TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

 

I bought this book at our local library’s used book sale in a state of pure nostalgia for my childhood in the 70’s and early 80’s.  Comic books and SciFi/Fantasy paperbacks were my primary source of entertainment as a kid.  They telescoped me out to the far reaches of the universe and then microscoped me in to the equally wondrous innerverse as I stood between the two in a kind of nexus of awe and wonder.

In was an active process of the imagination and required some work on the front end when I first started reading and I had to have a dictionary at my elbow to learn new words I’d never heard spoken or seen written on a page before.  I was exercising my brain muscle in the most thrilling of ways, eventually becoming all gain and no pain.

In this regard I do feel a bit sorry for kids these days who have had these stories heaped upon them but in a passive mode of taking in an image that is already created for them and spoon fed through a TV, laptop, iPad, or smart phone.  It appears the phones have been the ones to become “smarter” in this context.

But here is “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” by Philip Jose Farmer.  What a title!  I’d read some of his books as a kid but not this particular one or any of them in his Riverworld series for that matter, though that series was definitely on my TBR list before my interests began to change in my late teens.  This copy was $1.25!  That was money a kid could get his hands on by scouring ditches and dumpsters for empty coke bottles the grocery store would give you a dime a piece for.  And that back page with books listed for sale as low as 75 cents!  It even gives you the publisher’s address at the bottom in case you can’t find it locally and they will mail you a copy from New York City if you add 25 extra cents.  

Yes, that odd underutilized institution known as “The Post Office”.  Nothing electronic about it.  Just pen, paper, and stamps to buy these things along with pranks, gag gifts, and magic tricks that I loved (like fake doggy doo, X-ray glasses, the fly in an ice cube, a dog whistle, “snappy” gum that actually snaps unsuspecting fingers, etc).  As I made more money going into my early to mid-teen years I had to become familiar with where to get money orders and how to fill them out.  The days of sending cash had passed and I was growing up with more expensive interests, even if that mostly just meant buying hardback books instead of paperback books or comics.

A legacy of all of this is that even now when I visit a website I am not interested in playing the video to see what information is being conveyed.  I prefer to read it in the article itself or as the transcription.  My brain wants to see the words and actively work out the meaning at its own pace and leisure.  It shows my age perhaps but I am at an age where that doesn’t matter to me anymore.

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