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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
Sunday, January 30, 2005
I remember noticing the printed letter g, in the font called American Typewriter -- the lowercase g you can see in the Google logo, but not in Times Roman or courier. I remember noticing it when we were learning something about writing and penmanship and printing, in my third or fifth grade clasroom. It looked creepy to me, the two closed loops made no sense, the hook at the top loop seemed wrong, it seemed somehow malevolent or malevolently closed to me, to my interest in reading, to responding to my interest or to my perturbation about its shape. It looked like an insect, the insect truth behind the apparently letters, the Gregor Samsa of typography, a degenerate ampersand, a a cruel witch where one expected a grandmother, an indifferent and illegible Cyrillic within the heart of the helpless Roman. Could that character be the first letter of "grandmother"? Eventually I stopped seeing it, but sometimes still I can notice its implacable presence, and the insipid looped g's of Times Roman seem hopelessly clueless about the inscrutable and uncanny permanence of the metamorphosis I first noticed then.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
I remember what my cousin Cico (Silvio Baruh) told me about his experience at the Bergen-Belsen camp. He generally did not like to talk about that horrible part of his life, but he told me that one of the worst aspects of the camp experience was the roll call. The inmates would be summoned from their miserable barracks to line up outdoors for roll call. They stood shivering in the snow in their rags while the process was completed. Very often someone would not answer when called (probably because he was dead or dying) and the camp authorities would start the roll call all over again. Sometimes the procedure took hours.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
I remember that if you left the phone off the hook, or just held it, eventually an operator would come on to see what was happening. This was a way children could get emergency help. I suppose the operators could also hear if violence or disaster had knocked the phone off the hook. For me, the main consequence of connecting to the operator was that you couldn't play phone-off-the-hook games for very long -- listening to the dial-tone, making imaginary calls, pulling the wonderful coiled cord straight -- without an adult asking what you were doing. But it was comforting to know that an adult was always handy.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
I remember Johnny Carson. Not that I watched him much; I remember knowing and recognizing the routines, the golf-swing and so forth. But I remember in seventh grade kids asking each other whether they'd seen Carson the night before, which seemed sophisticated and glamorous to me (it was supposed to) because he was on so late, and was so adult. I remember feeling sad when he did his last show, and I remember feeling in the know because I'd read Kenneth Tynan's ambivalent profile of him in The New Yorker: how great Carson was at what he did, including tearing up jokes on the air, and how part of that greatness was avoiding anything real.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
I remember the infelicity of the crayon's relation to the crayon sharpener. (I believe that the 64-pack Crayola box had a built in sharpener, but of course we tended to use pencil-sharpeners.) The problem was the paper sleeve of the crayon. You wanted it to come down to the cone-part of the crayon, but if you didn't peel it back the paper would shred into the wax, messing things up, and if you tried tearing off some of the sleeve the whole thing would come apart, the crayon would break or be hard to hold, and hard to resist gouging with your fingernails, and it was all distressingly inelegant.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
I remember experiencing an odd revulsion to banners on products advertising them as 2 cents off. (The Apple keyboard doesn't have a cents-key. I remember the cents key! The up-arrow key -- ^ -- seems to have replaced it.) Why that revulsion? I remember it particularly about some powdered cleaning product in a tube, not Comet but a competitor. Ajax? I think that from a distance it looked like the product only cost 2 cents. That was in biggest type. Then closer, you saw that it said "2 CENTS OFF." And I didn't get how a price could be marked as something "off." It wasn't a price. It wasn't a meaning of off that I understood. It was some kind of witchery. It reminded me of my uptown grandmother, who had some of the physical presence of a witch, and who cleaned with this product. The you looked closer still and it said ""Price marked is 2 CENTS OFF regular price of this product." And this was strange too: that it had a marked price and then another reference to the price explaining the anomaly of the marked price. It seemed malicious to me: it was somehow breaking into the smooth surface of product, container it was sold in, label on container, and price of container. That smooth surface was somehow what the container and its label, almost continuous with the container itself, represented, so that price and product all belonged to one gliding self-offering commodity. But the jarring 2 cents off destroyed the commercial aesthetics of the whole thing -- seemed, as I say, cheap, and tawdry, and penny-pinching, just like one disconcerting aspect of my grandmother.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
I remember my grandmother telling me not "to raise my hand" to her. This was like being told "shame on you," a phrase I didn't quite understand, but the fact of rebuke was absolutely clear. Interestingly, I can't quite remember which grandmother it was; maybe it was both. And I can't quite remember whether it was me or my sister. So I guess the rebuke was fairly traumatic.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird because we had just learnt the song Listen to the Mockingbird in singing class. It was the first I'd heard of the bird, and I liked the weird evocativeness of the name. (Also, I think I was just beginning my ornithology-craze.) I was fascinated that the book and the song were connected, and that the connection had seemingly little to do with mockingbirds.
I remember that it was the first book I’d read that openly dealt with rape, so I was wary about my parents’ reaction when they saw me reading it, and was surprised that they didn’t seem to mind.
