History of Writing
Finally finished this today – you know how it is when you’re nearly finished a book, but the last half a chapter just seems like such a slog… yes. Well, that’s exactly how I’ve felt with this book, much as I have enjoyed it.
Let me get the gripes out of the way to start with. Lack of definitions irked me. Maybe Steven Roger Fischer is only writing for experts – although it doesn’t really seem like it – but he talks about graphemes and logography and other such words and doesn’t give a definition for any of them until about chapter 5, and then only defines a couple! So that was a bit annoying. I also should say that I didn’t entirely understand all of it; part of that is me – I am definitely not an expert in the area, and some of it just went over my head, as I knew it would – but some of it is Fischer: while he mostly writes plainly, every now and then he got a bit carried away with fancy-pantsed academic language that may not have been necessary.
Anyway… the first chapter is “From Notches to Tablets” and the second “Talking Art” – fairly obvious what they’re about. Mostly concentrating on the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian area (Fischer is a proponent of the idea that ‘complete writing’ started in just one place, Sumer, and developed everywhere else because of foreign influence), it looks at why complete writing developed, and how, and the advantages that came because of it. Knots, notches, pictography… humans really are quite creative. In the development of writing I particularly like the idea of the rebus – smart cookie, whoever realised that you can substitute a picture of one thing for something else that sounds the same but means something else (eg a bird’s bill for Bill).
Chapter 3 is “Speaking Systems,” It looks at the dissemination of writing throughout the Mediterranean and into India, Phoenicians and the Middle East and all. Basically tracing how syllabaries (where a sign represents a syllable) developed and influenced one another.
“From Alpha to Omega” is the fourth chapter, and there are no prizes for guessing its emphasis: the Greek alphabet. From Greece to the Etruscans to the Romans, and then on into all areas conquered by them, is the story told here. Mention is made of Ogham, Slavonic scripts, and Gothic script too. Very interesting, and lots of pretty pictures showing different writing styles.
Fifth is “The East Asian ‘Regenesis'”, which mostly looks at Chinese writing – its development, changes, and how it has influences cultures within its orbit, such as Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Mongolia. I had already read about the Korean script somewhere else, but the story of it being developed in the 1400s by the king (or at least under his aegis) is a brilliant one. And I had no idea just how complicated Japanese is… crazy, the amount of stuff Japanese kids have to learn just to be literate! And my students complain!
“The Americas,” the sixth chapter, is not one I had expected to be very long, but it was actually quite involved. It looked at who might have had writing when, who influenced who, and what role writing might have played in the different Mesoamerican (primarily) societies. The Spanish have a lot to answer for, with regard to destroying Aztec records, but then I guess we knew that.
Penultimately, “The Parchment Keyboard” looks at the development of handwriting styles in Europe basically from Charlemagne on, the dissemination of them and literacy more generally, and then the development and impact of printing. It always amuses me that we place so much emphasis on Gutenber, in the West, when the Chinese had been using paper and block printing for centuries before him. The joys of Eurocentrism…
Finally comes “Scripting the Future,” which is Fischer’s attempts at prognostication, for the most part. What the impact of computers will be, the likely success of trying create a ‘visual language,’ and the scripts that will still be around in 400 years.
This is a very, very brief overview of the book. I really liked that, in general, Fischer was not triumphalist, smug or assured about the overwhelming use of the Latin-based alphabet. Indeed, he went out of his way to emphasise that this is not necessarily the ‘best’ alphabet – pointing out a lot of the problems with it, calling it deficient, which I liked – and holding up the longevity and usesfulness of Japanese writing systems (three of them!) in contrast. It is mostly readable, and reveals things about writing that I had never thought about. Good for nerds who like thinking about the way things are done, and why, and the history of things we take for granted.
Easter
Ah, Easter. We love it because it’s a four-day weekend (five days, before Kennet, not that I know I know anything about that little deal, seeing as I arrived in Melbourne only a little bit before he was defeated and I was at uni anyway). Of course, it’s also the anniversary of the death of Jesus Christ, and for those of us who are Christian it is therefore a sobering time of reflection – and joy. I love Easter because it’s the anniversary of my becoming a Christian; I was eleven this year. Yay for me!
We took the opportunity this year to go away for Easter. J was in the musical at St Jude’s – well, he was playing trumpet, which I guess isn’t technically “in” the musical, but he was participating in it – and the last night was Good Friday, which I really don’t get (I’ve also always been amazed that it is Good Friday: I mean, as a Christian I understand why it is a good day, but still…). This meant we didn’t go away until Saturday morning, but that was ok, since I’m on holidays and he moved his day off from Friday to Tuesday so we still had four days.
