THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
March 9, 2024
A New Philology:
The old philology that once dominated Classics and many literary fields loved, as its name implied, language, especially in the form of old texts and individual words which could be traced back to remote origins. It deciphered papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, determined what was the best reading when sources disagreed about a text, cherished verbal nuance, meter, and figures of speech. It flourished in the Renaissance , and added a new dimension after 1786 when Sir William Jones argued that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and many other languages were all descended from a common ancestor (now often referred to as PIE - “Proto-Indo-European.”).
In the twentieth century, however, philology gradually lost ground to modern, “scientific” linguistics, new ways of analyzing texts, including enhanced attention to their social, intellectual, and historical contexts. Philology never disappeared but it lost its appeal, so much so that in 2013 the professional association of American classicists abandoned the name American Philological Association and became the Society for Classical Studies. Fine! Any good philologist would appreciate the greater clarity about the purpose of the organization.
Now, however, some signs are emerging that may add up to a New Philology. I detect three developments that point to a philology that is more international and interracial than its predecessor, more high-tech, and more acutely aware of the importance of keeping language clear and incisive. Will they add up to a New Philology? I don’t know, but this and subsequent Then and Now Newsletters will examine developments that have that potential.
The Vesuvius Challenge:
Speaking of high tech: an international team has applied sophisticated technologies to decipher scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. With assistance from AI these carbonized and seemingly illegible papyri are yielding the continuous text of one ancient treatise, perhaps Philodemus On Music. There are about 8,000 scrolls to go, and many more, surely, still buried under the volcanic effusions.
The Vesuvius Challenge is getting big results by offering big prizes for breakthroughs in extracting text from these scrolls. (The Grand Prize for 2024 is $100,000.) I am still trying to imagine what the field of Classics will be like when those scrolls are deciphered, translated, and interpreted. That will take many old-line philological skills and a new savviness about what they can tell us.
Congratulations to the Vesuvius Challenge and winners to date. Here’s the story as it appeared in The Jerusalem Post.
Getting Language To Do Its Job:
Any philology, old or new, values clear, vigorous, forthright speech. That may be especially important in politics, but academia has a special responsibility to be a model of clarity and cogency, not a font of turgidity. A 1946 essay by George Orwell is still a useful guide. It should be required reading in every graduate program – NO, for every citizen.
Politics and the English Language:
You can read George Orwell’s 1946 essay with that title here. His most important point, I believe, is not his critique of then fashionable ways of writing and speaking, though many of those persist today. Rather, it’s his understanding of the ability of language not just to express thought, but to shape thought, and hence action.
Here’s my favorite passage:
“ ... the English language ...becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation, and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
Rethinking Demagogy:
The core idea in Orwell’s essay - “If thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought” set me thinking again about demagogues, ancient and modern. For a long time. I thought of their rants and especially their reliance on hyperbole to be an identifying mark of this type of politics – a symptom rather than the disease itself. Now I wonder if it is not the other way around: slovenly speech, vitriol, invective, addiction to hyperbole may be causes of this form of political malaise.
(On hyperbole among demagogues, ancient and modern, you may enjoy my essay in Arion (2019) “When Hyperbole Enters Politics.”)
Keeping Our Language Alive and Kicking:
It’s not always hard work. It’s play – word play in all its forms -- rhymes and rhythms, riddles and limericks, palindromes and even a corny joke now and then. They all invigorate the spoken and the written word; that’s why they’re in this Newsletter.
A Corny Joke:
“When is a car not a car?
“When it turns into a driveway.”
I groan, but secretly admire it: It’s a joke, a pun, a riddle, held together and solved by an image, all packed into a half dozen blessedly silly words. Thanks to Jim Montana for it.
A Puzzle:
What English word contains all the vowels in order, a, e, i, o, u and y, each one occurring once and only once?
Send your answer to [email protected]. The answer will be in the next Then and Now Newsletter. No, there’s no cash prize, just eternal fame.
Can We Still Talk To One Another Even When We Disagree?
It’s sad we even have to ask such a question, but we do and Danielle Allen gives a resounding affirmative, plus a list of conditions for such conversations to succeed. It’s in her Washington Post op ed: “We can all still be as partisan and ideological as we want, as long as enough of us can come together around a few big things.” https://wapo.st/3wkOkAG
Poetry at the Divide:
In Yellowstone, when we crossed over an unimpressive saddle in the mountains, the same Jim Montana told us that we had just crossed the continental divide. There were higher mountains all around, but a snowflake that melted a few feet away would flow into the Atlantic, while a nearby snowflake would find its way to the Pacific. We had crossed the Rockies.
