The link below is to an article reporting on the winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards for 2016. Did you read any of them? Do you intend to read any of them? Are they worthy of their place in your opinion? Let us know what you think in the comments.
For more visit:
http://ebookfriendly.com/goodreads-choice-awards-2016-winners/
The link below is to an article that reports on readers living longer.
For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/people-who-read-books-live-longer
The link below is to an article that takes a look at the best books of 2016, according to Amazon.
For more visit:
http://ebookfriendly.com/best-books-2016-amazon/
Bruce Smith, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has been the site of many creative adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. The latest, Ivo van Hove’s “Kings of War,” which ran at BAM from Nov. 3 to 6, is a multimedia mashup of characters, lines and scenes from Shakespeare’s history plays.
“Extensively cut,” “deeply cut” and “severely cut” are some of the favorite phrases used by the reviewers of these types of experimental stage and film adaptations. Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review of “Kings of War,” observes that Van Hove and his adapters have decided “to strip the texts down to their political marrow.”
The implication is that deleting lines – not to mention deleting entire scenes and characters – is an act of cultural vandalism. It recalls Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus,” slashed with a chopping knife by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914, and Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” attacked three times during the 20th century, twice with knives.
Cutting, however, doesn’t necessarily mean getting rid of something. It could mean prizing something so much that you want to cut it out and save it, perhaps putting it to creative use in something you’re making yourself. A “cut,” in this sense, could be a speech that you’re using for an audition or a scene you’re reworking in a short story or a character you’ve decided to make the subject of a painting. Cuts cut both ways. What has been cut out can be discarded on the cutting-room floor or it can be made the centerpiece of something new.
In such cases, cutting up Shakespeare is not an act of destruction but an act of creation. Professional playwrights in Shakespeare’s time even thought about creating scripts as “cutwork,” like constructing costumes by cutting and stitching. When playwrights collaborated on a script, each writer got separate pieces, in the form of separate scenes. Shakespeare participated in several such joint-author enterprises in the course of his career, and an argument has been made recently that Christopher Marlowe was one of his collaborators.
In the four centuries since Shakespeare’s death, artists in all kinds of media have carried out creative cutwork of their own.
Decades before the types of cutwork we’re seeing today, beat writer William S. Burroughs and his friend Brion Guysin wielded pairs of scissors, cut up Shakespeare’s texts and rearranged them into verbal collages alongside cuts from other writers.
Particularly fruitful, they discovered, were cuttings that juxtaposed fragments of Shakespeare’s sonnets with fragments of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems. The effect, they said, was the creation of “a third mind.” I came across these examples in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, and they’re published, for the first time, in my recent book “Shakespeare | Cut.”
But creative cuts have actually been taking place since the 1590s, when readers came into possession of Shakespeare’s plays in their earliest print editions. In diaries and so-called “commonplace books,” these early readers transcribed the phrases, sentences and speeches that they found to be particularly striking. Cuts of a different sort were inserted by printers on title pages: woodcuts and engravings showing particular characters (often depicted, cartoon-like, with banderoles coming out of their mouths) and particular scenes.
Cuts of characters and scenes were joined by author cuts, beginning with the engraved portrait of William Shakespeare on the title page of the 1623 First Folio.
Yet another variety of cuts came to the fore in the 18th century, when cuts of the actors playing certain characters emerged in paintings and engravings. Successive forms of new media – lithography, photography, sound recording, video – have brought actor cuts, in particular, to the forefront in public consciousness of Shakespeare. Think of David Tennant’s Hamlet, Judi Dench’s Cleopatra, Laurence Fishburne’s Othello, or Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth.
Today, Shakespeare cutwork takes place on stage, in film, in installations and online. Van Hove’s “Kings of War,” with its video monitors giving access to hidden spaces, mirror close-ups and news conferences, exemplifies how media can converge in contemporary cutwork.
