Dan Brown's Inferno

I recently read the first few pages of Inferno by Dan Brown and thought, as I read, "Do I have to write like this to be a successful writer?" Brown's writing style includes passages like "I scramble, breathless..." and "hoarse voices smelling of lampredotto" and "They stare deep into my clear green eyes" and "dying unthinkable deaths" and "Langdon bolted awake" and "shot a glance at the bearded doctor" and "sat bolt upright" and "advanced with the intensity of a panther stalking its prey" and "mission had gone horribly awry." Popular writing mystifies me. Millions of people will read Inferno, and bestsellers like it, without cringing when they come across the cliches in the text. I don't understand that. I'm baffled that so many people tolerate writers writing at a mediocre level. Readers should gravitate to writers who are attentive enough to clean the cliches out of their writing and come up with poignant replacements. "Scramble"? I can't picture the Shade scrambling along the Arno. I think Brown meant something like "scuttle" or "crab," the Shade running sideways low to the ground to avoid being seen, since "scramble" usually implies more haphazardness than the Shade exhibits. "Hoarse voices smelling of"? Voices don't smell, breath does. Voices sound. More like "vendors..., with their hoarse voices, their breath smelling of lampredotto." Just to quibble, with actually modifies I. "I snake through vendors with their voices." But how did you get their voices away from them? "Into my clear green eyes"? That's an abrupt change in viewpoint, isn't it? Up to that point the reader has viewed the action as the Shade, but suddenly the reader has an external view of him. Rather than "unthinkable deaths," Brown probably meant "unimaginable deaths." "Langdon bolted awake"? The verb bolt should simply be retired from the language; label it obs. in the dictionary and leave it there. Brown uses the verb twice within a few pages. "Shot a glance." If the character had shot a glance, Langdon would have noticed it. I think Brown meant that she briefly met the other doctor's eyes to convey a message to him subtly. Advanced, intensity, panther, prey? Don't even get me started. If this were a movie, the actor would be overacting. "Horribly awry"? If the character is as methodically deadly as I think she is, a mission may catastrophically fail, but it would never go horribly awry.

Dear Jim Parsons:

I'd give considerably more than my left leg for your endorsement of my novel (although not a first-born as I haven't any-born). It's a kinda oxymoronic brainy gay novel. Digs down to the origin of most Western religions. A few pokes at conspiracies. Do you need a release form? Thanks big much lots!

(Note accompanying a Kindle copy of Secreta Corporis I sent to Mr. Parsons.)

Review of The Talpiot Find

Exercising Thought

Amos Lassen
To me a book that makes me think is a book worth reading and keeping. John Garvey’s book is a great example of that. It certainly made me think about the way I think and how I began to think a certain way. I think that is the result of being able to tie present and past together and by doing so in a unique manner—using an archaeological dig to do just that.

Marc is a graduate student and he really just wants to graduate. He does not appear to be overly ambitious and does not seem to want to succeed in his profession too quickly. He has been assigned to a dig in Jerusalem in the Talpiot area. If you know anything about Jerusalem, you know there are always digs going on and Talpiot is one of the major places for them. Many feel that Jesus spent his last few hours in Talpiot. Marc is near the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb and he is lackadaisical about any kind of find there. He doubts that they will find anything there. A year earlier a garbage pit from the 7th century bce was found there during the excavation of a well. Marc has been working around the well that dates back to the 12th century and all he has been able to find are pottery shards and bones of animals—just ordinary stuff. Suddenly he finds a human skeleton and when checked the bones date back to the 7th century bce and the diggers are faced with an interesting situation and want to know if the skeleton is the result of a murder.

Marc makes another find—clay tablets which also date back to the 7th century bce. On the tablets was something from the Torah written in an early form of Hebrew (so now I am truly hooked on the story since my field of study is Biblical Hebrew—not to be confused with the modern spoken language). I have seen many such finds and they have always been a major source of excitement. What the archaeologists have yet to figure out is if the tablets and the skeleton are at all related and if there was a murder. They have to ascertain if the location of the tables has anything to do with anything else or is the location coincidental. The tetragrammaton appears on the tablets and means that they should not have been so openly exposed and actually belong in a genizah (a special place in most synagogues where holy books that are worn are kept). The tablets that date back to the 7th century bce should not have been in a garbage pit and even more interesting, they were found next to a dead body.

