Sherry Chandler

I just received this e-mail from the Mary Anderson Center:

Dear Board and Friends of MACA:

The Mary Anderson Center is preparing for two very special events in June.

Fong Choo Master Clay Workshop, June 2-7th, 2006. SOLD OUT!

Magic at the Mount: The 3rd Dimension, June 10th, 2006, 4-9pm. Music, poetry, sculpture, children’s art activities, food & fun. FREE and open to everyone! Volunteers needed.

The residency calendar is nearly full in June and July. Our refrigerator in the calving barn died (RIP). We desperately need to replace it , in order to accommodate all of your guest artists and special events. If anyone knows of a used refrigerator that can be donated or purchased at a reasonable price, please let us know. Delivery could be an issue, as we are very limited in man-power and muscle. I believe Guy Tedesco has a dolly in the great barn. Please feel free to FWD: this request. I am always amazed at the results of effective networking.

If you want a copy of our wish list to donate gently used items to the center, please e-mail a request. Full size sheets and towels are always needed.

Thank you for your continued support to the center. We will see you in June!

Lisa Angell
Executive Director
Magic Co-chair

The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts
812-923-8602 (Phone)Office hours Mon-Fri,10am-4pm
MACArts@onebox.com
Visit our web site for upcoming events, directions, & options www.maryandersoncenter.org

“Providing time and space for artists to create.”

Juan Cole has an interesting post this morning that attempts to explain why The Da Vinci Code has such a firm grip on the Zeitgeist. It’s all about restoring balance:

Dan Brown’s narrative is about restoring the golden mean to contemporary Western modernity.

The novel has a binary structure. On the one hand you have the Church hierarchy, which is patriarchal, doctrinal, monotheistic, ascetic, and authoritarian. Those attributes are its normal pole, but it is open to corruption when they are over-emphasized. The first step toward over-emphasis is Opus Dei, which stands for a cult-like kind of monotheism in which individualism is much more surpressed than in the Church generally. But even Opus Dei is not so far from churchly normality. The villain of the movie is the man who corrupts the principles of Opus Dei itself, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa and his acolyte, Silas. They take self-denial in the direction of manic masochism…

This pole of the film reflects the authoritarian side of modern institutions and culture. It isn’t about Catholicism at all, or about Opus Dei. It is about the unchallengeable doctrines (norms) of society, and about the constant danger that ordinary obedience to the law can turn into a cultic exaltation of the law above principle and spirit. The Silas’s of the US are the Ollie Norths and the Irv Lewis Libbys, apparatchiks who are willing to break any law and throw over any constitutional principle in order to serve their masters. (I.e. Cheney gets to play Aringosa in the Plame scandal).

…The other pole in the Brown narrative is the priory around the female descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene. This pole is about paganism, feminism, individualism, scientific rationality and sexual freedom. This pole, likewise, can become corrupt and antinomian. Thus, the pagan orgy or hieros gamos repulses Sophie Neveu and causes an almost fatal break between the Grail (herself) and the priory. Likewise, scientistic society has led her to become an unbeliever, so that the Grail itself is corrupted by doubt. Sir Leah Teabing is the symbol of this pole gone to unethical extremes. In his quest for the Grail, he is willing to deceive and to kill. He is Silas’s structural analogue.

…The Brown narrative does not advocate replacing the patriarchal,authoritarian, self-denying Church with the feminist, individualistic, pagan, libertine priory.

It is, in fact, only the melding of the two poles that would create the golden mean. That would lie in gender equality, and in moderation in each of the values of authority and individualism, self-denial and self-indulgence, law and ethical principle.

That is the golden mean the public is looking for. It is religious, but for the most part values individualistic spirituality above dry Church discipline. It is willing to sacrifice, but not at the price of giving up self-actualization and individual ethical integrity. It is increasingly challenging patriarchy, though that struggle is lively. It recognizes the need for authority but is suspicious, in the Madisonian tradition, that too much authority will corrupt its holders.

The film is popular because it isn’t about Catholicism or France or some odd conspiracy theory centered on Mary Magdalene. It is popular because it is about the dilemmas of secular modernity.

I’ve cut out a lot of neat detail to bring you the outline of ideas, especially some parallels between Shiite Islam (where the prophet Mohammed did marry and have children) and the themes of the film. So you should go and read the whole essay.

Also, Professor Cole is talking about the movie and I think I heard that Ron Howard softened the ending a bit in his film.

Still, weariness with the culture wars seems as good an explanation as any why this mediocre book has been so enthusiastically received. I’m sure tired of all the shouting — have been since the Reagan years.

BTW, I have only read the book and don’t plan to see the movie, but I think Professor Cole has also hit on one of my major problems with Dan Brown’s craft (and I’ve heard that Ron Howard is very true to the original):

As a film, it has its disappointments. The figure of Langdon does not actually speak like an academic. His talk at the Louvre is a sermon, not an analysis. His arguments with Teabing are jejune and the substance unbelievable. There is too much exposition, too much explaining and dwelling on the details of the whole gnostic conspiracy theory. To be good, the film would have had to be more allusive and less preachy, to show not tell.

That, and the fact that the novel in a primer in how not to write an English sentence (as I read in the NYTimes).

The form of a poem, that to which every detail relates, is the same whether it is examined as stationary or as moving through the work from beginning to end, just as a musical composition has the same form when we study the score as it has when we listen to the perormance…One reason why we tend to think of literary symbolism solely in terms of meaning is that we have ordinarily no word for the moving body of imagery in a work of literature. The word form normally has two complementary terms, matter and content, and it perhaps makes some distinction whether we think of form as a shaping principle or as a containing one. As shaping principle, it may be thought of as narrative, organizing temporally what Milton called, in an age of more exact terminology, the “matter” of his song. As containing principle it may be thought of as meaning, holding the poem together in a simultaneous structure.

…

The form of the poem is the same whether it is studied as narrative or as meaning, hence the structure of imagery in Macbeth may be studied as a pattern derived from the text, or as a rhythm of repetition falling on an audience’s ear. There is a vague notion that the latter method produces a simpler result, and may therefore be used as a commonsense corrective to the niggling subtleties of textual study. The anology of music again may be helpful. The average audience at a symphony knows very little about sonata form, and misses practically all the subtleties detected by an analysis of the score; yet those subtleties are really there, and as the audience can hear everything that is being played, it gets them all as part of a linear experience; the awareness is less conscious, but not less real. The same is true of the response to the imagery of a highly concentrated poetic drama.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)