Verses in book six of Wordsworth’s Prelude came to mind, from his description of a similar experience and his ruminations on it. He and his companions had lost their way in the Alps, then seen a stream flowing in an unexpected direction. “We had crossed the Alps,” he wrote and then went on to meditate about the experience:
“Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.“
Infinitude?
“Looking for a miracle? Trying to imagine “infinitude”? Something miraculous is close at hand, whenever a creature of infinitesimal capacities manages to imagine, however imperfectly, an infinite universe. That is what you are doing right now. You need look no further.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
--
A Mellon Million:
Dan-el Padilla Peralta of Princeton and Sasha-Mae Eccleston of Brown University are the recipients of a million dollar grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation for a project called Racing the Classics. The writing in the press release is turgid, but it provides more information.
Buruma on Spinoza:
In an incisive essay Ian Buruma writes about another Dutch writer, the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza, launching some timely polemics:
“In our own time, we see demagogues inciting the masses with irrational and hateful fantasies. We see universities torn by ideological struggles that make free inquiry increasingly difficult. Once again there is a conflict between the scientific and the ideological approaches to truth.”
Anecdote (if I remember correctly): Wordsworth and his friends often talked about Spinoza, whose name they pronounced “Spy-nosey,” thereby convincing the government agent assigned to keep an eye on them that his cover had been blown.
Job Description:
A visual image can rescue speech from the precipice of abstraction. Speech then reciprocates by turning images into thought. That’s the job description of metaphor.
--
Short Takes:
** The Netflix series on Alexander the Great:
Whether you’ve been watching Alexander: The Making of a God, or not, you’ll enjoy Paul Cartledge’s critique, available here.
** A Fashion Show at the Parthenon Marbles:
The British Museum has decided to hold a fashion show at the display of the marbles removed from the Parthenon in 1806. Greece thinks this is totally inappropriate use of sculptures that belong back where they came from. Here’s the story
** International Day of Happiness is March 20th:
Contemplate some Stoic Wisdom on the 20th: “A man is as miserable as he thinks he is.” (Seneca Nescio quo.)
The maxim also works in reverse: We are as happy as we think we are. But it may not work for joy, since joy has a way of surprising us, swooping in, then sweeping us off our feet, and bringing us to where we never thought we could be.
**Does Your Muse Dance?
This one did.
**Murder in Macedon:
There’s new evidence on the murder of king Philip II of Macedon -- possibly at the behest of his former wife Olympias. Only a few days earlier his new wife, Cleopatra, had given birth to a possible rival to Olympias’ boy, Alexander. For the evidence click here.
**What’s It Like To Be A Scholar?
... Peter Brown knows better than almost anyone else. His new book Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.
** “The Return”:
Coming soon: a film based on what happened after Odysseus returned to Ithaka. It stars Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
A Surprising Turn by a Traditional Liberal Arts College:
Just what is the relation between the traditional “liberal arts” and the “creative arts”? That may be the big question (along with cultural policy more generally) Hamilton College will be exploring under its new president, Steven Tepper. At Arizona State, Tepper was Dean of the Herberger Fine Arts Institute (art, art history, architecture, music, film, theater, dance, not to mention a unit devoted to the intersection of art, media, and engineering). At Hamilton he will surely be looking for synergies between some of these fields and liberal education. Stay tuned; it might work.
--
On Your Next Trip to Rome:
Don’t miss the newly-reconstructed colossal statue of Constantine the Great. It’s now to be seen in a side garden at the Capitoline Museums, just around the corner from the courtyard where fragments of its feet, hands and head were found. For the story of its reconstruction click here, or go to the website of the FACTUM Foundation which has made the restoration happen.
Shaking the Champagne Bottle Before Opening It:
That’s my best metaphor for David Brooks’ effervescent reflections on his own education and what it has meant throughout his life. His long, hyperventilating essay is funny, excessive, an eye opener in which he argues “that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society [is] in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’ve overpoliticized, while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.”
Brooks’ prescription? “The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?”.
Thucydides in China:
Don’t miss the amazing story of a Chinese scholar who taught himself Greek (at age 40), read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Greek, then translated it into Chinese and produced a commentary on it. Yuanguo He’s story is posted on my blog. Don’t miss it.
--
Learning Greek at 40?
