So, I've just finished reading George Weigel's Letters to a Young Catholic; I'd read an extract from it a couple of months ago and been very intrigued; I'm glad I've managed to read the whole thing.

It's an extraordinary book, essential reading for anyone nowadays, whether Catholic or not. Despite the title, it's not just aimed at dedicated young Catholics - rather it's a book for doubting Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and Protestants, and indeed anyone who's interested in religion, culture, travel, good writing, lively anecdotes, or the world at large.

Constantly stressing the Catholic conviction that 'stuff matters', and that this material world is a holy thing, created and sanctified by God in all its variety, Weigel manages to simply gracefully explain complex theological issues while taking his readers on a tour around the Catholic world and the Catholic mind, demonstrating how there are many, many mansions in the house of God.

Frankly, the book's a breathtaking achievement, a grand tour that takes in Saint Peter, G.K. Chesterton'sOrthodoxy, the squabbling priests that take care of the blessed mishmash that is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Saint Edith Stein, the meaning of the mass, John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Birmingham Oratory, Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Pied Beauty', priests as living icons of Our Lord, Flannery O'Connor, Michelangelo, the theology of the body expounded over the past two and half decades by John Paul II, the makers of Chartres Cathedral, the medieval roots of democracy and civil society that predate the Enlightenment, Christopher Dawson's belief in culture as the driving force of history, and so much else...

One fascinating nugget from this book lies quietly on page 188: 'During the Great Jubilee of 2000, a comprehensive study of twentieth-century martyrs was done and the results were striking - more Christians gave their lives for Christ in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries of Christian history combined. the Nazis and the communists spilled more Christian blood than Nero and Diocletian imagined possible.'

I had no idea... somehow, in the light of this, it becomes harder to criticise the way that Pope John Paul II has recognised more saints than any of his predecessors.

If you have the time, have a glance at the first few pages through Amazon's excerpting option.
posted by Greg at 11:02 PM

 
The other half's in Paris at the moment, swanning around with her beloved mother. It seems like everyone's at this game nowadays. And again, I'm sitting in my room or out on the lawn, reading and working away, or sleeping or nipping to the cinema in my less industrious moments. Anyway, with herself going to Paris for her first time, I emailed her some hints on what to see there. Not that I'm an expert on the city - I've only been twice.

The first trip was the beginning of The Quest for the Holy Dingo back in 1996, where Alan and I spent just two or three days there, and the second was the last phase of my Four Buddies and a Lunatic trip in 1999 where for three days I foolishly wound up staying with a certifiable lunatic. That's the Jeana who's mentioned from time to time here. The story's too long to type, even for me; if you fancy hearing it, just ask me when you see me. And buy my a drink - my throat gets thirsty in the telling.

Anyway, here's my intro to Paris, albeit slightly tweaked as it's a bit more permanent than my email...

Paris: A Gregorian Guide
Okay, hon, here’s my belated Gregorian Rough Guide to Paris. I hope it gives you some idea of how to approach the city.

Take a look at the map for a minute. Try to fix the basic shape of Paris in your mind – the bend of the Seine is a semi-circle. There are two islands in the river, slightly to the east of the top of the bend. The city’s main road is at a tangent from the river at this point, more or less, heading north west.

Once you’ve got that clear you can cope pretty easily.

So, what’s interesting? Well, if you start looking just north of the island you’re basically in the Marais district where Jeana lived. She was by St Paul metro station – itself by St Paul’s church in Place de St Catherine du Marche, or something to that effect.

In this area you can visit the Picasso museum, which is small, interesting, and manageable. I believe Paris’s Jewish museum is there too, but haven’t been yet. Also in that zone is the Pompidou Centre, as immortalised in that staple of French textbooks: ‘Ou est la centre de Georges Pompidou?’. I think it houses the museum of modern art, but it’s mainly known for having its interior fittings on the outside – pipes, wires, all that. It was being renovated when I was there so I didn’t see it.

Now, if rather than going into the Marais you simply headed northwest along Rue du Rivoli - or Rue de Ravioli, as Jeana called it - you’d come to the Louvre. It’s no fun to approach it that way, though. These things are all about approach. Go in the front way.

How? Well, you get a metro to Madelaine metro station and come out by Place De La Concorde. This massive square is a frenzied traffic nightmare, the spot where the guillotine was based during the terror, and currently home to a huge obelisk which Napoleon or one of those geezers (probably his nephew really) brought from Egypt. What’s wrong with a stick of rock I don’t know. I wonder if you cut it open does it say ‘Egypt’ all the way down the centre. Probably not.

Right, so east of the square is the entrance to the Tuileries, which I’m not even going to attempt to spell properly. These gardens have a nice pool when you walk in and a long avenue, adorned with statues of various classical characters – try and spot who’s who for the craic – and with a tiny fairground to the side. The avenue leads to the Louvre, which its controversial pyramid crouched absurdly in front of it.

I can’t overstate how big the Louvre is. I think it’s about three miles around, and I don’t think there’s even any point in trying to ‘do’ all of it. Bite the bullet and just wander, accepting that you’ll not see it all. The famous highlights are The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and of course the Mona Lisa. My favourite’s Gericault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, as so well spoofed in Asterix and described Julian Barnes's ‘A History of the world in 10 ½ Chapters’. There are loads of preparatory sketches for it randomly scattered about the place. Just wander.

Now, on the under hand, if you were standing at Place de la Concorde and instead decided to head the other direction, away from the Louvre, you’d find yourself on the Champs Elysees. Think about what that means, for a minute. Elysian Fields. I’m sure this isn’t quite what the Greeks had in mind when they talked about heaven, but it’s pretty impressive all the same. Stroll along it, window shop, and eventually stop and stare at the Arc De Triomphe, which is far bigger than it looks. I haven’t been up it – the heights thing freaked me out – but I reckon it’d be well worth it. Next time, I guess.

Don’t try to cross the road to get to it. Use the subway. Trust me. I’d rather you didn’t die.

Now, standing at Etoile Charles de Gaulle, as that insane roundabout is called, you could carry on up the road. I’m not recommending it, mind, but a couple of miles further along is La Defense, the skyscraper district. It’s worth a visit to see the huge squared ‘arch’ alone. So go if you like, but probably best not to walk unless you’ve lots of time and energy.

Anything else on the north of the river? Well, there’s Sacre Couer, of course, which is in Monmartre or Pigalle – the old red light districts. You’ll pass the Moulin Rouge if you go there, and make sure you take a look at the MacDonalds in Pigalle. In fact a photo of that MacBrothel would be very welcome. Sacre Couer is a bit ridiculous as buildings go, but the view is phenomenal. It’s a hell of a climb to get up to it, but I’d recommend the climb over any other way up. Again, it’s the approach that makes you appreciate these things…

Pere Lachaise, which I’m sure I’ve spelled wrong, is also on the north of the city. It’s the big cemetery that holds the graves of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and so many more… it’s always worth a visit, and is rather fun to navigate your way around. Eglise St Eustache is an absolutely beautiful church north of the Louvre and west of the Marais, with some bizarre sculptures round about it. It’s near Le Halle, the spelling of which I’ll also have cocked up, a huge underground market.

Anyway, that’s the north.

If you were on Place de La Concorde and turned south you’d cross the Seine and basically hit the French Parliament. Turn left, and walk along the Left Bank. Look at all the little bookstalls on the river, and make sure you visit the Musee D’Orsay. This museum, situated in a refurbished railway station, is an absolute delight, mainly housing works from 1850 to 1920 or so… in other words, it’s chronologically between the Louvre and the Pompidou centre. It might be fun to visit the museums in order. This one holds oodles of Impressionist paintings, as well as post impressionists like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. I love it.

Anyway, carrying on you’re going to come in sight of Notre Dame on one of the islands. Take your time on this beauty. Everything about it is magnificent. Make sure you wander inside and around it. Me, I like the gargoyles best, but most people go for the Rose Window. Jeana, you’ll recall, preferred St Paul’s, her neighbourhood baroque church, which she felt was much prettier. Um.

The next island’s cool too, like a little village which is somehow bang in the middle of the city.

