The bulls of Bashan

Well, Cassiodorus is quite hard work. It's taking up my entire rat-exercising hour every night, but I am now nearly half-way through the first volume, and I've ordered the other two from amazon. I'm enjoying it in an austere sort of way. Setting a fixed target of stuff to read and then just working through it is the opposite of thinking, and enjoyable in its way -- no tyranny of the blank page here.

You can buy stickers from Muji that you put down the spines of books -- they have two thin ribbons attached, so that you've got a pair of place-keepers like the ones sometimes built into a hardback binding.

Yesterday I did both Psalms 22 (23), which is painful, and 23 (24), which is soothing. Psalm 22 reminded of this extract from a translation which I came across once:
Then Lord depart not now from me
In this my present griefe
Since I have none to be my helpe
My succour and reliefe.
So many Buls do compasse me
That be full strong of head:
Yea Buls so fat as though they had
In Basan fieldes bene fed.

They gape upon me gredely
As though they would me slay:
Much lyke a Lion roring out
And ramping for his prey.
But I droope downe like water shed,
My jointes in sunder breake:
My hart doth in my body melt,
Like waxe against the heate.

It's supposed to be from the 1569 Geneva Bible but I've never found the same version elsewhere. Maybe I should try the Rare Books room sometime. I taught under the name of Eadwig Basan a few years back -- it wasn't my idea but my boss's, because there were two of us who were arranging our own division of labour, so he put us down under that name in the lecture list.