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Joe Mahoney on D.G. Valdron’s The Mermaid’s Tale
48 Plays2 years ago
Mark and Joe host Re-Creative, a podcast about creativity in which creative people from all walks of life talk about the art that inspires them. Joe continues the conversation by introducing Mark to Canadian author D.G. Valdron's The Mermaid's Tale, a dark, compelling, and utterly original fantasy.
For more information about this episode and the podcast, please visit: The Mermaid's Tale on Re-Creative
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner
Contact us at: joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Today's Topic
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey Mark. Hey Joe, how's it going? It's going pretty good. So we're here to talk about a piece of art. You chose last time and it was a great choice. It was Star Wars. We had a great talk about Star Wars and everything related to Star Wars and I thought we could talk for days and probably we could.
The Mermaid's Tale and Obscure Art
00:00:28
Speaker
but nobody would listen for days so i chose the subject today i think it's a good choice because i think it's an amazing piece of art and i do think that actually it has legs for discussion but we will we will see okay so joe what do you got for us what are you bringing what's what are you bringing to show and tell okay this is a book that i read two or three years ago and it stuck with me i got a couple of reasons for wanting to talk about it the first reason is that i think it's an it's an excellent book and deserves a wider audience
00:00:56
Speaker
And the second reason is because I think maybe we can talk a little bit about fantastic pieces of art that are at the same time completely obscure pieces of art.
Obscurity and Success
00:01:08
Speaker
You know, because at one time Star Trek was completely obscure. Like I remember, I'm old enough that I can remember when Star Trek was just my thing and nobody else knew about it. It was just a special thing between me and Star Trek and then
00:01:24
Speaker
To my horror it became everybody's thing yeah i mean it's i left last night i watch the document wrote kurt Vonnegut which is excellent and i did not realize that no like you written a whole bunch of novels before he ever got famous and anyone knew who he was and i was like that blows my mind like hardly anyone red cats cradle until later on when slaughterhouse five became famous.
00:01:49
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. And I think that speaks directly to what I want to talk about, which is a book called The Mermaid's Tale by an author by the name of DG Waldron, who's a Canadian author. He's a lawyer by day.
00:02:05
Speaker
And an author by by night and maybe lunch times in early mornings. But it's animated. Do you know the book? I do not know it. No. So you'll have to tell me what the book is basically before we can go any farther. Like what's the it's a mermaid's tale. So obviously we're talking mermaids here or selkies or something. Yeah. It's so it's a fantasy.
00:02:25
Speaker
It is a dark, dark fantasy. Very dark. It's basically the main character is an orc. She's a detective in this fantasy land, but it isn't your Disney fantasy land. This is a dark, twisted, magic kingdom. A mermaid is murdered, and the orc is basically hired to solve the murder. So it's a detective story. So that's the scaffolding of the whole story.
00:02:51
Speaker
But the world building is incredible. It's very detailed, very well thought out, not just in mechanical terms, but in psychological terms. The psychological component of the book is just as strong as the rest of it. And the orc is filled with self-loathing. It's not just self-loathing. Everybody loves the orc, because who likes orcs?
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah. So a male orc or a female orc? It's a female orc. A female orc. Okay. That's a good choice too. Yeah. And she's not an attractive orc or... Yeah. No, I'm kidding. She's an orc. Yeah. So do you happen to remember the female orc's name? The detective's name? The female orc. Actually...
00:03:32
Speaker
Sorry, I just accidentally knocked over a trombone. It just mysteriously appeared beside me. Wait a minute. Is Kazoo in the room? Maybe. The the orc does not have a name and it's written from the first person. Oh, that's fascinating.
Influence and Timing
00:03:49
Speaker
And is the orc a PI? Is the orc like
00:03:53
Speaker
part of the fantasy detective force? No, there's nothing like that. She's basically approached by a group who I guess kind of runs things and is asked to do this. I'll just read you the blurb at the back. Oh, okay, good. That's a good idea. Yeah.
00:04:09
Speaker
In a city of majesty and brutality of warring races and fragile alliances, a sacred mermaid has been brutally murdered. An abomination, a soulless Aruch, is summoned to hunt the killer. As the world around the Aruch drifts into war and madness, her search for justice leads her on a journey to discover redemption and even beauty in the midst of chaos. That sounds really good. It is. It's really good. Sounds like it could be like a Guillermo del Toro movie.
