“The odors”
The first moment of involuntary memory in Boston Adventure.
Smells
Onion powder and Dial soap.
Back at it
The strange thing about being back in a concert hall after all this time: it felt, really, as if no time had passed.
Composition of place
I find myself these days recalling not so much moments as spaces. The layout of my grandparents’ house, my other grandparents’ apartment, libraries from childhood in Brooklyn and adolescence in NJ, college buildings. It must be that so much time spent in one place is making me travel in my head to others.
Recognitions
I recognize that bus, which I saw in the Berkshires some years ago. It was surrounded by hippie-esque types and their children. And I recognize this bus too, which I saw a couple of years ago, parked at an orchard in downstate Illinois. They belong to a group now in the news.
Far Side cave formations
“Oo! Grog run into a . . . a . . dang! Now which kind stick up and which kind hang down?”
More interesting tuna salad
If anyone doesn’t already know: curry powder makes tuna salad instantly more interesting.
Purple prose
A college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.
Backblaze, anyone?
A link for a free month.
Five words
I’m from Brooklyn — it’s just four words.
Found in an old pocket notebook
Two details from a talk by Eva Kor.
Hard copies
Peter Funt: “And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?”
Track
Involuntary memory meets the slot-car craze.
A “spectacular building,”a “beautiful room”
Is it reasonable to wonder whether someone helped with the name of the beautiful room?
A “fluid plane”
I strongly suspect that J.W. Dunne’s work helped to inspire the MJT’s Geoffrey Sonnabend and his theory of obliscence.
Misquoting from memory
Writing from memory, I had “The stone’s in the midst of it all.” That’s how I’ve had the line in my head since I was an undergrad. But no. Yeats’s poem reads, “The stone’s in the midst of all.”
Shakespeare’s and snails’
Memory, Shakespeare’s and snails’.
Smells like childhood
Bus exhaust, bubble gum, Camel cigarettes, caps for toy guns, my elementary school’s basement, laundry air-dried in my grandparents’ basement.
Mister Memory
Please imagine Jeff Sessions in the role.
Memorizing poetry
Molly Worthen, historian, writes about the value of memorizing poetry.
DQ Breeze
Was there ever a Dairy Queen product called the Breeze? Yes. It existed.
Time travel
Alan Lightman discovers a great-grandfather’s pipe.
Irrelevancies and solid objects
From Joseph Joubert.
Involuntary Brooklyn
Olive oil and meat and herbs and garlic.
Pseudo-mondegreen
“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowin’ through the chasm in my mind.”
Poetry and memory
Susan Howe, reading T. S. Eliot to a friend with dementia.
The Beloit Mindset List, 2018 edition
This year’s list looks to my eyes like a particularly tasteless and clueless array of hastily selected cultural fragments.
Music and memory
Fresca asks a great question: What songs will we remember after we forget our names?
Radiolab, “Things”
Elaine said that I had to listen to the Radiolab episode of that name. Our daughter Rachel, too, said that I had to listen. So I did.
Yet another Big Lots tea find
Yorkshire Gold: une madeleine.