The Bad Samaritan

Today I read Robert Barnard's The Bad Samaritan: worth the price for the title and cover alone, it's also a bitter and satiric yet still warm little novel that begins with a vicar's wife who suddenly, while walking in the park one day, loses her faith in God. It's a (literally) cutthroat study of hypocrisy (just like the story of the Good Samaritan is a cutthroat study of hypocrisy) masquerading as a murder mystery.

posted by Greg at 8:47 PM

It explains so much!

Such a beautiful photo! And with it is commentary from the monkey's keepers: "One possible explanation is brain damage from [an] illness, [Horowitz] said."

So the mystery of humanity every day becomes clearer, and we see we've learned the wrong lessons from evolution. (Are we really all that surprised?) Sure, mutation is apparent, but the point is that when we dig to the roots of our family tree, we see not an inexplicable transformation of genes, but, rather, we find a brain-damaged monkey.

posted by Greg at 1:58 AM

beer

in honor of a conversation we had many moons ago...well, okay, just a few

this doctor will tell you all you ever wanted to know about beer and health

unsurprisingly, the scientific research concludes that moderate drinking (which in one study was as little as 1 beer a year) has a plethora of benefits: heart disease, osteoporosis, lactation (non-alcoholic), ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, dementia, the common cold, loss of hearing, bone density during menopause, and many more very good health benefits.

not all is roses though.  heavy drinking is most unhealthful and the cause of myriad problems.

the dreaded beer belly, according to Dr. Marleen Finoulst is more due to the kinds of food eaten while consuming the brew.  in fact, moderate beer consumption comes up better than no beer consumption in one study

the best paragraph of the site (well, i can't say this very categorically, i haven't read them all) follows:

Excessive consumption of soft drinks and fruit juice is an important cause of being overweight, especially in children. Traditional table beers are a good alternative, which are not only low in alcohol but also low in calories and do not interfere with metabolism.

Are we to give our children beer as an alternative to fruit juice?

despite all the research to the contrary that Dr. Finoulst provides.   this evil, evil man David Kirsch, a weight loss specialist to the stars, who has a rather garrish website with a flash intro that spews phrases like: it's not just about a perky butt, says, of course, that one should give up beer to loose the weight

posted by Jeremy at 8:05 AM

dinner

tonight we went to a colleague's house for dinner. it's strange to think about him as a colleague. i knew him as the husband of the only lecturer with a phd. when i was a grad student. i also knew him as the stand-in outside reader for modern latin americanist.

but now he is my colleague and excited for me to be on board. he hopes to pick my brain about how to make GSU a better program. the strange part about it for me is that i still see myself as a bumbling grad student. also, i am still too close to my own days as student and the hazing of the exams and the dissertation to be able to see past all the stuff that i don't like about my institution. undoubtedly there are good things...but it's hard for me to see them at the moment. i am still reeling from the dissertation.

the worst thing about writing a dissertation in a year, and maybe this is the same regardless of whether or not its a year or three years, is that only now do i feel able to write the dissertation that i set out to write. only know do i have the knowledge to be able to write a kick-ass dissertation. going back to the dissertation to make the edits has been so painful that i am still avoiding. next week, though, i will need to sit down and do it all in one fell swoop.

the problem is that i go back to it and see more my lack of knowledge than what i know. but it needs to get done because i now need to start working on the various conferences that i've been accepted to this fall (MB i don't know if SAMLA is an association you'll be a part of...but if you are and you are attending this fall, let me know, we could meet) and sending out proposals for the always new conferences that spring up all the time.

a friend of mine and i joke that there should be career consultants for academics. people who come in and help young phids learn the ropes. plan their careers, etc. as in, how many conferences per semester is too many conferences? how many articles a year should you try to have circulating? etc.

posted by Jeremy at 11:26 PM

revisions

instead of revising my dissertation, which now i need to get to and whip it out and up and turn it in, i took a week and a half break. i took the last few days to read umberto eco's foucault's pendulum...a behemoth of book, weighing in at 640 pages, in the english translation.

since i've got to give priority to the revisions, it'll take me a few days to write up a review...that is if anybody wants to read a review of it. it really is a stellar novel.

in the mean time, here is one of the funniest paragraphs in all of literary criticism. it utterly redefines ad hominem.