00:04:35
Speaker
Almost. Oh, absolutely. He would be an amazing choice. The problem, though, is that and kind of what I want to get into is that it's basically a completely obscure book. It was put out by a small publisher, which full disclosure was also my original publisher. D.G. Waldron was in the same stable of writers as me. You know, it was a small team who put the book together and he shared the same editor. So my editor, I had two editors, but one of my editors also edited this book.
00:05:04
Speaker
and I think did an amazing job. But I'm not plugging it because of that connection, because there was plenty of other books also put out by my publisher that I like, but I'm not as passionate about as this one. I'm bringing this one up because I really think it's a terrific piece of work. But to me, it presents a great question.
00:05:26
Speaker
which is why do some works become so well known and popular and well regarded while others of the same, in my opinion, the same quality drift into obscurity? Are you looking for an answer for me? Yes. Because I really wish I do the answer. I think the answer is, I hate to say it, but I think the answer is just it's luck.
00:05:48
Speaker
I think, you know, things hit at a certain time and place, and if they hit the right people in the right numbers, then they become very popular. And I'm thinking again, I'm just probably lucky. I just watched that documentary last night about Kurt Vonnegut, which is called, it's right from, Billy Pilgrim is untethered from time. Oh, that's Slaughterhouse-Five. That's Slaughterhouse-Five, yeah.
00:06:15
Speaker
So Slaughterhouse-Five was a huge, huge hit for him, but he had spent basically all of the 60s working in obscurity, publishing novels. And one of my favorite Vonnegut novels, Cats Cradle, was published in that time period. And very few people knew about it, just a few hippies who really liked it. But most people had never heard of it. And then he published Slaughterhouse-Five. It came out in
00:06:40
Speaker
in 1969, so right when the Vietnam War was getting super ugly. And it was an anti-war book that he'd written. And it just hit at the perfect time so that people said, we should read this book. It gets an allegory for what's happening in Vietnam. I don't think it is, but certainly you could draw the comparisons between what was happening
00:07:02
Speaker
in the war, in any war, in what was happening in Vietnam. And so that book became a huge hit. And then suddenly people went, well, look at this. He's got this huge back catalog of stories he's written that are amazing. And so they reissued those at that point. So is it possible that we could have never heard of Kurt Vonnegut? I think the answer is yes. I think if he hadn't released that book at that time,
00:07:29
Speaker
And that's a book that he started writing in the 40s. He started writing that book in many drafts. And I don't want to spoil the documentary for people because it's really worth checking out. But there's a point where he's tried it from Billy Pilgrim's perspective. He's got other names for the characters. And he's told it from the first person. He's told it from the third person. At one point, he tried to make a play.
00:07:53
Speaker
to try and deal with the issues that he experienced. And if the listeners don't know, Kurt Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and as a POW was sent to Dresden and worked in Dresden as a POW, and then the Allies firebombed the city. So Kurt Vonnegut experienced the firebombing of Dresden.
00:08:14
Speaker
So one of the most horrific episodes of the Second World War. And so, of course, that had an impact on him. And probably one of the reasons he's such a great writer is that he's got sort of this darkness that he had to deal with through most of his life. And of course, he chose humor. That was his solution on how to deal with it.
00:08:33
Speaker
So that book, if he had been able to write that book faster, again, it probably would have been an unknown book because it wouldn't have hit the public at the moment when it did. So I
Themes of The Mermaid's Tale
00:08:46
Speaker
do think a lot of it just happens to be luck. Like if it does something hit at the time when it's going to have a really wide impact.
00:08:56
Speaker
So a book like the one you're describing, I don't know. It sounds good, but is it, I don't know. I mean, it's probably just as good as- Is it timely? Is it timely? Yeah. So it's not just timeliness, but I think timeliness is part of it. Does it strike a chord that really matters to people at that moment when they pick up the book and read it? I think that's part of it. But what do you got?
00:09:20
Speaker
Well, as usual, you have made me want to go in 17 different directions. All right. So first of all, the parallel between Vonnegut, I think, and this author, I think there are some parallels. Now, I don't know DG Waldron personally in the sense that I've never actually met him in the real world. We are virtual acquaintances.
