But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
I remember my parents' getting me chestnuts on the street when it was very cold in New York. I was surprised that ice-cream or pretzel vendors also had this wonderful hot bag to warm your hands on. I loved holding the hot bag of chesnuts in the cold, and watching them steam. I was surprised, later on, how little I liked chestnut puree or marron glace.
Friday, December 26, 2003
I remember spending Christmas one year in Stormville; I must have been seven or eight. The kids all stayed with the Herings in their house. They had a tree, despite the fact that they were more Jewish than Christian. We taped our socks to the mantle, I had no idea why. I was told that they would be filled with treats (or coal, if I'd been bad); this was the first I'd heard about that. I wished I'd worn more capacious socks. I remember my black nylon sock didn't look like it would hold more than a Hershey's kiss or two. But no one had very big socks anyhow. None of this seemed a big deal to me. I was amazed, and felt what you were supposed to feel, the next morning when my sock had been replaced by a giant Christmas stocking full of good things. I think this was the only Christmas I really shared in as a kid, and it was magical. (I think there were gifts too, but I don't remember those.)
Monday, December 22, 2003
I remember: "as effective as codeine, but not narcotic." This was an ad for some cough syrup. But I don't remember which one. Codone?
Saturday, December 20, 2003
I remember more about the archaic servants' bells in apartment 7-F, which I was so thrilled about when we moved there. In most rooms they were push-buttons, as I've mentioned before, but in the dining room you rang by pushing a big metal plate under the dining room rug. I seem to recall having seen it once, but I'm not sure: I have a sense of its being surprisingly ugly and not the continuous surface I'd imagined it was. But I'd only have seen it when we moved out (or perhaps if we ever changed the rug in the dining room), so I'm not sure I ever did. The rug that covered it was probably 8x10 and the heavy dining room table was above it, though once my parents moved the table out of the way for a party. More about that party in a moment. What I remember about the bell was the fun I could have with my parents and sister first, then when they got both irritated with me and habituated to the prank, the fun I had making my friends think there was someone at the door. Because you could hear the bell just fine: which sort of obviated what I now realize it was used for: making the servants appear as if by a kind of magical discretion at just the right moment of the meal, the way they do in the movies.
My memory of this bell, which I can't have thought of for decades, despite the way I would worm my way down in the chair -- the black leather chair with studs! what I thought of when I read about points de capitons in Lacan years later -- is partly how awkward it was to get it to ring. I remember feeling with my bare and therefore slightly shortened foot for the tell-tale projections that were part of its mechanism, like the projections you feel for now in a Barney doll to make it talk or sing. The dining room bell was so much more interesting than Barney. I must have been still fairly small, because I sat on the long side of the table, so only had to reach halfway across the shadow of its width. I remember the pleasure of finding one of those projections, having it under foot, and sitting there quietly, cherishing the power to ring.
I remembered the bell again because there's a similar one in A Slight Case of Murder, a wonderful Edward G. Robinson movie, with zesty and farcial screenplay by Damon Runyan. Jane Bryan, who plays Robinson's wife, tries to summon servants who have gone to move some dead bodies around and are unavailable. Robinson says, "Ring again." We haven't seen her ringing. But then she says, "If I ring any harder I'll put my foor through the floor." So this must have been a very well-known feature of apartments or houses at the time, and not only upper class or upper middle class. When I saw the scene in the movie, it all came back.
And this prompted me to remember this party which was attended by friends and friends of friends of my parents, including a very genial man whom I quite liked -- to my surprise, because he had two hooks for arms. And he was married, to someone he'd met after losing his arms, trying to defuse a land-mine for the Israeli Defense Forces. I wonder was that 1948? It might have been 1967: I think this party was after the six-day war. He was probably in his fifties or sixties though. But who knows -- maybe he was just in his early thirties. He was very jovial. My memory of him at the party is fixed not so much because he was there as because a few days later my parents went to another occasion with him, and my father told me that he'd really put his foot in his mouth, by telling one of his favorite jokes: "It's gangrene; we've got to amputate your leg." "Oh my God." After the operation: "I have good news and bad news. " "Ok, Doctor, give me the bad news first." "We cut off the wrong leg." "Oh my God! Well what can the good news possibly be?" "The other leg is healing." (I think his wife was a doctor. Now that I think of this, I think she might have cared for him professionally. A belated Great War story.)
I was shocked by my father's bad judgment, and asked him how this guy had responded. My father shook his head in pleasant disbelief and said, "He laughed harder than anyone." I loved that.
Friday, December 19, 2003
I remember, as I do on Hannukah, that I understood how dreidels worked but was baffled by tops with strings. They were mysterious to me, and being able to set a string-top spinning was like being able to whistle with your fingers -- a technique I didn't have a clue as to how to master. I still don't.
Thursday, December 18, 2003
I remember being sick as a kid, but don't want to remember it because I've got a high fever now. I do remember my skepticism about aspirin making you feel better, but I'll certainly concede now that aspirin and its ilk can help. Not quite enough though. But that puts me in mind of a Bazooka Joe bubble gum strip where the scholarly professorial kid goes to the drug store and asks for salicylic acid. "You mean aspirin?" asks the silver-haired pharmacist. Nerdy kid: "That's the word! I never can remember it!" I admired him. I remember also learning that bazookas meant something else before it became a proper epithet for Bazooka Joe derived from the name of the gum which was its original meaning. At least I think so -- I'm not absolutely certain which came first. (I remember that like the color lemon, the color orange derives its name from the fruit, where I always thought it was so elegant to call the fruit simply by its vivid color.) I had friends, like Hugh, who knew what bazookas were (and had toy bazookas), just as they knew what the Blitz was in football, when I didn't.
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
I remember first learning the word "jeopardy" as the name of the Art Fleming game show; then my mother told me it meant danger. And then in high school, when we read the Constitution, I became aware of the prohibition against putting someone in double jeopardy. I had no idea. The phrase still seems a little bit funny to me.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
I remember how impressed I was by the fact that adults could swallow pills. My parents did this as a matter of course: another impressive way that they moved with ease in the glamourous world of adults they defined, but defined as a vast penumbra around them. Swallowing pills was even more glamourous than whistling, since I wanted to be able to whistle, but saw no need to swallow pills. I think swallowing pills was for me something like the adult taste for wine and beer would seem a little later: an acquired taste that was glamourous because it was an acquired taste, and yet because it was an acquired taste there was no incentive for someone like me who didn't have it to acquire it.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
I remember that everyone would applaud when we landed safely on our trips to and from Europe in the summer when I was a kid. These were Swiss-Air charter flights (always hours late), when charters were the only way to get discounts. I don't know whether applauding was a standard convention at the time (as I didn't know that it was when everyone applauds at the end of Kingsfield's last class in The Paperchase, till my mother told me that this was standard -- indeed standard at the end of every lecture); whether it was or not, it must have been the case that people applauded because for them air travel was not as routine as it later became. And yet the passengers also seemed like connoisseurs, and I felt proud to be among them and their expertise. It seemed a fine and European thing to do.
Friday, December 12, 2003
I remember my mother getting a telegram one summer morning in Bellagio which said: JUST DIED YESTERDAY OF A CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE. I knew enough about telegrams, partly because of that one to me signed "Mummy and Daddy" which I wrote about November 26, 2002 here (scroll down), to know their postcard abbreviation convention. I was amused by the idea of someone saying of himself that he'd just died. I knew that the telegram was serious -- after all it was a telegram -- but seriousness wasn't serious enough for me at the time not to laugh when I presented my mother with my interpretation. (The telegram was delivered open on a polished tray, and I remember reading it on the counter of a table or bureau on my parents' room.) Of course Just turned out to be the last name of the woman who had died (my mother was either or lawyer or the executor of her will or both) -- died suddenly: this was the first I heard of cerebral hemorrhages. I think perhaps I wasn't disturbed by the idea of them immediately, but I was now well-enough informed to understand the story about FDR's death presented a year or two later in the reading textbook I remember using either in fourth or fifth grade. I remember Roosevelt's last words were, "I have the damndest headache," though this wasn't how the textbook quoted them. There he might have been reported as simply saying "I have a terrible headache," though I'm not sure. After that, every headache I had would always be slightly scary.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
I remember reading a story in Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazine-book on the beach in Bellagio, probably the last summer we were there, when I was twelve. The story was about the possibility of going to another world, a utopian world open to people who longed enough for its spirit of cooperation and generosity. You went to a travel agency, and if you looked like the right type of person and asked with the right mixture of subtlety and humility about this possibility, you might be told about it by the eerily knowing agent at the counter. I remember that he explained to the protagonist that this other world was both far away and not -- that it was like going to dinner at someone's apartment which shared a wall with yours, but to get to it you had to go out your front door, down the elevator, around the block, into the other building and through the front door of the other apartment. This other, Utopian world had vacuum cleaners but no TVs; busses but no cars (maybe: it's the vacuum cleaners I really remember and was impressed by). The protagonist is accepted and he sits in a waiting room with other travellers. Then he panics, and leaves the room. Then he regrets his panic and returns to it. But they're gone. He goes back to the travel agent and asks to be re-accepted to the utopian pioneers. But the travel agent feigns blank incomprehension. He's missed his chance forever.
I remember this story pretty well. I was surprised, yesterday, when a student in my Hitchcock class showed me a hardcover best-of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine that the story turned out to be by Jack Finney, whose Time and Again and From Time to Time are pretty marvelous evocations of time travel and the reality of the past. Time and Again was a book I inherited from someone, but I can't remember whom. It had a green hard cover, and it sat on the middle shelf of my right hand book case in my room for a while. I didn't read it at the time though. (The hero lives at the Beresford, just after it's built, where later John Lennon would be shot. I always confused the Beresford with the building in Rosemary's Baby, which is, I believe, slightly uptown, on Central Park West.) But had I recognized the name from the story, which turns out to be called "Of the Missing," I would have read it immediately.
