Aoidoi: on Hiatus

It should be obvious from the lack of posts here and updates to Aoidoi.org itself that I've not been producing work for the site much in the last to years or so. So, I'm declaring Aoidoi.org officially on hiatus.

I have no plans at all to take the site down, and I hope some day to have time to work on documents for it and Scholiastae again in the future, but right now Life is keeping me occupied with other things.

Aoidoi: the Cologne Epode of Archilochus

Bret Mulligan and some of his students worked up the (in)famous Cologne Epode, Archilochus 196A, and very kindly sent it on to Aoidoi.org.

Double Dactyl Redivivus

It is spring, and the bunnies are once again grazing on plants I care about. My double dactyl on this issue, well, bunnies and bonsai, appeared on my early blog, long gone. It seems worth a little revival, if only to document my use of the word dendromaniacally.

Hippity, hoppity,
Lepus sylvalica
sits in the yard and de-
vours my trees.

Neighbors watch on as I
Dendromaniacally
dash out the door while the
furry fiend flees.

Aoidoi: Delectus Indelectatus updated

I've added six new poemlets to the Delectus Indelectatus, a collection of Greek poets being cranky, vulgar or mean. I resisted the urge to just add the totality of Palladas' output.

Scholiastae: Alciphron 2.6 and 2.7

Two more letters from Alciphron today. Since they are a dialog between Anicetus and Phoebiane, both are in the same document: Alciphron 2.6-7.

The first sentence of 2.7 was such a monument of Greek word order, I decided to make a dependency graph of it:

Aoidoi: Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus

Newly commented, Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus, for a little Stoic reading.

Scholiastae: Lucian "Pan and Hermes" and Alciphron 1.3

Two more brief texts for Scholiastae.org: Dialog of the Gods 2, Pan and Hermes; and Alciphron 1.3, Glaucus to his wife Galataea.

Aoidoi: Bion 9 and 11

I've worked up two shorter fragments by Bion. I was looking something up recently in Theocritus, and happened to notice the smaller of Bion's works hanging out way at the end of the book (the OCT Bucolici Graeci), and found them straightforward to read, even in dialect.

Bion 9 is about whom the Muses will and will not help. Bion 11 is an appeal to Hesperus, the evening start.

Scholiastae: a little Lucian, a little Alciphron

Two new texts today for Scholiastae. First, I took the wiki version of Dialog of the Dead 13 by Lucian, tidied up some of the comments and amplified a few others. I'm not entirely certain I'm going to keep this style for giving character names, but it's less fussy than some formats I've seen: Lucian's Dialog of the Dead 13: Diogenes and Alexander.

The other text is one of Alciphron's letters, from Thaïs to Euthydemos. Thaïs, a courtesan, is trying to get Euthydemos to stop hanging out with philosophers.

This letter drew me first because of the pot shot it takes at Socrates near the end:

ἐπεὶ σύγκρινον, εἰ βούλει, Ἀσπασίαν τὴν ἑταίραν καὶ Σωκράτην τὸν σοφιστήν, καὶ πότερος ἀμείνους αὐτῶν ἐπαίδευσεν ἄνδρας λόγισαι· τῆς μὲν γὰρ ὄψει μαθητὴν Περικλέα, τοῦ δὲ Κριτίαν.

But compare, if you will, Aspasia the courtesan and Socrates the sophist, and decide which of them better instructs men. For you will see that Pericles was her student and Critias was his.

A more puzzling argument Thaïs makes earlier is, οὐ λέγομεν θεοὺς οὐκ εἶναι, ἀλλὰ πιστεύομεν ὀμνύουσι τοῖς ἐρασταῖς ὅτι φιλοῦσιν ἡμᾶς we do not say that the gods don't exist, but we believe our lovers when they swear that they love us. The line of reasoning in this escapes me.

Some of Alciphron's letters are frankly a bit tedious, but they have been widely regarded as models of Attic style. I'll be doing a few more of them, at least.

Scholiastae Changing

As I posted about almost two years ago, the experiment in using a wiki to collaboratively annotate ancient texts was a flop. So, I'll be taking that down at the end of April of this year. In the meantime, I've been converting the better texts into the same format I use for Aoidoi.org. The results are somewhat more attractive than a web page, at least. I've managed to automate some of the conversion from Wiki (and my own Wiki annotation module) to LaTeX, but it still takes a certain amount of hand-holding.

