John Walters's Blog, page 9

Book Review: Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Not long ago I attended an author reading at which Cory Doctorow was promoting his new novel The Bezzle. It features Martin Hench, a forensic accountant with the acumen to uncover the money trails of super-rich criminals. He functions as an unusual type of private detective, recovering funds for various wealthy individuals and organizations and in return receiving a hefty percentage of the take as his reward. The Bezzle is a sequel to Red Team Blues in that Red Team Blues was published first; however, Red Team Blues is a sequel to The Bezzle in that the events in The Bezzle begin in 2006, when Hench is actively pursuing his unique freelance work, but Red Team Blues takes place in modern times, when Hench, now sixty-seven years old, is ostensibly retired and wandering California in a bus-sized RV that formerly belonged to a rock star.

Like The Bezzle, Red Team Blues is told in first person by Hench himself. He has an engaging, intelligent, dynamic voice, much like Doctorow. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Martin Hench series is a wish fulfillment for Doctorow: if he were not a fulltime writer this is what he might be doing. Also like The Bezzle, Red Team Blues is not exactly science fiction because it does not speculate about anything that is not already happening, but it has the feeling of science fiction because it deals with cutting edge technology with which most of us are unfamiliar.

As I read, I was struck by how much Martin Hench reminded me of an elderly James Bond. He helps out an old tech friend, rescuing him from a theft that might have cost billions or even trillions of dollars. He is paid hundreds of millions for his services, and thereafter, as he eludes the criminals who want to torture and kill him, he has unlimited financial resources. So like Bond, he has cool vehicles at his disposal, he can check into the fanciest hotels and eat at the fanciest restaurants, and you get the impression that he is never really in any danger, even after he has discovered the bodies of a group of young people who have been cruelly tortured and murdered for the information that he possesses. Despite his age, he seems to have limitless strength and energy and can go all day and into the night without undue weariness. I’m seventy-one and in very good health for my age; I can tell you from experience that someone who is sixty-seven is not in his prime. At the least he would have to pace himself. Oh, and one other thing: through the course of the story he meets several wealthy, elegant, attractive women, all of whom are at least a decade younger than him; all of them are infatuated with him and he easily seduces them – or they seduce him. I share these observations not to put you off, but to explain that the novel, while blatantly unrealistic, is nevertheless highly entertaining – just as James Bond films are, if you go for those sorts of things.

One thing that I greatly enjoyed was Hench’s wandering lifestyle. He is a fulltime van dweller, and he often parks his RV overnight at Walmart parking lots, at least until he comes into his sizeable fortune and begins booking remote private campgrounds. (Walmart is renowned for allowing van dwellers to use their lots and public bathrooms.) I also liked the part in which, to avoid high-tech scrutiny, Hench is forced to go underground for days by joining the homeless on the San Francisco streets. He shuts down his electronics, pulls his meager belongings around in a “bundle buggy,” and sleeps in abandoned buildings or outside in empty lots.

All in all, Red Team Blues is an extraordinary book, Martin Hench is an engaging if unlikely hero, and Cory Doctorow is one of my new favorite authors.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or support me on Patreon.  Heads Up: I haven’t been keeping up with my Patreon posts recently – I have been posting here instead. If you head over there it should be for purely philanthropic motives.) Thanks!

Book Review: Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke

We all know the old adage that “winners never quit, and quitters never win.” In this fascinating book, Duke sets out to disprove it, and for the most part she succeeds. In fact, persistence can take us so far, but if it turns out that the goal we are pursuing becomes unobtainable, we are only going to win if we quit that path and take another.

To back up her premise, Duke shares examples of sports figures, business executives, entertainers, mountaineers, and others. She also draws extensively on her own past. Poor health caused her to have to abandon her ambitions in higher education. As an alternative, she took up professional poker playing. In poker, she had to fine tune her awareness of when to quit and when to proceed – large amounts were at stake when she made these decisions.

