I'm just mad about Safran...

I've just finished reading Everything Is Illuminated, and was hugely impressed by it. Not in the sense of it being tremendously enjoyable or a great work of art, but in admiration of its ambition and technical accomplishment, especially in such a young author. After The Time Traveller's Wife and Gould's Book of Fish, this has been a good year for me so far for novels which do interesting things with the narrative structure. It's the New New Wave all over again!

I wish in a way that I'd read this book when I was a teenager, when it would have opened up my mind to new and strange possibilities (as did books like Pale Fire, Tristram Shandy, Catch-22, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Moby Dick at the time). Now I seem to be too old and firmly grounded to have my world-view disrupted by a mere novel. Oh well...

Another mind-opener back then was Rites of Passage -- did anyone watch the BBC version on Wednesday? Again, this was best read at an age when I was making the same voyage of self-discovery as Talbot, and the adaptation has dumbed it down somewhat -- I missed that feeling of immediately wanting to read it again to pick up on the pointers that I'd missed the first time. The wisdom of hiundsight is just one of the important things that reading it helped to teach me! Still it was pretty good though, and I'm looking forward to the other two parts.

Strange times

I came onto this via a comment to Pepys's Diary, but it sort of crystallized something I'd been wondering about for quite some time, namely the (apparent) relative recency of familiarity with simple multiplication techniques.

If you look at this page and go down to where it talks about Robert Recorde, you'll see a discussion of the then (16th century) method for multiplying things like 8 by 7. More than a century later, Pepys, who is at this stage a 29-year old with a degree from Cambridge working as (the equivalent of) a financial manager, is having private classes to learn the arcana of 'the multiplicacion tables'.

What I find difficult to understand is: nowadays (or, actually, I don't know about nowadays, but certainly when I was at school) we think it routine for 6-year-olds to be taught 'times tables', so why was it so unfamiliar just 300 years earlier? Of course, utility considerations would have precluded its teaching to the bulk of people labouring in the fields etc, but surely the time it takes to learn the products up to 10 * 10 would have been well spent for anyone working in commerce or manufacture? And Recorde's method, linked above, is surely more involved than just learning the table of numbers would be?

Or is it something like: people so took abaci for granted that curiosity about how to multiply numbers by hand would have been seen as a bit of an eccentric waste of time?