A deportee memorial
Sixty-five years later, there is a memorial for those who died in the 1948 plane crash that inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and whose names are now, all, known.
The Beloit Mindset List, 2017 edition
Better scotch those Stapleton Airport analogies, Professor Higginbotham! The kids today won’t “dig” them.
Peppers and eggs
A powerful madeleine.
“I remember”
The artist and writer Joe Brainard (1942–1994) gave the world a deceptively simple writing prompt: “I remember,” two words to begin a sentence or a paragraph.
The Beloit Mindset List, again
In my lifetime, Bix Beiderbecke, Emily Dickinson, Juan Gris, and Fats Waller have always been dead. And the point is — what?
Roger Ebert on memory and mortality
“Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.”
A handy mnemonic
A handy mnemonic I am sharing with my students, with whom I’ll be watching King Lear in room 3290.
Proust, Barthes, involuntary memory
A note from Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, recording a moment of involuntary memory.
The Beloit Mindset List, 2011 edition
“ The 2011 edition of the Beloit Mindset List is out, and it manages to outdo the 2010 list in faulty perspective and tackiness.”
Philippe Petit on the past and present tenses
On the World Trade Center
Re: the Beloit Mindset List
Really troubling assumptions about reality and young adults
Infinite Jest, television
Television nostalgia
Toy Story 3
"We are ourselves, this film seems to say, only in relation to others."
Memorial Day
From the New York Times, 1910
Fresh cookies, fresh ironing
Proustian passage from a childhood book
Drugs and memories
Drugs for forgetting, in our world and in Homer's Odyssey
Involuntary memory in Mayberry
Liver as a madeleine
Streets and alleys of the Depression
Organ grinders and singers in alleys
November 11
From the New York Times: "Today is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and it will be commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It's a reminder that not all 'victors' experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collective trauma of conflict."
Proust in the news
A British paper gets the "Proust effect" wrong, all wrong
Anne Thackeray Ritchie on the past
The full passage is sunnier than Allen Shawn's excerpt : When people write of the past, those among us who have reached a certain age are so...
"[O]ur past inside us"
Proustian passage from Allen Shawn
Involuntary bicycle
A moment of involuntary memory
Joshua Foer on memory
Joshua Foer has a piece in National Geographic on people with unusual memory deficits and surpluses: AJ remembers when she first realized t...
"[T]races of ourselves"
Passages from The Fugitive and My Dinner with André
Linsey-woolsey
A word from the past
On the radio: Memory and Forgetting
Radio Lab broadcast, online
Memorial Day 2007
“Who are we as a country?”
Memorial Day, continued
Related post Memorial Day
Proust's pharmacy
Memory as a pharmacy