With footnotes, of course!
I've been reading Voltaire's Candide, or Optimisim the past few days; This is the English edition, I've a lot of learning to do before my French is up to reading Voltaire, and I've been continuously flicking between the pages of the story and the footnotes at the back. It's quite a task, trying to gauge the socio-political-religious atmosphere of an era that I know practically nothing about in the kind of particular detail that's required to understand a satire. I mean, we all know something or the other about the 18th century, but when Voltaire writes something like,
Pangloss taught metaphysico-theologico-cosmo-nigology.
I get the initial humor aimed at Pangloss' overzealous teaching absurdity, but I couldn't go past that basic level without a footnote that reads,
Voltaire's assault on cosmic optimism is a compound-caricature of Leibniz, Pope and Wolff, the latter a rigidly systematic thinker who introduced the word 'cosmology' to a wider world; 'nigology' comes from nigaud ('booby').
It can be quite frustrating when even after reading the footnotes et al. you still know for certain that you're not getting all the humour that Voltaire had intended to impart to his audience. It does make you think, while the funniest jokes today are the most topical, the ones that relate to current affairs, they're also the ones that will least stand the test of time, at least in their original form. How funny will a Bush joke be a 100 years from now when you don't really know how he was percieved by the rest of the world?
Of course, all they have to do is read 'The Complete Bushisms' and they can get the picture. Here's a recent one;
"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."— Speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007.
Yeah, understanding the political atmosphere around Bush won't be quite as hard as doing the same for anyone a few centuries ago. I haven't dipped into the internet as a resource for understanding Candide, but I'm sure there's plenty out there. In fact, I haven't even read the introduction, and all the other stuff which is there, because I don't like to do that until I've read the book. Makes an introduction useless, but hey, I don't want any spoilers. But it does say something about the necessary background you need to understand a book when only 60% of the book is the actual story.
Speaking of the internet, Penguin Books is trying something quite novel this year. It's called A Million Penguins, you'll understand why in a sec. Basically, they've attempted to apply the very recent Wiki concept to the good 'ole novel. A WikiNovel, if you may (and they do). To spell that out for you, they are allowing anyone and everyone to flex their writing or editing skills and set out to put together what will hopefully be the next big thing, wikified. So far, seven chapters in, the thing isn't winning any Booker awards, but it has got to be either a very interesting read to see all the different possible styles put together, and whether or not this will actually work/sell instead of just turning into one huge long never-to-end thing, or it could blow so badly, because, although there is moderation, just imagine what a similar project, a wiki-painting might turn out like?
Whether or not the actual product is a good read, the process is definitely interesting, and I think, if I like where the story's going I'll try my hand at writing some of it. It's a larger version of something else that I read about in the paper, although I'm not able to find it online (yet), about a publishing house in the States that's planning to make novels like they do movies. A group of people will sit together and thrash out a general outline for a novel, based on what has worked and what they think will please readers, and they'll give this outline to a writer who will then write the story. Again, a very interesting concept, and certainly we'll have to see how it turns out, as it has much more potential than the wiki-novel, of chaning the way things work in the writing world today.
One of the things I get from reading Voltaire is the amount of referencing he does to other writers and philosophers of his own time, and how there was actually communication between them, then. It's a cool concept, like the idea of how things actually went at the Hemingway, James Joyce modernist hang-outs and picnics. I suppose they do it today, when Veronica Mars continues to speak about cylons and people 'fracking'. Zadie Smith sorta does it in her excellent essay on literature in The Guardian, Fail Better, which seems as much targeted at her contemporaries as it is at us readers.
All said and done, this will be another interesting year in terms of writing, certainly the year where I try my hand at doing it some more. I joined Caferati recently, and am considering setting something up at Epic India.
So let's finish off with a statistic that will probably delight all those bourgeois uneducated-American haters out there; 80 percent of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 80 percent!
Which means 'simpleton', in case you thought Voltaire was that audacious (He was).
It can be quite frustrating when even after reading the footnotes et al. you still know for certain that you're not getting all the humour that Voltaire had intended to impart to his audience. It does make you think, while the funniest jokes today are the most topical, the ones that relate to current affairs, they're also the ones that will least stand the test of time, at least in their original form. How funny will a Bush joke be a 100 years from now when you don't really know how he was percieved by the rest of the world?
Of course, all they have to do is read 'The Complete Bushisms' and they can get the picture. Here's a recent one;
"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."— Speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007.
Yeah, understanding the political atmosphere around Bush won't be quite as hard as doing the same for anyone a few centuries ago. I haven't dipped into the internet as a resource for understanding Candide, but I'm sure there's plenty out there. In fact, I haven't even read the introduction, and all the other stuff which is there, because I don't like to do that until I've read the book. Makes an introduction useless, but hey, I don't want any spoilers. But it does say something about the necessary background you need to understand a book when only 60% of the book is the actual story.
Speaking of the internet, Penguin Books is trying something quite novel this year. It's called A Million Penguins, you'll understand why in a sec. Basically, they've attempted to apply the very recent Wiki concept to the good 'ole novel. A WikiNovel, if you may (and they do). To spell that out for you, they are allowing anyone and everyone to flex their writing or editing skills and set out to put together what will hopefully be the next big thing, wikified. So far, seven chapters in, the thing isn't winning any Booker awards, but it has got to be either a very interesting read to see all the different possible styles put together, and whether or not this will actually work/sell instead of just turning into one huge long never-to-end thing, or it could blow so badly, because, although there is moderation, just imagine what a similar project, a wiki-painting might turn out like?
Whether or not the actual product is a good read, the process is definitely interesting, and I think, if I like where the story's going I'll try my hand at writing some of it. It's a larger version of something else that I read about in the paper, although I'm not able to find it online (yet), about a publishing house in the States that's planning to make novels like they do movies. A group of people will sit together and thrash out a general outline for a novel, based on what has worked and what they think will please readers, and they'll give this outline to a writer who will then write the story. Again, a very interesting concept, and certainly we'll have to see how it turns out, as it has much more potential than the wiki-novel, of chaning the way things work in the writing world today.
One of the things I get from reading Voltaire is the amount of referencing he does to other writers and philosophers of his own time, and how there was actually communication between them, then. It's a cool concept, like the idea of how things actually went at the Hemingway, James Joyce modernist hang-outs and picnics. I suppose they do it today, when Veronica Mars continues to speak about cylons and people 'fracking'. Zadie Smith sorta does it in her excellent essay on literature in The Guardian, Fail Better, which seems as much targeted at her contemporaries as it is at us readers.
All said and done, this will be another interesting year in terms of writing, certainly the year where I try my hand at doing it some more. I joined Caferati recently, and am considering setting something up at Epic India.
So let's finish off with a statistic that will probably delight all those bourgeois uneducated-American haters out there; 80 percent of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 80 percent!
