The Cost of Reading, or Be Like John Bardeen

On Saturday a woman came into the bookshop with her husband and two children. She looked at a first edition hard cover of Jeffrey Archer and declared the price of $10.80 to be too expensive. She returned the book to the shelf, looked down another aisle, then said a curt "Thank you" and led her family out the door. Her husband proceeded to unload his golf clubs from the back of their van and head into the Golf and Pub, while she drove off with the children to visit the nearby amusement and water park where she will have no qualms about charging $200 or so to her VISA.

We recall an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge laments she never had the opportunity to apply the things taught in calculus class to her everyday life situations. The joke, of course, is that unless you are an engineer building the space shuttle, calculus will never apply to your everyday life situations. For many, calculus is studied in order to graduate, but never really learned, and then promptly forgotten. As our society becomes more visual, and more focused on the end user, learning is more often done by trial and error. See how a child learns to operate the remote control and the computer. Or how quickly he learns and masters a video game. Is it any wonder children study without learning and then forget how to read and write as well as do arithmetic?

The Golf and Pub is down the street from our store, and we watch people lug their clubs in all day long, far more in number than those who come into the bookshop. Americans have become brainwashed into equating the spending of money with being entertained. We wonder why other countries are performing better in academics. In a culture where the emphasis is on sports and celebrity, few children say "When I grow up, I want to be just like John Bardeen." They want to be like Tiger Woods or Paris Hilton. Why doesn't Random House turn to Tiger Woods to promote reading? Just as he raves about driving a Fusion, or shaving with a Tahoe, he can enthuse about the excitement, drama, and mystery of a Random House novel, or how he learned all about his idol Sam Snead by reading a Random House biography.

How will golf change the world? In 500 years, who will remember Paris Hilton? Few enter the bookshop while many enter the Golf and Pub; yet golf is the elite activity, requiring the expense of equipment as well as the precise maintenance of large amounts of land in an unnatural state. Only voting is more emblematic of democracy than reading. The Church used to put people to death for publishing the Bible in the vernacular, because they knew the consequences. Reading the Bible changed the world. Reading the Ninety-five Theses changed the world. The lasting value of books is so great as to make their cost negligible.

A man entered the shop today. "How much," he said as he strode by at a brisk pace, "do you want for..." and he quickly returned to place upon the counter a Stephen King book he had pulled from the shelf. $10.80. He already had his notes in hand, and without hesitation he peeled off two and handed them to me. My hope for mankind lingers on.

Afternoon Delight, or Reading The Best Of

Well, I wasn't quite as lucky as Bloglily, who enjoyed her in the flesh, but it did feel like I spent the entire afternoon with Litlove on Saturday. In between selling books at the shop, I read her new book The Best of Tales From The Reading Room. Though I have visited her salon often, I found I had never read much of her best. If you haven't already been, go check out the salon now. And when you discover you enjoy what you read, then go buy the book. Do this all in preparation for an impending wide-ranging interview with Litlove in this webspace. We promise to expose all her secrets!

Storylines, or Beyond One Dimension

Narrative irons everything out flat, linear, and one-way. It is what we use and how we are able to make sense of multidimensional experience. Today's question is, how can we overcome the flat, linear, one-way nature of fiction? How do we capture the messy, paradoxical simultaneous life? And if the essence of narrative makes such a thing impossible, what form of art can achieve it?

We Need More Slaves, or Let's Read Together

Danielle has dusted out some of the cobwebs at The Slaves of Golconda and the next book to read and discuss is The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence. There is still over a month left to read and digest it. The group continues to grow and more invitations have been sent out. If you would like to join in the mining, or know someone who might, let us know.

Short Stories, or How the Universe Works

Short stories have never interested us much. Perhaps it goes back to literature classes that forced us to answer twelve questions about every short story we read to show we understood its meaning and whatever.

A few months ago we were emboldened by Litlove's post about a story by Maupassant to pick up our volume of his short stories and read. We all tell stories every day of our lives, and many of Maupassant's stories struck us as being just like that. We had never thought of or regarded short stories in such a way, and soon the previously conceived possibility of writing some of our own transformed into a present probability.

Just when we start to consider writing short stories, we also follow a suggestion to read short stories. We do not intentionally do one because of the other. Reading the stories, however, reveals things to us that help us to understand the writing of them. This is all to set up the first of a series of questions we pose to either of our readers: what is the cause and what is the effect? Do we find the answer and then discover the question? Or do we know the question but don't ask it until we have stumbled upon the answer? Do we subconsciously mold one to fit the other? What is it that brings question and answer together? Does a person or thing uncover a hidden need, or create a new need? Or does a hidden need seek out the person or thing to uncover it?