The cutwork in Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work,” an adaptation of “Hamlet” that ran at BAM in 2013, was even more radical than Van Hove’s work. Each performance of Dorsen’s “Hamlet” was different, thanks to computer algorithms that generated entirely new combinations of words, visuals, lighting and music over the course of five “parts” corresponding to Shakespeare’s five acts. The algorithm shifted from one part to the next. And from one performance to the next.
The resulting cuts – including speech prefixes and stage directions – were projected on a large screen. Only in Part Four/Act Four did a live actor come up from the audience to speak a soliloquy that was being created then and there by the computer’s algorithm-of-the-moment and transmitted to the actor, in real time, via earbuds.
Mashups of Shakespeare on YouTube may be less pretentious than these theatrical performances, but they speak to a strong desire to intercut 400-year-old fragments from Shakespeare with everyday modern life. Craig Barzan’s “Hamlet on the Street” and Noor Ghuniem’s “The Tempest – The Missing Scene” are particularly striking examples.
If you watch YouTube on a smartphone while you walk or let your attention wander to other people, objects and events around you, the intercut between art and life becomes a physical fact. Make the device a smart watch, and the time factor is palpable: 1616 is juxtaposed with 2016 “in real time.”
But if cutwork with Shakespeare is nothing new, why has it become a fetish in the 21st century? One reason, surely, is the ease of making cuts with digital technology. Another reason, just as surely, is fragmentation in contemporary culture – fragmentation that may itself be a function of digital technology. A related factor is the general speeding up of contemporary life, exemplified in the clip culture that dominates YouTube. Judging from YouTube postings, the two-hour duration of Shakespeare’s stage performances can now be no longer than 15 minutes, preferably 10.
More disturbing is the thought that the violence of contemporary cutwork – its radicalism, its defiance of tradition, its psychological fascination – is connected with actual violence in the culture at large.
If so, the situation now may not be so different from the situation in Shakespeare’s lifetime, when most adult males carried weapons in the form of knives or swords and violent crime was rife. Shakespeare most frequently uses the word “cut” in relationship to body parts. At a deep level we should acknowledge the connections, in early modern culture and in contemporary culture, between cuts as bodily violence and cuts as violent ways of making art.
At a more fundamental level still we can point to the “gappy” nature of perception: We perceive the world in a series of cuts lasting no longer than three seconds.
Most important of all, however, is the selection and arrangement of experience that goes into the making of all forms of art. Cutting can create as well as destroy.
Bruce Smith, Dean’s Professor of English and Professor of Theatre, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
David Throsby, Macquarie University
The Australian book industry is in a state of considerable agitation as it waits to see if the federal government will scrap the parallel import restrictions of the Copyright Act.
Lifting the restrictions has been recommended by the Harper Committee and the Productivity Commission, and a decision could come next week, next month, or never.
These regulations restrict the importation of commercial quantities of books without the permission of the copyright holder. There is a strong sense of déjà vu in the current situation. Every few years since the 1980s a recommendation for repeal of these import restrictions has been put to the government of the day and every time the government, whether Coalition or Labor, has rejected it.
The arguments for doing away with them are based on simple economics. The restrictions provide some protection for authors and publishers in the face of international competition. The overall effect is to raise, at least temporarily, the price of books to Australian consumers, though the directly attributable cost increase is uncertain.
Keep reading: Parallel importation and Australian book publishing: here we go again
Nevertheless, any form of protection is anathema to economists as it distorts markets, creates inefficiencies in the allocation of our national resources, and restricts the access of consumers to cheaper supplies of products from abroad.
So should books be treated differently from anything else? Books are a cultural product, and can be defined as such for the purposes of international trade. Ever since the structure of the world trading system was set up in the 1940s with the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the forerunner of the present-day World Trade Organisation, a special case for cultural goods and services has been recognised: the so-called “cultural exception”.
The principle behind this concept is the proposition that cultural products are not just commercial merchandise, but embody cultural values that are separate from and additional to their economic value. These cultural values, it is argued, can be shown to be important to society, especially when they represent something about the national culture from which they are derived.