The story was magical, and the sense of loss at its end palpable. It was maybe the first story that I ever read that was about itself, about the fact that it ended. The protagonist lost his access to that marvelous other world, and so did I: the story was over.
So of course when I saw the story again -- I only looked it up in my student's book because I saw the author's name, not because I recognized the title -- I was slightly disconcerted. I had to check to make sure it was the same story (it was), but only as cursorily as possible, since I know that if I reread it now, I'd lose its magic forever, more conclusively even than its hero loses his access to that other world.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
I remember that Larry Sedgewick could belch at will. I couldn't understand how he did it, and asked him to explain. He couldn't explain, and he couldn't understand how someone could be unable to.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
I remember, thanks to George W.S. Trow's "Collapsing Dominant" in Within the Context of No Context, which brought them back to me, the stencils on the sidewalks of New York that said "Pray for Rosemary's baby." I didn't know -- who did? -- that it was a movie at the time. It seemed like some vaguely Catholic cult. Which was what it was supposed to seem like. Then when it turned out to be one, I read the book (as usual!). The movie ads gave Mia Farrow a lot of other-worldly, saintly, even Avila-like prestige.
Monday, December 08, 2003
I remember a kid with a bite plate (I don't remember his name). He could remove and take it out with his tongue, displaying it by turning his head around. It was disgusting, the sort of negative space version of my grandparents' taking their dentures out. And then of course he was young and they were old. In fact he was younger than we were but was able to disgust us -- and so he had power over us.
Saturday, December 06, 2003
I remember going down with my parents and maybe the Hoges and their parents one snowy evening into the playground at Riverside Park to make snowmen. The snow had stopped and the night was clear, with that odd clarity that comes at darkness when the sky is finally black but the ground is white so it's luminous all over. I knew about snowmen, from cartoons, but I'd never made a real one. I think they must have been refencing the playground, since I recall that we went down the sledding hill which forms such a feature of the landscape of my early memories straight into the playground. I was surprised how easy it was to roll the snowballs into the snowman's body. And the adults -- the Hoges or whoever they were -- really knew what they were doing. They'd brought coal! From where? And a carrot! And they wound a scarf around the snowman, and put a cap on its head. And it held a stick, somehow. It looked just like the snowmen in cartoons. It was amazing that rolling up that anonymous, featureless snow could produce something so like its own simulacrum. I mean the snow was still that anonymous thing, that visual hum, that it always was. But now the vast extent to which that substance could reach became somehow clearer: the most familiar, friendly, artificial, indoor thing -- the snowman on TV -- could be reduced to the pure blank exteriority of snow. Snow was at the base of everything.
Friday, December 05, 2003
I remember that I assumed that my parents knew that I was smoking, and that they were wisely not challenging me. I smoked so much: how could they not know? I was impressed by their wisdom (though I don't know if this wise silence would really have been effective; but it still seemed like the right Ward Cleaver response). But then they found some cigarettes in my pocket -- English Ovals! what a fool I was -- and they hit the roof. I'm not sure that was a wise response either, especially since it meant that they were so much less insightfully aware of what I was doing than I'd thought.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
I remember that I looked like Jerry Fall. When I changed schools in tenth grade, everyone at my new school, especially the athletic coaches, asked me whether I was related to him. He'd graduated the previous year. I think he was a football star. I didn't know whether to be flattered -- or anxious that I couldn't live up to him. I came down on the side of anxiety. People seemed to imagine I'd play football, which wasn't even the remotest of possibilities. In tenth grade, people who've graduated are like people who've died. I'd never met Jerry Fall and so coming to school after he was gone was like becoming aware of a historical figure (like Calvin Hill, who'd also gone to my school, and who was a historical figure). It was odd to be compared to him -- it was like being compared to the long-dead. (Of course he was just in college somewhere, but even now it's hard to believe that he was alive, present in the world, perhaps nearby.) I wonder now whether this was something I was particularly sensitive to because of my being named after my uncle, killed on Biak in 1944.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
I remember that in older hospital rooms the windows are open to the fresh air even in winter. I remember visiting my grandmother once at Columbia-Presbyterian and liking the way the windows were open six inches on the bottom, but the draft prevented by a glass baffle, so that right by the window there was a kind of coolness rising between the baffle and the opening muffled and insulated by the lovely warmth rising from the steam radiator just below the window: the warmth and coolness each making the other feel more precious and luxurious. I liked the marble and stone of the old building, and the high ceilings and tiled floors. Not that I would have wanted to stay there. But if I'd been sick, it would have been the room I wanted.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
I remember my parents' friend Ken Boyer, who was an interior decorator. He lived in Long Island, eventually moving in to a servants' bungalow next door to us. But he drove a Rolls Royce. He was friends with the pianists Whittemore and Lowe. (One of them was a pianist, anyhow: I don't quite remember how they performed together. Baldwin featured them in their competing-with-Steinway ads: "Whittemore and Lowe's accompanist.") My parents met them through him, as well as several other members of the gay intelligentsia. Ken Boyer got on very well with my sister. He struck me as very effiminate, his boyfriend -- Raoul! -- not. Raoul was maybe from Brazil. He was a doctor. His English was bad: I doubt he practiced here. One day I took Raoul and some other friend of theirs out in my boat. Or maybe it was Dr. Taylor, a confirmed heterosexual MD. At a discrete place Raoul made me stop, since he "had to go pipi in the water." ("PiPI" was how he pronounced it.) He pissed a nice lovely arc off the side of the boat. I had somehow expected that a gay man would be as embarrassed to piss in front of other males as I would be in front of girls. But it was all interestingly unexceptional.
Monday, December 01, 2003
I remember worn coins. In particular I remember how worn dimes might get, so that you couldn't tell the difference (especially on the reverse) between Roosevelt and Mercury dimes (with their three torches). Once the zinc-copper coins came in (I remember being fascinated by the brand new band of copper in the milling of the dimes and quarters!) they got replaced faster; but it was still possible to find worn pennies, especially the pre-1959 wreath ones. But then pennies started being coined out of zinc instead of copper (when copper came to more than a penny a penny-weight -- I wrote about the penny shortage during high school here -- scroll down to April 1, 2002). Since a worn silver dime had less silver than a new one, and since a new one was supposed to be made of roughly ten cents worth of pre-inflationary silver, it was more cost-effective to use old coins. Melt a hundred old dimes and you might only have silver for 98 new ones. But now the metal isn't worth the paper its printed on, so we get shiny but worthless new specii all the time. But I miss those friendly coins, comfortable somehow like the old shoes my feet were then growing too fast ever to have experienced.
Friday, November 28, 2003
I remember my father taking me to the Thanksgiving Day parade. We saw marchers dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers. At the time I didn't know the difference between parades with real soldiers, policemen, etc. and costumes. I liked the rifles or muskets the soldiers were carrying. I said something about the fact that they were carrying guns, but my father said they were "sticks" not guns. I found this confusing, because they didn't look like sticks. The had shoulder stocks and rifling and were uniform. This was troubling to me: his authority vs. my own judgment about what we both were seeing. His point -- as I only realized years later -- was that these weren't real soldiers, and they weren't carrying real weapons. But I think I didn't realize at the time that there still were real weapons still in the world. That would have been like real cowboys. (I did know there were revolvers, or at least handguns, since I would sometimes thrill to see policemen carrying them in their holsters.)
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
I remember that park workers used picks with sharp metal points to pick up trash in the park; they'd drop the trash in burlap bags. (Now they use prehensile plastic grabbers and heavy duty plastic.) I thought the tool was really neat. I remember watching them with my grandparents, either uptown in Washington Heights or near our house in Riverside Park. The idea that trash belonged to the order of things as well, that there was a tool specifically designed for it, was both curious and serene.
Monday, November 24, 2003
I remember the woman I called "The Prejudiced Lady" on 91st street whose dog I walked (sometimes with the Weisers' poodle). She'd broken her hip and couldn't walk her dog herself. I walked her (the dog) morning and evening. I tried to get there at 8:10, since I had to leave for school at 8:30, but sometimes I wouldn't get there till 8:25. (She'd leave the door open when she went to the bathroom for her morning rituals, so I had some leeway since she wouldn't know just when I arrived.) Then sometimes the dog would pee inside, and she'd be very angry at me. She gave me, I think, $5.00 a week. I remember once coming out of her building after walking her dog and seeing someone trying to file through the chain link lock I'd locked up my bike with. (I thought that the clear plastic sheath around the chains was part of the lock, maybe to prevent files from working. It seemed one of those odd, adult innovations that they no doubt had reasons for but which made no sense to me.) He was concentrating pretty hard, but when I said "Hey!" to him he looked up and asked, "Is this your bike?" He must have been thirty or thirty-five. When I said yes he apologized. He put over convincingly: that had he known it was my bike he wouldn't have tried to steal it. But of course I was a complete stranger to him. Nevertheless, I believed him. And I felt it was just a little odd that someone twenty or more years older than I was should be apologizing to me the way he had just done.
The prejudiced lady hated Mayor Lindsay. He had let "the niggers and the spics" ruin the city. The first word I knew, maybe from To Kill a Mockingbird, but not the second. My parents told me that it referred to people who spoke Spanish, mainly Puetro Ricans (they didn't use the word "Hispanic"). So I imagined its derivation: from Spic and Span. They were SPANish, so they were called SPICs as a kind of not-so-witty reversal. The person who got me this job -- perhaps Mark Dollard? -- warned me she was prejudiced. I think she used this term when I came in to find her watching a news show (she was always sitting on her chair, on a crocheted blanket with her metal cane in hand, watching TV) about black leaders agitating in Bed-Stuy (maybe) about no longer using books with black print on a white background. Rather black students should be given books with white print on a black background. That seemed vaguely interesting to me. But it was calculated -- really calculated, at least by the TV station -- to inflame the likes of her. I tended to maintain a diplomatic silence, though sometimes I would start arguing passionately against her. At the time my conscience wouldn't let me listen to vicious opinions without ever lodging a protest, no matter how ineffectual. Alas, things have changed since.