It did not take long to learn that there is something in the tables that is very important and that there are those who are willing to kill to get them. It seems that there is a connection between the skeleton and the tablets and someone knows more than Marc and his colleagues.

This is the second of Garvey’s books with a setting having to do with the Biblical world and right away the two books spoke to me. I spent many years in Israel and was on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem so quite naturally my interest was in the books. I understand that the book is based upon historical happenings. For me, reading this was almost like going home and Jerusalem is indeed a city that has both past and present visible in daily life. I remember being told that this Biblical person or that one stood where I was standing and maybe slept in that house over there. Combining history and mystery, Garvey gives us quite a read.


From Reviews by Amos Lassen

Secrets of the body

Secreta Corporis, a novel by John Evan Garvey, was published for the Kindle on 22 February 2013.

Two Templar knights are ousted from the Order for sexual perversion but are then targeted because of their knowledge of an ancient artifact the Templars will use to control the papacy.

The story
A.D. 1193. To avoid an arranged marriage, Rolant joins the Templars and is quickly transferred from France to Jaffa, the coastal city in the Holy Land that is the main port of entry for medieval pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. At the citadel in Jaffa, Rolant, who is nineteen and only recently knighted, is paired with Audric, a more experienced knight, who cautiously introduces him to a secret brotherhood of Templars who commit “the sin which shall not be named” in the dense groves of tamarisk trees scattered among the dunes along the coast. The secret brotherhood considers their activity in the groves to be comparable to grappling or swordplay, but for Audric and Rolant, their activity takes on a different tone because love becomes an integral part of it.

One of the main tasks Templars perform in the Holy Land is escorting pilgrims to Jerusalem and other holy sites. While Rolant is among the Templars escorting a group of pilgrims to Bethlehem, they encounter Saracens digging a well just at the moment human bones are displaced by the digging. The Saracens abandon the well and the pilgrims want to see if the bones are those of a saint. While the pilgrims pray over the bones, Rolant notices an old clay tablet in a dirt pile. The text inscribed on the surface looks ancient, like no language he has ever seen. He takes the artifact back to Jaffa with him as a memento but must relinquish it because Templars are allowed no individual possessions.

When in Jerusalem, Audric has avoided sleeping in the unsanitary lodging of the pilgrims by staying with a married Saracen friend, Tariq. Audric and Rolant’s activity in the groves and with a Saracen in Jerusalem do not go unnoticed by a secret society within the Templars, Lucerna Corporis, whose mission is to purge the Order of vice. At the citadel in Jaffa, Templars who frequent the groves begin receiving cryptic threats in the form of alchemical symbols drawn in blood on their bedsheets. A couple of Templars are killed, and when Audric and Rolant learn they are the next to be killed, they secretly leave the Order. They stay first with Tariq and then find beds at a boarding house, but their first night there they are attacked by Templars in plainclothes. They return to Tariq’s home, and Rolant realizes that the tablet he found—which, he has learned, is theologically damaging, and now would be called a smoking gun—can be used effectively by the Templars to threaten the papacy with disclosure only if no one knows about it other than a few Templar leaders. The Templars then target Tariq’s family along with Rolant and Audric.

The novel is available now at the Kindle Store and soon will be available for the Nook and iPad and in paperback.

More information about the novel is available on this page.

Thinking on the Edge

Dear Editor,

Wow, you're all about prestige, aren't you.

Every writer on the website's front page is a world-renowned this or that.

Prestige. Climbing as high as possible up the hierarchy. Being the alpha male. Enjoying the approval of many. Being the center of attention.

Sounds grown-up, doesn't it. And much more sophisticated than the animal species that exhibit similar behaviors؟

Please recognize that wanting to associate with only the world's most prestigious thinkers is sorta immature thinking. The sort of thinking that would provide great material for a BBC sitcom.


John Garvey


[Sent to edge.org]

The greed model

(Note to the Customer Support person: Please pass this on to Administration. They need a little perspective. Thanks.)

