Summer fun

     I need an impetus.  A goad, a driving force, an actuator for my morale and will.  It seems that an overwhelming fugue is easy to stumble into but tougher than molasses to completely lose.  Aarrg, existence, how I loath thee.  In this last lonely spiral of mine I quickly derailed the whole thing by following my one constant obsession: books.  I just read, in the last few hours, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert E. Heinlein also famous for another novel, Starship Troopers.  It was a cult novel, which I did a commentary about as one of my first blogs and it stands for good reason.  The main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is deliberately made into a messiah (actually commented that he is the incarnated Archangel Michael of biblical lore) who promotes sexual polyamory.  Of course, he has a superhuman POV and everything he does just proves his perfection beyond any human comprehension.  Randomly throughout the book Heinlein goes on rants expressing the views he really wishes you to hold and they slowly change throughout to inoculate you slowly into holding what seem as moral-shattering mores into acceptable if not quaint or sophisticated (depending how you internalize the whole situation I feel) cultural ideas.

     The basic plot is we tried to go to Mars, went a second time and found a human baby born from the first expedition who had been raised by Martians.  He returns to Earth naive yet more intelligent than us all.  He also is super rich and then he gets an ornery Yanky on his side and he starts a religion and is martyred.  Basic synopsis, sorry if you wanted to read it but it there wasn't anything even remotely resembling a plot twist nor was there any actual drama it's all smoothed over and then it asks calmly why you weren't panicking.  Even his gory death wasn't at all emotionally captivating so I really hope it wasn't meant to be.

     It was a good read, from a literature standpoint and not just as a soap box for these morally degenerate beliefs.  Oh, did I mention cannibalism?  Yea, they also hold cannibalism as awesome and it's how you 'grok' a person completely.  Yea, that's right, "grok," some mystic term that is so complicated that there's no even vague description comprehensible in English.  In the end I can only offer up my enthusiasm that this book wasn't a bad read but was very bad at pushing its religious beliefs since it mostly focused on deriding mostly Western religion and I kept poking in with the Buddhist teachings and valuing them against that.   It just didn't hold water, I'm sorry, it was nothing but a huge excuse to indulge in your own saturnalia.

     I also read a few other books in the last month and I will get myself through those, including next time commenting on the end of The Crystal World, which as a preview, did exactly what it promised, nothing.  I'll give some more details and all that since for now I'm out of my funk.  Let's hope it holds.