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 28, 2004
I remember spending Christmas with the Clurmans in Quiogue. They were Jewish but had a tree. It was a white Christmas, and somehow that was when I became aware that white Christmases were rare, that it usually didn't snow in New York or Long Island until January. I think that was the weekend I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull there, and either I loved the name Jonathan and so read it, or that it made me love the name Jonathan, so that I liked Jonathans after that, from the book of Kings to my best friend Jonathan D, sister of Belinda D (whose name made me interested in Pope).
Saturday, December 25, 2004
I remember that my father was strongly opposed to the plastic Christmas tree the Hoges got one year. (The Cramers also had a tree, and so did some Jewish and half-Jewish friends.) It seemed interesting that my father was so against it, so that I took it that somehow plastic Christmas trees were Christian -- normal American, like baloney or peanut butter and jelly which we never ate -- whereas Jews, or at least Ashkenazi Jews, supported real evergreens.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
I remember climbing a mountain with my Uncle Cico, the athletic smoker and my mother's cousin and blood brother who had a lot of sex and died young. I remember that this was either in Yugoslavia -- the Yugoslav Alps, I guess, or in the Dolomites, at Cortina d'Ampezzo or Tre Crocia above Cortina where we stayed and hiked a lot.
Cico was willing to be very adventurous, and so we went up meadow after meadow. I remember being struck by all this land thrust up into the sky.
I'd seen the Matterhorn, I think on our first trip to Zurich, and that was a mountain (one moreover I'd seen in a movie -- not I think Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" -- in which I remember my shock at the scene of a murderous climber cutting a rope, and little else) which seemed pure mountain, rocks and icy peaks thrust into the heavens. Something to climb, something to see.
But as I say, the mountain we were climbing was land: meadows, fields, rock walls, and it was strange and odd to keep finding these fields in the sky. And I remember thinking each time that one more pitch (not a word I knew then) would get us to the top; and finding at the end of every rise another rise, with more strange, aerial land, behind it. We never did get to the top, and I remember this as frustrating, strange frustration though to find that land extended, since that's what land does. But it was so odd to have it just go upwards and upwards, and it made me feel, I think, what extension really was: land but not ground (not Wittgensteinian ground, anyhow, which is neither true nor false).
Sunday, December 19, 2004
I remember the emergency pull-off bays on the West Side highway, on the west side of the road, between the highway and the river, which we always passed late at night, going home, downtown, from my uptown grandmother's or even north of that. I didn't know what they were. The didn't have the Emergency Stopping Only signs to be seen now. They were just these neat half-moons that could fit a car or two if they were angled, and reminded me of the semi-circular arches in my wooden blocks set -- the kind that hollowed out a regular sized oblong block, and that I think were supposed to be catenary and that I think weren't. It was as though these parking spots were flattened blocks on their sides. And sometimes there would be cars parked there, on hot summer nights, between the highway and the river. I was always curious about them, and about the credentials and expertise that entitled some cars to stop there. They seemed glamorous, full of know-how, part of that other life I would know as an adult but didn't yet and didn't have any explanations for. It's not that I knew that people were kissing there, or having sex; I didn't. But I knew that something was knowable that I didn't know, and it was purely glamorous, and had to do with the general world of the city and not with my own particular world.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
I remember (home with a fever today) how my father would shake down the mercury thermometer before taking my temperature (also that they called having a fever "having a temperature"), and how my parents would have trouble reading it when they were done. I didn't see why it was so hard till college, which was the first time I did it myself. I didn't understand, either (and still don't), why you had to shake the thermometer down, since the mercury thermometers that told the outside temperatures rose and fell. Why don't medical thermometers fall?
I remember my parents telling me that mirrors were backed by mercury. I think this is true, though for a while I thought it was false, that this was one of their fallible bits of information, like pi equalling exactly 22/7.
And I remember our English teacher -- Mr. Donahue, I think, though it might have been Mr. Baruch -- telling us how little balls of quicksilver would go squirting around over a surface if you tried to catch them. He said that we might have had this experience if we'd ever broken a thermometer. I seem to recall the experience itself, but I might just be recalling imagining it.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
I remember my father taking me on some Saturday mornings to -- I think -- NYU alumni association sponsored performances at Town Hall. But I might be conflating times he took me to NYU events and times he took me to Town Hall. At Town Hall I remember in particular one performance: an actor doing Browning's "Pied Piper." He was in costume, with pipe, and so on, but otherwise alone. He was very good. He must have done other things, but all I remember is the Pied Piper. I think we'd just learned the story in school -- at any rate it was relevant. My father might have read it aloud. I know that we had a record of James Mason reading it, and I wonder if there's any chance it was him. But I doubt it -- at least the actor I remember doesn't at all coincide with my adult sense of James Mason.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
I remember my uptown grandmother's pots sometimes boiling over -- big pots with soup or knoedel in them. And it just seemed part of the cooking process: she knew what she was doing, and boiling over was one of the things she did. She certainly acted that way -- she was never upset about things boiling over. And the food was always delicious.
Friday, December 10, 2004
I remember playing in sand, and not knowing what the seive was for. Pails go back as far as I remember, but the seive was something different. I remember seives around the sandbox in Riverside Park on 93rd street, and also on the beach with my uptown grandparents -- Jones Beach or maybe Long Island Sound. I picture them as plastic, but have a bare sense that they were metal, the pail especially. I remember learning that they filtered the sand from the larger stones, but that the result was the reverse of what you wanted: a seive full of stones, rather than fine sand. Only later did I somehow learn that you could seive the sand into the pail.
I also remember my parents taking us to the Lido off Venice, and my being amazed by sand like talc, outside the Lido Hotel. But this was years later.
And I remember talcum powder, which my father used after shaving, before it turned out to be bad for you and they started using cornstarch instead. I loved the smell. (They also dusted it on you in the barber shop after doing the back of your neck.)
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
I remember going to the gas station once and being served by an attendant smoking a cigarette. I knew you weren't supposed to do that. My parents asked him what he was doing, and he told them, with an air of great expertise, that if you pour gasoline on a lit cigarette it would put the cigarette out. I didn't know whom to believe -- him as someone who did this for a living, or my parents who after all were this time in sync with the government warnings: extinguish cigarettes. I thought the attendant was probably right, that is right most of the time, but that it might be a stupid thing to do anyhow. This was one of those instances where I tried to picture what would happen. It was hard to imagine the cigarette not going out if you poured a liquid on to it.
I remember that when I was much younger my mother told me that a diamond was the hardest substance in the world. I was very impressed by this, which came up with respect to her diamond ring, and my uptown grandmother's. (I associate this memory with the terrace outside my grandmother's building, overlooking the river.) But thinking about it, I had challenged her, asking her whether a cinder block dropped on a diamond wouldn't crush it. (I think I'd just got interested in cinder blocks. At the time I thought, somehow, they were solid. I remember it was later that I discovered they were not just very large cement bricks.) She said it would, but that this didn't matter, since that was just a question of scale (though she didn't put it that way, naturally.) Of course, we both were wrong. A picture held us captive -- we couldn't picture it otherwise, even though it was otherwise, just as with the gasoline and the cigarette. I was just as glad to get away from the gas station: my parents might have been wrong, but in this case that embarrassing possibility didn't seem as important as usual.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
I remember different food habits and utensils, that marked family differences. That is, I remember that the Schubins, I think, had corn-cob holders in the shape of corn-cobs that you stuck into the ends of the cobs; also they ate their corn with butter, which we didn't. I liked the corn-cob holders. I thought they should be symmetric (since they had different designs) around a cob, but no one else seemed to care. I remember that most of my friends had salted butter -- the Hoges I'm sure about -- whereas ours was always unsalted. I preferred salted. And I remember that the Hoges, again, had plastic mustard dispensers, sort of like at the movies or ball-park, maybe even sometimes pump style, with crusts of dried mustard around the spout, while we always had glass jars and used knives and spoons. We never ate peanut butter in any form, while most of my friends brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, sometimes at least. We never ate jelly either, but always jams, preserves, and marmalade (and honey too). But I got to eat PBJs on white bread at my friends' houses too. And they had buttered bread with cold-cuts, which we didn't. Salted butter. After sleepovers we got frozen orange juice, whereas at home it was always fresh-squeezed. I liked those more American utensils and products better, and it always felt a little bit like going out to eat when I ate at their houses.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
I remember, my memory jogged by just rereading Catcher in the Rye, that when we were doing public speaking I think in seventh grade the kids in the class would yell "Digression!" whenever the speaker went off topic. I remember the way Peter Rogers would lean forward, listening intently, ready to yell digression if a syllable went off, as though being the first to answer in a quiz contest. I have some sense that I was absent the day the procedure was explained. (Or maybe this happened at Riverdale, and it was Eric Grabino, and they'd all learned to do it before I got there in tenth grade. And it's interesting that this makes me realize that Eric as the Peter-Rogers figure at Riverdale, although we were never really friends, and Peter and I were.) So somehow I didn't quite know what a digression was, in this sense, and why you were allowed to task someone for digressing. The whole idea of the speech seemed digressive: you were up there talking about something you wouldn't otherwise be talking about. It wasn't as though there was some point you actually wanted to make. And now this whole blog is a kind of digression.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
I remember writing thank you notes for my bar mitzvah presents. This was at my desk in the Monaghan's house, the house we were renting in Quiogue, near Westhampon Beach (when we passed the sign coming from New York my sister and I would always cry, "I'm in...[our rear seat passing sign] Quiogue!").
This was the same desk where I wrote my frustrating report on Oklahoma, a state I'd picked only because of the musical which contained "Oh what a beautiful morning," the song my uptown grandmother said my fallen uncle liked so much, (although I liked getting all the mail from the Oklahoma chamber of commerce, and learned a lot about Tulsa); and where I would occasionally write the postcards to Wengen that my grandmother had left for me to send when she and my grandfather were away for the summer.
The thank you notes were a shock, the downside to the reward for all that practicing for the bar mitzvah. I thought the reward was the end of things. But then my mother came with all these cards and envelopes, and I found myself writing to all her friends.