I remember that she used to send me to pick up pepper steaks for her dinner at the Chinese Restaurant on 91st on the East Side of Broadway. This was a restaurant I took my parents to a couple of times in those years, and that I went to a few times in college too, until I found out about Empire on 97th.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
I remember The Sign of the Dove on Third in the seventies. We'd pass it a lot in taxis, and once we walked past and I got to look inside. I was awestruck by its beauty, and it became for me the El Dorado of restaurants, the place you'd want to go to if you could go anywhere. My parents were mildly amused by this, and by my atavistic awe of at least this feature in their lives, that they went there some time. There was something marvelous about the way the idea of the Dove, or the pictured dove on the sign, and the beautiful mildness of its brilliantly suffused interior went together. And then it was the only building with a light facade, a kind of afterimage of pink, on the entire street. How could there be any question about the food in a place that made all sensory experience somehow luxuriantly visual: made seeing into a constant, gentle, caressing luxury. I found it breathtaking. When I was old enough to go there it was -- of course! -- mildly disappointing. (I think the first time I went in was with Margot, in college. We had drinks, but they were booked for dinner. It was probably a couple of years later that I ate there.) But only mildly disappointing, just part of the general dim sense of disappointment that is part of adult experience of what you'd longed to experience as a child. So to say that it was mildly disappointing is to say that it sustained as well as anything in the world possibly could sustain its earlier beauty for me. It was all it should be: everything the high and dazzling adult experience I longed for could come to. That was less than I thought, but I was still glad that it wasn't the fault of The Sign of the Dove.
Saturday, November 22, 2003
I remember the poem that we were assigned to write, maybe the Tuesday we returned to school after Kennedy's assassination. I didn't know what to do. My parents "helped" me, by writing the poem (just as they "helped" me with my report in which I pointed out, to my surprise, that "The tomato is a fruit"). I was very impressed by it. The poem began:
On that black Friday when we heard
That our President had died,
We could not quite believe the word--
Then, knowing it was so, we cried.
It ended alluding to John-John's salute:
You really are your father's son.
(This turned out to be true, though in a slightly different way.)
I remember all the parallels we later spooked ourselves with between Lincoln's and Kennedy's assassinations: it was Friday; they'd both been elected in '60; they were both shot in the presence of their wives; Lincoln had had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. There were others, but that's what I remember.
I remember posting this a year and a half ago (May 28, 2002):
"Mrs. Eben announced Kennedy's assassination to us, over the school loudspeaker. It was near the end of the day, a Friday, and I was already in my coat, but we were at our desks still, making Thanksgiving decorations for the party we were to have the next week. I was coloring in a feather on the cream construction paper. She made the announcement, and we all didn't quite know what to do. I think our teacher, Mrs. Comiskey that would have been, told us this was shocking and serious, or maybe Mrs. Eben had already asked for a moment of silence or of prayer. (At some point, there definitely was a moment of prayer, and I said the Shema -- I had no idea what else you were supposed to do. I still don't.) Then we just sat there, and I went back to coloring my feather. Monday they cancelled school, and we watched the funeral and John John saluting the caisson. I think I didn't know the song yet about the caissons keep rolling along, since I remember this is when I learned the word "caisson." But I wasn't very good about the words of songs, especially of choruses, or about seeing that they were the same words that we might use in other contexts. On Friday, after we went home, my mother asked me whether I still wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History, where she had promised to take me to see the dinosaurs. I had been reading Danny and the Dinosaurand I really wanted to see them now. I said I still wanted to go. It was nearly empty: I remember that in the dinosaur room there was a young couple (in their teens or twenties I'd say) and a guard. I was struck by how empty it was, and I think I wondered what theywere doing there. I was disappointed by the dinosaurs because they were just skeletons, not the dinosaur that you saw in Danny and the Dinosaur which was more a taxidermy model come to life. They told me I think the next week that Mrs. Eben was weeping when she announced the assassination, although I don't recall this or noticing it. We had an assembly in the auditorium when we got back to school, and I do remember how subdued she seemed then. I remember Johnson's first speech on the radio, and being impressed that he could lead the country so quickly -- he seemed so much more authoritative than the assistant principal (Mrs. Nadler!) ever seemed when she took over just because Mrs. Eben was out. But that hierarchical principle still kicked in, and we all thought the vice-president was no match for Kennedy himself, the greatest of all presidents ever, as we assured ourselves for a long time. We felt both sorry for Jonathan Richmond and in awe of him since he knew Kennedy's inaugural address by heart (see an earlier entry); it was as though he was the great surviving member of that time, and as though Kennedy's passion could now survive subjectively only in his memory. His recitation skills were much in demand for the next little while."
Friday, November 21, 2003
I remember Dewar's Profiles, the ad campaign. They always had the back of The New Yorker. There was always a parenthesis that informed you that "Dewar's Profiles" was "(pronounced do-er's White Label)" but I didn't get that this meant that we were supposed to think that Dewar's drinkers were also do-ers. And I always read it as "Dee-wores," ignoring the parenthetical pronunciation, which I didn't much care about because I never imagined I'd be drinking Dewars (and now I try to avoid it still, though Margot and I used to order it as our standard everyday scotch). I was more puzzled by the word "profile," not least because of that bizarre pronunciation (White Label?), a word which also went with The New Yorker, since they had a feature called "profiles" which were long articles on interesting people. What made these profiles? All I knew about profiles were from drawing: they were easier than the impossibly-nosed full-face. Somehow it seemed that the only sense I could really make of this was that the shapes of letters, black against the white page, were like profiles: it was the countour that counted. I don't know when "profile" stopped bothering me as a word in this context. But perhaps it helped me understand -- decades later (!) -- what Michel Leiris meant in his essays on "literature considered as a bull-fight" that the matador turns in profile to the two-dimensional cut of the edge, becomes an edge himself to dodge the edge of the horn. Any cut he receives is then two-dimensional as well, the only cut that a pure surface can suffer, a kind of pealing away of a half-ply. How odd the idea of a life as profile.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
I remember Megillah Gorilla. That's almost certainly not how its (her?) name was spelled. But it made the Megillah Esther funny. "Gorilla! Megillah Gorilla for sale!" It must have been a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I just now realize that the theme song must be harmonically the same as the one for the Flintstones. "We'll have a gay old time!"
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
I remember a show called Maverick, a Western. Then I became aware of the car. Then of the figurative use: a contrarian. And finally: the horse.
Monday, November 17, 2003
I remember step-ladder chairs. In Vertigo Jimmy Stewart steps on one just like the one my downtown grandmother had. They were high-seated chairs, for sitting at counters, with backs, yellow or red metal (the Hoges might have had a red one), with steps that you could pull out so that you could stand on them, pressing your shins up against the back for a feeling of added security, added sense of balance. You used them to change light bulbs. I remember falling down face first at my grandmother's house off the step-ladder. I was a sheet of red pain from feet to face, but I held back my tears. They were very proud of me; I was very proud of myself, and for a long time I would refer to this time, asking them (in front of my parents, in front of their friends) whether they remembered the time I fell of the step-ladder "and I didn't even cry."
Sunday, November 16, 2003
I remember a game you played with three pennies. You made a goal with your pinkie and index finger extended from the fist pressed to the edge of the table, and your opponent flicked one of the pennies through a gateway made by the other two. You couldn't flick the same penny twice in a row, and if you missed the gate or sent the penny off the edge of the table it was the other person's turn. The aim was to flick a penny into your opponent's goal. It was always harder than it seemed it would be. There was something interesting about the different but related sensations of extending two fingers and jamming the others to make the goal, and curling your index finger to flick the penny if you were on offense.
Friday, November 14, 2003
I remember when automatic doors came in at the supermarket. They were only for exiting at first. I think Key Foods on 92nd Street had them before the Garden Market on 90th. The door opened when your weight on a padded platform in front of it signalled that you were heading towards it. This was before the current radar technology. It was fun to straddle the platform and go right up to the door without its opening (annoying, almost always, the people behind you waiting to go through). We'd also hold ourselves up on the hand railing that actually acted as a kind of guide to direct people directly to the door. I think we would engage in this apparently pointless activity just as a way of psyching the door out -- understanding its mechanism in a way that it couldn't understand out behavior. We could be invisible to it, and the reason we could is that its workings were so transparent to us.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
I remember the "razzle-dazzle" in touch football. Lots of laterals: it was a play that was a sort of precursor to ultimate frisbee. It always ended with a forward lateral being called by the other team very early on.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
I remember that "Veteran's Day" used to be "Armistice Day." My grandparents still called it that when I was a child; and I think some calendars called it both. Or it was like carrying the one vs. exchanging it: some adults used to insist on the older terminology. My grandfather fought in the First World War so for him it was Armistice Day. I guess it still is in Europe; and so maybe it wasn't an atavism but a Europeanism. Then I forgot this, but was reminded of it in seventh or eighth grade when I read Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut deplores the changed name, and the dishonor it does to the dead.
Monday, November 10, 2003
I remember that I used to think there was a word "anhiliate." It was actually my mildly dyslexic, or perhaps lazy, reading of anihilate. When I used it in conversation, Doug Breitbart said it was obvious that I read a lot, since it was one of many words that I deformed (like "parsh" for phrase or parse).
Sunday, November 09, 2003
I remember, maybe from Mission Impossible, that voice prints are like finger prints -- they are unique identifiers. I think this isn't so well accepted any more. I liked the idea of voice-prints. On the show they were large and rectangular, more like finger-paints than -prints. It was interesting that the voice was somehow rectangular. I remember another Mission Impossible, I think, where a murder was committed by the murderer using a tuning fork over a phone line which somehow killed the person who was on the other end of the phone. I think I was told to go to bed before I saw how the episode resolved. It was scary to think you could kill people that way. I guess it was an imaginary prelude to the cell-phone with plastic explosive bomb that the Israelis (and I think the British too) have perfected.
