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 wondering about the addition in "Billy Boy."  I remember the back of my record, and that it had the lyrics of "O Susanna," and maybe of "Billy Boy."  Why did I love those songs so much? I associate them with my grandmother; I remember reading them with her at her kitchen table, the same one at which I liked singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again," a song my uncle loved, and which one day prompted her to tell me about his death and how he wouldn't come marching home -- killed, not missing, in action in 1944.  (Now that my father died three weeks ago, I don't know anyone in the world who remembers him, though there probably are a few people who do.  Possibly even John Simon, the exact same age and also from Serbia, who beat the shit out of him on the playground when they were twelve or thirteen, prompting my grandmother to find him and threaten him with her umbrella.  He ought to remember that.)

Anyhow the addition: "Three times six and four times seven, twenty-eight and eleven."  I thought in terms both of apposition and of a series of terms.  Which was she 18, 28, 50, 78, 39, or 89? 89 was the only one that could make logical sense, but I knew that anything over 28 was probably implausible, given that "she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother."  The last possibility was that I was doing the arithmetic wrong and that three times six and four times seven equaled twenty-eight and eleven, which had the shared 28's in its favor.  I guess it didn't occur to me that Billy Boy might have been a) obfuscating; or b) uncertain himself of the calculation.  After all, the song was canonical, and therefore had canonical authority.

Later, I remember, that Beckett got the calculation of Molloy's frequency in farting wrong.  I remember learning that you couldn't trust everything in print.  I guess Billy Boy was the start of that.

posted by William 9:24 AM
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