Johanna Drucker

Few technologies are as important to our daily lives as the alphabet. But, as Johanna Drucker argues, we rarely give its history any thought at all. Despite its title, her book is not about the invention of the alphabet per se, but about how people have thought about its invention. The alphabet has been continually reinvented by each generation of thinkers in a story that meanders from Herodotus to the present day, via Jewish mystics, Arabic scholars, early modern typographers and 18th-century antiquarians.

As Drucker writes, the idea that the Greeks invented the alphabet is deeply ingrained in modern thought. But this is the opposite of what the Greeks themselves thought; they were clear that it was borrowed. From the Greek perspective, the alphabet was invented either by the Phoenicians and given to the Greeks by Cadmus (this is the account given to us by Herodotus) or invented by the Egyptian god Thoth (as in the account of Plato). Other Greek descriptions tend to riff on either or both of these basic narratives. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries scholarship lauded the ‘genius’ of the Greeks for adding vowels to the existing consonantal alphabet used by the Phoenicians. Only recently has it begun to describe the birth of the Greek alphabet as a process of cultural contact, borrowing and collaboration.

Inventing the Alphabet raises all of the questions that have vexed historians. The Bible presents insoluble problems. If God wrote the Ten Commandments for Moses, what language were they in? What alphabet? If it was the first ever written text, how did Moses know how to read it? These questions led early modern thinkers to develop an intense interest in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. But Drucker also shows how incomplete each generation’s information was. Knowledge of inscriptions and coins was very limited in the early modern period, which meant that the Hebrew alphabet known in Europe was the elegant ‘square’ script rather than the Palaeo-Hebrew script used in the earliest part of antiquity. This was, therefore, how they imagined Hebrew to have been written in the distant past as well.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Katherine McDonald is Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Durham.… (meer)

This is a tough book to review. I *think* it's sort of groundbreaking -- that is, it assays a territory of art-making that hadn't received much prior attention. So, kudos to Drucker for this. The book is problematic, however, because the problems inherent in art books generally -- reproductions rarely give you a good sense of the works -- are multiplied: there are loads of images, here, but they are black and white and they are very small ... and since books for the most part consist of *sequences* of pages, what you are getting (except in I think a single case where Drucker shows you multiple pages from one work) is thus very much a small part of a whole. The reproductions are necessarily that much less satisfying than they typically are in books about art.

And so Drucker *has to* take up the slack with her verbal descriptions -- she *has to* give you a sense of these works verbally, because the reproductions *have to be* less representative. Does she succeed? Well, sometimes. When I started this book my immediate reaction to Drucker's writing was "hmm -- this sure feels academic." And I meant that as a criticism: I meant "academic as in I feel like I'm trying to chew on a mouthful of modeling clay." But in truth it's not that bad ... except when it is. This isn't helped, either, by the fact that the text could have sure used at least one more copy-editing pass than it evidently got. Finally, for a book that's about artist's books, the book itself has a ramshackle, thrown-together feel that's less than satisfying: the cover design is, to my mind, pretty poor; the font Granary Books employed seems to be incomplete, since it appears to have no numeral 1 (instead, a capital 'I' is used). Perhaps this latter is intentional, a design choice, but it feels slapdash ... and so in the end you have a book about artist's books that is, itself, rather inartistic. This is all subjective, of course.

It's a shame, because I've tried to find copies of some of the works Drucker covers. They ain't in the library, and you'll shell out a lot of money to secure copies, yourself (the exception in my case is Tom Phillips's A Humument).… (meer)

Aug 24 2018 update: I've found myself thinking a lot about this novel in these last few days while visiting a friend who had a serious accident this summer and needs a lot of help still. Unnecessary things like yard work have slipped...the squirrels have found the stuffing in the lawn swing pillows and are busy borrowing it for themselves...the raccoons are bolder...and I began to think again about the changes that come across the world in this novel, where events unfold in a very interesting mix of glacial slowness and cataclysmic swiftness. Like evolution itself. I would wish for more people to seek this book out and read it.

Original review:

Downdrift is a book that amazed and delighted me. As the novel begins, organisms in every ecological niche on Earth have begun to experience the intrusion of human-like characteristics into their behaviors. This change is presented as the opposite of evolutionary progress: to behave in a human way is instead categorized as “downdrift.” The story is narrated throughout by “Archaeon,” a unicellular organism that belongs to the Kingdom Archaea, a creature that has (through contact with others of its kind) absolute knowledge of events the whole world over, but that has almost no sense of narrative suspense.

Archeaon explains its sense of narrative timing this way:

Our time scales–yours and mine–are as different as our size and complexity. To me, all of the follies of the animal kingdom are the trivial business of a few seconds of my historical memory. Nearly three-quarters of the earth’s existence has passed in my presence, billions of years. Compare that to the mere millions in which primitive arthropods and other organisms came into being. And you? A blip on the screen, a tweak in the evolutionary chain, a phenomenon of rapid acceleration. I will long outlive you and the changes wrought on this world by your machinations.

What forward narrative momentum there is in Downdrift (and it barely registered with me as I read along) hangs on the stories of a lost cat and a peripatetic lion, creatures that re-appear at intervals in the story, and that seem destined to meet at some point. And they do meet. But that meeting seems beside the point when it happens, because the real delight of the novel is not in narrative at all, but in an accumulation of detail, sentence after sentence, that by the end paints a picture of vast ecological disruption.

Another round of salamander antics is taking place in the autumn woods. A big group outing, comprised of extended families and pseudo-families, is underway at the edges of a pool. They have collected food bright as their red bellies or the stark yellow of their spots. The older ones are picking at a few, very few, highly colored bits of fungus and mixing them with all manner of beetles and flies, worms and larvae, spiders and moths and grasshoppers to make a banquet from an ancient recipe. These traditions may also soon be at risk, but not yet.

In a brave choice on the author’s part Homo sapiens barely signifies in this novel at all. At one point coyotes are stealing human babies; at another point Archaeon wryly observes “an outbreak of human shoaling, seepage into the homo sapiens from the minnows and sardines,” an image that carries with it both the idea of humans under stress, as well as the lack of significance that humans and their problems have to this story.

Because this is not humanity’s story. The subtitle to Downdrift is “an eco-fiction,” and the novel fulfills the goals of this relatively new genre in a significant way. The novel is a metaphor for the way we value convenience over preservation; the way we prioritize the artificial over the natural; the way we focus on our daily worries rather than the long-term problem of potential ecological collapse. For those who have the willingness to let the a story flow past at its own pace, the novel offers a unique and thought-provoking take on the world and our place in it.

Downdrift: An Ecofiction by Johanna Drucker (2018: Three Rooms Press)… (meer)

For the first thirty pages or so, I couldn't get enough of this book--I loved the focus, the characters, the style, the writing, everything. And then, at some point... I realized it was all hitting the same note, and I needed more.

There's no doubt that Drucker's writing is clever and lovely, and I kind of adored the few characters she focused in on, but in large part, this novel felt more like an experiment than a cohesive story. There just wasn't much of a plot, and what plot there was felt like something which had been overlayed onto the ideas in order to simply be able to Say there was a plot running through. And simple as that plot was, it still felt incredibly forced and a little unclear (in reason/motivation).

Animal lovers might still enjoy this work, and get a kick out of the cleverer moments while enjoying the author's clear love of animals and nature. Certainly, I'd give another of her books a try to see if it really was just an experiment that overtook a story here. But, when it comes right down to it, this isn't a book I can recommend to any reader but animal lovers who'd just perhaps want to wander through it.

For me, there just wasn't enough story here.… (meer)