I knew it

[dzlk]

By the way, Umberto Eco has confessed. As I suspected all along.
But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel. No, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Comments

[protodisco]

Ha, fantastic.

[anosognosia]

That is the greatest interview ever.

[megadog]

At first I was really rather ambivalent about Eco - then I read his Travels in Hyperreality - and he started to make visceral sense to me in a way that the leftist freaks such as Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky can only dream of.

[dzlk]

Mm. I'm unfamiliar with Klein and I'm not a great fan of Chomsky, but attaching the label "leftist" specifically to the contrast to the critical sophistication of Eco's essay, implicitly removing it from the sophisticated analysis, seems to me singluarly and wildly mistaken. There's a very good reason nearly all of the interesting theorists of post-modernism are or were Marxists. (Eco is notable for being an exception to this rule.)

There are fools and mediocrities in every political orientation. But if I told you the Austrian School has a sophisticated economic theory "libertarian wackos" like, say, Ron Paul can only dream of, you'd have every right to look at me funny, no?

[kurtmrufa]

I'm not so sophisticated. I have washed dishes in my life though.

[dzlk]

Our problem is that we're indoctrinated to think of these qualities as tending to be mutually exclusive.

[pastorlenny]

You should win some kind of award for this. Perhaps you'd like a free copy of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana?

[dzlk]

Aw. I'm just happy the party resposible for this unfortunate incident has come forward, so that now Mr. Brown can be returned safely to his home universe and the rest of us can begin to move on.

My inevitable Amazon gift certificate from my grandmother this year is earmarked for a copy of Inherent Vice (and thus so is the appropriate share of my free time and attention post-holiday), but as it happens I haven't, to my shame, actually read Mysterious Flame yet. I don't remember what I was doing in 2005 that took precedence. What did you think of it?

[pastorlenny]

It was fun. There's actually a bit of a straightforward story-within-a-story flashback in the middle of the book that makes you wish Eco would just write a good war novel.