How this works

It’s convoluted, how this works. I looked up the word “Mendacious” because I needed the Latin root, to correlate something from the first half of Dan Brown’s Inferno. Good book, too, which is what this is really about.

I’ve take to reading, at least some books, with an iPad close by to define, fact-check, or correlate data. Like “Shakespeare’s death mask.” From my recollection, there wasn’t one, so how to have one turn up more than 200 years later? Suspect, at best.

That search dumped cleanly into a site that called “Blogging Shakespeare,” which handily, and with good repute, summarily debunked the purported death mask.

The joy of the libraries of the world, now with commentary, readily available, makes literary life easier.

So the quick comment about Shakespeare’s death mask seems to lack substance. Still, a new Shakespeare website is always welcome.

“The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called denial.” (p. 214)

So how this works? I keep fewer and fewer books in my personal library, but a couple of the Dan Brown books are keepers, more for arcane bits than scrappy plot and torrid story-telling. What the continuity lacks, the literary and trivial minutiae more than makes up for.

From Inferno, Dante’s hat, any connection to other literary figures, especially A Confederacy of Dunces? Bueller?