On “Leaving Las Vegas” by John O'Brien ****

 

This is another reread for me from a book read about three decades ago. When I last read it, the movie was a more recent title, and O'Brien's other two books were things more heavily on folks' minds. I did not like Stripper Lessons, which seemed mostly some male fantasy, and I never got to Assault on Tony's, which someone in grad school had recommended and which sounded sort of intriguing, mostly for its ties to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but which I suspected would not be unlike the other two books in focusing mostly on dreariness and drinking and maybe some hot angelic woman. I was uncertain I would find this book of much interest this time around, and I was surprised by how well it held up.

Having come off reading Tapping the Source, this was a different sort of read. There isn't a strong plot on this title, but it deals with similarly salacious material. I can't say I'm likely to read this one again. In some ways, the plot is laughable and the characters seemingly nonsensicle and the whole thing unceasingly depressing. And yet, on some level, the work still manages to pull a bit at the reader, since it explores such dark and depressing lives and doesn't flinch at looking at them.

This is essentially a love story between an alcoholic and a prostitutee. The prostitute gets beat up. She has men (i.e., the former pimp) from her past show up and expect her to provide them whatever cash she's earning. This is not a glamourous life. It's hard and awful. The alcoholic has lost his wife and his job, though both losses seem mostly due to his drinking. He's chosen to drink above all else, and he has resigned himself to drinking himself to death, and he won't let anything or anyone stop him. He knows he's messed up. He gets the shakes anytime he hasn't had a drink recently enough. He too gets beat up or just stumbles for little reason and as such beats up his own body. (I'm prone to think such a life ridiculous, but having had a friend essentially do just that—drink himself to death—I know now this sort of thing happens, in late-stage alcoholism.)

The prostitute is desperate for companionship. The alcoholic, on some level, seems open to that for a while, but in the end, what he really wants is to be left alone with his drinking, and there's no stopping that. For a short while they meet and share share some moments. The plot never shirks from the inevitable bleak end.

On “Tapping the Source” by Kem Nunn *****

I was uncertain whether I read this while living in California or while living in Texas, but my reading log, reveals it was the latter, which makes sense, because a fresher read would better suggest why I kept the volume. It was recommended to me in California, while I was working at a bookstore. I picked it up cheap on remainder but like so many books at the time, I didn't read it. It sat in my library. In Texas, I was without access to a public library, which meant that array of books I'd collected over the years finally got read, every single one of them. This was one of those. And when I read it, finally, I was impressed. That's how it ends up here with five stars.

On rereading it here nearly thirty years later, I remembered almost nothing about it except for the fact that it involved a mystery and surfing. Likely, these sort of things are what impressed me. I love Nunn's description of a California desert town, which fits well with what I remember of the state. His attention to the California beach towns is also interesting, though Huntington Beach, where this book is set, always seemed a good deal more built up than how he describes it here. The attention also to surfing culture, about which I know little, and to bike culture, is also of interest. This is also a book about “tough” guys, a kind of overmasculinized culture, which is fun in its own right.

The novel is gripping. But it is also selacious and, in the end, rather ridiculous, at least to me as I read it now. (I'd be more inclined to give it four stars were I rating it now instead of then.) The story involves a young man who is in love (incest forges part of the text) with his sister. Years ago, his mother took off; he never knew his dad. Though their physical needs (a place to live) were supplied by an uncle and grandmother, he and his sister were left to fend largely for themselves. Ellen, the sister, eventually, though, ran away, taking up with various men. One day, Ike, her brother, receives a note with three names on it and word that Ellen is in trouble, has gone off with these three men to Mexico and never returned. Thus begins Ike's quest. He leaves the desert for the beach and takes up surfing to try to get close to the men who might know what happened to Ellen. (Spoilers from here.)

Instead, he ends up largely becoming friends with a man named Preston, a biker, impressed with Ike's mechanical skills, which he picked up working at a shop in the desert. Preston warns him to stay away from Hound Adams and the other two men on the list. They are trouble. But Ike never is told the truth about what happened to Ellen. As such, as one can imagine, he ends up not taking Preston's advice, and when opportunity presents itself, he takes up with Hound. Preston and Hound, as it turns out, are old rivals and old friends. Ike, meanwhile, takes up with a gal. Bad things go down between Preston and Hound. Ike ends up being pulled into a nefarious underworld of drugs and pornography and eventually Satanic rituals in the quest to find out what happened to his sister. While engaging, the book gets more and more ridiculous and perverted, until of course we finally find out where Ellen is.