And what I was thanking them for was mainly Savings Bonds, the ersatz money that kept tantalizing me in the envelopes they came in. I'd see something that looked like money, green and elaborately arabesqued, but never was. I remember my downtown grandparents had a lot of savings bonds stuck in their desk drawers too, and it just seemed so pointlessly adult to have this money which wasn't money but only future money, money that belonged to some unimaginable future that only adults would care about (the bonds came with a chart of dates showing their absurdly discounted rates every few years till maturity; and there was an ad campaign on TV which sold them as gifts which were far cheaper than their face value, a value which made kids' faces light up), money that is now for me long spent.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Agoraphiliac remembers:
I remember Highlights for Children, a magazine I saw only in doctors' offices. Maybe because of that, its comic-strip family (the Timbertots?) inspired dread and revulsion in me. They were so blank-faced.
I remember I never warmed to Peanuts, either. I never got that downbeat, non-punchline ending, at least not until much later.
I half-remember an animated film on television, animated the way the Rudolph the Reindeer show was. It featured a live actor I can picture but not name, and an animated sequence where somebody is expelled from a paradise: the sky turns dark and the wind blows and the sea gets stormy. It terrified me, and I only saw it that once.
(*later: an Internet search finally turned up Jack Gilford. The film was The Daydreamer, by Jules Bass of Rankin/Bass. I kept thinking of Vincent Gardenia, though I knew it wasn't him.)
I remember some Gustave Dore illustrations of Gargantua and Pantagruel that shocked me when I was about four years old. I saw them in a neighbor's basement rec-room. It was the giant child holding writhing adults in his pudgy hands that thrilled and frightened me. I regarded those neighbors as having some kind of special, secret knowledge that I probably ought not to have had access to.
--Cross-posted from her livejournal.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
From Rachel Wetzsteon (Happy Birthday!):
I remember, as a teenager, finding out through a loose-lipped friend that my father was throwing me a surprise birthday party, showing up at the party, and getting a weird kick out of feigning surprise: Oh but you shouldn't have! How did you arrange it so cleverly?
I remember a tall, sullen guy in my ninth-grade science class nicknamed "Mailbox" for no apparent reason.
I remember my frogs Max (fat and cheerful) and Sylvester (small and wily) and the plastic container of (stunned and repulsive) mealworms we kept in the refrigerator for them.
I remember a doll called Darcy who was all the rage when I was ten or so. Her scalp swiveled so that she could be blonde one minute, raven-haired the next.
I remember the cat with the guitar in B. Kliban's Cat, singing "Love to eat they mousies,/ Mousies what I love to eat,/ Bite they little heads off,/ Nibble on they tiny feet."
I remember the hopelessly cool kids on Zoom ("I'm Bernadette!") and how I so badly wanted to be one of them. How, I wondered, were they chosen? Did you audition, or did you have to know someone?
I remember Etch-a-Sketch.
I remember Reinforcements, those white adhesive paper rings you placed around the holes in your sheets of looseleaf paper so they'd stay put in the binder. And also the sickly green container they came (come?) in.
I remember developing a morbid fear of Charles Manson and nervously checking the newspaper each time he was up for parole.
I remember the sad day the New York City tokens lost the "Y" in their centers. The new ones were small and hard and bright and there was really no good reason to dislike them, but somehow they seemed greatly diminished, pale shadows of their former selves.
I remember false memory: telling my mother very proudly one day that I remembered where we were when we watched the moon landing on t.v. -- corner of the living room, rug, metal folding chairs -- and her telling me, no, that couldn't be right. I remember thinking I was too young for my memory to be playing such cruel tricks on me. I still think this when I forget things, however small.
--Rachel Wetzsteon (in high retrospective mode on her birthday, hoping
blogger will feel free to edit as he sees fit)
Saturday, November 27, 2004
I remember when a Japanese soldier who'd been hiding on an island was discovered, when I was a kid -- he didn't know the war was over. He was old and bedraggled and looked just as glad.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
I remember that Thanksgiving used to be at my uptown grandmother's house, but that after the fight between her and my mother and her mother we went downtown instead and didn't tend to see my uptown grandmother, although I have a sense that those unexpected early evening visits my father would pay, usually taking me along, to his parents would tend to happen on Thanksgiving Day. I remember being slightly surprised that my downtown grandmother could doThanksgiving -- I had sort of internalized its heavy food and massive presentations as Ashkenazi, not Sephardic.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
I remember kids in seventh or eighth grade asking "Would you rather be dead or red?" or "Better red or dead?" and I thought, Red of course: why object to some color, cartoonish thought it might be, if the only other option was death. I think it was another two years or so before I understood the question.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
I remember autograph albums, that some kids pulled out when we were graduating fifth grade. I remember Amos had one. It's one of maybe three things I remember about Amos, the other two being his name (and how it reminded me of my grandfather's Emil), and that he lived east and not west of P.S. 166, since I either went to a party once at his house or I saw him going home one day in the opposite direction -- I can't be sure. The autograph albums were oblong, with waved, cream pages. It seemed strange to me to be asked for my autograph, since I wasn't famous. I assumed that the autograph albums I had read about only had the signatures of the renowned in them. I didn't have one, and I don't think any of my close friends did. But it turned out my father did, and still does, I think, from when he was in high school or maybe even earlier.
Friday, November 19, 2004
I remember Cutty Sark whiskey, and that I always thought it was Cutty Shark, with an idea of the shark fin cutting through the water as representing the speed or impressiveness of the ship, till one day I was disoriented to see an ad for it in The New Yorker without the h. (The ads had a ship in a bottle, which never seemed like such a big deal to me, I guess because I imagined the bottom of the bottle unscrewed, until I saw a commercial where a father showed his son the last step of building one -- pulling the sails up with a thread through the mouth of the bottle which then detached from the ship and could be pulled out.)
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
I remember that after the movie, while the projector was still going, the pleated curtains would close, and it looked like they were transparent and you could see through them and read the credits (or see the figures) underneath; but they the lights would come up and they would be thick velvet opacities. (I think this was in the tonier, non-continuous showing movie theaters; not the New Yorker, but maybe one on 83rd, on the West side of Broadway (?), across from the Loew's 83rd which has itself been there forever.)
Saturday, November 13, 2004
I remember my mother bringing me to New Orleans, which I really wanted to see, and eating at Brennan's (screwdrivers!), The Court of the Two Sisters (where I had a hurricane, and which I think boasted was where the cocktail was invented), Antoine's, where they then took your order without writing it down, no matter how complicated it was (they don't any more), and Buster's Rice and Beans, the best then, where a meal was 75 cents. (Does it still exist?) I liked it a lot then. Then she left and I met my friends Michael and Andy and we hung out for another week, staying with a bass player friend of Michael's in the Garden District. He worked days and we went to the French Quarter and hung out with some hilarious addict street musicians we'd gotten to talking with in Jackson Square, because Andy was a violin and player and played some good stuff on the fiddler's fiddle. As the tourists (shudder) started coming in, the musicians would arrange themselves to play, and when they got a little money I remember one of them announcing to the world, "Well either we're bucking for breakfast at Brennan's or we can go get rice and beans at Buster's." I loved the rhythm of bucking for breakfast at Brennan's. I liked the fact that the rhythm was all you needed to know to get the meaning of the word, like trim in Jeremiah: "Thou trimmest thy way to destruction." Which I guess is what he might've thought of New Orleans too.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
I remember the seam on the wall-paper (patterned with lightly printed shelves of a boy's room: baseball and glove, hat, other gewgaws that I can't remember, over and over but stuttering at the seams: and nothing like my actual shelves) that ran by my bed, roughly where my knee was, and how I used to like lying in bed, especially when it was hot and my legs were bare, with my legs pressed high against the wall, and how I liked to feel the texture of the seam on my right knee and the relative coolness of the wallpaper against the outside of my right thigh. I remember later (earlier?) the cooler, rougher white paint on plaster of the unpapered wall against my leg.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
I remember my parents returning from voting once, maybe when I was 6. It was late morning, not a time they usually came home. I asked them who won and they said that the Democrats had. They always did. I don't know what election this was. And of course the results weren't in till later. But I was glad that our side, the side that called on them for support, won.
I remember Frank Ryan campaigning outside the 86th Street Subway station. I think this was the year Bella Abzug defeated him (when the number of districts shrunk). Then he got sick and died.
I remember my father taking me to vote. At P.S. 166! Where we usually lined up for recess there were voting machines. And grownups in coats lined up. We waited and then went into the booth, pulling the lever which closed the curtain. He showed me how you could flick the wrong toggles and then change them -- he flicked Republican toggles! but then unflicked them -- and then we voted Democratic all the way down (except, maybe, for Javits) and he let me pull the lever which registered the vote and opened the curtain simultaneously, which I thought was pretty neat.
I remember Democrats winning.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
I remember my shock when Nixon defeated Humphrey. I was in seventh grade. Such things didn't happen. And now I'm in shock again, even though I know such things do happen.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
I remember (it being Halloween and all): Chunkys (chocolate, raisins, big cubic bars with indented tops in silver foil), Bit o'Honey ("every Bit o'Honey candy bar...is a bit o'...fun!" "and try Bit o' Peanut Butter and Bit o' Licorice"), and Ice Cubes: chocolate with some wonderful liquid chocolate center that did always seem cold. I just realized that I haven't seen Chunkys for quite a while. Ou sont les bonbons d'antan?
Friday, October 29, 2004
I remember, from trying to figure out square roots from my Brittanica Jr in sixth grade or so that 2^10 = 32^2 = 1024.
And I remember 32767 (which is 2^15-1), the highest number the Dec PDP 11 could deal with as an address (I think), and therefore the number of the very last instruction you could put in a program. It was the end of time, of the computer's conceptual universe. It had an air of mystery about it. Like 186,262 and 6.02 x 10^23 it was just one of those numbers....
