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These days I am reading...

James Carroll
Constantine's Sword (Mariner Books2001)

I will read it again. This is the most deeply satisfying and challenging experience I have had in a long, long time. The writing is superb, the intensity of the intellectual and spiritual process is breathtaking, the depth and breadth of research astounding. And I am using, unfortunately, stock adjectives. This book contains so many answers to questions I was barely able to formulate that it ended up opening entire new avenues of reflection just on the stuff I knew. As to the new things I learned, and the new ways of thinking I learned, it will take me years to digest this whole trip. That's way I will read it again. And, most likely, again. I must write to thank him.

I must stop reading this stuff. Now I got into the genealogy of Moses, back to his Egyptian king forebears; Abraham and his Sumerian king forebears. And the nature of the philosopher's stone, the burning bush, the god of Genesis that wasn't really one god but a bunch of gods, etc. I don't mean to make light of this book: I had a really great time reading it but I wonder, I wonder. I am going to ask my friend Hilary who has a Ph.D. in Biblical studies and is a scholar of Akkadian and other obscure ancient cultures what she thinks about it.

So, he wasn't such a bad guy anyway. Yes, he killed wholesale but everybody else did it in his days. And, he really had leadership qualities. He must have been a fun guy to hang around with, with all the parties etc. Too bad the writer is so boring he makes even Attila sound like a bureaucrat, with all decisions made in the passive construction. A snoozer of a book that substituted for a sleeping pill for a subject that, in the right hands, would give nightmares. Waste of time.  

Eduard Estivill, Sylvia de Béjar (Mandragora 1996)
Fate la nanna

A slim 100 page paperback translate from Spanish on how to help your children fall asleep and, most important, stay asleep. With Kiki waking up every single night between 12.30 and 3.30 AM, any suggestion is welcome.
 

Laurence Gardner (Barnes&Noble Books 2003)
Bloodline of the Holy Grail

It's getting embarrassing, all these books on the Grail, the Templars, the Freemasons. On the subway, I hide the jacket and hope nobody snoops. But it's addicting, maybe because each one of these books is really, really pissed at the Catholic Church and Christianity in general for the millennium old lies it tells. This book is long on genealogies, from King Arthur's to the Merovingians' to Jesus' himself. It seems to have lots of knowledge about the mystical rituals of Essenes and Nazoreans, and I wonder how much of it is standard scholarship and how much just hypotheses. That's the problem with this kind of books: you cannot ever tell where solid historical research ends and where the flights of fancy begin. In any case, it was fun reading. I learned quite a few things about the origins of certain symbols (for instance the "X" that indicates error). At the end, though, I really could not tell what was the point that it was trying to make.

Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas (Barnes&Noble Books 1996)
The Hiram Key

Here we go again, a book that explains it all. From the Egyptians all the way to the contemporary Freemasons no historical mystery is big enough for this pair of fearless 'scholars'. Puzzles that have kept historians busy for centuries (and that have earned them hundreds of tenured positions in academia) are instantly solved through 'careful' selective reinterpretation, juxtaposition of apples, figs and oranges, bizarre deductions and Pindaric flights of fancy. It did reinforce some notions that I already have on early Christianity (at my age repetita iuvant), but nothing earth shattering. Oh, by the way, if you want to know the secrets of the Egyptian Kings (not to be confused with the second-rate Pharaohs), from the building of the pyramids to the shuttle back-and-forth to the kingdom of the dead and the secret of resurrection,  just dig under Roslyn Chapel. Everything is there. OK?

