{"id":722,"date":"2004-01-06T12:49:15","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T16:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2004\/01\/06\/imagine-oprah\/"},"modified":"2010-07-26T12:51:49","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T16:51:49","slug":"imagine-oprah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2004\/01\/06\/imagine-oprah\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine If He&#8217;d Gone on Oprah&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Barnes &#038; Noble has just issued a <a href=\"http:\/\/biz.yahoo.com\/bw\/040106\/65425_1.html\">press release<\/A> to announce that they&#8217;ve sold over a million copies of Dan Brown&#8217;s <I>The Da Vinci Code<\/I>. Sigh.<\/p>\n<p>The book (which I admit I haven&#8217;t read cover to cover) bugs me.  Not so much for the alleged anti-Catholic undertones, about which <A href=\"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/\">Amy Welborn<\/A>, among others, has written eloquently about, and I sorta see but not entirely.  Maybe it&#8217;s just the way that Brown&#8217;s mainstreamed tropes that go back at least as far as the <A href=\"http:\/\/www.rawilson.com\/illuminatus.shtml\"><I>Illuminatus!<\/I> trilogy<\/A> and got a somewhat more highfalutin&#8217; expression about 10-15 years ago in Eco&#8217;s <I>Foucault&#8217;s Pendulum<\/I>.  (Although it is rather amusing, I must admit, to see <I>Holy Blood, Holy Grail<\/I> on the bestseller lists after, what, 20 years? Especially since I can dazzle neophytes who only know this stuff from Brown with my mastery of the field, heh heh.)  But mostly it&#8217;s the bad (from my point of view, anyway) writing.  And as a lifelong science fiction and, to a lesser extent, mystery\/thriller fan, believe me, I know from bad writing. Oh, Brown can string together a roller coaster ride, but characters? From what I&#8217;ve seen, ptui.<\/p>\n<p>I suppose somebody was going to get rich off the Illuminati someday, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barnes &#038; Noble has just issued a press release to announce that they&#8217;ve sold over a million copies of Dan Brown&#8217;s The Da Vinci Code. Sigh. The book (which I admit I haven&#8217;t read cover to cover) bugs me. Not so much for the alleged anti-Catholic undertones, about which Amy Welborn, among others, has written [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}