You are kind of stupid, aren't you. It's understandable that you're not in this business to provide a free service. We understand that. But requiring that I subscribe in order to read emails/messages sent to me by subscribers? When you display ads on my screen, you are making money. If I were able to read emails/messages without being a subscriber, you would still be making money from the ads displayed on those screens. But almost every click on your site takes me to a page that says "Subscribe!" The fact that you provide so few features to non-subscribers indicates that you're trying to squeeze every penny out of the user. I wonder if you even display ads on subscribers' screens. Do you? The main purpose of a subscription is to have access to features without annoying ads on the screen. Which means that a non-subscriber could have access to those features with ads appearing on the screen, and Match.com would still make money. Didn't Match.com start out with that business model? But since then has gradually reduced the number of features available to non-subscribers? It's to the point now that a free account serves no purpose; almost no features are available. But you still make money from the ads displayed on non-subscribers' screens. Did you catch that? You still make money from the ads displayed on non-subscribers' screens. Since that revenue isn't enough for you, I won't be subscribing. Up to $40 a month? For what? On top of your not making money from my subscription, you also won't be making money from ads being displayed on pages that I would otherwise view. So, as a result, you are making less money now than you would if you provided features to non-subscribers. You lose ad revenue every time I don't view a page that I otherwise would. And I doubt I'm the only one put off by your greed. A potential user doesn't view any pages, and so no ads are displayed on those pages that are not viewed, and so no revenue is generated by either subscription or page views, multiplied times how many potential users? I'm fine with not viewing any of your pages, I lose nothing. But for you it represents a money leak—revenue lost because that revenue isn't enough for you. But the lost revenue doesn't amount to 0. It adds up to negative numbers.


[A note I sent to Customer Support at Match.com.]

Prepare to think

The Talpiot Find challenges and entertains the reader with its offbeat approach to the familiar archaeological-find-rewrites-history theme. Readers will confront the Big Questions in a calm, no-big-deal atmosphere and will find themselves musing more than once “I never thought of it that way before.” While following the thought-journey of a very likable protagonist with a bias for humor and irony, readers will explore whether their own world-view is based on a need for comfort and feeling useful, or on a desire for everything to make sense. Whether any change should be introduced to the world-view is left for the reader to decide, but by the end of the book the reader will have more information and ideas to work with in their experience of the everyday world.

Grad-student Marc isn’t hoping for a spectacular archaeological discovery to catapult his career right from the start. He just wants to graduate. His assignment on this dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, near the alleged Jesus ossuary tomb, hardly seems likely to produce anything of note, much less spectacular. An ancient garbage pit had been discovered the previous summer while the dig team excavated a twelfth-century well. Marc is now down in the well methodically uncovering unexceptional pottery sherds and animal bones thrown out with the rest of the scraps from meal preparations twenty-six centuries ago. But then he finds a human skeleton. When the human bones turn out to be as old as the rubbish around them, the archaeologists wonder if the person, apparently dumped into the pit, was a murder victim. And then he finds clay tablets, right next to the skeleton, carbon-dated to the same time frame as the skeleton and the surrounding trash. The tablets turn out to be an interesting find, a portion of Torah written in ancient Hebrew Canaanite, seventh century BCE. Are they related at all to the skeleton, and the murder? Or is their location coincidental? What are the tablets doing in a garbage pit? Bearing the tetragrammaton, they should've been placed in a genizah. Why were they discarded? In a garbage pit? Near a corpse? Of a murder victim?

1,800 MPH

A bullet traveling in the neighborhood of 1,800 mph is a compelling reason for gun control. Nothing else in our normal surroundings travels near that velocity with that much destructive energy generated by an individual employing a single finger. A car possesses more destructive potential but can’t approach the velocity of a bullet. Nothing in our normal surroundings can. That uniqueness is the reason for unique treatment of guns and gun ownership. Musket projectile velocities in the eighteenth century, when the Bill of Rights was written, were a fraction of current projectile velocities. Legislation intended for the musket is inadequate for modern weaponry.

A carrot on a stick for Google AdWords

(At the end of their online survey regarding the effectiveness of customer support, Google AdWords provides a text box for any comments the AdWords user would like to make. This was my comment.)