I had recently read a great book on the history of the Mongols and I could not resist buying what looked like a contemporary travelogue, a work of "literary journalism" about the land of the Mongols today. What I got was the narcissistic writing of a snide pompous bag whose only interest was using every single adjective ever invented in the English language to describe landscapes. The focus is relentlessly on the writer himself and the writing itself, with close-to-zero interest in the people around him. Actually, the book starts out well, but the moment this guy reaches Mongolia proper and the journey across the land begins, he loses interest in everything except himself. Encounters with extraordinary people, which could have overflown with poetry and empathy are just the pretexts for sarcastic put-downs. Travels through decrepit cities that could have suggested metaphors and reflections of cosmic proportions under the Great Eternal Sky, are merely excuses for cheap shots and dime-a-dozen attitude. You get the feeling that he wears his restrain in writing on his sleeve, throwing it in your face, but that in reality that is a mask because he doesn't know how to emote, or, quite simply, he is too shallow to have any real emotions. He spends four  months riding a horse through some of the wildest, emptiest, most suggestive land in the world, close to the edge of an image of infinity as you can get, and you never get the sense of his real self. I don't think it's because he is British and doesn't know how to get in touch with his feelings (at least you would have sensed the struggle and felt the pain of this inability), I think instead it's because the whole trip to him is just a stunt, and doesn't have anything to do with passion, curiosity, intensity and the search for the meaning of life (which is what any decent writing is about).

This is the kind of book that makes you wish you were reading the Congressional Record instead. Because this is the kind of writer who can make: the Pueblos rebellion; the deportation of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo; the Cherokees Trail of Tears; the history of Tecumseh; Wounded Knee One and Two; Geronimo; Chief Joseph and the Ghost Dance, bore you to death. There is no insight whatsoever, emotional, spiritual or even just plainly human, for the victims of the greatest genocide of our history. The only faint hint of discomfort with the history of Indians, is the boring and detailed "analysis" of the dozens of broken treaties that litter the land stolen by Whites. His biggest thrill seem to be the lawsuits about the establishment of casinos on Indian reservations. There is not one single line of original research, not even, say, the perfunctory perusal of period newspapers. And not one single footnote either. Everything is from secondary sources, cheap history books written for consumption by White masses. I can't understand why I wasted my time reading the whole thing. I have this obsessive-compulsive bug that, once I start a book, forces me to finish it. I need therapy.

Leon Wieseltier: Kaddish. Vintage 1998.

I am sure I am the only person who read every single word of this book without skipping even one. That doesn't mean that sometimes I didn't space out and ended up ruminating pages while my mind was wandering elsewhere. I had been planning to read this book for, well, six years, since it came out (has it really been that long? Seems yesterday.) I kept on postponing thinking that I would finally find some quiet time at home. This is not the kind of book I can easily read on the bus and subway in my four hour commute (two and two) to Brooklyn College. I had to give up: finding sizable chunks of free time without interruptions at home is impossible. When I do have that kind of time, I devote it to preparing my courses and my own research. So, that leaves the subway. It's a dense, intense, informative, and challenging book, typical Wieseltier, a great writer but certainly not a light one. That's why I like him. I never get the sense that he is out to please his audience. He is intellectually arrogant and that's fine with me: he is entitled to his arrogance because at the end he delivers the goodies. That at least is what I thought for the first three quarters of the book. Then it got too solipsistic and self-adulatory. The joy of genuine discovery became a parlor game of Talmudic one-upmanship, a baroque swirl of pseudo-philosophical pirouettes that ended up in pure sophistry. I took away a couple of great quotes (one is posted in my homepage,) a lot of information and insight into Jewish thought, and the nagging doubt that Wieseltier really does not know Leibniz all that well.