All of this caused me to look back and see how these principles have applied to my life. And of course I could come up with numerous examples. I completed a year of college and then realized that higher education wasn’t for me; the experience and skills I needed to become a writer I could attain more efficiently by living life and reading books. I also spent several months living in Los Angeles and learning to become a screenwriter. I even had a friend who was already a successful screenwriter and was guiding me in the craft. However, I eventually decided that this was not the type of writing I wanted to do, and from there I took off on my world travels, to obtain exciting experiences and to write about my adventures. On one occasion, when I was down and out in Nepal, I took a walk into the Himalayas along an unmarked mountain trail – to see what I could see. I got up close to the snow line, but I eventually had to turn around and come back down (quit) because I was unprepared and it would have been too dangerous to go farther. At various points along my path, I’ve opted out of relationships, jobs, and other situations when I realized that they would not be beneficial in the long term. I’m sure that all of you have had similar experiences.

So I found Duke’s advice to be thought-provoking and helpful. I like it best when she focuses on personal situations; I have to admit that the book becomes slightly less interesting along some stretches in the middle when she tells prolonged stories of businesses and business leaders – something I cannot not really relate to. However, overall the lessons she imparts are sound. Sometimes in certain situations quitting is the best thing you can do. Many people don’t tend to see this, however, at least not at first, and Duke explains why. For instance, they fall for the sunk-cost effect, which makes people reluctant to abandon a project in which they have already invested considerable time and money. Or they accomplish the easy parts of a project first only to realize that the cost of accomplishing the rest of it is far too high. Or they set goals and then become myopic about seeing them through, refusing to pay heed to the warning signs all around them. Or they fall for the cult of identity, refusing to deviate from the image they have built up of themselves. Whereas if they would accept the limitations of their talents and situations, they could accomplish much more.

In closing, this is a well-researched and well-written book, and it is a worthwhile read for anyone (everyone) who has to make important decisions as they proceed upon life’s path.

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is the author of weighty historical tomes such as Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, both of which I have read and deeply appreciated. Gulag, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004, tells of conditions in the Soviet prison camps during the Cold War. In my review of it I wondered why someone would write about such traumas and why I was reading about them; the answers, of course, have to do with remembering and honoring the survivors and hopefully learning from the ordeals they went through. Iron Curtain deals with a different type of trauma dispensed by the Soviet Union: the subjugation and crushing of the peoples of Eastern Europe after World War II. The Cold War polarized the world into opposing camps. In Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum explains that the world is once again becoming increasingly polarized, but this time into democracies and autocracies, which she also refers to as kleptocracies. Those running autocratic governments are intent on holding onto their power and obtaining riches at any cost, and they use the authority of their positions coupled with the propaganda potential of social media to make this possible.

Applebaum is well qualified to offer this profound and well-researched warning. She has been studying the history of communism and worldwide politics for decades. She speaks several languages, including English, Polish, and Russian, and she resides in Poland, from which she often conducts research and interviews in the field.

Compared to some of her earlier tomes, Autocracy, Inc. is a small, fairly short book, an overview of present political realities and the historical circumstances that have led up to them. In short, it argues that the autocratic governments of the world such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others work together to destabilize the world’s democracies via propaganda and economic intrusion, and she explains in detail how this is accomplished through news networks, social media misinformation, surveillance technologies, corrupt corporations, and other means. Part of the danger, according to Applebaum, is indifference and lassitude in democratic countries, so that incursions by autocracies go unobserved and unchecked. In the end, she offers several possible means of combating global kleptocracy, but to be effective these involve the cooperation of democracies on a major scale. They include, for instance, complete transparency of international real estate transactions, the dismantling of large-scale money laundering operations, increased regulation of social media platforms, the reevaluation of global trade relationships, and a unified emphasis on freedom and the rule of law.

It is easy to become paranoid while reading this book, because it seems that those ruthlessly intent on exploiting the peoples, systems, and wealth of the world, due to their immorality and willingness to resort to any extremes to get their way, have the upper hand. Even in the United States there are powerful individuals and organizations intent upon imposing autocracy on the rest of us. However, there are solutions, as Applebaum points out, if only we care enough to implement them.

