Words’ End

In the midst of eventful family life, I’ve been transcribing (“We in humanities computing call it digitizing, honey”) Roland works, so that I can work on the corpus come fall. Enfance de Roland / Jung Roland is a nineteenth-century French opera, written both in French and in German, which tells of his youth (if you haven’t figured it out from the title). What a young gentleman, I’ll tell you. Loves his mother more than life itself, cares only about returning her to honor after she’s been exiled by her brother King Charlemagne. Roland isn’t Charlemagne’s child of incest in this one, his daddy’s Milon, but he isn’t around. Roland undertakes battle with a giant so that he might help a friend procure a magic sword and win the hand of Charlemagne’s daughter – you follow me so far?

Here’s the kicker. The friend, the sworn blood-brother? He’s Pagan. Sigmar is a godless heathen! Granted, he converts to Christianity at the end, but that’s not the point. Roland the Christian hero, right hand to Roman Emperor Charlemagne, Roland who in the Song of Roland proclaims that “Christians are right and Pagans are wrong,” and who smites the Saracen enemies without mercy, in his childhood is made out to befriend a Pagan. I love this.

The other work-related thing is perl. Perl is great!, which should indicate to you that I’m still at the very beginning and haven’t run into real problems yet. But, really: I am bad at logic and associations, and perl is making sense. Of course, the Llama Book (Learning Perl, O’Reilly series) deserves a lot of credit for that. Best-written manual I’ve purchased in years.

Speaking of purchasing manuals, Hahn & Harley’s The Unix Companion is on its way to me. Used, but cheap, and otherwise out of print. Seems to be pretty easy to get used, though, and it comes highly recommended. For a tome of several hundred pages, it is remarkably clear and easy to use. Erm, if you are like me and actually need a unix reference book.