|
I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
|
But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
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.
|
. . .
| |
