Word: arcana
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Stone takes his time putting all the elements of an enormously complicated plot into place. Much religious arcana are offered: "How the Kabbalistic doctrine of ayin, the unknowable element in which the Infinite exists, had its Hindu cognate in the concept Nishkala Shiva, the remote absolute." Reading the first half of Damascus Gate can, at such moments, feel like a long uphill trek...
Despite such eloquent partisanship, which he sustains in The Blood and the Shroud, Wilson is punctiliously fair minded, always printing the other side's opinion before politely taking issue with it. He delights in sindonology's varied arcana. The new book touches on such points as Roman graffiti, the readouts of a machine called the VP-8 Image Analyzer, grisaille (monochrome gray) painting and the feeding habits of the ibis. He discusses the musculature of the brow and the existence of the twill-and-herringbone weave in ancient Palestinian linen, and in a footnote he downplays the possibility that...
...feel like what distinguished the group was an interest in the real world. As intellectuals, what really distinguishes them is that they really wanted to do things relevant to real world situations--they weren't arguing fine points of arcana. My feeling is that intellectual argument is an inherently interesting thing, not only an important thing; there's drama there. People in New York have said to me that we were selling out crowds around the block, and people were surprised. People said this is a political film, that political films do not draw well. Now we'll see what...
...Sudbury, Mass., and Boca Raton, Fla. Academic involvement in the discipline has multiplied, as have tangential pop artifacts like the best-selling Bible Code and an X-Files episode about a golem, the Jewish proto-Frankenstein monster. Publishers are turning out dozens of titles on subjects ranging from arcana to kids' Kabbalah. Most intriguing, mysticism is increasingly viewed as the answer to what United Jewish Appeal officer Alan Bayer calls "a hungry, thirsty, bottle-of-water-in-the-desert need for connection with transcendent meanings" among ordinary Jews. Concludes Brandeis University professor Arthur Green, a scholar and advocate of mysticism...
Tartikoff was not just the most successful TV programmer in history, he seemed to be having the most fun at it. He never tired of discussing the arcana of scheduling or parsing the reasons for a particular show's demise. The programmers who followed him could talk the talk, but they lacked his verve, instincts and humor. (Once, asked if he had anything else to offer if his new fall schedule fizzled, he replied, "My resignation.") Tartikoff truly loved TV--even the crummy stuff he put on between hits like Miami Vice and L.A. Law--and all that went into...