Right, now if you leave Notre Dame and head south back to the Left Bank, you’ll see Shakespeare and Co right in front of you. More or less anyway. It’s good, have a look around. Buy anything just to get that silly stamp. It’s not the real shop that published Ulysses and where Hemingway used to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good place.

(For what it's worth, it's apparently where Ethan Hawke does his reading in Before Sunset.)

(Just round the corner you’ll find the Musee de Cluny, the museum of the Middle Ages. This is probably my favourite museum in Paris, though theMusee D’Orsay may challenge it. The highlights here are the unicorn tapestries, which are stunning. Um, in the corridor before one of the rooms you’ll see a stone sarcophagous for a knight. That's the yoke Jeana mauled. Could you grab a shot of it if you go there? I’d be tres grateful.

Make sure that the staff don’t put a rock in your bag when you leave it in with them.)

This whole area’s the so-called ‘Latin Quarter’, by the way.

A bit further south the Luxembourg gardens will be on your right hand side, while a road leading to the Pantheon is on your left. The Luxembourg gardens are lovely, and filled with Parisians rather than tourists. There are expanses of lawn with flowers and sculptures, and areas shaded by trees where old men sit playing chess and draughts. This is the place they have all their duels in the ‘Three Musketeers’. ‘Meet me at twelve at the Luxemboug,’ and all that… it’d be a nice place to have your baguette and cheese for lunch!

What about the Pantheon? Well, I still haven’t been there, because it was there that Jeana cracked and needed food and rest. But if you walk round it you’ll see it’s basically a round church, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. Voltaire and a few other boys are buried there. It’s got an interesting history – check your guidebook.

On that street heading from the Pantheon towards the Luxembourg gardens, you’ll pass a MacDonalds. That’s the one where Jeana lamented her lack of mustard and I saved the day. In case you’re interested.

That’s more or less Paris in my mind. Yeah, there’s the Bastille monument, and the opera houses, and the Madeleine Church, and oodles more museums and parks. There are also more dogs than you can shake a stick at, and an infinite number of little brasseries and restaurants.

There’s also the Eiffel Tower, but I suspect you’ve heard of that. I’ve only been to the second level, not the top, but that’s what you’re meant to do. I hear it’s even better at night, a bit like your London Eye experience, I guess.

As for day trips… well, there’s always Versailles, of course. I've not been, to my eternal shame...

It's pretty basic, I admit, but I reckon it's okay as a starter's guide, at least as long as you have a proper guidebook as well. Not quite Patrick Leigh Fermor or Jan Morris, I admit, but a tolerable start...

Oh, that reminds me, I read a brief review of Words of Mercury in today's Independent - a fine paper, incidentally, today featuring interviews with Shane MacGowan and Julie Delpy - and was glad to read that 'Anxious fans of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) will be relieved by his publisher's assurance that the third volume of the trilogy - about walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople on the eve of the Second World War - is on its way.'

Thank God for that. If true, then all is not lost, despite Helen informing me that he's apparently not pushed, feeling he has loads of time to do it, and Heinrich's concern, having met him, that the great man is well into his eighties and has a fondness for whiskey and soda...

And on a totally and utterly unrelated final point, this article from yesterday's Guardian may have music industry bigwigs spitting in rage, but it certainly tallies with all the anecdotal evidence I know of.
posted by Greg at 8:02 PM

 
I've a feeling this summer might go down in cinematic terms as The Summer of Good Sequels. We've had summers of sequels before... you can read Bill Goldman bitch about them in Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?, but this summer looks different.

Ask yourself, seriously, how many sequels are better than the original films. The Empire Strikes Back is the obvious example. Maybe Batman Returns. But after that?

Things started promisingly this year, with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban being by far the best of the Potter films to date. Alfonso Cuaron managed to make a fine film based on Rowling's book, rather than simply filming the book as Chris Columbus had done in the two previous Potter outings. Granted, it could have done with an extra five minutes or so to tie up loose ends, but it was a fine film nonetheless.

Spider-man 2 I've already praised this week... and that same day heard that a friend of Jen reckons Shrek 2 is even better than the first film. Now that's high praise indeed, and my better half disagrees, but that's certainly promising.

And a few days back, when in the Cornerhouse to see Fahrenheit 911 I was delighted to see a poster for Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. My jaw dropped when I saw the poster. A sequel? After nine years? And after the first one made no money... I have to confess, I was troubled. Before Sunrise, starring the teary Ethan Hawke* and the strangely alluring Julie Delpy, is a minor gem, and the idea of doing a sequel troubled me. After all, it ends on a tantalising note of mystery, and in my experience mysteries endure, while explanations don't.

On the other hand, the word on the street is very good, with nary a bad review in sight, so I'm looking forward to it opening next week.

Could be the film of the summer...

(Um, on a couple of totally different notes, this is absurd, while this is hilarious. Ah, the UKIP...)
___________________________________________________________________________________
*No, really, he always looks like he's going to cry, doesn't he?
posted by Greg at 10:17 PM

 
Phoebe: Hey! Why isn't it Spiderman, like Goldman or Silverman?
Chandler: It's not his last name.
Phoebe: It isn't?
Chandler: No. It's not like... like "Phil Spiderman." He's a spider-man. You know, like Goldman is a last name, but there's no Gold-Man.
- Friends, "The One With the Tiny T-shirt"


I'm just back from Neil's after seeing Spider-man 2 which I really enjoyed. Far better than the first one, I thought, perhaps because you can actually see people's faces this time.

An odd reason, I know, but I got quite annoyed by lengthy fight scenes in the first film between a masked Spider-man and a masked Green Goblin. Not merely did this squander the talents of Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe, but more importantly it made the whole thing look a like a prolonged episode of Power Rangers.

No, really. Think about it. You've got two guys in absolutely ludicrous coloured costumes beating seven kinds of pulp out of each other, occasionally pausing to deliver one-liners - without moving their lips. That's what happens when you're masked, I guess.

This time, though, we had Alfred Molina wearing at most sunglasses or goggles as Dr Otto Octavius - that's Doctor Octopus to you and me - while Tobey Maguire spends most of the film as either Peter Parker or as an unmasked Spider-man. Marvellous.

(The film also starred the delectable Kirsten Dunst, but then so did the first one, so I guess that's a draw on that count.)

Oh, while I think of it, here's a fine old stamp drawn by Steve Ditko, the creator of Spider-man, showing Doc Ock himself. A sinister stamp, you might think, but not nearly so much as this new one from Austria, part of a series to honour Austrians living abroad...

The Woodman Cometh...
Em, radically shifting to a rather different side of the American entertainment industry, I had the great pleasure of hearing some of Woody Allen's Standup Comic CD round at Neil's this evening - he had myself, Jen, and Ceri round for much needed pancakes. We listened to the phenomenal story of the Moose, which I'd read years before. It's funny to read, but sidesplitting to hear... but on the offchance you never get to hear it, have a read of this:

'I shot a moose, once. I was hunting up-state New York, and I shot a moose, and I strap him on to the fender of my car, and I'm driving home along the west side highway, but what I didn't realize was, that the bullet did not penetrate the moose. It just creased the scalp, knocking him unconscious. And I'm driving through the Holland tunnel - the moose woke up. So I'm driving with a live moose on my fender. The moose is signaling for a turn, y'know. There's a law in New York state against driving with a conscious moose on your fender, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And I'm very panicky, and then it hits me: some friends of mine is having a costume party. I'll go, I'll take the moose, I'll ditch him at the party. It wouldn't be my responsibillity.

So I drive up to the party and I knock on the door. The moose is next to me. My host comes to the door. I say "Hello. You know the Solomons". We enter. The moose mingles. Did very well. Scored. Two guys were trying to sell him insurance for an hour and a half. Twelve o'clock comes - they give out prices for the best costume of the night. First price goes to the Berkoviches, a maried couple dressed as a moose. The moose comes in second. The moose is furious. He and the Berkoviches lock antlers in the living room. They knock each other unconscious. Now, I figured, is my chance. I grab the moose, strap him onto my fender, and shoot back to the roads, but - I got the Berkoviches. So I'm driving along with two jewish people on my fender, and there's a law in New York State ... Tuesdays, Thursdays and especially Saturday.

