How, when and why did novels start? Conventionally, people used to say two things, in the main: that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a game-changer; and the novel started in the “long” eighteenth century. Only Don Quixote was published in 1605, and in critical circles Cervantes’s giant may have eclipsed Defoe’s marooned mariner as the most influential book-that-might-be-called-a-novel there has ever been. Don Quixote holds in his bony hands the “romance” stories of love and chivalry he believes in, the ones he inherits from earlier centuries; but these outré influences are vulnerable to certain corrosive satirical scepticisms based in the stony reality of the Castilian landscape. Romance, satire and realism make the novel; they are already seething nicely in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688).
Sometime in or before the First Century CE a new kind of book appeared that promised to address the scroll’s shortcomings. The evidence is sparse but telling: archaeologists have discovered a few key scraps of papyrus whose text unexpectedly continues from the front to the back, and whose neat margins one might expect to find in a paged book. And that is exactly what these fragments are: they are leaves from the first paged books the world had ever seen. We know that the Romans called this new kind of book the codex (from caudex or tree trunk, because of its similarity to their wooden writing tablets), but how the codex came to be in the first place is shrouded in mystery. The first written mention of the codex appears in the words of a Roman poet named Martial, who encouraged his readers to buy his books in this new, paged format:
“You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages: give your scroll-cases to the great authors – one hand can hold me.”
Written between 84 and 86 CE, Martial’s sales pitch tells us not only that paged books were known of in the First Century CE but also that some of them, at least, were made from a new material called parchment. This alternative to papyrus, invented in a Greek city-state some centuries earlier, was made from cleaned, stretched animal skins by means of a bloody and labour-intensive process, but its smoothness and strength made it an ideal writing material. Archaeologists have since confirmed Martial’s claims via fragments of parchment codices dated to the First Century – and yet, these few tantalising finds aside, we still know very little about where or why the codex was invented, or who might have done so. Even the question of whether the first codices were made of papyrus or parchment has never been satisfactorily answered.
It’s Friday, folks. You’re here again. Still alive. Shit went down this week, you survived it. I hope you nailed assholes and bigots to the wall this week and will congratulate yourself with something sinful this evening.
Should you be worried that Jr. just wants to read the same damn book every day? No. Unless the book is something like Mein Kampf or anything by “Donald Trump” or Norman Mailer, et al., it’s fine. While this tiny advice column article addresses younger readers, my 17-year-old has always read and reread his favourites. The last few years he’s done this with the first two books of the legendarily-late-to-complete Patrick Rothfuss fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicle (in which no king has yet been killed, I might add). I’m okay with that, since I’ve also read those. Though the conspiracy theories about what’s behind the Doors of Stone are getting a bit stretched, I tell you. Anyway, point being, he’s decided to become a writer based on his love of this one series (not his poet dad and novelist/screenwriter step-mom), and for that I have to give Patrick Rothfuss credit where credit is due and say, “Screw you, nerd, he could have been a scientist.”
Kids love repetition—watching the same movies, singing the same songs, and, yes, reading the same books. They’re hard-wired to prefer familiarity, probably an evolutionary thing that helps keep babies close to their caretakers.
But repetition also helps kids learn. One study showed that hearing the same words in the same story helped more than hearing the same words in different stories.
What should we do with the art of people who are brilliant and yet bad for progress in the world? I don’t know, man. I’m just trying to not be a bad guy and still create art myself. It doesn’t get as much attention, that’s for sure, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror and admit less unpleasant things like, “You’re getting old” or “If that hairline goes any thinner, you’ll have to start giving individual hairs names to track them”. But I digress: this is an important question for our time, since we’re now in the business of pointing out and punishing bad behaviour instead of chuckling at it and rewarding it. But how far back do we punish? The way I look at it is, there’s SO MUCH art out there, why would I spend time on something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth when there’s something equally as good or enlightening by someone who isn’t a douche? Good for discussion, anyway.
When I recently interviewed American author Richard Ford for this paper, one question was bound to come up: his treatment of critics who have given him bad reviews, one of whom was sent a book with a bullet hole in it, another of whom was spat on. Ford’s response was not especially enlightening – he gets asked about this a lot – but it did raise an interesting, secondary question.
On social media and in the interview’s comment section, some readers said they no longer bother with Ford’s books after these actions. Part of this response is likely because what Ford did was so targeted, personal and grotesquely intimate; but writers also lose readers for broader political reasons, and for speech as well as actions.
