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I remember / je me souviens
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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
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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
Thursday, July 31, 2003
I remember that my downtown grandfather once found a dead mouse in his shoe. I couldn't believe that a mouse could be in a New York City apartment! They belonged to cartoons and the kinds of houses represented in cartoons. I thought it was sort of neat, though.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
I remember that the bread-box drawer of the counter in our kitchen in 7-F had a sliding perforated metal top to it. I now realize, or think I realize, that it was to keep mice out, but I didn't get it then. I guess I just thought it was some odd not-quite-functional decoration: function didn't feature much in how I understood things then. I didn't like it. It was never quite closed (which I guess means it wouldn't keep mice out very well). I didn't like the perforations either. And it tended to get crumbs on it, somehow, maybe when we were putting the bread back. I also didn't like the idea of a metal sliding through the wooden slats of the frame holding the drawers. It's not as though I hated it. But I remember having this objection to it, or distaste for it, maybe because it wasn't something any of us would have thought to have or buy or own, and yet there it was, so that it stood somehow for how our apartment preceded us, wasn't built for us or with us in mind, didn't offer itself to us as our home, but was a place that had these little alien habits or secrets or ways indifferent to us.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
I remember hypermodern openings in chess associated with Nimzovich. I loved the concept, just as I loved the concept of non-Euclidean geometry. Hypermodern -- I knew about that before I knew about hyperspace (which it now occurs to me is also non-Euclidean) from Star Trek. How could something be hypermodern? I knew that "hyper-" was an intensifier, like "super" and "ultra," and so I tried a drawing a comic character (with shaded cross-hatched muscles) parallel to Super- and Ultraman called Hyperman. But hypermodern was more than that; it was like the entry into a new way of thinking, a new conceptual scheme. I knew what being modern was from "thoroughly modern Millie," the Julie Andrews movie my downtown grandmother took me to (and that I liked, though it was very different from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music). She was my only grandparent to take me to the movies. But hypermodern seemed a step ahead, as though its modernity was always in the future, never in the present. And yet it was in the present too -- it wasn't futuristic so much as the limit case of modernity. You could never get more modern than the hypermodern: the future was in the instant, the asymptote had come as close to arrival as it was going to come. (And this made sense since hypermodern openings went towards the edges or limits of the board, and eschewed the center. I remember Brent Larsen [was that his name?], the great Danish grandmaster, who once as Black played a sort of hypermodern game: 1) P-K4 P-Q4, 2) PxP QxP, etc. He tried to take control of the edges. But he lost, as I recall. Still, I liked the daring of it.)
Monday, July 28, 2003
I remember "...and so flexible, you could pick up a dime." An ad about dishwashing gloves -- Playtex I think. What impressed me about the ad was the way they knew what the experience of rubber gloves actually was. They weren't meant for picking up dimes, and yet sometimes you just wanted to pick up something small without peeling the glove off your sweating hand. And when you saw the actress pick up a dime on the commercial, it just looked like an amazing magic trick, with all that magic tricks imply of the magician's knowledge of the difficulties and obstacles to be met with in every day experience. It was as though through the glove she could interact with the milled edges of the coin. The magician trades on common knowledge of everyday fate that she is nevertheless exempt from. That's one of the neat things about magicians: they're like us but also like our god-like parents. And the commercial also combined the absolute authority of the Creator -- font and origin of the Product -- with knowledge of how it felt like to be one of us creatures. Most ads didn't really seem to know what it was like to be a consumer or TV viewer. Who poured all the oil, except one tablespoon, back into the measuring cup? But you could pick up a dime: I tried it myself. I could do the magic trick.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
I remember that the song lyrics that came with albums were never accurate. I recall this especially from the Crosby Stills Nash and Young album, where "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" didn't have (I think) the last part. And the same was true for the fade out to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." And countless others. And it was always these improvised lyrics that were hardest to hear or make sense of. I was thinking of this today, noticing how accurate the lyrics are to Steely Dan's "The things I miss the most," on their new album Everything must go. I suppose that one response to internet piracy might be to make the ancillary material that comes with a cd more valuable and useful, and accurate lyrics do that. I never felt, what I would feel later, studying literature, that the fact that there were variations was interesting, and that the comparison of variations yielded insight. I just wanted good lyrics. Other albums I remember with inaccurate lyrics: Tommy, Elton John.