What helped my Chinese friend, Yuanguo He, learn Greek at 40 is the two-volume JACT series Reading Greek. Hats off to its authors and to Cambridge University Press, the series’ publisher. And loud applause for those who give it a try.
“It’s the Climate, Stupid!”-
Semantics matter, even in the form of a campaign slogan.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 upset victory came in large part from James Carville’s slogan, “It’s the economy stupid!” Now, approaching the 2024 election isn’t it time we heard the slogan “It’s the climate, stupid!”? That is, after all, the great life and death issue of our time, yet we hear little on either side except bland assurances and self-congratulation, as if everything else matters more, and climate can now take care of itself.
Yes, slogans matter, not just because some people are motivated by them, but because they focus the mind of policy makers on what needs to be done.
Last year was the hottest on record globally and January 2024 was the ninth straight record setting month. Now February has set its own record. In 2023, disasters, mostly climate related, forced 2.5 million Americans from their homes.
Come on, stupids. Focus.
Etymology Of The Month:
Change:
English borrowed it from Old French; Old French from Late Latin and Late Latin probably from the Celts. After all this borrowing, change is a bit worn, like a dog-eared lending library book that has circulated for years, still useful but unlikely to inspire action at a moment of crisis. “Climate change” is just too insipid a description of what is really happening to us.
OK, readers, what do you suggest? Send me suggestions for a word for change that has some oomph.
--
SATs:
Eighty percent of American baccalaureate institutions do not require applicants to submit scores on the SAT or a comparable exam. But things are changing, -- most recently Yale and Brown -- recognize that, used wisely, such scores can help make admission decisions fairer.
--
Ponderable (Maybe Even Doable?):
“To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
Aleksei Navalny
Thanks again:
Thanks to Judith Hallett, Jim O’Donnell, Callie Connor and all who have sent me suggestions and links. Keep ‘em coming, and, please, forward this Newsletter to friends you think might enjoy it. I can always be reached at [email protected].
--
An Apology and a Request:
So many people responded to the last of these Newsletters by clicking “Reply,” that my old computer couldn’t handle the volume, since each reply included the full text of the Newsletter. Result: my decrepit old computer just dropped the whole chain.
Sorry! Do let me hear from you, but please use this: [email protected].
Bob Connor
THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
March 9, 2024
A New Philology:
The old philology that once dominated Classics and many literary fields loved, as its name implied, language, especially in the form of old texts and individual words which could be traced back to remote origins. It deciphered papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, determined what was the best reading when sources disagreed about a text, cherished verbal nuance, meter, and figures of speech. It flourished in the Renaissance , and added a new dimension after 1786 when Sir William Jones argued that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and many other languages were all descended from a common ancestor (now often referred to as PIE - “Proto-Indo-European.”).
In the twentieth century, however, philology gradually lost ground to modern, “scientific” linguistics, new ways of analyzing texts, including enhanced attention to their social, intellectual, and historical contexts. Philology never disappeared but it lost its appeal, so much so that in 2013 the professional association of American classicists abandoned the name American Philological Association and became the Society for Classical Studies. Fine! Any good philologist would appreciate the greater clarity about the purpose of the organization.
Now, however, some signs are emerging that may add up to a New Philology. I detect three developments that point to a philology that is more international and interracial than its predecessor, more high-tech, and more acutely aware of the importance of keeping language clear and incisive. Will they add up to a New Philology? I don’t know, but this and subsequent Then and Now Newsletters will examine developments that have that potential.
The Vesuvius Challenge:
Speaking of high tech: an international team has applied sophisticated technologies to decipher scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. With assistance from AI these carbonized and seemingly illegible papyri are yielding the continuous text of one ancient treatise, perhaps Philodemus On Music. There are about 8,000 scrolls to go, and many more, surely, still buried under the volcanic effusions.
The Vesuvius Challenge is getting big results by offering big prizes for breakthroughs in extracting text from these scrolls. (The Grand Prize for 2024 is $100,000.) I am still trying to imagine what the field of Classics will be like when those scrolls are deciphered, translated, and interpreted. That will take many old-line philological skills and a new savviness about what they can tell us.
Congratulations to the Vesuvius Challenge and winners to date. Here’s the story as it appeared in The Jerusalem Post.
Getting Language To Do Its Job:
Any philology, old or new, values clear, vigorous, forthright speech. That may be especially important in politics, but academia has a special responsibility to be a model of clarity and cogency, not a font of turgidity. A 1946 essay by George Orwell is still a useful guide. It should be required reading in every graduate program – NO, for every citizen.