What I want to argue here is perhaps as simple as saying that Shakespeare didn’t write the books that bear his name. This is not, however, to enlist on one side of the familiar controversy about authorship, disputing whether or not someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays while hiding behind the identity of the glover’s son from Stratford. That argument has little to recommend it, except its unintended humor. One of the early proponents of the Earl of Oxford’s authorship was infamously named J. Thomas Looney (although, as Oxfordians never fail to point out, the common Manx pronunciation was in fact “Lone-y”). An article maintaining that the plays of Shakespeare were actually written by Daniel Defoe (in spite of the fact that Defoe was born about thrity-seven years after the Shakespeare folio was printed in 1623) was written by the no more happily named George M. Battey; and more recently a New York lawyer took up the cause of Marlowe’s authorship in a privately printed dramatic fantasy. His name, alas, was Sherwood E. Silliman. I sometimes take all this as ad hominem proof that there is a God. Kastan, David. Shakespeare After Theory. Routledge, 71-72.

posted by Jeremy at 3:26 PM

connect!

It just occurred to me that Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Da Vinci Code are pretty similar texts. Farenheit 9/11 has a better writer, but they treat history about the same: it is a convenient, simplified, distorted backdrop to make narrative work. The difference between history for Moore and Brown and for other writers, Dickens or Spielberg, say, is minimalhistory is always used as backdrop to make narrative workwhat matters is the scale of the history they distort.

posted by Greg at 11:13 AM

known issues

Assuming success is counted by quality and retention, not quantity, of readers, Hermits Rock! has had a good run in the last year. And the Hermit family is making significant changes this summer. Chris, Mary, and Rose will soon make their home in the City of Brotherly Arks; Jeremy and T. (who like kl has remained an unnamed Hermit Spouse) have moved into a new home and he will soon begin that unique form of slavery known as "tenure-track professor." (I remain perpetually on the verge of accomplishing anything whatsoever.) All that change, however, and particularly Chris's move, requires that we acknowledge the Ameri-Belgium incarnation of Hermits Rock! is reaching its swift demise.

Hermits Rock! is thus entering a new era. We have so far treated the change like menopause: we all know it is upon us, but we do not speak of it. Will the change be evolutionary or revolutionary? Will hermit spouses get names? Will we all drink Yoo Hoo, or will we throw it through the window? We do not know! (Ha! Sorry to be so melodramatic. I just wanted to use that "change like menopause" simile.)

I am sure Chris has ideas bursting from his ears, and maybe we can add to them. What follows, in no particular rank (though the first one is important) is my list of Hermit thoughts, needs, and desires. I invite both hermits and readers to add/subtract either in comments or posts....

• Hermits Rock! will not display on Mozilla web browsers. I have tried it on Firefox (Windows) and Camino (Mac OS X) and Mozilla 1.7. In every case when you call up hermits.port5.com the browser displays the page's raw code instead of its formatted text. With security experts recommending nobody use Internet Explorer (and on a mac, IE isn't worth using), we'd should try to get Hermits working on all platforms. (For the record, Hermits displays in IE, and Safari)
• What about purchasing a domain?
• Something that might be fun to tryaltho I dunno how well it would work, or whether we'd like itis to have text designs specific to each Hermit. It could be done super easy by defining DIV tags in CSS...
• Since we will now be the Iowa-Arkansas-Georgia (IAARGA?, GAARIA?, ARGAIA?) hermits, we need a new slogan and/or way to designate ourselves. Perhaps geography will not serve us as well as Ameri-Belgium now. Let me nominate, then, "Hermits Rock! - Pet Fantasies of Pasta."
• well, okay, no, that's not really very good.
• continuing with the progress we made by adding a black hermit two years ago, this one is radical: perhaps, looking to the future, we might invite a 4th hermit, a she-hermit?
• a page for favorite hermit recipes

ok. i'll stop there. whaddya think?

posted by Greg at 8:09 PM

aesthetics

i have been saving the following link for months. i have been reluctant to post it here. maybe i have been afraid that no one else will appreciate it or that i will not enjoy sharing it as much as i have enjoyed savoring it. but now the time has come to share it. with no further delay, i present a beautiful tale, which contains, in my unstudied opinion, the two best consecutive sentences in context in english-language writing in 2004:

"As the robber fled, Nick picked up a glass bottle of Yoo-Hoo and threw it at him.

