Great Literature thread...

Okay, class. Pay attention.

I finally went to see "The Da Vinci Code" last weekend. I thought about the same of it as I had of Dan Brown's novel. Not exactly up there with "The Grapes Of Wrath," but I found it a crackling good yarn. Which is what I was looking for.

Naturally, the critics have been as savage to the movie as they were to the book. "It's the worst sort of bubble-gum entertainment," supposedly.

Well...I beg to differ. "The Da Vinci Code" is, in my opinion, the BEST sort of bubble-gum entertainment. What's so bad about that?

If I had to choose whether to be a little-read literary genius, or a multi-million selling spinner of yarns and tall tales, well...to be honest, gimme those millions of sales, Baby! (Of course, I'd really rather be a million-selling literary genius, but only one pipe dream at a time, please.)

And yet, what makes great art? Is it something that touches the very depths of one's soul, or is it simply a matter of numbers? If I write a novel that speaks to Great And Noble Truths, how effective is my message if only a few thousand people see it? On the other hand, if a story shallow as a puddle gets millions of people talking about it, is that necessarily bad?

And what about the quality of the work? If millions of people like Stephen King's writing, he must be doing something right.

One of the reasons I like writing erotica is the challenge of it. Writing about sex is seen as such an unseemly genre that people just assume the quality of the work is non-existent. Crafting an entertaining and arousing story that still digs something up from the Great And Noble Truth section of the brain is a daunting task, and I enjoy taking a stab at it.

My first lit professor in college was a bubbly, charming grad student who rarely wore a bra. (Why do I remember that so vividly?) She kept enthusiastically pumping us up about our book assignments, arguing that the novels we were reading, (The Red And The Black, The Golden Bowl, and something else I don't remember: the theme was adultery in literature) were great because they were in part about sex; that touching on these themes was part of what made them great and worthy of discussion.

I do remember something else she said that stuck with me: "Great literature is a book you want to read again."

So how about it, sports fans? Are the critics off base to slam "The Da Vinci Code" so mercilessly? Could they just be jealous of sixty-one million sales? What good is a "great book" that nobody has read?

Talk amongst yourselves.