I spend a lot of time studying and researching. And, let’s face it, a lot of the rest of my time idly clicking from link to link to link. I come across many truths, half-truths, and complete untruths, which stew and boil around in my mind and torment me half to death. They have to go somewhere or I’ll go mad, I tell you. Blooming insane. Here are seven things I learned this week.
The population of ancient Rome was equivalent to that of Wolverhampton. That is about 250,000 inhabitants, apparently. Of course as soon as I learned that, I had to go and unlearn it. The figure set some alarm bells ringing for me, so like any good academic I headed straight for Wikipedia. Which claims ancient Rome reached a population of 1 million, possibly much more.Incidentally there’s a helpful page that informs me that the distance between Rome and Wolverhampton is 1006 miles. The distance between ancient Rome and Wolverhampton is might be more interesting. Though it looks as if Wolverhampton only started really doing city-like things sometime after 600 AD. Having said that, not existing didn’t stop the town from being a point on a mystical network of ancient Woolworths stores. In fact it turns out, with a bit of judicious selection, you can apply some of the dodgy maths that has been used to find meaning in the placement of ancient monuments to any scatter of sites. I still like the image of prehistoric pick and mix, though.
An ability to speak French is a sign of suspicious liberality. If you are a xenophobic right wing American voter, that is. Popular amphibian Newt Gingrich smeared his only slightly less unpleasant opponent Mitt Romney by suggesting he routinely let disgusting French vowels drip from his venal liberal mouth. It now turns out that Newt may be suspiciously polyglot himself. What to do? Agents of purity could imitate the Great Escape and have French operatives follow hopeful candidates around yelling “Bon Chance!”until someone slips and replies “Merci!”. The quisling operative will then point and shout in accented English. “HE SPEAKS FRENCH! HE SPEAKS FRENCH! TAKE HIM AWAY! (Can I have my cheese now?)”
In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all debate on the origin of language. The problem of course is that language, being language, is not something that hangs around to be carbon dated. Especially in pre-literate societies, which any society that has just somehow agreed to call all bananas HUURG probably is. You can imagine how it might have worked though. There’s the give me a banana gesture, which is a little gimme gimme gimme dance accompanied, half by chance, by a particular moan. And after a while it seems like a whole lot less effort to just lie around and moan until someone gets off his fat paleolithic arse and fetches you a banana already. And thus was language born. Next week. Fire.
An adult human could crawl through the aorta of a blue whale. Actually, I had to switch this fact in. Originally it was going to be a tidbit I gleaned from my son who maintains that a blue whale’s heart only beats once every five minutes. However I can’t find any evidence of this anywhere. Here’s the best I came up with on a quick search. He swears he read it in a book, but I told him “link, or it isn’t true.”
According to Claire Squires, writing in Judging a Book by its Cover, “By 2001, five companies (Bertelsman, Perason, HarperCollins, Hodder Headline, and Hachette) had just over 50 percent of market share in the UK, thus controlling over half the market.” To me, that’s so self-evidently a Bad Thing that I’m tempted not to say anything else about it. It is, perhaps, to publishing, what Francophone candidates are to American politics. Just wrong. A much linked articleby Rebecca Swift describes the impact of the collision between commercial and creative imperatives.”Good writers still need to play. They still need space, time and respect to practice their craft, make errors if necessary, and come up, if they want, with something new. Creativity was ever thus. If publishers don’t understand this, surely it will be at their, or the culture’s, long term peril? Publishers currently run the risk of losing important writers in the long term on the basis of short term decision making. Money people can say ‘it doesn’t matter as long as we earn money’ but in the long run this is to fail to have a healthy understanding of what books, or the ‘product’ is.”
In The State of the Novel Dominic Head writes that a literary novel is “the kind of book that is shortlisted for literary prizes.”This seems like an excellent model for a definition. Similarly, racing cars are the kind of cars that get entered for races, and school children are the kind of children who go to school.More seriously, though, there is a good point being made here, whether intentionally or not. The literariness of literary novels is a notoriously slippery category. We might say that a literary novel emphasises character over plot, or that it is concerned with form, that it challenges conventions of structure, that it references a canon. All these things may be true, but they can also be true of genre novels. And which genre authors are selected for elevation to literary status is also up for grabs. This Booker brought us the much-attacked ‘readable’ shortlist. I’ve just completed A.D Miller’s Snowdrops which I enjoyed. I couldn’t tell you why it’s more worthy of shortlisting than any number of other thoughtful thrillers (Child 44by Tom Rob Smith, for example).Like pornography, it seems, literary fiction is hard to define, but we know it when a judge sees it. There’s only one thing for sure. You won’t be seeing science fiction on the shortlist any time soon. Unless it’s by Margaret Atwood. And then of course, it won’t be science fiction. Will it?
Perfect daily bread. 500g strong white bread flour. 200g wholemeal bread flour. Two teaspoons of salt. A 7 gram packet of dried yeast. 450ml water. Stir it all up until its a proper ball of dough. Leave for ten minutes. Knead for a few minutes on a heavily floured worktop. Put it back in the bowl for up to an hour, until it is half again, or twice its original size. Knead again briefly. Roll it up into a bread shape and leave covered for another half hour or so on a floured baking tray. It should be slightly alarmingly puffed up. Slash two crosses in the top, and sprinkle some flour. Bake for 15 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius. Then another ten minutes or so at 170 degrees Celcius. (This is my hybrid of recipes by Dan Lepard and Linda Collister)
