On forgetting the names of characters

On a recent post on another of my blogs, two of the commenters referred blithely to a fellow named Parviz, assuming the reference would be self-evident to me. I in turn assumed that with their far superior cultural literacy, this was just someone they knew and I did not. I figured it was some Arabic poet, along the lines of Rumi, say, or Kabir.

Much to my mortification, it turned out to be a character from a novel that I had not only read, but posted about, and not too terribly long ago, either. Parviz is the first narrator in a book told from multiple perspectives.

I say 'mortification', but I don't really mean 'deep shame' so much as a certain sense of ruefulness. The fact is, I often don't remember the names of characters even for the length of time it takes me to read a book. It isn't that I don't remember the characters--Parviz in this book is a particularly sweet and slightly lost one. But names are somehow not what my brain latches on to. This is particularly true if there is some kind of similarity between the names. An easy example is if they were all Arabic, or Russian. But the fact is that even with the last P.D. James novel I read, there was a certain sameness to the very Anglo-Saxon names of the multiple suspects and it took me awhile to sort them all out in my head.

Usually, I can eventually figure it out by context. But sometimes I really do have to go back and nail down some of the characters more consciously. Most of the time, that's enough.

I was sitting out in the crowds waiting for a matinee performance of Shakespeare Santa Cruz one day, eavesdropping on my fellow picnickers to pass the time. Some parents were sitting with their college-aged daughter and they were talking about some foreign person who was in the news at the time. (No, of course I don't remember who it was--are you kidding?) It wasn't the easiest name for an American ear to assimilate, whatever it was, but the daughter pronounced it 'trippingly off the tongue'. Her parents (and I) were impressed. She replied, quite casually and not at all sarcastically, "I find that if you just pay a little attention at the time, it's not that hard to remember these things."

Indeed.

Five point four million tons--a coal ash spill

Technically, this doesn't really qualify as a lapse of memory, I suppose. At least not my memory. Because, when news that, on December 22, 2008, 5.4 million tons of ash generated from fifty years of coal burst through a dike near Kingston, Tennessee, threatening farmlands and the nearby river, I really wasn't aware of it. I don't doubt that it made the national news. I do doubt that there was any sort of sustained coverage of it.


Here's the link .

What I find myself objecting to here is the idea that if you miss a couple of nights of evening news, in the holiday season--I mean, I work in retail and this was three days before Christmas--a disaster of this magnitude would simply disappear from our collective view is outrageous. It not only has implications for the lives and livelihoods of the people of that region, it spreads outward to hundreds of other coal ash storage sites across the land, raising questions of their safety, and it reaches backward and forward in history into the nature and wisdom of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and by extension, to the nature and wisdom of many other government led schemes. I use the word 'schemes' deliberately, as I've noticed on the BBC that this is quite a neutral word when it comes to big ideas dreamed up by government or business, but as an American, I can't really hear the word 'scheme' and fail to be concerned.

White House Built by Slaves!

Originally, I thought I had a great new idea for this blog, because both the New Yorker and the Jim Lehrer Newshour have recently done thoughtful pieces on the fact that the White House was built in part by slaves. I thought I could say something about the way this little factoid comes to the surface now, and perhaps it's still worthy of mention. But it turns out it's the kind of factoid that is already on everyone's lips. Reporters looking at the White House can barely refrain from commenting, "built by African-American slaves, the White House..." and so on.

I did not know this fact before Obama was elected. I am glad, or maybe glad is not the right word, to know it now. But I am a little suspicious of the way we all do know it now, and how few of us knew it before the media decided that it would do as a nice frame for the moment. I can't help thinking that we should always have known this about the all too White House, first, because it is part of our history, and second because it makes a difference as to how we look at all kinds of things--Washington,D.C., government, democracy, even architecture.

Perhaps this is too cynical. There is something good too about the way facts, forgotten, resurface, and how sometimes they have all that much more weight for that. But I still feel I have been in the dark too long about this one.

A lapse of memory in an age of global warming

After a few posts that don't really address the original aim of this blog, I've finally found a story that resonates with what I want to talk about here. Last night I watched a Tom Bearden piece on the Jim Lehrer Newshour about the problems of resettling native Alaskan peoples from small islands that are being gradually submerged by the effects of global warming. One segment stood out for me. To wit:

PERCY NAYOKPUK, Resident of Shishmaref, Alaska: I think most of us have the same conclusion here is, in that we're not going to beat Mother Nature.

TOM BEARDEN: Percy Nayokpuk is one of the elders in Shishmaref. He owns one of the island's two grocery stores.

Residents here voted six years ago to move the village to safer ground on the mainland just a few miles away, but such a move will be expensive. Estimates run as high as $200 million to $300 million for each village.

And Nayokpuk thinks the federal government should pick up much of that tab. Nayokpuk says, for 400 years, his people lived in smaller, more nomadic communities, which could easily pick up and move.

But in the 1920s, the federal government mandated that all native children must get a formal education, so it built a central school on the island, effectively ending the nomadic way of life.

PERCY NAYOKPUK: They very easily could have built it on the mainland and everybody would have been on the mainland. Shishmaref is here mainly because the government insisted we move here.

