computer brain death

I've been struggling to get my computer back up to speed for awhile now. Though successfully using a Linux drive to get online, I haven't been able to get my own system to work decently without a lot of annoying pop ups, messages and warnings. I've gone the usual route with this--taking it in to be repaired, finding that the repair didn't really solve anything, and so trying to decide what to do next. Lately, though, I haven't even been able to get in to anything. So last night, I just went for broke and reinstalled the hard drive.

This meant that a lot was lost.

I retrieved and backed up a lot of my documents,and since most of it was backed up anyway, I'll probably have some version of most of it somewhere. I'm a little sad to realize that most of my downloaded email is gone, but the fact is, all this has happened before.

So the relation to this blog is? Well, I'm kind of struck by the difference between how we, or at least many of us, save paper documents, and the way we save electronic ones. I suppose it will reveal me as very old school to say that I don't ever really throw away letters, but I have witnessed two wholesale clearances of computer memory with sadness, yes, but basically with a shrug. Yet I still have all those old faded letters.

It's interesting to me how we have consigned some of our essential recordkeeping, which is in essence a memory sort of job, to an unstable constantly self-revising electronic system. There is already much that I saved, ie, remembered, to technology that no longer works on my system. It doesn't mean I can never get at it--it's just that I can't do that easily.

I'm on the brink of doing a month long writing challenge through Nanowrimo.org. The founder of this venture, Chris Baty, just had his hard drive inexplicably die mere days before the big event, leading him to remind participants to back up their data and not rely on luck or chance to do so.

I'll close with two observations. One is that electronic "memory" tends to be very black and white. It either works or it doesn't. You can't "remember" lost data by trying harder to remember it. Basically, you only have the option of trying the equivalent of expensive brain surgery to retrieve it. And like brain surgery, the result isn't guaranteed.

The second is more related to memory--our memory--itself. I'd love if anyone cared to comment on a different take on this, but for me, when it comes to informational data, nostalgia is overrated. I hold on to a lot of this stuff, don't get around to deleting a whole lot of email, except for the obvious junk. But if the fates decide to take it away from me, after a bit of regret, I find I don't miss it all that much. From this I conclude that online data is different because it is just digital. Souvenirs of the past may need to be just a bit more material to be missed much.

Or so say I.

October 17th, 1989

(In memory of Shawn McCormick and Robin Ortiz)

Every once in awhile, this blog is not about the lapse of memory, but memory, straight up. Today marked the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which some people may remember because of the World Series being played at that moment, and others may remember for images of people crushed and trapped on the collapsed Bay Bridge. However, the epicenter happened right here in Santa Cruz County, in the Forest of Nicene Marks, at a spot I have actually hiked to, though even that was a long time ago now.

Most people probably won't remember this earthquake at all, or maybe only vaguely, which perhaps ties in to my usual theme more than I thought. But this earthquake destroyed our downtown, forcing businesses into tents for a couple of years, and was one of those decisive moments in a community's history that marks all who were present forever. I don't mean that everyone was traumatized. I mean that our town changed forever from the kind of town that it had been only the day before. Many people lost property or suffered property damage. Many people left, changed their focus or direction. Some people, luckily only a few, lost their lives that day. However two of those people, very young people just starting their adult lives, died just on the other side of a wall from me. The wall fell the other way. They were in a little attic office, going over the days receipts of the coffee roasting enterprise that they were working in, and the top of the wall collapsed on them and buried them. The report later was that mercifully they had died instantly. But for days, many people stood around that pile of rubble, pleading with authorities to work faster, hoping against hope.

Today I walked down to the observances of the day. I wasn't really sure why I was going, though I had actually skipped going to my high school reunion for that very reason. As I walked down, I was struck by the incredible, almost too incredible vibrancy of the town. It was the last weekend of Open Studios and everywhere were signs advertising where some artist who had opened his or her home to the public could be found. A banner at the high school welcomed bands from around the state to the annual high school band review, which must have happened this morning. I walked past the Civic auditorium, where some sort of conference of jiu jitsu was in progress, and outdoor booths and music were spreading its followers out on to the street. The Pacific Rim Film Festival was in full tilt. And all of these things were bringing people out of their homes and over the mountains to our town, and none of it had anything to do with remembrance of the day at all.