Don't put data in to XML format unless you know you already have a way to extract it in a format you consider agreeable.

In any case, the better Wiki prose texts will end up on the new Scholiastae front page, and the few poems will go to Aoidoi.

Transatlantic Style: Classical Greek and Classical Nahuatl

I've taken a bit of a break from working up texts for Aoidoi.org for a while, instead working on some fun prose reading more for practice than anything. Lucian is fun, and the True Story edition by Nimis and Hayes is a nicely portable version. I've also recently started to study Classical Nahuatl, now that a more approachable textbook has finally come out, a translation and adaptation of Launey's standard Introduction, produced by a classicist no less, Christopher Mackay. There are a few other textbooks available in English for Classical Nahuatl, but they are pretty unsatisfactory, for reasons too tedious to go into here.

Apparently, Nahuatl poetry can be as opaque and obscure as Pindar, but I'm not really ready to step into that. Instead, I have been trying my hand at a few of Aesop's fables, which got a linguistic and cultural translation into Nahuatl (see Google Books, A. Peñafiel and the ms. transcription from Amoxcalli.org.mx). Keeping notes on my work with these has forced me to learn a few new LaTeX packages, so I now have a good setup to do Aoidoi-style notes on prose, something that has eluded me for years. I think I may migrate some of my prose work from Scholiastae to this format, which is just nicer to read and to edit.

To classicists (amateur or professional) who want to learn an interesting literary language with a entirely different tradition, I highly recommend Classical Nahuatl now that better learning materials are available for it. The morphology is not as complex, but in some ways studying it reminds me of studying Classical Greek. In particular, that vague anxiety and sinking feeling one gets upon learning yet another particle and when seeing yet another novel chain of particles.

In my brief Nahuatl studies so far, I have noticed a few turns of phrase which have close parallels in Classical Greek, or Indo-European, stylistics. There have in the past been unfortunate attempts to relate Nahuatl to Indo-European — I will leave that to you to hunt down in Google Books. I just thought these parallel developments were interesting.

Throughout the Mesoamerican cultural zone, the merism is a major stylistic device. They can be more metaphorical, and is usually called difrasismo in this context. Some are fairly obvious, and others are more obscure —

in xochitl in cuicatl the flower, the song : poetry
in cuitlapilli in ahtlapalli the tail, the wing : the common folk
yohualli ehecatl night, wind : invisible, or intangible

The first parallel to Indo-European habits is the difrasismo in axcaitl in tlatquitl which together are a general term for "property." The parallel comes in in tlatquitl which is derived from the verb itqui, which means to carry something. This doesn't perfectly match any mersim in IE literature, but it does match a stylistic preoccupation with movable vs. immovable wealth, Avest. pasu.vīra "cattle (and) men", Umbr. ueiro pequo "men and cattle." English goods and chattels almost gets there, since chattels includes the notion of movable property.

Finally, there's the difrasismo I recently ran into, which reminded me of Michael Gilleland's list of asyndetic, privative adjectives. Now, asyndeton is quite common in Nahuatl, and certainly in difrasismo, so this isn't particularly marked stylistically. But the double negative struck me in in ahcualli in ahyectli, "immorality." The ah- element (here, "h" is the glottal stop) is the negative, and has been attached to cualli "a good thing" (in the sense of fitness for a purpose or pleasant) and yectli "a pure thing."

Now if only I could find a collection of difrasismos. Current dictionaries tend not to focus on these.

Random Thoughts on the iPad

I find it is easier to justify ridiculous purchases when it's close to my birthday. Not quite two weeks ago I got myself an iPad. Since I've had some time with the thing, I thought I'd make a few random comments, in no particular order or relatedness.

First, I don't travel in teen or even tween circles, so it has been some time since I got called names relating to my sexual orientation. Yet mentioning that I had got myself an iPad leaves some complete strangers with the urge to call me things — online, at least, where being a flaming jerk is some sign of conviction. It's very odd. There's a lot of bruhaha about restrictions on the iPod, but I don't really have anything to add to it. Howard Stearns had more interesting things to say about the matter already, and better than I could. Besides, I've lived all my professional life neck-deep in the Unix and free software world and I've always managed to live happily in mixed environments — open tools on closed OSes, open OSes running closed tools — whatever can be made to work reliably without going over-cost is fine by me. If I really want to program an iPad directly, I can always fire up jsforth.