The first night we had in the Grampians. We had lunch in Ballarat with the in-laws – they’re on Stage Four restrcitions (actually, they are on tank water, but the town is on the restrictions), and if there are no changes they’re looking at having NO water by December); it’s really scary, until you remember that this is Australia, people, and we SO have to get out of the European mindset.* Anyway, we then went to the Grampians, and met up with MG and his fiancee (which is a bit exciting – been waiting for that for ages). They took some pics, then we eventually ended up at Burrough (sp?) Huts, at about 7.30pm, which was totally infested with people. We had a BBQ and went to bed.
The next day, Easter Sunday, we decided we would see what the Little Desert was like. J has this mad plan of taking pictures in every single one of Victoria’s national and state parks… it will be interesting to see how that turns out. Anyway, we travelled the 100km or so, went past Dimboola (and Wail, with a really cool nursery that we could only see through the glass), and finally got into the Little Desert proper. It’s not really a Desert, is the thing. When the Wimmera River is in flow (there were only a couple of bits with water – the bendy bits, mostly, which must be a bit deeper), it will/would be a most spectacular area. We camped at Acles Camp Ground, at about lunch time. I read for a large chunk of the day, and It Was Good. And when there is water – well, as I said, it will be spectacular. This is somewhere I would definitely go back to. J took some pics in the evening – a number of them from the riverbed, since it was as dry as a road.
After the night at Acles, with just one other car about 100m away (although we could hear some hoons over at Horseshoe Bend…), we drove a little way into the Desert, but turned around after 20km or so after we couldn’t go much further. We then went back to the Grampians, aiming for the Mt Stapylton campground, but going via Mt Zero Olives first: I love the idea of visiting organic-y, exclusive type places like this. And Mt Zero is really nice: a fantastic setting, great produce – we bought some basil oil, mellazina olives (my world has consequently been substantially changed), and some beetroot&orange relish. We also had lunch there, which was delightful – great food, great view, reading and ignoring the dog who adopted us because we were stupid enough to throw the stick for it… until someone else arrived, at which time we were promptly ditched as being Too Boring.
From Mt Zero, we went to the Staplyton campground, where again we sat around reading and dozing until J went to take pics (and being interrupted by middle-aged rednecks who thought that only non-English-speaking backpackers would be our age and in a Landcruiser like ours. Not sure how to take that.). He didn’t end up taking many good ones, which was a shame. We did end up sharing our campfire with some climbers, who were sort of interesting: a 25-ish bloke who works for a climbing gym and is obsessed, and a 30-something dude who works in the steel industry and is possibly even more obsessed, spending most of his weekends in the Gramps so he can climb, and 3 nights at the gym, and so on….
The next day we went to Horsham, via Natamuk, which J had heard was an interesting little town; he was so wrong. Then we drove to Ballarat for the night; we got some good light around Mt Buangor, which was good.
So our time away finished Wed morning, very early (we got home at c.8.30am).
*One of J’s cousin’s has really bad hot water, in Sheffield (UK), so they leave their water running for fully five minutes before putting in the plug to do the washing. I nearly died of shock. And I really will post some stuff about the trip at some stage….
Dreaming of Amber
I read this while we were on holidays. It’s by Tony Shillitoe – and it’s one of the few books I have ever read that is really, truly set in an Australian context: mallee country, numbats, bilbies… and it was very appropriate, since I was in the mallee when I read it. I’ll have a review of it up on ASif! soon.
Dr No
I read this for Popular Fiction when I was at uni, but I’d never seen the movie until last night.
I was really pleased to see that the standard Bond features of the opening sequence – the shot through the gun barrel, the silhouetted figures, etc – all started right back here; really does bring a lovely sense of continuity to the franchise.
As for the story… it was a bit different from how I remember the book. Ursula Andress (what a beautiful woman) has a perfect nose, unlike Honeychile in the book, which certainly changed her and Bond’s relationship. The action was a bit laughable, and the car chases were cringe-worthy. And if this was all the anthropology you were given, you would only ‘know’ that black people are always stupid, exist to obey White Man orders, and can be either good or bad; and Asians are always devious, cunning, and bad. And played by white people with bad make-up. Ouch.
Dr No himself is an interesting character. The reason I remember reading the book is because of an essay I wrote talking about how the villains are physically malformed somehow (No’s hands, and Lecter’s eyes in Silence of the Lambs), while the heroes are physically perfect. And really, No was always going to be a villain: a product of miscegenation (German and Chinese) and sin (a German missionary and a Chinese girl!). Poor lad never had a chance.
Overall… I did mostly enjoy it, if only for its historical value, but it really makes me doubt J’s occasional, continued push to buy the entire bck catalogue. The early Bonds just aren’t that good.