Now, I think they should also remember that and maybe also give us a hand with the move. We certainly can't do it ourselves.

TOM BEARDEN: The median family income in Shishmaref is $30,000 a year, and virtually every household on the island receives some sort of government assistance.

It's hard to imagine why rebuilding a village like this in another location would be so expensive. After all, the roads here aren't paved and the homes have no indoor plumbing. Instead, they use what are euphemistically called "honey buckets."

But the corps' Opheen says, if the federal or state government is involved, it means following strict rules and regulations for housing and infrastructure, all of which is costly. New construction also means transporting building materials a great distance and bringing in workers.

PATRICIA OPHEEN, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: You've got a crew of 25, 30 people. You have to bring everything in to house that crew for construction, including their housing, water, as well as all of the food.

The transportation and the hauling to get these folks to those locations is extremely expensive. And we're moving to a location, typically if they do relocate, that doesn't have a road service to it. So even building the road service up to the new community has an expense associated with it.

I think it would be a shame if these people had to lose their community because of the short term memory problems of local governments. I can just see now how a hue and cry will be raised about the 'enormous expense' involved in keeping these communities intact. The whole problem has arisen because there wasn't enough respect for native communities' vitality and importance in the first place.

Let's not think we are somehow good because we fix a problem we created. Repairs are costly, and harder to shell out for when we know we have some responsibility for them in the first place. But we need to bite the bullet and pay for them, not blame the people who are blameless and only want their communities to survive.

No Lapse of Memory

We take a brief intermission here on Pearl Harbor Day to talk about not what falls through the cracks, but what doesn't. I was very happy to go to a breakfast this morning honoring the survivors of that attack. There were seven left here in our region. I went because my friend's father was being honored. I wanted to go, but I didn't really expect my own emotions to be so close to the surface.

What struck me is that these big events of our lives, good and bad, never really go away. Each of the men got up and spoke their piece, some more ably than others. I suppose in some ways it has become a set piece in their recitations of it, but that doesn't mean the emotions were any less real. I was just listening to an interview with the writer Jonathan Carroll about his latest book, and he talks about his conviction that we don't act out of one self but many. We are not always the present moment person as it might seem, but act from all the different people we have been. He spoke about how we return to the different moments in our lives, not in some sort of detached and tranquil memory, but as if we were still there. My friend's father talked about how he was on the ship the Holbert and had been anchored along side the Arizona and other ships in Battleship Row, but were moved to over by the Submarine Base the day before. Just a simple fluke of luck. He's still here and my friend actually exists because of this random twist of fate. He described his witness to this apocalyptic scene, with oil burning on the surface of the sea, and men jumping off of sinking ships, not into water but into fire, and men shooting down their own planes because they were afraid that the Japanese suicide bombers were returning. His words to sum this up were simple. "It was a total mess," he said, shaking his head. 'A total mess' stands in for a lot.

The thing is, that after all these years, after having returned home, worked for the post office, married, raised a daughter, that total mess hasn't ever really gone away. I don't know if it's right to say that this experience trumps all the rest. I hope not. But I was struck by the fact that even in the mind of an elderly man, hard of seeing and almost blind, this memory is still being lived out and interpreted anew.

Also, and maybe somewhat surprisingly, my friend's father still remembers that they were all in the mess that morning and were waiting for their breakfast. They asked, where's our breakfast? And the mess cooks answered, "The Japs are attacking!"

They thought it was a joke. But all these years later, my friend's father remembers, 'We never got our breakfast that day.' Well, I hope that this morning's breakfast made up for that a little. Actually, that was another sweet and unexpected moment. We had come to the end when it was announced that a local company called Gravelle's Boat Company had footed the bill for breakfast. Just a low key thing. Didn't make any big advertisement out of it. But again, no lapse of memory. I will remember that kindness.

So here's to you, Howard Trotno, and to the other men who are still here today, as well as the ones that aren't.

Today at least, we don't forget. We remember.

More Ways than One to be Buried

Over at Adrian McKinty's always excellent The Psychopathology of Everyday Life blog (http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/), they, or I suppose I should say we, have been discussing the recent exhumation of the bones of Garcia Lorca from the mass grave in which he was buried with many more of his compatriots.

It's interesting in this connection that I have just read recently of another Spanish literary light of that era in the latest issue of Tin House, which has the theme of "The Political Future". (Great issue, by the way--full of essays and reflections from all the current literati you'd care to read.) Mark Statman writes of the erasure of the work of poet Jose Maria Hinojosa, a member of the Franco faction who was murdered in prison only days after Lorca himself was killed. Statman himself finds himself at odds with Hinojosa's politics, but is disturbed that the literary work of this man, which was not political, has vanished from our view. You can read his full if brief essay on the subject here:

http://tinhouse.com/mag/issue_current/current_lostfound.htm

It's not so easy, see?

Try to Remember the Kind of September...Because it's Already October

Wouldn't it be funny if this blog itself became a victim of my own lapse of memory? It seems to be headed in that direction lately, anyway. I wonder if anyone has done any research on forgetting the existence of one's own blog? Because you know there have to be a million of them mouldering away untended out there...