Keep reading: Friday essay: thriving societies produce great books – can Australia keep up?
So the argument concerning Australian books, written by Australian authors about Australian subjects and published by Australian publishers is that they convey such values. Hence, in the context of international trade they should be granted a cultural exception and should not be subject to the same free-trade ideology as other commodities in the global marketplace.
Some hardline economists – including in the Productivity Commission – acknowledge the significance of Australian books to our culture. They’re willing to accept a role for the public sector in ensuring that the cultural contribution of the book industry is maintained, provided that the community agrees that such a role is worth paying for.
The argument here is that if Australian books generate a sufficient level of public-good benefit through their contribution to our collective cultural life – a contribution that cannot be purchased overseas, by the way – this may constitute a case of market failure. Government intervention to correct for it may be justified if the benefits from intervention outweigh the costs.
So far so good, you might think. But it is one thing to agree that some level of support for an industry is justified – and quite another to determine how such support might be provided.
Economists are likely to argue that instead of the blunt instrument of parallel import restrictions, whose beneficiaries may well include many of the “wrong” people, direct fiscal support would be more appropriate because it can be targeted at those who generate the public benefit, such as Australian authors.
If we accept this line of argument, and if the existence of public-good benefits from the Australian book industry is assumed, it can be argued that the best policy action in the present circumstances would be to remove the import restrictions, and replace them with an equivalent level of protection provided through fiscal channels, for example by increasing the levels of financial support provided to writers and publishers of Australian books.
Such a recommendation may have merit in principle, but in the realpolitik of the Australian government today it simply doesn’t stand up. Federal funding for the arts and culture sector has been under considerable pressure in recent years. Even more pointedly, the government last year signalled its attitude to supporting the book industry by abolishing the newly-established Book Council before it had even held its first meeting.
Keep reading: Short shelf life: the Book Council of Australia is stuffed back on the rack
The possibility that the Government would approve a new budget allocation of any significance to compensate authors or publishers following removal of the import restrictions must be regarded as very remote indeed.
Some commentators have argued that import restrictions are a relatively minor issue, particularly when set against other more far-reaching copyright proposals such as the possible introduction of US-style fair dealing – a prospect that would have much more serious implications for the book industry. Nevertheless the recommendation is there, and needs a response.
What to do? To avoid a confrontation with an entire industry and to demonstrate a concern for the health of Australian cultural life, the government could either abolish parallel import restrictions and provide compensatory support for the production, distribution and consumption of Australian books, or it could leave things as they are.
As we have noted, successive Australian governments have in previous years accepted the latter as the appropriate practical and principled strategy. In its own interests, the present government would be well advised to do the same.
David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Macquarie University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Robert Manne, La Trobe University
Robert Manne’s new book, The Mind of the Islamic State, traces the evolution of the jihadist group’s world view. By poring over Islamic State’s texts, online magazines, and prison accounts by key figures, Manne offers insight into an ideology that most have heard of but few understand. In this extract, Manne unpacks the split between Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Islamist who led the Sunni insurgency in Iraq following the US-led invasion, was a man of action not of words. There exists, however, one fascinating lengthy letter from him to the leaders of Al Qaeda, dated January 2004, whose purpose was in part to begin what turned out to be a protracted negotiation for his movement’s entry into Al Qaeda.
Zarqawi begins within an apocalyptic frame. In Sham (the ancient name for Iraq and Syria) “the decisive battle between the infidels and Islam is taking place”. As Al Qaeda no doubt already grasps, he continues, the Zionist-led American administration of George W. Bush entered Iraq under “a contract to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates”. Their purpose was “to hasten the arrival of the Messiah”.