Galactic North
I finished this a couple of days ago – given it is a set of novellas, it serves as my break from reading about the Chinese Revolution, which book I will also post about at some time – there are some doozies of quotes that I have to share with people.
Anyway, to Galactic North: the latest Alastair Reynolds (although apparently there’s a new novel on the way – hurrah). I am eternally grateful to Kate for getting me to to read short stories, since before she started foisting Urchin stories on me (an example of which can be read here – I do so love the Wild Hunt), I never was much of a fan. This I have since repented, and am doing my part in reading a large stack of Aussie shorts (don’t believe me? Check this out). But back to the point. The first two stories (Great Wall of Mars, and Glacial) of this collection are about Galiana and Clavain, familiar to anyone who has read Revelation Space stories and still fascinating characters for newbies. Representing very different forms of culture and humanity – one a Conjoiner, those humans who exist with what is, crudely, an interweb between them, connecting them irrevocably, the other from a faction implacably opposed to such forms of humanity. They are great stories, and although you can read them as stand-alones, as I said, i think they are best seen as filling in (very nicely) holes from the novels.
Those two stories were probablymy favourites, because they did plug holes. “A Spy in Europa” is excellent, a very clever twisty story; “Weather” looks at both Ultras (space-adapted sailors, basically) and Conjoiners more than usual. “Dilation Sleep” is apparently a very old story, and suitably creepy, although not the most interesting of the set; “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” allows Reynolds’ macabre side out to play. “Nightingale” (took me a while to get the name; it’s the name of a hospital ship) is also quite macabre, and an anti-war gem. Finally, “Galactic North” reminded me a lot of Time, Space, and Origin by Stephen Baxter, for its sheer scope of time and space. It was really, really good, too – picking up on something mentioned in one of the novels, and running with it to what should be a ridiculous extent, and yet… it works.
All in all, a glorious set of stories. And it just makes me want more from the Revelation Space ‘verse.
The Player of Games
I found Iain M Banks when we were in the UK – reminds me that I should get around to talking at least about the books I read over there, if not about the whole trip. It feels like it was such a long time ago, now, though – 10 weeks in fact. Anyway: I just finished his The Player of Games the second of the Culture novels. I think I’ve decided they can be safely read out of order, which is nice – now I can just go nuts at the second hand book shop, and buy whatever they happen to have.
It’s a great book. Banks is a great storyteller – you know, after you’ve read one, that there is a fair bit more going on than is obvious at the first and that this will be revealed in clever ways, and pretty much logically too: that is, there won’t be ta-dah! moments just to get the hero out of a sticky spot. I have to say, though, that I found the conclusion to this one just a bit anti-climactic. I don’t know what else I was expecting (well, yes actually I do, and it has a lot to do with Janny Wurts and the Empire books), but it wasn’t what happened.
Getting to that conclusion, though, was fun. The main character isn’t much of a hero – just an every-day Culture dude, who happens to be about the best games-player in the entirety of the Culture. He gets contracted, basically, to go and play the highest-stakes game he’s ever come across, and the book is about him learning it and playing it. Which sounds daft, except that the stakes are who gets to Emperor of Azad.
One of the more interesting, if surprisingly understated, aspects is the difference between Azad and the Culture, in politics and morals and pretty much every other aspect of life. There are a few conversation where these things are explored, and – I think deliberately – it’s weird for a reader to try and figure out exactly where they want to position themselves. With the Culture, that tolerates incest and pretty much anything else its citizens can come up with, or the Empire, that goes around subjugating everyone they meet (sounds familiar)? And really, as things are presented here, there are no half-measures. One side or the other.
Interesting. Fun. And, unlike Consider Phlebas (the one I read in the UK), only one page of ickiness that I had to skip over.
Spicy history
I finished Jack Turner’s Spice: The History of a Temptation yesterday. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It’s quite an idiosyncratic history, and deliberately so – writing about absolutely everything to do with spice, even just in western Europe and/or just in the Middle Ages would be an incomprehensibly huge project, I would imagine. So he hasn’t done that: although he does go into great detail in some things, in others he skips over stuff a bit. He does seem to have a fairly good bibliography at the back, so I guess if you were so inclined you could chase stuff up yourself.
The first part is about the spice race – Columbus, Magellan, and their cohort, who opened up the world for Europeans – at least the western ones – all, or at least partly, in the name of spice, I love the idea of Portugese or Spanish explorer getting to Malabar or other such places and finding Italian merchants already there; the look on their faces must have been priceless… much like the spice there were seeking.
