No Such Thing As A Fish - 63: No Such Thing As An Anti-German Sock

Episode Date: May 29, 2015

Live from the Hay Literary Festival, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss the world's first novel, a Beatle as Gandalf, and the inventor of the television.

Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish this week coming to you from the hay festival in hey My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with three other QILs. It's Anna Chazinsky James Harkin and Andy Murray and once again We have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here We go starting with you Chazinsky Yes, did you mention that these are specifically literary fans? Absolutely Yeah, because it's a literary festival. Yeah, that's why I said it So my literary fact is that the first ever novel ended mid-sentence and

This is a Japanese novel called the tale of Genji. It was written in the early 11th century So probably 1008 they think and yeah ended in the middle of a sentence Was it like a cliffhanger ending? Kind of I mean not as melodramatic But she's into the characters introducing another to character to someone and the end saying Kauru introduces him to the You never find out who and people don't know if that was intentional or if she just died in the middle of I think most critics think that it was intentional I heard another version which is like they just she just carried on she was gonna carry on a carry on until she couldn't do Anymore because it's quite long book, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's about 1100 pages

Yeah, 100 pages. Yeah, apparently there's like 400 characters in there. Yeah, and none of them have names No, none of them have names and I read in one Yeah, it must have been so confusing so there are 400 characters and apparently at the time it was rude in Japanese It's all about Japanese aristocratic society in the 12th century and it was rude to refer to someone by name because It was thought as being like unnecessarily familiar So for 400 characters, none of them are allowed to be referred to by name So they're all like your Excellency your Majesty his Highness I mean, there are 75 his Highnesses

People like oh, what's he doing here said him The key knew what he meant about him. That's a very cool way to end it. I like it Yeah, it is so she's so she's like a precursor to Tristan Jandy She seemed to have interesting things. She did with the form of the novel She defied the convention that she created 400 pages earlier So two thirds of the way through she killed off the main character about whom the whole thing is written the tale of Genji Just dies and also doesn't really explain these been killed off It's just that there's a blank chapter called vanished into the clouds with no text in it

And then in the next chapter becomes apparent that the protagonists has died Does anyone know what the first e-book was no that's the thing where it's like there's a few different claims But probably the most likely it was a book called Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy And you can still see it online It's like all hyperlinked and you go in there and it's like there's been a party and it has all the characters You can click on a character and it gives you their little story and then you click on the next character and you do that It's like a you know choose your own adventure books those things Wow They were amazing those books

And so reading that this was like choose their own events adventure I thought I'd look into those and apparently you can get adults choose your own adventure books. Oh God. Yeah And the two best sellers that I could find are called beer women and bad decisions That's great sounds good that doesn't it it sounds like you're gonna try and get the bad decisions. Yeah, it's like another point That's how most nights work and the other best selling one I found is called night of a thousand boyfriends Oh So the first novel in the English language is obviously a different thing because this the tale of Genji is not in English People often say it's Thomas Mallory's Lamort D'Arthur, which I like the idea that the first novel written in English has a French title

Couldn't so I think it's actually this novel written in 1561 called beware the cat Is I think the main content of the first novel written in English is just by a printers assistant called William Baldwin It's kind of a horror novel about like evil cats really It's about this for this guy eavesdrops on a cat and he overhears a female cat on trial and the female cat's called mouse layer for obvious reasons and She's having to explain to this court of other cats that She hasn't broken the cat's code of sexual conduct which dictates that a female cat is not allowed to say no To any fewer than 10 male cats a night

So if you reject, you know the 10th guy you're up in court on trial and anyway He's overhears this another point in this story this first first novel ever written a priest slipped on a cat and falls into a crowd Does he does he slip on a hat or does he slip on the hat? He's gonna be googling a book called beware the hat His priest does slip on it and he he ends up with his face in the bear ass of a boy who out of fear I Ends up with his face in the bear ass of a boy who out of fear had to be shit himself First novel well

So first novel in English Wow Yeah, so I was seeing seeing what was happening in Europe at the same time as this book was being written This Japanese one and in 1008 Bishop Birchard of worms was writing books on cannon law A book that he called correct or at Medicus and the idea was he would give it to the bishops and give it to the priests And it would give them the rules of the penance that they would give out to people So if he did something wrong, it would be like five Hail Mary's or whatever But quite a lot of it seems to be very strange

One of the things was if a woman had Smothered a live fish inside her vagina And then served it to men Classic Really got it with the old vagina He won't put cling film under my toilet again Either that or kneading bread on her naked buttocks Then she would get a penance of two to five years fasting on feast days according to this book

