I can only think of books. The Sot Weed Factor has pirates. Giles Goat Boy, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.
You mentioned Barthelme and I think of he and Barth almost together - they are both postmodernists.
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Ok! Thanks. The titles do ring bells. But for most of my adult life in NYC I was still warming down (on the very slow and gradual plan) from my cultural anti Americanism, from coming of age in the general PR Independence Movement, and having the Chilean Sept 11, 1973 Coup D’Etat occur during the very first week of my freshman year of college.
Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo were the two authors who got me, in the 1980s and 1990s, to abandon my youthful fanatical refusal to read anyone who had ever published in The New Yorker.
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Yeah that was a good thing to abandon. I discovered Haruki Murakami in the pages of the New Yorker. They published an excerpt from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a standalone story and I was instantly hooked. Some of my happiest reading hours came from Murakami - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Dance Dance Dance, A Wild Sheep Chase.
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After I widowed in late Oct 1993, my first book was Pronto! by Elmore Leonard. My second book, from the Jackson Heights Branch of the Queens Library, was Dance, Dance, Dance. My son was three years old at the time. Over time, he became an avid Haruki Murakami reader and has outpaced me in keeping up with his books. My best Jesuit HS in Puerto Rico friend (going back to the first week of 7th Grade in August, 1967) got into Murakami. He advised me to get a Kindle, as he had done after his wife protested at the space taken by all of his lifetime accumulation of books.
So, I tell him I have become a Kindle owner. And what does he do? He proceeds to order me hard copy of both Murakami’s 1Q84, which is at least 1,000 pages, and Arturo Perez Reverte’s El Asedio (The Siege) which is 816 pages. So, if I ever have a need for two really heavy doorstops, I do have them.
The last Murakami short story collection I read, I was not crazy about. During the 80-90’s Mario Vargas Llosa went for me from a point where I loved everything he wrote to where I cannot read him or stand to read about him. Don DeLillo too, during the early 2000s. The last short story collection by Murakami, which I read during a late night baby sitting gig in 2018, was that kind of experience for me.
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Yeah that happens and I have had the same problem with Murikami. The last one I read - Killing the Comandante - is a big fat No.
I read 1Q84, last one I really liked.
I have two houses full of books and I only read on my kindle now. My eyes are shot and I need the lighted screen. That’s one reason I’m here all the time too - I just can’t read books right now. I need surgery but COVID nixed that last year.
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Good luck with the surgery. I have found myself unable to read without two hours of subway time every day. I have read books here in my new digs. But definitely not at the old clip. Last week I started re-reading Camus’ The Plague. But without the subway commuting, I only clock about 40 minutes a day reading actual books.
I have a friend set me up with an app called Kody that allows me to stream movies (for free). I own a good number of DVDs as well. So, I am getting my share of movie viewing in. I hope you are able to enjoy movies.
I hope you have your cataract or whatever surgery you need soon. When I was growing up in PR, everyone would travel to Springfield, Mass, for their cataract surgery, one eye at a time over about a year’s time. My little brother, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently had both of his done the same week.
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Cataracta and new lens for my farsightedness which is out of control. I’m really blind without glasses and it gets harder to correct all the time.
I have glaucoma as well.
It irks me - my eyes were my best feature. Now people just see glasses.
O and thanks.
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I have heard that Cannabis Sativa is good for glaucoma related conditions.
Wish you the best of luck with the needed surgeries. This morning I had my eyes examined for new graduated lenses (I accidentally slept on my old pair recently and they were flying off at random times and movements all day) and so I had this chat very similar to ours now with the eye doctor this AM. I have had astigmatism too my whole life. And a phobia about putting contact lenses or even drops in my eyes. My deceased wife, however, never loved a pair of contact lenses better than the thick heavy ones that you had to sterilize every night in saline solution.
Anyway, hope you get your eyes taken care of soon. Texas is reopening full steam so I hope you get yours scheduled soon.
I use it heavily and consider the lowering of pressure in my eyes to be a beneficial side effect. hahahahahahahaha
it really helps keep the pressure down.
I could get surgery now but I’m still wary. I’m going to wait a while longer.
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I probably use light to moderately. But I could see that becoming heavily as legalization sprouts up all around me. I did enjoy a December road trip to Sheffield, Mass for a dispensary. It was very counter intuitive being asked to provide ID as a condition of doing business. I am also wondering if that is one of the factors lowering reading. Didn’t stop me in college, but it could be that the interior monologue interferes with reading as one has become accustomed since college.
I support your scheduling whenever you feel comfortable. The MDs are probably all raring to go. Have to pay for those college tuitions and weekend country places, they do.
One of the unexpected results of my move is that I have reconnected with a college friend who grew up in PR and went to my Junior High-High School. He has retired as a surgeon but sees patients on consults and is busy giving people the Covid vaccines lately. I will ask him but I bet you the surgeons are all well rested. You want to get yours while they are all freshly rested and before they are all burnt out again. 
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I am not a fan of the health care system in this country and I believe that.
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One day, there will be publicly financed universal health care in this country. And then people will have to rely on historians to explain to them how the hell it took so long, even after the medical community was on board. Growing up in PR in the 60s, “Socialized Medicine!!!” was the canard du jour every election cycle.
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I agree. I think by the end of this century things will be so different here they will be aghast at us. Millennials are a lot more tolerant than we were, even us hippies.
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