The second part focusses on the palate – the thing that I was expecting most of the book to look at, to be honest, despite the fact that I know spices were used in incense etc. Anyway, this section was really interesting: it looked at recipes, it looked at how spice helped to create/maintain class distinction; discredits the idea that spice was used in the Middle Ages to hide the taste of rotting meat (it was rich people who used spice – do you think rich people would be eating rotting meat in the first place? It was at least partly to hide the taste of the salt used in curing the meat, probably).
The third part focussed on the body, in two ways: spice in medicine, and spice for love. Starting with cloves being shoved up Ramses II’s nose, as part of the mummification process, and then talking about the whole idea of pomanders and bad air (mal aria…) being respondible for disease. The section on spice as aphrodisiac was quite funny. And almost entirely male-centred – the remedies suggested, that is, not Turner’s treatment of it, since he himself points it out.
Part four is on the spirit: the use of spice in incense, for example. It mostly focussed, though, on the changing attitude of Christians towards spice in worship. The earliest Church fathers thought it was ok-ish – Christians were often anointed with spices for burial, since Christ was. Then people went a bit off it, because after all if God is incorporeal then presumably he doesn’t enjoy pleasant smells (personally I think this is a daft argument: so you’re limiting what God is able to do, then?). This is a very, very brief overview, of course.
The last chapter is called “Some Like it Bland,” which is a great heading. It talks about the movement – slowly – against spices, for a range of reasons, including that it was a drain of resources away from Europe towards those nasty, decadent Easterners; plus, interestingly, he links the development of the nation-state and national sentiment to the development of a national cuisine, which makes sense, and in England at least this led to a bland cuisine they were proud of, contrasting it with those very spices their forebears used to love.
As I said, this is a ridiculously brief overview, but it gives an idea what the book was about. It’s really well written, and a lot of fun to read; Turner’s not afraid of pointing out the humorous and ridiculous nature of some of the things he discusses.
Reading for pleasure (gasp!)
I feel like it is a long time since I read anything without another agenda in mind: it was for school, or I was going to write a review of it… even history books I read for fun still have the not-very-subliminal purpose of increasing my general (trivial) knowledge. That’s not to say that I dont enjoy those books, of course; just that as I read I’m thinking of things other than just the enjoyment.
To celebrate the start of my break, I am reading Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds. It has been sitting on my shelf for a while, holding out the promise of complete escapism and masterful writing, for a while now, and it is with a huge sense of relief and relaxation that I dived into it yesterday. It’s 8 short stories – novellas, really – set in the Revelation Space et al universe. The first two are about Nevil Clavain, Galiana, and Felka. I remember them from at least one of the four stories set in that ‘verse, and it’s really nice to get some background on them. It also, of course, makes me itch to go back and read them all again. I think I read them too fast first time around and may have missed some of the subtleties. Plus, they are jsut damned fine stories. Truly, Reynolds is a heroic storyteller.
Hell, and the history thereof
As I cook an enormous lasagne to feed a 5 year old and 4 year old tonight (and their parents), I’m catching up on my “In our Time” podcasts. At the moment it’s “The history of hell,” which is interesting for a whole load of reasons. But something that just struck me: Bosch and Luther were contemporaries! Fascinating.
Now they’re talking about the fact that in many early traditions, hell was freezing, rather than being, with the speculation that this is some sort of folk memory of the change, 10,000 years ago, from the last Ice Age. Apparently – and I don’t know who thinks this – there is an idea that the Ice Age changed over just 10 years or so, such that people would experience it very obviously.
And now they’re talking about Heart of Darkness The Waste Land. The idea of the journey down the Congo, to the supervisor at the inner station, who might be described as a modern Tiresias. Now that is a really, really interesting idea.
Spice, and Spice Girls
I’ve been hearing the Spice Girls song, “Stop”, a lot recently, at school. This has a weird effect on me. A group of girls at college used to do the moves to this song all the time, and consequently when I hear it I have a vision of them doing so – and an urge to join in. Mainly to upset the kiddies.
What made me think of this is the book I am reading: Spice: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner. It’s very enjoyable – although I am dubious of his repeated use of the term ‘Dark Ages’ in referring to the time after the (now) official end of the Western Roman Empire. Nonetheless. He has a whole chapter, of course on spice and sex: looking at all the different ways it was recommended to use spice to improve sex in a variety of ways, as well as the problems the more prudish (and supposedly celibate) members of the community had with it. Throughout, he makes comments on some of the things that have lasted to the modern day, and towards the end he comments on the Spice Girls, saying they “shot like a gaudy, squawking comet through the outer orbits of pop stardom before, in obedience to the Newtonian physics of celebrity, the acrimonious plummet back to earth and bust-up.” Beautiful. No wonder he writes about spice; he certainly has the language for it.
Randomly Yours, Alex 