The following morning the Berkoviches wake up in the woods, in a moose suit. Mr. Berkovich is shot, stuffed and mounted - at the New York Athletic Club, and the joke is on them, because it's restricted.'

Yep, and there's loads more where that came from.
posted by Greg at 11:58 PM

 
I'm still not sure about yesterday's film. I'm a bit torn on it. I enjoyed it, but others of my friends have seen it as a complete waste of time. One said it wasn't a documentary - that she hadn't heard anything new.

Well, to be fair, I don't think I learned anything new from the film, aside from how the American system for calculating the unemployment figures looks rather designed to make the figures look a lot better than they actually are.

But that hardly means it wasn't a documentary. Nor does the fact that it's a highly opinionated piece, far from lacking in bias. It's blatantly designed as a polemic, with one clear aim, which is to show that George Bush is unfit to be president.

Granted, it relies a lot on juxtaposition of images and ideas to imply rather than express the ineptitude and corruption of the Bush regime, but this mean it's not a documentary? It relies on real footage, and doesn't have any actors or actresses, so I guess so...

It's certainly not neutral, sober reportage, but neither is it, as I've heard some half-hearted apologists say, the equivalent of an editorial cartoon. It's closer to being a well-informed op-ed piece.

For my money, I'd like to have seen a bit less of the silly stunts like asking Washington bigwigs whether they'd encourage their children to enlist, and perhaps a little bit less on supposed links between the Bushes and the Saudis... but rather more , indeed anything at all, on how the Project for a New American Century had been campaigning for years for a new invasion of Iraq, and on how the American political elite and intelligence services have been fed lies for ages by Ahmed Chalabi... lies that still poison the debate.
posted by Greg at 10:54 PM

 
I saw Fahrenheit 911 earlier; I'm not certain whether I liked it yet, mind. I'm still pondering that.

Perhaps the most arresting scene in the film shows George, having already decided to do his primary school photo op in Florida despite having heard of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Centre, learning that a second plane had also hit the Twin Towers. Having heard that 'America is under attack' George reaches out for a schoolbook and proceeds to stare at it for the next seven minutes...

You've goat to be kidding me...
The book in question was Reading Mastery - Level 2 Storybook 1 by one Siegfried 'Zig' Engelmann.

Now it would certainly seem that the book is utterly gripping, at least if this quotation is accurate:

A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard. But the goat did some things that made the girl's dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps. One day her dad said, "that goat must go. He ate too many things." The girl said, "dad if you let the goat stay with us, I will see that he stops eating all those things." Her dad said he will try it. So the goat stayed and the girl made him stop eating cans and capes and caps and capes. But one day a car robber came to the girls house. He saw a big red car near the house and said, "I will steal that car." He ran to the car and started to open the door. The girl and the goat were playing in the back yard. They did not see the car robber.

I know! Fantastic, isn't it? I'd certainly rather sit with such a book in my lap then actually do my job... and it seems I'm not the only one to think that. Via Backwoods Dave, I was delighted to discover that people have taken to reviewing The Pet Goat on Amazon in decidedly scathing terms. Sadly, Amazon have removed most of these reviews, though one rather subtle one, from the appropriately named 'Lolla Fallujah', remains...

'After reading the enclosed story "The Pet Goat," I was stunned by its lyrical beauty and easy cadence. The tempo, the choice of words, and the layout on each page captured my imagination so much that it took me about seven minutes to recover my bearings.'

Thank God that someone had the presence of mind to save the site before Amazon cleaned it up, so if you mosey over here you'll be greeted by such wonderful observations as:

'For anybody who wants to know about pets, or goats, or simply wants to avoid the responsibilities of national leadership, My Pet Goat is a "Must Read"!

"A real page-turner! When you pick this one up, you'll wish you never had to put it down!" George W. Bush'

'Destined to take their place alongside von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, Engelmann and Bruner have captured the very essence of strategic thought in a mere 32 large-print pages. In this masterwork, when Smirky the Goat is stung on the nose by Osama the Wasp, he jumps over the fence and butts the living daylights of out Saddam the Swine. Advanced students will see the seeds of the Bush Doctrine in this landmark book.'

'I just couldn't put it down! Certainly much more interesting than Richard Clarke's memo of August 6, 2001 entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States".'

'A riveting story that keeps you glued to the page until the stunning climax. Even a notification from your staff that the nation you lead is under attack can't keep you from reading the gut-wrenching final words.'

Of course, while this is all very funny, or horrifying, depending on your general attitude to the absurdity that is modern telepolitics, it really doesn't zoom in on the big issues over the last few years. My feeling about this sort of stuff is that while it makes Bush look like an idiot, it's not quite a satirical precision missile.
posted by Greg at 11:07 PM

 
This is a bit of a gamble.

I know, I've had pictures on the site for ages now, but they've always been hosted by my brother, or Fotango, or just nabbed from somewhere. But actually hosting it on Blogger itself... I hope this works.

It isn't that hard really, aside from the fact that I don't like the way it looks when posted from Hello to my Bloggerbot. So, rather than the new way, I'm going for a more complicated option. Post, find the address of the picture, and then edit the post in a more conventional fashion.

In the long term the answer may simply be to start a third blog - a photo blog that can host all my shots. The way forward, I suspect.

Anyway, this is my belated birthday card from my brother and his son. Why so late? Well, Liam mailed me a couple of weeks ago, saying 'Just found your card sealed and addressed but unstamped and unposted under a pile of stuff on my desk. It went off this afternoon with my bills - also late.'

Fair enough so. It's well worth the wait, I suspect you'll agree, drawn as it is by my nephew. A fine gag, with surreal speech balloons, having nothing whatsoever to do with birthdays.

And who are those two lads? They're not normal, that's all I can say. Neil was perusing it the other day and was deeply taken with them. 'They're obviously a bit mad,' he said.

I want to know more.

My kind of card.
posted by Greg at 11:41 PM

 
A few days back, I received a very nice link to my post on the farcical 'Da Vinci Code'. The link, by one Phil Ledgerwood, recommended people to read my critique of Brown's book but warned them about my site. 'Watch out Mozilla/Firefox (and presumably, Netscape) users,' he said, 'you’ll probably need to scroll to the right to see the actual post.'

This reminded me of an email from the brother a few weeks ago, who said

'Speaking of your margin - I'm presently using Firefox browser instead of Internet Explorer... and your margin fills my screen in it - it's over a
thousand pixels wide. Now only about 1% of all internet users are seeing this, but if more of the 95% that use IE switch like I did - primarily for security reasons - then your site becomes almost unreadable to a lot of people. Had a quick look at the HTML and I imagine it's part of the template and not anything you've hardcoded.'

And now it looks like Liam's prediction is being borne out by a distinct - albeit tiny - drop in the percentage of people using Internet Explorer. Begun, the Browser Wars have, as Yoda might say.

The point being, does anyone have any ideas what I can do to control my margin? I would have thought that limiting its width to 160 in my template ought to have been enough. Any advice would be much appreciated.
posted by Greg at 10:42 PM

 
The other half is away at the minute, tramping about the continent in a mildy backpackerish kind of way. Whenever we chat on the phone I wind up oddly jealous. Well, not jealous, but certainly envious, in a way. I guess I'm getting itchy feet. I haven't done any travelling in three years now - visits to Sandra in Brussels or Heinrich in Frankfurt hardly count - and really miss it.
 
That's not surprising really, considering how my summers used to be spent travelling. Prior to 1996 I'd only once been further away than London - I'd gone on a school trip to Brussels and the Rhine Valley back in in 1991.

1996 - The Quest for the Holy Dingo
In 1996 though, with my finals out of the way, I decided to go interrailing, to take a reconnaisance tour of the continent, and so myself and Alan, an old school friend, set off, rapidly breaking from our plan, and visiting Paris, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, and Prague. I made a few friends on that trip that even now I'm still in touch with, albeit not as often as I should be - Neil, Doug, Ali, and Roxanne.
 
