This is how I found my way here.
I love everything about Pynchon except reading his books. I think he's a very interesting man with many curious ideas, but I kind of feel like there's this colossal joke being played on me every time I attempt to finish one of his tomes. I've attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow maybe six or seven times now, and I just can't finish it. I love the beginning-- A screaming comes across the sky is just a beautiful way to begin a story. I follow Prentice through the banana breakfast, and meet Slothrop, and then I find myself reading the same paragraph a few times and then I'm somewhere else, in a different time perhaps, and someone else is talking, and I don't know who it is or what's going on. It's like having someone lead you to a place where true magic can happen, and then suddenly being bit on the nose by an ostrich. It's unexpected, it's unpleasant, and I don't understand why I can't seem to enjoy it like the others who have participated before me. I have read DFW and enjoyed Infinite Jest a good deal, and I don't consider that light reading-- but I just can't seem to find my groove when reading Pynchon.
I would love to have a home that would be so efficient the cost of utilities would be almost non-existent. I'd use solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling to run most of the house's needs. I'd recycle the rainwater for showers and to water the vegetable gardens outside when needed. The whole thing would be crazy insulated to retain the temperature as efficiently as possible.
Thanks!
It wasn't a pronounced taste, although to be fair this was probably around 20 years ago (good lord, really?) so I'm not sure how faithfully my memory serves. It was kind of a delicate texture and semi-overpowered by liberal amounts of jerk seasoning and some spices (cinnamon and nutmeg, if I recall). The first few bites went down well with a Red Stripe, but I kept envisioning the naked turtle sans shell and my stomach started to lurch a bit. I finished what I could so I wasn't too wasteful, but it was a fair amount of effort to keep it down after a while.
I did a month of intermittent fasting for kicks, where I would only have water on Mondays and Thursdays. In the morning, it wasn't too bad, especially if I could get engrossed with my work. Afternoons were tough, with some stomach pangs and a strong desire for food. After that afternoon hump, though, I was usually fine and didn't think of food until well after dinner, where I would have some strong cravings for late night food. The odd thing is the next morning, I wouldn't be starving-- I would not really be hungry again until closer to lunch that following day. I ended up losing about 12 lbs over the course of a month. It was an interesting experiment. After going back to regular eating, I put about 10 of those pounds back on.
Honestly, I don't know. After such a long time, the turtle soup has remained my only real memory of the food I had there, because it was the only food I had that I was totally unaccustomed to eating.
I tried turtle soup once when I was visiting the Cayman Islands, many years ago. It sounded like an interesting Caribbean delicacy, so I figured, when in Rome... The taste itself was fine, but I couldn't get rid of the mental imagery of what a turtle is, and what I was eating. My brain would replay an image of a turtle, complete in its shell, and then I'd focus on what was actually in the soup-- the meat of the turtle, which was the scrawny, reptilian flesh that was underneath that shell. I couldn't finish my bowl, and haven't had any desire for it since.
The commas, that are so prevalent, in this story, seemingly, sprinkled, with great gusto, make it hard, for this reader, to digest the story, without pausing, in my head, every time, a comma is seen.
The black swipe of bathroom graffiti announced, "Albert Fowler bites the heads off birds." -- I am sitting on steps that lead to Blessed St. Mary of the Benediction's south entrance, beyond a chained-up gate that I scaled an hour ago. -- A gritty, salty cold descended from the frosty clouds, enveloping people, cars, animals and trees with an intensity none of them were accustomed to in the past few years.
This is an older thread but still very relevant to my interests. Has there been any updates for mobile / API development?