good writing about writing ping.
bump
Thanks Poley! As usual, Steyn amazes me with his turn of phrase and gets right to the point of the controversy.
The peculiar thing about this trendy, liberal fascination with Gnosticism as that the Gnostics entertained beliefs utterly foreign to modern liberalism: they were contemptuous of the body, of sex, and of life in general, which they regarded as the misbegotten product of an inferior god. They entertained a bizarre mythology completely alien to the kind of scientific rationalism that liberals normally promote. I think that liberals are responding to a sanitized IDEA of Gnosticism, rather than to the real thing.
Note to self - don't do this!
Excellent Post!
Wow, we've gone 13 posts without someone saying "It's just fiction!" That's amazing.
Yeah... that's going to happen!.
"perhaps Dan Brown could try writing a revisionist biography of acclaimed prophet Muhammad"
Brown is Jewish.
Any liklihood of him hanging a maybe-fictional-but-with-implied-newly-found-hushed-up-secrests-from-an ages-old-suppressive-religion tale around the neck of say, Moses, Isaaac or Abraham?
No, I didn't think so.....
I started reading "The DaVinci Code" last summer. It was like reading a transcript of a pretentious Scooby Doo episode. I got to about page 30 before calling it quits. I just figured that the meddling art guy would unravel the mystery in the end.
The girl who owned the book told me she thought the story was a little bit hokey, but she found "the history" fascinating.
She's a liberal, of course.
"Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own."
"Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years . . ."
Just a thought: Maybe one of the organizations debunking/lobbying against The DaVinci Code could start a contest for the best purposely-bad examples of imitation Dan Brown and publish the winning entries to raise funds.
Thanks for posting this article. A good read!
That's a delicious turn of phrase.
Steyn's writings are like delightful dejeuners at a wonderful little Parisian bistro.
Brown's work is more like Old Country Buffet.
I'm glad that someone finally pointed out the bad writing.
When I grow up, I want to be able to write like Mark Steyn!
Gnosticism = knowledge. It started with Adam and Eve when they were promised "knowledge" that would enable them to be like God. We continue to see its influence in the New Age/Eastern Religion influences with their talk of "We are all gods if we could only tap into the God within each of us." We see it even in some Christian denominations in their emphasis on being guided by their "inner experiences" rather than the Word. Of course if we are all guided by our inner gods, we have little use for any external source of moral guidance.
Yeah...uh... < Slim Pickens voice > Ditto! < /voice >
It is, actually, a form of sentence structure popularized in newspapers, where the loss of the occasional article is a gain for the typesetter. Although it's a bit of a corruption I don't find it as objectionable as the use of footnotes to present the reader with synonyms instead of citations. That is essentially the author stating that the reader is an illiterate moron (who also happens to be reading his book, a most unhappy combination of messages).
Brown may be a literary hack but he's a very wealthy literary hack with a story that sizzles if you can swim through the detritus of his writing. I'd as soon not, but I'd take his paycheck.