It was a dark and thundering night in the renowned Louvre museum ...deconstructing The Da Vinci Code
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It was a dark and thundering night in the renowned Louvre museum ..."Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad! ...one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature!!"
--- Geoffrey Pullum, LanguageLog
"...a collection of fascinating esoteria [sic]! ... some will quibble with the veracity!!"
--- Jeremy Pugh, Amazon.com
"Brown has assembled a whopper of a plot!! ... Langdon is a hero in desperate need of more chutzpah!"
"Great Summer Reading! It'll knock your socks off!! Like, totally, wow!!!"
--- Blurb-o-Matic Daily Lit Review
What with all the hype and overblown searching for religious meaning and hidden symbology accompanying today's opening of the cheesy (but almost guaranteed to be a Hollywood summer blockbuster) movie The Da Vinci Code, based on the even-more-cheesy eponymous novel by author Dan Brown - I hesitate to call him a "writer," although he does put words on pages and stuff - it's time to say "Whoa there!", take a deep breath, step back, and attempt to regain some healthy degree of perspective. Or, as Mr. Brown might put it in his inimitable prose "style":
"His eyebrows arched like desperately pronated semicolons, obscure blogger and sporadic literary critic Ernst Mayer's fingers staggered across his blood-besmirched computer keyboard, in a blind and increasingly futile struggle to find the right words to describe the almost unimaginable drivellishness he considered mega-bestselling author Dan Brown's novels to evoke in his fevered, reeling brain."
(As one quickly discovers, Brown's prose style is actually very imitable, in fact deliciously so - it's just not recommended for budding authors to do so, except by way of parody.)
We begin our quest for some kind of satisfyingly synoptic literary and pop-cultural perspective with the breathless (it even includes the word "breathless", by golly) review of the novel at Amazon.com - a disinterested party if ever there was one. I've taken the liberty of highlighting some of the more-subtle key adjectives and adverbs, so you don't miss them:
"A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his granddaughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's grandfather's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself. Brown (Angels and Demons) has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries--from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Code is an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought."
--Jeremy Pugh
"With The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria [sic] culled from 2,000 years of Western history.
Notwithstanding my disappointment at Mr. Pugh's failing to mention the mesmerizing green-eyed-ness of the lovely and talented (and let's not forget renowned, that would be remiss of us) Ms. Neveu, a smashing review, this. Note the subtle use of thesauristic (and yes, that really is a word - which I really just made up) replacement, which Brown also makes masterful use of in his novel - instead of treading on Brown's turf via use of the Brownian "renowned", the characters are described alternately as "noted" and "famed." Even more brilliant is the cleverness with which the Amazon.com reviewer restricts the reader's potential objections. Do we dare criticize the novel for being terribly written, with characters so poorly developed as to be comical? Is it even thinkable for one to opine that the only really interesting aspects of DVC are the ones which are taken from someone else's work? (To paraphrase a well-known epigram: "Your novel is both original and interesting. Unfortunately, the parts which are original are not interesting, and the parts which are interesting are not original.") Might one be permitted to say that DVC's key premises are highly dubious, its conspiracy theories blatantly unsupportable, and its "revolutionary" conjectures completely laughable? (Oh, and did I mention that the writing is crap? I probably did, but it just feels so *right* to say it repeatedly about this book.) No, but according to the Amazon.com review, we *are* allowed to quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures," the "quibble" implying of course that if one can merely "quibble" with them, they must be gosh darn close to the truth.
Publishers Weekly, for one, has apparently taken the bit about quibbling to heart in their review - interestingly, Brown's own website only includes the "whopper" part:
"Brown sometimes ladles out too much religious history at the expense of pacing, and Langdon is a hero in desperate need of more chutzpah. Still, Brown has assembled a whopper of a plot that will please both conspiracy buffs and thriller addicts."