00:09:41
Speaker
we have interacted online, so I know a little bit about him. And I don't want to say too much because it's not Waldron himself that I want to talk about, it's his book that I want to champion. But I think I'm comfortable enough in saying that although he does not have, he never fought in the war like Kurt Vonnegut or anything, he shares some of the same darkness, I think. This is a man who, for whatever reason,
00:10:07
Speaker
understands that this is a world that consists of great evil and potentially great goodness, which is something that I believe that there is those extremes and that I try to capture in my work
00:10:22
Speaker
but that I don't believe that I captured anyone near as well as he did in this book. So there's that. And the other thing that you had mentioned about timing and luck at my day job, which I'm not supposed to mention much in my extracurricular activities, but it's a media organization, they'll say.
00:10:42
Speaker
When I was involved in the creation of art and entertainment for that organization, there was always, it was always considered to be stronger if you were relating it to something that was actually happening in the world. I didn't necessarily agree with that at the time. I thought that art could stand on its own merits because obviously you can, you can write something like Slaughterhouse Five, you know, which relates to the, the Vietnam war, but then 30 years later, it's still a great book.
00:11:12
Speaker
And now it relates to another war. I mean, it's, it's got a timelessness to it a little bit because of it's of the way he wrote it. Yeah. The, the war, cause there's a war in the mermaid's tail. It's that's part of the backdrop. And I think about the current situation in Ukraine and the issue with Russia and the Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been referred to as orcs. Yeah. Easier for us on this, this side of the, the conflict to, to cast them in that mold.
00:11:42
Speaker
So they are they are orcs and now the main character in the mermaid's tale isn't is an orc reviled by by everyone including the orc herself and has to go and Kind of champion the mermaid who died and the rest of the mermaids who are mourning her and there's vampires as well and all sorts of other
00:12:01
Speaker
But he does such a twist on each of these characters. It's such a fresh take on all of that. And nobody knows about this book and they need to. I know it's, it's a shame. It's, it, it, it happens. I mean, dare I say it's happened to maybe two of the people talking today that many people know about our books and they probably should. And I think for the reader, I think it's a great time to be a reader because of that. There's so many great things out there right now, but it's finding them. How do you find them?
00:12:29
Speaker
Like how do you find new things that are great like this? For me, I think what's cool about it is that it's something that moved you. So what specifically about the book moved you, do you think?
00:12:44
Speaker
apart from sort of like the intellectual activity of like, why isn't this more popular? Which I get all the time when I read stuff or watch things that I don't understand why this wasn't a bigger hit. But why that story? What about the arc's journey appeal to you so much? It was the, the self-loathing on the part of the orc and her trying to go about her life and go about her work and dealing with that.
00:13:11
Speaker
at the same time. I think it spoke to something in the human condition. I don't think I have more than the usual amount of self-loathing, but I can relate to the idea every now and then, you know, we'll do something, you know, reprehensible or something and feel bad about ourselves, you know, some fleeting self-loathing. But this or hates herself all the time. And she hates herself because society has told her to.
00:13:39
Speaker
hate herself. I think that doesn't just speak to individuals out there. It speaks to whole swaths of society, that the larger society has decided we will revile you for whatever reason. And especially in the world that we live in now, which everybody talks about how increasingly polarized it is, and there are factions out there who make no secret about how much they revile other factions. And I just, to me, that just as the
00:14:09
Speaker
and Tetris as of how I think and...
00:14:11
Speaker
how I want the world to be. So, Waldron captures that, I think, very well in this book. And it's a part of the energy, the electricity that drives it forward. Yeah, so that's a really, and it's a, when was this book put out? Because I think that might be important too, for listeners to know. Yeah, it was put out relatively
Societal Polarization
00:14:33
Speaker
recently. I have it here and I'm just going to look it up. Like in the last 10 years or so? Oh yeah, 2016. Oh yeah, yeah.
00:14:41
Speaker
So I think that that theme is very relevant. I think you're totally right. That theme is very relevant these days. And I too am very worried about this othering that people want to do. There's a human nature side of it that unfortunately exists. But I think the vast majority of us share more experiences than we don't share experiences. We're all humans. We're all going to die.