In this connection I remember going with David Heilbronner and I think Doug Breitbart, and maybe Linda, to see Steely Dan at the (then) Philharmonic Hall. They were opening up for the Electric Light Orchestra. They were great, but we were the only people there for them. Everyone else wanted ELO, and tried to boo them off the stage. One of them -- actually I think one of their section people, not Donald Fagin or Walter Becker -- gave the finger to a section of the audienec booing them. When ELO came on, they did a good show, much better than Steely Dan's. But Steely Dan's music was so much better. I think in those days, though, they never printed lyrics. So I think that "The Things I Miss the Most" is a little like their version of I remember: they miss those days, and the talk, the sex, the girl stand for those days.
Friday, July 25, 2003
I remember liking the fact that nickels were made of nickel. I learned the name of the coin before that of the element. I was also intrigued by Jefferson, and by his very high forehead. He reminded me of my uptown grandfather, who was bald, with a fringe of hair. And when Kruschev visited and we saw him on TV, he also reminded me of my grandfather: round-faced, bald, kindly looking. I called him Nikita. So it seemed right that the nickel and Nikita, both reminding me of my grandfather, should sound like each other.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
I remember that Curt Flood sued (and lost) to have baseball's antitrust exemption overturned. I was against him. I loved baseball! I wanted my teams to be my teams. I was surprised when it turned out that Curt Flood's lawyer -- Norman Topkis -- lived across the hall from us. I was against him too. But I was always civil, and he was always kindly towards me. Years later I heard him on May it Please the Court, where he was effective and witty -- a nice revelation. I thought of him as personally inoffensive, and wasn't really worried that Curt Flood would win. After Topkis moved out a gay couple moved in. I liked their domesticity: they got the paper, and left for work, and kissed in the morning and kissed in the evening when they reunited. Their hallway was very neat -- much neater than ours. I don't recall knowing their names, although we must have sometimes got their mail, as we got the Topkises'.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
I remember dry cell batteries. I didn't know what a wet cell could be. (Then a 9 colt battery leaked in my cupboard, staining it with acid). They were big and ungainly, but good for electrical experimentation. For some reason we used picture wire -- I think because it was easier to manipulate than the insulated kind. I remember the smell of a short-circuit, and how hot the wire got. I'd wondered what would happen if you connected the wire straight across. Some adult (my mother?) rebuked me for doing it.
Monday, July 21, 2003
I remember believing that it was Crosby Stills and Nash's first gig (man), and that they were scared shitless. (I was surprised that they could do their first gig there, in front of a million and a half of you fuckers -- actually 400,000, as I knew at the time --, but then those were days that recognized themselves as days of freedom and innovation.)
Sunday, July 20, 2003
I remember shading or trying to shade muscles onto the costumes of superheroes I was drawing. I tried to emulate the cross-hatched shadows in the comic books I read. The muscular arms seen through the skin-tight jerseys of the superheroes were a real challenge, like noses. It was unclear what the balance between elliptic outline and cross-hatched volumes should have been. The thigh muscles, when they were running right at you, were a little easier. I remember liking to draw one leg down on its toes, and the other cut off at the knee, the rest of the leg hidden behind the thigh, with sometimes the boot toe sticking out below the flexed knee. I drew this over and over again, on pieces of paper, in margins of books, everywhere when I was bored in school. I think this was one of the few superhero poses I drew well, so I liked to be able to produce it at will. And it was so elegant and graceful, that abbreviated outline for the supercharged vitality of the hero.
Saturday, July 19, 2003
I remember velour shirts -- blouses my downtown grandmother called them. I liked them to be turtlenecks, though I didn't mind the v-necks. In black and white it looked like the crew on Star Trek wore them as well. I liked the nap and the softness and the rich extensive color. I think the ones I always chose were a kind of mauve maroon, but I might have had a sky-blue one as well. They'd look appalling now, but that's just fashion, not a comment on their intrinsic worth.
Friday, July 18, 2003
I remember invisible runners! And how you could play softball with as few as, like, three people (if you fungoed the ball when you were at bat). [Memory jogged via Steve and Checkers at onepotmeal (in passing), July 16, 2003.]