I must confess that the word "whopper" also came to my mind, albeit not in quite the same way. And since we're now on the subject of fast-food burgers, let's move on to what our specific literary beefs with DVC are, by going straight to the source. As pointed out on the LanguageLog forum, things start off quite badly. (Were Brown criticizing his own novel he would probably say "start off quite badly right from the outset" - echoing his "learning the ropes in the trenches" construction - but I lack his gift for innovative phrasing). The prologue begins:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
LanguageLog's Geoffrey Pullum does a wonderful job of deconstructing this opening paragraph, which I can scarcely improve on. But let's just briefly review and expand on the troublesome aspects of the above opening salvo. Do we really need to be told that Saunière is renowned? Wouldn't merely indicating him as a curator and replacing the vague "the museum" with "the Louvre" tell us the same thing in much less jarring fashion? Next, "he lunged for the nearest painting he could see"? What - he's going to lunge for a painting which is near enough for a seventy-six-year-old (man, no less, as we are duly reminded) to lunge for but which he somehow can't see? "Heaved the masterpiece"? The most-common uses of heave are in the sense of to throw, to cast, to haul or to draw, all of which indicate a sense of both effort *and* motion - in other words, first you tear it from the wall, *then* you heave it somewhere or at someone (perhaps at the nearest literary critic). Sure, "heave" can also be used in the sense of "to tug at with great effort", but wouldn't "pulled desperately" or even the cliché (but cliché for a reason) "clawed at" be better here? Moving on (but only a few words further on): Is the painfully obvious toward himself necessary? If you must remind of the most likely heaving direction, why not the better-sounding away from its mounting? (A surprisingly non-heave-proof mounting, but that's a mere technicality - Brown has more important stuff to get to, I'm sure). The unnecessary toward himself is followed immediately by the redundant collapsed backward - let's see, he's pulling, erm, I mean, heaving a large painting (according to the Louvre database, the museum has three paintings by Caravaggio on display, the smallest of which measures slightly over 3 by 4 feet (0.99m by 1.31m), unframed, and probably nearer 4 by 5 feet together with its frame) in a heavy frame away from the wall until it tears loose. What is he going to do at that point - magically turn on his Acme® momentum reversers and fall into the wall? Subsequently collapsing in - as opposed to into, but I suppose I'm niggling there - a heap of one, no less. (Note that a heap of one and even an empty heap is allowed in the field of computer-scientific data structures, but surely not in a normal non-technical context.)
At this point we are a full two sentences into the novel. Things are looking grim indeed. The next paragraph confirms our fears:
As he had anticipated, a thundering iron gate fell nearby, barricading the entrance to the suite. The parquet floor shook. Far off, an alarm began to ring.
And at this point it dawns on the reader - Dan Brown is apparently aspiring to be none other than the second coming of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, yes, *that* Bulwer-Lytton, he of "It was a dark and stormy night" infamy, a bad-novel opening made immortal by way of being oft-emulated by a famous (or was it renowned?) cartoon dog. In fact, were the author and marketers of The Da Vinci Code not attempting to pass it off as serious work of literature, one would almost think that Brown is attempting to parody Bulwer-Lytton (which is in and of itself a popular sport) here.
To be fair, here is the full opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
To Bulwer-Lytton's credit, despite the excessively florid nature of his prose (not at all uncommon for that era), it does possess a few deft turns of phrase ("rattling along the housetops") and despite some stentorian pedantry ("...for it is in London our scene lies..."), it is at least grammatically reasonable. And of course Bulwer-Lytton, by way of positive contributions to the literary canon, at least gave the world some epigrams which are memorable in the way he would have wanted, most famously "the pen is mightier than the sword." (He apparently didn't consider the possibility that some author's pens might make the reader want to fall on his sword, for even the worst prose stylists of the Victorian era in England surely wrote material less execrable than Brown's.) One can only imagine what the above stanza would have become in Brown's bumbling (or was it heaving?) hands:
The most famous and oldest of the large historical metropolises of England found itself suffering through a dark and stormy night. The fabled London rain for which the city was so renowned - and frequently cursed - fell drenchingly in patchy torrents, the heaving squall finding itself interrupted now and then only by startled gusts of roaring wind which swirlingly made their leisurely way up the savage splendor of the unnaturally deserted streets, lurching drunkenly along the housetops, and angrily agitating the almost forsaken, anemic blue flames of the gas lamps that struggled to peer their way in the darkness. Suddenly, a roaring thunderclap flashed out, shattering the damp darkness with a blazing blast of white light. The whining silhouette of a mangy dog emerged startled from the shadows, as the frightened beast slunk off in shame after having piddled himself on his master's favorite rug, an oriental masterpiece from the Ch'ing'gong'lo dynasty, in its terror at the frightening fury of the tempest."
