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I remember / je me souviens
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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
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But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
Saturday, January 31, 2004
I remember going to see the Broadway musical (?) version of Superman. He flew on a wire, and even though you could see the wire it was still pretty impressive. I remember one curtain-raiser on a set made to look like the page of a comic book -- about sixteen different frames over four levels in which different things were going on, some simultaneously, some sequentially. I remember that I thought this was witty -- not a concept that I quite had at the time, but that maybe this scene helped me to have. (My parents were always calling people or observations witty -- I think that this is now a slightly outmoded word, like "cute" and "commotion.")
I remember my parents rebuking me for various things that I had done that I thought really were victimless crimes (like wearing torn jeans, going around in the cold in shirtsleeves, not brushing my hair, being generally slovenly, etc.) They would explain their anger by saying that my behavior was "a reflection on them." Somehow they thought this was a powerful argument, and that it would encourage me to alter my behavior. Whereas I thought that anyone stupid enough to connect what I was doing to their conventions and codes of behavior was too stupid to take seriously, and that they were being sort of stupid themselves to think that this was a good argument.
Friday, January 30, 2004
I remember "Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox." Sic. This sentence is 26 letters long, and is pangrammatical -- ie it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. A crwth is a kind of Welsh violin. W is a vowel (as in cwm /coom/ = valley). A dissatisfied crwth player takes off his crushed fez and asks it to take care of the crwth, whose sound is rather skimpy or jimp. He addresses his headpiece and asks it to blank or mute the sound made by the voice (vox) of the jimp crwth. Apparently this is the most famous and most perspicacious English sentence to use all 26 letters once.
Thursday, January 29, 2004
I remember that "Hi!" is short for "Hiya!" which is really "Hi ya?" as in "How are ya?" I remember that I figured this out reading John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and that I realized that I'd figured this out only after I read the scene in which someone answers "fine" to the greeting "Hi ya." It made sense, so I'd sort of known it -- but maybe only orally; and now I knew from reading that "Howya [doing]?" and "Hiya" were not just homonyms but actually the same phrase.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
I remember the first time my sister and I accompanied my parents to Europe how bad the jet lag was. We were up till 3:00 am, playing cards, frustrated, bewildered. It turned out not to be fun to be up that late. later years I would try to avoid napping when we arrived (something my parents always did). Then I remember when we went to Italy (we always spent a night or two in Zurich because we flew a Swiss-Air charter) I saw chamberpots in our hotel room for the first time. Actually I remember these chamber pots from Bellagio, whereas the first two summers we went to Europe we went to Yugoslavia for two or three weeks before going to Bellagio. But I do remember them, and remember not know what they were for. They were decorative, of course, since the hotel had beautiful bathrooms. But they were available, and squeaky clean. I recall that they were stored in the bottom of the night-table in a compartment with swinging doors. I remember also that our rooms were at the end of the hallway, a dog-leg from the main elevators (but right down the hall from the slow and creaky back elevator). I remember sometimes going down that hallway back to the room at midday, which was the worst time to go through the corridors of the hotel: the sun made them seem somehow insipid, a pointless interior on a beautiful day. At night and in the early morning they were far more luminous and vivid.
Sunday, January 25, 2004
I remember that there used to be a lot more nuns, at least in habits, around. They tended to be old, but at that time of "unchanging types" this didn't seem to imply that there would be fewer in the future. After all, there were a lot of old people around then, and there are still a lot of old people around now. I remember seeing one young nun, though. That was a little surprising.
Saturday, January 24, 2004
I remember my mother not wanting "all this commotion." She'd hold her ears. She also didn't want our house to be "Grand Central Station." And later, when we wanted stuff to eat at times other than meal-times (and of course didn't eat what was served at meal times) she told us she wasn't "running a hotel." Which gave me a vision of a possible loveliness I'd never dreamt of withheld.
Friday, January 23, 2004
I remember Captain Kangaroo, perhaps with somewhat more fondness than I did, now that he's dead and I've already resuscitated my own childhood distaste and perhaps diffused it into the general atmosphere of early TV in a former post, just about a year ago today (27 January 2003). I guess what I hated about him was, now that I think of it, that he would die. He was so unlike the pure types that inhabit the worlds of children, whether the inhabitants are young or old. He was not a type. He wasn't a Kangaroo! He wasn't a captain! And yet he wasn't a fraud, which would also be a type, either. He was a somewhat ridiculous ersatz version of a TV show personality we could love. And now that he has died, he's somehow conformed to the type he was destined for, and that makes him ok.
