Have some shame!

I recently took a long plane ride, and was lucky enough to be seated next to a hot Belgian chick. We hit it off, but she said something that really struck a nerve with me and by god I'm going to rant about it. What I am reporting now is about 2 minutes of a 4 hour exchange, but I feel I need to say something. We started out with a casual discussion about the entertainment for the trip, there were several movie channels and one of them was showing 'The Da Vinci Code' and she commented that it was a great movie that would lose something on the small screen. Now, I know I'm a movie nerd and I'm willing to concede that to people who aren't intimately involved in cinema, maybe 'The Da vinci Code' is a great movie. Why not. She goes on to explain to me that she has never read the book, but that her sister had read it so fast blah blah blah... OK, so we're making small talk, so I admit to her that I read it on a plane once and am ashamed to admit that I enjoyed it a little. Her reply was something about how people shouldn't be snobs about things like that.

Well, if being ashamed of enjoying the da vinci code makes me a snob, then I'm a serious snob. And I am PROUD TO BE ASHAMED. So listen up America, and Belgium, HAVE SOME SHAME. Yes, we enjoyed the da vinci code, it was exciting, it was a page turner, we spent a little less time with our TVs for the three days it took us to read it, but that is nothing to be proud of. It is a crap novel. A crappy, mindless detective story masquerading as pseudo-intellectualism. Not even bothering to masquerade as intellectualism, just picking up on popular pseudo-intellectual themes and incorporating that into a crappy, low-brow, detective story. Its sexy, it makes us think we're reading about history and culture, but we're not. And it's crap. Just to begin with, in the beginning the name that they claim is the true title of the Mona Lisa is incorrect. And thats just for starters. So now we have a book, no one had any false pretenses about it having any literary, structural, or theoretical significance, and now it turns out the author didn't even do his art history homework. Besides which, isn't it our shame that made the book so enjoyable? Isn't the dirty pleasure of getting wrapped up in a pointless, fictional intrigue, the escape from real life and serious thought, exactly what we liked about it? So yes, be ashamed, BE VERY ASHAMED.

When people talk about reading being good for you, exercising your mind, ect...that doesn't mean the physical act of reading. It means strenuous mental exercise, in which you consume and process logic structures and theoretical content embedded in language. Reading traffic signs all day long is not going to grow you any new neurons, and the da vinci code is not much better. Note that I am not telling you not to read this kind of crap, I'm just telling you to have some shame when you do. You'll enjoy it more.