After that, things would pretty much fly along on their own, awful prose having a kind of terrifying inevitability about it: "In the fetid alley next to the sumptuous estate of the Duke of Wolverhampton-Rutlandstone (Nigel to his almost nonexistent close friends), a shot roared out. Cowering beneath her pots and pans, the scullery maid yowled in terror. Blissfully oblivious to the thundering din swirling all around him, the deaf albino butler calmly continued, um, butling, or something, the shockingly red retinas of his eyes glinting like ghostly pink pools in the guttering candlelight. Et cetera, et cetera."
But, returning to our critique: we now find ourselves a full five sentences into The Da Vinci Code. Staggering (the thesaurus also suggests reeling or lurching) onward:
The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock. I am still alive. He crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace to hide.
Uh, we thought you *were* hiding (in a heap) under the Caravaggio you just heaved from wall - what, hiding under a masterpiece (it's a Caravaggio, you know) not good enough for you? Who would possibly notice a seventy-six-year-old man and renowned curator who is a cowering in a heap of one where he collapsed under a masterpiece recently heaved from the wall of a famous European art museum (the famous Louvre, no less) located in the heart of Paris? That would require a keen eye, indeed. But no - having apparently only heaved the masterpiece from the wall so he could hear the thundering of the iron gate of Thor, our renowned elderly male museum curator abandons what was a perfect hiding place, looking for something with even more, um, hide-ousness, at which point...
A voice spoke, chillingly close. ”Do not move.”
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.
LanguageLog's Pullum really goes to town quibbling with this:
Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.
But personally, I'm really more interested in the albino-assassin aspects of the story here. That tells me that perhaps Brown is having trouble deciding whether he wants to be the next Bulwer-Lytton or the next Trevanian, another author who was big on albino assassins. Let's examine the parallels between DVC and Trevanian's bestselling 1972 thriller, The Eiger Sanction (TES for short):
[Jonathan Hemlock's] eyes adjusted to the dark, and Dragon's face became dimly visible. The hair was white as silk thread, and kinky, like a sheep's. The features, floating in the retreating gloom, were arid alabaster. Dragon was one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena: a total albino.
...
Jonathan felt his hands grip the arms of his chair. Dragon's eyes were becoming visible. Totally without coloration, they were rabbit pink in the iris and blood red in the pupil. Jonathan glanced away in involuntary disgust.
Despite the similarly silly material, Trevanian never fails to engage the reader, because his writing is actually quite good. (Consider the unconventional but highly effective use of arid in the above passage, for example.) Perhaps that is no longer important in this era of focus-group-driven marketing hype, but call me one of those old fogeys to whom it still matters. Brown, by way of contrast, clearly can't write a lick, so has to resort to one contrived plot gimmick after another in a desperate attempt to hold the reader's attention (the parallels with contemporary Hollywood moviemaking are unmistakable here - clearly a marriage made in heaven.) In DVC this occurs next by way of a well-known novelistic technique known as when in doubt, pull out a gun:
The albino drew a pistol from his coat and aimed the barrel through the bars, directly at the curator. ”You should not have run.” His accent was not easy to place. ”Now tell me where it is.”
