floundersgreatadventure

South America just finished 8 days of honoring the Author and news man Garcia Marques. Now seeing that most of what he has written is in Spanish Jeff really hasn’t read a lot of his writing he did however read a story written for Rolling Stone magazine in 1980. It was about post war Viet Nam and the effect the war had on the people we left behind. What amazed me the most about the death of Gabo as he’s affectionately called is the out pouring of sentiment for him? You won’t see anything like this in the US for any of our famous authors even if they do win a Nobel Prize. They might get a one hour special or coverage of their funeral but nothing like what went on in Colombia and he hasn’t even lived here for years, residing instead in Mexico City for the last many years. Great writers aren’t there anymore and you can thank the digital age for that and TV. There aren’t any great journalists setting in the shadows or Poe’s and Walden’s or Mark Twain’s waiting for their moment. Authors that are writing today do it for love and in some cases money. Journalists’ are on the list of dying jobs in the US. They call them bloggers now and finding an audience is not a simple thing. Print media is dying Jeff publishes on amazon Kindle and he does have paper book copies available as well but is the digital world where he thinks he might find success. I wish American authors could experience the same kind of adulation as the one down here. They get it not by having there bucks made into movies but by people reading them as they become a part of the history of Colombia. Garcia Marques is famous all over Latin America he’s friends with Fidel Castro and others. If you get a chance and you’re Spanish isn’t that good look for the article in Rolling Stone Magazine and read it. This Flounder saying CIAO from Medellin, Colombia.