On “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart D. Ehrman ****

I'd been a little leery of this book, knowing Ehrman's penchant for calling into question basic tenets of Christianity, and that is, on the whole with this book, his point and purpose. His general thesis, as denoted in the introduction and conclusion is that because the text of the New Testament can't be perfectly known, it must not be inspired. But his general point, alas, does not necessarily follow from the evidence he provides. In between is a really good layman's introduction to textual criticism and to some of the issues that arise when trying to edit the Bible (the same issues, actually, that arise with editing virtually any book whose author no longer is alive). It was because I couldn't get ahold of Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture that I ended up reading this layman's version. I actually wanted to know more about the various alternative versions of the text. And while not as thorough as that book, this one certainly provides some great case studies.

The start of the book and, indeed, some passages later on are very basic. Such made me reflect on the difficulty writers have who are aiming at a general audience. How much is too general? How soon can one delve into specifics. But soon enough, Ehrman drops into literacy rates in the ancient world (they were low, but Ehrman takes the lowest end of estimates as a given) and the nature of how early texts were copied. The earliest texts, as he notes, were copied not by professionals but by what few literate members there were among the Christian community. Most of the time this would have been those who also were rich enough to have large enough homes to host Christian gatherings. As there were a number of Christian beliefs, some “scribes” would have had a willingness to change texts to fit an agenda. (The fact that our texts are as close as they are to one another would itself seem to be something of a miracle, but Ehrman focuses on differences not on similarities.) A few centuries in, the role of copying was taken over by professionals, but the damage of these early years was already done. There were no really reliable manuscripts. But I'm not so sure this reading of the history is correct. Professionals, as Ehrman brings out in his examples, were inclined to make similar errors or even deliberate changes as well.

This is the situation we find ourselves in when we come to the translations into English. The King James Version, which has so affected every English translation since, was itself based on a faulty manuscript, according to Ehrman, one of the most faulty of them all. Other reading of mine, however, shows this claim to be debatable, counterarguments that Ehrman largely ignores. The issue, of course, as Ehrman brings out, is that with varying manuscripts, editors are left trying to figure out what the original actually was. We have, in many cases, older manuscripts than those that were used to translate the KJV. Differences there would seem to indicate that some of the later manuscripts reflect changes made to the text that weren't in the original. But our early manuscripts, alas, are also often from particular regions and reflect, arguably, changes that were made in that region. They might be older, but there is possibly a reason that the variations in those texts didn't show up in later versions: They weren't the accepted or best text. It's impossible, often, to know. Ehrman describes some of the ways in which scholars attempt to figure out which really is more accurate. One way is by looking at what is the more difficult reading. It's more likely that a scribe would have changed something to be easier to read or understand than to be more difficult. This makes sense to a point, but it's no given. Another, Ehrman does not, is also regional variation. Copyists in one part of the world might have a manuscript with an error that is copied from frequently, an error or variation that doesn't exist in manuscripts in other parts of the world.

Ehrman himself admits that the vast majority of the changes to the text are mere typographic errors that are easily enough discerned. It's in the places where such changes make a difference to meaning that issues arise. But even here, some of these variations don't seem quite as profound as Ehrman makes them out to be. Whether Jesus looks on a disabled man with grace or anger when healing in one passage in Mark makes a little difference in the context and even to an extent in how we read Mark generally, but when we look at the overall point of the Gospels, I don't think it signficantly changes Christian teaching. One can read such a passage both ways and find value in each.

And I can totally understand the difficulties scribes and editors are up against. Sometimes a passage is unclear. If there's no author to ask, one is left sometimes with a difficult decision. Is this weird thing an inadvertant error or was that what the author really wrote and intended? It happens even when editing contemporary texts. The more interesting observations are those where Ehrman claims the text was changed deliberately. Some of these are more obvious than others; others are certainly open for debate, though how one reads other parts of the New Testament will often affect whether one believes these were later changes.

In the end, I found this book really engaging and informative. And while I don't think that Ehrman's overall point is ultimately convincing, denying that some parts of the Biblical text are difficult to discern is not the best means toward valuing faith. It's better to acknowledge that we don't know everything, even as we look to the overall themes of the New Testament text.

On “Underground” by Haruki Murakami *****

I first read this book at the airport in Madrid, Spain. I believe it was 2001, but it could have been 2005. Either way, at the time, I found the book engaging and heart wrenching, especially the account of the woman who became mostly a vegetable after the 1995 Aum Shinriko sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, which is the focus of this book. On this second read a quarter century later, I didn't find myself tearing up (in fact, maybe because I remember the account of the woman, I was more affected this time by the account of a pregnant woman who lost her husband), but I was nevertheless pulled in by the interlocking accounts.