I personally cannot stand laptops — this is a quirk, I realize. They're too big to be really convenient, and too small to be comfortable to use for very long. That the iPad doesn't try to be a laptop is actually a plus for me. I've had an iPod Touch for quite a while, and while one can visit web pages, read documents, compose email or post to web forums from it, it's really not very nice. On the iPad, this is all much more pleasant. The device was made for casual browsing at a coffee shop, and I've adjusted to the freaky keyboard fairly quickly.

I've been waiting for something like an iPad running something like the GoodReader app for more than 15 years. While I may be a professional computer geek by day, when not at work I turn into the Dilettante Philologist. I do use some of my computer skills for my dead language work of course, but my computing needs are very different when I'm on the Philologist setting. I've transferred a large stash of journal articles, old books, Helmut van Thiel's magnificent editions of the D scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey, PDFs of my own notes on Greek work to the iPad. Now when I'm waiting at the dentist's office I can once again try to comprehend Matic 's paper, Topic, focus, and discourse structure: Ancient Greek Word Order; or Dale's classic three papers on the metrical units of Greek lyric verse. The iPad may be a bit heavy for a mobile device, but it weighs considerably less than the print edition of the unabridged LSJ, which I have at my fingertips in the Lexiphanes application. I can only hope someone will write an application to interact with the Perseus corpus.

On a whim, I downloaded Charlie Stross' Iron Sunrise into the iBook application. I'm about three-quarters through the book. I'm a big lover of the traditional book format even for casual reading, but I have to say reading on the iPad has been very comfortable. The amusement value the over-wrought page-turning animation passed quickly enough, and I can read for hours at a stretch without the thing distracting me from the novel. The only small complaint I have is about some of the typesetting. For chapter and major section starts Iron Sunrise was probably typeset with a few words in small caps, but that font didn't make the transition to the iBooks app. The first three words are in slightly large all lowercase. More careful editing would fix this.

All said, I love this device, mostly because I know I can travel a lot lighter in the future (I used to have to be content with the Middle Liddell, heavy enough in carry-on). For me, the iPad is mostly a way to interact with text — lots and lots of text. Thanks to some development time with the iPad Touch and the iPhone, the iPad is awfully good at that. It'll be interesting to see what the next five years bring to the entire industry around devices like this.

Scholiastae.org: not entirely a success

It's been a bit more than a year since I announced my scholiastic Wiki, Scholiastae.org. In that time by far the majority of text and annotations published to the site have been my own. When I started the project I had hoped other people would use the site to make notes on texts, but except for a few random drive-by notes (no more than a few comments), this has not happened. I'm not sure exactly why this is, given the enthusiasm for the idea when I first made the announcement, but I have a few guesses.

First, while a Wiki can be made to work for what are basically margin scribbles, it's not an entirely natural fit. Here's the last line of Catullus 48 marked up —

sit nostrae <sch lemma="seges segetis" grammar="f.">seges:: crop, grain field.;;</sch>
<sch lemma="osculātiō ōnis" grammar="f.">osculationis:: kissing.;;</sch>. //

That's sort of messy, though it gets the job done. Other people have been able to use the system without too much difficulty, though sometimes with rather different style habits than I favor.

There are probably other ways to handle text annotations like this that are a lot more natural for people who are classically inclined but don't have my background in computer programming, publishing, etc. But I'm not sure that would result in more people adding to the site, which leads to the second thing I believe has kept submissions slow — annotating a text well is a huge pain in the ass. Some people even mentioned this when I made the Scholiastae announcement. The technology isn't the hard part. The research, the double checking, the hunting down citations, the worrying about what really needs comment and what does not — all these things are a much bigger commitment. Even a simple 10 line poem by Mimnermus for Aoidoi will take me a week or two, which includes checking up on different versions of the text, as well as dealing with comments from the small group of people I can send out early drafts to (who probably deserve some sort of award). Someone has to be very committed to a text to mark it up formally and carefully in any medium at all, much less on a Wiki run by someone you've never met.

