Lost

 In the chapter "Writing" of Reading and Writing, Robertson Davies wrote

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to draw in upon himself and his work until he knows nobody except other writers; he is then reduced to the literary desperation of writing a book about a man who is writing a book, and when he does that we know he is finished.

On St. Patrick's Day 2006, near the Gallery Place Metro, someone from Solas Nua offered me the choice of one of two or three books by Irish authors, and I chose the novel There Is a House by Kieron Connolly.  I took it home, looked at it, and put in on the bookshelf. It stayed there a good while.

Recently I noticed it and thought that I might as well read it: it is about 200 pages long, and the pages are not large. I have read it, and think that in part it is subject to Davies's criticism. The theme of the narrator's writer's block is varied if not improved by chapters of convalescence from alcoholic benders. 

Having said that, I will say that I don't believe that Connolly knew only other writers, though I can imagine that this might be easier in Ireland than in some other countries (and might not imply an especially narrow circle of acquaintances). I will also say that if Solas Nua were to appear suddenly next week and offer me another choice of books, I might take one of Connolly's if one were in the mix.

Tangible Reality

 Last week, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section gave about 3/4 of a page to an excerpt from a book that concerns Joan Didion, the Mansons, etc. I read the excerpt distractedly, until I came to a sentence beginning "Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969..." That stopped me.

Just above my left ankle there is a scar from a mishap in the late summer of 1969. The reality that contributed to the wound was certainly tangible enough. There are plenty of other tangible encounters I remember from that summer that left no scar but were sufficiently pleasant, unpleasant, or in any case significant, to stay in the memory. I imagine that most humans born by 1963 can say the same.

If in place of  "barely tangible" the author wrote "multiform and confusing", I could understand the sentence. As it stands, I can't.

 

Timber

 While we were out walking on Sunday, my wife and I had the following exchange:

W.:,"What does 'Zimmer' mean in German?"
I: "room". 
W.: "What does Zimmermann mean?"
I: "Carpenter. Hmm."

 A look at the Grimms' dictionary shows that "Zimmer" derives from roots cognate with the English "timber", and originally applied to buildings of wood and to wood suitable for building, then to portions of such a building. So a Zimmermann would be just who one needed to build a Zimmer.

And I don't know why it occurred to my wife to ask.

 

 

Certificates, Again

 It turns out that our network manager signed us up for certificates for the period 2013 through 2026. Evidently this means that we are grandfathered in for the one-year certificate duration. One of his successors received and verified the request for 2025-2026, then sent me the certificate bundle. I have applied the certificates to most of the servers that need it: two are very slow to come up after the installation and restart of the processes, and so are waiting for an early morning.

Suddenly the weeks leading up to mid-March are much less stressful. We have another year to think about how we will manage with the three-month certificates.

Certificates

Web server certificates used to last one for three years, I recall. Our network administrator would send a request to GoDaddy, get back a certificate, and it would be up to others of us to install it, possibly with some change of format, on the assorted servers. I thought that the three-year span was convenient. It gave one enough time to forget the procedures, but with proper documentation that didn't matter.

At some point, GoDaddy shortened the life of certificates to one year. That was tolerable. Last year, I read that the standard length of certificates would be three months, and so it is. This is great if you can set up LetsEncrypt with the http challenge, and let the certbot take over. If you can't, then life becomes somewhat more complicated. I suppose that we will figure out the dns challenge instead. But I wish we didn't have to. Is it really plausible to suppose that a certificate can be defeated in one year but not in three months? And there are proposals to shorten the lifetimes still further. Oh, dear.

Present-Day American Usage

 Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume gives page numbers for its quotations from Hume in the manner (T 266) or (E 153), referring to particular Clarendon Press editions of Hume's works. It happens that I have the edition he uses for A Treatise of Human Nature, which in Part II, Causation in the Treatise, I did refer to at times. Having reached, Part III, Causation in the Enquiry, I went to find my copy, doubting I had the one used. I did not: I had an edition printed by Bobbs-Merrill.

Curiously, Bobb-Merrill printed it as An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. On page lv, "A Note on the Text" concludes

Spelling and punctuation have been revised throughout to conform to present-day American usage.

And so it has. For example the edition replaces with "insure" the "ensure" in

The poorest artificer, who labours alone, expects at least the protection of the magistrate, to ensure him the enjoyment of the fruits of his labour.

And of course it removes the "u" from "labour".

This strikes me as just wrong. It is well to impose present-day American spelling on present-day American authors; though Jacques Barzun thought otherwise about publishers' conventions, as he wrote in the essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp", collected in A Word or Two Before You Go...: Brief Essays on Language. But though Bobbs-Merrill's market consisted of present-day Americans, its author was not one. I have to think that anyone capable of following the arguments of An Enquiry can manage English or Scottish spelling and an older system of punctuation.

It is fair to say that the edition appeared in 1955. Quite likely practices had changed with twenty or thirty years at Bobbs-Merrill and comparable publishers.

Alloys

 In checking a term in Liddell and Scott, I was interested to see "pankalkeos" defined as "all-brazen", being used to think of "kalkos" (χαλκός) as meaning primarily "bronze". And indeed in the main article on "kalkos", the lexicon says that antiquity did not know what we call brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. But evidently the ancients were loose in their designations, sometimes using "kalkos" for unalloyed copper, sometimes for what we call bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The Romans were likewise free in their use of "aes". No doubt the purchasers of metal products were quite precise in specifying what they wanted and in checking what they received, though.

"Brass" does not quite sound as impressive as "bronze". Partly I suppose this owes to I Corinthians 13, partly to the colloquial use of "brass" for money or for effrontery. But it was the term that earlier English made do with, and that is why the Authorized Version used "brass" for "kalkos". The OED's earliest citation for "bronze" in the modern sense is from 1739; and in 1755 Johnson used "brass" in his definition of bronze.