What is the political situation following the invasion? Zarqawi regards not the Americans but the Shi’as as the overwhelming problem for the Sunnis. They are “the most vile people in the human race”, “the insurmountable obstacle, the prowling serpent, the crafty evil scorpion, the enemy lying in wait”. Throughout history, the Shi’a have stabbed the Muslims in the back. Their religion “has nothing in common with Islam”. Perhaps worst of all, throughout history they have served the interests of the Jews.
What then is to be done? The key, according to Zarqawi, is to provoke a Sunni-Shi’a civil war:
We will trigger their rage against the Sunnis… [forcing them] to bare their fangs… If we manage to draw them onto the terrain of partisan war… soon the [Sunni] sleepers will awaken from their leaden slumber.
Prospects in this struggle are bright. Zarqawi concludes his letter by asking the leaders of Al Qaeda whether they accept his plan. If they do, he promises, they will have his allegiance.
The leaders of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri must have faced a difficult decision in pondering future relations with Zarqawi. On the one hand, the ferocious battle Zarqawi was leading in Iraq was the most promising ever mounted by the Salafi jihadist movement. On the other, the war against the Shi’a Zarqawi was intent to fight represented a radical break in the history of the mujahidin. Clearly however admiration for Zarqawi and a judgment of the political advantages of alignment with him, overcame concern. In December 2004, Al Qaeda accepted the formal allegiance Zarqawi offered.
In July 2005, a long letter was sent by Al Qaeda Central to Al Qaeda in Iraq. All scholars say that this letter was sent directly to Zarqawi from Zawahiri. This cannot be right. Towards its conclusion it reads:
By God, if by chance you’re going to Fallujah, send greetings to Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.
Most likely, although its contents were intended for Zarqawi, it was sent via another Al Qaeda member.
The letter documents Al Qaeda’s ambivalence about their new supporter. Zawahiri mounts a series of harsh and fundamental criticisms of Zarqawi’s leadership. The battle for the Islamic State cannot succeed without the support of the Muslim masses. They will never understand the disrespect that has been shown for the Sunni religious leaders. Zarqawi and his followers must not think of ruling on the basis of the mujahidin alone.
Even more sternly, Zawahiri chides Zarqawi for his anti-Shi’a sectarianism. No doubt many Shi’a have behaved treacherously during the American occupation. No doubt their understanding of Islam is deeply mistaken. But the Muslim masses will never understand a program based on the destruction of holy sites or systematic killing, especially of ordinary Shi’a. They will ask: “Can the mujahidin kill all the Shi’a in Iraq?” Zawahiri urges Zarqawi not to be seduced by those who praise him as the “sheikh of the slaughterers.”
Zawahiri’s letter was obviously ignored. Some three months later, a senior Al Qaeda leader, Atiyatullah al-Libi, sent another, far blunter warning. If Zawahiri’s letter concerned Zarqawi’s political mistakes, al-Libi’s concerned the defects of his character. Although this letter is almost unknown in the scholarly literature, it is even more revealing than Zawahiri’s.
Al-Libi’s letter contains a devastating catalogue of the dangers of Zarqawi’s style of leadership. Zarqawi must strive to win the love of the Muslim people. “Do not be harsh with them or degrade them or frighten them.” He must learn to accept disagreement. It does “not require hatred, clashing, hostility or enmity”. He must not become “arrogant” because of praise. His inner circle must avoid “injustice, conceit, haughtiness, superciliousness, excessive harshness and violence.”
Al-Libi reminds Zarqawi that Islam is a religion of “mercy, justice and good deeds”. A balance must be found “between severity and softness, between violence and gentleness”. “Let us not merely be people of killing, slaughter, blood, cunning, insult and harshness”. Zarqawi is warned:
You need to look deeply within yourself and your character.
If he fails to heed these warnings he will be replaced.
It was clear by now that not only through his unrestrained brutality and the expanding circle of what he regarded as permissible under Islamic law but also in his attitude to the Shi’a that Zarqawi had transformed and radicalised the Salafi jihadist tradition.