My first thought on putting up Scholiastae.org was that I'd give it a year or so, and if no one was interested enough to publish on it, I'd just close it down. But I still find it useful as a dumping ground for my own purposes. It's the best place for me to keep notes on prose works, but I've found it a nice place for smaller poems, too, like things from The Greek Anthology or the fragments of Pindar. Besides, I can hope someone else will find it interesting enough to add comments to eventually.

ὀτοτοῖ, ὀτοτοῖ

Why oh why is this book so expensive? And this one?

Learning Greek through Greek

If you ever want to watch an amateur classicist go up in flames and start channelling Cicero at his most denunciatory and his least fair-minded, start up a conversation about the quality of Greek and Latin textbooks. A very few books may get positive comment, but for the most part these books aren't friendly to the autodidact. It's one reason why Textkit's forum is always going to be popular. While there are books I warn people away from, for the most part I don't usually get too agitated about textbooks. For the self-teacher, it is far more important to stick with one than it is to succumb to the temptation to churn through a dozen books hoping to find one that makes the middle perfect of consonant stem verbs easy to learn.

That said, I'm going to complain about Greek textbooks now. Well, make a slightly cranky observation.

When I was in high school, by the time I got to the second year of French and German, the textbooks we used were introducing some grammatical material in the language being taught, along with obvious things like calling chapters chapitres and describing the requirements of homework auf Deutsch. Even the mechanics of day-to-day classroom work were turned into another opportunity to use the languages which, in theory, the classes were supposed to impart. I have seen a few Latin textbooks which do use Latin for more than just the exercises. The only book I've run across doing this in Greek was published in Spain in 1856 (Google Books), and that's clearly an advanced book.

So, it seems to me that by the time you start learning about -μι verbs you should be seeing Greek not only in the terrifying new construction the lesson presents, in the idiotic practice sentences and in whatever adapted passage of literature that lesson has, but also as the chapter headings, in the notes explaining tricky parts of that adapted passage, etc. On the other hand, I've recently been working on a page for Scholiastae.org which describes ancient Greek grammatical vocabulary, Greek Grammar in Greek, intended for people who don't want to drop to English in the Greek- and Latin-only sub-forum. There's a lot of Greek grammatical vocabulary. The beginner to Greek already has to learn to cope with strange incantations like "aorist middle optative" in their native language. Are the benefits of seeing more Greek worth the cost of learning the substantial technical vocabulary when lots of more basic vocabulary also needs to be learned? Since no one is forced to learn Greek any more, I'm inclined to see value in laying on Greek as thickly as possible for those few who do decide to take it up.

The Tablet of Cebes, or, A Gap in my Education

Recently a Textkit study group has formed to read the Discourses of Epictetus. Naturally I slurped up the text into Scholiastae, and one scholiastic activity I've been involved in is creating a list of the most common Stoic terms and idioms used in Epictetus. A few weeks ago, in the course of my hunting down references, I discovered that Keith Seddon (“The Stoic who Never Sleeps”) in 2005 came out with a translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion. In addition to the Enchiridion, however, the book contains a translation of the Tablet of Cebes — a work I had never heard of until that point.

It turns out the Tablet was once frequently paired with the Enchiridion, with Theophrastus' Characters often rounding out the collection. The Tablet is a brief, 1st century dialog introducing Plato's puzzling doctrine of pre-existence, and the value of philosophy in general (it is invariably compared to Pilgrim's Progress in English references).

It is astonishing to me that the Tablet has no showing in any of the many introductory and intermediate Greek textbooks I have seen in my life. The work, along with its usual company, was once quite popular, both in Greek and in translation — into Latin, of course, but also into European vernaculars and even Arabic. It seems well suited to beginners in Greek. The language is not too trickified; it is short and could be read entirely in even a quarter-system school schedule; it introduces philosophy, a subject which doubtless draws more people to Greek in the first place than does Xenophon; one can even bring in discussion about Hellenistic and Imperial intellectual trends — how many philosophical dialogs start with ekphrasis?

The Wondrous Textual Powers of the Internet give us several reading options.

Drosihn's 1871 Teubner seems to still be the standard critical edition, but I'll gladly hear correction about that. It is available on Google Books, a copy of which is also at Archive.org.

C.S. Jerram of Oxford has a 1878 school-boy edition with extensive notes, including many useful to those with wobbly Greek. Again available via Google Books, with a copy of the Google scan at Archive.org.