Book Review: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

I haven’t read Zorba the Greek since I was a young man in the late 1960s. It wasn’t as influential for my intellectual journey as Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, or Walden by Henry David Thoreau, but it was one of the works that helped give me a kick in the pants to get out and do something with my life. The occasion for this second look at Alexis Zorba is a fairly new translation of the Greek classic by Peter Bien. According to the translator’s introduction, this version is raunchier and more precise than the one that appeared decades ago: he has retained various expletives that the original translator left out, and in addition, he has worked from the original Greek, unlike the previous translation which was done from a French rendering, not from Greek. This has allowed Bien, as he explains, to go over problematic words and more precisely turn them into English.

Even though it was adapted from French rather than Greek, the original translation of Zorba the Greek became a worldwide phenomenon when it appeared in the early 1950s and was made even more famous by the 1964 Oscar-winning film starring Anthony Quinn. In the film, Alan Bates, an Englishman, plays the book’s narrator, but in the book the narrator is from the island of Crete, where most of the story takes place, and Zorba is from Macedonia, in northern Greece. The narrator’s voice in the book, in fact, very much reminds me of Kazantzakis himself, whose memoir Report to Greco I read a few years ago.

In short, the narrator is a writer who intellectualizes life, while Zorba is a laborer and a womanizer who revels in every moment of his flamboyant existence. When they meet in Piraeus, the port of Athens, the narrator, seemingly on a whim, decides to take Zorba along to southern Crete to help him open a lignite mine. They become good friends, and the narrator absorbs much of Zorba’s freewheeling philosophy as they eat, drink, meet women, and interact with the local villagers.

Kazantzakis is a very talented writer; his descriptions often become poetic as he, through the narrator, comments on the simple beauties and joys of life. Zorba’s moods, on the other hand, shift from pensive to bombastic from one moment to the next. The narrator is obviously envious of Zorba’s childlike, constantly amazed outlook on life, but at the same time he is unwilling to completely forsake his books and writings to adopt this lifestyle for himself. By modern standards, many of Zorba’s outbursts concerning women are blatantly misogynistic; however, I think it is important to take the story in its historical and geographical context. The culture and societal structures of Crete (and of Greece in general) shortly after the end of World War I, when the story takes place, were vastly different than that of the modern era, and readers need to keep this in mind. It reminds me of the boxed set of Looney Tunes cartoons that one of my sons recently gave me. In some of the discs, Whoopi Goldberg comes on to explain that some of the portraitures in Looney Tunes depict racial minorities in ways that today are considered wrong, but to censure or erase these cartoons would be the same as saying that these wrong viewpoints never existed. So: content warning. It’s the same with Zorba the Greek. Some of the things Zorba says are wrong by any standards, but that’s how some people thought and spoke back then, and thus it is portrayed by Kazantzakis in the book.

Would I recommend the book? It depends on whether you can handle the raunchiness and violence. It didn’t affect me personally now as hard as it did when I was a young man who had not yet stepped out and really lived life to the full. However, it does have its touching moments. As I mentioned above: Kazantzakis is a superb writer with a gift for poetic description. This alone is a good reason to give the book a try.

Book Review: Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

Susan Cain is the author of one of the most profound and personally significant books I’ve read in recent years: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In this volume she inverts another popular trope, namely that melancholia is inherently destructive, demonstrating through various examples as well as personal testimony the efficacy of bittersweet moods in the creative process and in the navigation of life in general. According to Cain, she obtained inspiration for the book as she pondered the conundrum of why sad, poignant music is often so inspirational. She attributes it to a yearning for a “perfect and beautiful world,” or, as she quotes the mythologist Joseph Campbell, our desire to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

The primary definition of poignant in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is “painfully affecting the feeling: piercing; deeply affecting: touching.” I feel this way often when something in a book or film brings back memories of when my kids were young. We were so busy raising them, and yet those were the most fulfilling years of my life. Tears stream down my cheeks as I realize how much I miss those days. Plato expressed it as “a yearning desire for something wonderful we can’t have.” C.S. Lewis called it an “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Sufi Ibn Arabi referred to “the pain of separation as a spiritual opening.” Saint Teresa of Avila put it like this: “God wounds the soul but the soul longs to die of this beautiful wound.” Cain offers these examples and many more in her analysis of what makes the bittersweet so important.