Except it did. It was the sign of the phoenix's rise from the ashes, the town continuing in a new way with its old quirky energy, and no one could be blamed if they didn't make their way to the post office and the town clock to remember what was really only a moment in time. And I myself didn't go to hear the speeches, which was just as well, because some of them couldn't be heard anyway, from the back of the crowd. And there was a crowd, an old timer crowd, you might even say a home town crowd, although for all my years' involvement with the place, it's never really felt like my hometown. It probably never could.

As the speeches ended, the clock tolled the number of the dead from that day in our county. A couple of silver balloons floated into the air. I saw a few people I knew, but no one felt like talking. I walked over afterwards to the chainlink fence that to this day surrounds the site of the store that I worked in and the coffee house that the dead worked in. My eyes teared up. I didn't care about the store, though many still lament it. The store rose again in another location, after all, as did the town. Bigger and better you could even say, unless you didn't quite feel that way about it. And a hole in the ground is just a hole in the ground.

But the dead stay dead. Robin Ortiz and Shawn McCormack have not been part of the rebirth. I was glad to see the signs on the fence, with sweet sentimental comments like "We still miss you, Shawn." "I haven't forgotten you, Robyn." People brought bouquets of flowers to stick in the fence. Silver balloons were tied to the fence and floated above it.

Twenty years is a long time to be gone. A whole lifetime for some. My friends' son was born in a hospital right here in town the day before. Twenty years is an awful lot of living. I can't help but think of all the last twenty years has given me, all I did and failed to do--all I was granted time to do and fail to do.

Earlier this week, in a coincidental recapitulation, a tree fell in my yard. It was exciting, dramatic, but it fell the other way--harmless. The other one, its twin, which was leaning over my house did not fall. The thing to realize, if we can, is that this is not extraordinary luck on my part. We are all, for the moment, living on the right side of that brick wall. We are all, for the moment, living in the shadow of the tree that did not fall. And the only thing to ask, really, is what are we going to do with the time that remains?

Uncanny--the return of the repressed

In an excellent article in September's The Believer by Sara Gran and Megan Abbott on the now somewhat eclipsed horror queen V.C. Andrews, an essay of Freud's on the uncanny comes up. Not being much of a student of Freud, I found this analysis quite interesting, especially from the point of view of this blog. According to the authors, Freud thought that our sense of the uncanny came not from the unfamiliar but the familiar--it's our sense of dread in facing what we've known, but no longer have direct access to."The uncanny draws a map to what has been repressed." Gran and Abbott think that horror stories that revolve around "dolls, imaginary friends or other relics of childhood" have an extra power to scare us, because they bring back fears, desires and other memories from our earliest years that have since become unacceptable to us.

I've long been interested in the phenomenon I've seen around Andrews, which is the fact that they seem always to have been read mainly by young teenage girls, who read them as a sort of rite of passage. I was at a barbecue right after reading this article and took an informal poll about who had read her. Several hands shot up, all female, including that of one person who read her older sister's copies on the sly, as she was too young for them. That seemed quite in keeping with the Andrews tradition, though.

I liked the article's hypothesis that Andrew's can be found in plentiful supply in thrift shops and yard sales because, once read, these aren't the kind of books that people feel comfortable hanging on to. I wonder--do they forget the experiences brought up by the reading, or does the repressed see the light of day again?

Although I like some horror, it's never been my first area of interest, so I haven't read Andrews. I suppose, too, that I always felt a little superior to them, but I'll now concede I may have missed something.

Here's another interesting blog I came across that where this Believer article inspired a post.

The Mysterious Case of the Forgotten Language

Over at Peter Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders recently, the discussion turned to the curious fact that one of the members of the Swedish group ABBA, once fluent in English, has completely forgotten it. As several of us were trying to figure out how this could possibly be, it occurred to me that it would make a good post on this lapsed but not forgotten blog.

According to this informal but anecdotally interesting blog post, the facility with which children learn languages is exactly the reason why they forget them more easily when distanced from them too. In contrast,

Adult learners normally learn languages through grammar which gives them a skeleton onto which they hang the meat of vocabulary. Grammar based learning never delivers as good as result as immersion based learning but it does have the advantage of giving you hard wired rules that you don’t forget.