1997 - Follow that Elephant!
The following summer, in the guise of research - I did need to visit the Hannibalic battlefields - I headed off to Italy, spending five weeks between Milan, Florence, Siena, Cortona, Assisi, Rome, Naples, and Barletta.  And again I made friends who've lasted, notably Katie and Zoe with whom I used to meet up whenever I was in London - we haven't managed it in a while, mind.

1999 - Four Buddies and a Lunatic
God alone knows how I coped with staying put in 1998, but in 1999 I was off again, this time mainly staying with friends - Sandra, Susan, and Emma were flawless losts in Bilbao, from where I got a night-train to Barcelona and another to Luxembourg to see the eclipse. From Luxembourg I made my way to Frankfurt where Heinrich put me up, and told me of the impossibly Hellish day he had undergone just a fortnight earlier, and then I went on to see Renate in Vienna. A day long journey brought me from the easternmost tip of Austria to the westernmost of Switzerland, where Ger picked me up so I could stay with herself and Richard in their home just across the border in France.

From Geneva I made my way to Avignon, the only place in my entire time travelling where I was the victim of theft - some cur stole my towel - and then on to Paris where I spent three days with a mad girl who I had met earlier in my travels. If you know me, there's a good chance you've either heard the tale or heard me alude to it.
 
2000 - Screw the Guidebook
2000 began with me flying to Barcelona to meet up with with Doug - yes, the one I met in Munich in 1996 - and his girlfriend Lara. I had plans to fly to Greece, but only bought my ticket there - not exactly the most thoroughly planned holiday, you'd probably guess. You'd be right. Thank God, too, as my lack of planning made this my most interesting summer ever.
 
In Athens I made friends with a couple of Canadian archaeologists, and wound up joining them on their dig. I'd only meant to stay a couple of days, but instead stayed for ten or so, working away - and finding shards of skull on my first day! - and then made it my base as I did my own thing occasionally. We all took a trip to Nafplio, but whereas the others returned to Stymph, I took an extra few days to go west and south, visiting Olympia and Pylos. A second trip away took me to Crete, where I spent a week with Heinrich and his cronies, and a third saw me heading north to Delphi and Meteora.

Quite a summer, you'd think, but that was just the first act - I'd yet to begin the dry leg of the trip. Josh, one of the first two Canadians I'd befriended, had a yen to go to the Holy Land, and one day, as we motorbiked around the Argolid and up the Acrocorinth, I went for the bait and decided I'd join him, somehow. The fact that it looked like it would be the last safe summer to go there for a while did influence my thinking, I must admit.

And so it was that I came home for a week before zipping off again, this time to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Wadi Rum, Petra, Eilat, and of course Masada, which we madly climbed at noon. As you do.

2001 - Working off some Steam
For an encore, the following year I returned to Stymphalia, mainly to recover from my head almost exploding in a demented few weeks that had seen me mark over 500 essays and finish writing my book. To say I was burned out and in dire need of a break would be an understatement... and if that break involved lots of washing pottery shards or bones in the shade, or digging in the sun, then so be it.

Quite a few of the crew from the year before were there, and I made quite a few new friends, notably Allison, Morag, and Denise... I shouldn't single any out, really, there were so many, as the year before. I also took a week off to visit Heinrich and the gang in Crete, where we again went travelling, taking in Knossos, Gortyn, the Lassithi Plateau, Sitia, Agios Nikolaus, and too many other places to name

But since then, I've been coped up in warm rooms under grey skies in muggy,wet, miserable Manchester. And now my better half is living the life I used to live, and I'm reading a fantastic book that captures Greece better than I would have thought possible.

I miss being away.

I'd best finish this PhD pronto. I need a holiday. In particular, I think, I need Greece.
posted by Greg at 9:05 PM

 
Another new look Blogger dashboard. Hmmm. Let's see how it works...
 
(Not very well, judging by how the preview looks. What on earth is going on with the links? It seems that Blogger is trying to be too clever...)
 
I know, I'm one of nature's sceptics. It's not surprising really that my favourite apostle has always been St Thomas, with his understandable attitude that he'd believe it when he saw it... or that I should be so fond of the great St Thomas Aquinas, who effectively begins his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica by asking whether God exists, and admitting 'apparently not,' before going on to build the maginficent crystalline tower that was medieval Catholic theology.
 
Anyway.
 
 
'So they are no longer two but one...'
Being in a sceptical mode, today seems to be a fine day to whinge about Project Unity, the laughable attempt by Manchester's two older universities to become one new one.  It would appear that on the first of October a brand new university will be established. At least, that's what we're told. There's a ridiculous clock over the University Precinct Centre, counting down the seconds...

(Of course, this'll mean that Manchester Metropolitan University will be the oldest university in Manchester. That should silence the fools who dub it 'Mickey Mouse University'.)

Of course, there's a problem with this.  Take a look at the logo, which is so tastefully decorating the right of your screen. Nice, isn't it? I mean, it would look good on a cigarette packet. I wonder how much the new university paid for it... Anyway, take a look at the date. Yep. 1824. Established in 1824. Now I was under the impression that the new university hadn't been established yet...

I'm confused. I was under the impression that 1824 was the year the Manchester Mechanics' Instutute was founded in a pub, not the year that the would-be world class University of Manchester was established.

I don't mind telling you, I was a bit confused.

So I did some research. The Manchester Mechanic's Institute eventually became the Municipal School of Technology which in turn became the Municipal College of Technology which was tagged on to the University of Manchester. This became the Manchester College of Science and Technology and then changed its name to 'University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology', remaining a branch of the main University until a decade ago, when it sort of went out on its own, though still relied on the main university to award its degrees until four or five years back...

And now both the University of Manchester and UMIST are dissolving themselves to become a 'new' Institution called the University of Manchester, which was established in 1824 and will be established in 2004. Clear as mud, so.

(Married couples are in theory one flesh, joined by God, yeah? On that basis married couples should date their marriage from the conception of the elder partner.)


'Nine out of ten people like chocolate. The tenth person always lies...'
On an entirely separate note, I spotted a link to this strange love ditty on Rachel's site recently and had Anna take a look.

She was typically incredulous at the line 'you're better than ice cream' and insisted that nothing was better than ice cream. Well, I was feeling a bit devil-may-care so thought I'd have my favourite chocophile listen to Sarah McLachlan's Ice Cream. Predictably, she snorted at the line 'Your love is better than ice cream' but was astounded in disbelief when Sarah sang 'Your love is better than chocolate'.

'Now we know for a fact she's talkin' rubbish!' declared Anna.

'Maybe she got very lucky...' I pondered, 'Or it could be the fact that being a Canuck she's talking about Hershey bars and that sort of muck.'

Not real choccie then,' said Anna, consoled that the natural order had been restored.

I tasted my first Hershey bar a couple of years ago, and was terribly disappointed. Another story for another day, though, methinks.

My bed is calling.
posted by Greg at 11:38 PM

 
Happy Bastille Day!
Vive la France! Vive la Revolution! Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! And other things too!


Anyway...
I was amused to read in the IHT yesterday an article from the Boston Globe on owning too many books. Mind you, I'm not sure how many is too many. I've got an essay at home somewhere - don't ask who it's by - where some nineteenth century geezer disparages another for being proud of having a library of a thousand books.

A thousand? Nonsense, he declares. That's not a library. One shouldn't claim to have a library until you have at least two thousand books, and you shouldn't begin to be proud of it until you have ten thousand.

I suspect my mother would disagree. I'm approaching two thousand volumes now, I think (somewhere in the region of 1,920 at the last count), and she's fretting. Despite the fact that more than five hundred of them are here in Manchester she fears for the walls and floor of my room at home, suspecting that the weight of the books there will tear the shelves from the walls and crash through into the room below!

People get startled whenever they see how many books I have. Sometimes their jaws drop and they say things like 'You have so many books... have you read them all?'

Unlike Umberto Eco*, I can't resist the urge to reply, 'And more besides. Many more.' I know, I deserve a clatter. Or two.

