Umberto Eco

For a long time, social norms spread by the Church suggested that positive emotional responses, like laughter, expressed a temporary enjoyment of worldly things, and therefore a visible threat to moral purity.

In the eyes of the medieval church, as Umberto Eco suggests in his novel The Name of the Rose, 1980, laughter could be seen as a kind of daytime orgasm or ejaculation, the waking counterpart to the nocturnal emissions, i.e., wet dreams, that doctrine excused as involuntary and a shameful public display of earthly pleasure uncontrolled by spiritual discipline.

but that reading is reductive.

Women's emotional expressions in general, and their laughter in particular, have often been policed more closely than men's.

Before I get going with all the questions, though, I would like to know, what are you reading today?

Today? Well, I usually read a couple of things at once, John, but the one that's at the forefront is a graphic novel, of course, and it is a French edition of, let's see if I translate it would be, it's a graphic novel based on the famous novel by Umberto Eco called The Name of the Rose, so in French, Le Nom de Rose, and it is really well done.

I remember that movie edition with Sean Connery.

I'm sure there's a lot of variation between the film and the book, but interesting graphic novel that's come to be.

And I am reading from a website called sacredarchitecture.org, by the way, in case anyone [chuckles] wants to follow up on any of this.

Um, "Umberto Eco," the article continues, "describes it as the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone's looking at or seeing the object.

The rationality that belongs to every form is the light which manifests itself to aesthetic seeing." Now, the third word in Edward Abbey's prose is veritas, but Thomas Aquinas didn't use veritas or truth in this triptych.

The word he used was consonantia, proportionality, the view that the dimensions of an object should suitably correspond to other physical objects as well as to a metaphysical ideal or end.

So definitely mystery and romance are both, you know, mainstays to her career.

One other author that I might add to this list is someone who was an academic philosopher, Umberto Eco, who in 1980 published the Italian version of The Name of the Rose, and then it was translated and published in English in 1983.

So this is a medieval historical mystery that I think has, you know, some philosophical elements and kind of exploration of some pretty big themes.

But it is consistently listed as one of like the top mysteries of all time.

yeah.

And can you sum up Oasis for me in one sentence? Yeah, well, I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Liam's a town crier and Noel's a poet, and that's always, for me, a perfect combination.

If there was one word to sum Oasis up, what would that word be? Trousers.

They've got so much time for their fans and everything.

mistake yeah i don't know but it's funny It's funny, yeah, all of the different, the way he's sort of just describing a library.

And it's funny because a contemporary and a countryman of his, Umberto Eco, had this thing about like the library being like, you'll never complete it.

Like you'll buy books, you'll add to it.

And, you know, you're never just going to get to all of those books, but it's good.

And I think there's that irreverence and that humility that treats with equal care and fascination the whole spectrum of the human experience.

So Umberto Eco does this really well, at the same time that he is writing such dense and rich passages about history and philosophy.

He's also making fun of everybody in every story.

Borges is great at this.