You’re not looking in the right place. Support is very helpful, very effective in getting an issue resolved. The problem is with AdWords’ management itself. You should send surveys to users about AdWords’ policies and procedures, not about Support. That is where the problems lie. For example, I’m never told what websites display my ad impressions—except, once a month I’m sent an email that includes a list of the top four websites for my ads. Four websites a month. When there can be 10,000 impressions per day. Almost every time I’ve received the list of four websites, I’ve seen that the impressions were appearing in the wrong types of sites—game sites and sites where the text is displayed in Asian languages. I’ve responded to each email report by changing keywords, adding negative keywords, and filtering out additional countries, but since the language of my site is only English, no impressions should have appeared on Asian-language sites in the first place. This isn’t an issue I need Support’s help with. I need AdWords to show me every site where an impression of my ads is displayed so that I can adjust my campaign appropriately. Why wouldn’t I want to know where my ads are being displayed? Why wouldn’t you want to provide me with that information?

Regarding the whole AdWords paradigm, I have the best suggestion any user could come up with. Change the business model of AdWords so that your revenue comes from actual sales, not clicks. If that were the case, it would be in AdWords’ best interests to focus impressions on the right types of sites. As it is now, AdWords’ job is done when an ad is clicked on, even if a person clicks on an ad only out of curiosity and has no intention to make a purchase. An ad is clicked, you get paid, and you’re done. If the carrot were held a little farther out, AdWords would focus its efforts on getting its users’ products sold so that AdWords could be paid. But would AdWords/Google ever consider a business model like that? I know that Support is directed to respond to comments like this by saying that more money needs to be spent to be competitive with higher bids. Pour more money into the problem rather than fix the leak where the money falls out. But please, don’t direct Support to say that AdWords has no way of knowing if an actual sale is made or not. Tracking is what you do.

Dear Amazon

It would be interesting if, in tandem with sales rank, you could analyze the writing in a book and give it a rank based on how well it’s written. Density of vocabulary, number of words of various types, length of sentences, number of cliches, number of typos, and similar criteria. It would help people find good writers who are buried in the sales ranks. (It would also motivate authors to proofread.) If you set up the analysis so that books by, e.g., Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger scored well but weighted the ranking toward current writers, it would be an innovation in the industry as well as an alternative to the paradigm where popular writers just keep getting more popular. Offer the customer a choice of how books are sorted, by sales rank or quality rank. The media attention it brought Amazon would naturally result in an increase in sales.

Toes of parchment, feet of clay

(My recent submission to Boing Boing)

The Talpiot Find by John Evan Garvey follows a grad student from Los Angeles doing his required fieldwork in archaeology at a dig site in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem. He uncovers ancient clay tablets while excavating a twelfth-century well, and when one of the archaeologists begins translating the tablets, he realizes that this document may have been part of a deception coordinated by Temple priests and scribes in the seventh century BCE. The archaeologists contain the information as long as they can, but a disgruntled student on the dig team who was the target of an unbelievably offensive prank leaks it to the public in an online video. The archaeological team then learns that anonymous groups want to discredit the tablets and are determined to keep any further information about them from reaching the public.

There are a billion Catholics; add to them all Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Mormons and any other religious group who takes Moses seriously as a prophet; then add to them all atheists and agnostics who have rejected any of those faiths. The sum is the number of people affected by the novel’s proposition that Torah began with a deception in the seventh century BCE. Numerous scholarly books since the early nineteenth century have suggested that the Temple priests and scribes during the reign of King Josiah composed a scroll that eventually developed into Devarim/Deuteronomy (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002), which the priests themselves “found” during Temple repairs as described in II Kings 22:8-13 and presented to the people as if it were the divinely inspired writings of Moses from six centuries earlier. The priests’ motivation would have been to redirect all of the worship and offerings to the Temple by getting rid of all the competing shrines and sex temples crowding the Temple courtyard. The priests benefitted greatly by the implementation of the law in the scroll which they themselves had found; even the King subsequently had to seek their approval. Motive and opportunity. Like the Book of Arnold in The Book of Mormon developing out of what the originator knew were untruths but that were accepted by the people beyond what he expected, that one fake scroll may have led to the development of the rest of Torah and Tanakh/Old Testament and then the New Testament and the Qu’ran and the Book of Mormon and so on. The priests who composed the scroll intended only to control the worship and the flow of tithes of their time; they had no idea it would develop into the huge Judeo-Christo-Islamic structure it became and that still exists 26 centuries later and still influences elections and lawmaking.