I remember getting a small pox vaccination, before my parents took me to Europe for the first time. (Useful to know!) I was surprised that it didn't hurt -- it was a scratch and not a shot. I hated shots, but this was nothing. But even though I hated shots, I knew that they were no big deal, and I was surprised when I heard that the series of fourteen rabies shots were supposed to be so terrible. Why? I knew they were into your stomach, but still. Just fourteen, over the course of a month. I imagined the needles must have been gigantic -- otherwise adults wouldn't dwell on how awful they were. But I couldn't understand why you'd need gigantic needles, since it was just a question of getting attenuated virus into the bloodstream. That was a time of my life when being sick rarely felt any different from being healthy. I almost never felt bad when I was sick (oh, I did from stomach aches -- but not from fevers), and tended to take the word of adults, especially Dr. Steffy, as to when I was sick and when not.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
I remember Screen-Gems!
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
I remember one of the first movies I remember. My father took me to see it -- it was in color, and it was about an American astronaut who goes into space and finds that there's a beautiful Russian stowaway cosmonaut in his capsule. They're very elegant in the spacious, well-lit, penthouse-like environs of the capsule. I seem to think she has a gown and he has evening clothes. It might be that she's a cosmonaut in a Russian ship that gets into trouble, and she has to get into his capsule. But her weight means that the flight plan won't work and that they'll die, as the elegant astronaut tells her. But before that, they have love.
How much of this is made up I don't have the foggiest. I am putting together what I remember seeing -- the orange motifs of the penthouse-capsule, and what I remember my father explaining to me as we watched. I wonder as well whether this isn't a George Pal movie, whose version of H.G. Wells' Time Machine I recently saw -- costumes and hairstyles a prototype of the original Star Trek
Monday, January 19, 2004
I remember that my father's friend Mr. Glocer, serenely old, gentle and grandfatherly, purveyor of chocolates, with a lovely house (or maybe I remember him sitting on the porch in Stormville), had a son my age -- eleven! -- who was an uncle! (My uncle, my father's elder brother, had been killed in the Second World War and I always had a wistful relation to the idea of an uncle.) And not only that -- his nephew was an adult! I remember that I was puzzled by the implications for lines of familial authority. My father told me about Mr. Glocer's son's adult nephew in his office one Saturday, during tax season when I came in with him -- that's when I was eleven. Now the child-uncle, my father recently told me, is head of Reuters, which means that there are still living survivors of the gentle embodiments of old age from one's early youth.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
I remember -- my memory jogged by Paul -- testing batteries on my tongue. Nine volt batteries were convenient because both terminals were on the same side. But they stung badly if they were live. Then I discovered that you could put saliva on one finger and touch one terminal to your tongue and one to your finger and you'd get a pleasant, attenuated current. I avoided thinking about what it was flowing through (me!) and whether this was dangerous. You could also test lower voltage batteries this way, whose terminals you couldn't get on your tongue simultaneously, but the current was then very subtle. When battery testers came in I stopped doing this at all. But the 9 volt current actually was slightly pleasurable.
I also remember repeating the really neat science experiment that we did in seventh grade where we sent a current through slightly acidified water and watched hydrogen and oxygen bubbles stream up from the two terminals we'd put into the water, to be captured by test tubes. Mr. Weinberg then combined the two test-tubes (one with twice the gas the other had--two hydrogens per oxygen), and lit a match. There was a little explosion and...water! At home I just put a nine-volt battery into a bowl of water with vinegar added and put test tubes over the terminals. It worked like a charm. But don't try this at home!
Saturday, January 17, 2004
I remember Jonathan Easton casually standing on his head one day. He'd come in to some exercise we -- but who were we? maybe those of us performing in The Bald Soprano? maybe Searchers, the NOLS / Outward Bound-like program we were doing? (but I vaguely think Jonathan was in Searchers too; I know I convinced someone unlikely and interesting to do it with me); maybe soccer practice? maybe just hanging out? -- some exercise we were doing, which included various mildly impressive postures. I could just about do the standard circus headstand -- head and hands form a triangle, and you put your knees on your elbows and then straighten up. And Jonathan just did this other thing, smoothly and wonderfully, part of his grace being the casual way he did it, without being at all impressed with himself. I'm glad that thanks to this blog we've remade some tentative contact.
