Theos-Talk Archives (December 2006 Message tt00877)

Mini-Review, Pynchon, Dawkins


    I didn't completely read either of 
these books.


"Against the Day," Thomas Pynchon, 2006


   This is Pychon's first book in about 
8 or 9 years. He's won some book awards, 
and his last book, "Mason & Dixon" 
was on the best-sellers list for a 
time, as this one probably will be for 
a few weeks.  Pynchon is an anomalie 
among the "big" english writers - as no 
one knows what he looks like, or where 
he lives.  "Against the Day" is  900+ 
pages of small print, and if anyone reads 
it straight through looking for a message, 
I'd have to place him in the "sucker" 
category.  Its as if Pychon has been 
accumulating all his extra ideas, characters, 
anecdotes, and insights in a warehouse 
for the last 40 years, and hauled them 
out willy-nilly, in no particular order, 
and piled them up into another book. It 
not really a novel, but more a surrealistic 
painting.  It will definitely wake you 
up as a reader, and sort of send your 
head reeling in wondering what it is all 
about.  The book opens with a group of 
young secret-service -types named the 
"Chums of Chance," floating around in 
a balloon, going to the Chicago World's 
Fair in the 1890's, and gets crazier 
from there.  I was wonder what Pychon's 
title meant - "Against the Day," and 
think possibly it is a private joke - 
that he could get at least one more 
big royalty check out of the public 
- against the Day of his retirement.  
If one can get it from the Library, 
it is definely worth reading parts of, 
but I wouldn't recommend buying it 
unless one's rolling in the green stuff.
----------


"The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins, 2006


    This is on the best-sellers list 
for non-fiction in the U.S., and Dawkin's 
is an atheist and Scientist.  He is 
really the old-style strictly materialistic, 
lower manas type of atheist.  I didn't 
see a spark of anything higher than the 
logical-type mind in anything I read.  
(Ingersoll, the grand-father of the atheists, 
who was a freind of Blavatsky's, and who 
she published an article or two of, 
definitely had an under-current of 
something higher in his humanitarianism.)  
For instance, Dawkins gives four reasons 
in support of "altruism" and they are 
all biological reasons - passing on one's 
genes, survival by mutual support, etc.  
The religious or buddhic insight of 
brotherhood at base, that we are all 
linked as ONE, and undeserved suffering 
of one is your suffering also - simply 
eludes him.  His reasons are all lower-manas 
based. (Brotherhood is something more 
easily viewed from a distance, as we 
all find out.) He does bring in a whole 
array of proofs on the total irrationality 
& endless strife caused by personal-god 
worship, and dogmatic religion. ("...2/3rds 
of the worlds evil is caused by religion, 
the other 1/3 by human selfishness...." 
says a teacher in the MLs.)  Dawkins also 
brings in, in about ten places, an 
emotional defense of homosexuality, and 
one wonders what this has to do with the 
whole issue, and why the emphasis.


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