Note to threatening silhouette of an albino: it might be a good idea to aim the gun between the bars of the thundering iron gate, since aiming through the bars, which are presumably made of solid iron (possibly even steel - I'm sure the good folks at the famous Louvre museum would spare no expense in this regard) might lead to a dangerous ricochet. Also, do we need to be told that it is the barrel of the gun that gets aimed at its target? By way of other targeting options, aiming the *grip* at the renowned curator would not exactly inspire confidence in the professional skills of our mountainous albino assassin.
”I told you already,” the curator stammered, kneeling defenseless on the floor of the gallery. ”I have no idea what you are talking about!”
"Kneeling defenseless" (lys were apparently in short supply here), as opposed to "kneeling threateningly?" Of course it is possible to kneel threateningly, but not in this context. In any event, after a bit more pleasant chit-chat between renowned defenseless curator and chillingly close staring silhouette, we are reminded of the hulking albino's ongoing pistol-pointing issues:
”Tonight the rightful guardians will be restored. Tell me where it is hidden, and you will live.” The man leveled his gun at the curator's head. ”Is it a secret you will die for?”
Well, it might be a secret I'm willing to die for, but with respect to whether I will die for it - you tell me, dude - despite your apparent barrel-aiming issues, you're the one holding the gun, n'est-ce pas?
Saunière could not breathe. The man tilted his head, peering down the barrel of his gun.
"The man?" Which man? Oh, *that* man. Wouldn't he be better off peering along the barrel of his gun? Isn't it the intended victim's job to peer down the barrel? It might be time for a remedial NRA gun safety class here.
Saunière held up his hands in defense. ”Wait,” he said slowly. ”I will tell you what you need to know.” The curator spoke his next words carefully. The lie he told was one he had rehearsed many times ... each time praying he would never have to use it.
For a man who can't breathe, I must say, his speech seems remarkably unimpaired.
When the curator had finished speaking, his assailant smiled smugly. ”Yes. This is exactly what the others told me.”
While "smiled smugly" may be a nifty use of alliterative phrasing, it just doesn't work here - the mountainous albino is supposed to be dead-seriously threatening, not smug.
Saunière recoiled. The others?
”I found them, too,” the huge man taunted. ”All three of them. They confirmed what you have just said.”
"Taunted?" As in, "I know some-thing you-hoo do-hon't, and I'm no-ot tel-ling..." But in order to remain smugly threatening, better recheck the aim of our gun's barrel:
The attacker aimed his gun again. ”When you are gone, I will be the only one who knows the truth.”
...Unless all four of your victims were in fact telling the same lie (as the author has already informed us is the case), in which event you'll be in deep doo-doo and running low on ammo, to boot. Not all too bright, are we, Mr. Albie Ino?
The truth. In an instant, the curator grasped the true horror of the situation. If I die, the truth will be lost forever.
Ah ... so maybe ol' Al isn't as stupid as he looks, eh, Jacques? But wait - first we're told that if you, the renowned curator, die, the albino will be the only one who knows the truth. Now you're telling us that if you die, the truth will be lost forever. Which is it? Make up your mind, man!
Instinctively, he tried to scramble for cover.
Back under the heaved masterpiece of a painting with you...and try not to be such a pathetic collapsed heap this time, 'kay?
The gun roared, and the curator felt a searing heat as the bullet lodged in his stomach. He fell forward ... struggling against the pain. Slowly, Saunière rolled over and stared back through the bars at his attacker.
Okay - artillery-sized guns may "roar," but anyone who has ever heard a pistol fired knows that pistols do not "roar." (It seems that in the official excerpt on the official Dan Brown official website this has been redacted to the much-better "The silencer spat," the resulting lack of roaring also apparently being enough to take a full three years off the curator's age. Nice to see you're taking those suggestions from your readers to heart, Dan). And once again with the magical momentum reversals - you get gut-shot (which generally implies from the front, especially if the bullet "lodges" in your gut, there being more bony material for it to lodge against at the back of the gut than at the front), but instead of knocking you backward, the impact pulls you forward? But fine, perhaps the frozen breathless curator was initially knocked backward, but then somehow reversed his motion and fell forward. I suppose it's possible. Unlikely, but possible. So he falls face forward to the floor. (At this point I'll omit a gratuitous quip about him being "prone" to falling forward - whoops, too late.) He's lying prone, so rolling over would put him flat on his back (the technical quibblers call this "supine"), staring at ... the ceiling? Apparently not - our curator, world-class contortionist that he is, is instead staring back through the bars of the thundering iron gate at the silhouette of his attacker - but at least we can safely assume that he's not doing so smugly or tauntingly.