Richard Parsons brought some Yankee ingenuity (well, Ohio Wesleyan ingenuity) to Cebes, producing a 1897 edition with less copious notes. It does, however, have a brief vocabulary at the end, which makes his book prime bus-to-work reading material. There are several indifferently produced off-prints on the market now, but if you don't love your printer too much, there are again both Google Books and independent Archive.org editions.

There is a 1997 Bryn Mawr Greek commentary by T.M. Banchich, about which I can find little information.

A project at the Université catholique de Louvain has text versions (in Greek and French). I am as yet uncertain, given the editorial markings, of the provenance of their text. And I do wish they had a clear statement of copyright for this very tasty pot pourri.

Finally, Archive.org houses a rather florid 1910 English translation — to say nothing of the typesetting — The Greek Pilgrim's progress; generally known as The picture.

Well, that's one way to curate

One thing I was concerned about after the death of Bill Harris was that his magnificent web site would silently disappear some day. I was happy to see this notice today:

Bill truly enjoyed sharing with all of you, and he greatly appreciated the contact he had with so many of you from around the world, especially in his latter years. We invite you to continue using and enjoying his web site. Bill Harris' web site will be maintained on the Internet permanently as part of the digital archives of Middlebury College.

I'm certainly not going to complain about this... but I still wonder what a librarian would think about this approach. "Just leave it there" may not be the best way to go in the long (permanent) run. I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to these questions yet.

Numquam what?!

I have this problem that no matter what it is, any text that passes before my eyeballs gets read, often at a barely conscious level. I can't stop it. I assume many literate people have the same problem. Today I was on campus, and while waiting for the bus and admiring the splendid, ah, charlie-foxtrot that is University Ave. during this construction season, my brain forced me to do a double-take... "numquam tickle?!"

I took a closer look at the book bag: Draco Dormiens Numquam Titillandus, "a sleeping dragon is never to be, um, tickled?" Finally the rest of my brain kicked in, and I realized I was looking at Harry Potter-ware. A college-age male — and not a freshman, I'd guess — was sporting a Hogwarts book bag. He's the right age for it, I suppose. I haven't yet decided if I want this to be an ironic gesture on his part or not.

A little googling tells me was displaying Gryffindor colors, in case anyone was curious.

What other Chariot? A Textual Crux in Mimnermus 12

I recently received email asking me about a textual decision in the Aoidoi.org version of Mimnermus 12 (open that in a new window to follow along). They wanted to know why I kept the paradosis reading ἐπέβη ἑτέρων in line 11 when nearly everyone else accepted Schneidewin's emmendatation ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν. It turns out nearly everyone else does not include M.L. West. I use his Iambi et Elegi Graeci for sanity checking and a reasonably current apparatus. West's apparatus does include some emmendations, but not Schneidewin's ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, which I got from Campbell's 1967 Greek Lyric Poetry for the Aoidoi apparatus. I decided to do a little more digging.

First, for Schneidewin. In his 1838 Delectus poesis Graecorum elegiacae, iambicae, melicae (pp.16-17) he declines to include this emmendation attributed to him. So, either he saved this speculation for a later edition or published it in some paper I haven't been able to find.

Next, of course, comes Bergk. In his 1866 Teubner Poetae lyrici Graeci (p. 412) quite a lot gets said —

V.11 ἑτέρων VL, ἑτερέων BP, conieci σφετέρων vel προτέρων, Schneidewin ἱερῶν vel πτερινῶν vel ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, Ahrens στερεῶν vel ἐπεβήσετ’ ἄρ’ ὧν.

Well. Except Ahrens' ludicrous στερεῶν, these emmendations are strikingly banal. But what problem are they trying to fix?

My email correspondent and his colleague were concerned about the sense of ἑτέρων. Helios, sleeping the night away, has been born along by the waves in a golden, winged bed made by Hephaestus. When he arrives in the land of the Ethiopians, "where his swift chariot and horses stay," he gets on his other (ἑτέρων) chariot. The question is, what other chariot? Where's the other one? Some of the emmendations seem to be inspired by this same discomfort — σφετέρων, ἑῶν, ἱερῶν, κτλ. One of Bergk's emmendations, προτέρον, seems more concerned with the hiatus, since "his earlier chariot" doesn't remove that extra chariot from the picture. Hiatus for a long vowel in princeps position is sanctioned by both Homer and other elegiasts, but without more information it's hard for me to know for sure what motivated Bergk here.

