No idea why this stupid, inane thing had me laughing until I cried.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRRt-LpJoA

Walked into the Harry Potter Store amid a light drizzle and somehow emerged to find a blizzard.

Rewarded myself after a long visit to the dentist yesterday with a trip to the Strand. Mostly to look for a copy of Strong's Concordance, which they didn't have, but in the section where it would have been, this little book on Mary Magdalene caught my eye (my interest kindled from the recent read of HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL). Then I had the idea to buy a French novel to see if throwing myself into the deep end might bear any fruit. It's interesting to slowly crawl over a sentence as one might when one is four years old.

Had a birthday dinner with a thirteen-year-old at the River Cafe last night.

#BooksOf2025

2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

6/10

GOOD: Fascinating history from a number of discrete periods
BAD: Since debunked; Silly logical contortions to align with the desired conclusion

I'm going to be in Paris in May for meetings and wanted to take advantage of being on the continent by squeezing in some culture. Somehow I heard of a basilica in the South of France where Mary Magdalene's purported skull is displayed inside of a golden body. Evidently, there's a monastery with spartan accommodations to host pilgrims who then have to hike through the woods to access it. It seemed interesting, like something the characters in an Italian neorealist movie would do.

I mentioned it to a friend who referenced this book and some complex conspiracy about Mary Magdalene having been married to Christ and borne his children and carried the Holy bloodline to France. Popularly known more recently as the underlying conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code. So I bought the book and dove in.

It begins with the story of a priest in the late 1800s having been assigned to a tiny parish in the South of France. He eventually refuses the Church's order to be moved to another parish, seems to exhibit a sudden great wealth, behaves strangely, and finds hidden ancient parchments left by a Knight of the Crusades.

From there we try to establish that the famous Knights Templar were patronized by a secret society later connected to a particular Frankish royal family which lost power but seemed to have many prominent descendants in later centuries behind many major historical events.

SPOILER ALERT: This royal line was sired by Jesus, who was just a man, and if it is ever restored, it will unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the human view of Jesus is acceptable to all.

It's a pretty dense book, and they work through each step of this methodically. Much of their source material has, in the forty-plus years since publication, been debunked as fraudulent, but while they contort and connect and make spurious leaps, they do it all over a background of well-researched and interesting history. I learned a lot about the Knights Templar, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the history of Franks and France and Visigoths. I also learned a lot about the Holy Grail (for instance that the word 'grail' has no other meaning than to refer to the Holy Grail...) and the literature around it.

But the part of it I enjoyed the most was the Biblical criticism. I consider myself a Christian Fundamentalist, and genuinely hold the admittedly absurd and indefensible view that the Bible is literally true and inerrant. But if you really believe in something you should be comfortable with it being assailed.

Reading about the Roman Emperor Diocletian's role in destroying much of the Christian Canon was fascinating, and I find arguments that the established Gospel was molded to be acceptable to Roman authorities compelling. There are also some compelling arguments that Jesus was not a humble carpenter but a well-to-do and well-connected member of an established Messianic line. Even relatively minor arguments that, for instance, the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John was not John, but Lazarus, were fascinating.

So on the whole, I don't ascribe a lot of value to the book, but it proved as fun a way as any to learn about topics I might not otherwise have been exposed to. And I admire a peripheral stated goal which is to united discrete scientific disciplines in the pursuit of truth. There's an aside about that I found thought-provoking:

"Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole? [...] Since the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness has been toward analysis rather than synthesis. As a result our age is one of ever-increasing specialization... In consequence the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments... [F]ew experts on the Grail romances have been historians... Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to "factual" records and documents... To suggest to such a historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy, even though Schliemann, more than a century ago, discovered the site of Troy by dint of careful reading of Homer."

I love this as a defense of "fiction" as often being a greater aid of truth than "non-fiction" and as an exploration of what truth is generally.

Fauna

#BooksOf2025

1. Less by Andrew Sean Greer

5.5/10

GOOD: Funny, engaging, well-written
BAD: Blow-by-blow from a single perspective, self-indulgent

Finished my first novel of 2025 last night (though I read the majority of it in 2024). Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It was fine. Engaging and fun and a few very funny lines, eg:

His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.

The fact that it's not dissimilar from stuff I've written and gotten nowhere with, and that it won the Pulitzer probably played no small part in engendering some bitterness... But it also does the thing that I used to love and can't stand anymore, which is to paint as realistic a world in which literary novelists have any sort of recognition or relevance.

The protagonist, Arthur Less, is an aging novelist, and a minor one by all accounts, who finds fans among the working class he encounters in different countries. It's writer porn. By writers and for writers.

There's also an under-developed thread that turns out, in the end, to be the big pay-off, which felt a bit pat and uninteresting.

I'm also a bit squeamish with male physical intimacy, and there's that throughout the book, though it's perfectly tasteful, but it probably didn't help its chances of winning me over.

When I first moved into my little studio on E. 9th Street in November of 2021, I kept things pretty spartan for quite awhile. Slowly started populating the space with Facebook Marketplace deals, and things like this that I encountered on the sidewalk on evening walks through the neighborhood.

This little table fit my space perfectly and became my desk. Then, when I bought my younger son a fancy PC for his birthday, I sawed out the crossbeam and moved it back to fit the tower.

I even moved the thing to my new apartment and put it in my son's bedroom closet. But after Christmas, he got other furniture for the closet and there was really no place for it, so today, it went back to the street from whence it came.

I hope it gets another chapter.

For something like 15 years now, I've kept a daily diary, using Leather Gallery's Desk Weekly Leather Planner (Open Format) - 8" x 5.5". Last night, I stuck 2024's on a pile in a cabinet and set pen to 2025's for the first time, starting the January first entry: The scene opens.

I went on to detail where the night found me, broadly, which painted a pretty positive picture in terms of all the metrics generally regarded as meaningful. I could write endlessly about God's endless indulgence and providence towards me; I've been hurling myself off increasingly tall cliffs and landing in the beds of increasingly luxuriant marshmallow-and-goose-down trucks for a long time. I'm very lucky and increasingly focused on being happy with my luck rather than fearful.

If I took any particular lesson from 2024 (other than constant reminders that I am of more value than many sparrows and will never get stones in lieu of bread), it is that many of the foundational attributes I ascribed to myself -- anxiety, sadness, laziness -- were either misattributed or not-particularly-relevant derivatives of my real core quality: cowardice.

Which is a promising diagnosis, as I think it has more ready remedies than the others. Namely, patience and gratitude (or patience, experience, and hope).

I'm always grateful for fatherhood as it provides such great illustrations of God's perspective. It annoys me when my sons worry about things that are far beyond them and really only my concern. The affordability of something, managing certain details, etc... And it saddens me to see how it can dampen what should be a purely positive experience I've afforded them.