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
I remember that commercials almost never mentioned rivals by name. They were "the leading brand," or some such periphrasis. But RC broke this taboo (or was one of the early breakers of it). I remember their great commercial, where they had an announcer saying that they were half the price of BLEEP or BLEEP. He hated being interrupted. But he kept being bleeped, until finally he walked off dejectedly, then suddenly ran back to the camera and yelled "of Coke or Pepsi!" beating the panicky bleeps that came split seconds too late triumphantly.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
I remember the thrill of new cassettes. Cassette players had just come in (when I was slightly younger, it was really cool to have a reel-to-reel player, and during the transition you could sometimes get albums on reel-to-reels also; I spent a lot of time at the Hoges recording their records on reel-to-reel -- or maybe only once). So my friends' older, taste-making-siblings and their boyfriends had record albums, but you could get the same albums on cassette for a dollar more and play them much more conveniently. And it was wonderful to have the miniature version of the album cover as the insert for the cassette. There was something thrilling about being able somehow to possess the cover in this pocket-size format, in a way you could never possess an album cover, because it wasn't portable. And then, cassettes didn't scratch, so somehow you could count on them. I remember having James Taylor's rereleased second album (with "Carolina in my mind") and Emerson, Lake and Palmer on cassette. I had Crosby Stills and Nash (and CSN and Young) on vinyl, perhaps slightly earlier. And I had Donovan on cassette, but that object was somehow not as thrilling. There was something about the well-designed compactness of the whole experience that happened when something I guess that I knew first as a record was reduced to a cassette -- that was what was thrilling.
Friday, October 22, 2004
I remember when Rube Goldberg died and our eighth grade teacher explained Rube Goldberg devices to us. The Times had shown one with his obituary, but it looked like a hard diagram so I didn't pay any attention to it. But then when our teacher explained him, I did, and I was intensely disappointed that there would be no more Rube Goldberg cartoons (in The New Yorker) because he was dead. Somehow I wanted to see them as he produced them, and not what he'd done in the past.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
I remember Sinclair gasoline, with the Danny-and-the Dinosaur logo. What happened to them? Who bought them?
Monday, October 18, 2004
I remember the Black Panther -- was it Stokley Carmichael? -- who wrote the poem: "Jew-boy, Jew-boy with that yarmulke on your head, / Hey, pale-faced Jew-boy, I wish you was dead." I think I read this in the Post, back when the Post was still a liberal afternoon paper. It was hard to defend, although at the time I wasn't quite thinking about defending positions, just about the justice of the causes they represented. So I was pretty unconcerned, especially since the kids in the neighborhood who wore yarmulkes could in no way -- they or their families -- be responsible for the oppression of black people. They were the ones getting beaten up by the kids at my school. What I was most surprised by, and rolled around my tongue for a long time (in fact I do so still) was the spelling of yarmulke, which I thought was "yamaka." And it seemed strange that Carmichael, or whoever it was, knew how to spell it (I realized, after I figured out what word it was, that this had to be the right spelling, like "colonel," which I always confused with colonial), even though he was an antisemite, and I didn't.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
I remember my Peace Sign ring, that I got out of a gum machine at the Garden Supermarket (maybe after it turned into Daitch Shopwell). It was one of those plastic rings with a gap at the antipodes of the display so that you could adjust it. It was a little tight, and I liked the feel of the plastic edges and played with it a lot. Part of it broke off, leaving an even sharper edge, but the rest was tight enough for me to continue wearing it. I fiddled with the sharp edge a lot, pushing it into my finger and worsening the chronic scab that it caused, taking a kind of pleasure out of that. And now I still have a kind of pin-point scar from doing this.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
I remember that the #5 bus didn't always go all the way uptown. I think it stopped at 135th or 145th street. I got out there once, and had to wait for another bus, and I remember that I was in front of the Apollo Theater, which I didn't know at the time, but heard about shortly afterwards.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
I remember my mother showing me that book margins were justified. I think I was just learning to mess around on the typewriter that my downtown grandparents owned (the only one, I think, in the family), and wondering about the way typed passages both did and didn't look like books. I learned later about proportional spacing from Doug Breitbart, whose parents had a Selectric (like those at issue in the Swift Boat Veterans forgeries). But I was I think still reading the Hardy Boys when my mother showed me that the right-hand margin was justified, something the bell on my grandparents' typewriter could only, barely, approximate. And I looked at page after page, and wondered how they did it. How did they get, as I thought, the same number of letters into every line? I so much assumed that the each line had an equal letter-count that I didn't even check, until several years later, maybe reading Marjorie Morningstar, maybe reading Hemingway, I saw the same words repeated at the beginning of two consecutive lines, but their spacing differed. So now I had to think about how they made that happen.
Saturday, October 09, 2004
I remember Derrida. I remember liking best his quoting a bit of Jabes which he ascribed to Reb Rida. And I remember that I gasped with delight after finishing "Freud and the scene of writing," during a lunch hour after I graduated and was working, depressed and hypochondriac, as an acquisitions assistant at Klein Science Library.
I remember that taxi meters -- ugly things that I put in the same category as thouse hydraulic door regulators -- had flags which the driver rotated downwards to start the meter. It was illegal to carry passengers flag-up. (I think I learned this from a human interest story in the Sports section: some player or coach or someone with savoir faire split the profit with the driver.) I didn't know how anyone could really see, until I learned that the sign on top of the cab went off if the flag was down, showing that it was taken. I never had the guts to ask the driver to take me off-book, but when Linda and I took a cab -- to Brew Burger! -- she just said to the driver: "Want a dollar?" and he said yes, just like that, and we got there for a dollar.
I remember another time in Brew Burger with Lou that at the next table a hippiesh guy was saying to his girlfriend, in depressed and demoralized tones, "We need to talk about out relationship." He kept using the term. I didn't know whether I thought it was ridiculous or cool. He belonged to that world, that free love world, where people had relationships. But he was so slow-motion and morose about it. She didn't say anything that I remember.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
I remember my surprise when my mother showed me -- not meaning to, but just helping me correct something -- that you could erase a lot more completely if you erased lightly rather than pressing down as hard as you could. My mother could sometimes even erase ink! Not entirely, but patiently, with her light touch. She could do it without tearing the paper, though sometimes it would get more translucent, and the light blue ruled lines would also get effaced.
I used to wonder where the pencil-lead (the graphite) went when you erased it. Oh, I remember the frustration of blackened erasers, and erasers worn down, or worse snapped off at the grooved, brassy tasting metal, and trying to erase with the bare rubber that was left, as you tore the paper with the metal that dwarfed it. I remember the difference in fact between the smooth, compacted hard rubber of an eraser worn all the way down and the rough, nubby healthy pink rubber of the broken eraser. And I remember realizing, with all the mealy residue from erasing lightly that the little flecks and fragments of rubber that you blew away after erasing was where the lead had gone.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
I remember "Warning warning danger danger!" -- the Robot going robot-shit on Lost in Space. I remember how it protected Will Robinson, whose whole name it always used. I remember it had a powerpack that Dr. Smith would remove when it went crazy with its warning system. I remember its articulated-tubing arms.
I remember realizing one day, to my extreme amusement, that Dr. Smith was the only person in the Robinson cohort to behave normally: fearing the terrifying, desiring the gratifying, seeking security, and comfort, and wealth. He was the only reasonable figure on the show. Who would behave differently? This was fun to see and to tell my friends, and I remember it as an experience of that silent-laughing hilarity where you just wheeze out a tiny bit of air, mouth open, sound at the very extreme of human pitch coming out with the wheeze. (I'm sure there's a physiological name for this, but I don't know what it is.)
Saturday, October 02, 2004
I remember that my parents, and other adults, would want to relax. Also that my father would tell me mother to "relax!" when she was tense. I didn't understand relaxing: it wasn't sleeping or even resting, and it wasn't doing anything either. It was an adult thing to do -- I sort of knew that -- and Tom Hoge (Tommy's father) would often relax with a drink, so it seemed very sophisticated. I associated it with wearing "slacks" (because of the rhyme) which is something women wore, especially modern fashionable women like my mother (as opposed to my grandmothers); and my mother also drank, which my father didn't, so relaxing and wearing slacks made sense. I think this was my first take on informality. My mother's mother, though, would often refer to my slacks, especially when they were slightly more formal (not jeans or corduroys), and I was never sure whether she was misusing the word. It seemed kind of off, but also maybe an introduction into that sparkling adult sophistication I admired from afar.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
I remember the Expos's first season, which was the first season I was a baseball fan -- a Mets fan: the Yankees were ludicrously bad in that era. And the Mets' first game was against the Expos. I remember the Mets always won their first game, and then did terribly after that. (But it might be actually the next season that their first game was against the Expos, and that they lost it.) I remember thinking I understood their logo, until a kid came into school one day with an Expos hat on, and I couldn't resolve the logo into ME (Montreal Expos) at all. I was first taken aback that it was multi-colored. TVs were black and white, or at least the local stations were. I didn't realize, later that season, that the Mets and the Yankees had different caps: not only the slightly different dispositions of the NY's but also that for the Mets it was orange, so that Mets caps were the colors of New York State (as were the license plates too: blue and orange), whereas Yankees caps were (and are) navy blue and white. I had a Yankees cap (but why?) which I wore to a softball game once, thinking it was indistinguishable from a Mets cap, but all my friends cried, "Yankees! Kill him!"
I remember the Yankees wear pinstripes at home. I remember my father showing me the retired numbers in Yankee stadium: Di Maggio, Ruth, Gherig.