Neil Gaiman comments on the same phenomenon in this interview:'The funniest thing I find is the question that non-bookie people ask bookie people when they walk into their houses. They look at the books and they ask, "Have you read all these?", as if the idea of reading all these books is like some kind of terrible, awful punishment. It's as if they would actually be relieved if the answer were , "No, no I haven't read all these. These are purely for wall decoration. We buy them by the yard." '

About which Flann O'Brien once wrote a legendarily funny series of article for the Irish Times.

'BUCHHANDLUNG
A visit that I paid to the house of a newly-married friend the other day set me thinking. My friend is a man of great wealth and vulgarity. When he had set about buying bedsteads, tables, chairs and what-not, it occurred to him to buy also a library. Whether he can read or not, I do not know, but some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses. So he bought several book-cases and paid some rascally middleman to stuff them with all manner of new books, some of them very costly volumes on the subject of French landscape painting. I noticed on my visit that not one of them had ever been opened or touched, and remarked the fact.
'When I get settled down properly,' said the fool, 'I'll have to catch up on my reading.'
This is what set me thinking. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune.

DOG EARS FOUR-A-PENNY
Let me explain exactly what I mean. The wares in a bookshop look completely unread. On the other hand, a school-boy's Latin dictionary looks read to the point of tatters. You know that the dictionary has been opened and scanned perhaps a million times, and if you did not know that there was such a thing as a box on the ear, you would conclude that the boy is crazy about Latin and cannot bear to be away from his dictionary. Similarly with our non-brow who wants his friends to infer from a glancing around his house that he is a high-brow. He buys an enormous book on the Russian ballet, written possibly in the language of that distant but beautiful land. Our problem is to alter the book in a reasonably short time so that anybody looking at it will conclude that its owner has practically lived, supped and slept with it for many months. You can, if you like, talk about designing a machine driven by a small but efficient petrol motor that would 'read' any book in five minutes, the equivalent of five years or ten years' 'reading' being obtained by merely turning a knob. This, however, is the cheap soulless approach of the times we live in. No machine can do the same work as the soft human fingers. The trained and experienced book-handler is the only real solution of this contemporary social problem. What does he do? How does he work? What would he charge? How many types of handling would there be?
These questions and many more I will answer the day after tomorrow.'

I might post the next bit then myself, but I might not, so if you're interested in what the man had to offer, just toddle over here...

Before I leave you, may I point you towards this challenge... can you Name that Beard? If that's not enough to idle away your time, try this internet simulator... I know, you're probably fairly handy at the real thing by this stage, but give it a bash anyway.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
*For an alternative description of Mr Eco, check out the end of this... dehydration can do weird things to a Hibernian like myself.
posted by Greg at 11:03 PM

 
Mancownian News...
Somehow I manage to miss out on all sorts of obvious stuff on this blog. Manchester's currently full of fibre-glass cows, and yet I've not mentioned it before, nor the fact that the brother painted one of them when Kansas City hosted a Cowparade a few years ago...

Um, just a quick blog here, since I was still tinkering on Sunday's ueberblog until a few minutes ago and feel rather blogged out.

Glovefox sent me this excellent link to a supposed powerpoint version of Bill Clinton's autobiography. Tres funny. She's also linked on her site to this horrendous news story!

In other news, I'm delighted to hear that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shall soon be returning to BBC radio, and this NYT article implicitly suggests that you're more likely to say soda than coke or even pop if you prefer Fahrenheit 911 to The Passion of the Christ. More or less. Check the map if you don't believe me. I've wondered about this sort of thing before.

Oh, and there was a surprisingly good article on modern comics in the New York Times the other day. It's well worth a look, focusing on the likes of Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Joe Sacco. The multimedia attachment is interesting too.

Finally, I'd like to thank Paul for sending me a highly amusing email this morning, quoting an 8th of July letter to the Irish Times:

Madam, - I was visiting your beautiful country when my country, Greece, fought its way into the European cup final by bravely defeating the favoured Czech Republic. On the following day, Friday, July 2nd, I travelled from Cork to Rosslare.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find that almost the entire route - especially between the towns of Youghal and New Ross - was gloriously festooned with the blue and white colours of Greece!

Such overwhelming support of one small country for another brought tears of joy to my eyes. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Irish people for making this Greek feel so at home at such an important time for his country. - Yours, etc.,

MANOLIS ANDROPOULOS, Athens, Greece.

A response appeared in the following day's paper, pointing out that the blue and white flags were most probably for the Waterford hurling/football team.

Ah well. So it goes.
posted by Greg at 11:22 PM

 
ave any of you seen the Coen Brothers' masterpiece Fargo, perchance? It opens with the following claim: 'THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.'

When the film was being made, one of the cast, Steve Buscemi or William H. Macey - I'm not really sure - asked to see the official records and newspaper articles about the real series of crimes. He was laughed at, and told the crimes had never happened. The disclaimer was part of the film. It was as much a work of fiction as what followed it...

My point?

Well, over the last couple of nights I've been reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It's a book that's garnered a lot of attention, and several of my friends have read it and recommended it to me, so I was curious. The story proper is preceded by a statement beginning 'Fact: The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion...' and firmly stating that 'All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.'

I reckon Brown's opening claim operates on the same basis as that at the start of Fargo. It's part of the book. Like what follows, it's utter fiction...

...because if it's genuinely meant to be taken as fact, then Brown is a liar, a fool, or a mere idler, as the book is littered with spurious claims, presented as though they're undisputed facts.*

I mean seriously, there's something wrong with a book where it's claimed that the Merovingians rather than the Romans founded Paris... that the planet Venus traces a pefect pentacle in the night sky... that the Olympic games were held in honour of Venus rather than Zeus and were held every eight years rather than four... that the Papacy was based in the Vatican in the third century - it was a graveyard then... or that the Papacy was based in the Vatican when the Popes were holed up in Avignon... that five million women were burned as witches by the Catholic Church over three hundred years - the figure's more like a maximum of 50,000, and that's including men and those who weren't burned as well as those slain by Protestants... that irrational thought is considered left brain, when the left side of the brain controls analytical thought while the right side is the less rational and more 'artistic side'... or that a cross with all arms of equal length 'carried none of the Christian connotations of crucifixion associated with the longer-stemmed Latin cross' despite being the standard 'Greek' cross.

And those are only the little lies.


Sang Raal, San Graal
ithout giving away too much, Brown's book begins with the murder of the curator of the Louvre, who turns out to have been a prominent member of the Priory of Sion, a secret society which has existed since the Middle Ages, dedicated to hiding the 'Holy Grail'. But this 'Grail' is no cup, rather it is the relics of Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus, whose true identity was suppressed by the church; supposedly, the Magdalene was with child at the time of Jesus' death and fled to Gaul, where her descendents eventually became the Merovingian kings.

None of this was shocking to me; I'd heard it all before, when I read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail back in my mid-teens. I'd been shocked then to discover how the Gospels were full of contradictions, that oodles of gospels had been suppressed by the Church, by Jesus almost certainly having been married, and by the way that he could so easily have faked his death. The stuff about the Merovingians, and the Priory, and their henchmen in the Templars didn't interest me quite so much, though I was taken with the history of the Grail, and by what happened in the Albigensian crusade.

Anthony Burgess had evidently been impressed by the potential of the tale, as the book's flyleaf bears a quotation from him where he remarks 'it will seem to some a crackpot exercise, but these young men are no fools: they have learning, energy, enthusiasm tempered by skepticism... it is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel.'

Well, with The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown rose to the challenge. Such a pity he did such a bad job - the book's a fast paced airport novel, sure, but is marred by cliched characters and a plethora of absurdities which surely even the densest of editors ought to have noted.

But as it happens, none of that bothers me quite so much as the claim of truth on the opening page. We're obviously meant to take the esoterica of the book at face value, when in fact it should be treated with a rather liberal shovelfull of salt. Irritated by the constant errors - or lies? - in the text, I began to scrawl comments in the margins, annotating the whole book.

This, for the record, is something I never do. Now, however, I have a new book tattooed with green corrections. Oh well.


Secrets and Lies...
he Priory of Sion, the conspiracy at the heart of Brown's book, and its pseudohistorical inspiration, did indeed exist, but it is not quite so prominent as the likes of Brown would have us believe.

