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 movie Vanishing Point, which I mentioned before as an example of an M rated movie.  I didn't understand it.  The movie opens with what will turn out to be its last scene, then is almost all flashback.  In that last scene, time stops just after a car, roaring towards a roadblock, passes another car going the other way.  Freeze-frame, and then the car roaring towards the roadblock just... disappears.

Next scene is forty-eight hours earlier.  The car driver is an outlaw-type, trying to drive cross country at some insane clip, on a bet I think.  He ignores a trooper, and after that the whole thing is a more and more elaborate chase scene.  Cleavon Little -- his first major roll, I think -- is a radio DJ who gets interested in this outlaw hero and starts broadcasting useful information about where cops are congregating, etc.  He's getting this information from what we would now call crowd-sourcing: people have heard him praising the outlaw driver and therefore they phone the radio station with what they've seen, and he broadcasts the information and the driver uses it to evade capture as he keeps roaring westwards.

Eventually we get to the last scene again: road block set up, car tooling down the road, passing the other car as at the beginning.  But now, no freeze-frame, and the outlaw car crashes spectacularly into the bulldozers blocking its way.  And that's the end of the movie (I have a vague memory of a minute or two of sad, anti-climactic clean-up, people milling around, tension all gone out of everyone's life). The hope we'd harbored throughout, that he would escape the lifeless, unimaginative simulacrum of justice that the police represented, was smashed with his car.  We knew he's vanish, or thought we knew, and the only question we had was how?  We assumed the end of the movie would tell us. And then he didn't vanish.  He died.

I remember being very impressed by my parents in our car-ride home.  I was thirteen, so being impressed by them was a big deal.  I said I didn't know what had happened but they both understood and agreed intuitively, without needing to discuss it or work it out, that the opening of the movie showed the legend -- the legend that would live on.  The sad empiric ending (the sad, disappointing, deflating, but uninteresting truth), didn't matter.  The movie did tell us.  (As the John Ford dictum almost has it: film the legend.  And they did.)

posted by William 1:41 PM
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I remember that some other buildings had mail chutes, as did my father's office building. But my father would never use them: his general, pain-in-the-ass principle was to rely on mediations as little as possible. That's why I always had to confirm reservations even when they were guaranteed, check theater times despite what the ticket said, etc. And so when I came with him to his office, and when they moved to a new building and I was visiting, I always had to go to the mailbox on the corner with his mail. He also thought letters would get stuck in the mail chute.

Me, I loved (and still love) seeing other people's letters come barreling past me sometimes when I waited for the elevator. I liked how fast they went, as though not made of paper but of metal. The chute forced them to go almost perfectly vertically, so there was almost no air-resistance. And that's why they didn't get stuck!

posted by William 2:57 PM
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I remember the bees buzzing around and hanging from the jams in Bellagio when we went down to breakfast.  Somehow they were always there before us, no matter how early we were up.  They were enjoying the morning but they also were part of it, part of the morning they enjoyed.  The had a proprietary interest in the jam, and in the whole scene.

posted by William 11:27 PM
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I remember being puzzled that the weeklies -- The New Yorker and The Village Voice (Sports Illustrated too) -- were dated in the future.  I found this very frustrating, because it meant I could never be current (and sometimes that mattered!).  The future didn't actually have news about what would happen in the next few days, and when the date that the weekly was dated finally came along, the past was different from what the publication from the future reported or failed to report.  So I felt a little as though news and time diverged, on the scale of a week, anyhow, and this was disorienting.  It probably contributed to a sense of the difference between public and private -- the world of the future news which never became what the future publication suggested, and the world of what I knew, past news, assassinations, wins and losses, election results.  That knowledge was part of my private world, but the weekly's potential other worlds were always seemingly just the news but always pointed to a time forever inaccessible.  Maybe they do still.

posted by William 10:12 AM
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I remember, and even used the term here twelve years ago, "the dynamic duo."  Since I never really put the meanings of the words together but took them as a quasi-proper name, a description so definite as to designate a complex singular term, the team comprising Batman and Robin, while still realizing that it was a description, that the terms had meaning as well as reference, I now suppose that this is a good analogue to Homeric epithet. "Caped crusader" would be another one, though if crusader was slightly obscure, caped was obvious. Maybe that's closer to the Homeric experience or maybe both terms are analogues to analogues in Homer.

posted by William 9:23 AM
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I remember how much I liked seeing the occasional Massachusetts license plates on parked cars in Mangattan after the 1973 election.

posted by William 10:08 AM
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I remember when Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran for mayor and City Council president.  I was against them because they wanted New York City to secede from the state and become the 51st state.   But I was proud to live in one of the original thirteen!

A couple of years later, Breslin's Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight came out.  I loved it when I read the paperback in seventh grade (I remember because I discussed it with Michael Hoban in math class). I remember the hilarious moment, maybe quoted on the back of the book, describing how one mafioso "died of natural causes.  His heart stopped beating when the men who snuck into his bedroom stuck a knife in it."

I remember that that's when I began to like him more and more.

Mailer not so much.

I am not sure why I didn't offer either the lead-up or the sequel of the story I posted nearly ten years ago, when Mailer died, but the whole story is kind of interesting.  I was visiting colleges and staying with friends at Tufts.  We'd rushed to get a dozen donuts when we heard he was speaking since it turned out there wouldn't be time for dinner now.

Like most of the audience, we were sitting on the floor of the Tufts gym. Mailer did his anti-feminist schtick, calling on all the women to hiss.  They did and he gloated: "Obedient little bitches."  So one of the women in our group, meeting aggression with love, got up and took a jelly donut up to him as a kind of show of our generous superiority.  He laughed and tossed it back into the crowd.  They laughed and tossed it back to him.  He laughed and threw it back harder.  It landed right near me, almost back where it started.  It was quite a tough little ball of gluten.  I picked it up and threw it just as hard back at him, imagining I guess, that its consistency was robust enough to last through many such rallies.  But it splatted him right on his jacket and tie.

So he wiped it off with a handkerchief and then went straight to a dramatic effect he was obviously saving: he opened out his attaché case at the podium and took out... a tumbler full of ice and a bottle of scotch, and poured himself a stiff drink.  Everyone loved that.

Then after the talk was over I went up to him as he was moving backstage to apologize -- saying, truthfully, that it was an accident.  I didn't mean to hit him, and certainly would have been happy to have him catch it.  He was with some goon body-guards, maybe Tufts plainclothesmen, maybe his own.  He looked at me witheringly and walked away without a word.

I guess I can't blame him, but it did make me feel better that he was graceless about it.

posted by William 2:41 PM
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I remember being somewhat surprised that the verb "mind" could mean "object" or "find unpleasant."  I think our family somehow didn't use the verb at all, so for me it was only a noun.  But the Herings (I think) used the word -- I think someone asked if I minded something he was doing, or if I would mind.  This is all in the dark backward and abysm of time, but I remember not understanding, and then understanding a few minutes later -- maybe he explained it? -- and being puzzled by it.  I still am, a little.  It's an interesting idiom,

posted by William 12:36 AM
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I remember a cockroach skittering between my bare foot and the rubber floor pad you stood on by the sink in the kitchen.  I was headed for the sink to use something, and expected to find the usual baby roaches that were much slower to dive for cracks and crevices than their parents.  I was reconciled to them, but I hated the big roaches, and really hated the one that darted under my instep and away under the sink before I could do anything about it but feel disgust.

I remember that I would squash the baby roaches with paper towels, but that my uptown grandmother, when she was cooking at our house or taking care of my sister and me, had no compunction about killing roaches of any size with her bare hand.

posted by William 9:45 PM
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