"Oh, It's All Right. We Commissioned a Group Portrait..."*

I'm one of those people with a wonderful capacity to stay far, far away from A-List cultural trends. I still haven't seen Titanic (Not all of it, anyway). I still can't name any of the winners of Survivor. I've never contemplated opening a Harry Potter book. But I think I may have to break that tradition.

I may just have to read The Da Vinci Code.

I'm not making this decision hoping to be impressed. Quite frankly, if Dan Brown has penned a novel half as good as Foucault's Pendulum (by Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose), which covers much the same material, albeit with an emphasis on the Knights Templar, I'll eat my favorite hat. But if I can happily ignore Leo's Opus and the Dysentery Game and The Adventures of Wizard-Boy, it's because, whatever their merits, they have but pop-importance; ephemerality is guarunteed to strike at least two of them dead before the century is half-over.

The New Gnosticism, on the other hand, cannot be so dismissed. Whatever truth The Da Vinci Code may or may not have, it cannot be denied impact. People (mostly women, in my notice, but that's the target audience, isn't it?) have been raving about it and recommending it for years. It's now a big Hollywood movie, replete with publicity junkets and protests and defenses and threatened boycotts and rebuttal books and the slapping and the hurting and the partridge in a pear tree. It behooves me to take a gander.

So off I go to the branch library (you didn't really think I'd PAY for it, did you?)
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*History of the World, Part 1 reference.