Politics and the English Language:
You can read George Orwell’s 1946 essay with that title here. His most important point, I believe, is not his critique of then fashionable ways of writing and speaking, though many of those persist today. Rather, it’s his understanding of the ability of language not just to express thought, but to shape thought, and hence action.
Here’s my favorite passage:
“ ... the English language ...becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation, and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
Rethinking Demagogy:
The core idea in Orwell’s essay - “If thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought” set me thinking again about demagogues, ancient and modern. For a long time. I thought of their rants and especially their reliance on hyperbole to be an identifying mark of this type of politics – a symptom rather than the disease itself. Now I wonder if it is not the other way around: slovenly speech, vitriol, invective, addiction to hyperbole may be causes of this form of political malaise.
(On hyperbole among demagogues, ancient and modern, you may enjoy my essay in Arion (2019) “When Hyperbole Enters Politics.”)
Keeping Our Language Alive and Kicking:
It’s not always hard work. It’s play – word play in all its forms -- rhymes and rhythms, riddles and limericks, palindromes and even a corny joke now and then. They all invigorate the spoken and the written word; that’s why they’re in this Newsletter.
A Corny Joke:
“When is a car not a car?
“When it turns into a driveway.”
I groan, but secretly admire it: It’s a joke, a pun, a riddle, held together and solved by an image, all packed into a half dozen blessedly silly words. Thanks to Jim Montana for it.
A Puzzle:
What English word contains all the vowels in order, a, e, i, o, u and y, each one occurring once and only once?
Send your answer to [email protected]. The answer will be in the next Then and Now Newsletter. No, there’s no cash prize, just eternal fame.
Can We Still Talk To One Another Even When We Disagree?
It’s sad we even have to ask such a question, but we do and Danielle Allen gives a resounding affirmative, plus a list of conditions for such conversations to succeed. It’s in her Washington Post op ed: “We can all still be as partisan and ideological as we want, as long as enough of us can come together around a few big things.” https://wapo.st/3wkOkAG
Poetry at the Divide:
In Yellowstone, when we crossed over an unimpressive saddle in the mountains, the same Jim Montana told us that we had just crossed the continental divide. There were higher mountains all around, but a snowflake that melted a few feet away would flow into the Atlantic, while a nearby snowflake would find its way to the Pacific. We had crossed the Rockies.
Verses in book six of Wordsworth’s Prelude came to mind, from his description of a similar experience and his ruminations on it. He and his companions had lost their way in the Alps, then seen a stream flowing in an unexpected direction. “We had crossed the Alps,” he wrote and then went on to meditate about the experience:
“Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.“
Infinitude?
“Looking for a miracle? Trying to imagine “infinitude”? Something miraculous is close at hand, whenever a creature of infinitesimal capacities manages to imagine, however imperfectly, an infinite universe. That is what you are doing right now. You need look no further.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
--
A Mellon Million:
Dan-el Padilla Peralta of Princeton and Sasha-Mae Eccleston of Brown University are the recipients of a million dollar grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation for a project called Racing the Classics. The writing in the press release is turgid, but it provides more information.
Buruma on Spinoza:
In an incisive essay Ian Buruma writes about another Dutch writer, the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza, launching some timely polemics:
“In our own time, we see demagogues inciting the masses with irrational and hateful fantasies. We see universities torn by ideological struggles that make free inquiry increasingly difficult. Once again there is a conflict between the scientific and the ideological approaches to truth.”
Anecdote (if I remember correctly): Wordsworth and his friends often talked about Spinoza, whose name they pronounced “Spy-nosey,” thereby convincing the government agent assigned to keep an eye on them that his cover had been blown.
Job Description:
A visual image can rescue speech from the precipice of abstraction. Speech then reciprocates by turning images into thought. That’s the job description of metaphor.
--
Short Takes:
** The Netflix series on Alexander the Great:
Whether you’ve been watching Alexander: The Making of a God, or not, you’ll enjoy Paul Cartledge’s critique, available here.
** A Fashion Show at the Parthenon Marbles:
The British Museum has decided to hold a fashion show at the display of the marbles removed from the Parthenon in 1806. Greece thinks this is totally inappropriate use of sculptures that belong back where they came from. Here’s the story
** International Day of Happiness is March 20th:
Contemplate some Stoic Wisdom on the 20th: “A man is as miserable as he thinks he is.” (Seneca Nescio quo.)