In response to Leonard Cohen’s touching lyrics Cain says, “Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.” She points out studies showing that sadness drives creativity. “It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.” She emphasizes that a teacher (or by extension a writer or other artist) needs to understand suffering.

In one section of the book, Cain dissects the American myth of positivity, success, and disdain for so-called losers. This is a cover-up and weakness, of course, because Americans experience as much sadness, despair, and loss, if not more, than people in the rest of the world, and the duplicity of the pseudo-success cover-up makes it more difficult for Americans to heal through honestly accessing their emotions.

I relate to some parts of the book more than others. For instance, Cain expends considerable effort detailing elite seminars she attends that only the wealthy would be able to afford. I also found it difficult to get into her description of a bizarre cult of “immortalists,” also known as radical life extension advocates or super-longevity enthusiasts – people who believe they can live forever and expend considerable effort to make that happen. Unfortunately, this causes them to eschew the bittersweet in their desire for eternal life. Cain counterbalances this extreme viewpoint by extolling the value of grief and impermanence in the following chapter. She points out that you can’t necessarily move on from profound grief; you carry it with you and it becomes part of you.

In the end, Cain raises the question: “What are you longing for?” She challenges readers to write the word “home” at the top of a piece of paper and imagine what they would write next. I thought about this for a long time. I don’t really consider the apartment where I currently live to be home, at least not more than an interim home. The house where I grew up as a child was a real home, and the houses where my wife and I raised our kids in Greece were true homes. Now? I couldn’t really pin down a particular place that I would call home. When I roamed the world as a young man I had a different concept of home. As I wrote in my memoir World Without Pain: “And home? I couldn’t go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular stage of the journey, not an absolute.”

A conundrum, to be sure. But that’s the value of this book. It makes you think, but even more: it makes you feel. And it helps you to realize that your feelings, both joyous and bittersweet, are essential elements in your journey through life.

Book Review: The Great Divide: A Novel by Cristina Henriquez

The Great Divide deals with the monumental historical event of the digging of the Panama Canal and the ramifications for Panamanians and others pulled into the epic drama of its building. However, it presents its themes in microcosm, through intimate looks into the lives of people affected by the overwhelming reality of the building of the canal. The machinations of governments remain mostly in the background; it is the effect of decisions in high places upon real people that is brought to the fore.

The title refers not just to the huge literal ditch that is dividing one continent from another; it also refers to the divisions between individuals as they confront the changing of their lives. For instance, a fisherman refuses to speak to his son when he takes a job as a digger in the Canal Zone; a sixteen-year-old girl, the child of a white plantation owner and a Black servant, leaves her family in Barbados to seek employment in Panama to pay for medical treatment when her sister becomes ill; when an American scientist researching a means to eliminate malaria moves to Panama, his wife becomes deathly sick.

It took me a while to become absorbed in this story because of the manner in which each subplot is introduced and then left hanging while another thread is added. Once all the major characters have made their appearances, though, their lives begin to intersect and blend in holistic patterns that afford a view of how the inevitable upheaval of the canal building impacts the people involved in it.

The strength of this novel is in its presentation of its characters with all their backgrounds and intricacies. They are depicted in fascinating detail, through flashbacks and even flash-forwards of what happens to them in years to come. This context adds to the appreciation of who they are and why they do what they do.

I don’t often read historical novels; usually if I am interested in a particular time I prefer its depiction in pure nonfictional history. This novel, though, while emotionally written, manages to avoid the melodrama that plagues so much historical fiction. I became invested in the characters without feeling that I had descended into an antiquated soap opera. This is one of the book’s strengths. Another is the way that it thoughtfully deals with so many pertinent issues: the audacity and racism of the Americans as they barge into another country, rip it apart, and then put it back together in their own image; the disruption of the lives of common Panamanians; discord between generations when confronted with inevitable change; attempting to eradicate deadly diseases that claim multitudes of lives; and the disparate toxic effects of colonization on both the oppressed and the oppressors.

Henriquez at no time yields to preachiness; she always confines her commentaries within the bounds of the metaphorical lives of her characters. This strengthens the book’s relevance and gives universality to its themes. It’s not just about the great divide that split the country of Panama in the early twentieth century; it is also concerned with the great divides that isolate humans one from another – and it poses the question of whether it is possible for us to breach these gaps.

