I’ve been enjoying reading Vast (1994) by Doug Huston. As Huston’s punning pseudonym ‘Moore Lande’ suggests, it’s a Western, and the author glories in his book’s pulpy conventions. ‘Ahead of him lay danger-bullets and fists. Ahead of him lay trouble with the only girl he really cared about.’ The subtitle is ‘an unoriginal novel’, and when we begin to read we notice immediately that each sentence is pegged to a footnote. Here is the opening.
Interesting that St. Jerome has a codex in his right hand, but what looks like the makings of a bookroll under his left hand, on the table. I expect it was a sheet for one of his letters, cut from a papyrus or parchment roll. Jerome lived right at at the point where the roll gave way to the codex; Jim O'Donnell says Augustine for example, probably never saw the holy books combined into a "bible."
And isn't the creation of a commonplace book, such as that compiled by Susanna Ferrar in the early 1630s and recently identified by Whitney Trettien, another variant that leads from the Gidding Harmonies to the modern 'quotation-novel'?
Reads like the start of a book on the boundaries of pastiche and collage. Wonderfully observed!
Interesting that St. Jerome has a codex in his right hand, but what looks like the makings of a bookroll under his left hand, on the table. I expect it was a sheet for one of his letters, cut from a papyrus or parchment roll. Jerome lived right at at the point where the roll gave way to the codex; Jim O'Donnell says Augustine for example, probably never saw the holy books combined into a "bible."
Now I'm wondering what could be done by taking the scripts for an entire TV series and cutting and pasting bits to make a single composite episode.
And isn't the creation of a commonplace book, such as that compiled by Susanna Ferrar in the early 1630s and recently identified by Whitney Trettien, another variant that leads from the Gidding Harmonies to the modern 'quotation-novel'?