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.

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, 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.


posted by william 11:17 PM
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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.


posted by william 9:51 PM
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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.


posted by william 6:27 PM
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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.


posted by william 1:33 PM
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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.


posted by william 10:52 PM
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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.


posted by william 11:59 PM
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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?


posted by william 11:55 PM
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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).


posted by william 3:06 PM
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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?


posted by william 7:26 AM
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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.


posted by william 12:57 AM
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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.


posted by william 8:27 PM
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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.


posted by william 12:37 AM
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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.)


posted by william 11:27 PM
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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.


posted by william 7:41 AM
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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.


posted by william 10:02 AM
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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


posted by william 11:50 PM
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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.


posted by william 1:10 PM
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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.


posted by william 9:18 PM
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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.


posted by william 10:31 PM
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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.


posted by william 9:51 PM
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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.


posted by william 6:34 PM
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Friday, September 05, 2003
I remember radium watches. I think we may have had one in a drawer, that had belonged to my great-grandfather (my uptown grandmother's father?). Later glow-in-the-dark watches were phosphorous, and didn't glow long. I remember that radium watches were dangerous: spooky, ghostly, dangerous. The glow was yellowish, not that phosphorescent green. In junior high I bought some glow in the dark paint, at that toy store on 83rd, but my mother and her mother wouldn't let me use it, for fear that it had radium in it. I knew it didn't -- the government wouldn't permit such things, would they? -- but they prevailed.


posted by william 11:42 PM
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Thursday, September 04, 2003
I remember Mikhail Tal (whose name I loved) the chess world champion would read beginners' chess books every year, so as to always be fresh. I liked it that he was reading just what I was reading, and was somehow getting both more and less out of it than I was: less because he knew all this stuff; more because he was getting out of it what the champion of the world would get out of it.


posted by william 11:55 PM
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Wednesday, September 03, 2003
I remember that my father told me that blood in movies was really ketchup. I was skeptical of this. Not that I thought it was blood; I just thought ketchup was not the likely blood-substitute. Why, in the black and white movies he was talking about, would it have to be red at all? And the red of ketchup wasn't quite right: it was too dark. But he insisted that it was ketchup, and I'm not sure whether this is because he thought I thought it was actually blood, or because he was right.

I remember ketchup vs. catsup. I liked knowing that catsup was pronounced "ketchup."


posted by william 11:02 PM
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Tuesday, September 02, 2003
I remember Dondi.


posted by william 11:05 PM
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Monday, September 01, 2003
I remember, at least twice, stories of stowaways who'd hidden in wheel wells of planes and frozen to death. I think I read about one of these in the International Herald Tribune when I was in Italy as occuring at Kennedy, but I'm not sure about that.


posted by william 11:42 PM
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