'Yoo-Hoo is a Pepsi product,' explained Jason. 'It's a chocolate drink.'"

posted by Chris at 5:59 AM

|r|e|a|d|i|n|g|

I wouldn't want to be caught calling The Da Vinci Code a great book; clever, maybe, but not great. Too often I was compelled to scoff at its plot contrivances; too rarely was I given the chance to believe that the history it tells made the book worth mulling over. In some ways, The Da Vinci Code is like a mobile home: one might become comfortable there, but its walls are thin, and in the case of this trailer, somebody forgot to tie it to its concrete slab.

Robert Langdon is an historian from Harvard who studies religious icons. Early one morning, however, after a lecture in Paris, he is accused of murdering the curator at the Louvre. It was the curator who tipped the police to Langdon: he left a cryptic message on the floor before he died, and that message identified Langdon by name. The murder connects him to the same curator's granddaughter, cryptographer Sophie Neveu, who recognized in her grandfather's message a puzzle that to her understanding, far from accusing Langdon of murder, frees him from guilt. The message proves to be deeply meaningful for Langdon and Neveu, who team together to solve its puzzle and, hopefully, the murder.

So they race about Paris, dogged by the police and by an albino fundamentalist Catholic monk, and they soon learn that to solve their puzzle, they must embark on the greatest quest of the Christian age. They must find the Holy Grail. As it happens Neveu’s grandfather is just the man to put Langdon and Neveu on the quest, since he was the leader of the ancient order that has protected the Grail since its discovery by the Knights Templar during the crusades. (It also happens that Langdon is a foremost expert on the same ancient order.) In a plot that twists through misguided priesthoods (in the grand tradition of the Catholic church [an irony not lost by the novel]), all-knowing government agencies (in the grand tradition of James Bond and the C.I.A. of "assassinate Castro" fame), and ancient secret societies (in the grand tradition of the Masons), and corrupt scholars (in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones), Langdon and Neveu inch toward—and eventually find—the Grail.

And they do it all in six hours—about as long as it takes to read the book.

Brown’s puzzles are inventive. Take the following number sequence, for example,

The sequence subsequently represents a playful salutation to Neveu, a random reorganization of Fibonacci’s sequence, an invitation to showcase the unsurpassed brilliance of Langdon as a teacher, and the ancient secret society’s ancient account number to its safety deposit box in its ultramodern, super secure 24-hour Swiss Bank. Through anagrams and iambic quatrains, the puzzles come as though the novel were a special Weekend Edition: all Will Shortz, all the time. Often, though, it seems as though the plot progresses only because it's time to give the characters new puzzles to solve.

Puzzles, however, have an added benefit. They keep the secret society secret. The novel begins when its ranks have unfortunately been broken, its top leadership—the only people who know where the Grail is hidden—murdered. It is up to Langdon and Neveu to rescue the Grail from being lost forever. Not coincidentally, the Grail is important because it is far more than Jesus's communion cup. Rather, the Grail is both the physical remains of Mary Magdalene and a documented history of her heirs. Magdalene is the Eve to Jesus's Adam, the true wife of Jesus and bearer of his children (oh yes, she is the yin to his yang) but nobody knows it because the patriarchy of the church has suppressed her, just as it has suppressed all suggestion that there is anything sacred in the feminine. In other words, the Grail is a truth so powerful that its unveiling could destroy the whole history of the church. The power of the Grail is witnessed in its keepers' beliefs. They recognize that sex is holy, for example, not shameful, not because they like women more than Catholics do (didn't I say that there was no irony lost?), but because sex is a complementary act.