Book Review: Joy Hunter by Alexis Jones

I picked this book up from the library because it seemed, at first glance, to be about a rejuvenating road trip in an RV, and I like travel stories. Then, when I read the author blurb on the inside back cover, I almost gave up on it before I started. It says that “Alexis Jones is an internationally recognized speaker, media personality, activist, and author.” It goes on to delineate the awards she has received, the famous people lists she’s been on, the appearances she’s made (including at the White House, United Nations, Harvard, Stanford, West Point, and on and on), her world travels, and her stint as a contestant on the TV show Survivor. I usually avoid books by celebrities. They offer advice from a position of power and wealth, and thus have little to say of practical value to us common folk. Still, I decided to try ten or twenty pages of Joy Hunter before I cast it aside, and I ended up reading the whole thing.

Jones is writing from a position of power and relative wealth, and I couldn’t help but be aware of that as I read her story. Merely to rent an RV, take off for a month and then more, and stay in fully-equipped RV camps, is something I dream of but cannot afford. And there’s the fact that Jones seems to have close friends everywhere; it seems that just about every town they travel through she’s visiting another intimate associate. I couldn’t relate to that at all. Most of the closest friends I have known have died, and sometimes I feel quite alone in the world. When I think about it, though, when I was hitchhiking around the world back in the 1970s I did meet a lot of people, and eventually I was able to stop here and there along the way for fellowship and refreshment. Still… Jones’s position of privilege has to be taken for granted as you read, almost as if this were a fantasy tale of a noble princess.

As for the road trip, it takes up a fairly small portion of the book at the end. What Jones mainly writes about are the personal traumas that led her to embark upon the road trip, including a miscarriage after she and her husband had tried so hard to have a child, and the discovery that the man who had raised her and she had always considered her dad was not her flesh father. The road trip is a last-ditch attempt to improve her emotional well-being, and this proves to be a resounding success.

What rescues this book from becoming a maudlin soap opera is Jones’s writing skill. She really is a very good writer, and she weaves together the multitudinous flashbacks and reminiscences that lead up to the road trip with skill and acumen. And the lessons she imparts on self-love and joy-seeking really are relevant to everyone, even those of us who do not have vast networks of friends and associates and cannot afford to rent RVs or take weeks off work. After all, even if we are not all princesses and princes, we enjoy stories about fantasy lands and long to live happily ever after.

In conclusion, I recommend this book. Even if most readers may not be able to relate to the privilege and power of the author, it tugs on the emotional heartstrings, and there are lessons to be learned from it.

Book Review: Philosophy for Polar Explorers by Erling Kagge

Not long ago I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful photos and thoughts in Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge. This book is similar in that it is full of breathtaking photographs, mainly of Kagge’s journeys to the poles, and also brimming with insightful comments on courage, decision-making, goals, taking risks, loneliness, and other topics. Kagge was the first explorer ever to successfully meet the three-pole challenge: walking to the North Pole, walking to the South Pole, and climbing to the summit of Mount Everest. Someday I hope he writes a comprehensive memoir about his achievements. In the meantime, the lessons he shares from his unique experiences are edifying, well-written, and worthwhile.

He writes: “I am no scientist, but my experience has been that, to a large extent, feelings of insecurity, loneliness, and depression stem from the flattening of the world that occurs when we are alienated from nature.” In fact, he emphasizes that he feels lonelier in a crowd than he felt while he was walking alone across the ice to the South Pole. I can relate to this. I felt less lonely hitchhiking around the world alone than I feel sometimes in my apartment building – where I am ostensibly surrounded by other people but don’t know any of them on a personal level.

The book bursts with inspiration on making decisions and reaching goals. He says: “For me there’s a great joy in setting targets.” And then, to reach these targets involves a lot of practical gumption. For instance, when he was alone on the ice, despite the cold he always got up early, knowing that there was a lot to be accomplished each day. In this context, he writes that to him raising his three teenage girls seems to sometimes take more courage than mountain climbing. And: “It takes so much courage to battle a serious illness, to show kindness, to keep promises, to end relationships – not to mention daring to love and to express love – and to deal with betrayal, disappointments, and sorrow.”