Friday, January 16, 2004
I remember, I think, the introduction of Poptarts. They were really cool. No frosting or sprinkles at the time. You ate them as they were, or put them in the toaster. I was never patient enough for that. Besides, I liked the underdone dough-taste the raw Poptarts had. Having access to the jam only through the soft crust was a new experience -- unlike, say, that of Oreos and certainly unlike bread and jam.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
I remember that in my seventh grade Latin textbook I found this note one day: "I like you very much and I think that you are a very cute buoy boy. Love, ? ? ?" Who was she? And why that misspelling of an obvious word? I considered everyone in the class, and no one seemed right. Which was ok, because I didn't particularly want it to be any individual in that class. Except maybe Wendy Wachtel, but I had enough knowledge of the world to know it wasn't her. The anonymity was somehow better. Of course, it could have been a prank, written by a male classmate, but I don't think it was, because the moment that I would be fooled, my experience of being fooled, would never be public. So someone did think I was a cute boy. Mostly, those weren't the days, but in this one instance: those were the days.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
I remember flippers. All I really wanted was a mask for the pool or beach, but they were hard to come by without also getting flippers and a snorkel, with an ingenious little bobbing ball to keep the water out that never worked. I remember that Janet swam with flippers in her pool, but for me they just made swimming harder and walking impossible. But in Bellagio, Michelle (ma belle), also used flippers -- and she could water-ski! So now they seemed a mark of status. Perhaps they would be another way that I could get closer to her.
My first sentence to her, I now remember with anguish and longing, was the day after I'd spotted her as Daniella's cousin. I was down on the beach feeding the ducks early in the morning, and she came down. She was curious about what I was doing! I offered her a bit of bread, and asked, "Du willst?" I knew she knew German, Italian, French and Luxembourgish -- now -- I mean right now, tonight! -- I see that she was very vain about repeating this linguistic litany. But she didn't know English. I wonder if she understood that I was offering her the bread to feed the ducks, not that I was hoping that she would take bread at my hands. I'll never know, I guess.
Still, I never quite saw the point -- except that she could show her gracefulness, diving off the raft with flippers on -- till years later when I did real snorkeling in Hawaii. The snorkel worked better too. And so did the masks -- I hated the fact that the masks of my youth always let water in, which always sloshed up my nose.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
I remember my tenth grade biology teacher. I remember her explaining viruses. My hand shot up! I got it: why they might cause cancer (because they hijacked DNA to their own uses). But she kept lecturing: the only time that year that she was bound and determined to get through the class without interruption. I kept squirming and bouncing and she kept ignoring me. Then she said, this is why viruses might be implicated in cancer, and I was filled with disappointed resentment.
Another time I said I had two questions (maybe we were learning evolution). I asked one; and then the second one was: "And why do you wear the same dress every day?" I wince even now at what a pointless brat I was. There was an answer she could have given: that it was her sturdy, workers', do some science in the lab dress. It was pink with leather patches here and there, and I think it was sturdy, etc. But I felt terrible the next class when she came in wearing something different.
She told us that at age 35 you lose 10,000 brain cells a day. I asked her how old she was? She was thirty-five. I felt really sorry for her too, given her daily decline, which I looked for signs for every class. Later I met James Merrill, when he was just over fifty, and he complained that he was losing 100,000 brain cells a day. These numbers started looking scary to me. They still do.
Monday, January 12, 2004
I remember my father showing me that he could stick a balloon onto the wall with static electricity. This was in Stormville. I was very impresed by this, and very impressed that I could do it myself the first time after watching him do it.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
I remember that Jerry Stern, Geoffrey's father, would eat everything the apple, core, pits and all -- everything but the stem. I never saw him do this, but my sister (whose best friend was Geoff's sister), who would have no reason to make this up, told me that he did; and said he'd demonstrated it to her. I tried it myself (I thought of him as a person who knew how to do things right: after all he was Geoff's father! And not snooty, like his mother; so he was doubly wonderful) and found that you could do it, but that it wasn't particularly pleasant. Still it was neat to have the cyanide bitterness of the apple pits be a goal and not a mistake.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
I remember how the status symbol among the kids I hung out with in junior high was a Cross pen. I remember all about them, and I'll try to post some more soon: but what I'm vividly remembering today is the interesting stand Ronnie Rogers took on never lending anyone his pen: he said that he wanted to think of everything that that pen ever wrote as being written by him. This made a lot of sense at the time. (Later it made more reasonable sense when we jealously guarded our grad school Mont Blanc pens, because the nibs were supposed to conform to the owners' handwriting. But Ronnie's pen was a ballpoint.) I liked this idea: it seemed to take the very act of writing seriously, the physical act of putting ink on a page. I hadn't thought of that, and it was an interesting new thought. ("Who would write," asks Freud, "if he thought that the ink coming out of the pen was like sexually violating the page?" But I hadn't thought of anything like that yet.) I was somewhat disappointed in Ronnie, though, when his brownnosing trumped his romantic commitment to exclusive use of his pen, and he lent it to a teacher who had to sign some mimeographed form for him. I expressed my dismay, but he gave me a superior smile. I asked to borrow the pen then since it no longer was the exclusive instrument of his own expression. But he wouldn't lend it to me: now it belonged to him and the teachers, and the rest of us were excluded.