It appears to have been founded a few years after the Second World War by one Pierre Plantard, a convicted fraudster, but was disbanded in October 1956. There were only a handful of members in that society, which was opposed to the gentrification of the surrounding area. The society was revived in 1963, this time to aid Plantard's false claim to the French throne - the Priory was dedicated to the revival of chivalry and monarchy in France, and Plantard claimed to be descended from the Merovingians. Plantard and his cronies concocted a false history of France and the Priory, planting numerous false documents in museum and library archives in order to support his claims.

(There was a real, and entirely separate Priory of Sion, for what it's worth, based in Jerusalem originally and absorbed into the Jesuits in 1617. But that's got nothing to do with this laughable thesis.)


Was Simon a Saint?
o conspiracy theory is complete without those stalwarts of superstition, the Knights Templar. Brown follows the Holy Blood, Holy Grail argument that the Templars were a front for the Priory of Sion, and were accordingly suppressed by the Papacy in the early fourteenth century.

Further he claims that all Templar churches were round, since they were really a sect of cryptopagans - one character describes the Templar Church off London's Fleet Street as 'Pantheonically pagan! The church is round. The Templars ignored the traditional Christian cruciform layout and built a perfectly circular church in honour of the sun. A not so subtle howdy-do to the boys in Rome. They may as well have resurrected Stonehenge in central London.'

Well, aside from the fact that round temples weren't that common in the pagan world - with the exceptions of the temple of Apollo at Delos, and the Pantheon in Rome, how many Greek, Roman, or Egyptian round temples can you think of? - it's not true to imply that the Templars were unique in the way they built round churches, or that they did so in honour of the sun. Round churches - or more accurately, churches with round naves - were commonly used by other military orders. There's one in Essex, for example.

Why? Well, for the simple reason that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the ancient hillock of Calvary, had a round nave. Jerusalem was the centre of the medieval world, and most medieval maps centred upon it. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the most sacred place in that city, marking the place where Christ died and the garden tomb where he rose. By modelling their churches upon the Holy Sepulchre, the Military Orders paid homage to the most important place in their world.

And what of the annihilation of the Templar order? Well, according to Brown, on Friday the thirteenth of October in 1307 hundreds of Templars were killed and interred on the orders of Pope Clement V - many being 'burned at the stake and tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber River'. Clement felt the order had become too powerful and needed to be stopped, and so planned with Philip IV of France to crush the order and seize their treasure and secrets. The Templars had honoured a stone head named Baphomet, and Clement used this as the linchpin of his case against them, arguing that Baphomet was the Devil.

Fascinating, eh? Utterly wrong, but fascinating nonetheless.


hilip the Fair of France used bribes to ensure that the archbishop of Bordeaux was elected pope in 1305, and bullied him into moving the Papal seat from Rome to Avignon - from where it would be tricky to scatter ashes in the Tiber. Clement V was sickly, weak, and terrified of Philip. This was understandable; his predecessor had died shortly after being seized by Philip's troops when they had attacked and plundered the Papal palace.

The Templars were by far the wealthiest organisation in Christendom, and Philip was determined to make their wealth his own. Unfortunately, as their wealth was within the ecclesiastical domain, Philip could not simply seize it unless they were found guilty of sacrilege. With the help of a few degraded Templars, he - not Clement! - issued secret orders to have all the Templars arrested on 13 October 1307.

A litany of charges were drawn up, all staples of the heresy trials carried out against the Cathars of southern France. The captured Templars were horrifically tortured, and many pleaded guilty to charges - some even did so because they feared the ferocious tortures in store for them.

This corrupt investigation had taken place without Papal authorisation, and Clement protested vigorously, annulling the trial and suspending the powers of all bishops and clergy involved in it.

Unfortunately, the admissions of guilt were in the open, and Philip coached seventy-two Templars to speak of their crimes to the Pope at Poitiers. Clement was then compelled to open a new commission which extended to everywhere Templars were to be found. The Templars were found innocent of the charges in virtually every country except France. Those who had previously confessed but now admitted that they had lied to save their own lives were considered relapsed heretics, and were burned at the stake. The Grand Master was one of these, having refused to repent for his sins, since he said that he had never committed them and that the Order was innocent of all charges.

Despite his attempts to rescue the order and stand up against Philip, Clement eventually gave way, and decided to have the order dissolved, though not condemned.

Now, where does this leave Brown's conviction that the order worshipped a stone head named Baphomet? Well, considering the fact that hundreds of Templars were tortured, and the conventional nature of the charges, it's interesting that only a handful said anything like this - and again, bear in the mind that people are apt to say anything when tortured.

Two Carcassonne Templars said they had adored a wooden image called Baphomet, a Florentine one called it Mahomet, and another templar described it as a severed head with a long beard. It's hard to believe that the Templars would have worshipped the head of Mohammed - Mahomet - considering that over two centuries 20,000 of them had died in the defence of the Holy Land. Could it have been a representation of the severed head of John the Baptist, as venerated by the Knights Hospitaller? Or was it simply a case of desperate men making outlandish claims to persuade their tormenters to stop?


Heroes in a half shell...
o much for the Templars having been suppressed as they were a front for the Priory. What then of Leonardo Da Vinci, who Brown presents as having led the Priory between 1510 and 1519?

Leonardo couldn't have been Grand Master of the Priory at that point, since Plantard's Priory lay more than four hundred years in the future. Leaving that aside, however, Brown's book is filled with information about Da Vinci's life and work, much of which is spurious, being at best speculation.

Brown's hero describes Da Vinci as a ''flamboyant homosexual' who hypocritically accepted hundreds of Vatican commissions. Neither statement is true. If Leonardo was homosexual, he certainly wasn't flamboyant about it, although in 1476 he was accused of homosexual contact with a 17-year old model. The accusation was anonymous, and considering that this was a common way of blackening people's names back then, Leonardo may well have been innocent.

As for his acceptance of hundreds of Vatican commissions? No, only one, I'm afraid, unless you count his designs for fortresses in the Papal states. He may not even have completed the one painting commissioned by Leo X, and only a couple of small paintings of his have been positively identified as painted during his generally unhappy stay in Rome.

Brown's identification of the Mona Lisa as a secret self-portrait of Da Vinci is possible, despite the traditional view that La Giaconda, as it also known, depicts Mona Lisa, the wife of a prominent Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. A digital comparison of the painting with a self-portrait of Leonardo gives an exact match. On the other hand, this may just be due to both being painting by Da Vinci in the same style.

Brown takes a while to discuss the Madonna of the Rocks housed in the Louvre. 'Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus-blessing-John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus... and Jesus was submitting to his authority! More troubling still, Mary was holding one hand high above the head of the infant John and making a decidedly threatening gesture - her fingers looking like eagle's talons, gripping an invisible head. Finally, the most obvious and frightening image: just below Mary's curled fingers, Uriel was making a cutting gesture with his hand - as if slicing the neck of the invisible head gripped by Mary's claw-like hand.'

I mean, where do you start with this, aside from wondering what hallucinogens Brown was taking when he looked at the picture? How about with the fact that Uriel is pointing, not cutting anything? And that Mary's hand doesn't look remotely clawlike? Yes, it's palm down, but that's more as though it's being lowered to rest on Jesus. Yes, Jesus. The child that's sitting looks younger than the kneeling one. The kneeling one is paying homage; the sitting one is giving the blessing. It looks as though John is paying homage to Jesus - his junior by six months, and that Uriel is pointing at John to indicate that he will precede Jesus and announce his coming. So the people who ordered the picture weren't happy? Well, of course not - they'd given Leonardo very specific demands, and he hadn't met them. There's no need to imagine any secret heretical messages hidden in the painting.


entral to the book's presentation of the Grail as Mary Magdalene is Da Vinci's Milanese masterwork, The Last Supper. Noting that despite the Gospel accounts, Jesus does not have an obvious chalice or grail, and that the apostles all have their own glasses, Brown's argument is that the character to the right of Jesus is in fact Mary Magdalene.

