Sir Leigh

It's a tough choice, but the low point of the Da Vinci Code just has to be the portrayal of Sir Leigh Teabing. At the outset Brown manages the quite difficult feat of finding a surname that has not only never existed in a thousand years of English surnames but appears unprecedented, even impossible, in any language. He then goes on, with the American tin ear for English status, to describe Teabing's home - "an exquisitely [well, that's just poor writing] adorned [ditto] drawing room, softly lit by tassel-draped Victorian lamps. The air inside smelt antediluvian [which Brown vaguely thinks means 'old' - Victorian, even], regal somehow, with traces of pipe tobacco, tea leaves, cooking sherry, and the earthen aroma of stone architecture. Against the far wall, flanked between two glistening suits of chain mail armour [incidentally, the preferred usage is 'chain mail'; mail armour' is redundant], was a rough-hewn fireplace large enough to roast an ox."

The crowning touch, though, has to be that 'cooking sherry'. Sir Leigh is a millionare, has pretensions to being an aristocrat, and he drinks COOKING SHERRY? There was once actually a kind of sherry that was labelled cooking sherry - it had salt in it, and the idea was to stop the servants glugging it down on the sly - but the term's now used to describe cheap sherry that's undrinkable except when masked by gravy. Not, on the whole, the preferred tipple of the upper crust.
It's all of a piece; Brown works on the basis of degraded memories of past stereotypes, conjuring a vague fog of associations that give a comforting background hum and the illusion of scenepainting.

`

Don Marquis

I said some while ago, somewhat repetitiously,
"Saw this in an anthology yearss ago and have since tried without success to find Marquis's other non-archy verse, but without success."
I hadn't tried very hard; it I had I would have found
http://www.donmarquis.com/readingroom/index.html
For which much thanks.

Da Vinci Coding Error

I know that airport thrillers aren't held to a very high standard, but the Da Vinci Code is surely crappily written even for that. The first sentence - no, the first two words - no, the first word marks it as a clunker.
"Renowned curator...'
'Renowned' is a purely public word, used in obituaries and public speeches but never in interpersonal interaction. Its noun, 'renown'is now confined absolutely to historical romances. The word itself is used when the user wants to say 'famous' but dimly realises that this would be an obviously laughable exaggeration, and so picks a word that has less content but the same aura.
And "Renowned curator" is a particular example of a persistent weirdness about the book; the people involved are academic wet dreams, people who are celebrities for their work in obscure learned journals. Indiana Jones has a lot to answer for.

Correction

No, my memory failed me. Eisenstein was squashed when II was finished but before it was released and before shooting for III started - and died soon after, so couldn't have finished III anyway. But then, surely Stalin must have seen the II script before shooting? How did it get as far as it did if he didn't like it? Different faces for different times, I suppose; what was appropriate for a wartime leader wasn't right for a peacetime tyrant.

Stalinist Art

Looking at Eisenstein's script for Ivan the Terrible III. Great opera, certainly. But, like I and II, defending, hymning, the indefensible. "He shines transcendentally through all the blood he spills... He soars like God above a sea of blood; out of this blood he is founding a new cause;he is creating the Russian state."
As Ivan accuses his crony the oprichnik Basmanov of corruption, and then orders Basmanov's son to kill him, and on the son reentering the hall sees in his eye that Basmanov has corrupted him and orders him killed too...
Eisenstein must have thought, particularly after he'd got away with II, that this was the sort of thing Stalin wanted to hear; but no, he didn't want to be told that his atrocious cruelty was justified, he wanted to be told that he was a kindly old uncle and that all of these stories about seas of blood were libels. So we never got III, which is a tragedy.
Still, if anyone is worrying about antisemitism in Wagner's Ring, there's a much worse moral crux involved in liking and admiring Ivan. It's as if Wagner had made an oratorio out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Which, incidentally, badly needs a revamp; the existing prints/videos/DVD's are really crappy.

Anime Mary

Jasus, Joseph, Mary and Fook, as the Irish say.

Commonplace Book

On the Imprint of the First English Edition of The Works of Max Beerbohm

'London; John Lane, the Bodley Head
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons'
This plain announcement, nicely read,
Iambically runs.