I asked a buddy of mine with fairly good taste whether I should read ‘The da Vinci Code,’ watch the movie, or both, and he deliberated for a few minutes before replying, “Just read the book.” So that’s exactly what I did, being a long-time fan of Mr. da Vinci himself.

Now, I’m not going to leap into the murky waters of literary snobbery and complain that the book’s prose style consists of a big bowl of seven-layer cliché dip (though it does), nor will I cattily remark that Mr. Brown’s world must be pretty boring, what with every large space ‘yawning,’ every vaguely shiny thing ‘dazzling,’ and anything set higher than a metre off the ground ‘perching’; nor will I compare him to Thomas Harris, who also has a way of punishing a great premise with bad writing but redeems himself with felicitous little touches that make his writing pleasantly memorable. Nossir. Not me.

Anyway, I found the book a zippy page-turner with a good moral core (”Women are great: try one today!”), but - did anyone else think this? - weirdly and disappointingly truncated. I closed it and thought, “That was strange.”

It seems it was both dumbed-down and cut short. I mean, with a premise like that, there was room for another couple of hundred pages (not that I wanted it to be another ‘Les Miserables’ or whatever), the language didn’t have to be so insultingly bland, and, I don’t know, it sort of deserved more words or more scope or more characters or something. I just wasn’t satisfied with the amount of book I got, given the hype.

Also, um, before Silas really got into the ol’ Opus Dei thing, he was a U of A computing science student and we dated briefly in 2000. So that may be biasing my opinion slightly.

That, and the fact that cloggéd cloth wasn’t mentioned once.

“Yes, sir, he’s already named his two Scottish accomplices: Ben Doone and Phil MacAvity.”

HAHAHAHA

Recently I acquired a DVD copy of a French-produced cartoon I never watched in my youth, ‘Ulysses 31.’ It’s not bad, and the plot is reassuringly familiar - Ulysses is still cursed by the gods and must still journey far to return to his home, but it’s set in space approximately twenty-five years from now.

The ‘other’ Ulysses is the hero of my favourite poem - no, not ‘The Odyssey,’ but Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses.’ I think you have to love a poem which, when you attempt to dissect its meaning in some English classroom, turns out to say “I’m bored, byeee.”

ULYSSES

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Just as the opposite of love is death, the opposite of rage is civilization.

Seriously. I just got back from a Calgary Philharmonic concert (a rather good one - maybe even the best of the season), with the delicious James Ehnes as soloist. I ogled him, but did not approach him, during intermission. Too intimidated. But I’m jolly relaxed now, and don’t feel like stabbing anyone any more. :-)

James Ehnes is a SEX BOMB with a VIOLIN. Don’t see that every day.

I am having some fairly serious anger management issues today and I would like to put my fist through something, but there’s no sense making a fuss about it because that’s just the way life is sometimes.

Don’t you hate it when somebody pisses you off via e-mail using awful clichés and euphemisms and sententious ‘real-life experience,’ then tells you not to bring up the subject again, so you can’t even defend yourself and instead have to snap at your office mates and chew through pens?

Yeah.  Me too.  And if I can’t even bring up the subject again, how’m I supposed to deal with this TOWERING RAGE I’m in?  Suggestions?