Essentially, the book is a set of interviews Murakami conducted with some of the attack's victims. In the account of the pregnant woman, it was incredible the coincidence that on thar particular day, her husband and she go up early to eat a heavier breakfast together before work. It was like a good-bye, but how would they have even known? Murakami organizes the accounts around stations, so one reads several different people's observations from each station, and often the one observed in one account is one telling the account in another. Also fascinating was the way that the people generally speaking didn't know what was going on, which I suppose is almost always the case in real time in these sort of events. I remember 9/11, which would have happened, actually not long before I read this title, the kind of chaos and confusion of the moment, and I also remember a friend of mine who lived in New York at the time explaining how that day was even more chaotic for her. After all, the Twin Towers were where most broadcasting towers were, which meant no TV or communication was available. Were we are war? What's happening?

But the accounts of the victims are just the first part of this book. The second part, tacked on apparently after its initial Japanese publication, concerns those who actually are or were part of the Aum Shinriko cult. This was interesting insofar as the accounts expose the way in which one's reaction to being in a cult really is complex. Most people got quite a bit out of the association, in terms of mental stability, but at the same time, it's clear that a good chunk of the teaching and behavior was abusive. Some were locked up for days or had to make a furtive escape from one of the group's communes. Further, of course, was the degree of loyalty the group inspired such that members would go through with such a plot as to release poison gas on a subway.

One other thing that surprised me was that these events occurred in 1995, so around the time of the Oklahome City federal building bombing. I'd thought these event occurred in the late 1980s, around 1987-89. Strange how our memory can transplant events like so. When I heard of this on TV (which I do remember), that means I was in grad school, not high school or my first year of college, as I'd thought.

On “Early Christianity in Alexandria” by David Litwa ****

We don't know much about Christianity in Alexandria before about 180, when folks like Dionysius, Pantaenus, and most especially Clement and Origen show up on the scene. Or at least, that's the usual story. Litwa claims that we actually know quite a bit about Christianity before these folks arise, if only we stop overlooking the obvious. Christianity in Alexandria was not what we have come to think of as orthodox. It predates all that and nourished quite different views of Jesus than those that have come to be adopted by the church centuries later.

A major point in this claim comes in the form of the Jewish community itself, which was highly Hellinized, at least among some of the intellectual class. Our source for that sort of info is, of course, Philo, the Jewish philosopher who resided in the city around the time of Jesus who adopted Platonic thinking to Jewish scripture. Jewish Christians simply fell in line with such Jewish thinking. Case in point for Litwa is Apollos. I'm not convinced that Apollos was a thinker in line with Philo and with Christian thinkers who would later be termed gnostics, but Litwa tries to make a case for it from Paul's writings about Apollos and about false teachers in his letters to the Corinthians. (For me, the two simply don't fit well together. Paul doesn't seem one for subtlety when it comes to people he disliked, so I don't see him writing positive things about Apollos in one place (although Litwa reads Paul, even in such passages, as actually placing himself above Apollos, thus snubbing him) and then writing such sarcastic and denigrating things about “ministers” more generally, while actually meaning Apollos among them.

But after those early chapters, as Litwa notes, Jewish people were essentially for a few decades removed from Alexandria, around 117. This left primarily non-Jewish Christians, who did their best to use the Jewish scriptures but read them in allegorical ways, like Philo, finding in them valuable lessons even while giving up the Jewish rites connected with them. Mix those ideas with others from Greek philosophy and from Greek and Egyptian mythology, and you end up with a unique form of Christianity, one that most would come to see as not Christian at all: These would be the followers of people like Basilides and Valentinus. Such teachers, however, at the time were no less Christian than those who would eventually win the doctrinal debate going on among early Christians. Transmigration, the idea that Jesus was never really human or that the god of the Jews was some other, lower god who was not the real one—many of these things found space in the theologies of the Alexandrian Christians, until, of course, they didn't, because other Christians won out. But truly, as Litwa notes, even Origen and Clement dabbled in such ideas, even if those men eventually got adopted into what become the Catholic Church.

Litwa's book is a good corrective to the manner in which we often think about early Christianity. Although I'd argue that such thinking was not that which reflected the early apostles, at least as preserved in our New Testament, it's clear that other Christianities existed from early on. Those, however, were not the ones that eventually came to be the Christianity we know. (Even so, such ideas subtly changed much of what Christians have come to believe in the millennia since the New Testament was put together.)