00:15:06
Speaker
Speak for yourself. You're not going to die? I hold out hope, as all humans do, until proven otherwise. After I'm dead, then I'll be like, oh, okay, I guess I was going to die. But right up until that final second, I'll be holding out possibility, I think, as all humans do. I try to remember where I saw that recently, but I saw that in the movie recently where the person was saying, yeah, everyone
00:15:31
Speaker
It's always a look of surprise when you die, when people die because everyone up to the very last moment is not expecting it to happen.
00:15:41
Speaker
You know what? I was doing exactly the same thing as you. I'm relating something that I just saw in a show, and what was that show? And as you were asking the question, I realized it's the premiere episode of the new Star Trek. Exactly. That's it. I was waiting for you to get it. Which is fabulous, by the way, but I don't want to get distracted again on Star Trek and Star Wars. Yes. Well, it all comes back to Star Trek and Star Wars in the end. Of course.
00:16:11
Speaker
No, let's not go there. I do think the idea of the othering is a problem. I mean, it's just so baked into what's happening in culture now. But it's such a false idea, really. The fact is, we're basically…
00:16:28
Speaker
We're not the same, obviously, but we're all in the same boat, you know? Yes, yes, exactly. We're all in this little tiny craft together. And if we don't get along, we won't be in the craft for as long.
00:16:42
Speaker
It's not going to be very much fun. Yeah, it does upset me. I also often use the analogy or the metaphor of a boat. I always think that, man, who's operating this boat because they're piling us right into an iceberg or over a waterfall or something. When have we just worked together and got along? I think it's the guy running the gift shop that's running the boat right now.
00:17:05
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. He just wants us to buy as many tchotchkes as possible and be distracted by them so that we don't notice the iceberg. There is so much more truth in what you just said, I think then. I mean, it sounds like a joke, but I think it's the truth.
00:17:25
Speaker
The other thing I want to say about the othering business is so many of us like animals, but what could be more other than an animal? But we can get along great with animals and respect animals and whatnot.
00:17:37
Speaker
And yet we turn our own species into other. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, it's, like I said, it's just really upsetting. I recently saw somewhere a story about a police officer being interviewed, and he's talking about how many more people he's having to arrest for shoplifting food. And there was this line, it was like a throwaway line, he said, and they're like real people too. They're not just like homeless people that I'm arresting. I'm like, oh my gosh. They're like real people. This is like, oh my God.
00:18:06
Speaker
They're like real people. That's othering at its worst, right? They're not even a human being anymore because they don't have a home. Yeah, I was really disgusted by that police officer's comments. I think that's why it's such a relevant topic and it doesn't surprise me the book is fairly recent because I think we've been confronting it more in our daily lives. Maybe not as much in the last two years during the lockdowns and so on because we're not meeting people as much.
00:18:36
Speaker
But certainly we see it on our media a lot more and the internet, especially this kind of vicious othering by one group against another. Yeah. And how will it end? Well, I mean, it ends one of two ways, right? Either we get over it and we start to
00:18:55
Speaker
I hate to bring Star Trek back. You do the Star Trek thing and actually work together, which is really what that is about, is how important it is for us to recognize that we're all of the same boat and we need to work together. Or we don't and you have conflicts in civil war and if we can't work together, we're certainly going to destroy the ecosystem of our planet. We might not destroy all life.
00:19:20
Speaker
just with global warming, but certainly we have the ability to do that. If we have a nuclear war, that would happen. So if you don't get past that othering, then yeah, the consequences could be pretty dire. Absolutely. I mean, it's not very funny, but I do think it's a possibility. And in some ways I see progress too, like, I don't know if you've
00:19:47
Speaker
thought that at all in the last 10 years, but I certainly see progress in the sense that, for example, the acceptance of trans people and that whole thing. I mean, even 10 years ago, if you'd asked me that that was going to start to happen, and I know there's a huge backlash, and there's a group of people that are othering trans people, some of them are very famous, but if you talk to me 10 years ago, I don't think I would have predicted where we're at now with that specific issue.
00:20:17
Speaker
I completely agree with that. That is shocking and surprising in a good way. And here in Canada, to use another example would be the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how there is, now I don't see it in everyone, but I certainly see it in a lot of my colleagues, a real acceptance of those ideals and like not just an acceptance of them, an idea that we're going to have to work towards those ideals.