So we're on endings of books earlier. Yeah, so the first version of Hamlet has a happy ending Oh, which is nice and it's called Amleth which is Hamlet with the H at the other end That's the sole change Some kind of like copyright William we can't do anything with Amleth wait a minute And it's the same and ham it's right down to stabbing someone who's hiding behind an aris all of that stuff But then at the end of it. He kills the usurper so his father's brother his uncle Killed the usurper goes to England marries the sexy Queen of Scots

Returns with an army and then becomes king and then he has two Queens one is his wife and one is his mother who was Queen before Yeah, that's how it ends originally. I think they should redo it like that Do we have it or we've just heard that it exists. I don't know just about Authors who who sort of came up with something and then flipped it into something else Do you know how fear and loathing in Las Vegas started Hunter s Thompson's book? It was meant to be and this is what he handed in when he handed in the majority of the book It was actually originally meant to be a 250 word photocaption for sports illustration

They wanted him to go cover a derby and he started writing and they were like it's great, but we kind of needed a fit Can you say the same stuff but in there Wow That's amazing. Well, so they said bad news. We can't put that below as a caption So we've had to just give you a book deal instead. No, no, no They didn't like it at all and he had to take it elsewhere and of course they didn't like it Read the mail online articles and there's a one-line description of the photo, you know So and so turned up at a party looking nice. You don't want a 60,000 word novel there

Okay, why don't we move on to our second fact and that is James, okay. My fact this week is that JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis went to a party dressed as polar bears It was not a fancy dress party Is the added shame of turning up in the same thing as somebody else So talking and Lewis they were really good friends, of course and Well, not always No, not always you'll probably get onto that in a few seconds No, please. Wait, sorry. Do we know the circumstances of a fancy dress party or is that just a matter of thinking?

No, not really it seems to I read it in a book It was a biography of Tolkien and it was like here's one of the funny things that he used to do But he used to like dressing up a lot Yeah, he and not even when it wasn't a fancy dress party just in day-to-day life really yeah Yeah, like he apparently very famously dressed up as an axe wielding Anglo-Saxon warrior and chased his neighbor down the road So after they met for the very first time CS Lewis wrote in his diary about Tolkien no harm in him only needs a smack or so So they did they were very good friends for a long time and then they had a rivalry later

Talking eventually they had their meetings of a group called the inklings Which is a sort of famous literary salon in a pub in Oxford and they would read out their stuff to each other And eventually Tolkien didn't even go along to meetings when he knew that CS Lewis was going to read out Narnia stuff That's how bad it got he really didn't like the allegory and He said that writing an allegory which Narnia a lot of people say is yeah, I think it is He said that allegory was a very lazy form of writing and he didn't really prove of it So that's what it was one of the things that the inklings did Would they is they would hold competitions to see who could read a particular lady's work without laughing?

She was the worst writer what in the world was this a particular writer or just did they find any woman author? He said it just sounded like they're all massive sexy It's still sounds pretty So this lady was called Amanda McKittrick Ross she wrote lots of lots of Fiction and here's some examples of things that she said and she refers to eyes as globes of glare She refers to legs as bony supports and she refers to pants as southern necessity Well that one's got assamance the first one had a Literation I mean this is like taking all the literary books as far as I can tell okay

She called sweat globules of liquid lava That's great. She's a damn good simile One of the main reason if I think the main reason actually that Tolkien objected to CS losses allegory and I just think this is quite interesting It's not funny at all, but Tolkien was a strict Catholic and He so for instance he when they started to start the 20th century even in Catholic mass They would start saying that in English. He would say the mass very loudly in Latin in the middle of church While they were saying in English to make clear his thoughts, but he didn't object to CS Lewis as an Anglican so

Talking so he didn't really believe that the word of God should only be spoken through like priests and members of the clergy Whereas Tolkien did so Tolkien thought that it wasn't CS Lewis's place to be telling people about religion Because he wasn't a member of the clergy. It was just you know, it was quite interesting Also Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 and the committee rejected him And they only recently have released the papers which because they have a sort of 50-year rule on the committee's decisions And they rejected Tolkien saying that he was a bad storyteller No, they said the storytelling here is just not up to scratch You know that um Lord of the Rings

I don't know if this is really common knowledge But the Beatles try to option it to make it into a movie and they approach Stanley Kubrick to make it and what I think Everyone decided it was a bad idea Once they all saw yeah, but um, yeah, that would have been amazing all the characters They were gonna play all the characters with the Beatles Lord of the Rings. It would have been amazing. I Think quite red as like there's so many theories about why I was rejected and I don't even know why there needs to be a theory It's quite obvious And then they were like no such a terrible writer