I remember the Washington Senators, and Frank Howard -- their great and pointless slugger.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
I remember that there are 23 hours 59 minutes and 56 seconds in the day. I remember hearing this, or maybe hearing 23 hours 56 minutes, from Peter Rogers, who corrected someone's answer to the teacher's question, "How many hours in a day?" I was surprised but not overly: why should the day be exactly twenty-four hours long? And the teacher knew just what he was talking about (sidereal time, as it happens). I recollect this happening at P.S. 166 though, and I didn't meet Peter until I went to Franklin in sixth grade. So either it wasn't Peter or it wasn't P.S. 166.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
I remember needing to fiddle with vertical and horizontal holds on the TV. Somehow I liked the horizontal Charlie-Brown zigzags a lot better than the vertical cycling, even though you could still see what was going on in the latter. I think I liked those angular abstractions.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
I remember being impressed and surprised by my downtown grandfather's spending the whole of Yom Kippur day (and the evening before) in the synagogue (not "Shul" because he was Sephardic), praying and understanding the adult version of the ceremonies apparently as well as the other people of his generation. (I remember there was some issue about Tallises too, wherein the Sephardic and Ashkenazi rituals differed. I think maybe the Sephardim didn't all put them on on Yom Kippur; maybe just the cantor. I also remember the cantor at B'nai Jeshrun, who knew a lot but was sort of powerless to perform real ritual, so I thought, like a vice-president.) I remember that my downtown grandfather wouldn't break fast till very late. I remember once being struck by a wave of weakness while waiting for the elevator near the end of the fast, and my father telling me to eat -- but I took it a lot less seriously than he did. I remember that I weighed about 105 pounds at the time, because I weighed myself near the end of the fast, and I was surprised at the two or three pound difference the fast made. I remember that the delicious yeasty chocolate coffee-cake babka my grandmother made was often marred by being burnt at the bottom, so you couldn't eat one of the delicious buttery layers of pastry. I remember trying to think of all the wrongs done to me so I could forgive them, and also the wrongs I had done, and not doing well remembering a lot of either. Things have changed since.
Friday, September 24, 2004
I remember the little silver-handed, pointing-finger pointer always up on the podium for reading the Torah, although I don't recall anyone actually ever using it. I got to hold the Torah open from time to time (there are I know names for these implements and offices but I never knew what they were), to be one of the kids gravely head-bent around the podium as the older, more knowledgeable kids or young adults did the reading. And I loved that pointer and wanted to use it or at least see it used. But I never did. I remember the velvet case for the Torah. I remember that if you made a mistake in transcribing it (I remember all Torahs were hand-transcribed) you had to start again at the beginning. I remember the ark and the ritual of taking the Torah out and putting it back. But I loved that little silver hand most.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
I remember "Pantrice is the thing, That you'll feel skin-sational in, da da da da da da da, It's skin, it's skin, it's skin-sensational!" Pantyhose. I think Gentlemen prefer Haines came a little later.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
I remember Mrs. Park, our French teacher, telling us that in France there was no school on Thursdays, but that there was school Saturdays. On Thursdays I thought this was a good idea, but on the whole I preferred having the weekend in a chunk. I was reminded of this reading Hegesias's entry about not having school Wednesdays; things seem to have changed after 1968.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
I remember laughing and laughing when my father read me "You are old, Father William." Part of the laughter was that the name William might be applied to an old man. Part that a poem could be so funny. (He'd read me mainly Kipling.) Or maybe irreverent: that a printed poem should be irreverent, and that my parents should explain and approve of its irreverence. And part of it was how funny the poem itself was.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
I remember how surprised and delighted I was when we started hearing about geology and learned about bedrock. Like everyone else, I knew the term from The Flintstones -- "from the, Town of Bedrock, they're a page right out of history" -- but didn't know it was something real. I remember that bedrock was often about twenty feet beneath the soil, and for some reason this made me think, then, of the sandbox in Riverside Park on the hill around 93rd street, maybe because I thought the hill was twenty feet high, maybe because I'd once thought you could dig down to China through the sand in the sandbox, and now it turned out you'd be stopped after twenty feet.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
I remember that along with desert boots another thing that the cooler kids had were knapsacks instead of the hand-me-down briefcases most of us used. (I remember the tongue-strap that held the briefcase shut, and how I would always overpack it so that it would compress on top when I tried to shut it, how the tongue let you leave a gap if you used the loosest setting, and how the briefcase would start coming apart at the bottom, even though the stitching seemed so tough.) So we went to a store in Riverhead to get a knapsack (no one called them backpacks then), and the salesman offered me a "rucksack" which I absolutely refused. It was too big and it had this weird Lederhosen like name, and it seemed that once again I was to be balked by some ersatz substitute, like Hush Puppies instead of desert boots. Eventually I got something more to my liking, but not just the thing.
Monday, September 13, 2004
I remember my yellow long-sleeved soccer goalie jersey and the double zero I had stiched on it; a cool number for me ever since my father explained (slightly misexplained) the puzzling 0 and 00 on the roulette wheel. (He slightly misexplained it by saying the house always won if the ball landed on them; but in fact you can of course bet on those numbers.)
Saturday, September 11, 2004
I remember that a plane, an Air Force or Army Air Corps military vehicle, once crashed into the Empire State Building (in the late forties?) killing the pilot, I think, and no one else. Three years ago I called the Department office with some question on my cell phone, and the administrator asked whether I'd heard that a couple of planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I assumed they were light planes and that this would be a fairly minor event. And when the tops of the buildings collapsed, I didn't realize that they'd brought the whole of the towers down with them. I assumed everyone had escaped, more or less, and didn't realize the scale of the thing till later that day. Then I thought of the saying "nine-days wonder," which I'd learned from an Orson Welles movie, and wondered myself whether this would be a nine-days wonder or whether it would be more significant than that. It was. I watched the Golf Channel that night, or maybe a day or two later, and found it very soothing.
Friday, September 10, 2004
I remember that in the Hering's bathroom in Stormville, which I think had a shaggy toilet-seat cover, they had a shelf which had what looked like Leaves of Grass in it. But when you tried to read it, it turned out to be a metal container with fake pages. Its cover was a lawn-greenish. I don't know whether it mentioned Whitman on the cover. This was the first time I'd ever heard of Leaves of Grass, so I didn't know what I was missing. But I remember liking the title, and later I think I associated Whitman and "leaves" with John Greenleaf Whittier.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
I remember when our teacher said that she had a friend who was a real Indian, and that her friend would come in. A Cherokee! And she did come in, wearing ordinary clothes. She turned out to be a teacher too. She was interesting, but not of course what anyone expected. This was mildly disappointing, mildly because it turned out that the world (our world) wasn't so various as one thought, and lacking variety all disappointments could be was mild. I found the Cherokee teacher likeable. I wondered a little about how much time it mattered to her that she was Cherokee.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
I remember da-DUM, da-DUM, "Sooner or later, you'll own Generals," sung by harmonized voices in which the baritone predominated. They were tires. I never did, I don't think.
Monday, September 06, 2004
I remember my soccer cletes. They were black with yellow trim of some sort. I remember the pleasure of getting wet, grassy dirt out after playing, the way it would come off in clumps and sheets, rather like the Elmer's glue I used to peel off my fingers. I remember that you really weren't supposed to walk with them on concrete, though I did. They jarred when you walked, and I remember that strange rolling stride they made you take when you walked on cement or asphalt (the walk of an athlete), and the tap-dancing click they made. They were very light, and easily misshapen, but I loved them.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
I remember a couple of times my father did ride in the passenger seat, when we went with other people. Once I think this was riding up the West Side highway, maybe after he'd sold the Pontiac and we didn't have a car any more. (I think of our family as essentially being carless, although they later bought a car and probably they didn't own one for a total of only five years or so, at the most. They were just the right five years.) And I remember a time that the Georges drove us up into the hills above Lake Como -- I was amazed that they'd brought their car from England. It was right-hand drive, so my father sat where he always sat, but it was now the passenger's seat. It seemed strangely wrong, but strangely ok too.
Saturday, September 04, 2004
I remember the first space walk, when I was at the Franklin School. I remember the photos of the astronauts outside their Apollo (?) capsule. But they were floating, not walking; somehow from the science fiction images that we'd absorbed before that we imagined them walking on the surface of the space ship but not falling even if they were walking upside down. I remember also finding it interesting that they had to be tethered. I seem to recall that one of them lost a hammer and that there was no way to get it back as it slowly floated away, just out of reach.
Friday, September 03, 2004
I remember that my aged cousin, Jack Zadikov's wife, I think, was a "reporter-researcher" for Time Magazine. I used her office and some access she had once, for a school report I did, but can't remember anymore about it. "Reporter-researcher" turned out, I think, to be a term like "sales-associate" at Walmart: a way to gussy up menial labor. I think she was a fact-checker. I mentioned her to Richard Clurman, my friend Michael's father, who was then (a?) vice-president of Time-Life (he of the endless telegram), but he didn't seem impressed.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
I remember ping-pong diplomacy. And I remember a lot about ping-pong: that you're not allowed to touch the table with your other hand (or you lose the point); that you have to toss the ball or maybe let it drop at least an inch or two (or something) when you serve it. I remember the way you lean the racket-wing on the ball when you leave the table, each reciprocally keeping the other stable. I remember two kinds of rackets (I'm sure this is a misnomer): the pipped paddle with the same friction-producing surface that my goalie gloves were covered with when I played soccer, and the three-ply padded paddle that somehow seemed more evocative of ease. I remember that the padded paddle seemed to have a slightly more lacquered grip too, with those stripes on it (corresponding to the tape on a tennis-racket handle holding the leather or whatever twisted round the grip in place). I remember that I could play almost as well left-handed as right-handed. I remember learning the Chinese grip, and picking it up immediately, though it wasn't particularly better (for me) than the American grip I already knew, though my high school classmate Wei Chi was great and used the Chinese grip. And I remember playing strip ping-pong in her basement with Mary C and Jimmy B, an early and gratifying sexual experience. Every game anyone lost, the loser had to take off an item of clothing. Fun to win, fun to lose.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
I remember when Ford (I think! but it might have been Chrysler) introduced ignition keys that were symmetrical so that you didn't have to figure out which was the top. The commercials announced them with much fanfare, appropriate it seemed and seems to me. I think this was before ignition keys were put into the steering column, locking the wheel. They used to be in the dashboard, which I guess made it easier to hotwire a car and drive it away.
