Moot Thoughts & Musings

Peyton Manning (some NFL football player I have never heard of but now know as a real, nice guy) was Santa to the students at the school where Chris teaches. All the teachers and students had a limit of $20 to spend on books at Barnes and Noble. So, this morning, they loaded up the school buses and took the boys shopping. (It's an all-boys school.) I went along, too, to see Chris in his element (without actually having to go to school) and to help with crowd control (i.e. guarding the entrance to the CD section--off limits). I got to pick out a book, too. I got a little book on cookies full of great recipes that my mom has and that I'm always pining for this time of year. Since the cookie book is a bargain deal, it was super cheap, and I had enough left over to pick up Umberto Eco's newest novel now in paperback, Baudolino. I enjoyed The Name of the Rose, the novel for which he is probably most famous, at least in the English speaking world. Though I must say, TNotR's ending was a little disappointing to me, because the reason I liked it was how well it got into the mind and rhythm of monastic life. The scene where the youth-protagonist stands in front of the cathedral door for the first time and is overcome by the carvings of the Last Judgement is priceless! It's his historical imagination in that moment that is simply brilliant. So when the book turns into a murder mystery, it's a little disappointing, but then, that is what makes us continue to turn the pages. He's not Proust, after all. And if you think about Eco as a semiotician, the ending to TNotR is rather interesting. So anyway. After I make dozens of cookies, I'm looking forward to curling up with Baudolino and dipping into another corner of the postmodern, medieval historical imagination of Umberto Eco.