Things I Will Keep #23: FLEETWOOD MAC, Future Games

Fleetwood Mac
Future Games
1971, Reprise Records

I was born in October 1976, which makes me too young to have any firsthand nostalgia for the 1970s, but I do have some simple, dreamy images in my head that don’t really mean anything.

The dark hallway of the house where we lived at the time. Patterns on bedsheets. Green shag carpet.

I don’t remember people. I don’t remember words. I recall nothing that happened. All I have are these surface details, these scattered dinosaur bones buried in my memory.

I’m interested in that. Why do we remember what we remember? What story did I want to keep alive somehow by remembering bedding and carpets? Is the answer so complicated that I’ll never understand it? Or is it so simple that I’ll always overlook it?

I doubt that I’ll ever know, but the first time that I heard Future Games (about twenty years ago), it sounded like a witness in my investigation. It was sooooooo 1970s and sooooooo dreamy and sooooooo removed from the present world that it touched a nerve and I had an irrational love for it right away.

According to the price sticker on my ragged old vinyl copy, I paid fifty cents for it. Sometimes that’s all that it costs to blow your mind.

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Philip Jose Farmer’s TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

Philip Jose Farmer
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
1971, G.P. Putnam’s Sons/ Berkley Medallion

I love Philip Jose Farmer’s imaginative, often daring, outright scandalous short stories (see “My Sister’s Brother” and “Riders of the Purple Wage”), but I’ve never gotten around to reading his popular Riverworld series of novels.

The name put me off, I think. I hate the river. There are creatures in it. I’m sick of the river. Do I want to go to a riverworld? No, I don’t.

Also, does Riverworld have anything to do with Riverdance? I hope not.

But as the pile of unread books around me expands so perhaps will my tastes, so I decided to check out Riverworld finally and this first book in the series turned out to be a perfect read for my current state of mind as a middle-aged man who worries about death all day.

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