00:20:46
Speaker
And again, if you'd talked to me even 10 years ago, I don't think I would have said, yeah, that's going to happen. That's so I do see progress, but you know, it's two step forward, one step back. Do you think that there's a connection actually, because we are seeing acceptance in those areas and it seems there seems to be an increased momentum that may be some of the, um,
00:21:11
Speaker
The anger that we're seeing is just a response to that. It's a natural reaction. Maybe this is all unfolding naturally. I think there's something to that. Do you listen to Malcolm Gladwell at all? He's got a podcast. It's called Revisionist History. I haven't heard his podcast, but I've certainly read some of his work, seen his Ted Talks. Okay.
00:21:34
Speaker
I mean, I think you have to take his work with a grain of salt because he's trying to do a popular thing. But that said, he had a point about the election of Trump that I thought was really kind of interesting, which was Trump was a natural pendulum reaction to Obama in the sense that, okay, we've elected a black person to be the president, so therefore we're not racist, so therefore we can elect this very racist person.
00:22:04
Speaker
And we're not necessarily going to be racist because we've already proved that we're not, right? We've elected Obama. That sounds right to me. That sounds like there's something to that. So I think you might be right that there might be just a push and pull in these kinds of things. And what happens next really depends on what people do.
00:22:25
Speaker
And what side wins the information war, essentially? Or maybe not that there's sides, particularly I think in some of these things, like around racism and acceptance of trans people, I actually do kind of think there are sides. And I think there's a compassionate side. And I think there's a side that's not compassionate. So I do think that there is a bit of tug of war going on. And that's maybe why we are so much more aware of it right now. Hmm. What do you think?
00:22:54
Speaker
Well, yeah, because I, and I want to take it back to the mermaid's tale because I think he explores a lot of this tension in that book in 2000. I'd say obviously he was writing it before 2016. So he wasn't seeing the same necessarily, you know, it had, uh, Waldron still been writing this book after Trump was in, it would have been an even darker book.
00:23:14
Speaker
Possibly. Yeah. Exploring this kind of stuff. I should mention as well, actually, because I owe it to anybody who potentially picks up the book. They need to know that it is a very violent book in places. Our first episode, we talked a little bit about Thomas Covenant, an incident that happens a third of the way through the first book that was tough for some readers to get past. There's a similar incident in this book, which actually is even far more intense.
00:23:40
Speaker
But it's not at all gratuitous. It completely speaks to the character and the milieu. And it's a part of the book's DNA. There's no getting around it, but people need to know that it's in there. I think that's wise to let people know that before they encounter it. Just cold. Yeah.
00:23:58
Speaker
At the same time, though, I don't want to put people off the book. I want to put people onto the book. No, of course not. No, it's it's I think I mean, I think we're probably both hopeful that we'll have listeners who are like us in terms of being fairly omnivorous and being able to take these kinds of things in the way that they're intended. Yes, I think so. And that there should be no books that are banned.
00:24:24
Speaker
I do love the idea that there's all these book banning happening and that's just making them fly off the shelves. There's something wonderful about that. Oh yeah. Yeah. The irony. Yeah, that's great. Now, do you like in the books that you read, so all the stuff that you were just talking about, the increased acceptance of things that were not societal norms in the past and then the reaction to it and that kind of real world
Storytelling and Authenticity
00:24:50
Speaker
stuff. Do you like that in your entertainment and fiction?
00:24:53
Speaker
I think you use the word that is the important word when you're describing The Mermaid's Tale. It has to be organic. I don't like it when it feels like the author is preaching at me and trying to make a quote a point. But if it comes naturally out of the story, then…
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, I do actually like one of my favorite Ursula K Le Guin books is The Left Hand of Darkness. And it deals with the idea of gender pretty explicitly. And I really like that book and like that book doesn't exist without that idea. Yes. The story itself is based on
00:25:29
Speaker
those ideas and confronting them and and i really love that book so yeah i like it when it's baked in and it's organic i don't like it when it feels like it's layered on top i don't want to point anything out specific but i do sort of see that a lot now i see it happening a lot i was like that doesn't feel like that's part of it feels like they've got well we need we need to have this representation and
00:25:53
Speaker
I, well, I understand that's important. Maybe in, in fictional enterprises is not always the best choice. It's not organic. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because that's actually something that also needs to be said about this book. The mermaid's tale is that there's an authenticity to it. You can't manufacture that kind of authenticity. This is, this came from someplace real and it informed every
00:26:21
Speaker
page, paragraph, sentence, and word in the whole book. There's nothing grafted onto it. And you're absolutely right. Cause you do see that in some popular entertainment, probably both of us, maybe when we've been writing have thought, Oh, I got to put something deep and meaningful in, in this writing. But if it doesn't come from someplace real and organic, it probably isn't going to work.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's been my experience as a writer. I find if I try to make a point that I think is important and I just, I try to put it in there and it's not coming out of the story, then it really, it has to go. So luckily I cut them and my editor is really good and he says, no, it's not, that's preachy. You can't put that in there. And that's great because first of all, your first duty as a writer is to be entertaining, really is.