Zarqawi was killed by the Americans on June 7, 2006. Shortly after his death, his successors fulfilled his wishes by announcing the existence of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). For a time, the warnings al-Libi had issued about the dire political consequences of Zarqawi’s brutal behaviour seemed accurate. The Americans found eager partners among the Sunni tribes in the anti-insurgency movement called the Sahwah, the Awakening.
As a consequence, the Islamic State of Iraq was forced during 2008 to retreat to the arid lands of al-Anbar in the west. One of the wives of a leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, inquired:
Where is the Islamic State you’re talking about? We’re living in the desert.
The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), by now under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the desert in 2011 at a propitious moment – the military and political withdrawal of the Americans from Iraq, the increasing persecution of the Sunni by the Shia-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki, and the descent of Syria into civil war.
ISI began taking territory in the Sunni Triangle and despatched a small force to Syria led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, in what became known as the Nusra Front. In April 2013, ISI and the Nusra Front fell out speedily, spectacularly and bloodily after Baghdadi’s unilateral announcement of his leadership of a new political entity called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), covering the lands of both Iraq and Syria.
By this time, Osama bin Laden had been killed by the Americans. Al Qaeda’s new leader, Zawahiri, attempted unsuccessfully to arbitrate the differences, requiring Jolani to limit his authority to Syria and Baghdadi to Iraq. His negotiating team was murdered near Aleppo by members of the Islamic State.
In September 2013, Zawahiri published what he called General Guidelines for Jihad, an apparent and belated attempt to re-assert Al Qaeda’s ideological authority over the global Salafi jihadist movement. Zawahiri reminded the mujahidin that their main struggle must be conducted against the Americans, whose weakening grip on power has been revealed by the Arab Spring. Fighting against “deviant sects”, like the Shi’a, ought also to be avoided except in the case of self-defence and even then only in proportion to the danger posed.
Zawahiri warned the mujahidin to:
refrain from killing non-combatant women and children… from harming Muslims by explosions, killing [or] kidnapping… [and] from targeting enemies in mosques, markets and gatherings where they mix with Muslims or those who do not fight us.
Zawahiri’s guidelines were an attempt to rescue the Salafi jihadist movement from what he regarded as the grievous strategic, jurisprudential and sectarian errors introduced into it in Iraq by Zarqawi and his successors. Its publication formalised an ideological division in Salafi jihadism, between ISIS and Al Qaeda, as fundamental as the split that tore the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks apart in the years before the Russian Revolution.
The Mind of the Islamic State is published by Black Inc. Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University.
Robert Manne, Personal Chair in Politics, La Trobe University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to an article that takes a look at Sweek, a free writing and reading app.
For more visit:
http://www.noshelfrequired.com/free-mobile-reading-and-writing-platform-for-all-to-use-yes-please-and-thank-you-sweek/
Kevin Wheldall, Macquarie University
Children who do not learn to read in the first few years of schooling are typically destined to a school career of educational failure, because reading underpins almost all subsequent learning.
Even when exemplary reading instruction is available, there will always be some children who take longer than others to catch on to what reading is all about. It is important to identify these low-progress readers as early as possible so that they do not fall too far behind their peers.
We need a clear plan in place to ensure that no child falls through the net. Such a plan needs to be both effective and cost-effective.
A three tier model of reading instruction, known as Response to Intervention (or RtI) has become known in recent years as the best way of achieving this.
The three tier RtI model is based on the first tier of exemplary, quality initial instruction in reading for all students during their first year of schooling.
The instruction offered to all children beginning school should be based on what internationally conducted scientific research has shown to be most effective.
To the layman, this sounds patently obvious but this is not what is currently the case in many Australian schools. For the last few decades an implicit model of reading instruction has held sway.
Most of this implicit approach to reading instruction makes a good bedrock to build effective reading instruction on. But it is not enough for every child to learn to read.
