Review of "god is not Great"

My review, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, of a pretty good book I read a while back and just finished rereading. 

god is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens

A must read for any freethinking person who still practices or defers to religion. I didn't find anything startlingly new, but Hitchens makes a strong case that religion is both false and destructive. Then he addresses counter-arguments to his case, and concludes with the hope of a “new enlightenment.”

Hitchens’ argument is well constructed and informed by his many years of travel, journalistic experience, and reading. He writes with sharp wit and great, highly literate style, dissecting and sometimes flaying his subject.

I can't quite give this book five stars because he sometimes lost focus and missed opportunities to develop his ideas. It's a fairly short book, and I would have liked more on alternatives to religion. For example, it seems clear to me that religion is so transparently false that it would not still be with us unless many people felt a great psychological need for it to such extent that the need will be satisfied in one way or another. So if people need to feel persecuted, or an authoritarian father figure, or can't accept death, or whatever (I really don't know what people want), then some person or institution, a religion or dictatorial political system, will be more than happy to fill that need, and so what is to be done about that? Hitchens states that most people are capable to the extent that we can avoid this pitfall, but I don't know.

Book Review: Out of Such Darkness, by Robert Ronsson

This could have been a very good novel. Ronsson writes with flair and style, the descriptions are sharp and vivid, the dialog witty and in tune with the characters. The narrative voices—especially that of Cameron Mortimer—are engaging, and the story moves along at a brisk pace. More important, the story has something to say, draws parallels between 1930’s Germany and America at the beginning of the 21^st century, and relates the inside lives of individuals with larger historical events. It’s actually a pretty good story, and interesting.

The problem for me is that the author seems to trying to tie his book to Cabaret, as though hitching it to its wagon. I have no problem with the book drawing inspiration from the play, or its having a character who is haunted by the ghost of Cabaret’s MC, or even marketing the book as having been inspired by the play; but there appears to be a deliberate marketing effort going on within the story itself, that left me cold. I would consider reading another book by this author that didn’t contain that element.

Where You Go When You Die

I’m not really sure about any of this but I think maybe after you die if anything happens it goes something like this: You find yourself standing in a universe of light. God walks up and shows a scene with a lot white-robed people on clouds, playing harps. Maybe you see your mother and your spouse are there, and you can be reunited with them, and wait for your children to come along.

But what if you don’t want that? Like maybe you had too many obligations in life, and you just want a vacation. The minute you walk through the gate all your relatives are going to be grabbing at you; everybody wants a piece of you just when you thought you’d gotten away from all that. Or maybe you never had children and/or weren’t such a good person. You might not want to see your relatives and they might not want to see your sorry face either. Or maybe the whole scene just looks boring. What exactly do you plan to do up there? How will you fill the time? So you ask God if there’s some other place you can go instead.

So God shows you another scene, where people are running around fighting and screaming, chasing each other around with blowtorches and so forth, everybody both an inflictor and victim of misery and suffering. If you’re a bad person, this might look like fun. All your friends will be there; most of your enemies too, and you can settle any unsettled scores with them.

Maybe you were never the inflictor, only the victim, not of other people but of God himself. If you’ve lived a life of pain, illness, and tragedy, or are close to such a person, then any option free of suffering might look good to you, but you’d have to wonder why God did that to you in the first place.

The whole idea, the way the afterlife is set up, is that you get to choose; God's not going to send you anywhere you don't want to go. The only caveat is that once you’ve made your choice you can’t change it. But there’s a whole spectrum of different places to choose from, and probably you have the additional choice of simply ceasing to exist. Suppose that, even though God might be Love, in life you’ve found that love, for all the good it may or may not be, does carry a lot of baggage when it moves in on you, and you’ve decided you want to travel light for a change, leave people alone and have them leave you alone. What’s wrong with that? You can go to hell for all anybody cares, and that’s the beauty of it: Nobody cares; you’re free.

Probably something moderately hellish is the place for me. I’d do a little sightseeing, then look around for a quiet place, maybe a crevice in the rock, crawl in and try to get some sleep. If somebody starts stabbing at me with a pitchfork or something,  I won’t feel obligated to put up with it and be polite about it.  I’ll stab him back, give as good as I get, make that guy wish he’d never screwed with me.

One request I’d ask God is if I could have a cat. I’ll bet there are plenty of cats in hell, so having one of my own shouldn't be a problem. Who knows, I may even see Princess and Scuffy again, but they probably won’t remember me, and I might not even recognize them anyway. The only thing I know for sure is they’re not in heaven.

It might be that life without death has no meaning, and that any conceivable afterlife gets boring after a while. The whole thing is probably beyond mortal conception anyway, so I don’t know if there’s even any use in talking about it.

I’d have to have made more of my life on earth before I could start expecting anything more. I can’t imagine a better place or time than right here and now, and that’s enough for me.

Nothing without Freedom

Warning: The following contains scenes of horrifically twisted and gruesome introspection not suitable for mature readers.

Seriously, the following is just me talking to myself, though of course I welcome readers or I wouldn't be posting it in the first place. After two years of false starts, finally I think maybe I've got a potentially terrific blockbuster of a fiction story I've been working on, but today I got sidetracted into writing this. Tomorrow I get back to working on that story I'm really excited about. Anyway, here's today's brain droppings (love George Carlin, though this is in a different vein).

If the place where you stand (your attitude) is not useful in the larger place where you find yourself, you might consider moving to a different place, which might simply mean finding a more appropriate line of work (where you can actually be of some use) or new friends with common interests. Change your attitude (viewpoint, the place you stand) not in relation to the place in which you find yourself, but find a completely different place altogether, in which your bad attitude might be a good attitude. The best time to do this is early in life, though it’s never too late to make a change.

Where I come from, when The Man hands you a shovel you start digging, and you keep your head down and your mouth shut and keep digging until he tells you to stop. I never knew anything different, and so I kept digging, and never stopped for even long enough to think about it. Did I know that hole was never going to be deep enough to satisfy him? I can’t remember.

The Man just wouldn’t say stop, wouldn’t quit. Not that he was doing anything but standing up there looking down on me and occasionally kicking dirt on top of my head for amusement, but he wouldn’t quit with that, just standing there doing nothing. The Man appeared to me as the boss, but it could have been the classic Freudian father/son deal; or he might even have been me. Yet in the end (which I see more clearly as I get closer to it) the responsibility falls on the individual, if for no other reason than that he is the only one that can change himself, who alone has that freedom.

I can’t resist blowing some smoke, self-serving I’ll admit but there might be some truth in it: In the US anyway, the power that government exerts over the individual is actually minimal. The government never gave me any real trouble unless I had it coming, and I think the laws for the most part are meant to keep people from violating the freedom of others, which seems to me like a good deal and the way it should be. I don’t see how people who the first time they don’t get their own way will straight off present themselves as victims of “tyranny.” If they want tyranny (and I suspect they do), and if they know as much as they claim, then they ought to be capable of building a time machine by which to travel to Nazi Germany where they’ll be happy.

Social institutions are far more coercive than the US government (at least in regards to its own citizenry), but even social institutions with all their braingames will generally leave you be as long as you perform the rituals and feign respect; though that seems to be changing of late, as the coercion is becoming more devious and forceful, as the legitimate authority of constitutional representative government is being deliberately and treasonously undermined. It’s all being engineered by big corporations advised by psychologists and motivational experts, who now that they’ve taken almost all the money (stashing it along with their allegiance in foreign countries instead of investing it here) find themselves still unsatisfied, and so shift the object of their greed from money to power. Like kids playing King of the Hill, the alliances change whenever somebody gets knocked out of the game.

I can’t blow smoke forever, and when it clears the real dictator stands as he always has, oneself. If there are overly restrictive limits to freedom, you haven’t even gone anywhere near those limits, so don’t complain. Nobody really can make you do anything you don’t want to. The problem may have to do with confused motivations, and I think we usually end up getting what we want but what we want is not always what we think we want. Maybe we should call in a shrink, get one of those motivational experts in there, inside your (no, my) head, to help figure this thing out. Nah, because I can figure all I want and it will be just me stalling my actually doing anything about it. The trick (talking to myself now) is to simply get your head screwed on straight, find out what you want and then go out and get it.

But when you’ve been holding that shovel all your life it’s not so easy to pry your fingers from it and start the long climb out of that hole.

Guilty

While going over some old stuff long buried in my computer, I came across this bit I'd all but forgotten, something I'd written for my novel "In a Cat's Eye" but there wasn't room enough to include it so I left it out. I know blog posts are supposed to be brief, but this will be a long one. The narrator is an emotionally detached, psychologically fragmented young man of limited intellect. He's been trying to track down a killer, and incriminated himself in the process.

There was a fly walking upside down on the ceiling and I wished I was him instead of me. He was looking down at the detective and me sitting at the table and water was falling on the table and I thought, “That guy’s crying; he’s guilty.”

It looked like I’d finally solved the case. I thought, Great detective work, Willy.

“It was an accident,” I said. I figured my whole life was an accident and it didn’t matter anymore.

“Are you sorry?” the detective said.

I put my face in my hands and shut my eyes, because I wanted everything to go away.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why not try writing a letter to Cindy and tell her just how sorry you feel?”

I figured if I wrote the letter like the detective said, then I could get it over with. I didn’t see how Cindy’d ever get the letter though. The detective gave me a pen and some paper and left the room, and once I started writing I really got into it. The letter said:

Dear Cindy,

How are you? I am fine. I’m sorry I killed you. I thought it was Roy but it was me all along. The Major said I was guilty, and he’s a pretty smart guy and he’s my friend and  he never lied to me. The good news is now they won’t have to send him to the nut house because they’re sending me to prison instead. Don’t worry it’s okay. If I had asked you out sooner, you wouldn’t have taken drugs and gone out with Roy and none of this would have happened. If I had just stayed with you that night, I wouldn’t have come in through your window and killed you, because I would have been in your room with you already and I would have saved you. It doesn’t matter whether it was me or Roy that came in through the window and gave you the hot shot, because either way if I’d been there with you I wouldn’t have let anybody hurt you.

The detective says I  made Mr. Scruffy up and he isn’t real so I don’t know maybe he isn’t. All I know is I don’t want to go back to the hotel if he won’t be there anymore. It’s just as well if he isn’t real because now the police won’t take his eye out and Bessie won’t kick him out of the hotel. I never should have made him up in the first place.  None of this was his fault. Don’t worry about him because I’ll get a message to Gloria and I know she’ll take care of him and give him his cat food when I’m in prison. It’s the only place where I understand what anybody’s talking about half the time. I could always talk with you, though.

When the Major hypnotized me he said I forgot all the bad things I did. That’s probably why I can’t remember ever killing you, but if I ever did kill you, then I wouldn’t want to remember that, and I’d probably blame Roy because I don’t like him. I still think Roy gave you a hot shot, but who knows and it doesn’t make any difference now anyway.

Sometimes you have to say crazy things or people get mad at you, and I think maybe I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t sometimes. I still don’t understand all of it, but I think it’s like one time I heard somebody saying this friend of mine got fired, and I ran over to the guy’s house to make sure he was okay, and he wasn’t even burned. He said, “Don’t worry Willy nobody burned me I just lost my job that’s all.” Then he said maybe he did get burned in a way, because he lost his job and got fired. We both laughed so hard and it was funny, but I still don’t like when they say somebody got fired, because I always see a guy standing in the middle of a fire and then I can’t breathe. You can go to prison for murder if you’re guilty, but you don’t have to kill anybody, it’s bad enough if you leave somebody alone and they die. It’s like if you got fired doesn’t mean you really get burned, but in a way you do. When you do something bad you get burned, and I guess we both got burned, didn’t we, Cindy?  I know you didn’t do anything so bad, though. I don’t know who’s guilty and who isn’t anymore. You’d have to be a lawyer to figure it all out.

I almost got your statue back for you but it got broke. It’s okay and don’t worry about it.

For a long time I didn’t ask you out because I had to think I wasn’t good enough for you. Now I know you’re not the Virgin Mary and you made mistakes just like I did, but that’s okay, because it’s something we have in common. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t figure all this out until it was too late. We could have had a good life together, and it’s all my fault that it turned out the way it did.

They say I have illusions, and I guess they’re right. But you know of all the crazy things that happened, the idea of you and me and what we could have had together is the only thing that I know for sure wasn’t an illusion. It was maybe a dream that didn’t come all the way true, but it was never an illusion. Maybe we both had bad circumstances and that’s why we would have been good together.

 It’s too bad you ever had to get mixed up with me. I hope you don’t hold things too much against me and that you know I can’t help sometimes being sorry, on account of my mother was sorry when she had me. But I was never sorry when I was with you. I’ll think about you every day of my life, and think about the good times we had and I won’t be sorry about that, only that it didn’t turn out better.

 If I don’t hear back from you, then I’ll never know if you didn’t get this letter or if you just don’t want to talk to me, so Cindy if you hear me let me know. You don’t have to write a letter, just talk to me, so we can talk again like we used to. I know you’re dead, so maybe you can’t hear or talk anymore, but we might as well make the best of it and at least pretend we can still talk and you can tell me all about how things are where you are. I promise I’ll hear you even if you can’t talk anymore.

Wow this is a long letter. The detective just came in and asked if I was done yet, so I guess I am. They’re going to take me to my cell now and maybe the guys will be playing cards or something like that, and I can get away from the detective and the cop and their crazy questions. The detective’s not a bad guy, but I don’t like that cop.

Your friend,

Willy

I asked the detective if he had an envelope, and he went out to get one, and he said he had to take the letter with him so he could get the right envelope for it. I didn’t like him taking the letter, but it was no use arguing with the guy. I figured he was probably going to read it one way or another.

He was gone for a long time and then he came back and I said I thought of more things I wanted to put in the letter, but he said he mailed it already.

Book Review of Death of the Detective

I read this book when was first published, and am happy to see it reissued in both paper and electronic format. Upon re-reading it from the perspective of an older person I better appreciate its considerable depth and scope. I was a student of the author around the time the book was first published and nominated for the National Book Award, a fact I should mention though I don’t think it prejudices my review of the book.

The story and subplots all succeed individually and as they’re interwoven. The reader gets a vivid vision of the city of Chicago in the late 1950’s, a city I’ve never visited or seen except from the window of a plane.  It is partly this vision that weaves or binds the many elements into a rich tapestry. Imagine an intricate and detailed pen and ink drawing of an apartment building with the wall cut away, hundreds of people going about their daily lives in their homes, a spaghetti-like complex of highways jammed with vehicles, planes in the sky, people on the streets, the details of which can only be seen with a magnifying glass, and also seeing the entire picture, sort of like some of the drawings of Peter Aschwanden. The picture is both microcosmic and macrocosmic.

A particular scene of many that might come to mind describes the detective Magnuson walking through alleys that many years earlier he had used to walk to and from work. There apparently are or were all these wide alleys in Chicago which serve as unofficial pedestrian arteries. On either side are the backyards of homes, so there’s this whole insular world of families and neighbors and passers-by that is unseen by visitors, known only to Chicagoans. The descriptions of scenes and characters in this book are extraordinary, Dickensian as other reviewers have said.

This is a book to be read again and again. When I read it as a young man, I couldn’t grasp it in its totality, but particular chapters I would read numerous times, enthralled with the large cast of secondary characters, including gangsters, small time punks, a young man in search of his roots, working class people enjoying themselves at a Polish American picnic, and more, too much to tell about here, all the good and the bad in human nature personified. The chapters concerning the main character Magnuson did not so much interest me then as they do now, and his evolution—or his disintegration, depending on how you look at it—stands out for me upon reading the book now.

Some reviewers have thought the prose to be overwrought or florid in places, and there might be something in that. It did seem to me that in some spots the author might have been reaching some in trying to define and convey the thoughts and feelings and memories of Magnuson. He is a somewhat uncommunicative character who keeps much to himself, who is both famous and unknown, a pillar of the city and yet alien to it, whose mystery I can only partly solve.

There’s so much I want to say about this book,  but every word I don’t write puts you the reader of this review one word closer to reading the book instead of reading this. The Death of the Detective is enthralling from cover to cover any which way you read it. It’s probably more in the literary than detective genres, but it’s both. Download a free sample from an online retailer and see if it doesn’t pull you in and leave you wanting to read more.

Been doing a lot of reading during this cold and snowy winter, and unable to do much else since smacking my head on the ice in January. The reverberations in my head have finally calmed down, and I'm starting to write some reviews of recently read books. In books I'm always looking for something that looks at life from a different angle, and "Kockroach" by Tyler Knox certainly fits the bill. Here's my review:

Kockroach wakes one morning to find his body has been morphed into that of a human. A horrible development for sure, but cockroaches don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the past. So Kockroach leaves his colony and ventures forth into the bright light and the strange society of humans. Cockroaches have been around for millions of years and will probably still be here long after humans are gone, because they are very adaptable, so it’s no surprise that Kockroach finds a pair of sunglasses and quickly learns to adapt to his new condition, observing human behavior from the shadows in which he lurks, then gradually interacting with humans, imitating their sounds and gestures until he learns the language and modes of behavior. Cockroaches are self-centered creatures whose every instinct is pointed to survival. A cockroach wants only food, sex, dominance, and security within the colony; a lot like humans, in other words. So Kockroach fits right in, and not only adapts, but thrives and prospers. How can this be, when so many humans try and fail? What makes Kockroach different is that he is unscrupulous. When he plays the human game, he plays to win. And win he does, climbing the ladder of success first in the mafia, then in the extermination business, leaving behind a trail of betrayal and ruined lives. But Knockroach doesn’t care, because it’s just not the way his brain is wired. As the book ends Kockroach has his sights set on the supreme prize, and I have a feeling he’s going to win it.

Kockroach is a blast to read cover to cover, loaded with humor and insight. The author knows a lot about cockroaches, and gets you to really feel for this seemingly heartless character. Kockroach does have feelings, and the passages describing the safety and security he felt within the swarming mass of his fellows, crawling over one another and happily chirping, touching antennae and smelling each other’s pheromones and so forth, are really quite moving, in a strange kind of way.

Kockroach may not gain a place among the great classics of literature, but I found it an inventive, wonderfully quirky and offbeat novel, thoroughly entertaining and beautifully written, unlike anything else I’ve read. I really enjoyed this book.