bookandswordblog @bookandswordblog@scholar.social

New post: the ancient origin of a simile, life as a play https://bookandsword.com/2019/04/20/life-as-a-play/ #shakespeare #rah #stoicism

Wow, a respectful response to one of my essays on FB (!)

#patreon will be introducing the new fee schedule on all accounts created after 6 May 2019. How to fund creative work which can be digitalized (which asymptotically approaches 100% of all creative work) is a hard problem and they were helpful for a few years even if they are losing their will or under the thumb of their funders.

And crikey, after correspondence with one of the authors there may be a second edition in the pipeline! Skillfull writing and analysis can still change the world #writing

In which I begin alluding to show tunes, and end with W.B. Yates: oh the scholar and the swordsman should be friends https://bookandsword.com/2019/04/06/oh-the-scholar-and-the-swordsman-should-be-friends/ #hema #historicalFencing #bookReview

#wikipedia peeps! I know someone with a long history of cheating business partners who I am almost sure is writing their own wikipedia page (or having their spouse do it) to hide their past. Is there someone whom I could pass the information on to to flag the page for investigation? Some people hunt creeps like that as a hobby, but Wikipedia is not my world. Please reshare.

If you want to get a sense of what i was working on, I just published a popular article on Achaemenid Conscription in Babylonia https://www.uibk.ac.at/fsp-kultur/junge-forschung/texte/manning-altorientalistik-wehrpflicht.html #ancientHistory #assyriology #sciCom

I have decided to combine some half-written things into a triple review. I don't think I have ever written one of those!

This review by Donald Lateiner talks about the main ways scholars disagree about how to study early Greece: should we rely on contemporary, indigenous evidence (which is mostly archaeology) or literature written by outsiders hundreds of years after the fact? Should we treat literature as a collection of facts to be arranged, or as claims to question? Should we postulate revolution followed by status, or constant change and reinvention and invention of tradition?

http://www.michiganwarstudiesreview.com/2017/downloads/2017-004.pdf

Odd mix ... WP-the-open-source-project boasts of its increasing market share, while wp-the-company continues its new special-offer-once-a-week marketing campaign https://wordpress.org/news/2019/03/one-third-of-the-web/ #stateOfTheWeb #wordpress

Europeans! Do you have a 'best practice' for citing authors whose names are spelled differently on the title pages of different works? This is common with researchers from Scandinavia, Russia(-aev, -ayev, -aiev), Germany (ß vs. ss, ue vs. ü), or the Arab world ... I feel like I should normalize the spellings #citationPractices

Call for Papers: Narratology in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Event will take place from 15-17 November 2019, Innsbruck AT.
https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-39808

@AceNovo I found an essay by an Australian philosopher named Peter Harrison on the history of the phrase "Judeo-Christian" https://www.abc.net.au/religion/an-eccentric-tradition-the-paradox-of-western-values/10095044 He thinks that the postwar United States was key but that it goes back to 19th century German thinkers who were quietly dropped down the memory hole: that seems to be a classic pattern in postwar culture.

For all the attacks on the academe, on humanities and social scientists, and on universities, its worth noting how many quacks and pop thinkers with some kind of academic credential or affiliation trumpet it everywhere they can get. These things still have power in pop culture, even if many people are not sure how to separate babblers and name-droppers from serious thinkers respected by other experts.

Cross-post: art dealer Randall Hixenbaugh has published a catalogue of 2100 surviving Greek bronze helmets http://bookandsword.com/2019/03/21/cross-post-hixenbaugh-on-ancient-greek-helmets/ #book

#patreon which processes payments for fine projects like https://www.patreon.com/bookandswordblog is launching another change of policy in May. At first glance the main difference seems to be that accounts created after the launch will pay more to patreon and a different rate for payment processing. Existing accounts are grandfathered in, so #altAc people with an account might want to look closely.

New post: the inclusive renaissance approach to the past, or, when did some people start telling Europeans and European settlers that their only cultural ancestors were Greeks and Romans? Was it after WW II? Samuel P. Huntington and VDH are very recent blatherers https://bookandsword.com/2019/03/16/hieroglyphics-in-mantua/ #ancientHistory #rezeptionsGeschichte

Ok, and now wordpress is advertising on the stats page for upgrading to a Business plan and getting Google Analytics ... something seems to have convinced them they need to raise more money.

Ok wordpress, now you have popups asking us to sign up with something called G-suite? Another reason to move to a static site on my own server.

This is important because in ancient history, the literary sources tell us about the world as seen from about a handful of cities by the people with so much money that they could devote their time to writing and thinking and hunting. If you want to access the 99%, the farmers and weavers and wandering prophets and children and people from Rhaetia or Tarracontinensis or Bactria, you HAVE to look at material culture.