In any accomplishments in life, Kagge stresses the importance of not undervaluing ourselves, avoiding small-mindedness, and distinguishing the impossible from the merely improbable. Real courage involves risk, and avoidance of risk leads us down the broad path to mediocrity. “Humans need challenges, moments that make us feel we need to earn the gift of life.”

Near the end of the book, Kagge writes of the “champion’s dilemma,” something that can afflict explorers after they reach the goals they have set for themselves – or anyone who reaches a goal or dream and has no idea where to go from there. The solution, of course, is to set new goals. For him, after he accomplished the three-pole challenge, he became a parent. This “gave birth to innumerable new dreams and visions.”

By the time I finished reading this book, I realized that I too need new goals and dreams. For a decade or so I’ve been a single parent, but not long ago I became an empty-nester. In the absence of the direct responsibility of parenting I have been foundering – just barely treading water and wondering what to do with myself. I have the writing, of course, which I accomplish daily, but I need something to replace the void of my family’s absence. This is an ongoing concern. Regardless of your own life’s status, though, I highly recommend Kagge’s book. You’re sure to find something in it to console, inspire, and challenge you.

The Nemesis of Content Creators

When I moved back to the United States from Greece, it was not my initial intention to become a self-employed freelance writer. I looked for a job. Any job. Well, almost any job. I drew the line at flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant, although some of my sons took such employment for a time when they first got here. However, I could not find a traditional job. My first attempt was to seek a position teaching English as a Second Language at one of the many private language schools in San Diego, the city where I initially landed. After all, I had taught English in Greece for over fifteen years; I was very good at it and had excellent references. I went around to every language school in the area and filled out applications, left reference letters, and so on. Several of the schools were impressed but would not give me an interview; one of them honestly explained to me that though they would like to hire me they couldn’t because I didn’t have a college degree. Damn. Whatever. At one point I applied for a position at a tech company. I impressed the hiring manager and went into the office for a video interview with a higher-up, who really liked me. Again, they wouldn’t hire me. In this case, it was blatant ageism. I was almost sixty years old, and no one else in their office was over thirty. When I went to apply for a job as a Fed-Ex delivery assistant for the Christmas holiday season, hundreds of people showed up to apply for a couple of dozen positions.

And so I turned to the internet to search for freelance writing work to stave off abject poverty. After all, at the time I was responsible for several of my sons who had accompanied me to the New World. Fairly quickly I found jobs. For instance, I got a few hundred dollars for an article on the local surfing scene for a start-up website. Soon after, I got a steady gig writing daily articles on topics of interest to seniors for a company selling Medicare Advantage plans. When that source dissipated, I found websites offering paid writing work that could be claimed on a one-by-one basis. It didn’t pay much, but it supplemented the income from occasional short story sales and royalties from my self-published books. One website would fold and another would open. For months I was writing travel articles: one or two a day for a major online travel company. For a time I was writing mainly business articles. Later I wrote articles on history, literature, and other topics for an educational website; this was one of my favorite gigs.

And then, sadly, came AI, which scrapes the Internet, acquires data, processes it, and regurgitates it in the form of generic articles similar, though far inferior, to those I had been writing. The websites I’d been writing for didn’t care about the diminished quality; using AI was so much cheaper that they gladly took the hit. What they were mainly after was increasing traffic to their websites via SEO through key words and phrases. Quantity, not quality, is what they wanted. One by one, these websites closed to human writers. If we suffered financially as a result, they didn’t give a damn; after all, we were freelancers and they were not legally responsible for us.

By this time, my sons had moved out and I was on my own, so at least my struggle for income did not affect them. I was too old to look for some shit job to pay the bills, so in desperation I searched for any type of paid online work I could find. (I had begun to collect Social Security but because I had spent decades overseas I could only claim a few hundred dollars a month.) Most of this online work involved short writing tasks and even filling out surveys. I figured anything was better than nothing.