The majority of children will need direct, explicit and systematic instruction in the five pillars or “five big ideas” of reading instruction: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
What is often lacking in initial reading instruction, in particular, is effective instruction in what is known as synthetic phonics: specific instruction in how to relate letters to sounds and to blend letter sounds into words.
In New South Wales and some other states, many schools typically screen students at the beginning of year one for possible placement in Reading Recovery, one of the most well known and most widely utilised remedial reading program in the world.
Whatever the debate about the efficacy of Reading Recovery, it is necessarily very expensive. It is based on a daily, half hour, one-to-one session with a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher, for two or more terms.
The RtI model recommends that struggling readers should be offered more intensive Tier 2 intervention in small groups of three to four students.
Again the instruction provided to these students is based on what the scientific research evidence has shown to be most effective.
In effect, this is essentially the same emphasis on the same five big ideas of reading instruction but it is both more intensive and more individualised. Teachers also need to be more responsive to the specific idiosyncratic needs of the students with whom they are working.
Research suggests that good small group instruction can be just as effective as one-to-one instruction.
However, even with a solid Tier 2 small group reading intervention in place for young low-progress readers, there will still be a very small number of students who “fail to thrive”, perhaps about 3 to 5 per cent of the total population of Year 1 students.
The small number of students whose reading problems seem to be more entrenched and who are resistant even to specialised intensive small group instruction are the ones who should receive Tier 3 one-to-one intensive reading instruction.
By now it will come as no surprise that the general nature of the instruction provided in a one-to-one Tier 3 intervention is exactly the same as offered at Tier 1 and Tier 2.
What is different is the intensity of instruction provided to this very small minority of students.
Because we have successfully taught the vast majority of Year 1 students the basics of learning to read by Tier 1 and where necessary, Tier 2 teaching, we can afford to provide these remaining students with the individual support they need.
Some of these students may need this support for some time, but this is a far more manageable proposition with a smaller number of students.
With this three tier Response to Intervention model in place, most, if not all, children will learn to read, given the necessary time and resources.
The RtI model does not stop at the end of Year 1. It’s important to monitor all students’ reading progress closely, especially for the first three years of schooling.
By following these models, it’s not too much to ask to expect all of our children to learn to read.
Kevin Wheldall, Emeritus Professor of Education, Macquarie University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The Maya were, at their height, one of the world’s great civilisations. In the “classic” period, from AD 250–900, Maya cities with monumental architecture and huge populations spread across a large area through what is now Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and western Honduras. Extensive trade networks connected the Maya to the rest of Mesoamerica, producing the dynamic landscapes and bustling ports reported in early Spanish accounts.
Much of what we know of the Maya comes from codices – screenfold books made of paper from the bark of a fig tree. Pages were coated in a white stucco wash and then painted by scribes with text, which was often accompanied by images. The Spanish in the 16th century reported a flourishing manuscript tradition comprising histories, prophecies, songs, genealogies and detailed information on the movements of the heavenly bodies.
Of the thousands of books produced throughout the Mayas’ long history, however, only three Maya codices were known to have survived, all written in the “postclassic” period after AD 900 and brought to Europe sometime after the conquest. They are named after the cities where they were archived: Dresden, Madrid, and Paris. Now, after years of debate over its authenticity, we can add a fourth manuscript – the Grolier Codex.
Information in the surviving codices is presented as either tables or almanacs. Tables record historical events in the absolute calendar system used by the Maya, known as the Long Count, in which time is reckoned after a fixed date. Our Gregorian calendar reckons similarly in that years are counted after the birth of Christ. The Maya counted from a day which in the Gregorian calendar is August 11, 3114 BC. Almanacs on the other hand are organised around the 260-day calendar used throughout Mesoamerica for keeping track of named days for various events. Unlike the Long Count, this 260-day calendar is cyclical, like our own repeated cycles of named weekdays and months.