The man was now taking dead aim at Saunière’s head.
Saunière closed his eyes, his thoughts a swirling tempest of fear and regret.
Brown probably considered using "heaving hurricane" here, but mercifully was rescued by Monsieur Roget.
The click of an empty chamber echoed through the corridor.
Wait - I though we were in a grand gallery, not a corridor.
The curator’s eyes flew open.
"Hmmm ... I already used lunged, staggered, collapsed, heaved, froze, run, knelt, leveled, recoiled and crawled (and if you don't think an eye could possibly crawl, I beg to differ) - c'mon, Roget, throw me a frickin' bone of an eye-popping action verb here ... aha, eye think I have it, ha, ha, ha!"
The man glanced down at his weapon, looking almost amused. He reached for a second clip, but them seemed to reconsider, smirking calmly at Saunière’s gut. ”My work here is done.”
How does one look "almost amused," pray tell? "Looking bemused," perhaps, but when it comes to amusement, bemusement or abusement, is "almost" really the best modifier? And back to the professional competence of our albino assassin (a.k.a. "the man") - he's presumably already killed at least three people this evening, but while making his way to the renowned Parisian art museum called the Louvre - for it is in Paris that our terrifying tale takes place didn't have time to check his gun's clip? Maybe he was just too busy aiming its barrel properly. But at least we are told that our ever-menacing attacker has switched from smiling smugly and looking almost amused to smirking calmly, and not just generally at his victim lying dying on the recently-shaken-by-the-thundering-iron-gate parquet floor, but much more specifically at his victim's gut - perhaps he's attempting to provoke the poor perforated gut by smirking calmly at it? One can only guess. But just when we thought the writing couldn't possibly become more dire, Brown once again proves us wrong:
The curator looked down and saw the bullet hole in his white linen shirt. It was framed by a small circle of blood a few inches below his breastbone. My stomach.
So the blood magically seeped from the wound and left a circular (as in ring-shaped) stain in the linen shirt, rather than a stain with a circular outline? No, Brown clearly states that the bullet hole is "framed" by the circular bloodstain. Must be that newfangled stain-resistant linen that's all the rage among renowned museum curators these days.
Almost cruelly, the bullet had missed his heart.
...Perhaps cruelly but not at all surprisingly, since he got shot in the stomach, not the chest.
As a veteran of la Guerre d’Algèrie, the curator had witnessed this horribly drawn-out death before.
The very *same* death, as opposed to the same kind of death? Whatever ... at this point that seems an almost benign lapse. Amazing that he managed to survive that earlier same death, though - what a trouper.
For fifteen minutes, he would survive as his stomach acids seeped into his chest cavity, slowly poisoning him from within.
The precision of modern medicine never ceases to amaze - not "at most fifteen minutes" or "as much as fifteen minutes, which would seem like an eternity of pain" - no, exactly fifteen minutes, not a second more, not a second less. A Warholesque fifteen minutes, but of pain rather than fame. But - in a mere fifteen minutes, wouldn't loss of blood be more likely to kill one than stomach acid? Sure, the acid might cause a painful burning sensation (one is tempted to say "heartburn" - perhaps the seeping acid, unlike the roaring bullet, would not be so almost-cruel as to miss his heart), but would it really kill you that quickly? And wouldn't it be seeping into his abdomen, rather than his chest? Medical science needs to know these things.
”Pain is good, monsieur,” the man said.
"...And extreme pain is extremely good - welcome to Marine Corps boot camp, maggot! Now drop and give me vingt!"