You may discuss among yourselves for the next five minutes, and then please share your answers with the rest of us.

Possibilities

Three months.

I don't blame you if you didn't wait for me.

For those who pop your head back in, I will be generating some thoughts in the near future. Until then, you can read my column From The Bookshop, as well as the works of many other fine writers, in the new January issue of ...

Book Thirty-Six

The thirty-sixth book we read this year is The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. The book originally came out in 1998, but received a recent surge in popularity after mention by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. We, of course, obtained our copy through BookMooch.

As we have already seen in The Jesus Mysteries, Christianity is but paganism reshaped. J.M. Robertson declared in 1903:

There is not a conception associated with Christ that is not common to some or all of the Savior cults of antiquity.

But The Templar Revelation ventures beyond that premise, finding a strong current of Egyptian religion and myth in the actions of Jesus. They cite the Jewish Talmud, which states that Jesus came not from Nazareth or Galilee, but from Egypt. They believe Mary Magdalene functioned as a high priestess who christened Jesus by her anointing (the words messiah and christ meaning "the anointed one"), thereby bestowing upon him the attributes of the god-king, just as Isis had done for Osiris. We found it most interesting that the gospel of Mark has Jesus comment on this:

Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.

To us, this statement carries the same weight as Jesus command at the Last Supper to "do this in remembrance of me," yet when does Christianity offer a memorial to Mary Magdalene? In addition to her anointing, she also served not as the wife of Jesus, but as his consort in the practices of sacred sexuality.

The authors investigate Leonardo's works and find numerous references to John the Baptist. (One of their previous books showed that Leonardo was the creator of the Shroud of Turin.) They follow the reverence for John and Mary Magdalene throughout southern France. They trace the history of the shadow groups--Templars, Rosicrucians, Priory of Sion--that Leonardo was connected with. Secrets and hidden knowledge abound.

The strength of the book comes in the minute analysis of the canonical gospels, not so much what the evangelists say as why they say it. The authors present a persuasive case, although it is admittedly easy to fall under the spell of any argument when surrounded by it, and there have been countless theories about the real Jesus:

... [he] was a divorced father of three, a Freemason, a Buddhist, a conjurer, a hypnotist, the progenitor of a line of French kings, a Cynic philosopher, an hallucinogenic mushroom--and even a woman!

The authors set out to question every piece of accepted knowledge and view Jesus without preconceptions.

The authors suggest the raising of Lazarus was an initiatory rite, a symbolic death and rebirth into a new living that preceded the final revelation of secret knowledge to the adept. This also is probably what was recorded in the gospels as the resurrection of Jesus.

The authors find that Jesus' cry from the cross in Mark and Matthew has been misinterpreted. What was recorded as "eloi" and "eli" and thought to be "Elias" by some bystanders was not "My God," which should have been "ilahi" in Jesus' native Aramaic. As a follower of Egyptian mysteries, Jesus' cry was actually to the sun god Helios.

Finally, the authors state what they have been hinting at all along, and what they believe is the secret that the Templars and others have kept: Christianity's true message as preached by John the Baptist was hijacked and perverted by Jesus. John the Baptist was revered as the King of Light, while according to the gospel written by John the Beloved Disciple, Jesus was handed over to Pilate as "a doer of evil" which in Roman law defined a sorcerer. The two were rivals, until John was killed and Jesus assumed his leadership. What began as a mission of repentance and baptism was turned into a cult of personality.

What bothered us most was the tendency of the authors to declare certain conclusions based on weak evidence, often highlighted by their narrative assertion, "as we have already seen," and then build on those conclusions. At times it even felt like they would cast doubt on a clue, and then immediately use that clue as if beyond doubt to support their argument. But to complain that the authors make leaps to reach the conclusions they desire misses the point of the facts they reveal. What those facts mean may be open to interpretation, but what they are they are. To explain away anomalies in the gospels as the mysterious works of God is at best to deny the truth, and at worst to bury it.

We are certainly not experts in Gnosticism or even Christianity, but for the last ten years we have made a hobby of exploring the beginnings of the organised church--this is the first time we have heard the rivals theory. This book is stunning in what it reveals, and overfull with information. Our brief review does not begin to suggest the wealth of details presented by the authors. The material they cover ranges far beyond what the book title hints at, though it's all related. What we wished the authors had done was tie it all together much more tightly and neatly. We were left rather unsure of how everything fit together. Perhaps they were overcome by the depth and breadth of their material and became similarly lost. However, the completed puzzle is not what makes The Templar Revelation interesting, it is the unraveling of dogma and the formation of theories.