Of the surviving codices, the Dresden is the most finely executed and best preserved, containing astronomical tables as well as almanacs. Some scholars have speculated that the Dresden was in the spoils of conquest sent by Cortes to Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. About eight inches high and 11 feet long when unfolded, some of the Dresden’s content is believed to have been copied from Late Classic sources, but most of it seems to have been written just before the Spanish conquest.
At 56 pages, the Madrid Codex is the longest of the surviving manuscripts. It is believed to have been written in the Yucatan region of Mexico or perhaps by Yucatec speakers living in Guatemala in the 17th century. The Madrid Codex contains about 250 almanacs concerned with a range of activities related to agriculture, rituals associated with the coming of the rains and the rain deity Chaak, the cycle of the solar year, deer hunting and trapping, the killing of war captives, carving images of the gods, and beekeeping.
The Paris Codex contains histories that have so far eluded translation, but also includes pages devoted to deities, dates, and unique set of pages devoted to constellations. Its origins are unknown, but scholars agree that the book was in use at the time of the conquest and was very likely produced in Mayapan in Mexico, around AD 1450.
The fourth codex came to light in 1971, when the Grolier Club in New York City exhibited a manuscript reportedly found in a cave in Mexico. Because the manuscript was recovered by looters, rather than archaeologists, and then passed into the hands of a private collector, its authenticity has been questioned. A major critic was the famous British Maya scholar Sir J Eric S Thompson, who maintained that the codex was a forgery – modern painting on Pre-Hispanic paper.
Recently, four Maya scholars carried out an exhaustive study of the Grolier codex, bringing together and thoroughly analysing all available data on the manuscript. The overwhelming conclusion is that the codex is authentic, making it the oldest known Mesoamerican manuscript. It is believed to have been written between AD 900 and AD 1250, when Classic traditions were fast disappearing and the scribes of the Maya area were becoming heavily influenced by artistic styles associated with central and southern Mexico. As someone who works at Maya sites that thrived during this period (Lamanai in northern Belize, and Marco Gonzalez on Ambergris Caye), the relatively early date of the manuscript makes it especially exciting to me.
The manuscript’s authenticity has been supported in several ways. Details in the Grolier Codex of astronomical tables and gods are what would be expected for the early Postclassic period. The manufacturing of the paper and the book all match what we know about Maya paper-making traditions, and radiocarbon analysis dates the codex to the end of the Early Postclassic period, around AD 900–1250. The appearance of red sketch lines beneath the black ink of the final version matches what is known of Maya painting methods, especially methods in use at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. The proportions and conventions of the way bodies are drawn match works that span the period from Chichen Itza’s peak until the conquest.
The Grolier contains astronomical Venus tables and day signs, but the later Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices are marked by more complex grammar, explanatory texts and denser imagery. It seems the Grolier is a scaled-down work meant for use by individuals less skilled in reading and writing, but capable of keeping time and linking the days, the gods and their significance to the cycles of Venus.
That so few Maya books have survived is partly owing to the humid tropical climate, which is not conducive to preserving paper. Only rarely are codices encountered by archaeologists – and then as unreadable stucco fragments. In the 16th century, however, the Spanish invaders described vast numbers of books on a range of topics in use by the Maya. Their loss is attributable to the Spanish friars, who believed all Maya books promoted heresy and burned them. The most zealous was Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who served as bishop of Yucatan, who burned thousands of books. It is a tragedy that has left just four remaining, with the Grolier Codex taking its place as the oldest of these remarkable manuscripts.
Elizabeth Graham, Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology, UCL
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Rebecca Braun, Lancaster University
Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker prize, becoming the first American to win the award since it was opened up to authors outside the Commonwealth in 2013. Most won’t yet have heard of the 54-year-old author of The Sellout, a satire of US racial politics. Because if one thing united this year’s shortlist, it was the lack of literary celebrity.
As the Man Booker website itself commented, of the six authors shortlisted, only Levy had even been heard of before in Booker circles. All were on the list on the literary merit of their books. But celebrity such as the Booker changes all this.
