Yann Martel

another mind-blowing classic and a great translation, John Ciardi.

There, you have to read that, you were reading the footnotes, because Dante was a man of his time and told a story of his time for people of his time, so they'd be familiar with the story, so they wouldn't have to have any footnotes.

But, you know, seven centuries later, we don't know who these people are.

So it's a narrative that you must go from the cantos to the footnotes.

And they're always narrative little footnotes.

So that's one where I remember, you know, it's like a needle and you sew the whole thing together.

So it's actually Dante that brought the idea of glorifying footnotes.

He's an academic Canadian from the prairies.

Out of nowhere, he gets a fellowship to Oxford.

He gets to work on the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which is a true find from 1890 to 1902 by these British papyrologists, Grenfell and Hunt.

Oxyrhynchus is a town just off the Nile, not on the Nile, off the Nile, south of Cairo.

And I say off the Nile with emphasis because it has the peculiarity of never, ever flooding.

As you know from whenever you learned about Egypt, legendarily, the Nile floods every year.

And what it does, among other things, and you don't want it to do, is it floods your garbage dump.

Well, Oxyrhynchus' garbage dump was never, ever, ever flooded, and it never, ever rains in Oxyrhynchus.

So the garbage dump is perfectly preserved.

So these two papyrologists discovered a trove of papyrus fragments that were thrown out by the citizens for about 500 years.

It's everything they'd written thrown out.

So it's a slice of life of Oxyrhynchus.

So Harlow Dunn, in looking at those, discovers wisps,