Monday, August 30, 2004
I remember always wanting to read the Bantam Books logo (with its little bantam where Penguin Books had a penguin) as Batman Books. I had no idea what a bantam was. I think I didn't learn for years -- certainly I didn't think it had anything to do with the bird. (What exactly is a bantam, anyhow? For some reason I associate it with a shuttlecock in badminton, and maybe that's just because of the near abbreviation of the name of the sport that "bantam" looks like.) I think I learned about bantam-weight boxing first. But I knew there was something wrong with reading Bantam as Batman, only I never wanted to look carefully enough to figure out what it was.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
I remember Lee and Judith C, who were run over and killed on Long Island Thursday night. I remember liking them both, Judith, especially, who I thought very beautiful. I remember Lee's 60th birthday party, to which my parents were invited; it seemed amazing to me that he was celebrating such a disaster. I remember that their son Dan had a jungle jim in their apartment, in the same place where my parents' room was, I think. (They had the same layout in 12-F that we had in 7-F). I remember that Lee was mugged after parking his car one night, jumped and beaten and I think robbed. I remember they had a female German shepherd and I would often meet Lee walking her while I walked Powell. I remember that Dan saw a shrink too (he was a couple of years younger than I) and that I found it weird that the children of shrinks always needed psychological help, which proved to me at the time that shrinks were bad parents, too concerned or protective. I remember that Lee first told me about Rollo May, who eventually led me to reading Binswanger, whose notion of extravagence -- wandering beyond the point at which you can still rescue yourself -- I loved. (I think de Man writes about it in Blindness and Insight or maybe it's Hartman somewhere.)
Thursday, August 19, 2004
I remember our seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Donohue, describing his free vacation in Las Vegas, eating sandwiches and drinking drinks in the casinos at night and sleeping by hotel pools during the day. He was proud of this achievement. I wonder whether it was true.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
I remember that one of the differences between my status as a child and my mother's as a knowing adult was the she used an oral thermometer whereas they took my temperature with a rectal one. Knowing how to use an oral thermometer belonged to the set of beautiful talents that she had -- like knowing how to wear contact lenses and when to give aspirin and how to sing and how to draw and in general how to be beautiful. And also, interestingly, it never seemed to me that my father had any relation to having his temperature taken: he was as unlikely to have a fever as to ride in the passenger seat of a car. So I guess I thought of my mother as a person whose life I might one day have, or at least live within: what it would be like to be the adult version of my child-self. But my father was pure adult.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
I remember confusing Solomon, "solemn" and my cousin Manny Salom; later came canned salmon. When I had to "solemnly swear" not to go swimming when my parents were away, I somehow thought that the solemnity reflected the seriousness of Solomon's wisdom, and that Manny and his family (related to my mother's mother) had a name that alluded to that tradition. When Finn McCool got wisdom from sucking on his salmon-impregnated thumb this all made sense. Later on, when I learned to ski with the Sterns, in Windham, I learned about slaloming, a word with power for me, like deconstruction and Hassid. It made sense that slaloming was such a major skill, since it belonged to that constellation of authorities who knew how to do things in the world, who could be solemn when they chose, and knew when to choose to be.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
I remember blind beggars selling pencils for a nickel. The pencils were unsharpened, which I thought was a mistake. My mother and I passed a pencil-seller once, and I gave him a nickel, at her urging, I believe, and was about to take a pencil. She told me not to, and said that the pencils were really there just to preserve their dignity. But then why did they need so many? It seemed to me that if they weren't really selling them, one would have been enough. I thought it would be ok to take the pencil I purchased. But I didn't. It would have been hard to get it out of the rubber-banded bunch it was in anyhow.
I remember spitballs, like everyone else. I don't mean the baseball kind (which I thought legal for a long time, just like slowballs, later called change-ups, short for change-of-pace balls, curveballs, knuckleballs, and screwballs), but the kind kids shot in school. You got a straw, rolled and compressed the paper wrapping in your mouth and saturated it with saliva, and blew it through the straw. I think some episode of a TV show -- not Diver Dan but the one that came after it and from which I learned pressure points: it might have been a Korean War era adventure show, because I remember the hero and a Chinese enemy of the would-be brainwashing type holding each other by the shoulders, trying to get their pressure points -- showed blow guns; or maybe it was Diver Dan; it would have been set either in the Amazon or in New Guinea. Wait! There was also a safari show. Was it called "Safari"? The hero in one episode is attacked by a tiger which he wrestles to a draw. I was impressed by this. Anyhow, the blowguns were the local origin of this idea, which I think was reinvented countless times, like my own proud invention of the imprecation "Holy shit!"
Thursday, August 12, 2004
I remember that the trainer at the place we stayed in Milano Maritima played in long white pants. I think this was the first time I saw full length white pants, and I liked the lazy, aging, dissolute Italian way he moved slowly but deliberately around the court, always returning my mother's shots with smooth, calm ground strokes. The white pants were an important part of the effect: no need for the freedom of movement nor the exposure ot the breeze that we more active but less dissolutely skilled duffers required.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
I remember Nixon's resignation. I was in the hospital, recovering from the water-skiing accident in which I injured my arm. My favorite nurse, who'd been flirting with me in very pleasant ways, came in and said, "We've got to turn on the TV. That wonderful man says he's about to resign." He did! We all cheered.
Sunday, August 08, 2004
I remember the pleasure of peeling Elmer's glue off things: the top of the glue dispenser, the carved up desks, your own fingers. It was like tape, a little, but held together somehow of its own consistency and not because of the backing that the sticky stuff was put on. When you peeled it off it wasn't sticky any more, so that the glue was somehow at some point everything at once: Elmer's was both what stuck and what was stuck, at once the uniform surface and the thing that made that surface adhere to something else. I loved that about it.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
I rember Kiner's Corner, the post-game interview show with a couple of players when the Mets played at home. I think maybe they only held it when the Mets won, but I'm not sure. Maybe I only watched it when the Mets won, as a way of prolonging the pleasure. I remember that Ralph Kiner (now the surviving member of the trio which also included Bob Murphy, who just died, and Lindsay Nelson) had been a Pirates player, and I wondered what he thought about when the Mets played the Pirates. I remember being surprised to find out that Kiner was one of the greats, with (I think) 475 home runs.
And I remember, remembering those stats, when Willie Mays got his 3000th hit: Sports Illustrated had a cover which said "Say hey! 3000 hits!"
Thursday, August 05, 2004
I remember Bob Murphy, who did Mets games with Lindsay Nelson and Ralph Kiner. Murphy was the most jovial one, the guy I liked best, the one who seemed happily reassuring and genuinely appreciative of all that went on. RIP.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
I remember that British sailors were called "limeys" because they discovered that sucking on limes would prevent scurvy on long sea-voyages. I remember learning this at P.S. 166. It was interesting that something of genuine historical interest -- since I loved stories about the sea: Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall -- should matter as well in my practical life, since we were always being told of the importance of eating fruits with vitamin C in them.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
I remember, now, that it was actually "Diahann Carroll." And when I thought of posting on her, I remembered there was an h in her name, and then it just didn't seem right -- that there was any reasonable place to put that h. But there are a ton of entries on Diahann Carroll, and so I'm glad to say that she's not forgotten at all: I'd been thinking of Frost's poem "Provide provide," which seemed just to grim to apply to anyone that famous (although I guess it was pretty true to Veronica Lake's experience).
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
I remember that Diahanne Carroll lived in our building. This was when she was starring on The Diahanne Carroll Show, which was in some ways a forerunner of Seinfeld. On the show she used her real name but was involved in fictional activities. She lived in New York on the show too, but not at 175, rather in a more modern, post-war building. And I was never sure whether to think that building counted as a representation of our building (after all, it was the building where Diahanne Carroll lived), or whether on the show she lived in a different building. In some ways I'm still not sure, since the building on the show wasn't real (presumably) to begin with. So there wasn't another building that was different from ours, only a fictional one. But was it a fictionalization of ours or not? (One problem was I think it was downtown from 90th street.)
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
I remember, from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon: "Senor, I forget to tell you. Slowpoke Gonzales: he always carry a gun." I laughed and laughed.
I remember my downtown grandmother telling me that ventriloquists "talked with their stomachs." This was one of those facts that seemed amazing, and then when I was older I realized it was wrong, and then when I was much older I found out it was true.
We had a cousin in South America, a smoker, I believe, who had to have his larynx removed and had to learn to talk with his stomach. I thought this was pretty cool. but hard, since essentially it involved learning a circus-type skill as an adult that most people could never perform. I don't think I ever met him, but I was impressed with him none the less. I believe she told me about him as a warning against smoking, but at the time smoking was so much out of the question for me that I didn't see him as a warning at all. He seemed a fool to smoke, and there was an odd dissonance between his being a fool and his learning this tremendous and difficult skill.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
I remember being surprised that park and playground were not synonymous. I think my uptown grandparents took me to what they called a park, and I was looking forward to it -- and then there was no playground there! I confused the two because whenever the adults took me "to the park" we went to the playground (in Riverside Park at 90th street). A little later I think I thought that what defined a park was a place with a playground in it, so that playgrounds and parks formed coextensional sets. (A playground by itself was enough to constitute a park.) I still have something of this archaic view of parks, since I still can't quite get either a National Park or an industrial park to seem legitimately so-called.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
I remember that it was the Herings I think who called the gigantic field that constituted most of their property in Stormville the "big field." It must have been farmland: there was one large tree, maybe an apple or an oak, at its edge, but not part of the woods that limited it. The Herings used to ride there, and it seemed to be filled with lots of hay. It went uphill parallel to the dirt path to out cottage above the Hering's, which we rented from them. It seems to me that this was my first experience of something that people were calling a field. In New York that wasn't a word we used much, except maybe when talking about sports, but even then we didn't -- no "ball fields," no mention of Wrigley field, nothing like that. So the big field was my first sense of a new and major feature of topography in the world: that the world is full of fields. And I think there's a trace of that memory and that surprise every time I read about a field, and I tend to read about them when atrocities have occured (farms are not much part of my reading life). The world is full of fields, they're everywhere to be discovered, come upon, noticed. The sun beats down on them, and they're bugs and nettles and long grass, but also flowers and places to run, snakes (like the garden snake Lou Hering cut in half with the lawn mower) but also tons of other interesting things. Fields should remind you of the surprise of being alive. How can you take someone's life there? (I'm partly thinking of John Bricuth's (John Irwin's) pro-death-penalty poem which ends with his evoking the murderer taking someone's life as he "screamed for mercy at the edge of a field.")
