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

I remember the cane seats on the IND subways.  I remember posting about how I didn't like them as much as the more modern seats you'd always find on the IRT, but on this muggy summer day I am remembering them with fondness. We'd only sit in seats like that if we were taking the BMT or IND, and in the summers that would be to some interesting, above-ground station at a place you'd go to on a family outing on a hot day: Queens or Brooklyn or Coney Island or the Rockaways, in order to picnic or visit people with actual houses in the suburban outer boroughs.   And then you'd get a subway car with cane seats and it was as though the promise of a day of sun and fresh air fun was already beginning.  My uptown grandparents, whom I would sometimes visit on the A-train, the superexpress as I remember we called it, roaring through three miles of tunnel without stopping, to the 168th St. station three blocks from their building, wore straw hats that matched the seats'  plaiting in color and in weave, and it was a wonderful and calming change, on a hot day, to be in a train that harmonized with their old and mild ways.  I generally hated having to go outside, but taking a sunny, above-ground subway car made it worthwhile -- the best of all worlds, at least for the day.

posted by William 12:07 PM
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I remember reading aloud dialogue that was in all-caps. There was a lot of it in Enid Blyton. I got that it conveyed shouting, and I couldn't change amplitude in my subvocalization, so vocalizing it was the only option. After a while, I started feeling embarrassed doing it, even though it was only at home, and I also found that I could amplify while subvocalizing.

I do remember that I didn't know what italics signaled until my mother read aloud a story (at the phase when I was comfortable reading but still enjoyed being read to, so I was reading along), and emphasized that where it was italicized. This may have been why I started vocalizing all-caps -- discovering that typography could have a prosodic function. 

posted by sravana 6:43 PM
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