I remember that the copy I read was a Penguin edition from the bookshelf upstairs, and that it was labelled with my father’s name. Not long after, I found a hardback downstairs in the drawing room that turned out to be my mother’s: I thought there was a cool symmetry about that. Then I started noticing some other symmetries in my parents’ respective collections: The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, The Prophet and The Broken Wings, The Bhagavad Gita and Gitanjali, War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, Peter Camenzind and Gertrude. But not many doubles: The Return of the Native, The Odyssey (I hunted a lot for The Iliad), and a Somerset Maugham collected stories.
Friday, January 14, 2005
I remember that the Herings, and with them sometimes my mother, drank gin-and-tonics, which was therefore to me the sophisticated drink. I think they drank Gordon's gin, and I'm pretty sure that Barbara Hering's maiden name was Gordon -- which made perfect sense, more than perfect since my mother used to work for a lawyer named Murray Gordon. Gordon meant the drinking, sophisticated, female, lawerly part of my life. (And wasn't another powerful woman whom I would have thought sophisticated, Victoria, on the Gordon's gin bottle? Or was that Tanqueray, which I remember the Herings were drinking several years later.)
Thursday, January 13, 2005
I remember the sounds of my adult relatives cracking their joints -- ankles and knees mainly, when they stretched their legs. I remember this particularly of my mother, and to some extent of her mother. It was one of those things adults did, and were competently unsurprised about doing. Of course I learned to crack knuckles later: Hugh Cramer and I would do it all the time, and he knew the various hypotheses explaining the sounds. But much earlier, it was a part of my mother's ambience, part of the way she manifested herself to me, part of the totality of her presence to me, that she would raise her leg, sitting or lying in bed, to crack her knee or ankle. It was something she did, something she knew how to do, something she had reasons for doing, something she was perfectly at ease doing.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
I remember Robert Heilbroner, whose obituary I saw in the Times today. He was my friend David's father. I only met him once, maybe in 1973 or early 74. He was completely cool about smoking pot. I remember that the time I met him he was sitting at their piano, and played extremely well. Somehow I didn't put this at all together with David's musicality -- that David was so splendid a classical guitarist. It occurs to me that at the time I didn't think in terms of general musical talent, but thought of the guitar as one thing you could do, and the piano as another. So Robert's piano-playing seemed completely alien, unrelated to anything, since the salient point was that he was an economist, not that they were a musical family. Later that year I read what he had to say about business cycles, and learned a lot about capitalism (and the causes of the 1929 crash) from what I read.
In his obituary I see that he was divorced in 1975, which means that the day I met him was near the end of his marriage. And of course his kids were leaving or had left: I think David graduated high school in 1975 (possibly 1974) so that perhaps David's leaving home was the salient incident after which divorce was possible. But I remember feeling what a well-established home they had: kids, honesty about drug-use, big piano, pianistic skill, all brought safely to the harbor of the kids' beginning to set out on their own, and so this part of the obituary was what most surprised and disturbed me.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
I remember thinking the Van Allen belts were a neat science-fiction invention, a name (like the "Tannhauser Gates" in Bladerunner) for something evocative and unknown. I liked the idea that they circled the earth. I think I first read about them in Foundation. I remember being completely thrilled to find out they were real.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
I remember a paperback that I saw, maybe at the New Yorker bookshop, certainly on one of those turning racks, with a cover showing six men, one in a different color or wash of color or maybe in negative, called (I think) One in Six, and making the sensational claim that one in six men was homosexual. I don't know whether this book was pro- or anti-gay, though I suspect pro. And I associate this book with leaving the Bretton Hall one day, where I went to exercise class, and looking at men, singly or in groups, and thinking that I knew something about them that they didn't know I knew, namely that one in six of them was homosexual.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
I remember "Bayer works wonders."
I remember:
"The earth is flat." "Man will never fly [I'm not too sure about this second one]." "All aspirin are alike." Funny how truisms come and go, isn't it?
The guy who said this was someone I later thought I recognized as the boss and mission assigner on Charlie's Angels, but it probably wasn't the same person. He also reminded me of the guy who said cop-AHH-septic, showing that he could now say "AHH." I think the truisms were from a Bufferin ad. (Anyhow, here was where I learned the word truism. I also liked that aspirin could be plural: all aspirin are alike.) With Bufferin more aspirin going to your headache meant less to upset your stomach.
Monday, January 03, 2005
I remember when it cost more to send a domestic letter airmail than surface mail. And then it turned out that it all went airmail anyhow if it was long distance, and once this got public the post office stopped charging differential rates.
I remember my father explaining to me that mail from abroad was carried for free by the country it went to. I remember wondering why it cost twice as much, and assumed that this was for the trip over the ocean, to the borders of Europe. Later, when they instituted double-cost one-way toll crossings over the Hudson, and explained that almost everyone who went one way returned the other, I realized that the same strangely and somehow grimly inexorable logic -- as though there were no freedom, but only repetition -- applied to the mail too.
But it didn't seem so grim when it came to the mail, since the bi-directionality of mail meant that there was communication between two parties, not the endless dull back and forth of one. That communication would be reciprocated was somehow normal and obvious to the postal authorities, and that seemed wonderful and hopeful to me.
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