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
I remember mosquito netting in the hotels in Italy that we used to go to. I think especially in Milan, and maybe in Bellagio the first year or two we went there. I remember that they hung over the beds in very fine mesh, but we didn't use them. (My two year old sister might have been covered though.) They were a relic from some other era, and interesting and elegant, like the hotels themselves. I regretted not needing them. They hung down from the posters of the poster-bed frame, or could be pulled down. I loved how sheer they were.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
I remember (mildly disgusting memory) that just when I was learning the equations for parabolas I had a series of zits on my right cheek that looked (in the mirror, I only now realize) like y = square root of x. This somehow reconciled me to those zits.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
I remember a couple of Michael Hobin's routines in seventh grade. In one he half-squatted like in the vaudeville routine where hands and knees criss-cross and opening and closing his legs very rapidly (also like in the routine), he said "Dicky-itchy." We laughed and laughed. And he was fond of his own nonce-term, used where later one might use "absitively-posolutely." He said "exacatacally." This is the first time I've ever tried spelling it out.
Monday, July 12, 2004
I remember Pan-X (ASA 100) and Tri-X (ASA 400) black and white film. I think they still exist, but aren't the preferred versions any more. I remember (I think) that Pan-X came in purple-ornamented boxes, and Tri-X in green. The green was thrilling, and Tri-X had the same prestige for me that deconstruction would have later. It seemed inscrutably self-possessed and fast. I liked the idea of fast film too, of using that word in a way slightly different from the way it applied to cars or runners. I also remember color film, as having I think an ASA either of 80 or of 125: something you had to fiddle with on the light meter.
Friday, July 09, 2004
I remember "I'll get on it right away" (Dick Tracy into his wrist-phone).
Thursday, July 08, 2004
I remember my uptown grandmother identifying a cement mixer for me when we were driving one day. I was six or so. I don't know whether she pointed the truck out to me or whether I was the one who saw it and asked her about why it was revolving. But it was very interesting: the conical body of the truck, big and dense and graceful all at the same time. I always associate ugly, big, elegant, interesting, effective machinery with my grandmother: you could trust her and you could trust these machines in the same way. There was nothing remotely seductive about them; but they were solidly competent and made the world just the comfortable place you wanted the world to be.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
I remember taking up Peter Rogers' (I think) practice of dropping the pull tabs from soda cans into the full can itself (as a way of not littering, or of getting rid of the top). It was interesting that generally the tab didn't fall out again into your mouth as you were drinking, though at the end, when you were getting the last few drops you could feel it and bounce it around on the tip of your tongue. (You still get that slightly sharp sensation around your tongue when you dart it into the near empty can). One day my father saw me do this and was appalled: the dirtyness of the top, the possibility of choking!
He also objected, some other time, to my intentionally swallowing cherry-pits. I'd done it once by accident, and was told (and saw) that it was all right, so I did it intentionally then, till he stopped me. I think I was just as glad.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
I remember my parchment-like replica of the Declaration of Independence. (I think also that it was there that I first saw and was confused by the long f-like initial and medial S.) It was neat to have one, but at some point and for some reason I got a second (I might by then have lost the first) and this easy access to two copies of this rare document somehow cheapened it.
Monday, July 05, 2004
I remember, thinking of Laugh-In, Walnettos. I just now discover they were a candy from the twenties that are stilla available. They sounded vaguely obscene. The dirty old man (Arte Johnson, it turns out) offers them to the dowdy woman (Ruth Buzzi, ITO), who is primly attempting to avoid him on a park bench.
I remembered this because I was remembering when our class went to see a taping of the dress rehearsal of the David Morse show. Ruth Buzzi was the guest star, and she sings a song a couple of lines of which I remember: "I [know how to do a lot of stuff] / I even know...where you can get Walnettos! But I don't come on too sexy, I don't come on too strong -- Where did Stella Swoboda go wrong?" I remember also that there was a baby who had to be hushed, and since he actually stopped crying on cue, our teacher said that they would almost certainly put that scene in the final version, since it was perfect. So I was glad to see that something I was seeing would actually be on TV.
I was impressed that they could memorize all their lines for the show that quickly.
For some reason I only got to see a couple of minutes of the show, though, and I was bitterly disappointed. Was I being punished? Was there a political crisis? Was the reception too bad? I still remember how larger than life the taping was, and also the explanation our teacher gave us, before we went in, about how TV flattened perspectives so that the sit-com stage room would be exaggeratedly long. It was a very interesting day.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
I remember "You bet your sweet bippy." Also "Blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere."
Saturday, July 03, 2004
I remember that ants are so strong that if they were bigger they could carry train carriages on their backs. I remember this being illustrated, in our second or third grade textbook, with an ant carrying a heavy carriage, and I remember somehow thinking that this made the little engine that could a less impressive little engine.
I remember crushed ice. It was a great thing you only got with soda at the movies. Then later you could get it in soda machines -- do they still have these? The cup would come down, then a heap of crushed ice would drop into it, and then it would fill with soda. Orange soda was the best with crushed ice. Later, in suburban houses, you could get it from fridges. And once it became common, I think people lost interest in it, and now I don't know whether crushed ice is a thing people have any more. I remember when I started realizing it was a cheat: that with crushed ice the soda/ice ratio was even higher than with ice-cubs. But I did like it as a kid.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
I remember coming upon the Appendix to some book I wass reading. I didn't know what it wass, but it was uninteresting and disappointing -- a kind of sheaf of broken promise, since I thought the exciting book was longer than it turned out to be. I thought of it as repellent in the same way that "I-books" (first person narratives) were repellent: a kind of hole in the fabric of the work disguised as substance but in fact just absence -- of hero (how could a first person be a hero?) or of substance (how could this unintersting supplementary material have any narrative density to it?).
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
I remember Mr. Baruch (seventh grade?) giving us -- as a "reward" -- a long and obscure word to know each week. The words I remember learning this way (there were others, though) were: temerity, ululation, and sesquipedelian, which he told us meant a six-foot word (and I still think of it as meaning this), but in fact means a one-and-a-half footer.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
I remember "Sorry Charlie." I'm not sure that I remember the other Danny Dark voices -- Raid kills bugs dead; the Budweiser ad -- but I remember being puzzled also that Charlie the tuna would want to be caught, and would demonstrate good taste in order to be killed and eaten. Now Danny Dark has been caught.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
I remember asking my mother -- I think about Lake Carmel -- why lakes didn't just seep away into the dirt, the way water did when you poured it on sand. I don't think she quite understood me, or she would have told me about water tables. But she told me that "springs" kept lakes full. So I imagined that lakes were somehow held up, like mattresses, by giant springs which kept the water from flowing away. I didn't see how, but the answers to my questions were clearly getting more baffling than the phenomena they were explaining, so I don't think I pursued the topic.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
I remember that "The Star Spangled Banner" has several more verses. I remember sitting at my desk reading the hand-lattered hand-out with all the verses, or at least with two of them, when I learned the song. Also I remember that it only became the National Anthem some time in the twentieth century. I remember wondering what they sang at baseball games before that.
Monday, June 21, 2004
I remember that when I used to feed Powell (sometimes using the wall can-opener), I would try to shake his food out so that I wouldn't have to wash the spoon dedicated to that task. It was stainless steel with a textured handle. I hated washing it. The best food for shaking out was Alpo's chunks, usually horsemeat chunks. (And Powell sometimes bit the legs of the Sterns' horses, though I doubt he made the connection.) I found it disgusting to contemplate ever eating with that spoon, even washed. I think my parents still have it though, and do eat with it. I would also have to wash Powell's dish when he was done, which I hated. I preferred it when he licked the dish clean, so that it looked washed. But my mother would often check, either seeing gobs of that white dog-food fat on the dish, or feeling it with her fingers. I think I hated the idea of using anything to wipe the dish down, since now that thing -- paper towel, steel wool, sponge -- would get yucchy too.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
I remember can openers hanging on kitchen walls. This was a standard feature of (New York) kitchens. In ours that can-opener, painted white, like the kitchen itself (I seem to recall, but suddenly I'm not so sure -- maybe just the hinge?), wasn't very good, so we had more can-openers in the drawer.
Friday, June 18, 2004
I remember that Hugh Cramer taught me to clap my how to clap my hands loud. I remember that I learned about clapping hands -- about applause -- either from my mother or her mother. I think I asked what they were doing. And they clapped hands symmetrically, which made perfect sense to me. That's what I did from then on. But in the 72nd street bowling alley Hugh and I had to applaud something -- maybe a strike that someone else made? I just remember that that's where it was -- and Hugh was surprised by how weak my clapping was. He showed me that you could angle your hands with respect to each other, which I think I sort of knew. After all it was still symmetric. But he showed me also that the loudest claps came from striking the palm of your hand with the fingers of the other hand, so that your hands were asymmetric, fingertips at the base of the fingers of the other hand, heel of that other hand at the base of the fingertips of the first. I always loved symmetry, and wasn't happy about this new and obviously correct technique.
And it seemed a rebuke to my family as well, to the aesthetic of symmetry and therefore to the very notion of aesthetic sense, which Hugh, with his rough-and-tumble tough-guy practical manner seemed indifferent to (as far as I understood aesthetics then, at any rate).
Thursday, June 17, 2004
I remember learning about the equator. My mother told me it was the hottest place in the world. "An imaginary line." Somehow the idea was thrilling. And then I remember that Ecuador was named after the equator which runs right through it. So it seemed thrilling to be a citizen of Ecuador, a country whose essence was that it was at the equator.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I remember getting poison ivy. It was something my mother talked about, in Stormville. And then I got it a couple of times. I remember the Camoline Lotion (?) and not showering or bathing because you could spread it. I was actually surprised that your skin could be a place of toxicity. I had an inside/outside sense of what had to be protected: so I was fastidious about food and flecks of anything in my food. But skin was supposed to act as the boundary between inside and outside. It could touch anything that needed warding off. The idea that it could itself be a source of disease when it warded off the poison ivy was very troubling to me.
I remember also asking my mother what would happen if you swallowed poison ivy, thinking that whatever it did to your outside would be orders of magnitude higher inside. I think this was somewhere in the context of my mother's describing my father "crying on the inside." All these mysterious complications to the difference between inside and outside!
Monday, June 14, 2004
I remember that we used to say "touche" (you know: "toushay," which is probably how I thought it was spelled) when we meant: "en garde." I don't remember what we fenced with though -- plastic swords from Roman gladiator costumes? Hangers? Sticks?
