Paintings

Blog—Pieter Claesz, Vanitas-Stilleben, 1634
Research—Caravaggio, St Jerome, c. 1606
Start—Unknown Dutch Master, Still-Life with Books, c. 1628
Resources—Rembrandt, Doctor Faustus, c. 1652

Theme I :: memento mori

For more on the theme, I recommend People of the Book, by David Lyle Jeffrey. (Here's a review by Alan Jacobs.) Note especially Chapter 7, "Symbolism of the Reader" (it starts on page 209). Jeffrey gave the absolute best chapel address I heard in four years of chapel addresses, three times a week, at Wheaton College. Here's his translation of the Goethe epigraph:

Still this old dungeon, still a mole!
Cursed be this moldy walled-in hole
Where heaven's lovely light must pass,
And lose its luster, through stained glass.
Confined with books, and every tome
Is gnawed by worms, covered with dust,
And on the walls, up to the dome,
A smoky paper, spots of rust;
Enclosed by tubes and jars that breed
More dust, by instruments and soot,
Ancestral furniture to boot--
That is your world! A world indeed!

Theme II :: sphere

I have dabbled with html before, and even a little with css, but mostly by borrowing. (See one example.) There is no way I could build a site like this without taking months out of my life to learn the skills properly. Thankfully, Christoph Richardet of Rapid Ideas has done the hard work for me.

History

I starting blogging in January 2005. I had just read Christopher Seitz's Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture, which seemed to put several pieces into place. So I called the blog Figured Out, thinking, maybe, that I'd write a lot about typology. (It's a catchy title, it seems; a conference borrowed for itself the title Figured Out too.)

I didn't. Periodically I would change the drapery to see if I felt more at home, but I lacked a clear sense of what the web presence was for. Blogs are great for narcissists and people who are on the cutting edge of something fast paced. But I have (some) scruples about talking about myself too much, and I'm trying to write a PhD about the Old Testament. In principle, there is a frontier to what we know about my area. And officially, my task is to test that boundary. But if I once thought my blog could be integral to the project (better, the project integral to my blog), all I can really do on a daily basis is to tell you how cold it is on top of this glacier, or that the sun is shining, or what my instruments look like.

So in February 2006 I started over with a new home. All I kept was the blog title (now that's been changed, too) and photo of me on the St Andrews pier. After the spring term, at the end of May 2006, I redrafted the site layout and introduced the theme memento mori, accenting these pages with the iconography of readers. In 2007, I retitled the blog. It's now called "Occasional Publications," a clever name my dad came up with for some extended Christmas card vignettes about my brothers and me which he wrote and had printed when we were younger. That was before blogging, but it's one of the better examples of self-publishing I know. Seemed a good precedent.

Back in the spring of 2006 I also registered two domain names, danieldriver.com and vetustestamentum.com. For now the latter redirects you to the former.