And another tangentially related article tells us that when people are trying to learn a new language, forgetting the correlate word in their own tongue may actually be an adaptive strategy. College students who had one year of Spanish under their belts were asked to name objects in Spanish, and the more they did so, the harder it was for them to come up with the word in English. Apparently, it gets easier to keep both in mind as you become more fluent in the second language.

Finally, I happened upon this rather poignant NPR piece about a Thai-American woman who was relearning Thai as an adult after her parents had made the decision that they would all speak only English in their new home in the Midwest--an adaptive strategy in its own right, but one that may have brought as many losses as it did gains.

The Life Beyond

We all die, though virtually, it ain't necessarily so. Sara Paretsky's new website led me to this recent Times Magazine article , which has much to say about the ways the dead live on in their online presence, and how memory may be enhanced and shared by such possibilities.

This may seem a bit macabre, but I have already encountered my first blog ended by reason of death. This was the excellent blog of poet Reginald Shepherd, who died too young, of cancer. He's left us--his blog still remains. The survival of the blog is a good thing, I think. There is much to mine there, for those who are interested in his thought, and it remains a place where his partner can post announcements about various things related to the man and the poetry. Still, it does remain slightly unsettling to go to the bottom of my blog roll and click on that blog. I am tempted to erase it sometimes, as it's hardly dynamic.

For now, though, I think I'll leave it be.

On Forgetting Where You Read It

It's slightly ironic that I thought my next post here would be about a quote from Antonio Machado regarding dreams and memory. As those of you who have your own blogs may recognize, an aspect of the blogging world is that it turns many pieces of your own life into potential material. So I was quite excited when, going through a stack of used books I was considering purchasing, I came across this opening quote that seemed so apt.

Unfortunately, I can't find it again.

I've looked at all the books I thought it was in, but no dice. I've done a little internet research, but it turns out Machado has spoken, or perhaps more accurately, written poetry about dreams and memory many times. In any case, the quote did not come back to me.

Fortunately, this has sent me on a somewhat different tack about memory. I couldn't tell you how many times I have read something brilliant, or that resonated with me, or at the very least was worth recalling and pondering, and then been too lazy to drop what I was doing and write it down. Neither could I recount the number of times I have subsequently searched the text I know it was in, only to come up empty handed. "It had to have been about here." "I remember it came right after this." "I am absolutely sure it was on the left hand side of the page, towards the middle." If I turn out to be fifty percent right about these 'certainties', I'd be surprised.

More often than not, I never find the line that caught my interest again.

Now I'm sure more tenacious people, or those rare, commendable people with photographic memories, are sneering slightly at this point. And really, I don't blame them. I must say that if by now I haven't learned that I should at least make note of the page number, or in this case, the title--by which I mean actually write it down--well, more fool me.

But here's the interesting part. Sometimes, I do find the quote. And usually, it is not quite how I remembered. It does not quite express the point I thought it did. It says something almost the same, but not quite. It turns out that I have put my own spin on it. Used it to my own ends. It's not usually in contradiction to what the writer has to say, but my own brain has 'tweaked' it slightly. In some way, my mind has taken the ball and run with it. Hopefully towards our side's goalpost, but not always.

I like to think that this doesn't mean that I am just a careless reader, though obviously, sometimes I am. The more charitable view is that we all read things and sometimes identify closely with them, leading to our own insights, which we then in turn read back into the text, altering it ever so slightly as we go.

At least, I really hope it's not just me.

"The true kiss vanishes the moment their lips separate."

In other words,"If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you're likely to change it."

Or so I learned from Radio Lab, a show produced by WNYC, which my friend Brian O'Rourke was kind enough to track down for me. Admittedly, this was awhile ago, but although the theme of this blog might suggest otherwise, I did not actually forget about this. I have only recently gotten a DSL hookup, which makes listening to an hour long radio show on my laptop possible, rather than merely theoretical.

Just listened to the first segment, which was more than enough to absorb for one night.

In any case, here's the link.