Saturday, June 12, 2004
I remember "Ladies and Gents, Laugh-In looks at the news!"
Thursday, June 10, 2004
I remember "Try it, you'll like it." Try it, you'll like it. TRY it, you'll like it. So I tried it. Thought I was gonna die. My head, my stomach, I took two Alka-Seltzer. Then some return to "Try it, you'll like it, maybe in voice-over, but I can't quite remember.
I remember looking out the window of my room with binoculars -- I don't know where I got them but I associate having them with Hugh Cramer's being over, and maybe Brian Seeman. What I remember in particular was the puzzle -- my first conscious experience with minimax problems -- of how much to focus them. You got them to focus more and more sharply, and it felt as though you should just keep twisting the knob in that direction, and yet after a while you lost resolution and clarity. Why should this be? And why should there be a limit on clarity? And how could you know when you reached it? The Polaroid cameras we had, and later the Honeywell Pentax SLR that I owned usefully told you that you were in focus when frames lined up properly, without, I guess, any refraction. It was a neat trick, though I'm not sure quite how it was done. But those binoculars! They just sort of challenged your idea of vision, of the visual space you were in, and of what clarity and lucidity might be. Designed to help you see more, they just challenged one's serenity about seeing at all.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
I remember when dial tone first pay phones came in. "This is a dial tone first pay phone. DO not deposit any money until you hear a dial tone." Now that's standard, but then you picked up a dead phone, deposited your dime, and waited for the dial tone.
I remember as well losing a dime in a phone. This was at the subway station at 242nd Street. The phone didn't make the connection and didn't return my money. I was in high school, and it was my last dime, maybe my last money (although I had a token to get home with). I called the Operator to complain, assuming that she would make the call for me. But all she would offer was to take my name and address to get the dime refunded. She wouldn't put me through under any circumstances. I was frustrated beyond belief.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
I remember that when we had weekend guests my mother would make a big plateful of scrambled eggs, which were always moist and great. This reminds me that weekdays I would make myself eggs before school, sometimes scrambled, sometimes sunnyside up, and then later over easy. At some point I got disgusted with the strings of protein that my overcooked eggs would always entangle themselves with, and then eggs became disgusting to me. But only for a while, and my mother's never.
I remember that eggs used to be mainly white, with brown as somewhat exotic. Now it's the other way around.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
I remember Archibald Cox. I went to a dinner with him in college, at a time when my command of years was sparser, so it seemed to me a long time after Watergate, though not to him. I was surprised to see, from his inability to tell where voices where coming from, that he was deaf in one ear. He was very charming in a bluff, straight, to the point way. I had no idea then what it meant to have had the courage to handle what he handled.
Friday, June 04, 2004
I remember how I liked getting tanned in the summer, especially my arms, and liked seeing the hairs on my arms bleached white or flaxen against my coppery skin.
I remember "Your Anchor banker -- he understands." And then a little later the commercial evolved so that that spritefully knowing commercial voice of feminine superiority -- young but with all the knowledge of mothers -- corrected or supplemented it with "Your Anchor banker -- she understands."
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
I remember that in, I think, The Great Escape, one person gets caught when he falls for the trick that he's taught others not to, which is to respond to someone talking English. He shows his papers, gets on a bus, and the Gestapo officer says, "Gut Luck!" "Thanks, old man," he replies, and gets pulled off and shot. Maybe he's one of the two who get shot when they're let off a truck for a minute to piss. I remember that in Stalag 17 the tip off about the chess game is the wire from which the bulb hangs over the board. I remember that in one or the other there's a character called "the scrounger" (James Garner?) and that I liked him so much I started stealing things (which led to big trouble), especially after Michael Hobin started calling me "the scrounger" as a term of praise. I remember Michael once kicked a pencil I was pretending was a knife or a gun in some game out of my hand. We were both amazed, and he yelled, two or three times, with delight, "Just like in the movies!" It was.
I remember Kim, the girl who sat next to me, I was going to say in third grade, but now I realize it was junior high because it was at the Franklin School. So it must have been seventh or eighth grade. Stacey, whom I thought strikingly beautiful, was in that class too. Kim was big and strapping. (I remember Stacey's last name, but not Kim's.) She would laugh at my jokes. I liked her but wasn't attracted to her. I think, recollecting this, that it was that year that I started becoming sexually aware. Kim may or may not have had a large red birthmark on her thigh. Her skin turned read under the slightest pressure, and I spent a lot of time wondering if the inchoate red area didn't come from the way she crossed her legs. And then she wore opaque tights a lot. I know that I became sexually aware that year because I remember the texture of those ribbed tights, and how I tried to turn myself on by fantasizing about Kim, especially the way when she laughed at her desk she'd double over sweeping her hair close to me. It didn't quite work, this fantasizing. I never fantasized about Stacey, although I think she became sexually active first, with a stud in our class named Judson. (I remember Stacey reacing down his shorts once at gym!) Kim clearly represented some emerging encroaching encumbring physicality for me. She was the sweetest person, and I was completely loyal to her sweetness, always entertaining and friendly to her, and this made me resent her a little bit. But only a little. If only she could have fitted my fantasies better! I wonder how different my life would have been then.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
I remember my surprise that four had a u in it, that vacuum had two u's (I got this wrong on a spelling test), and also that you wrote "4" without the triangular shape, but with the top open. I remember also that I wrote "5" wrong, since the top horizontal was supposed to be done last, as a kind of flag to the body of the numeral. But I always wrote it as a single arabesque. I think that of these things, the thing that surprised me most was that you didn't write a 4 the way it looked in type. This made much more sense for the letter g the way it used to appear on typewriters, as a kind of hanging pair of spectacles or pince-nez. (I remember I used to think they were prince-nez.) It was much harder to write that g. But why the 4?
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
I remember learning to play Simon Says in school. I sort of knew about it, because people had talked about it in the park, but only that it was a game. Then in school we played it. I was terrible. I always obeyed authority. It was somehow viscerally shocking to me that a teacher might tell you to do something, and you could just defy her. It wasn't that I didn't get it, it was that my behavior was pure reflex.
Monday, May 17, 2004
I remember -- as the author of Danny and the Dinosaur -- Syd Hoff who died the other day at 91. I remember my mother giving me that book, and I remember that I was shocked by it, just as I was shocked by The Cat in the Hat. What shocked me was that a spirit of mischief -- the dinosaur, the cat -- should just be allowed to do all that stuff, should be allowed somehow in a book, which was after all under the control of adults, to act as he did. The Cat might be more obviously a mischief maker, but so was the Dinosaur, who shocked the cop at one point, and perturbed the adults around him throughout. Interestingly, I was never disturbed by mischief-making on cartoons, but only in books, maybe because they were for me the representations or ritual objects of serious and approved adult culture, whereas TV was TV. And then to contain that kind of misrule...! RIP.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
I remember the vogue -- or maybe just the day -- when some kind showed us the contemptuous Italian gesture of flicking your nails out under your chin. Our teacher (Mr. Donahue) saw this and disapproved. When we asked him what it meant he said "Nuts to you," as the kid who was doing it looked on in superior conspiritorial approval. And that was the first time I heard that expression. So I sort of learned both expressions of contempt simultaneously, and probably thought "nuts to you" was stronger than it was because of my teacher's attempt at mitigating the gesture by explaining it through this mild paraphrase.
I remember that when I used to walk to school from the subway I'd pass a property (in Riverdale) with "lehman-haupt" on the sign in lower-case, black on white Helvetica type. I assumed (and still assume) that it belonged to Christopher Lehman-Haupt, one of the New York Times's book reviewers. It was very odd to see that famous newspaper name on a sign on the street.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
I remember the fuzzy, wooly tubular insulation around the power cords of high-wattage devices like irons. The insulation was soft and I seem to recall had a white pin-stripe running along it. It was big and friendly and old-fashioned, not like the colder, more plasticy double-lined insulation that's now standard. You could put the old cords in your mouth and feel them on your lips. They reminded me of my uptown grandmother -- I think maybe all her devices had this insulation, whereas my parents had newer things.
Sunday, May 09, 2004
I remember my father singing "Standing on the corner," about which I've posted before (May 15, 2002). But what I'm remembering now is the way he'd sing "Matter of fact!-- [pause] neither do I," in "Brother you don't know a nicer occupation; matter of fact, neither do I, than standing on the corner, watching all the girls, watching all the girls, watching all the girls go by." And I remember my delight that this phrase he always used -- "matter of fact" -- was in a song. I didn't quite think it came from the song, but the song acknowledged and ratified it, and my father acknowledged and ratified the song, and they all belonged to this network of confident endlessly qualified, endlessly confirmed, practical knowledge.
Friday, May 07, 2004
I remember that in maybe second grade someone brought a coconut into school. We'd been talking about coconut milk. She said that her father would open coconuts with hammers, and we tried this. This was surprising to me -- a fruit you opened with a hammer -- but the whole thing was surprising. I'd never seen anything so exoctic as a coconut -- like another one of those cartoon items materializing in reality.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
I remember the Mary Renault books my parents had, and in particular The Last of the Wine whose title I found very evocative. Somehow that title came up -- I might have made a joke about it at a party where they ran out of wine -- and they asked me what I thought the title meant. I said I thought it was about war about to start (I realize that I still don't know for sure), which I thought because it had that August 1914 sense of the end of things: war starts because plenty fails as well as plenty fails because war starts. After this, the wine is gone. Anyhow they were very impressed with me for seeing this in the title, and I was proud that they were proud of me, especially because I didn't think it was such a big deal that I should be able to interpret it as I did.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
I remember that I had two nannies named Gisela. One used to tie me up, I'm told, so her name was a watchword for scary nanny, though I don't remember her. But when I had a second one named Gisela, I was afraid of her too, because of her name. Then my sister had a friend in elementary school named Gita (P u n j a b i) who my sister reported grabbed her own shit out of the toilet. So I basically turned against people with Gi--a names.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
I remember thinking that only drakes yodeled. No, not even that, since I thought Drakes (as in Drakes Cakes) was a proper name. I thought ducks yodeled, because of Yodels (TM). And then I saw The Sound of Music and it turned out that Austrians and Swiss people yodeled too. I was puzzled.