The maxim also works in reverse: We are as happy as we think we are. But it may not work for joy, since joy has a way of surprising us, swooping in, then sweeping us off our feet, and bringing us to where we never thought we could be.
**Does Your Muse Dance?
This one did.
**Murder in Macedon:
There’s new evidence on the murder of king Philip II of Macedon -- possibly at the behest of his former wife Olympias. Only a few days earlier his new wife, Cleopatra, had given birth to a possible rival to Olympias’ boy, Alexander. For the evidence click here.
**What’s It Like To Be A Scholar?
... Peter Brown knows better than almost anyone else. His new book Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.
** “The Return”:
Coming soon: a film based on what happened after Odysseus returned to Ithaka. It stars Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
A Surprising Turn by a Traditional Liberal Arts College:
Just what is the relation between the traditional “liberal arts” and the “creative arts”? That may be the big question (along with cultural policy more generally) Hamilton College will be exploring under its new president, Steven Tepper. At Arizona State, Tepper was Dean of the Herberger Fine Arts Institute (art, art history, architecture, music, film, theater, dance, not to mention a unit devoted to the intersection of art, media, and engineering). At Hamilton he will surely be looking for synergies between some of these fields and liberal education. Stay tuned; it might work.
--
On Your Next Trip to Rome:
Don’t miss the newly-reconstructed colossal statue of Constantine the Great. It’s now to be seen in a side garden at the Capitoline Museums, just around the corner from the courtyard where fragments of its feet, hands and head were found. For the story of its reconstruction click here, or go to the website of the FACTUM Foundation which has made the restoration happen.
Shaking the Champagne Bottle Before Opening It:
That’s my best metaphor for David Brooks’ effervescent reflections on his own education and what it has meant throughout his life. His long, hyperventilating essay is funny, excessive, an eye opener in which he argues “that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society [is] in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’ve overpoliticized, while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.”
Brooks’ prescription? “The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?”.
Thucydides in China:
Don’t miss the amazing story of a Chinese scholar who taught himself Greek (at age 40), read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Greek, then translated it into Chinese and produced a commentary on it. Yuanguo He’s story is posted on my blog. Don’t miss it.
--
Learning Greek at 40?
What helped my Chinese friend, Yuanguo He, learn Greek at 40 is the two-volume JACT series Reading Greek. Hats off to its authors and to Cambridge University Press, the series’ publisher. And loud applause for those who give it a try.
“It’s the Climate, Stupid!”-
Semantics matter, even in the form of a campaign slogan.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 upset victory came in large part from James Carville’s slogan, “It’s the economy stupid!” Now, approaching the 2024 election isn’t it time we heard the slogan “It’s the climate, stupid!”? That is, after all, the great life and death issue of our time, yet we hear little on either side except bland assurances and self-congratulation, as if everything else matters more, and climate can now take care of itself.
Yes, slogans matter, not just because some people are motivated by them, but because they focus the mind of policy makers on what needs to be done.
Last year was the hottest on record globally and January 2024 was the ninth straight record setting month. Now February has set its own record. In 2023, disasters, mostly climate related, forced 2.5 million Americans from their homes.
Come on, stupids. Focus.
Etymology Of The Month:
Change:
English borrowed it from Old French; Old French from Late Latin and Late Latin probably from the Celts. After all this borrowing, change is a bit worn, like a dog-eared lending library book that has circulated for years, still useful but unlikely to inspire action at a moment of crisis. “Climate change” is just too insipid a description of what is really happening to us.
OK, readers, what do you suggest? Send me suggestions for a word for change that has some oomph.
--
SATs:
Eighty percent of American baccalaureate institutions do not require applicants to submit scores on the SAT or a comparable exam. But things are changing, -- most recently Yale and Brown -- recognize that, used wisely, such scores can help make admission decisions fairer.
--
Ponderable (Maybe Even Doable?):
“To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you are just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
Aleksei Navalny
Thanks again:
Thanks to Judith Hallett, Jim O’Donnell, Callie Connor and all who have sent me suggestions and links. Keep ‘em coming, and, please, forward this Newsletter to friends you think might enjoy it. I can always be reached at [email protected].
--
An Apology and a Request:
So many people responded to the last of these Newsletters by clicking “Reply,” that my old computer couldn’t handle the volume, since each reply included the full text of the Newsletter. Result: my decrepit old computer just dropped the whole chain.
Sorry! Do let me hear from you, but please use this: [email protected].
Bob Connor