Thursday, July 17, 2003
I remember nail-brushes, for getting the dirt out from underneath your nails. I'm sure they're still available, but I never see them in people's bathrooms. We had them, my grandparents had them, their friends had them. They were very effective. The bristles were, I guess, nylon, and you rubbed them on the soap, gouts of which they grabbed, and then scrubbed under your nails. Given the yucchy fact that you were getting soap under your nails, unpleasant in the way that I've described before (January 2, 2003 and June 29, 2002; scroll down), they weren't bad. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's most interesting disciples, has an article about the surface of the skin and the experience of discomfort when you're confronted with its strange two-dimensionality. You somehow become aware of yourself not as a volume but as defined by a surface that is not you, but not your carapace either. Feeling silk or soap or other paradoxically non-interacting surfaces is a sort of flaying, not so much of your skin from yourself, but of the world from your skin. Your skin becomes the surface or the interstices of that flaying. It's unpleasant. But the fingernail brushes were ok. There was a roughness about them, a solidity, that counteracted the squishy glancingness of the soap. Still I didn't like them. I think they always got all the soap out from under your nails, but I always felt that I couldn't be sure that they did. And I certainly never felt that I'd gotten all the soap out from the bristles. This wasn't that important, but it was another mark against them.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
I remember never to put money in your mouth, because it's so dirty. I also remember how bad coins taste: that peculiar, shocking bitterness.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
I remember four color Bic pens. They were torpedo shaped, and there were four different plungers that you could push down and get one of the four colors: red, blue, black (maybe), green. They were unwieldy but imposing. Only red and blue really mattered, or at least green didn't. The other two colors were just there so it could be a four-color pen. I doubt the red mattered much either. I think we liked them because we thought we could draw color pictures with them. But I never drew with ink -- you couldn't erase mistakes! (I remember being impressed by a textbook I had that had a drawing of a horse in it, done, the caption said, in ink. That meant the artist couldn't erase anything. That was the most impressive part.) The pen itself was as I recall white on top and blue on the bottom.
Monday, July 14, 2003
I remember that the Cubs couldn't win a pennant because there were no lights in beautiful Wrigley field, which meant they played all their summer home games in the heat of the day, which meant they were exhausted at the end of the summer and kept losing to their fresher rivals. I remember Ernie Banks ("let's play two!") standing in front of the beautiful brick outfield fence. Still I loathed them (though I loved Banks) for being the rivals of my beloved Mets.
Sunday, July 13, 2003
I remember that the New York Times never had a front page article which broke at the end of a sentence. If you read to the end of the column, you always were left hanging with a fragment, continued on the inside. At first I thought this was accidental, but then realized that with at least ten or twelve jumps every day, day in and day out, the odds against this were astronomical. Once or twice in my life I found a column that ended with a full-stop -- it was like finding a four-leaf clover. I was very impressed with the Times for doing this (I think I realized that it had to be intentional in tenth grade or so): they were serenly inscrutable, but they knew me, knew their audience and that the dangling, unfinished sentence would be a powerful incentive to make the jump. It made me feel good, the way my reaction turned out to be somehow the right reaction, the reaction of the reader they were contemplating. I felt that I had some connection to what was in print before me (like the narrator in Proust being thrilled when he saw his name and article in Le Figaro), not that I was named but that my way of reading was anticipated in the editorial architectonic of the paper. It was constructed for and around just what I was. (My name was actually in the Times for the first time in twelfth grade, for winning a scholarship, but in a fine print list, so to me it didn't count. MY actual name seemed to refer to me less than did that deviously constant broken sentence at the bottom of every column. Those columns knew and accepted me as I truly was.)
Saturday, July 12, 2003
I remember that when I used to wear my space-suit (my very warm, heavy, bulky woolen winter coats -- see March 9, 2002 -- I would often suck and chew on the strap that covered one's chin or mouth. The chin strap had a slit for one of those long, torpedo-like buttons that would fasten it easily, and there was great compensation for wearing the uncomfortable coat to be had in chewing on the strap pressing my tongue through the slit, and tasting the insipid wet wool. The only taste it really ever had was a salty one: its interesting effect was more in the way it would feel essentially dry in my mouth, without altering my sense of my mouth's familiar self. The cotton the dentist shoves in your mouth, or the effect of certain drugs, gives you dry mouth as well, but the woolen strap felt dry without making my mouth feel dry. William James says somewhere that most of our sense of interiority really comes from the physical experience of our tongues in our mouths. Sucking on woolen things -- the strap of my space-suit and sometimes my ice-crusted gloves -- provided the only sense of dryness that I could experience fully in my mouth, experience, that is, without my mouth being abnormally dry as well. I think, now, that this is why it was so interesting and so tempting (not because it was proto-sexual or an oral phase of sexual development, although no doubt that provided some of the general incentive). This experience of winter is an interesting thing to remember, now, during high summer.