Saturday, November 08, 2003
I remember that in the downstairs (guest) bathroom at the Sterns' house they had a framed poster above the toilet of a vaguely Chagallian landscape and the word Hundretwasser (spelling?) below. I thought that must be a place, or perhaps a Yiddish, or German word, and I kept trying to parse it as Hundredwater. It would always be there when I peed, and it never made sense. But the enigma never lasted longer than the fifteen or twenty seconds it took to pee, and faded back into the ranks of annoying obscurity until the next time. Later I learend -- I think I learned -- that he was a person, the painter of the landscape, and that the poster was from some show or other. But I still don't quite know who he was or why or how his strange name designated him.
Friday, November 07, 2003
I remember, on my birthday, that it was maybe for my thirteenth birthday that my father got me the small pool table from Rappaports (which I've mentioned before). Recalling it now, I remember that there was some problem with it, and they took it back, and my father kept pressing me to call them to find out what was happening. But I was mortally embarrassed about calling stores about anything -- whether they had something, whether they were open, etc. So somehow I managed to dodge this call, which I now see was part of my father's campaign to make me more aggressive with other people in the world (but it was his aggression that I hated); what I don't understand is how it came about that he eventually let the matter drop (since I do know it was never resolved). This is one of those things where I don't know now whether to admire or disparage his behavior: did he decide, after full consideration, not to pursue it? Or did he just forget, as Miss Brenner did the note she sent home and that I never got signed (see entry for March 16, 2002)?
From Tim Paul:
I remember the sound of rotary telephones. And how if you dialed a "9" or a "0" it would take what seemed like a very long time to complete the dial. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I remember how you used to rent phones instead of owning them with only three or four varieties to choose from. We got the most plain black socialist number. I remember when touch-tone came in and how sexy that was. I think it was my rich uncle who had the first touchtone phone with glowing (green) buttons. And loud and melodic tone sounds. bleep, bleep, bleep. It took another year or more before we got one at home. I remember my Granny had rotery at her summer home until only a couple years ago and it seemed perfectly natural that she had one. - Tim Paul
Thursday, November 06, 2003
I remember that it's ok to buy one stick of butter. You can take it out of the box. I was always embarrassed to do this, but the check-out cashiers never looked twice. I'm still a little embarrassed to do this: what if the rules have changed? But I like knowing that it's ok.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
I remember the Hathaway man with his beautifully pressed shirts and his eye-patch. That was the first eye-patch I saw that didn't belong to a pirate. I was confused. Was he a pirate? Or in disguise? I thought eye-patches were only pirate accesories. But now they seemed to mean -- well what? Had he lost an eye? It seemed unlikely, since he was so well put together. Was it just a fashion statement? Well, yes, but somehow it wasn't supposed to be only that. I never quite got it. I remember though at about the same time that some Peanuts character had to wear an eye-patch because she had lazy-eye, and this would force her bad eye to work. The concept of lazy-eye was interesting to me.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
I remember people opening car doors to slam them tighter while we were driving. I have a general memory of this -- a practice that is much rarer now that lights and bells tell you that the door isn't shut. And I have a particular memory of my mother doing this, in the left back seat of the car as we drove up the West Side Highway. I was surprised at the incongruity of her opening the door as we were driving, and then of her slamming it. My parents told me never to do that, so I think I must have wanted to open my door as well. I didn't understand then that you could get killed falling out of a quickly moving car. I thought that all that counted was downwards velocity -- and besides in many TV shows people fell out of moving trains. But later Hugh Cramer told me -- in the context of admiring some hero who survives a fall or jump out of a car, or maybe some friend of his brother Ben's -- that fifty miles an hour was usually fatal.
I remember Hugh was also the source of information about the world's records for bicycle speeds: fifty miles an hour on a straightaway, and close to a hundred when drafting a train. He was also, as I pursue these associative memories, the source of information on land speed records on the salt flats. And my father told me why they used the salt flats instead of roads: because if you even hit a pebble at four hundred miles per hour you would flip and crash and burn. This seemed unlikely, though it did tell me something I couldn't have suspected about the salt flats: that they were perfectly debris-free and smooth. Later, when Paul Marsala taught me to shoot a rifle (see entry in archives for January 22, 2003), he said that a single blade of grass would deflect a high-velocity bullet. This was one of those cases where two intuitions clashed: that the momentum of the bullet would be hard to deflect; that the momentum of the bullet was so tightly wound, as it were, that the smallest perturbation would be catastrophic. (In Jack Finney's Time and Again, a book I inherited from the house my parents bought but didn't read for twenty years, the conflicting theories about the alterability of the past take the form of the same intuitive hunches.) At any rate, opening doors in moving cars seemed another one of those adult skills: they could do it, and they knew when it was necessary to do.
Sunday, November 02, 2003
I remember doing a report on fruits and vegetables in third grade, or maybe second. It was a collage report on colored construction paper. My parents helped me, a lot. They had all sorts of neat binding gadgets, and they used a three-hole punch and some manilla envelope ribbon to bind the report together. But what I particularly remember was the austere page, all in black, near the end with a picture of a tomato glued right in the middle, and the caption "A tomato is a fruit." My mother put this page together. I was very surprised that a tomato was a fruit, and impressed that the page knew that it was surprising. But I was also surprised by my parents' knowledge. This was one of those times, like the time when they told me that the first straight-edges were traced against taut string, that I was impressed with the sheer extent of their knowledge. Not impressed that they knew more than me, which was obvious, but that they had a kind of command of a vast space of knowledge that I didn't know existed. Generally they seemed to me the adult presiders over a world whose measure I knew even if I didn't know its contents or its controls. I thought I saw what I would grow into knowing. But in moments like this, I became aware that their knowledge exceeded mine in kind as well as in degree. They grew somehow distanced from me, they expanded like a benign version of the father figure in Kafka's "Judgment." They were no longer captured by the term "my parents," whereby I was the center that defined the circumference of the world they knew and acted in. They were something else besides, strange to me, remote, distant as their own friends. "A tomato is a fruit:" in a way this was my first inkling of adult life.
Friday, October 31, 2003
I remember trick-or-treating, and that one person once asked us for a trick (maybe the first time I went), and we had no idea what he was asking for. I had sort of thought that they were supposed to perform a trick for us, if they weren't going to give us a treat. It might have been the same person -- at any rate it was some earnest but good-humored intellectual -- who played the piano for us as a treat, some Broadway song, I believe. We didn't think that was a treat, plus it took a long time that we might have spent getting candy. But we were polite. I remember that one apartment always had a bowl full of dimes, instead of candy. Usually we'd end up with tons of candy and a little money -- plus all the money for Unicef. I remember stealing some of the UNICEF money to buy comics, but not very much of it. I wouldn't have been able to refold the box so it was just a question of trying to shake coins out of the slot. I put the quarters back in, but kept a few nickels and dimes. I remember the results of shaking, and how you wanted the coin that came out to be a dime. I remember one person -- or couple, maybe -- opening the door when we rang and refusing to give us anything. I was puzzled that they were surprised and irritated to see us. We must have been one of dozens of groups from the building. We went up to the fifteenth floor, and then walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. No adults chaperoned us. In buildings, you don't know who's home and who's Halloween-friendly, so you just ring at every door. Some opened and some didn't, but those that opened always had treats. No one liked getting apples. We were told about razor blades, but didn't take the threat seriously. It was just that apples were always available at home, and candy wasn't. I remember the smell of the lacquered cardboard halloween masks we'd buy on 83rd street, and the elastic cords that always threatened to rip through their eyelets at the sides of the mask.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
I remember when our next door neighbors, the Hoges, installed an intercom system in their apartment (2-H). It was the first intercom I ever saw (though I guess I knew the school version from the principal's daily announcements. I was surprised and perturbed to find, when I went to Franklin for Junior High, that the principal and the dean could listen in on class as well as announce things to us). I remember the white boxes in each room, with the white wires stretched against the molding, and the expertise of the whole family in the way they could use this system. Yet it was also a kind of rebuke to the kids, who were supposed to stop screaming from room to room (which they continued doing). Still the way they all knew how to get such a thing installed (like their air-conditioner too! We didn't get one till we moved to 7-F), and then to use it as a family, seemed part of their general, all-American Protestantism.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
I remember, from cop shows (Dick Tracy too?), the Miranda warning (which must have been brand new, and which I didn't know by name at the time): "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." I never understood why it positively would be used against the accused. How could you use the truth against an innocent person? How could you use a denial of guilt against the denier? Somehow it seemed the police had ways of making what you said proof of your guilt: as though they had control of meanings, or of the consequences of meanings no matter what the meaning of what was said. I was curious to see such a protestation used against the accused in a court of law -- it promised to be very interesting -- but it never was.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
I remember -- another useful fact learned from comic books -- that if you die in a dream, you die. And I noticed that I did always wake up before I died in disaster dreams and nightmares. I think I learned this from a Batman comic. The bad guy somehow gets people to dream that they die, and then their hearts stop beating. I don't remember how he does this. It never occured to me that the writers of the comics couldn't possibly know this as a fact.
