by Jon Lackman | 4 August 2006 | Books
From blogger Bostonianne: “A couple of years ago while on vacation in Florida with my parents, I was, naturally, watching television in the hotel room. They had taken me to Disney World for my twentieth birthday, an extraordinarily sweet gesture that was somewhat complicated by the fact that my parents positively loathe amusement parks … So, on this particular sunny Florida morning, my parents watched in abject horror as I completely flipped out at Good Morning America. Confused by my outrage, horrified by the seemingly endless stream of obscenities, and, in every possible way, at their wits’ end, they slipped away to the hotel swimming pool. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not entirely insane. That morning I had, in fact, been provoked. You see, Matt Lauer was interviewing an author I’d never heard of before who was releasing a new book. This author, who struck me as an imminently hate-able pretentious twat, was talking about how he did not consider himself an art historian, but a ‘symbologist.’ I became increasingly infuriated as he compared the relative merits of art history and ‘symbology,’ failing to address the most obvious difference between the two, namely the fact that one of these disciplines is real, and one of them is not. The absurdity of what he was saying, the obvious lack of respect for art history and art historians, and his self-satisfied tone made me absolutely furious. As many of you may have already guessed, this author was Dan Brown and the book was ‘The Da Vinci Code.’”
