A Biography of a Fish

When it comes to biographies you expect the subject to be a celebrity, political leader or cultural icon. Not a fish – biographies aren’t written about fish. But Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod is just that, a self-described “biography of the fish that changed the world.”

Written over a decade ago it is not the story of a singular fish, but rather a history of a biological species – the Atlantic cod. Kurlansky writes about this fish as a food, as a resource, as an economic unit. But he also writes about the fisherman who’ve pursued it across the Atlantic and who’ve depended on it for their livelihood.

Blending equal measures history, reportage and culinary knowledge from the Atlantic coasts, it is a remarkable book.

But apart from its fascinating tale of consistent overfishing, which has doomed cod’s commercial future and threatened, perhaps fatally, its biological survival, it is also peppered with fascinating ancillary detail.

Did you know Basque fishermen have been catching Atlantic cod off the coast of North America since long before Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World? And that the traditional wood cabins of Nova Scotia are red because they were painted with cod liver oil which stains them that colour?

Where The Slime Live

Last week, after listening to Baroness and being suitably impressed, I didn’t really know how to continue my heavy metal exploration. So I sought out a guide on the internet and I found (the now defunct) Stylus Magazine’s article Into the Void: A Beginner’s Guide to Metal.

It sounded perfect, and after a brief read through it seemed pretty promising as it broke heavy metal down into some of sub-genre’s I’d heard of: death metal, black metal, doom metal, etc… So I jumped right in and listened to their Death Metal list (at least, all of it that was available on Spotify).

Now, maybe this was a bit of a rash decision because I’ve subsequently learnt that death metal isn’t the easiest of genres to listen to. In fact, some might go so far as to describe it as the some of the hardest, ugliest (to use Stylus’ word), least pleasurable music you can find.

Well I gritted my teeth and over two days worked my way through the list. I got through it, and in the next day or two I’m going to put up some of my first impressions of death metal.

But before I do so, you should know that since I listened to that list I’ve researched the evolution of heavy metal. Really, just because I needed to clear up how you get from Black Sabbath to Mastodon in forty years. The result of this investigation is best served in diagram form. I therefore present the Shoveling Snow Evolution of Heavy Metal Flow Chart in all its pot-holed shoddiness:

Now before anyone says “that’s wrong, and that’s wrong too” – I know, this is a really, really, really rough sketch and is in no way definitive (or even right). But on the other hand If you want a copy of this gloriously error-ridden guide, send me a postcard with your address on the back and I’ll send you your very own hand-crafted copy.

Medieval Iceland

When Iceland’s first settlers emigrated from Norway in the ninth century, they took a number a things with them. They took their families and they took their slaves, but they also took their lawbooks.

For the first three hundred years of settlement, law became the central pillar of Icelandic society. In a new land, with no indigenous population and scant resources, the Icelanders did without a monarch. Instead they created a commonwealth with a detailed and complex legal system which guaranteed the rights of the freemen of Iceland. (This included the rapidly emancipated slaves)

Now, this wasn’t some idyllic, egalitarian society, women had few rights and bloodfeuding was common. However, medieval Icelandic society is interesting because when contrasted to the increasingly hierarchical political culture developing across medieval Europe, it is a historical anomaly.

In Jesse Byock’s fascinating book “Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas and Power” this Icelandic society is brought to life, yet it is also examined in an unusual way. Byock takes Iceland’s most famous literary product, the sagas, and uses them alongside traditional historical sources to illustrate how this society would have functioned. The result is a brilliant book that breathes life into an esoteric topic that few people would consider ever reading about.