Friday, July 11, 2003
I remember station to station vs. person to person calls. The latter were three times as expensive. I remember waiting for the Operator to call you (my parents) back when they were trying to make an international call (over a "trunk line"). I didn't quite get how that worked. I'm not sure even now I do. I remember Richard Clurman, then Time / Life's vice-president, dictating a telegram to London. I'd gotten five word telegrams from my parents, and knew how brief they were in general. Clurman dictated for five minutes or so -- at least five-hundred words. I was very impressed -- close to shocked -- and amazed by the apparent aplomb of the Western Union operator, since he never had to interrupt himself to assure her that, yes, he knew how long this telegram was.
Thursday, July 10, 2003
I remember the gerbils I used to own. They were in a terrarium on top of my dresser. (I remember when my sister was a new-born, my mother changing her on top of the dresser and her arms and legs flying everywhere. My mother explained that new-borns can't control their limbs, which I found interesting.) They turned out to be of opposite sexes, and gave birth to blind purple lumps. They started eating them. We saved them, and I think we got to a next generation of gerbils. I remember one escaping -- jumping out of the cage -- and my mother and me chasing it all around the apartment. I thought that if it got under the fridge, that would be it. I was amazed to get it back. I remember when the last one died -- some hideous lesion broke out on her rear leg, and slowly spread down her haunch and up her belly. She no longer ran in the treadmill/wheel with that look of odd determination as she sped along. She lay there suffering. I remember not knowing, really, how the water bottle with its bent spigot worked -- why didn't the water all come out? (Surface tension.) Anyhow, she'd stopped drinking, and stopped eating the lettuce we gave her, and which I also ate. And then she died.
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
I remember my parents taking me to "the Italian Feast" in little Italy. They told me that that's where we were going, and I think that the first time I thought this was unpromising. But then I had an amazing time. It was endless, with nothing but fun and good cheer everywhere. I couldn't believe that a street at night could be so much fun. I couldn't believe anything could be so much fun. It was amazing that you could walk in the middle of the street, and that this usually forbidden zone of traffic and danger was now saturated with pleasures. The next year, when my father announced we were going to the feast, I was ecstatic. And it was nearly as much fun as it had been before. I don't know how many times we went, but I do remember, from later feasts: the cotton candy; and the "Kiss me, I'm Italian" buttons. I wanted one, since by then we'd started going to Italy summers and it was my favorite place in the world. But I associate cotton candy and those buttons, and the Virgins and Saints covered with money, with no longer finding the Italian feast transcendentally wonderful. It started looking to me like commerce. (I remember feeling the same way about the outdoor fairs in Stormville, although we went to fewer of them, and in the daytime. I was amazed by the first one, but later they seemed dry and dusty.) Later, in college, I went back to some of these now nameable feasts, with friends, on dates, and they hardly seemed any fun at all. They'd dissolved into nothing, like the cotton candy.
Monday, July 07, 2003
I remember Buddy Ebsen, so well. Reading his obituary today, I was surprised he'd been still alive. He was, of course, Jed Clampett, on The Beverly Hillbillies, whom I always think about whenver I read Amy Clampitt. He was the easy-going father, always harasssed by Granny -- herself a combination of Whistler's Mother and Grandma Moses in her attitude -- but always serenely unconcerned about it. But I remember one particular scene when Jed has decided that it's time to do something about some trouble she's caused, instead of practicing his usual amused detachment. He asks Mr. Drysdale (like the pitcher! I would always think later) to do something for him; Mr. Drysdale righteously refuses, till Jed pulls out a roll of money, like a gambler, and casually tosses it into the air several times. This was so interestingly out of character that it spoke volumes about his intelligence and secret competence. At that point he reminded me of my own uptown grandfather, also serenely phlegmatic and detached, but with hidden resources of canniness and know-how, and command of money and its uses. I loved that moment, and loved TV, or loved the show, for giving it to me. RIP, both Jed Clampett and my grandfather.