'Sophie examined the figure to Jesus' immediate right, focusing in. As she studied the person's face and body, a wave of astonishment rose within her. The individual had flowing red hair, delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom. It was, without a doubt... female.'

Female? That seems unlikely, as none of the sketches Da Vinci did as preparations for this show any female faces. What's more, the 'hint of a bosom' is caused by a crack in the plaster, and she's dressed in the same fashion as the other apostles; would a woman wear male clothing? Besides, if that figure was a woman, then there's be an apostle missing from the scene. Not just any apostle either - St John, the one who was most dear to Jesus.

John's gospel records how he had been leaning against Jesus when Jesus announced that one of the apostles would betray him, and how Peter had beckoned to him to ask how it was. That's what Da Vinci is showing - the consternation on the faces of the apostles after Jesus' revelation, and John, depicted as a typically androgynous Da Vinci youth, leaning towards Peter to listen to him.


Gospel Truth, honest!
h, Brown would say, but the Gospels don't reflect the reality of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Smeared by the early church as a former prostitute, in the Gospels she is simply one of many followers of Jesus, notable for telling the apostles about the empty tomb.

The traditionally accepted Gospels, that is. After all, Jesus' life was 'recorded by thousands of followers across the land... More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.' Many of the other gospels have been preserved in the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls, described by Brown as 'the earliest Christian records'.

These so-called Gnostic Gospels make it very clear that Mary Magdalene was in fact the wife of Jesus. Brown has one character read from a couple of these gospels:

'And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?"' - Gospel of Philip

'And Peter said, "Did the Saviour really speak with a woman without our knowledge? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?"
And Levi answered, "Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like an adversary. If the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us."' - Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Brown notes that it's not really surprising that Jesus should have been married. After all, he was a Jew. As one character notes 'the social decorum at that time virtually forbade a Jesus man to be unmarried.' And none of the Gospels specifically state that he was unmarried; surely if he had been unmarried, which was unusual at the time, then one of the Gospel authors would have mentioned this?

(This is taken further by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail who argue that as he is often addressed as 'teacher' Jesus must have been married, as the Mishnaic Law forbade unmarried men from being teachers; against that, only his followers call him 'teacher' and Jewish officials reportedly wondered what authority he had to teach, suggesting that he was not qualified to do so (Mark 11.28). That book also argues that the Marriage of Cana must have been Jesus' own marriage - that's a decidely muddled section - and conflates Mary of Magdala, the woman who anointed Jesus, and Mary of Bethany into one person, who is the only feasible candidate for the wife of Jesus.)

As presented by Brown, Mary Magdalene was smeared by the early church as a common whore in order to discredit her royal lineage and special status. She was of Benjamin and Saul's royal line, just as Jesus was of Judah and David's, and their's was a sacred marriage with the potential to make a serious claim to the throne. Further, Jesus' church was to be founded, not on Simon Peter, but on the Magdalene herself, and would hold feminist principles in high regard, honouring the Goddess - as represented by the Magdalene - just as much as God.

Amazing, eh? Alas, it's balderdash again...


o start with, there's a dangerous argument from silence here... Jews would have seen it as weird for Jesus not to have been married, and the canonical Gospel writers don't remark on this, so he must have been married.

Well, no. First of all, celibacy was very common among the Essene sect at Qumran, and their teachings dovetail with those of Jesus to a striking degrees, so him being unmarried is far from unlikely. Furthermore, Brown assumes that the Gospel writers wrote for a Jewish audience, who might have wanted to know this - but at least three of the Gospels are primarily written for Roman or Hellenised audiences. And on top of that, if Jesus were married, it would be odd for the canonical Gospel writers never to have specifically mentioned his wife. It would certainly have been strange for Saint Paul to have missed out in his first letter to the Corinthians on an opportunity of using the example of Jesus to defend the apostles having wives: 'Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brethren of the Lord and Cephas?' (1 Cor. 9.5)

But what of the Dead Sea and Nag Hammadi scrolls, the 'earliest Christian records'? Surely they're evidence of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Well, no. In the first place the Dead Sea scrolls aren't Christian documents. But the Nag Hammadi scrolls? Well, considering that the canonical gospels predate even the Gnostic texts by between fifty and a hundred years we should probably favour them. Some Gnostic Gospels were written in the third, fourth, and even fifth century.

The Gnostic gospels aren't quite as clear on this issue as Brown seems to think anyway. The manuscript Gospel of Philip has a lacuna in the text, so rather than saying that Christ used to kiss Mary often on her mouth it simply says he kissed Mary 'on the ...'. Furthermore, the so-called Gospel of Thomas, the most well-known of the Gnostic texts, ends with a message that belies the feminist take Brown has on the Gnostic gospels: 'Simon Peter said to them: "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."'

But then, it's a bit much to expect consistency in Gnostic texts, since the basic point about Gnosticism in all its forms was its disdain for the physical world - the Gnostics were big on celibacy, for what it's worth, and would surely have frowned on a marriage between Jesus and the Magdalene, sacred or not.

The Gnostics had a rather ahistorical approach to things, since God himself (or herself?) would hardly care for this material world, and as a result felt free to treat Jesus as a metaphor or myth, making up stories about him. It seems bizarre to treat their representation of Jesus as historically accurate. In fact, it fundamentally abuses the texts, which are designed as wisdom literature, not as spiritual narratives.

Who controls the present controls the past... Who controls the past controls the future
es, but why should we trust the canonical Gospels, even if they do predate the Gnostic ones? One of Brown's characters claims that '...history is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books - books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.'

As far as Brown is concerned, the winners who have written our history are the Emperor Constantine and the post-Constantinian Catholic Church (Brown seems hardly aware that there are other Christian groups, whether they be Orthodox or Protestant).

As Brown presents it, Jesus was regarded as a mortal man, albeit the rightful king of Israel and a great spiritual leader, for the first centuries of the Christian era. In Constantine's day, the official religion in Rome was the cult of the Invisible Sun, with Constatine as Pontifex Maximus - chief priest. There was great turmoil between the followers of Jesus and the devotees of the Sun, so Constantine, 'a lieflong pagan who was baptised on his deathbed, too weak to protest', set out to bring peace to Rome by unifying the two religions.

He merged the symbolism of the two religions in many ways and held the ecumenical Councel of Nicaea in 325, at which 'many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon - the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus'.

It was, as Brown sees it, the Council of Nicea that established Jesus as the Son of God; it was a relatively close vote too. This was crucial to Constantine's plans to consolidate the unity of the Empire and the establishment of the new Vatican power base. In order to ensure this could happen, 'Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.'

You've probably guessed where I'm going to go with this. Again, Brown's hypothesis, while intriguing, is wrong in almost every aspect.


irst of all, it's absurd to say that the official religion of the Roman state in Constantine's day was the cult of Sol Invictus. Roman religion was a mishmash of the old Roman gods, neo-Platonic and neo-Pythagorean philosophies, and new cults such as those of Isis, Mithras, the Great Mother, and the Invincible Sun. There was a high degree of syncretism with Gods being identified with each other within the framework of Greek mythology. There was no official religion, as such.
Constantine himself had been a devotee of the Invincible Sun, but was favourable to Christianity before the Battle of Milvian Bridge; after that battle he converted, and issued an edict of toleration - the 'Edict of Milan'. He certainly supported the Christians, but he did not make Christianity the official state religion - that was to wait until the reign of Theodosius, over half a century later.

But what about Brown's conviction that he was a pagan who merely attempted to merge Christianity and 'paganism' for reasons of realpolitik? Well, it doesn't really fit in with the times. Rationalism was rare at this point in Roman history, and unlike the early Empire, Romans really did believe in their gods. It's hard to believe that Constantine was merely pretending to be a Christian. Besides, Christians only made up a miniscule percentage of the population of the empire as a whole.

On the other hand, it has to be conceded that his religious journey was clearly not even. He may have adopted Christ as his patron at and after Milvian Bridge, but his coins still showed pagan deities, notably the Sun. It's probable that, in typically pagan syncretistic fashion, he was identifying the Christian God with the Sun, thinking them the same thing. This could explain why in March 321 he made it law that the 'Day of the Sun' should be a day of rest. For all that, however, his understanding of Christianity undoubtedly deepened over time, and his use of pagan symbolism declined over time, especially after he moved to the East.