00:27:10
Speaker
I'm totally with Vonnegut on that one. That's a good question, actually. Is it? Okay, so where does it come down between educating and entertaining or provoke a catharsis or uplift? And does there have to be a first one? Well, that's still entertaining.
00:27:27
Speaker
I guess it really depends on how you define the word entertaining, but I like Vonnegut's quote about use the time of a stranger in such a way that they don't feel like their time was wasted. As long as they feel like their time has been spent well, then I feel like they've been entertained in
Balancing Audience and Art
00:27:44
Speaker
some way. They've learned something or they've got an experience they would have had, or it's just maybe feeling good about the happy ending that you provide, or maybe feeling frustrated because you didn't give them a happy ending and it's an ambiguous ending.
00:27:58
Speaker
they want to talk about that. That's all a form of entertainment in my mind. So all of those things are possible. But I do think that you don't want to read something and feel like you're just being preached at or someone's just in their own thing and they're not thinking about the audience at all. I mean, I don't think you should write specifically just for the audience. You have to also please yourself. But at the same time, if you're only pleasing yourself and you don't care about the audience, then
00:28:27
Speaker
Is there any point to writing? Hmm. Yeah. I don't know. You put me in mind of what I've heard about comedians, standup comedians, that certainly when they, when they start out and at a certain level of their careers, not that I'm an expert in standup comedians, I never have been a standup comedian. I know some, but my understanding is in the beginning, you know, they want to make the audience laugh. But then some of them later in their career, people like Andy Kaufman and, and I think Jim Carrey to a certain extent,
00:28:57
Speaker
became more interested in experimenting when they were up there in this stage. And it was less about gratifying the audience and more about experimenting with the form. And I think there's a place for that totally. I get that. And that can be entertainment too. Like you can just watching Andy Kaufman
00:29:19
Speaker
do something bizarre is pretty entertaining because if you know what he's doing, if you don't know what he's doing and you're coming expecting something else, then yeah, it could be pretty frustrating and not entertaining. But if you get that he's an artist and he's trying to accomplish something new and different, then yeah, I think that can be entertainment too. Another one I would think of would be George Carlin. I love George Carlin, but I would say near the end of his career, he was just preachy. He wasn't funny.
00:29:47
Speaker
He stopped being funny and he still had to make a joke there and there.
00:29:53
Speaker
make me laugh a little bit. But, you know, that's just me.
Recommendation and Conclusion
00:29:56
Speaker
Well, I can reassure you that there is I don't think there's anything preachy about the mermaid's tail. It's just laying it out. This this character trying to survive in a horrific world, there's no advice, really. I don't think about how to survive in that horrific world. It's just surviving and trying to solve this this mystery. I got to say, I really like the idea of a character
00:30:20
Speaker
dealing with self-loathing because I've written on that topic and it's one that's really current. We have a lot of people trying to conform to some kind of ideal that is totally unrealistic.
00:30:32
Speaker
And I think that is a very current topic too. So it sounds like a good book for people to be reading. Yes. Yes. I should also know there's one curiosity in the book that I'd like to ask him about someday. And that is there are no chapters in the book. It's not broken into chapters. He just dispenses with that. Oh, that's like the first book. The first books didn't have chapters. Robinson Crusoe originally did not have chapters.
00:30:58
Speaker
I did not know that. There's natural breaks because I think it was an epistolatory novel, but that was added later. Yeah. The idea of a chapter. So there's a logic to that. Right. So there was my pick, The Mermaid's Tale. The Mermaid's Tale. By DG Waldron, Canadian author. Cool. Thanks, Mark. Thank you. That was interesting. It's on my list now. Thanks to Reed. Good.
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There you go.
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Speaker
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