When Peter Handke won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the commentary in the press was not about the work, but about Handke’s defence of Serbia’s actions in the 1990s Bosnian war. “The Swedish Academy is still an attention-seeking trashfire,” said one British newspaper books editor. Aside from the damage to the Nobel’s reputation – already on shaky ground – there is an additional loss in that many will no longer want to read Handke, whom John Updike called “the finest writer in Germany”.
But can we really separate the writer from the work? If a book is an expression of the author’s psyche, why would we want to rummage through the dregs and peelings from the mind of someone we find repellent?
I mean, is there really any other news today than the letter? Wait… “The Letter”. Needed caps. And perhaps a gothic, church organ soundtrack. Here’s what would have been covered if the entire literary world wasn’t sharpening long knives in their respective dark rooms.
Margaret Atwood was tweeting support for transgender communities right before she signed a letter calling for (I realize I’m cherry picking here) tolerance of JK Rowling’s views against transpeople… Can’t we have a day in which everyone just behaves at least consistently, if not well?;
The juice on Trump via his niece (I imagine “Trump juice” to be like that unidentified oily liquid one might find at the bottom of a dumpster that hasn’t been emptied for an entire August… what I call “rat’s bourbon”… You’re welcome for the smell that is now in your nose for an hour);
So, there’s another open letter. FFS. I’m still scarred from the last one, which I signed for all of about one hour until I was swiftly and mercilessly educated on the context of the letter by Ms. Ninja. It was sent to me by a friend whose judgment I trusted, and seemed to present as a fairly reasonable argument about due diligence and poor decision making on the part of an institution, but I regret signing it, given all that I know about the situation now, and I take responsibility for the fact that it was my privileged position within society that let me gloss over all concerns but the academics of the argument. Then watching the letter divide and destroy the entire community as it became a political tool for those seeking to entrench an ideological stance that’s already entrenched, rather than effect real change…Well, it’s a moment of shame for me, as I imagine this new one will end up for some of the signatories already on the letter.
I read the letter last night and here is my takeaway: it sounds reasonable, once again. EXCEPT… EXCEPT… It’s so very vaguely written that it allows multiple interpretations and has so many problematic signatories whose very presence skew the letter toward a manifesto calling for freedom of bigotry instead of freedom of argument.
I find it difficult to separate the argument of this letter (as well as its timing) from the fact that some of the Western world’s most marginalized groups are in a state of outright rebellion, fighting on the streets in some cases for their lives and rights to exist without prejudice.
What is your take on this?
Published in Harper’s Magazine, the letter is signed by more than 150 writers, academics and artists, also including major names such as Martin Amis, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell and Gloria Steinem.
Acknowledging that “powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society”, the letter goes on to decry what it calls “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity”.
Damn, they look good for their ages. Amphibians, eh? We read so many Arnold Lobel books in this house, it’s not funny. I realized my firstborn could read when I tried to skip a paragraph in a Mouse Tales story to hurry bedtime along and he said, “You missed this part here,” and pointed to the words. He was three and a half. My personal favourite of his books is Owl and Home, but we did Grasshopper on the Road, Uncle Elephant, all the F&T series, Mouse Tales, Mouse Soup, the Fables, etc. etc. Love them, and probably the most in-rotation books of our early days here, along with AA Milne and EB White. Here are a bunch of authors at Slate reflecting on the influence of Frog and Toad over the years.
“The very first thing is sad,” marvels Mac Barnett about the opening story in Frog and Toad Are Friends. Barnett, a prolific children’s book author whose work includes Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, is right about that. Though the book series by Arnold Lobel has filled young readers with a sense of warmth and closeness for five decades, Frog and Toad opens with disappointment and desperation. It is the first day of spring, and Frog is eager for a celebratory post-hibernation reunion. But Toad won’t get out of bed. He tells Frog to return in a month and hops back to sleep. Frog pleads, “But Toad, I will be lonely until then.” Instead of resigning himself to isolation, Frog sneaks back into Toad’s house, rips a handful of pages out of the calendar, wakes Toad back up, and tricks him into believing a month has passed. “Faced with the prospect of being alone for a month or committing an act of deception, he deceives his best friend,” Barnett explains. “And it’s a happy ending because they’re together. These amphibians, they act in complicated ways to each other, but the friendship is the only thing standing between them and despair.”
Bookninja 