Monday, October 27, 2003
I remember the pointlessness of the UHF dial on our tvs. You spun and spun and almost never got anything: I remember looking for something in the low teens, and then again something in the eighties. On the whole UHF seemed non-existent, but the triumph of hope over experience would occasionally prompt me to try to tune in on a show that seemed fascinating in the TV section of the newspaper. I seem to recall wanting to watch Flipper this way once. It was always a grueling exercise in frustration. I remember the round UHF antennae, which did nothing. I remember using hangers (as we did on our walkie-talkies) to try to boost reception, to no avail. Once, though, a junior high teacher -- Mr. Baruch, I think, who taught us the word "aficionado" because (like me) he was so into Hemingway, and who introduced us to Death in the Afternoon -- told us you could see the bullfights from Puerto Rico Saturday afternoons on some high-two-digit channel. I tuned in -- I think this was one of those Spanish language channels that I could get on UHF, but that I'd always ignored -- and there in very fuzzy black and white, on the kitchen portable, was a bullfight, and a fighter getting tossed on the bull's horns. I couldn't believe it. It seemed both shocking and entirely unreal, just the barest outline coming out of the black and white snow and fog. It occurs to me now that this couldn't have been live; that they must have been doing a repeated replay of some disaster, or some previous fight. But the ghost of a southern truth seemed to disclose itself as its own nebulosity in our kitchen, and then drift out of tune and fade forever. (It made The Sun Also Rises seem far more unreal, like a cartoon or garish comic, and not the depiction of real bullfights.)
Sunday, October 26, 2003
I remember seeing how far I could walk down the street with my eyes closed. I would always aim for twenty steps, though things often started getting ticklish around ten. How far I would try to walk was a function of several different things: were there people in front of me? Coming towards me or receding? Where there people behind me? Was there traffic on the street? Parked cars? Trees on the sidewalk? Garbage? Balustrades? Wrought iron fences? Sun or darkness? How wide was the sidewalk? I would always slow down for the last few steps, which always became a question of will. And yet I was rarely as far off of my planned trajectory as I always feared I was. If there were people behind me I imagined they thought I was drunk. When I was drunk (like, maybe, senior year of high school, the year of Southern Comfort) I'd walk more rapidly, in a haze of self-assurance.
I remember as well that much easier was going up or down steps with your eyes closed. There's a kind of visual or iconic counting that goes on, so that you know when you reach the last step, even when they're twelve or fourteen of them, without either counting the steps you see or the steps you take. Your feet know. Steps are easier. But I remember how surprisingly jarring it is to miss a step. To expect to have to step down one more riser, and to find you're already at the bottom.
I remember doing this once in Long Island, at night, through some fields with trees in them, and Jimmy Buhler (of whom, at some other point, much more later) watching me and wondering what was going on. I told him and he offered to guide me. This seemed a neat experiment, but he couldn't resist guiding me right into a tree, which really hurt. Jimmy once ran right into our sliding glass door, though, banging his nose terrible (though not breaking it) a scene I remembered when reading Michael Cunningham's amazing (fictional) account of the death of the narrator's brother when he crashes through a door and pulls a piece of glass out of his carotid artery.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
I remember frontsies backsies. To let someone cut in line, you let them in front of you, and then they let you in front of them: now they were in the line. This seemed unfair to me when I was its victim, and eminently fair when I was its beneficiary. Interestingly, I thought the phrase was "front seats back seats" which didn't make sense but didn't not either, and at least was real English. So invented baby-talk is at a higher level than standard vocabulary.
Friday, October 24, 2003
I remember a particular kid whose hair grew really fast, so that in a flash he seemed my age and not the full two-year-generation younger that he had been -- Peter Obstler. And I remember one day (this was on the basketball courts south of the Promenade, on 80th street or so, in Riverside Park) Peter said that he was trying to savor the years before he graduated high school (I think he was in seventh grade and I was in ninth), because he knew that once he graduated, he'd just suddenly accelerate and find himself eighty years old. This seemed amazing, a thought that had never occured to me but that was strikingly, vividly right. Well, it isn't happening as fast as Peter predicted, but I must say it is happening a whole lot faster than I anticipated before he made that quirkily charming, melancholy remark, grinning with a kind of lopsided punkish authority as he stood with his back to the bench that we were tying our sneakers on that day.
(If I was in ninth grade, I was fourteen, and my uptown grandfather would have been eighty-one. So this made plausible how he got to be that old too. After he died, years later, my grandmother would also lament: "It is easy to grow old, but hard to be old.")
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
I remember how the hair of kids I knew got longer and longer. They shifted registers of life, became different people, as their hair became luxurious in a way that much outpaced their chronological or physical growth. Twelve to fourteen wasn't much psychologically, no matter what concern the earnest adults kept expressing. But the difference in hair length! Even curly-headed kids, like me (who hated my curls), had hair that tumbled backwards in long streaming waves. It was as though they were giving themselves to the accelerations of time, as though the rapidity of aging which was already (although just barely) starting to be an issue was something they were so insouciant about as to hasten it onwards with this yet more rapid development, as they changed who they were as quickly as their hair grew. It grew fast enough to make the sorites paradox (when do imperceptible changes yield perceptibility? How?) vivid and almost visceral: the imperceptible was breathing down your neck. They were the same and different, and so nearly instantaneously.
I remember wanting my hair to grow long, and the mammoth struggles I had with my parents over this, and measuring whether it came down over my eyebrows, and whether I could suck a strand hanging down over my foreheard or not.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
I remember different ways of picking up tennis balls. I remember seeing a girl pick up a ball by raising ball, racket, and foot simultaneously, right up to her other hand. I learned to do this, but then preferred the American way of pulling the ball towards yourself while compressing it slightly, using the follow-through from the downward, selfward angled compression to pull the racket below the expanding, rising ball, to let it roll on to the strings. I remember that this was harder with Wilson T-1200's, which gouged clay courts when you did this and which got badly scuffed by hard courts. I remember the baskets we used to pick up scores of balls after serving. You pressed down over the ball and it popped through the slats and into the basket, with a sudden satisifying give that had a little bit of anal eroticism about it. I remember trying to fill up those baskets, but that there were limits before you couldn't do it any more, well before the baskets were close to capacity.
Monday, October 20, 2003
I remember the chalky taste of Kaopectate. I remember my mother giving it to me (on Dr. Steff's orders) but mainly my uptown grandmother doing so, either at our house or at hers. I liked the big measuring spoon that I took it from -- three or four tablespoons at a time -- and I liked the taste, whose wide-spreading alkalinity is associated for me with memories of my grandmother and her warm, low accented voice (the European feeling K in "Kaopectate," as in Kafka's Amerika whence the somewhat later polemical spelling) was part of the association with her none-too-competent accent. I liked also that the bottle was black and white but the liquid inside it was a profound chalky pink, as though in fullfillment of the bottles low-key, generous, gentle promise of relief.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
I remember film strips. I remember the reels they came on, like the reels of the movies my father shot, but bigger. I remember not knowing if they were film strips or scripts or scrips. Somehow they all fit. I heard the word "scrip" at some Purim party, I think: we were given scrip to buy treats and toys. And since the scrip came in perforated sheets, it seemed not unlike the sproket-holed film, with the clicking sound that it made seeming the auditory coutnterpart to the perforations. The idea that these were scripts was also obvious, somehow: they were pre-determined in their meaning. And all of this would eventually...mesh with the idea of stripping gears, on projectors, and in cars. Somehow the words strip, script, and scrip felt attached to each other by their shared letters, and perforated in ways appropriate to all of them where they diverged. Perhaps I'm just registering a faint residual dislexia, since I still have trouble with the difference between specter and sceptre, also around those letters (s, p, c, r, and t), but still the connection seemed very real to me.
Saturday, October 18, 2003
I remember "Man alive! Four out of five...like Yoo Hoo (chocolate drink)!" Yoo Hoo and Bosco were competitors. I followed Hugh Cramer in liking Bosco better. I guess if you mixed Bosco and milk you got something like Yoo Hoo. I thought "Man alive" was a version of the ubiquitous "man" (as in "Oh, man, what are you talking about?") but it seems to predate it: I just saw the phrase in a book from 1946.
Friday, October 17, 2003
I remember Yaz bread. I think it was a variety of Wonder Bread. Or maybe Wonder just had Yastrzemski endorse their bread one year. It was the first time I heard of him. His name reminded me of pastrami. I liked the word Yaz, with its extreme letters.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
I remember that you always had to win sets in tennis by two games. Occasionally, sets would go as high as 20-18. Endurance really counted. (As a cross country runner, I had endurance, but not speed.) Then sudden death came in, but you still had to win by two points, as in a game. It was best of 12, as I recall, and the final score was 8-6 (or was it 7-5). Now (I believe) you can win by one point, with the final set score 7-6.
I remember subtleties of score-keeping. You might be ahead Fifteen-love, but if your opponent tied it up it was Five-All. Thirty-thirty was never deuce, even if it was the practical equivalent of deuce. If you won on a second serve, you were ahead Five-love instead of Fifteen-love. I never heard these conventions in professional matches, only in the games we played. I never understood why the first two points were worth fifteen each, and the third was worth ten (as in "Forty-thirty", or "Forty-fifteen"--but never Forty-five).
I remember that "Love" ("word known to all men") is derived from French l'oeuf, the egg, i.e. zero.
Monday, October 13, 2003
I remember thinking that if you went out in the cold you would catch ammonia. It seemed odd, that way adult terminology seems odd but not interesting, that a cleaning product and a disease should have the same name, and probably be related to each other. I was surprised when I found out it was "pneumonia." What word starts with pn?
Sunday, October 12, 2003
I remember toilet paper in pastel colors, to match your bathroom. There was sky blue, pink, and a pale tan. Was tan strangely demure or strangely daring?
Saturday, October 11, 2003
I remember a liberal public service ad soliciting more government money for substandard housing in New York, which had a girl in a rundown kitchen calling, "Here, kitty! Here! kitty, kitty, kitty." She was cute (about six). The voiceover was serious. One was disturbed that she'd been left alone. Finally we got to see the kitty she was trying to entice. It was a rat.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
I remember: "Will you be my PLP?" If you said yes, the person leaned on you. PLP = Public (or Private) Leaning Post. I guess we didn't really know the difference between public and private then, only that they were coordinated, since "private" is actually more appropriate -- "my PLP" but we thought of "public" as the standard answer, and only used "private" when the person we asked said, "I know what that means: Public Leaning Post."