I remember the old license plates in New York. The first ones I remember were orange letters on a blue field. I was shocked by the modern seeming of their reversal when I was in my early teens into blue on orange. It was about this time that I realized that the Mets cap was different from the Yankees cap, since I'd seen the Mets only on black and white TV (my father had taken me to a Yankees game). I didn't know that the NY on the Mets cap was orange. I found that out just when I found out that New York State's colors were orange and blue. This explained the license plates. (I think we all called them licenses then, maybe from the movies: "Did you get his license?") Then they went back to orange on blue, but the letters were more streamlined, less like the boxy letters of my youth which reminded me of my uptown grandfather's boxy Ford. (He was the only person in the family to own a car. His last one was a Ford Granada.) I liked those older letters: you can still see them, I think, in North by Northwest. Then the black and white Statue of Liberty plates came in, and the whole tight relationship to the State colors came to an end.
Friday, July 04, 2003
I remember how hard it was to get people's phone numbers from Information if you didn't know their father's first names. It was also hard from the phonebook, but a little easier, since you could make an educated guess about their addresses. (It would also depend on how common their last names were. And I remember that Dan Davis didn't hace a phone. His family used the pay phone at their corner.) I remember that the way to get someone's address from Information was to ask for their phone number first. Then you could ask for their address (on the theory, I think, that you were writing it into your directory.) But if you called Information and just asked for an address, they wouldn't give it to you. I was told this by an Operator, when I asked her in some emergency how to get an address which Information refused to give me. It was neat to know this secret, and she was right. I remember also the first time I heard a male Operator's voice. I commented on it to him, but he was imperturbable. Everyone must have done so. It was a reversal of the childhood pattern in which I was called "ma'am" by Operators until I was thirteen or so.
Thursday, July 03, 2003
I remember "Lonely Girl," a song by Eddie something. "Hey hey lonely girl, my only girl, ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta." And then "Lonely girl, my only girl, something break your broken heart in two." "You said that only his two lips, could kisss your lips, ta ta ta ta ta ta, But no one can kiss your lips, can kiss your lips, the way I will, The way I will." This was a hit when I first started listening to contemporary music on the radio a lot, on the stereo with 8-track system that my parents had gotten me. This must have been seventh grade, when, as I remember, Michael Hobin got me into listening to WABC, then a top forties station: 77, Double You Ay Bee Sea! I could never figure out if Eddie, the singer, was male or female (I'm now sure he was male). He sang in a very high falsetto, and the song was thrilling to my adolescent self as a lesbian come-on -- the singer's rivalry with the boy who broke her heart was not a rivalry with another version of himself, as in so many pop songs, but with a different sexual stance. I liked that it was ambiguous too, that is that the singer was excitingly indeterminate (which that other boy wouldn't have been). As I say, I now know (having more experience with the tradition of rock falsetto) that the song was not the daring sexual tease that I thought it was. But of course, falsetto must preserve some remnant of what I felt was going on in the song, and so I wasn't completely wrong either. Oddly, I didn't like the song much.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
I remember our English teacher, maybe in eighth grade, reading aloud a New Yorker story which was a hilarious mystery based on puns. Someone kept setting things up so outrageous puns would appear in the local newspaper. At least part of the story was set in Quebec. In that part, the town priest, whose last name was Squegg, loved to get up town theatricals. But someone interfered with the casting of the latest production, which was about fox-hunting and such, and Squegg was not given the central role he usually had in the town's plays (just as I had to play a wolf instead of the king of the wolves or the adventursome boy, etc. in our second grade play). That made it possible for the next day's banner headline to be: PERE SQUEGG IN HOUND ROLE. I like that no one got it, no one laughed, that our teacher had to explain it to us. And then we all found it hilarious. So I like that we were at an age where explaining a joke worked.
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
I remember another novelty trading card (along with the four-armed woman and the "You look like a million dollars -- all green and wrinkled" one): "You have the skin of a peach" -- flip! -- "All covered with fuzz!" (under a fur-covered face).
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