I really will be mystified if you don’t think this is interesting enough to include in your blog. It’s true that your Buddhist and Hindu readers will find it ho-hum; their faiths are rooted elsewhere. But how many of your readers are attached, loosely or firmly, to a faith that grew out of the law of Moses, or have left a faith that grew out of it? I’d say a majority. A book that strongly suggests that no aspect of any of their faiths can be true because all of the faiths were founded on the belief that the faith that preceded them was true, all the way back to a single forged scroll, isn’t relevant?

The Talpiot Find is available in Kindle and Nook/iPad editions and as a paperback.

The story follows a modern-day archaeology student and a 7th-century-BCE slave manager. It’s even kind of brainy in spots. And none of the central characters take themselves too seriously. Lots of pop-culture references.

(Another submission to Boing Boing)

Assassin’s Creed meets Brokeback Mountain:
Secreta Corporis, a novel, is an examination of what would happen if two knights were placed in a similar sexual-identity crisis as Ennis and Jack. The knights, Rolant and Audric, in this case Templars in 12th-century Jerusalem, see a sea-change in the look-the-other-way policy of the Order as a secret-society-within-a-secret-society, called Lucerna Corporis (“light of the body”), begins purging the Order. Rolant and Audric begin to see knights dying around them and, when they realize they are the next targets, they secretly leave the Order. Their married Muslim friend in Jerusalem, Tariq, takes them in and helps them assess what their options are, since Rolant and Audric would rather be dead than return to the Languedoc in France as dishonored Templars. A seemingly innocuous episode, Rolant finding an ancient clay tablet in a dirt pile as Templars escorted a group of pilgrims to Bethlehem some weeks earlier, leads to Rolant and Audric being targeted again when the Templar leaders, unseen, within the citadel in Jaffa, evidently piece together what the clay tablet’s purpose was. Tariq surmises that Rolant’s clay tablet, as well as others left in the ground, represent a rough draft of a book of the Torah, Devarim/Deuteronomy. It looks like the Temple priests and scribes in the 7th century BCE composed the book to authorize their taking over the worship system in Israel but presented it to the people as the writings of Moses from six centuries earlier. The Templar leaders realize that the tablets would allow them to control the papacy with threats of disclosure of the fraudulent origins of Scripture, but only if the knowledge of the tablets were limited to a few Templar leaders. When Rolant and Audric are attacked by Templars in plainclothes, they piece together that their knowledge of the tablets is considered a threat, and then they learn that their association with Tariq and his family puts them at risk as well.

The inclusion of the tablets was inspired by II Kings 22:8-13 and the thought “What if the rough draft of that scroll surfaced?”

But New Yorkers call everybody savages

My comment to the article "NYC Subway Ads Call For Defeat of Jihad 'Savages.' The ad: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

Support Israel? Why? The land wasn't Israel's to take back after 19 centuries. "19 centuries since what?" Find out. Look it up. It's been 19 centuries since Israel was an independent nation governed by Jews. Think about it: It's been only 13 centuries since Babylonia was an independent nation governed by Persians. Who would support Iranians retaking their portion of Iraq? Anybody? Anyone? No? Then why should Israel's occupation be supported after 19 centuries? Why are the rules different for Israel? Are the rules different for Israel? Why? Whatever answer you give...why is [your answer] legally binding now? That was 4,000 years ago. "What was 4,000 years ago?" Look it up. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, what did the West do? When Jews invaded Palestine, what did the West do? No, the rules aren't different for Israel, they just think they are.

Freedoms: Speech = Faith

Muslims!
It’s a poorly made little film!! No one takes it seriously!!

Enough already! Every religion gets trashed by somebody! Even by you!

Freedom of speech allows freedom of religion.

Freedom of religion requires freedom of speech.

React like grownups! View insults in perspective.