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
I remember a coin bank, that might have belonged to Geoffrey Stern, or to Conrad, or to Lem. It was a clear plastic coin sorter. You dropped a bunch of change in a funnel, and the coins rolled down past gradually increasing holes until they could drop in where they belonged, in a poker-chip like stack. I thought it was really neat. It had graduated markings up the sides so you could see how much money you had. It illustrated vividly how much more than pennies quarters were worth. The graduation up the quarters slot was in dollars, whereas the top of the pennies slot was only fifty cents.
I remember the brass change mechanisms that newspaper salesmen and bus drivers used to have. They dispensed a coin from one of four slots when the person giving you change pressed in a spring lever with his (almost always his; but I do remember an anomalous moment when a woman had such a dispenser) thumb. The old guys and the bus drivers were very fast, bewilderingly so I discovered when I got a toy version (maybe not a toy either but certainly not so heavy duty as the professional model). They were like those people who were faster with abacuses than accountants were with adding machines.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
I remember that Mr. Durocher used to have "conniption fits." Also that I didn't and don't know how to spell that word. Is it one? It was his own term for his violent but voluntary tantrums.
Monday, October 06, 2003
I remember that on Yom Kippur eve we would go to my uptown grandmother's house for dinner -- a late one, well into darkness, with matzoh ball soup, knoedel, chicken (I remember I liked dark meet then!), 7-Up ("You like it. It likes you."), cole slaw, two kinds of cake (the linzer torte I always demanded, and dobos torte, or her amazing apple and plum tart or nuss torte or chocolate layer cake), and then the strange fruits she served, big and bloated like her arthritic fingers. One Yom Kippur my mother wasn't talking to her, but my father got them talking again by saying it was Yom Kippur (more about this years-long fight in some other post, I hope). Then the next morning, my parents would sleep as late as possible. 10! 11! Noon, one time! Much later than their already late sleep on weekends. At 2 or so we would go back to my grandmother's house and break the fast with cold-cuts (including tongue!) cakes and cafe mit Schlag (which I loved); some of my grandparents' elderly friends -- Vlado Hertz, the probably gay bachelor older than my grandfather almost always. Later, when I was older, I would fast till darkness, but my parents and grandparents never did. In those later days, especially during that period of mild religious mania I've mentioned before, I would go to the Association of Yugoslav Jews service in a brownstone basement on 99th street (where I also went to the Purim party I described a year and a half ago or so). The congregation was largely sephardic, and my downtown grandfather would always go there, so I went with him. He was the only one in the family who wouldn't eat pork or shellfish. My uptown grandfather -- Ashkenazi -- came at least once, for the full day of prayers (I don't think he stayed for the afternoon, but my downtown grandfather and I did). I brought my tallis -- I think I got one for my Bar Mitzvah -- and I remember the different traditions of the tallis. I'm probably not getting this right, but as I recall the Sephardic tradition was not to wear it as often as the Ashkenazis did, so my uptown grandfather put his tallis on when the rabbi and cantor did, but very few other people did so. I wasn't sure what to do, but finally I put mine on.
I remember wanting to wear sneakers, as the orthodox did, on Yom Kippur, but not being allowed to. They looked really fine in their suits and sneakers: they had secret knowledge, a puzzle to almost everyone else, Christian and non-orthodox, but I knew why they wore sneakers (no leather!). I remember in this connection that Schulchan Aurach requires you to eat meat on the Sabbath, as a reminder of the sin of carniverousness that came with the fall and the expulsion. But on Yom Kippur we put that sin away, like all others.
I remember the crushed blue velvet case of my tallis and of my teffilin, and the gold brocade with which Hebrew letters were stamped into the case. I loved the feel of it, and the odd dark plastic (or painted metal) zipper discretely covered by overlapping piping to open and close the bags. It was as though the zipper -- that modern technology I never understood -- consented to be discrete, to accommodate itself to the accoutrements of piety and belief, and to help out in a self-effacing manner, and so confirm the relevance of these ancient ancillaries to devotion. I think that the zippers and the sneakers both spoke to the same thing in me: the moving thrill of something modern subordinating itself to uses which their modern inventors hadn't contemplated, as though the objects themselves took a kind of life from the truth of the tradition to which they contributed their functions. They joined in, and what that meant was that everyone and everything could join in, not in that sublime sense of "declaring the glory of God," but in a more intimate sense like that of New York, and what it meant for me to be told by Hugh Cramer that it was a Jewish city (when it certainly was that but also a million other things as well): the world makes itself available to a way of thinking, makes its universality possible, in a kind of act of friendship which it is always lovely to see the world offering. I still feel that way about New York, but I'm not so sure about the world.
Sunday, October 05, 2003
I remember that I learned the word especially from my mother. I thought I was mishearing "special," but I wasn't. I remember that she used this word a lot (and may still do so; but I noticed it then). It was a word I associated with her -- an intensifier of some sort. There was an odd expertise that it signalled: she knew things, and she knew their subtleties and varieties and could focus in on those parts of them about which something was especially true; or on those things in the world about which something was especially the case. I remember that it was interesting that especially didn't mean special in the high-praise mode of special (as in "a special occasion," which I guess is where I most heard and used the word). This may have been my first intuition about how adverbs worked: they could add texture and nuance to a judgment or the the object of a judgment. And that texture and nuance was that of my mother, of her voice, of her saying those four syllables.
Friday, October 03, 2003
I remember reading lots of James Michener. I read The Source and learned the history of the Jews. I read a novel in eleventh or twelfth grade about college kids going to Morocco and taking drugs, which I liked. I read another novel, which was the same vintage as The Source whose name and subject I'm now failing to recall. In The Source I remember a character who gets himself uncircumsized (yuch!) so he can join the Roman army. His elderly father sees him wrestling in some games, and is so shocked and outraged that he lifts up his cane and kills him. I also remember that I first saw the term El Shadai in The Source. I tried reading Hawaii but was bored to tears. But I derived important sexual misinformation from it, namely that it takes roughly four copulations to produce a pregnancy. (Some missionary's wife gets pregnant on the boat over.)
I also got sexual misinformation from the Shulchan Aruch, the seventeenth century code of Jewish Law, which I read obsessively in my phase of religious mania, inspired both by The Source and by my best friend Geoffrey, to wit: the hymen prevents conception during a woman's first copulation. (This had to do with some woman who gets pregnant in the Bible -- it might have been Eve.) Later I thought this knowledge would come in handy. Fortunately, when it did become relevant I wasn't so sure about it any more.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
I remember that once when I failed to return three books to the New York Public Library in eleventh grade (one of them was Beckett's Three Novels) a library investigator came to our building looking for me! I wasn't there, but my mother was. How could something so trivial lead to this Kafkaesque persecution? The Public Library had investigators? They pursued people through the city? The investigator left word that he'd be back if I didn't return the books. I didn't know who I was in more trouble with, the Library or my mother. It was interesting, and alas this was not the last time that this was so, the possibility of being in trouble deeper than the trouble you could be in with your parents. Up until then my parents were as much the origin and final arbiters of trouble as they were of love. But this was my discovery of real trouble -- the trouble that life brings with her in her equipage -- and how much farther than the parental realm it can extend, how powerless parental love finally is to neutralize it.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
I remember how Hugh Cramer used to use the word "strategy." It had a sort of magical aura to it. You could do things by strategy. It was vaguely military, and some of the group feints and dodges and scrimmages we did in the park were guided by Hugh's strategy. I didn't quite get what strategy was: it was somewhere between a well-formulated right way of doing things and the occult unexpected. This is what gave it that faintly talismanic sense: there was a right thing to do -- it was strategy -- and only Hugh really knew it. The game Stratego, which Hugh introduced me to, derived some of its initial interest from the idea of strategy, which I still didn't quite get, or which at least was an idea he could still brandish to good effect. When I heard Brian Eno's wonderful "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)," named after the Mao-era Chinese opera, I was reminded of that expert mystery to which I had never been quite initiated (as Chiang Kai Chek's followers never had either), strategy.
Sunday, September 28, 2003
I remember the test that you used to do to see if you were over- or undersexed. You closed your eyes, someone slapped your arm a couple of times and then pricked you with their fingernails going up your arm, and you were supposed to say when they reached some pre-determined point. If you were oversexed they'd get past the point; undersexed, you'd respond too soon. None of us had had sex yet, I don't think. For reasons that I didn't understand then, those who came out as oversexed were teased (cheerfully and mildly) as much or more than the undersexed. But why? Since at the time we'd already reached the age when it was clear that getting sex was good. But I guess girls weren't supposed to feel that way, even though the fact that they were interested in this game and introducing it to us (the girl who told us about it, whose name I forget, was pretty, but seemed a lot prettier after she introduced the game) made them seem like us boys: eager for sexual experience. But of course, being shown up, as the critical prefix to either state shows, trumped an anyway clearly false badge of sexual experience at the time.
Saturday, September 27, 2003
I remember that Mr. Durocher, my seventh grade math teacher who would throw chalk at us, would actually make you stand in the corner. Michael Hobin and I would clown around in the back row. Once he made me stand in the corner, and then in the course of some demonstration he asked what 3% of a million was. My hand shot up, he called on me, I said about $33.000, and he gave me some gruff praise and told me I could sit down again. I wondered then why I wasn't more precise -- why not (what I knew) $33,333.33? But somehow it seemed that he wanted that rough-hewn practical ballpark answer. It was a quick and dirty answer, an appropriate response to his own admirable quick and dirty justice, and I think he understood that I understood and admired him.