Langdon proves to be the perfect man to join Neveu on this quest. Although a brilliant 30-year-old cryptographer, she is still naive to the ways of the world; he, on the other hand, is an expert in the "sacred feminine." Not himself a worshiper, he is the next-best-thing, a scholar who has spent a whole year researching the subject. That year should set of alarums. Langdon's history is certainly in doubt; indeed, it is largely improbable and ridiculous. Although Mary Magdalene has witnessed something of a revival—I read a book recently that argues her case as the first apostle—it is absurd to argue conclusively that she is the Grail, or that the Knights Templar could have found and protected her in secret for nearly 2,000 years. One of the reasons, perhaps, that so many have found this history probable is because the novel continually sets Langdon in lecture mode. In between escape scenes (why is the novel all escape and little action?), Langdon must explain to Neveu what amounts to a subterranean history of the Christian age. Because he lectures, he seems credible. As he seems credible, so too does the novel. To make its point, for example, the novel turns briefly, but significantly, to the canon debates of the fourth century. Constantine's yoking of the Roman Empire to Christianity was shrewd politics, says the novel, but his influence on the formation of the New Testament canon was anti-paganistically patriarchal. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John thus represent just four of eighty possible gospels that might have gone into the canon. And the formation of the canon rests on only one criteria: the primacy of patriarchy over anything else. There, of course, is the problem. Any other evaluations that were important in canon formation, from historical authorship, reliability of source, or value of message, are left by the wayside. This is of course convenient for the historical narrative of this novel, but not for a wise representation of history.

In the end, what Brown achieves in The Da Vinci Code is a novel about multivalence, but only partly so, for words must have some sort of greater context for multivalence to exist. The Da Vinci Code is exactly opposite that multivalence. Plots, characters, histories-—they don’t measure up to the possibilities of meaning that puzzles do. So it is that the most interesting things in this book are not the characters, nor even the Grail quest, but instead they are the small snippets, the codes and puzzles, both because they are inventive themselves and because they are the only things that, with the context of this novel, are really tied down in context. For that reason, they are the only things that fruitfully multiply.

Following is a list of other articles on The Da Vinci Code:

• Christianity Today: "Breaking The Da Vinci Code
• Christian Chronicle:"Can Odd Vice Be a King, Sir?"

posted by Greg at 9:01 PM

question of the week

For me, the question of the week is this: What is the best response when one of your friends is involved in a serious romantic relationship with someone who evidences glaring personality issues and who seems not to be a good match? In the particular instance to which I am now referring, I have witnessed the friend's girlfriend being icily rude to m.b., me, her boyfriend, and an assortment of sales clerks and restaurant personnel. To be fair, in the 72 hours I spent with her, she showed no signs of serious psychological illness, substance abuse, or character problems, apart from inconsiderateness and selfishness.

A few specific examples of her potentially problematic behavior include: (1) deciding for absolutely no apparent reason that she would ignore or speak in icy tones to m.b.which prompted our friend to take her aside for a two hour chat, to apologize on her behalf to both of us, and to tell us that he thought she was not behaving reasonably; (2) speaking only English to salesclerks and restaurant staff, despite knowing enough basic French to have tried and despite currently being a student in translation studies, having lived in several different countries, and feeling confident to repeatedly try to correct my and m.b.'s French; (3) never saying "thank you" or "please" to ANYONEeven when we walked her all the way across Brussels to see the European Parliament building, which she had requested; (4) taking pains to point out that her family owns two houses, that she likes to shop for shoes, and that people in England have poor taste; (5) talking about how it would be great to live in the States and about how she has had difficulties getting a visa to visit the States in the pastsomething which our friend's US citizenship could help; (6) never paying for or offering to pay for ANYTHING, despite our eating out for every meal and constantly traveling via train; and (7) making disparaging remarks about people with babies (e.g., "Why do people with babies take them to restaraunts? Other people go to restaraunts to relax, but it's hard when there is a baby there."), despite our friend's intense interest in our baby and apparent desire to have a baby.

In general, I avoid meddling in the affairs of other people. However, this case involves one of our best friends, whom we have known for around 10 years. Also, this case involves a long-distance romantic relationship in which they meet for a few weeks every 5 or 6 months. In addition, our friend has never broken off a relationship with any female. Finally, our friend asked my opinion but repeatedly indicated that he was very interested in continuing the relationship with her even after I expressed politely over-generous tentative misgivings about her. So what, if anything, should I do or say? Does heightened valuation of a friendship require heightened willingness to risk damaging the friendship?

posted by Chris at 12:45 PM