We love the Beatles we love Kubrick and the Beatles but Tolkien thing I read one theory that it was because Paul and John were fighting over who got to play candle That was what a tour in a park That's great some things on fancy dress. Yeah, we're here There's a lady called Sharni Christie who lives in Kent and she has a phobia of people in costumes Which the newspaper article called metham phiso my phobia and she works in theater She said people think it's quite funny that I've slept that I'm working in something that means I'm around people in costume all the time

I have to watch people get dressed in costume in order to reassure myself that I know who they are She has to watch them get changed just so she knows it's not a fantastic excuse for being a pervert But also so she's not only got a fear of people in costume She suddenly recognizes them as the character that they're playing. Yes, so she's like at the Lion King. She'll be like hey Mike I Want to know when people started dressing as really crazy things because they used to dress as You know aristocracy or people from different ancient Greeks you would dress up as ancient Greeks or Trojans and I think I've pinned down one early date in terms of dressing as crazy things which was

1745 King Louis the 15th of France had a masked ball at Versailles and there were 15,000 guests and Everyone was in nice dresses and with masks, but he and several of his courtiers turned up dressed as clipped you hedges Is that you And I think that's the year zero for dressing as stupid stuff and speaking sorry just speaking of French fancy dress Do you know the Charles the fourth of France this story of the dance of the burning man? Burning men actually this was a fancy dress party and Charles the fourth and a load of his courtiers came dressed as sabbages Which meant they blacked up and they covered themselves in pitch tar

And they chain themselves together And then when they arrived the party one of the other guests wanted to see have a good look at their costume So he went up to them with a naked flame and they were all wearing pitch tar And they were all chained together and they all went up And I think two people were burned alive two people died within days of their injuries And it really like he was pretty mad to start off with but that really tipped him over Fancy dresses are dangerous game They got Americans got really into fancy dress in the 19th century didn't they and they would dress up as

European aristocracy and where so it was like I think the general consensus people weren't really doing it in Europe The America didn't really have at that time and aristocracy or a history of its own In terms of you know, it didn't have a great nobility It didn't have all these big families and so it kind of what was that the quote is it bought its own history And so people would buy like Marie Antoinette's genuine jewels and costumes and then go wearing them to parties And you'd go to a party with like 1200 guests like the Vanderbilt's used to hold these amazing parts in the 90th century And it would be a competition as to who had the most genuine artifacts that used to belong to a great British King or a great French ruler Yeah, so it used to be a bigger deal than just buying a 10 pound plastic, which is

The local Scott knit Polar bears. Oh, yeah, Polar bears are in the original fact. Yes. They were Polar bears this is just because I discovered coincidentally last week that pollution in the sea and then in the seas at the poles is Contaminating various wildlife there and Polar bears penises are getting weaker. They're penis bones are being Trunken. Well, they say that but it is cold up there They really don't need that expert excuse

It's getting warmer though So the female polar bears are going it's getting warmer You've been promising me for two million years That's what they claim they don't know why Polar bears have penis bones But they are getting smaller and they think it's gonna do some kind of damage most most animals have penis bones Most of us on this panel Animals have penis bones. Yes Like in the Victorian times they wore badger penis bones as typings. Yeah

Have you seen a walrus penis bone? I've held one they're extraordinary When the walrus asked just say no dad I Was out of fancy dress Okay, hey very quickly, this is just to bring it back to Tolkien and CS Lewis CS Lewis died the same day as Aldous Hutzley We lost two literary

Juggernauts that day and it kind of really didn't register with anyone because someone else died that day JFK They just completely no one actually knows they're dead yet We need to move on because we're really running past our time here Okay, time for fact number three and that is Andrew Hunter Murray my fact is About Agatha Christie and it's that Agatha Christie thought that Hercule Poirot Her most famous creation was a quotes detestable bombastic tiresome egocentric little creep She hated him From quite early on as well in her career and she wrote an essay called why I got fed up with Fouro

And she really really didn't like him and she She wrote his death story in 1945 which was 30 years before she died So she wanted to write it quite early and she left instructions that when she died that story should be published So she would take him down with her And she even kept the manuscripts in a bank vault that's how much she disliked Poirot's character And then when she was 85 with her own health failing she decided to publish it so that she would outlive him I think is that that's what I think she wanted to do. But when she did publish the story Poirot got a front page obituary in the New York Times

Which I think is might be even more than she got And so really yeah, I'm not sure I don't know It's been a swole news day, isn't it? It's the only fictional obituary they've ever published Yeah, and so even even in death he was really really famous and she you know couldn't get away to Properly lock him up ahead. Was it front page of the obituary section? Nope. It was front page of the paper. Yeah We say they're dumbing down today It is weird when you hear authors hating their central characters like when window don't they like who was