When I first read this line, I had a passage from Hesiod's Theogony in my mind, 746-757, which describes Day and Night passing each other on the threshold to the same house each day. While Hesiod mentions no vehicle for them, chariots taking celstial divinities across the sky is a common idea across Indo-Eurostan. A little digging shows that Dawn herself, mentioned in line 3 of Mimnermus' poem, is given her own chariot in the Odyssey (23.243-246), and several times in Vedic and Avestan literature (M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, p.223.). We don't know enough about Mimnermus' model of the celestial mechanics, but it's certainly possible that the other chariot refers not to another of Helios', but someone else's.

Finally, the word I've been translating chariot, ὀχέων (a funky heteroclite in Homer, ὁ ὄχος, τὰ ὄχεα, but normal 2nd. declension plural in other authors), has a wider range of meaning. While chariot is certainly the common sense, it can mean anything which holds or carries something. In Odyssey 5.404 it describes harbors, λιμένες νηῶν ὄχοι. And it can even describe a ship, ὄχος ταχυήρης "a swift-oared vehicle." The related word ὄχημα covers the same range, from chariot to ship to vehicle. Right now I'm inclined to see ἑτέρω ὀχέων being contrasted not to some other horse-drawn conveyance, but to Helios' splendid sea-faring bed. In any case, I see no good reason to meddle with the paradosis.

Octavating a Tenor Guitar (Martin LXM "Little Martin" Tenor)

In the last year or so I've started spending more of my spare time playing music again. For quite a long time my only instrument were the tin whistle and Irish flute (a keyless, wooden flute which is fingered the same as the tin whiste). Then I made a little stretch, and got a mandolin, which I played for years, again mostly Irish, some Scottish stuff, and any random other thing that grabbed my attention, such as the medieval Lamento di Tristano, so often played at absurdly slow speeds. Somewhere along the way I got myself an old 20s Gibson Oriole tenor banjo, which I've always treated as an unusually noisy mandolin, including tuning it down to GDAE from the usual tenor CGDA.

Unfortunately, neither the tenor banjo nor the mandolin have much sustain. There is only one way to fake out sustain on these instruments — tremolo. After years of playing the mandolin, however, I must now admit that I have a really serious hang-up about tremolo. It doesn't matter what you're playing — bluegrass, jazz, celtic folk, whatever — once the tremolo starts I have a spaghetti sauce ad in my brain. Also, playing the high course on a mandolin (two very small wires tuned in unison to E) is not unlike playing a tuned cheese slicer.

So, a few weeks ago, I finally gave in and ordered a tenor guitar. This instrument was invented around the 20s when the guitar fad overtook the banjo fad (which in turn had replaced a mandolin fad), so that musicians used to the 5ths tuning of the tenor banjo could just pick up a guitar and go. This is perfect for my needs — I don't have to learn yet another fingering system, and I get more sustain out of the deal. It's normal for people coming from an Irish music background to tune both tenor banjos and tenor guitars down like an octave mandolin, GDAE an octave below a normal mandolin. So I got some heavier strings put them on my new Martin (.012, .022w, .032w, .042w). There were a few problems.

First, a .042 wound string will not fit in the nut on these guitars. Neither will the 0.032w. Second, these big, fat strings flop around, even at correct tension, and were buzzing... a lot. Finally, these new Martins are, as they say, modest instruments. Some unevenness in the frets was exposed by the patterns of buzz. Fortunately, I'm on a first name basis with a local luthier, who handed my Martin over to an apprentice to (1) widen the grooves in the nut for the lowest two strings, (2) file the frets into evenness and (3) raise the action a bit with a new saddle. This has improved things quite a bit. If I'm lazy about my finger placement and land too far behind a fret I still risk some buzz, but nothing like before.

So, any celto-mandolin or celto-tenor players wanting to venture into tenor guitar will find the LXM Tenor an affordable option, but you'll need a little extra work done to it to make it work best down in GDAE. If you're prepared to sand down a new saddle for yourself and aren't scared of a file, you could perhaps do the adjustments yourself, but I doubt any repair shop will charge too much to do them.