Thursday, January 08, 2004
I remember my downtown grandfather's practicality. His stentorian voice would boom out his judgment as to whether something was PRACTICAL or not. (My first understanding of the word -- from TV uses of "practically" -- was that it meant almost, as in "We're practically there;" so initially I was puzzled by what he meant.) It was practical to put your water glass where you wouldn't knock it over (and he'd mime knocking it over with his elbow). It was practical to put your lower lip inside the water glass when you drank, so as not to leave an unsightly smear on the glass. I thought this was absurd, making practicality another name for the kind of fastidiousness that was itself disgusting; but later I found some etiquette book that recommended the same thing. He was a tyrant of practicality, forcing his obsessions on us -- on us kids anyhow.
But he was smart, too, as I realized one day. Of course his fastidiousness meant that he was very alert to our handwashing. He didn't like Powell, because Powell was a dog. One evening, when he had come to dinner; we were summoned to sit down, but my mother hadn't come in yet (she was in the kitchen fixing the salad). I think I realize now that he tended to come to dinner only on nights when my father worked late. After washing my hands, I came in to the dining room, where my grandfather was already sitting. Powell jumped up on me, and I fielded him with my torso, avoiding petting him. I sat down, and my grandfather boomed, "I'm glad you washed your hands." Usually he asked me, but now he said: "I know you did because of how you backed away from the dog" (miming me). This seemed a very neat thing for him to observe and put together like that; plus it redounded to my credit, which was a rare result of an occasion when my physical behavior gave me away. I thought he was really a very decent person. (Which he was.)
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
I remember Herbert Warren Wind who wrote the horse-racing column for The New Yorker. I always ignored it. It was short -- a kind of divider between what might have been more interesting stories. Then, shortly before he retired, I found out that the name was a pseudonym. This interested me: why use a pseudonym to write an utterly boring and uncontroversial column? So I started reading it, and it turned out to be an uncontroversial column. But somehow it wasn't utterly boring, mainly, I think, because I knew now that its writer was using a pseudonym.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
I remember Tug McGraw, "the fireman," the Mets' ace reliever. You could always count on him (although I remember one shocking time that he lost a game). He made me realize that there were different ways of being supreme. The Mets had this incomparable starting staff. And then, late in the game, in a region of the game you couldn't even contemplate when it started, as though the game had gone like the USS Enterprise through some gate or channel or warp in space to a differently configured universe, there was this other incomparable pitcher who would come in, who you weren't even thinking of as part of the staff during the sunny daylit start of the game, Tug McGraw. RIP.
Monday, January 05, 2004
I remember how often I used to press a glass up against my mouth and suck out enough air to make a vacuum that would hold the glass on. I liked the ones with thinner rims because I liked to feel them digging into my face in a circle around my mouth. I could never sustain that experience by just inhaling, though. The glass would start coming loose, and eventually would drop off, in a disappointingly gentle way. I remember the kind of stuttering breaths I would take to try to keep the glass on. But the best part of the feeling was the initial clamping, when my hand and my breath would pull it hard into my face -- hard enough, alas, to distort the seal that the glass made and cause it to start loosening.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
I remember noticing for the first time that my watch was causing that bright disk to move around the classroom walls and ceiling, and then spending my time controlling it, no interest at all in the class, and then being sharply rebuked, more than once. Sometimes other kids' watches also reflected off the surfaces of the rooms, as they talked or wrote or gesticulated, and I would try to trail or pursue their reflections with my own.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
I remember an air hockey table that a friend had. I remember the little round nozzle-like holes that the cushion of air came out of, and pushing my finger tips down into them to feel their texture, both when the table was on and when it wasn't.
Friday, January 02, 2004
I remember that we used to work paperclips back and forth till they broke in half and then use the half-paperclips as projectiles with rubber band slingshots. They really stung and were of course quite dangerous to the eyes. But they were really fun. I didn't quite get how David killed Goliath with a slingshot, till I saw an illustration and someone explained to me that that was what a real slingshot looked like. But I liked the ones that consisted of a rubber band and your fingers, or sometimes a rubberband and a forked stick.
Thursday, January 01, 2004
I remember that all the members of the swim team at my high school were required by their coach to wear hats outside all winter long, so that they wouldn't catch colds. It was interesting the way what would otherwise be a sign of wimpiness became a badge of honor and status.
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