Literature is generally held to be the opposite of popular culture, something that requires solitude and sustained engagement with words and ideas beyond the everyday. So its relationship with celebrity, that most visual and ephemeral of phenomena, is in some ways unique.
It is certainly true that even a very famous writer is unlikely to pack out a football stadium, although the award of the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan, coupled with his signature failure to acknowledge it, must make the literary establishment check their assumptions about both literature and celebrity. But what is peculiar about literary celebrity is that it is not about “the literary” at all. It is about our obsessions with the biographical person.
Enter the author. Following the announcement of any major literary prize in the UK and Europe, the immediate focus falls on the author’s biography. In the case of Elena Ferrante, as we have recently seen, this public hunger for the personal can suppress pretty much everything else, including the actual writing. Although Ferrante’s efforts to keep her private person out of the public eye are as extreme as the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti’s distasteful obsession with tracking her down, her dislike of the celebrity machine is shared by the many other authors who also try to shift attention back to their books.
Beatty clung to his after the first awkward minutes during which he foundered on the podium after winning the prize, clearly uncomfortable with having to share his immediate thoughts and emotions with the international media. “Maybe I should talk about the book a bit,” he suggested. But his book will not hide him now. Herta Müller’s claim that it was her books that won the Nobel Prize in 2009 could not do anything to stop speculation about her hairstyle and choice of dress doing the rounds in the international broadsheets.
Beatty will also have to get used to the invariable discussion of the cash, and whether it is really desirable for one author to hit the jackpot at the exclusion of everybody else. Mention of money sullies the literary for some.
All of this could be uncomfortable for Beatty, who told the Booker dinner guests of how he cried with joy in front of readers in Detroit some years back when he read aloud from his work for the first time. He had realised just how perfectly it replicated the language in his head. This touching tale from an author who loves his craft made up for his being, in his own words, “woefully underprepared” for speaking as a celebrity at the gala dinner.
Not so the publishers, who have been working up to this for months and will now take every opportunity they can to push their product with shiny stickers and prime displays, just as the laws of celebrity require. Beatty should expect to have numerous meetings with numerous publicists lined up to expedite sales at home and abroad. He may start to feel a little bit like Beyoncé. Unlike Beyoncé, however, literary celebrity doesn’t travel. This could be his writerly salvation.
Although the English-speaking book market is huge and highly influential, it is still just one geographically-bounded market, and not a very cohesive one at that.
Julian Barnes has a strong following in the UK. But he is not such a big deal in the US, where he is (justifiably) described as particularly British. Jonathan Franzen is an A-list literary celebrity in New York, and he’s pretty famous in the UK, but the further east he travels, the more he is in need of mediators. While still a well-known face in Germany, he mainly goes there to bird watch.
Travelling back the other way, Joël Dicker’s French blockbuster The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair sold 2m copies in Europe, but bombed in the US. Just 13,000 of Penguin’s 125,000 copies sold on its much trumpeted launch, and reviews quickly turned negative. Routinely accosted in his home town of Geneva, he is safe in New York.
Can Beatty take some comfort from these regional quirks that accompany even bestsellers? “I love being lost,” he quipped on the stage as he searched for words. “It’s the only way I get anywhere.” He has been found for English readers, but once his book starts to travel to other places, there are no guarantees that the same piece of writing will arrive as set off. There could be an escape route here.
Readerships are diverse, knowledge and expectations are different, and the more mediators are needed (translators, foreign-language editors, international rights departments), the more the book becomes detached from its biographical author. Some famous authors make it on a global stage, for sure. But there is often remarkably little left of the original author by then.
So here’s a plan for Beatty. He can take the money and settle down to write somewhere where English is not the primary language. He doesn’t have to deny the literary establishment entirely like Bob Dylan, but he could look to put more of the rest of the world on the literary map. Not by selling books there, but by writing them. That would be another kind of sellout – one that might just make people stop and think.
Rebecca Braun, Senior Lecturer in Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
You must be logged in to post a comment.