And now we come to the reason for this essay. One of the most lucrative survey sites suddenly cut me off. The ostensible reason seems to be that I took my computer to another city for a few days and when I got back the algorithm will no longer recognize and approve my network connection. But here’s the thing: when I wrote a human support member to correct the error, I was told there was nothing they could do – that I had to wait until the algorithm self-corrected. In other words, the human was helpless; the algorithm was in charge. What the hell? What have we come to that in a matter such as this, humans will defer to algorithms to make final decisions about humans? Something is very, very wrong. People have become so lazy and indifferent that they are unloading tasks onto algorithms that algorithms are not or should not be designed for. Already even fiction markets are being inundated with bland, generic stories that obviously have been created by machines. They are attempting to cope with this flood of crap, but it slows down their editorial processes and makes it more difficult to work with real human artists. It’s an ongoing concern. I can’t say that I have answers, as I am still dealing with it myself, but somehow we have to set clear limits between what machines can and should do, and what should be left to humans as they communicate one to another.

As a postscript, I can report that someone at this particular website in question finally did take the trouble to investigate and correct the mistake. However, the larger problem in general of ceding online authority to algorithms still applies.

Book Review: Outside Looking In: A Novel by T. C. Boyle

T. C. Boyle has a penchant for examining countercultural issues, especially those from the sixties and seventies. One of his previous novels, Drop City, concerns a commune of hippies that decides to relocate from California to Alaska; the transplanted freaks are ultimately unprepared for the stark realities of the harsh climate and struggle for survival. In Outside Looking In, Boyle focuses on the early 1960s and Timothy Leary’s initial experiments with psychedelic drugs and communal lifestyles.

After a prologue set in Switzerland in 1943, in which the scientist who initially discovered LSD’s radical properties gets unexpectedly blasted out of his mind, Boyle cuts to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. The story is told in three parts through the viewpoints of Fitz and Joanie, a couple with a teenage son. Fitz is a Harvard graduate student in psychology who is studying under Leary. In the first part, through Fitz’s viewpoint, the couple begins to become part of Leary’s “inner circle” by attending weekend psychedelic parties. They initially take psilocybin and gradually move on to the much more potent but then-untested LSD. At the time, both these drugs were legal, and Leary had Harvard’s approval to pursue the project. In part two, told through Joanie’s point of view, Leary’s followers spend two summers in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where Leary has booked an entire seaside hotel. In this idyllic setting, they continue to indulge in LSD, psilocybin, marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs, supposedly in the name of research. During the second summer, the authorities in Mexico deport them.

In the third part, told through Fitz’s point of view, Leary is gifted a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, and he invites the entire inner circle and their families to move in. They continue their so-called experiments, which basically amount to staying stoned and drunk most of the time, sharing communal chores and activities, and concocting ever-wilder schemes to expand and unite their minds. One of these involves drawing the names of two random people from a hat; the selected couple spends a week together, freed from household duties and encouraged to partake of large amounts of LSD. When Fitz is paired with an eighteen-year-old teenage girl, he develops an obsessive infatuation with her, losing interest in his wife and son and everything else around.

The Millbrook section traces the deterioration of the group’s harmony, which is inevitable, really, considering that they are united around Leary’s charisma and overindulgence in hallucinogenic substances. The drugs eventually render them at least partially glazed and dysfunctional, and Leary proves to be an untrustworthy guru; by the end of the book he is planning to take off for a six-month-long honeymoon in India with one of the multitudinous beauties that he regularly sleeps with. This last section, to my mind, is a bit tedious; Boyle takes his time detailing the inescapable deterioration, and it is particularly onerous because Fitz is so enamored with his teenage heartthrob that he can think of little else. Joanie eventually gets fed up with the commune and Fitz’s shenanigans and leaves with their son, and Fitz hardly even notices or cares.

In conclusion, it’s an interesting novel, and absorbing in parts, and I would recommend it but with reservations. The last third, as I mentioned, really does stretch out too long, and the climax comes with a fizzle rather than a bang. It doesn’t touch on any of the legal problems that are ahead for Leary; it ends with the so-called inner circle helplessly enmeshed in an experiment gone awry, an experiment that has descended into a mishmash of dysfunctional relationships and drug-muddled minds.