Violence is the wrong response. Did the film burn any vehicles?

Make a film insulting the Coptics’ Christ if you want.

Peaceful protests are much more effective than violence.

No one listens to a violent mob.

State your objections. Don’t shout your objections.

You’ve succeeded in greatly increasing the audience for the film Innocence of Muslims.

Almost no one would have seen the film without the protests.

Think about why you, personally, are protesting violently.

Never join a violent protest to prove how faithful you are!

Never join a violent protest because everyone else is!

Never join a violent protest because religious leaders tell you to!

Never join a violent protest for the adrenalin rush!

Peaceful protests are boring, but they work.

Think about why the film was made.

Do Muslims discriminate against Coptic Christians?

Think about why you think that’s all right, if you do.

Do you think Muslims are superior to everyone else?

You despise Israeli exceptionalism. Why would you be the same way?

Get used to being equal with everyone else.

Get used to everyone being equal with you.

Don’t generalize about non-Muslims.

They’re not all the same.

You want respect. They want respect.

To get respect, give respect.

Your protests against corrupt regimes were noble.

These violent protests are just immature.

Admit you’re wrong sometimes. Everyone is.

Think more. Shout less. Talk less.

Conform less.

Trust authority less.

The world will always be evil. It will also always be good.

The visual realism of Assassin's Creed III

(A comment I was going to leave for an Assassin's Creed III trailer on YouTube before I learned about the word limit.)

Eh, the game is all right, if you like chop-fests. No, seriously, the game is phenomenal—the amount of detail in the textures, the smoothness of the animations constructed on the fly, the beautiful lighting, the sophisticated particle effects. The state of the art has really reached an astounding state. It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the technology from Altair moving among the NPCs in Jerusalem to Connor in the Colonies displacing knee-deep snow as he walks through it. A significant increase in detail and realism at each stage. And on top of the technological advancements is the game’s concept itself—locating the different stages of the game at significant points and places in history so that the user’s experience ends up being effortlessly, invisibly educational. Grand concept, impressive execution.

While watching one of the trailers for AC3 the first time, however, I had an unexpected negative reaction to Connor on the battlefield chopping a path through the Redcoats. The effect was different than Ezio taking on a dozen Templars in battle gear with his sword and retractable knives and all. It was different seeing Connor using a sleek steel tomahawk to actually chop up soldiers dressed in natty uniforms and armed with quaint guns. The game almost seems to be celebrating the killing. At one point, soaring orchestral strings accompany the hacking of British soldiers. At first, of course, I thought he was going after the British, which made the seeming celebration of the beauty of efficient killing even more disturbing. But even after I read that he killed only Templars in that scene, the scene was still disturbing because of the number and detail of the kills.

I understand the need for the kills in the context of the game and the use of the tomahawk in the context of Connor’s heritage, and that episodes in American history actually were as gristly as this. But I feel that things are different with the game this time around. With advancing game technology making characters look progressively more like real people than constructs of uv-mapped polygons, it becomes more significant that players feel a surge of endorphins and dopamine when hacking away at the characters. You can say “Nobody dies in a game” and you’d be absolutely right. They’re just polygons. But it’s also true that a part of the brain does not perceive it as just software moving polygons in response to user input, and that is the part of the brain that motivates the user to play the game. If you were to replace human models in the game with donut models that spurted jelly or creme when stabbed, the effect would be comical and the game would be fun to play for a while. Assassin’s Creme III. But the user wouldn’t have the deep visceral reaction to it that he has to gameplay involving animated models that closely resemble humans. The more realistic the characters look, the more significant that reaction is.

So, Ubisoft, since users would never, on their own, cap the number of kills they make in a game so that things don’t get out of hand, you could do that. You could easily reduce the number of Templars to be identified among the soldiers. As game worlds continue to look progressively more real, you could diminish the importance of the kill in the gameplay and emphasize instead the decision, the clue, the plan. It’s true that movies present very real-looking violence to the viewer, but the difference with realistic games is that the player isn’t a passive viewer of violence, he initiates and propels the violence. Ubisoft, you’re making a killing from a part of the player’s brain processing the game’s visual information the way it does. Play carefully with that part of the brain.