Piera Sonnino: Questo e' stato. Il Saggiatore 2004

Memoirs of the Holocaust. The most extraordinary fact about this text is that it was written in the late Fifties, and probably was not meant for publication. It thus precedes the recent, rather abundant production of Italian Holocaust memoirs, a literary and publishing-industry phenomenon that is begging for an analysis and an explanation. Piera Sonnino's book belongs to this phenomenon in the sense that it is being published only now. At the same time it is outside the recent interest in that it was written in the mid to late fifties. My literary bloodhound nose smelled the scent of "Se questo e' un uomo" in a couple of pages. It is not impossible that Piera Sonnino did indeed know Levi's work, either in its first edition (Da Silva, 1947) or more likely Einaudi 1956. The description of the mud, for instance, is reminiscent of Levi's comments. Also, she uses the word "gamella." That's Levi's word. Was that the standard Italian term for food canteen? I never saw it anywhere before reading Levi. Did she take it from him? An obvious reference to Levi is the title, taken from the poem "Shemà" that appears in the opening page of "Se questo e' un uomo" ("Voi che vivete sicuri nelle vostre tiepide case..... meditate che questo e' stato"). But I think the title is the choice of the editor, not Sonnino's. Briefly, the book is the account of the destruction of her family of 8: parents and six children.  They were all deported from Genova together and died separately in different Nazi lagers. She was the only survivor. Although I have read several dozens of these accounts, every time it's like the first time. This is really the never-ending story. You can't stop asking over and over and over the same old trite and worn question: how could such evil ever exist?

Michael Baigent et alii: Holy Blood, Holy Grail. (Dell Publishing)

Some people watch football or professional wrestling for relaxation. I read about stuff about the secrets of the Knights Templar, the Grail, etc. It's my mental chewing gum. And I liked this book. The basic -- although convoluted -- hypothesis is that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene who left Galilee to settle in southern France. Maybe Jesus himself did not die on the cross and managed to sneak out to southern France. Anyway, his bloodline a few centuries later intersected that of the Merovingians who were themselved descendents of the lost tribe of Benjamin. The Merovingians lost the crown to the Carolingians thanks to the betrayal of the Catholic Church. Their bloodline continued underground and eventually one of their descendents, Godfroi de Bouillon became King of Jerusalem. After that it gets more complicated, with the Albigesian Heresy, the Rusicrucians, the Prieure de Sion, the Freemasons etc. etc. etc. Oh well, this stuff is fun to read mostly because it is written well and at least one gets the sense of some serious secondary-source research being done on some very obscure periods of history.

John McWhorter: Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why we Should, Like, Care. (Gotham Books).
There are only two reasons that explain why Steven Pinker wrote the dust-jacket blurb for this book: he didn't read it AND he is on the take. The author is the prototype of the crassly ignorant self-important dunce whose works populate Barnes and Noble bookshelves. A professor of linguistics by trade (god save our children,) he lives with a total vacuum in his skull and calls that ideas. The only thing he knows anything about are show tunes and that's all he should be allowed to write about: show tunes and piano bars. He is such an idiot he doesn't even realize that his own thesis leads naturally to the indictment of the Civil Rights movement for the dumbing down of America. As far as the research methodology of this book, I cringed. Clearly, clearly, one night he got drunk in a bar, started arguing with a couple of other drunks that the rhetorical quality of today's speeches isn't close to that of the past, woke up the next morning with a hangover and a deadline to publish a book for tenure, decided it was a brilliant and original idea, went to the library and -- without any knowledge, historical, sociological, philosophical, cultural and poetic of either the past or the present -- started stealing passages from the speeches of some famous orators he never knew existed and -- voilà -- here is the book. Oh, he talked ignorantly about other things. For instance that he doesn't like opera in the original language. He likes it translated in English or at the most with supertitles. As if that wasn't dumbing down. By the same token, if he didn't speak English he probably woudn't like the Beatles and Bob Dylan either, because he wouldn't understand the words (which didn't prevent the rest of the world from adoring them). And he goes on with this kind of idiotic, ignorant non-sense. He says, for instance, that Italians have a love for elaborate oratory. Now, I am Italian and he is not, and I will bet that he can't even read the headlines of Italian newspapers, let alone comprehend the sorry pedantic state of Italian rhetoric. To make it short, he is the very emblem of the idiotification of culture, rhetoric, art, music he incoherently blabs about. How sad. I will ask Steven Pinker for a refund.