Monday, May 03, 2004
I remember a couple of things that I thought about passing City College on 135th street in my grandparents' car, going to or from their house. I remember going uptown and being threatened with being returned to the store. (This wasn't during a particular episode of discipline; it was really more-or-less idle talk about discipline.) I had an image of rack on rack of kids lying there waiting to be picked up, all of them like me: my age and height (and sex). And going downtown once I remember wondering how you could be sure you understood a language, that you could learn one accurately, since maybe you were understanding different things from what was being said, and being understood as saying different things from what you meant, with pure good luck leading to apparent agreement. Truth: I thought this myself! But didn't follow up on what I was thinking at 8 or so, till I read Quine years later.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
I remember the way my father sat with his left elbow on the open car-window sill, casual and competent and cool and relaxed as he drove. I reached up to put my elbow on the sill but was made to bring my arm back in: too dangerous! So now it seemed a glamorous and adult thing to do; adults were just the right height, and they had just the right command of the space around them to do this. The pose was beautiful, maybe the automotive version of holding a cigarette casually. I like driving that way now, and recognize that it's not just a natural and relaxed thing to do with my arm, but (for me) a willed imitation of my father's posture.
Thursday, April 29, 2004
I remember Thom Gunn (not personally, but his great great poetry).
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
I remember that baseballs were also strange and exciting, as compared with softballs. I remember my father introducing me to softball, and my disappointment, and then surprise when this big soft ball turned out to be pretty hard and hard to catch, and not so child-designed as its name suggested.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
I remember certain words had a near-charismatic force, like the tremendous word tackle in "tackle football." We almost never played tackle -- to scary, too rough. Once when I did I was amazed by how hard you got slammed when you were tackled. The Kennedys were famous for playing touch -- I remember two-handed touch and one-handed touch -- but tackle was the transcendent thing. Later I think first cigarettes and then deconstruction gave the same thrilling feeling.
Monday, April 26, 2004
I remember classified ads in The Times, and also I think the International Herald Tribune, that read: "My wife, ______, having left my bed and board, I no longer am responsible for any debts contracted by her. Signed, ______." There'd always be one, sometimes two or three. I found these fascinating: where they legal? What if you failed to read it and lent her money -- how was this fair to you? (The print was so tiny.) Was the husband sad? Angry? Was the purpose to embarrass the wife? Was that why he named her? Was she being represented as someone who went into debt? And was the husband unhappy or not? He certainly had enough presence of mind to place the ad. I wanted to know the psychological circumstances in which someone would engage in this ritual. And also to somehow plumb the fact that these circumstances were stereo-typed, that every day this happened between two or three people, with different last names, different ethnicities (as indicated by the last names), but that it was universal. And I also wondered whether they spontaneously kept hitting on this formula, or whether they were copying each one his predeccessor, so that maybe the fact that these ads existed was self-sustaining, every abandoned husband thinking he was supposed to post one on the model of the ones already posted. I didn't quote get the exact nature of the authority or custom that governed and regulated the placement of these ads.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
I remember Woody Woodpecker's laugh, in the song. I remember it because I just saw (on Boingboing) that the guy who did it, Harry Babbitt, just died at 90 (his interesting obituary here). I always thought, when I thought about it at all, that it was the cartoon character who provided the laugh.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
I remember things that I saw on cartoons way before I saw them in real life. Some I was surprised really existed, like fly strips hanging from the lamp. But I also saw mousetraps, and mouseholes, and even, I think, mice in cartoons before I saw any real ones.
Friday, April 23, 2004
I remember TV dinners. In that pre-microwave age (yes, people had "radar ranges" just as they had color TVs, but we didn't, and they weren't standard) TV dinners came in aluminum trays and were covered with foil. They were fun to eat, although no one ever liked the hot apple sauce. When my parents didn't come home for dinner I used to sit in the pantry on the step-ladder, watching the little portable TV there and eating my TV dinner. My downtown grandparents had a TV tray, or what I thought was one -- maybe it was just a little side table -- which I thought of as perfect for putting the TV dinner down on. I think I usually ate Salisbury Steak.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
I remember Mrs. Russler, one of the Hebrew School teachers (and who reminded me a lot of my uptown grandmother, although I hadn't been in her class yet) giving a stern talk at some event, some extraordinary symposium, one afternoon, taking Lord Snowden to task for his claim that Jews were probably genetically endowed to be intellectually superior. I was surprised that she was against this idea -- who wouldn't want to be genetically superior? But she was fierce, and it was neat to have this experience of intellectual surprise. She was obviously right, and I believed her, and yet I'd assumed completely that she would take the opposite tack -- partly because the opposite tack would provide a reason to believe her: she was Jewish, she was smarter. This is the earliest experience I can remember of a kind of intellectual thrill in being convinced of the superiority of a new idea.
I remember the little opaque plastic eye-shields that you would put over your eyes like pince-nez to lie under the sun and tan. They were improbably slight, but they kept the sun out, though you could see red at the rims of your closed eyes. I liked lying with them: they looked really neat when my mother (and others) used them. I remember that I thought the word was prince-nez (with an "r") until maybe college. I remember Natty Bumpo saying that even a blind man could tell the direction of the sun, I thought (and think) in the same way that I could tell it through closed eyes, because of the translucency of the eye-lid when struck full on by the sun. But he might have meant only that you could tell it by feel. I remember Peter Graves on Mission Impossible getting opaque eye-implants so that he could go under cover as a (particular) blind man, and not reveal his sightedness through involuntary reflex. The villain holds a match up to his face and Graves says, "Even a blind man can feel heat, Mr.____." And I remember another wonderful Mission Impossible in which they convince someone he's on a moving train leaving the country, but it's done in a barn with filmed scenery and a shaking mechanism -- a simulation, just as though it were in a film or TV studio.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
I remember that a trinket you always used to get, in gum machines and party favor bags and purim loot, and carnivals, was a bubble level -- an inch long, yellow plastic and the bubble in the water. I didn't see the point (though Hugh Cramer explained how they worked to me), and couldn't do anything with them, except hypnotize myself moving the bubble around. And I didn't like the bubble, which I read as aesthetic imperfection, like the unevenness of training wheels. But I guess that actually levelling something would so centralize the bubble that it would get close to aesthetic satisfaction. Capillary action and friction prevented those small levels from working right, though, just as they compasses we also got as trinkets never pointed in the same direction -- again because of friction and inertia. I disliked that fact too.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
I remember having to write about an embarrasing moment at the beginning of the school year -- maybe in seventh grade. I wrote about seeing a woman naked through the window of her hotel room in Bellagio, which I thought I mentioned here, but can't find now. My sister and I were eating on the terrace in Bellagio, and I looked up to see a woman I saw often on the beach, saw often lying face down on her towel, reading (including The Autobiography of Malcolm X, her bathing suit strap undone to give her back an even tan, come out of the bathroom naked. She saw me see her and a look of horror crossed her face as she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her, then approached the window to close the blind. I didn't see this part because I looked away, horrified myself, and didn't glance at her window again. I wanted to eat dinner quickly, and get away before she came out. I had visions of her talking to the dinner-jacketed head-waiter I liked so much, and his looking at me with reproachful surprise. I remember the scene and also remember remembering it when I wrote about the embarrasing moment, in which I described being "afraid she would sue." My teacher or my parents or both were amused and impressed by this phrase. and by the whole incident, and their amusement, a couple of months after the event, decathected it for me. It was really interesting to have this tense interior adventure come out so much after the fact and get defused.
Friday, April 16, 2004
I remember sitting on the subway once and watching three toughs stride in. They walked purposefully to the middle of the car, leaned over a bunch of people sitting on the bench there, and slid the windows down. Then they strode out of the car -- all this in the interval that the door was open. This seemed odd, but then when the doors closed and the train started moving they reappeared on the platform and with a whoop reached in and scrunched the hair and hats of those sitting below the open window. I couldn't help grinning -- with pleasure? with relief? I'm not sure. It turned out to be so mild a version of delinquency.
I remember people who knew people whose brothers were JDs (juvenile delinquents).
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
I remember walking down West End once, a block or so North of where I'd been doored (on the East side of the street) when a girl about my age smiled at me. I think I was smiling too, but either because that was my perpetual mask or because of something private. But she smiled back! And that was the first thing I noticed about her. It was a lovely moment. I remember in connection with that getting self-conscious about eye-contact on the street, and then reading somewhere that in the U.S. approaching pedestrians maintained eye-contact till they were about eight feet from each other, at which point they looked down. This was helpful when I got self-conscious, mainly because I was struck or attracted by the person approaching.
I also remember the opposite: getting involved in staring contests on the subway -- usually they were one-way. I'd read somewhere in a novel of someone who was frankly at ease with himself and didn't look away, and I liked getting strangers to look away first. Since they weren't even thinking that this was a staring contest, they usually did, although I think also that you're aware of a kind of timed and cued agreement to look away. One night, in the bus to Long Island (I don't remember why I was taking the bus out: my mother might have been there for the month, while my father was staying in the city) I got involved in a staring contest with a guy in his thirties. He wouldn't look away. He was very tough. He got angry. He rebuked me. But I was within my rights! I wouldn't look away, but he got scarier and scarier. Finally I did, and then he explained, with some vehemence, that challenging people like that was a very stupid thing to do. I don't think I did after that.
I remember another time going to the city from Long Island on the train and smoking. Once I got away from my parents I could smoke. On the platform I heard a guy yel, "Watch your cigarette, fuck!" I wondered what he was talking about. "Yeah, you, fuck!" He was yelling at me. Apparently I'd given a jaunty swing to my cigarette-holding arm and came too close to his child. These are morphing into memories of rebuke, but this one was different in kind. He wasn't being helpful to me. It wasn't to improve my behavior or the impression that I made on people, or my chances in life, that he was rebuking me. He was protecting his kid, and expressing his sheer hatred for me. And I was just a kid myself! This was the poisonous version of the first time a mother told her toddler not to "bother the man" -- meaning me.
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