The above-described grammatical horrors all occur within the equivalent of roughly one full page of text - an astonishing feat. One could scarcely do better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by collating the most egregious blunders of an entire class of bored freshman English composition students.
One could go on for literally hundreds of pages analyzing Brown's literary howlers, but that would rob our readers of the "fun" of discovery (and frankly, not being a sturdy veteran of la Guerre d’Algèrie who has survived witnessing himself die of being gut-shot before, I lack the stomach for it.) Let us conclude our present tour with a link to the (by now oft-quoted) review of the film version by New York Times critic A. O. Scott, which succinctly (but hopefully not smirkingly) writes:
"The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence...
Let's just count our blessings and be thankful they're not making Brown's earlier schlock "thriller" Digital Fortress into a movie - that piece of, um, work - aside from its absolutely horrible bungling of even the most basic concepts of modern digital cryptography - makes the writing in The Da Vinci Code look positively Shakespearean by way of comparison.
I leave you, dear reader, with my feeble (Roget suggests pusillanimous or possibly feckless) attempt at a suitable Brownian literary coda: after running, driving, flying, lurching, staggering, reeling, lunging and wincing all over Europe for a nonstop thirty-six hours without a pee break, our love-struck heroes, after having further suffered the indignities of being pursued, taunted, shouted, shot (and quite probably smirked) at, finally get some quality time together, with no thundering iron gates, shaking parquet floors, ringing alarm bells, roaring handguns or menacing mountainous albino silhouettes to interrupt their imminent nooky session. How to do possibly do justice to the swirling tempest of their ensuing lovemaking? Allow me to try - Dan could obviously improve on this, but alas, he's not here:
"...And he took her to new heights of strenuously acrobatic sexual bliss. Searingly sense-numbing though their shared pleasure was, nevertheless they blundered blindly on in the savage splendor of the fog of their heated passion, like a storm-tossed squadron of sailing ships in the roaring gales of the deep southern ocean. She screamed and moaned liked a banshee, never having imagined that lovemaking with an academic - even if he was a renowned religious iconologist and noted symbologist at Harvard University - could be so pleasurable. (Between his own gasping exhalations he told her she had just graduated cum laude, with a wry, knowing chuckle and a twinkle in his deep blue eyes). After satisfying her in every conceivable way for thirty-six nonstop hours of making all her dreams come true in the bed, Robert Langdon finally allowed himself his own pleasure, his precarious petit mort with this vivacious French vixen being so intense that he briefly blacked out. Finally they collapsed together in a sweat-streaming heap of tenderness, letting the ebbing waves of postcoital pleasure wash deliciously through each other, like a cool, forsaken and viridescently-jungled tropical shore after the breaking of the flood tide.""The End - Or Is It???"
Thanks to my sister Eva for the LanguageLog link. Of course (at least according to Dan Brown's publicist, who I'm sure is quite objective in his views on these matters) it's all sour grapes - a bunch of oh-so-cunning linguists in their academic ivory towers making snarky commentary, when they would all give their limp-wristed, tweed-sleeve-with-obligatory-elbow-patched writing arms to be able to write a novel that, while it may be utter crap from a prose-style and literary standpoint, still becomes a mega-bestseller that makes them rich beyond their wildest Iowa-writers-workshop fantasies and winds up being made into a Hollywood summer blockbuster movie starring none other than Tom Hanks. Yes, *the* Tom Hanks, he of mah-name-is-Forrest-Gump-maht-ah-interest-yew-in-a-box-of-chawklits and soliloquizing-to-his-lipsticked-soccer-ball-cutely-named-Wilson (after the sporting goods brand, in case that threw you for a loop - it sure did me -and it's good that the ball wasn't made by that other sporting goods company Head, because that just somehow doesn't work as well: "Head! Head! Come back to me, dear Head!!! I promise I'll never be cross with you again, Head!", ha ha ha - but I digress) on-a-deserted-island - fame Tom Hanks. Oooh, and that darling little French actress (whose name I can't recall but it sounds like tattoo) from the movie Amelie. Jealous bastards, I say, the lot of them.