David Byrne has this weird little book out — it looks like a red Gideon bible, with the title — “The New Sins” — stamped in gold leaf on the cover. Inside, it looks like a weird, vaguely Satanic bible, with strange chapters and verses interspersed with lush and faintly surreal images. This British review of the book sums it up neatly.
Byrne is often witty – “Our loved ones demand honesty, but what they really want is better fiction” – and sometimes wise – “One would do well to be suspicious of all things sweet and cuddly” (and, we might add, of those cuddliness-mongers who promise to make the world safe for our children). In its goofy way, this book works like such earlier instances of Christian satire as Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, or Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It frees up religious apprehensions from their tendency to petrify over time into ethical codes or mere patterns of social conformity, more or less strictly enforced by more or less plausible leaders in whose hands lie merit awards, penalty points and, should the need arise, depleted uranium.
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