Friday, September 26, 2003
I remember George Plimpton, who died today. For reasons I don't remember he spoke at my high school graduation. (I think he might have gone to my school.) This was in the days when he was doing his Paper Lion stunts, which were fascinating. He told us about being on the bench for the football team, and he told us about being the drummer who would strike with the cannon in a performance with maybe the New York Philharmonic of the 1812 Overture. He kept blowing it in rehearsal, and then he hit it much too loud in the real performance. He said -- I forgot that this is where I learned this fact until now -- that orchestra members applaud each other by rubbing their feet surreptitiously on the stage. He would watch them do this as he waited for his cue. After he hit the drum too loud, he was mortified. But then, from everywhere, he saw and heard the sussuration of the shoes on the stage. He told the story well, and obviously he'd told it many times. But it was obvious to me: I hadn't been around many stories that had been told many times at that age, and so I wass very taken with it. He was genial and surprisingly intelligent -- surprising to my seventeen year old obnoxious adolescent self, who assumed that anyone who was writing about this kind of thing wasn't culturally serious. I didn't realize at first that he was the same George Plimpton as the one who started and edited the great Paris Review, friend of Koch, friend of Merrill, even I think friend of Beckett, my god of the time (and still a member of my pantheon). Later he was friend of several of my friends, but I never saw him in person again, as in all likelihood I might have. I didn' t think to think about this until now, and now it's too late.
Thursday, September 25, 2003
I remember Karen K, who was in P.S. 166 with me, and lived in my building. She was a tom boy, the first in a series of tom boys (does that term still exist? I remember we also used the inverse tom girl, just for the symmetry, but I doubt that was ever a real term) whom I used to hang out with, wrestle, and otherwise engage in faintly protosexual activity. Karen and I used to wrestle each other into positions where we could tie each other up to her bedpost; then whoever was tied up would escape and we'd do it again. In fact this may be the only specific memory of Karen that I have -- the rest being the general facts of how she looked, where she lived, and also that we went to school together. That wrestling match, that bedpost, stands for everything I remember about her, which seems to be a lot more. I think my memory of Cathy Yerzley is only barely more diversified. And yet they were among the most important populators of my childhood.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
I remember that there were always seats at the back of the bus. My downtown grandmother knew this. I was skeptical when she claimed that if we went to the back of a very crowded bus there would be seats there. But she was right, and later I would confirm the truth of this wisdom for myself. I don't recall my uptown grandparents ever riding the bus, although my uptown grandmother must have when she came to our apartment. But my downtown grandmother was an expert in bus travel, and I admired her expertise.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
I remember laundry hanging out to dry on lines strung between buildings. This was a very common sight, and I remember it particularly in a courtyard neighboring my grandmother's building uptown, but also pretty generally. It's still a common sight, but only in movies, photos, and paintings. It's been a very long time since I've seen it in reality. The drying laundry disappeared imperceptibly in the last few decades, and no one noticed its absence. I used to wonder how people rigged the lines up. How did you make contact with the person at the other window in the other building? I liked the pulley system that moved the laundry out and back, a system which solved one of my other puzzles: how the laundry got so far out over the void. I remember lines of laundry criss-crossing each other. All the laundry that I remember hanging on those lines is white. Where did people dry colored clothes?
Monday, September 22, 2003
I remember The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (I think). It was a work of popular anthropology. It contained the first vivid verbal description of sex that I'd ever read, and I found it very stimulating. Unfortunately there wasn't much more in it than the one extended description of heterosexual courtship, foreplay, and copulation (plus a couple of other brief moments). But it was a lot better than Boys and Sex (which was better than Girls and Sex) which I read looking for the same kind of writing (see entry for September 14, 2003).
Saturday, September 20, 2003
I remember that rayguns shot disintegrating beams. I knew that disintegration meant you were reduced to nothing, or to particles, or to a vacuum. (May one say "a vacuum" or only "the vacuum?" It seems to me that recently people have been saying the, just as you're supposed to say "the empty set.") It was years later before I knew what integration meant. I never put "disintegrate" together with racial integration (whose antonym was "segregation"), nor with mathematical integers (vs. fractions) or mathematical integration (vs. differentiation); I think it was only when I learned the word integral that I realized that this is what rayguns destroyed. I remember "Ronald REAGen -- *ZAP*" from Woodstock, and how glad we all were that he was a has-been. And then who should propose Star Wars and rayguns?
Friday, September 19, 2003
I remember the first time I saw rainbow-colored oil in a puddle, in a gutter under the fender of a car. I was awestruck by its beauty (partly because I'd never seen a rainbow). My parents and uptown grandparents said it was oil. and dirty, and pollution. I couldn't believe it; I loved seeing it then, and for a while after. Eventually I came to see it as ugly pollution too, but I don't know how that transition occured.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
I remember how fascinated I was by Business Reply Mail envelopes. I loved the bars down the side, and the framed message to the post-office. I also liked it that occasionally what I had to do -- subscribe to a comic or Jock Magazine or the Book of the Month Club (one of my first four books was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) -- counted as business. Business! Like my parents'. "No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the United States." I remember that you couldn't send stamps in to cereal companies in lieu of money when you were sending away for something. This seemed obvious until much later I learned that stamps were legal tender. (I think. They are in England, anyhow.) And that there was once a time when cereal companies actually encouraged you to send stamps in as a form of payment. I remember, from later on, that Abbie Hoffman (in Steal This Book?) encouraged you to paste subscription cards for Time magazine onto bricks and drop them in the mail to bankrupt Time.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
I remember that the mystery reviewer for the New York Times Book Review signed his reviews Newgate Calendar. I thought this was his real name until college, when I learned about Newgate and the Newgate Calender, from reading Moll Flanders I believe.
Sunday, September 14, 2003
I remember one of the first things I remember about Michelle and Daniella. They would jump from the top of the diving platform on the raft in Lake Como and shout "Via!" as they jumped off, a kind of Italian "Geronimo!" (the shout I think I learned from my friend Comrade or Conrad, the "whatyamacallit" guy). Daniella always held her nose. Michelle could dive, beautifully, like her older brothers. She and Daniella were so full of life and self-assurance! I could never get myself to shout it. But I loved hearing them do it. When I started taking Latin in sixth grade, I learned that "via" meant "way" or "street," which I couldn't quite figure (nor why Latin should really be so different from Italian; I thought it was going to be such an easy language to learn). The platform was head-high, green, and next to a lower one, waste high, on the edge of the raft. The raft was held up by mossy metal barrels, that were yucchy to touch. But we'd sometimes dive under them and surface under the raft and spy on those outside its perimeter. Michelle and Daniella liked to try to pull my bathing suit down, but I was just barely too young to be happy about this; partly also because it was more Daniella than Michelle who would do it. I think this explains the remoteness to me now of those vivid cries: my aim in being in love with Michelle was not yet quite sexual, and the playfully frank sexuality of these "jeune filles au bord du lac," and which provided some of the energy of those via!s, was not something that my memory could quite fix on and therefore fix at the time. (It was on the plane back that summer that I read the masturbation scene in the novel about the Walter-Mittyesque spy who watches his guard masturbate and uses this knowledge to put intense psychological pressure on the guard. That was the first I knew about masturbation.) Daniella used to go around topless -- her breasts hadn't developed at all yet -- but Michelle never did, and that was certainly a difference that I knew and that mattered to me, and that I regretted, without quite knowing why, by the last time I saw her, when I was twelve. I was certainly aware of sexuality and sexual desire then, but just barely: the next year in school (eighth grade) was when it all became about as clear as it was ever going to. (It was the next summer, I remember that I read Boys and Sex, not on my father's urging -- I think it was Hugh who'd discovered it -- but with his surprising approval.)
Saturday, September 13, 2003
I remember Eva M, the youngest kid in the family that lived a floor below us at 175 Riverside Drive. (I've since seen a letter or two by her in the New York Times.) She had no legs. She very gallantly walked around on wooden legs. She was always outgoing and cheerful. I think she was two or three years younger than I. She sometimes used crutches -- she had a kind of swinging walk. She'd get into the elevator a floor below me, and then we'd leave together, through the long lobby. I don't remember this being awkward, which means that she must have figured out a routine for stopping to do something so other people could hurry off without having to linger with her. I didn't think much either way about her not having legs: it was a fact about her. It might have been her personality, since I did feel so weird about the guy with missing fingers in school. But Eva was effervescent. My downtown grandmother, with an odd disapproving look -- of Eva? of pharmacology? -- one day, told me that Eva must have been a thalidomide baby. I assumed this was true until very recently, when I found out that thalidomide had never been marketed in the U.S., thanks to the pre-Bush FDA. I miss her smile.
Friday, September 12, 2003
I remember Johnny Cash. I don't remember why I liked him so much, except maybe that I liked "A Boy Named Sue" as a novelty song. It was on the juke box at Chicken on the Run, our favorite pizza place in Westhampton. Once we put all our quarters in and st it to play ten times, and then we left. We were rebuked by the owner, who followed us out. I was surprised by this, since it was our money, and playing the song was for sale. Now I'm not.
I used to listen to Johnny Cash on my little transistor radio, on WHN, the country music station, while I walked Powell. I also remember Tammy Wynette from that radio: "These boots are made for walking...." But I loved Johnny Cash, and a Johnny Cash song coming on provided a later version of the same thrill that I got seeing Bugs Bunny pierce through the Looney Toons cartouche. I had at least two records, Folsom Prison and San Quentin (or maybe those songs were on two different records). I remember that he'd supposedly never spent more than a night on jail, on some traffic charge, but that later that turned out to be false. "I hear the train acomin' -- It's comin' round the bend. I'm stuck in Folsom Prison since -- I don' know when. Away from Folsom prison, that's where I want to be....."
Johnny Cash played Madison Square Garden when I was about fifteen. I went, with my father! I prevailed upon him to take me. He was amazed by the huge crowd of clean-cut people there. He shook his head, saying that this was "the silent majority," in Nixon's recently coined phrase. I didn't know any republicans, and I didn't actually believe that the people surrounding us would vote republican. Later I found out that my friends James B and Mary C, out in East Quogue (and with whom I later had some interesting, frustrating sexual experiences, mainly with Mary) supported Nixon. I couldn't believe it. They smoked, and drank and used drugs. Nixon?
