so it’s food for thought. I’ve heard of a position I’d like in a good department which I can go for. I’ve got the CV prepared and ready to go, but I haven’t mentioned this site. I suppose if it’s generating papers, then perhaps I should, but it always unnerves me when I discover someone else has read what I’ve typed.

Note: I’m not fishing for compliments.

Anyhow I’m gone till Saturday. You’ll be able to tell if it went well or not. I’ve been trying to write a piece on Aristophanes’s opposition to the Peleponnesian War for a couple of months, but it’s come out ham-fisted and partisan every time, when what I’ve wanted to concentrate on is the bravery of standing up to someone who has already tried to have you put to death. I’ve tried taking it from Aristophanes‘s point of view, Cleon‘s point of view and an ‘objective’ third person view but it’s a complex issue and the modern parallels aren’t very subtle. If the entry based on Knights finally goes online then I’ve probably had a whale of a time.

* “Why a second keyboard?” I was asked and I replied. “So I can type things in twice as fast.” I find laptop keyboards small and it’s so much easier, and faster, to type on a full-sized keyboard. I’ll admit I could have explained it better. I’d set the laptop to act as the mouse and tapping that with my left whilst typing in on the other keyboard with the right as they passed later on. They are now convinced I can type at 240 wpm.