Hi Alphas,
Welcome to Alphaday 11. With only two more Alphadays left this season – three if you count this one – we now are heading towards the end of Season XII. So make the most of what’s on offer today. There’s plenty there for you to enjoy. The only missing item is the challenge brief. To compensate I’ve contrived another little job for you to do instead. Last Alphaday I mentioned the very un-Alpha-like idea of a ‘customer satisfaction survey’. Call it what you like, but it is useful to hear what members think of the season. Critiquing is something writers know a bit about, and this is your chance to voice your opinions on Alpha strengths and weaknesses as you’ve experienced them in the course of this season. I’ve put together a document to explain it in more detail which I’ll send out after this bulletin. I’ll sum up your views next Alphaday, so, please, look at the ‘survey’ as another challenge brief and let me hear from you before the usual deadline. That would be very helpful!
Back to today’s agenda which has the following treats on offer:
- This bulletin from me
- The results of the phobia challenge from Stephen (which may or may not be delayed as Stephen warned us in a recent email)
- The collated entries for the humour challenge from CCG
- The Writers’ Reads column from Morgen
- The Log as edited by Sally
- Season XII questionnaire
Not so lean a feast after all, is it now?
There is a bit of a dearth of other interesting news. I suppose you’re all enjoying the abundance of Shakespearean events to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his death. Mugs and things, I suppose? Or seeing the plays performed live at a theatre near you?
The other literary giant to die on the same day as Shakespeare turns out to be Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote which is considered the prototype of the novel genre. And that, surely, is an enormous claim to fame?
Sir Walter Scott very clumsily and inadequately tried to bring the Norse Sagas to the attention of the rest of Europe. The translations of more recent Norse specialists, Magnus Magnusson in particular, have made this wonderful literary treasure accessible to anyone who’s interested. The sagas were, for the most part, written in the 13th century. Many of them are written in a genre that’s immediately recognisable as the novel form, while Don Quixote is more picaresque or episodic.
Iceland is still keeping its distance from the rest of Europe (an indefinable entity at this moment in time), culturally, politically and financially. So we’ll celebrate Shakespeare and Cervantes. But those sagas deserve to be recognised as the earliest novels to be written in Europe.
Christine