Sherlock Holmes. Yeah Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock and then had to do you have did you hear what? Chaos that created when he killed off Sherlock Holmes. I've got yeah I found a bunch of stuff basically he just got he so he killed him off And then all these letters came in which one began you brute like they've just treated it as if it was real It's like the trolling of its day. Yeah, it is to write a letter to someone saying you brooched. Yeah a Lady picketed his house fans wore black armbands 20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions to the strand magazine which and it was being published as a periodical And yeah, and then I guess he eventually brought it back, but that must have been a confusing time

So a millen really hated Winnie the Pooh So cruel All of his creators a mill hated Winnie the Pooh Christopher Robin Like so, I mean his life was kind of ruined by the fact that he was Christopher Robin and he always resented Was Christopher Robin a mill son. Yeah, yeah resented that and the guy who did the illustrations Who was kind of his name, but he said it? E8 shepherd ruined his life as well ruined his career everyone to find it by Winnie the Pooh Did they all have meetings where they're going not this shit again?

If only we could stop doing it Another thing that mill hated about it was that it made people think that he liked children And he said I have never felt in the least sentimental about them And he but he did have a son. Yeah, I was taking dictation Take a note kids are crap. Yeah, they're very difficult relationship with this Kind of you know, it seems to be explained by this So one thing you can do if you really just like your character. This is something that Agatha Christie did I love this she put a version of herself in her own books a mystery novelist called Ariadne Oliver and

In the novels that Agatha Christie wrote this fictional novelist Ariadne of Oliver hates her most famous creation Who is a vegetarian finished detective called? Sven Herson who and she appears in six novels this character who hates her main character And she Oliver says if I ever met that bony gangling vegetable eating Finn in real life I'd do a better murder than any I've ever invented That's a really good. I don't want to see this like this I think I had the idea of putting yourself in novels and then like then the guy said oh easy Jetta Everything that you're annoyed with you can put in your part another person who hates your own creation now is Annie Prue

Who wrote broke back mountain? Oh, yeah, because of found fiction. So she hates the fact now So she was like nominated for a Pulitzer prize She wrote this brilliant short story and she says she wish he'd never done it She played by fan fiction now by people writing either sequels to break back mountain or alternative endings to break back mountain And she said the vast majority of them are people who so the majority of them are people who start their letters With I'm not gay, but And then go on to give an alternative ending I've written an intense searing homoerotic series of yeah

Yeah, I've never written anything before in my life. And that's not the point. Yeah. Yeah It's not weird. Oh, yeah, it's just every day. I'm more homoerotic that different people saying they're not gay Yeah, there is there I think more than a hundred sequels to pride and prejudice and obviously it's been 200 years So, you know, there's a lot but in one of them Elizabeth Elizabeth Darcy as she becomes is widowed Darcy is dead and then she has to defend England from invasion by Napoleon in a fleet of hot-air balloons And I've never tracked down this book, but if I do I am reading the hell out of it We need to move on guys by the way, but if anyone does anyone have anything else

Nothing that's short enough. I've got I just one last thing Which is I really like when as you're saying Poirot goes on the front page of newspapers I love it when these characters seep into the real world and there's a thing I read that which is the Met And all crime departments in Britain or the police. They use a national computer system Which is developed basically for major crime inquiries all the British forces use it and it's called the home office large major Inquiries system, but everyone refers to it by its acronym Homes It's quite nice and there as well is a training program for it called elementary Okay

Time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact So we've been talking about books this whole time So I thought I'd find a fact which was about the enemy of the books the television So my fact is that before he invented the television John Logie Baird invented a pair of socks to wear Underneath your socks And who who can say which history will judge the greater invention I'm not calling it. I Just I love that fact because I just think that's you know

Because if you look at the history of his inventions as well prior to the television He invented as well a razor Which was rust proof you could never make it rust But it never ended up selling because it was made of glass and it shattered on people's faces and ended up Okay It doesn't rust but yeah, but it slices your face Yeah, he made some pneumatic shoes that had balloons in them that he thought they'd pull your feet off But just that's that's his history and then suddenly the television. It just makes no sense

But the socks were actually quite good. They're amazing. Yeah, how do they work? So they have They're not designed to protect against moisture from the outside that it's the moisture that your feet create when you're walking around the day So they were for soldiers in the First World War and they're sprinkled with a chemical called borax which Absorbs the moisture from your foot. So you put it under your foot facing upwards as a way you put it on that way Then you put your sock over that then your shoe over that and soldiers in the trenches swore by it And it made him a huge amount of money is what let him resign his job as an electrical engineer One soldier said I find the bird on the socks keep my feet in splendid condition out here in France