When Johnny Cash played "A Boy Named Sue" at Madison Square Garden -- his centerpiece still -- some old guy stormed the stage. We couldn't quite figure out what was going on. The cops stopped and subdued him, and then started dragging him away, while Cash sort of strummed the cords for a while. As he was being led away Cash said, with great aplomb and in that tough gravelly country voice of his, in cadence to the accompaniment, "He's all right" -- all right, decent, not someone to punish, a regular Joe. "He's all right." He finished the song by saying, "And if I have a son I think I'm gonna name him...after you." (Instead of "...Sue.") That was a very interesting moment. The you obviously referred to the disoriented old guy who'd stormed the stage, but who was still "all right." But it also referred to the singer's father: in the song, or that night's strange redaction, the singer honors his father not by imitation but by reference. Usually, when he promises to name his son Sue, the song reads as an acknowledgement by way of repetition of the father's desperate wisdom. But here the acknoweldgement is by way of reference. But if you also referred to the old guy, than the old guy in some sense was Johnny Cash's father, and that seemed a sad thing. And, as I now think of it, here I was with my father, who it turns out, I see from Johnny Cash's obituary, is actually older than Johnny Cash, though younger than the old man. I always thought of Johnny Cash as much older too, but I guess that's because he was so wrecked up. I haven't listened to one of is songs for decades, I don't think, but they're still part of that cosmic background radiation of songs in my head: I hear them comin' round the bend, and I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
From Jenn Lewin:
I remember my uncle and my cousins visiting us in NYC during the summer of 1995, when we lived on Amsterdam and 122nd. They stayed over and the next day they wanted to see the Twin Towers, which featured in a movie they liked (I want to say it was Dumb and Dumber but that may not be true). We didn't want to go all the way downtown even though it was on the same subway line so we said goodbye; they were to go home to Lawrenceville via Penn Station afterwards. A few weeks later they sent us pictures they'd taken on their trip and some of them were of their visit to the WTC. The buildings were still ugly but that wasn't what mattered. What mattered to me then was my regret (I was surprised to feel regret) at not going with them because it looked as if they'd had a lot of fun and we weren't there. So when a friend from Paris, Jean-Marc, came to stay a week or so later one of the first things we did was to go up there. I remember the elevator going really fast and feeling fearless. I was proud, in a way I didn't expect myself to be, being there.
I remember flying home for the summer from Nashville to Providence in May of 2001, on the night of Mother's Day. I had taken that flight many times that year because my mother-in-law was ill and Dien was living with her in Newton and it was a direct, cheap flight. But this time we had to change routes, I can't remember why, and when we came upon the Twin Towers it seemed as if we were really, simply coming across them, on some kind of air-boat just floating by in slow motion, a perfectly natural and strange thing to be doing, and they were all lit up. I'd never had that view of them before. As we approached I'd been writing in my diary, and I stopped to look out the window, and I watched th! em as I wrote for probably 5 minutes. As I did so I cried, from stress, gratitude, and sorrow. I was going home to what would be a changed world because I knew it would be our last summer with my mother-in-law, and it would be her last summer. But I remember feeling that the towers at that moment had a special meaning, that they knew something. They had a deep, golden glow.
When 9/11 happened we got a call that morning from two old friends of Dien's mom in Hong Kong who wanted to make sure that she was okay because they knew how much she traveled to Chinatown. She had died 6 weeks before, and they hadn't been told, and there was the horrible strangeness of having to tell them at that moment.
Jenn Lewin
I remember the World Trade Center being built, and how ugly everyone thought it was. I acquired and agreed with this judgment, and still do. I also didn't like the fact that my beloved Empire State Building was no longer the tallest building in the world. But I did like it that we now had the four tallest buildings: the Chrysler (which I knew about first of all from a book of Margaret Bourke-White's photos that we had, which also gave an account of her Parkinson's Disease, first I heard of that, and how she got some relief when they drilled a hole through her skull and then gave her some L-dopamine), the Empire State Building, and now the two featureless glass towers. Their relative heights also went into the hierarchies of size that Hugh Cramer and I were always establishing, and that I've mentioned here several times already. I remember going downtown to see them somewhat after they'd been completed, and looking up from the plaza below them to find that their height was hard to see and that you had to remind yourself that this radically foreshortened vertical perspective was of something really tall. I remember after that driving to New York on Route 80, and how on clear days you could see the Twin Towers from about forty miles away, just above the horizon. I remember the Channel 11 ads about the poor peon assigned to find a new symbol for New York's Channel 11 (WPIX) moping dejectedly in a waterfront park in New Jersey, not seeing the gigantic 11 behind him across the river, standing for the City itself and all its energy. And now that gigantic 11 has turned into the awful symbolism of the one-one in 9/11 ("two uprights and an upside down birthday cake with one candle," as Atta conveyed the date in a coded email).
I remember dinner in Windows on the World, a memory that I recall reading Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World, just published in France, a novel about the last 118 minutes of the restaurant's existence. When we went there it was beautiful and dark, and we could hear the wind and feel -- or it felt as though we were feeling -- the tower sway just a little bit. Clouds would engulf the top of the tower, and then we could be on board ship, and sometimes we'd see bits of New York or New Jersey in the far distance, beyond the cloud that surrounded us or sometimes passed underneath us. The restaurant was quiet, and efficient, and calm, and pleasant because it was so clearly a place that no one came to regularly, and yet a place of great aplomb and self-confidence: what Tavern on the Green wanted to be, but wasn't quite (at least in my experience). It was a little like the intermission at the Met. They had a good wine cellar, there on the 107th floor. Beigbeder's book reproduces a color shot of the inside of the restaurant, empty, set-up, wine glasses, table cloths, linen, silverware, and the city outside the window on a beautiful day. It's very eerie because that view, that view point, is gone, but in the photo you see the view and the view-point. I remember the cheese course and also that I had some sort of fish in puff-pastry. It was a room, with carpeting, and table cloths, and glasses of water. What could be less harmful or less reprehenisible?
I remember that after the attacks two years ago, a Pakistani militant and Osama supporter was explaining why the militants would win: "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola. We love death." This was meant as an insult, obviously, but it seemed right when affirmed. Loving Pepsi was loving life. I do love Pepsi-Cola, and all sorts of other things. Part of this weblog is about the salutory, radiant incommensurability between Pepsi and death. What I remember on the whole is how Pepsi hits the spot, how I've got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got a lot to give -- that is that a lot of what I live, and what all the people murdered on September 11th had to live -- is on the order of Pepsi (or 7-Up, now owned I think by Pepsi: I like it. It likes me!). That's what I meant by my post on inconvenience a couple of weeks ago: the towers were these blank walls of glass, and not much seems wrong from the long perspective with knocking down blank walls of glass and killing some "not that great" number of people, as someone I know somewhat thougtlessly put it. But that's to forget everything that everyone remembered, the living and the dead, and all the memories that would now never be formed.
Beigbeder's book is a lot like Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, and I suppose he's deeply influenced by Perec. It's about those moments that in Perec are on the pages that face disaster in his own memories. The book is in alternating chapters, as is Windows on the World, and what alternates is horror and apparent triviality. But the unfathomable sorrow of human loss goes with the sense that we are endless repositories of trivial objects which mark that endlessness. This is what makes for Perec's greatness as a writer: all that Pepsi and all the places he drank it.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
I remember my father's Diner's Club credit card. That was the only one there was. And you only used it in restaurants -- because you were a diner. But not a diner at a diner; a diner at a fine restaurant. I thought -- as I was supposed to -- that Diner's Club cards were very debonaire.
Monday, September 08, 2003
I remember how good my father was at getting pillows into pillow-cases. (He still is, probably.) I remember how crazy the business drove me. My father would hold the pillow under his chin, and then pull the case straight up. But when I tried to do that, my chin wasn't big enough to hold it securely, and I couldn't see down to the bottom of the pillow, and my arms weren't long enough to get the case adroitly around it and then to pull it up. It was one of those experiences of paralyzing frustration that just drive you crazy. The pillow never slid smoothly into the case either, once you got it in, and often I'd drop the whole thing and have to start over. Beckett in Molloy has a sex scene in which Molloy's experience of copulation is like trying to get a pillow into a pillow case, but in Molloy it's an adult problem and an adult fiasco, not the sheer pointless difficulty that I experienced as a child.
Sunday, September 07, 2003
I remember "Blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere," from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. (That's also where I first heard of Burbank: "Beautiful downtown Burbank," which I then thought of as Secaucus, NJ to L.A.'s New York. (My father had to go to Secaucus on business lots.) Blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere. This was funny because it was silly; I didn't know then how close to true it might become.
I remember "Jeffrey Cohen's Laugh-In." He was the hilarious class clown in sixth and seventh grade (at the Franklin School) and maybe fifth too (at P.S. 166). He had some wonderful obscene routines. I seem to recall he was kicked out for his wildness, but I'm not sure about that. He was very funny, and lived for Rowan and Martin.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
I remember asking my father how cameras worked. He told me that they recorded the "shadows" of what you pointed them at. This -- like the ketchup blood, and the sticks not guns of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade -- left me dubious. Shadows were black silhouettes, but in photos you could see everything, and besides many of them were in color. But he insisted, and at this time I still believed in his expertise. (As for example, later, when he said Pi was exactly 22/7, confusing a repeating decimal with an irrational number.) These sorts of explanations left me with a kind of skewed relationship to expertise or expert knowledge. I was sure it was right, that knowledge that he offered, but nevertheless it didn't correspond to what I wanted to know. I was somehow off-kilter with respect to knowledge, unsatisfied with it (unsatisfied, I guess, with my father's knowledge), and this meant somehow that the world was going to be fundamentally an unsatisfying place, a place which didn't contain the knowledge of the things it contained.
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