But what of his deathbed baptism? Surely that suggests that he wasn't a real convert? Well, no, because that was common practice in late Antiquity. Baptism washed away all sins, so it made sense to delay baptism until one could sin no more. Understandably, the Church denounced this notion of delayed baptism, but Constantine may have felt he was a special case, God's delegate on earth superior even to the apostles' successors. When he was being baptised he told the bishops that he had hoped to be baptised, like Christ, in the Jordan, but it appeared that was not to be; if, however, he should recover, then he was determined to live openly as a full Christian.


hat then of the Council of Nicea, and the Constantinian Bible? Well, the latter is easily dealt with. There was no such thing. I've talked about the compilation of the Bible before, but what it comes down to is that Christians had been debating which books were authentically inspired and worthy of canonical status for alomost two centuries prior to the Council of Nicea. By the late second century the four canonical gospels, which have been securely dated to the first century, were almost unanimously regarded by Christians as the only divinely inspired ones.

Irenaeus, for example, writes 'Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia... It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.(Against Heresies 3.1.1, 3.11.8)

The list was more-or-less fixed long before Constantine's day, and he had no input into the overall canon, which was eventually listed in the late fourth century as the fourty-six books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven of the New.

But what then of Nicea, and the decision by a relatively close vote to raise Jesus to the status of 'Son of God'? Nicea was indeed called by Constantine, and it did concern Jesus' nature, but it wasn't about recognising him as Son of God. All Christians already did that. The issue to be settled at the Council was the so-called Arian heresy, where Arius, an Alexandrine priest, had taken a unitarian view, rather than a trinitarian one. He believed that rather than there being one God in three persons, Christ being one of those persons, there was simply one God, and that Christ was a mortal, created by God, who was at best raised to Godliness.

The first Council of Nicea took place in 325, with at least 232 bishops in attendance. We know only of two bishops, Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais, who opposed the adoption of the Nicene Creed, which firmly defined Christ as being 'the only begotten Son of God, and born of the Father before all ages. (God of God) light of light, true God of true God. Begotten not made, consubstantial to the Father, by whom all things were made.'

That really doesn't strike me as a close vote. Less than one per cent of the bishops there opposed this...

I know, I know, in theory Constantine and the Post-Constantinian Church could have falsified the records for the Council as they did the Bible and presumably all the writings of the Church Fathers who spoke of Jesus as God. But if Constantine really did this in 325, do you not think people might have been startled by this? Do you not think the sudden elevation of Jesus from man to God might have caused chaos in the Roman empire, and torn the Catholic Church asunder?

I think we have to concede that, like just about everything else in the book, Brown's ideas about Constantine are utter tosh.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary...
o where does that leave his view that Catholicism disregards 'the feminist principle', and by ignoring Mary Magdalene pays no honour to women?

Well, funnily enough other Christian groups tend to think that Catholics pay too much honour to women, by venerating Jesus' own mother as the greatest of the saints. They certainly don't ignore her, feeling that as Jesus was made from her flesh she herself must have been specially sanctified by him, and that she was assumed bodily into heaven... she's honoured as a virgin and as a mother. Is that really scorning 'the sacred feminine'?

Yes, but what about the Magdalene? Brown has one of his characters announce that 'The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine'

Well, she's not entirely ignored. After all, being regarded as the patron saint of sinners means we all have something very much in common with her. And if you really want to pray at her bones, the Greek Church claims that her relics lie in Istanbul, while as a result of the medieval French belief that she came to France, her head is supposedly to be found in the Dominican church at La Sainte-Baume in Provence.

It's be a lot easier than being chased around by the French police and an Opus Dei assassin, after all.
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*And before anyone says that views put forward in the novel don't necessarily tally with the author's own views, he repeats his claims on his website.
posted by Greg at 11:04 PM

 
Yesterday's was apparently my 500th post. And I had my 25,000th visitor this week as well. I should probably buy a cake or something.

So, thank God for Google. That's my conclusion after it helped me in a quest for utter trivia this afternoon. I'd had a meeting with my supervisor, which went well, and then I went for lunch with Gareth. Thankfully it stayed within the bounds of decency, and there was no getting utterly wellied involved, as happened last time we went to the Oxford.

Yeah, so anyway, we're chatting away, mainly about theses, and structures, and Roman Republican history, and about teaching, and historiography, and somehow the conversation took a sharp left turn towards tv shows from our youth.

I got to talking about the more eerie programmes of my childhood. Not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, though the scene where the Duke and the Dauphin were tarred and feathered haunted me for months. No, more sinister and obscure shows, which I could only vaguely remember, like Under the Mountain, The Nargun and the Stars, and Into the Labyrinth, starring Ron Moody, better known for playing Fagin in Oliver!

So while we babbled, I mentioned a show that has been skulking on the edges of my memory for at least ten years. All I could really remember was the opening sequence - a car at a border checkpoint in a foggy night, and that it was about a teenage boy, possibly against a Cold War backdrop... not a lot to go on, aside from remembering a decidely ominous flavour. Somehow it troubled me as a child, though I can't think why.

Well, I wondered whether there might be anything to help me online, and found this interesting list of British children's programmes from the eighties. Nice shots of Tucker and his Grange Hill mates, the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Kay from The Box of Delights and others there, I have to say.

Well, anyway, perusing the list, the name Barriers kind of rang a bell, so I set to work. I checked the Internet Movie Data Base, and came across this rather bare list of people involved in the show. Well, googling some names I quickly found this description... 'At 17, Billy Stanyon discovers he was adopted and that his real parents died in mysterious circumstances on the Austrian-Hungarian border in 1963. Determined to find out the truth, he follows a trail of danger that takes him across Europe and nearly takes his life. An international production starring Benedict Taylor and Paul Rogers'

Twenty episodes of sinister Cold War teenage drama, starting with a shot of a border checkpoint. Bingo.

(Two afterthoughts. Firstly, if you feel a need for inspiration this week, go see what Edward Monkton has to say. Something interesting, no doubt. Secondly, with regard to the election of Eugenio Pacelli as Pope back in the the thirties - I mentioned him at the end of yesterday's post - there's an amusingly apocryphal tale of an old Irish lady who was delighted to hear that Cardinal Pat Kelly had got the job. Boom boom.)
posted by Greg at 11:15 PM

 
I'd never had kippers in my life before, so bought some in Sainsbury's yesterday and broke my fast this morning by dining on them. It was an interesting experiment - they were delicious, if oddly strong for a morning meal, but the smell has rather lingered. There's still a whiff of smoked fish about. And it makes me feel hungry...

(In search of a decent way to cook them, I chanced upon this site; aside from its perverse identification of Britain with England alone, its pretty good, giving interesting rundowns on many local cuisines. Have a gander.)

Um, in town yesterday I overheard a fascinating conversation. I couldn't really help it, as it was a loud conversation in a small shop. Two old men, one apparently a retired priest, were browsing some shelves, glancing at some old Chesterton, Belloc, and Newman books. The priest picked up a copy of Illustrissimi by the then Cardinal Albino Luciani,* and began talking about what a marvellous book it was. It's a selection of letters to famous historical and fictional figures, ranging from Pinocchio to Chesterton (of course!).

He said he was always sure that God must have had some special purpose with Luciani, who as John Paul I was Pope for but 33 days until he died in mysterious circumstances. He remarked on how special that little book was, and spoke of Luciani's humility and sanctity, telling the tale of how Basil Hume had returned from the first 1978 Papal conclave, one of the shortest ever, hailing the new Pope as 'God's candidate'.

Part of me thinks that blogging the conversations of strangers is bad form - but on the other hand, they spoke loudly, in a small shop, so were effectively in public. Besides, I found the whole episode deeply charming, not to mention informative in its own little way. I'm tempted to find out more about this so-called 'smiling pope'...
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*I've always thought that most Popes sound like gangsters or footballers. Albino Luciani, I think, is definitely a gangster's name. Eugenio Pacelli, on the other hand, would be a footballer.
posted by Greg at 9:06 PM