Foot trouble is one of our worst enemies, but thanks to the bird under sock mine are in the pink Just make an anti-german sock My other worst enemy But he advertised them in the newspaper and managed to sell one pair doing that So initially it was a complete failure and then he built a plywood tank and Carried it around the streets of Glasgow with the the bed under sock written on the side and then he sold loads Yeah, this was during the war though, wasn't it? Yeah, so like a big tank going through the streets He's actually a war people look like scary

So he he made these socks and then he got ill for a while didn't he and then when he got better He suddenly realized he had loads of money in his account because people have bought all these socks Well, he went didn't he go away well gone away Yeah, but when he when he got all this money, he went to Trinidad and he started up a jam factory Unfortunately The local insect life either ran off with the sugar or landed in the hot baths and boiling preserves Wow, I read and so it never took off because it was just insects just full of insects And so he lost a bit of money from that and then came back and then it was when he invented television

There's but when it when he came back before inventing the television We had the sock business and the razor the jam and the razor. Yeah, he then He then he had 200 quid left. He was really broke So he decided to buy two tons of Australian honey Cheap and starts and selling it for people to people and then he bought a ton of soap and he sold that Wow Then television To be fair the television thing was something that he He really dreamed about making quite early on and he couldn't do it

So he had all these other businesses that went along the way So they were just kind of maybe a smoke screen as other inventions to throw people off the scent. They absolutely were In that as well as when he would just make these other things When he was making the TV any time he had a photo where he was showing how he was making the TV He would put in fake objects so that no one who saw the photo could go Okay, so he's got that and got that so he would he would miss place So, yeah, yeah, he was so unique. Okay, so it looks like he needs two tons of cheap Australian honey To get the TV to work

Where did the socks go You're saying about the electricity When he was working in Glasgow and he decided to try and make artificial diamonds by passing electricity through a stick of graphite And he put so much electricity through the stick of graphite that he caused a blackout over the whole of Glasgow There's a weird coincidence in his life as well just one of those tiny things that's actually it's quite nice when you discover it He went to school with a guy who was called so this and this was his classmate This is actual classmate. You went school with a guy called JCW Reath

Who we now know is Lord Reath? So basically the inventor of the television went to school with the man who defined television for the BBC in England That's an absolutely insane coincidence and he got bullied by Lord Reath All the time he just bullied the hell out of him and Lord Reath's parents had to pull him out of school because he was just too much of a Menace in that school. Wow really? Yeah, Lord Reath was a bit of a he was a bully. Yeah Amazing it's a John Legubert thing. I'll get back at him. I'll event something that's so good He won't ever be able to take part in it He'll have nothing to do with

I've read I don't I cannot believe this is true that originally when the BBC sent out experimental Transmissions which was in 1929 that John Legubert had to pay the BBC to transmit his images Right, she's just so topsy-turvy. Well because yeah, but like Lord Reath for as much as he's done for TV And if you haven't heard the name Lord Reath in this country most people have I'm assuming he's the guy who absolutely Defined how the BBC became the thing that it is. He hated television. Yeah, of course he did. Yeah, we know we know bad Valerie was 5,000 pounds and a mean wedgie Just On them authors early inventions and early careers before they did the thing that we know them for can I tell you very quickly about Daniel

Defoe. Yes, okay, here's early jobs and obviously Robinson Crusoe and a diary journal of the plague year all these incredible works Before that his early jobs included selling hosiery Dealing wine investing in a diving bell to recover sunken treasure and Harvesting musk from the anal glands of cats She's saying He in 1692 he bought 70 civic cats for 850 quid because they the Dutch made perfume using the musk which they secrete as the base ingredient and He hated them and then to get the musk an attendant had to put them in a special cage

So they could only face one way they couldn't turn around and then I'm quoting here I use a spatula to scrape out the butter like secretion that gathered in a pouch between the tail and the anus and Then he lost the cats because he didn't even own them He didn't pay for them properly He got the money by borrowing it and then to keep them he defrauded his own mother-in-law Who then sued him like he was a disaster? But that was is yeah, so who's cat they were just wandering cats No, they were owned by someone else and he bought them with borrowed money and then someone else said no

I want my cats back you can use them, but you don't own them and also where's their anal butter I can't believe it's not civic Oh We're gonna have to wrap up Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts Thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this Podcast we can all be gotten on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at eggshakes Anna You can email podcast at qi.com and we will be back again next week

By the way, thank you so much for being here tonight guys. This has been really fun For those listening at home, we'll be back again next week on another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye