Auxiliary Memory

How Religious Concepts Are Spread Like Computer Viruses

This is a book review of Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels, but I’m going to go about it in a very round about way.

How the Concept of Heaven Came to Be

Once up a time there was a man named Jesus. He was an ordinary human. He was not divine. He was not God. We know next to nothing about Jesus and can’t even prove he existed. We are fairly sure he did exist and that he said some interesting things about compassion and love, but even that is speculation. We know if he existed that he died. Everyone dies.

After he died his friends began to remember him through oral story telling. He must have made a great impression on them. At first they told stories about what he preached. Those stories were told to other people. The stories spread and grew. Story tellers began to embellish on those stories and Jesus became something new.

The storytellers developed a whole life around Jesus, telling more than than just messages. He was deified. He was giving magical powers. And the stories grew and grew. Decades after his death people began collecting those stories and writing them down. Some of those stories were attributed to men who had known Jesus personally, but it’s doubtful those men actual wrote the gospels. Then a man named Saul had a vision from Jesus, and he began preaching about Jesus and spread stories about Jesus far and wide, especially to people who were not Jews, to the pagans. Saul became Paul and invented Christianity. The myths of Jesus caught fire in the minds of men living around the Mediterranean in the first century.

We know dead people can’t talk to the living. We know the dead don’t return to Earth. We know the people in the first century were very ignorant, illiterate and superstitious. We know the followers of Jesus were marginalized people. We know the followers of Jesus were persecuted. We know the poor people of the first century lived extremely hard lives. They wanted escape from cruelty, poverty and death. They believed the stories of Jesus. They believed because they had nothing else.

As the stories about Jesus spread, what was promised to the believers of Jesus? Jesus could conquer disease and death. Jesus promised eternal life. Jesus was God, and he could give you anything you wanted if only you believed. Ideas about Jesus became very powerful ideas. Ideas about Jesus eventually overthrew the Roman Empire. Ideas about Jesus have survived for two thousand years and spread to billions of people.

We know life after death is not real. We know God does not exist. We know people aren’t born from virgin birth. We know magic does not exist. So how did these ideas survive and spread? How is belief in fantasies so much more powerful than reality?

Words and ideas do have power. Ideas and concepts do spread. Belief and fantasy is far more powerful than facts and reality.

The logic against God is overwhelming, but the power of belief is even more powerful than logic. Why?

Jesus no longer exists. Ideas about Jesus do exist and are so powerful as to almost be indestructible. Ideas about Jesus aren’t immortal, but as long as believers exist they will thrive and spread. How are ideas able to become this powerful and spread so thoroughly?

Heaven

There was a time when the concept of heaven didn’t exist. The idea of an afterlife is so old that it’s impossible to trace. We think Neanderthals believed in an afterlife. We know the Egyptians believed in an afterlife. The ancient Jewish people didn’t. One Jewish friend told me once that if modern Jews think of heaven or life after death it’s because they’ve been corrupted by Christianity. I’m not sure Jesus promised an afterlife, but sometime after he died, his followers started using the promise of eternal life as a selling point for Christianity.

Where did the idea of heaven come from? Well, one specific place is the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It describes Heaven quite specifically that is completely different from most people’s concept of heaven today. How did the heaven in the Book of Revelation get to be the heaven we know today? And which heaven. It seems every person that’s heard of the concept imagines it differently.

The Tree of Ideas – Forking Branches

Here’s a chart I’ve borrowed from the Internet to show how ideas branch, and how new ideas even merge with other ideas. If I were to give a chart that tracked this history of the concept of heaven it would have billions of nodes.

In the computer world when programmers argue over a programming project, they’ll split into two groups and each take the source code and develop new versions separately, in the manner each want. That’s called forking. Judaism and Christianity are a fork. Judaism and Islam are a fork. Christianity and Mormonism are a fork. Every different Protestant sect is a fork. Every personal view of The Bible is a fork. Some people want to believe in the literal truth of The Bible and cut out all the middle forks of religion, but every personal interpretation is a fork.

But smaller ideas fork too. Religions are composed of many, many concepts, even thousands, so it’s very hard to pinpoint any whole subject exactly because it’s components are always forking and mutating.

If God exists and is all powerful he could just appear in the sky, on every TV, on every cell phone, on every computer screen, on every Game Boy, once a year and tell us all who is is and what he wants from us. The Book of Revelation is like many of the books of The Bible where the writer is extorting its readers to all act the same way and it uses the fear of God as the stick and the promise of heaven as the carrot.

Go read The Book of Revelation. Use this link which has a modern easy to understand translation. The Book of Revelation has the most descriptive accounts of heaven and hell in all of The Bible. Read it carefully. The Book of Revelation’s description of heaven sounds no different from hell to me. Here is the description of heaven:

10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.

13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west.

14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls.

16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long.

17 He measured its wall and it was 144 cubits thick, by man’s measurement, which the angel was using.

18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass.

19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald,

20 the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.

21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass.

22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb

2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

From this description most concepts of heaven have forked. Heaven is a meme that entered the collective consciousness almost two thousand years ago and has infected our minds like a virus ever since. It has forked so many times that it’s impossible to reassemble all the mutant paths. Nonetheless, heaven is just an idea, that’s all. It’s an idea people want to be real, but it’s not.

Is this your image of heaven, a building that one translation of measurements of the time would make it slightly smaller than Australia, with no sun or moon or sky, lit only by the light of God. Some people rationalize The Book of Revelation by claiming it’s symbolic, but then why isn’t the rest of The Bible symbolic?

Does Christianity merely promise an afterlife of living in the biggest mall on Earth where you spend all your time admiring God? No, Christians loved the idea of immortality and life in heaven, but they’ve constantly reshaped each.

Heaven is an idea that has infected the world and constantly mutates. It’s an ancient meme. It’s a mental virus.

Generally, ideas, once introduced are hard to reclaim, like the contents of Pandora’s Box. But, in the early days of Christianity there was a war of ideas and many were erased from the minds of men. Or almost. See The Book of Revelation wasn’t the only book of revelation going around when they assembled the Bible. All the others were repressed and destroyed so the one we have today is the officially divine version. So why did early Christians insist on John of Patmos’ vision?

Book of Revelation

One of the most powerful pieces of writing that has ever existed is The Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation has inspired religions, believers and artists for eighteen centuries. If we could trace all the ideas it contained, forked, mutated, inspired and generated, the list would be staggering. The Book of Revelation has generated more false beliefs than any book in history, except maybe The Book of Genesis. However, stories about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and Noah don’t really match up to the power of the second coming, the final judgment, and life in heaven and hell. Just look at the Left Behind movement, which came from The Book of Revelation, and deeply affects politics and society today.

Again, I recommend reading The Book of Revelation in the New International Version here. It’s a fairly quick read, and for all its legendary reputation for having confusing symbolism, it’s quite straight forward and explicit once you know few historical clues. 666 is a numerical coding for Emperor Nero probably, and the whore of Babylon is Rome. Basically The Book of Revelation is a declaration of war on the Roman Empire. The Jews are God’s chosen people, the Gentiles and Pagans are evil and unworthy. Like most of the other books of The Bible, it nags the good to follow God’s laws and warns the bad of his wrath. However, this time, John is given a preview of what’s to come. Basically God and Jesus will rescue the chosen, the elect, the 144,000 people’s whose names are in God’s book, and the followers of Christ, and then kill everyone else.

Elaine Pagels, a scholar specializing in the Gnostic Gospels and Apocrypha books of The Bible just came out with Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. Her book is a short overview of The Book of Revelation, what it’s about, why it was probably written, how it’s significance grew until it was included as the final book of The Bible, and finally how it beat out many other books of revelations to become the book of revelation in the Christian belief system.

My friends often wonder why I read books about religious history. They figure since I’m an atheist I would have no interest in religion. But I am fascinated by history, information theory, science, philosophy and how ideas are created and spread. How religious concepts go viral is just as fascinating as how computer viruses are created and spread. Since humans are not computers, many people dislike this analogy, but you might be surprised that ideas are like viruses, infecting their hosts and spreading through social contact. The theory isn’t new. It’s slowly spreading itself. The science of infectious ideas is called memetics, and the idea that memes are “Viruses of the Mind” was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1991. A newer book by Richard Brodie called Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme takes this concept further.

While Dawkins and most atheists study how religious ideas are spread in our contemporary world, I find it worthwhile to go back to the beginning of Christianity and see how its most powerful memes got started in the first place. An excellent of example of this kind of study is Pagels’ book Revelations. Another book that covers the same territory Forged by Bart D. Ehrman, that also came out in 2012.

Let me be very clear in my position – anyone believing that The Book of Revelation is about anything other than 1st century politics is spinning out new memes. There is no such thing as divine revelations or prophecy. We know this is true for two reasons, science, and the fact that all people we’ve examined in modern times that proclaimed revelations or prophecy have proven to be insane. But for some reason modern people think that ancient people really did receive revelations from God and angels and were given the power to foretell the future. Those are just two of the memes that grew out of The Old Testament and even older religions. We have no way to track down the originals of those meme, revelation and prophecy. They are very ancient concepts that have spread all over the world to all religions. They probably originated separately in various parts of the world.

The Book of Revelation by John of Patmos does create many original memes we can track through the centuries. One of the most fascinating aspect of Elaine Pagels’ book, and of Forged by Bart Ehrman, is how early Christians used their religious beliefs for political purposes. Their rhetoric, tactics, motives and argumentative styles are almost identical to contemporary Christian fundamentalist thinkers and the political pundits we see today on Fox News.

The Book of Revelation has a lot of mysteries that I am not interested in. Many people want to believe that the John who wrote The Book of Revelation was also the John who wrote the Gospel of John, and many of those people want to believe that John was also the John the Apostle. Most scholars consider them three separate men. But authorship is an issue that I am interested in for a different reason.

When Jesus lived, and even that’s open for debate, he had a few followers. How did Christianity go from a few believers to billion of believers? How did the early Christians spread their ideas, especially after Rome started a program to exterminate them. How did they keep spreading their ideas until Christians were the rulers of the Roman world? How did Christians codify their beliefs into a book that spread their beliefs across the whole world? Strangely. the story is far more political than spiritual.

How did Christian ideas spread like a virus infecting untold billions of people through the centuries, even after better, and more rational ideas developed? I believe they used certain techniques that made their memes more powerful. They include:

God told us (revelation)
Jesus taught us
Jesus died and was reborn (it’s funny how people just accept this idea of proof of Christianity)
the disciples taught us (Gospels)
Jesus reveal to us after he died (Paul, John of Patmos, etc.)
we will live after we die (heaven didn’t exist as a reward until after Jesus died, but it was a huge selling point)
the scriptures taught us
allegories and coded works
forgeries, fakes and forked ideas

One way to validate your idea is to not claim those ideas are yours, but God gave them to you. Very few people get away with being a Prophet with a message from God. The next best thing is to claim your idea was given to you by a Prophet personally, these are the disciples that knew Jesus. But if you weren’t part of the original twelve how do you validate your ideas? Paul claims to have met Christ on the road to Damascus in a vision. That’s pretty convenient, and he got away with it, even though he taught a message of Christianity that was distinctively different from Peter and James and the other apostles. In today’s world there are countless people who hear from God and Jesus but we don’t take them serious.

As Bart Ehrman points out in Forged, that back in the early days of Christianity there were a lot of people with ideas, mainly political, that wanted their ideas accepted, so they wrote using another name. Ehrman shows how many Christian scholars believe several of the books in the New Testament are forgeries of this kind. Mostly people after Paul’s time using Paul’s name to get some things done. What John of Patmos does is claim he got his revelations from a vision of Christ. He was attacking Rome in an allegoric and coded document. He had to hide his true meaning because the Romans would have killed him. For centuries other people have used The Book of Revelation as the basis of their authority to attack social and political conditions in their own day. The entire second coming, left behind meme comes from The Book of Revelation, even though it was intended the first century and not the current. Coding your ideas in allegoric visions usually doesn’t work, but thousands of writers have cribbed from this story.

This kind of claiming authority worked for the first few hundred years until it became very hard to believe anyone knew the original guys, or that any of their writings were still left undiscovered. Today we always doubt people who claim they got a message from God, except that it’s been pulled off rather well twice since Christianity began, by Islam and The Church of Later Day Saints.

Today we get people who claim they know what God thinks and they try to speak for him. Here’s a horrific example that came out after the Sandy Hook killings. Watch this video till the end, so see how their logic is refuted.

The logic used by the people to promote prayer in school is the same logic that was used for form Christianity and take over the Roman Empire. There were writers in those early centuries that attacked Christianity for its illogical premises, but those works have been mostly destroyed. For a religion claiming be based on the lamb, the early Christians were as aggressive as lions. Pagels told of a bishop who foiled the power of his enemy, a powerful intellectual monk, by writing the monk’s biography and having him believe everything the bishop did.

Reading about early Christianity is the study of political power of memes. Christianity spread spiritual memes like belief in heaven and hell, but it mainly spread political ideas that developed the Catholic Church. Pagels chronicles the early Christians who believed very differently from modern Christians. The Catholic Church, which became the orthodoxy, had many opponents which the orthodoxy labeled heretical. These opponents had different ideas as to what Jesus taught. We can never know what Jesus really taught because the orthodoxy wiped out the heretics and all their writings. Well, victors always get to write history, except in the 20th century we discovered a couple caches of documents hidden by the heretics 1800 years ago. Elaine Pagels has made a life-long career of studying these documents and they give us vague tantalizing clues to the early Christian years and how various memes were created.

If religion is a virus of the mind, what is the anti-virus? Obviously logic and science are not the answer. They do work against religion, but their effective rate of cure is very slow. Scientists are learning that humans are not logical and rational, but are powerful rationalizing creatures. Most people’s desire to believe in an afterlife is so powerful they will do anything to maintain that belief. This is particularly perplexing because the details of what immortality will be like are extremely vague. Other than not dying, the most common benefit of the afterlife is getting to meet dead family and friends. Most people expect a pleasant existence in the afterlife but have no specifics of what that will involve. The Book of Revelation does provide a lot of details, but I can’t believe people actual find them appealing.

We live in a reality obscured by ideas. John the Apostle and John of Patmos did know the power of “The Word.” Like Plato they believed their ideal concepts were reality. They thought their concepts were purer than reality. Their visions became memes that have infected the minds of men ever since. Will we ever be cured of these fantasies?

We live in a world were the majority of people live lives based on delusions. They fiercely campaign for political changes based on their delusions. They demand that all people follow their delusions. They demand that all morality be based on their delusions. And many of them are willing to kill to get what they want. All for a virus of the mind.

JWH – 1/13/13

How To Change The World?

I want to change the world
I want to make it well
How can I change the world
When I can’t change myself

“Change Myself” by Todd Rundgren

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn has dozens of real life stories about exceptional women changing the world. Kristof and WuDunn are two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters who have traveled the globe, gathering thousands of facts culled from hundreds of research articles and interviews with leaders about the problems we face making women truly equal to men. Half the Sky is a gut wrenching chronicle of real life suffering, more horrific than the wretched that Victor Hugo wrote about in Les Misérables. Half the Sky is a book that will make many readers want to change the world too, although I’m afraid most will want to hide away in escapist fiction. This is an intense book about the nature of our reality.

For all the misery that Half the Sky presents, it’s important to know Half the Sky is a positive narrative about heroic women changing themselves and their communities. I doubt there will be any readers not humbled by this book. Changing the world is tremendously difficult. We’re talking theory of relativity hard, but not impossible as these stories prove so dramatically. Helping others is far more difficult than writing a check, although you should write plenty. Charity is a complex endeavor. Often helping others causes more misery, and just giving money can be corrupting.

Half the Sky is about finding the right way to help others. Half the Sky is not about helping the helpless, but finding the right female outlier who is willing to change herself dramatically with just the right amount of help. Often this is minimal to individuals, but it can be very expensive getting resources to the right women.

We need to change the way we see charity. Changing the world is about changing ourselves. And we all know how well we do with New Year’s resolutions. To help others, we have to help ourselves first, and reading Half the Sky is a start.

I’ve come to this 2009 book late, but I’ve yet to meet any of my bookworm friends that’s read it. A few months ago, PBS presented a two part documentary based on this book. It’s now available for sale and on Netflix streaming. Half the Sky is becoming a movement. I highly recommend reading the book first, because its far more educational. It will prepare you to appreciate the documentary all the more.

Americans Have Already Won The Lottery

It’s hard to think about so much suffering worlds away. We have plenty of poverty and injustice in this country, yet compared to the rest of the world, most Americans have already won the lottery – in money, freedom and equality. And we spend hundreds of billions every year on protecting our country, either through defense, foreign aid, or influence. And after eleven years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and trillions of dollars, we have not eliminated terrorism. Kristof and WuDunn point out, time and again, that terrorism is a product of male dominated societies, and that we could more effectively fight it far cheaper by just promoting the equality of women in these cultures. I don’t know if they are right, but we should try. Our expensive testosterone solutions haven’t worked, have they?

Americans are quite charitable, we give away billions of our own money to help others, but how effective are our dollars? In case after case, Kristof and WuDunn show how insanely hard it is to actually help people, even when we have the money and volunteers. You can’t just buy equality. You can’t just pay men to stop enslaving and raping women. And even when our hearts and money are in the right place, like with Three Cups of Tea and the education of girls, things get corrupted.

Read Half the Sky carefully, because it’s about creating effective business plans to change the world. That means changing ourselves. We have to help people help themselves. It’s about teaching people to fish, rather than giving them fish. It’s about education. But it’s also about how we help ourselves, our country and our culture by uplifting women in distant lands.

Even though America is a leader in gender equality, we still have a long way to go. As long as Americans bitch about paying property taxes for education, or can’t understand concepts like Title IX, or why fifty percent of Congress and corporate leadership shouldn’t be women, then we do have a long way to go, but we can still help the women elsewhere. The battles won by the women portrayed in Half the Sky should inspire us. I don’t have one millionth of the guts and determination of some of these women I read about, and I’ve had a million times more money and opportunity than they have.

With every TV show you watch, with every movie you attend, with every book you read, with every song you hear, observe closely and ask yourself do you see gender equality, freedom from sexual oppression, equal opportunity for women?

Until women are truly free and equal everywhere, most of the problems we face as an evolving species won’t be solved. It will take one hundred percent participation, and quite often as I think Half the Sky so effectively proves, it’s the inequality of women that’s causing our bigger problems.

JWH – 1/12/13

Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick is probably one of the most famous science fiction writers to ever live, but few people remember his name. At least ten of his stories have been made into motion pictures, but few people who have seen those films took the time to read the stories the films were based on. Philip K. Dick was the first science fiction author to be published by Library of America, which seeks to issue the best American writers in uniform, durable and authoritative editions. But when I bring up the name Philip K. Dick among my bookworm friends, most ask, who?

Why isn’t PKD more famous? The easy answer is writers seldom become famous, even though most writers hope for literary immortality.

Movie stars, music stars, sports stars become household names with the citizens of our pop culture, but few writers do, and especially not science fiction writers. Philip K. Dick knew this back in the 1950s when he began writing. He wanted to be more than just a science fiction writer selling stories to pulp magazines for a half cent a word.

How do writers become famous? Write an unforgettable novel! What’s the formula for doing that? Did Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott know that formula when they wrote Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol and Little Women, stories so famous they get a new film adaptation every decade or two? Philip K. Dick’s success with getting filmed should have made him more famous, but it hasn’t.

Fame is of little value itself, other than to draw attention to artistic work that might be worthy of our attention. That’s what all artists really want, to create something worthy of fame. Philip K. Dick didn’t figure his pulp writing was worthy of literary fame, so he wrote a series of mainstream novels in the 1950s hoping to prove his writing ability at observing real life in Marin County, California. Only one of those novels was even published during his lifetime, Confessions of a Crap Artist. Phil’s fame rest entirely on his science fiction, and among science fiction fans, PKD had the reputation for being weird even among the denizens of the geeky, nerdy world of science fiction fandom. I think that’s a shame because Confessions of a Crap Artist is probably his best and most sane book.

Here I am claiming that one of a minor writer’s least famous books is his best. How can that be? I’m claiming that Confessions of a Crap Artist is as least as good as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, another book about marital conflict I’ve recently read. And although I admired Freedom a good bit, I think Dick reveals better writing techniques for getting inside his characters’ heads than Franzen. Freedom is more contemporary, sophisticated, and larger in scope, and thus more suited to modern readers, but my life resonates with Confessions of a Crap Artist, so I loved it more.

To me, the goal of literary novels, as oppose to genre novels, is to observe a place and time, and get into the heads of people to chronicle their emotion conflicts and growth. Most bookworms prefer made up fictional worlds that have complicated plots and exciting characters that offer a thrill ride for their readers. Often genre fans find literary novels to be about nothing in particular, and fans of genre novels, even fans of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novels, may find Confessions of a Crap Artist boring.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is about Fay and Charley Hume’s marriage falling apart and how it’s observed by Fay’s brother. Jack Isidore, a rather oddball child man in his thirties who sees the world in a peculiar fashion. Jack is a science fiction fan, flying saucer nut, believer in crackpot ideas, thinks the world is hollow, that Mu and Atlantis existed, that people can receive telegraphic messages. He think fiction offers just as much scientific evidence about reality as nonfiction. Charley Hume calls Jack a crap artist for all his weird ideas. Jack Isidore’s extremely literal view of reality, and his poor social skills, makes me wonder if Dick had known someone with Asperger’s. That should appeal to modern readers. There are end of the world cults and mad shooters in this story too, that might also appeal to modern readers. There’s a lot to 1959 that’s very much like 2013, and that might be a selling point too.

So why should you read this book? If publishers didn’t want to publish Confessions of a Crap Artist when Dick wrote it back in 1959, why should you want to read it now? Internet Science Fiction Database shows it’s had a dozen editions from 1975-2012. Now that’s interesting. And that’s not even counting the audiobook edition I just listened to or foreign editions with alternate titles. What’s going on here? I’ve heard that 99% of all books never have a second printing, much less a second edition. Could Confessions of a Crap Artist be a minor underground classic?

I first read Confessions of a Crap Artist when it came out back in the mid-seventies, and was very impressed then. I read a couple more of PKD’s mainstream novels and thought they captured the 1950s wonderfully, but then I forgot about them. Recently many of PKD’s novels have been getting new uniform editions in book, ebook and audiobook formats and I bought several on sale from Audible.com. I started listening to Confessions of a Crap Artist just before New Year and was mesmerized by the writing. Peter Berkrot narration for the audiobook perfectly captured the first person inner thoughts of the four main characters, Jack Isidore, his sister Fay, her husband Charley, and Fay’s lover Nat Anteil.

The book also captured many wonderful details that I remember about the 1950s.

Why remember the year 1959? You could read 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, a book I’ve read twice because it’s so fascinating. You could read some of the books that came out in 1959 to try and capture the feel of that year, but if you look at the list I linked to at Wikipedia, many of the books that came out that year weren’t about 1959, they were science fiction books about the future, like Starship Troopers or The Sirens of Titan, or they were best sellers like Psycho and Goldfinger, which I hope aren’t the real 1959, or books like The Tin Drum or Hawaii, which are histories of earlier times.

I remember 1959, but just barely. I was 7 until November 25th, when I turned 8. I was living in New Jersey at the time. But over in California, Philip K. Dick was living in Marin County, and he wrote a book about life in his place and time that captures 1959 better than anything I’ve ever read before. So why would a science fiction writer back in 1959 want to write about suburban life? Well, Philip K. Dick told his publisher that he was quitting science fiction to write mainstream novels. He wrote several novels before giving up, and returned to writing science fiction. When he did, he wrote is science fiction masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle, which won a Hugo Award. I’m thinking 1959-1960 was a peak creative period for PKD.

So you might be wondering by now, why I would be trying to convince you to read a book that no publisher wanted when it was written, and was only published by a small press just seven years before the writer died in 1982, and is over 50 years old. Shouldn’t it be lame and dated? For some reason Confessions of a Crap Artist amazed me. It has a 3.63 average rating over that GoodReads, so not everyone is impressed.

Why am I so impressed and others aren’t? I hate to encourage you to go buy a book and that you read and think, “What is that Harris talking about? This book stinks!”

I’ve been reading and rereading books by Philip K. Dick most of my life. I’ve read biographies about him, read countless articles and interviews about and with him, listened to tapes of his conversations and I even visited his gravesite. I now think Confessions of a Crap Artist is Philip K. Dick’s best book. First published in 1975, but written in 1959, and in late 2012 appeared on audio from Brilliance Audio, running 8 hours and 13 minutes.

This still doesn’t answer: Why remember the year 1959? I’m not talking about nostalgia. When we read Pride and Prejudice, are we learning about 1813? When we read The Great Gatsby are we exploring 1925? When we read The New Testament, are we time traveling back to 70 AD? Yes and no. A photograph or film of 1925 or 1959 is more revealing of what reality was like than a novel or even a nonfiction book. Books give us words and ideas from a writer long ago. So Confessions of a Crap Artist is really a tour of the mind of Philip K. Dick in 1959. PKD was a certain kind of reporter about a very specific place and time.

Now I’ve mentioned before Dick was a weird guy. He has a reputation for being weird, but Confessions of a Crap Artist is vivid, exact and very sane. It’s a sane book about how everyone is crazy to one degree or another. At first you think Jack Isidore is the only Joker in the deck, but as you read on, and get into the heads of the characters, you realize there are no normal people in this story. By the time you finish the book you might be thinking there are no normal people in this world.

This is the second time I’ve “read” Confessions of a Crap Artist, or more precisely, I listened to it this time, and the narrator Peter Berkrot made it come alive in a vivid dramatic reading that caught the four principal characters perfectly. Confessions of a Crap Artist is told through four first person accounts in a round robin order, so the reader feels like they’re inside the heads of Jack Isidore, his sister Fay Hume, her husband Charley, and Fay’s lover Nat Anteil. This works much better on audio I think, especially with Peter Berkrot’s reading, because you actually feel the different personalities. PKD did a fantastic job of thinking in different POVs.

Philip K. Dick is famous for writing science fiction, but Confessions of a Crap Artist isn’t science fiction. To the public outside of the science fiction community, Philip K. Dick is known for several movies based on his novels: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Impostor, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and The Adjustment Bureau. Confessions of a Crap Artist was filmed in France in 1992 as Confessions d’un Barjo. It’s not available on Netflix and is out of print at Amazon, but some used VHS copies are available.

Charlie Hume calls his brother-in-law a crap artist because Jack Isidore collects facts about the world that most people consider nutty, stupid or insane. Jack looks to his science fiction magazines for scientific validation of reality. He’s involved with flying saucer cults, and hangs out with people who channel past lives and believes higher beings are preparing the end of the world for Earth.

I remember my uncles talking about Bridey Murphy, George Adamski, Edgar Cayce, and other writers who used to pray on crap artists of the 1950s. I thought my uncles were nuts. Most people think the 1960s was when times got wild, but the real 1950s wasn’t Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best, it was much closer to The Twilight Zone.

Of course, I was a science fiction fan back then, and that was considered pretty nutty too. Another thing I remember from the late 1950s and early 1960s, was how everyone wanted to go to a psychiatrist. Fay Hume goes to her analyst three times a week and brags about it. Fay does not work, takes care of two little girls, but uses her charm, good looks, and manipulative ways, to get ahead. On the outside Fay is a model wife, community organizer, and charming. Charley, her husband thinks she’s a psychopath. Nat, her lover thinks of her as childish and willful, but totally alluring. Jack, her brother sees Fay in a particular strange analytical way.

Charley Hume was like a lot of men I remember from back then, he was obsessed about getting ahead, owning a big car and house, and having a beautiful wife and kids to show off. Think Don Draper from Mad Men. Finally, Nat Anteil, is the young college kid who could have been a beatnik. He worked part time, him and his wife rode bikes, wore jeans, and wanted to be intellectuals. In a few years they would become hippies probably. Confessions of a Crap Artist reveals itself as an embryo of the 1960s. The 1960s wasn’t that radically different from the 1950s if you knew where to look for the seeds of the sixties.

On the Road, which came out in 1957 has a reputation for being the bible of the Beats, and people remember it as one of the defining books about the 1950s. But it was really about the 1940s. Ditto for A Catcher in the Rye, another 1950s classics. I think Confessions of a Crap Artist is a detail painting of 1959.

Maybe given enough time Philip K. Dick will be remembered for his literary efforts in the 1950s, not because he wrote about the future, but because he wrote about the moment, his life in 1959. I’d love to know more about his life then and who the models were for Jack, Fay, Charley and Nat.

JWH – 1/7/13

2012 Year in Reading

By the way, just to be upfront about things, when I say “read” I often mean “listen” – but I consider consuming books with eyes, ears or fingertips to be reading.

This is the 5th year I’ve done these annual reading summaries. Writing about reading is turning into an enlightening subject because over time I can see my reading habits evolving and showing trends. I’ve been logging what I’ve read since 1983, and I’ve often wish I had started recording which books I read right from my very first book. (Just some advice to any bookworm tykes reading this.)

I kept a reading log once before, in the early 1970s when I was in college and had a lot more free time, and I read 452 books in 18 months. I hate that I lost that list. That epic reading period was mostly short science fiction paperbacks. I’ve always read mostly science fiction, a smattering of science, a handful of history books, and a few odds and ends. Since I’ve started these yearly summaries I always end up wishing I’d try more variety. I slowly have.

In 2012 I read 49 books.

I again read too much science fiction this year, but then I’m in the Classic Science Fiction Book Club. I’m also addicted to audiobooks and love to listen to all the old science fiction novels I first discovered back in the 1960s. I ended up reading to 22 science fiction books, way more than I should because I only read three actual science books. I’d be a lot more impressed with myself if I had read 22 science books and only 3 science fiction titles. Resolutions for next year: read only one SF book a month and read at least one science book a month.

Of course that brings up the whole fiction versus nonfiction guilt that I have. For me fiction is more fun, but nonfiction is more rewarding. Fiction can be deeply philosophical and observant of reality, but usually it’s just escapism. Science fiction is known for its sense of wonder, but none of the SF books I read this year could touch A Universe From Nothing, From Eternity to Here and The Mind’s Eye for their overwhelming sense of wonder.

Regarding the quality of fiction, the most thought provoking novels I read in 2012 were: Anna Karenina, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Freeman, On the Beach, The English Patient, The Age of Miracles, Frankenstein, Ready Player One and The Windup Girl. If I was honest with myself, I’d stop reading so much old science fiction because it’s just not that worthwhile. However, nostalgia often overwhelms my to read impulses. Science fiction imprinted on me at that impressionable age of 12 and I’ve never been able to give it up the habit.

I did read eight history books this year and they were so rewarding that I feel I need to up their number next year. My yearly averages for books read usually runs around four a month. See my past years 2011 (58), 2010 (53), 2009 (40), and 2008 (45).

For 2013 I’d like to aim for a monthly mix of:

1 novel
1 science book
1 history/other nonfiction book
1 new (2012/2013) title per month.

I’d also like to read one big classic novel during the year. This year was Anna Karenina. I’m thinking about Les Misérables for 2013.

Besides loving audiobooks, I love reading new books that just came out. It’s great fun to discover books published during the year and promote them with your friends and then have those books validated at the end of the year by showing up on Best Books of the Year lists. This year’s discoveries was Full Body Burden by Kristen Iverson and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, but sadly they were only on a couple best of lists. I didn’t read Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo until after I saw it on a zillion lists this month, so it doesn’t count.

Every year when I write this summary of books read, I also think about which books I want to read for the next year. Since I have over 500 unread books sitting on my physical bookshelf, and over a 100 unread audiobooks sitting in my digital bookshelf, I should be concentrating on clearing out my backlog, but that doesn’t happen. Many of the books on my list below were bought just before I read them. I’m in three online and one local book club that discusses 5 books a month. That’s dictating too many of my reads – 19 this year. Obviously I didn’t read all 60 discussed books.

I would like to participate more in the book clubs, read more books off my to be read pile, as well as read as many new books as possible. That’s only possible if I read more books. I could give up television, but I’m not sure I can digest more than a book a week anyway.

In a perfect world, every book I read should be thought about for hours, researched, studied, discussed in a book club, and reviewed for my blog. To do all that would require 10-30 hours each week depending on the size of the book. Most books are 10-20 hours of listening time. Anna Karenina was 42 hours long, and it took me three weeks to finish. As a hobby I’m pushing my limits as a bookworm. I know bloggers who read 100+, 200+ and even 300+ books a year and write reviews. There are some real super-bookworms out there. I’m just not one of them. I can accept my smallish total if I read 52 great books each year. My goal is not to read more books, but better books.

Most of the books I “read” every year are books I listened too. I just don’t have much time for eyeball reading anymore. Theoretically, I might average two books a week, one listening and one reading, but I’d need to find more La-Z-Boy reading time, and that’s hard. I do watch a lot of TV and listen to a lot of music, so I suppose I could sacrifice some of that time. But do I want to be more of a bookworm? Sometimes I think I should be less of a bookworm, and do more active things. Or instead of reading books I should be writing them. I’m happy with the book a week pace. It would be nice to actually hit 52 books a year though.

Here are my favorite books I’ve read this year. Only the first was actually published in 2012.

Novel of the Year

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Nonfiction Book of the Year

Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson

Classic Science Fiction Book of the Year

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Modern Science Fiction Book of the Year

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Most Recommended Book This Year

The Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Orekes and Erik Conway

Books Read in 2012

The Gnostic Gospels (1979) – Elaine Pagels
Tunnel in the Sky (1955) – Robert A. Heinlein
Ready Player One (2011) – Ernest Cline
1959 (2009) – Fred Kaplan
The Ecstasy of Influence (2011) – Jonathan Lethem
Midnight Rising (2011) – Tony Horowitz
The Forge of God (1987) – Greg Bear
A Universe from Nothing (2012) – Lawrence M. Krauss
Life (2010) – Keith Richards
The Swerve (2011) – Stephen Greenblatt
Pushing Ice (2005) – Alastair Reynolds
Anna Karenina (1877) – Leo Tolstoy
The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970) – Wilson Tucker
Embassytown (2011) – China Miéville
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (2012) – Jenny Lawson
The Last Starship From Earth (1968) – John Boyd
Little Women (1868) – Louisa May Alcott
Beyond This Horizon (1948) – Robert A. Heinlein
The Day of the Triffids (1951) – John Wyndham
Glory Road (1963) – Robert A. Heinlein
Assignment in Eternity (1953) – Robert A. Heinlein
Merchants of Doubt (2010) – Naomi Orekes and Erik Conway
A For Andromeda (1962) – Fred Hoyle and John Elliot
Imagine (2012) – Jonah Lehrer
The Age of Miracles (2012) – Karen Thompson Walker
The Listeners (1972) – James E. Gunn
The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction (2009) – edited by Allan Kaster
Full Body Burden (2012) – Kristen Iversen
The Black Cloud (1957) – Fred Hoyle
Freeman (2012) – Leonard Pitts, Jr.
The Mind’s Eye (2010) – Oliver Sacks
Horseman, Pass By (1961) – Larry McMurtry
From Eternity to Here (2010) – Sean Carroll
Ubik (1969) – Philip K. Dick
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) – James Joyce
The Dog Stars (2012) – Peter Heller
Eden’s Outcasts (2007) – John Matteson
Aftershock (2010) – Robert B. Reich
Frankenstein (1818) – Mary Shelley
Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace (2012) – Kate Summerscale
The Windup Girl (2009) – Paolo Bacigalupi
The English Patient (1992) – Michael Ondaatje
Space Cadet (1948) – Robert A. Heinlein
The Worst Hard Times (2006) – Timothy Egan
On the Beach (1957) – Nevil Shute
Jumper (1992) – Steven Gould
Behind The Beautiful Forevers (2012) – Katherine Boo
Revelations (2012) – Elaine Pagels
The Wizard of Oz (1900) – L. Brank Baum

I’ve annotated this list with links to my reviews.

The last book I read in 2012 was The Wizard of Oz in anticipation of Oz the Great and Powerful that comes out in Spring 2013.

JWH – 12/19/12

Time, Time, Time

I never have enough time. And I’m always craving more time. Days flick by like I’m an accelerating time traveler.

Every year at Christmas I take off two weeks. I always have big ambitions for my windfall of free time, but I never get done all the things I plan. This year is no exception. I have two days of freedom left and I’m depressed that I won’t have more. I never have enough time, and I’m so envious of all my friends who have retired. But those friends tell me that they’re as busy as ever. I guess we never get enough time, even when we have all our time free.

And it’s not like I’m doing anything very important. I go to bed at night regretting the friends I didn’t see, the albums I didn’t play, the television shows I didn’t watch, the books I didn’t read, the dirt I didn’t clean, the clutter I didn’t organize, the thoughts I didn’t think, the ideas I didn’t write about, the characters I didn’t develop, the photographs I didn’t take, the programs I didn’t write, and so on. And that doesn’t even count the big ambitious goals I’ll never do like learn how to play the guitar, build a robot or become a chess player. The list goes on and on.

My days start the same way every day, and my nights end the same way every night. These morning and evening routines remind me just how much my life is like a clock, or how much our lives are based on rhythms.

I get up and let Nicky the cat out of the bedroom, petting him while he meows loudly at me for locking him in for the night. He yells at me every morning. I pick up his wet food bowl and follow him to the main bathroom where I get him fresh water for his daytime water bowl. I take the wet food bowl to the kitchen and put it in the sink to rinse out, and then put on a finger cot and squeeze out .5 ml of medicine and go rub it in Nicky’s ear while he’s drinking his water. I set my watch timer for 25 minutes and go check email. Nicky comes in and sits in his chair next my desk chair and I pet him while I read emails. When the alarm goes off I go back in the kitchen and fix Nicky one quarter can of Fancy Feast. I then get a syringe and fill it with .5 cc of lactulose. I pick Nicky up and put him on the counter and calm him down with some petting and friendly chatting before forcing his mouth open and squirting the medicine onto the side of his mouth. His reward is the bowl of wet food.

Now I go back to the bedroom take off my clothes, start the shower, weigh myself and touch my toes 15 times. I shower, dry off, put on my underwear. I go back into the kitchen and repeat the procedure with the lactulose but this time reward Nicky with one teaspoon of Yoplait original yogurt. Then I go to my exercise room, put on my socks and do 15 minutes of physical therapy exercises for my back. After that I put on my pants and shoes and do 130 reps of rowing and 30 arms pulls on the Bowflex to further strengthen my lower back. Finally I eat my breakfast.

With all that done I can start my day. What I do each day varies, but it’s surprisingly routine.

At night, around 10 pm I do Nicky’s medicine again, the third round of the day, in three parts spaced 25 minutes apart. I usually watch TV while waiting between doses. Finally, I lock Nicky in the bedroom, with his bowl of wet food, some extra crunchies, his heating pad and some new water in his nighttime bowl. I then go to my office where I sleep in a chair because of my back. If I didn’t lock Nick in the bedroom he’d walk on me all night long. I undress and put on sweat pants for PJs, and put Restasis in my eyes. I then go put on the alarm, turn off the lights and go to bed in my La-Z-Boy. The last thing I do is think about all the things I didn’t get done during the day and think about all the things I want to do the next day.

Nicky’s getting old and I have no plans for another pet. I’ll have to alter my routine, but I guess I get a few more minutes of time for each day.

In about a year I hope to retire. That will get me a lot more time, but it will never be enough. And then one day I’ll run out of time completely.

Maybe it’s time to think about the things I really want to do. Maybe now is the time to prioritize my activities and time.

Is that even possible?

The year 2012 is almost over. I wonder if there’s anything I really meant to do before it finishes? How did it get to be 2012? I remember so clearly 50 years ago thinking 1992 was the far future, and 2012 was unthinkable almost.

Time, time, time…

Does time really exist? Is it a quantity we can bank or squander?

I love my life and what I do. One of the things I like to do is bitch about not having enough time. Bitch, bitch, bitch, that’s how I am about time.

Doesn’t everyone? Does anyone ever have enough time?

So it goes.

JWH – 12/30/12