That was fun--now what?

Awhile back I posted my fear that this blog would become a victim of my own forgetfulness, and wondered about all the forgotten blogs out there. Although its early demise has turned out to be a false alarm, Slate magazine currently has an article about one tweet Twitters and mentions in passing the link to a blog dedicated to one post blogs.

Now the reason for these abandoned twitters and blogs is probably boredom and lack of self-discipline more than forgetfulness, but I'm sure that a lapse of memory does play into most of them after awhile...

Check out that One Post Wonder blog by the way. It looks good.

Speak, Memory--but don't say too much

I think I mentioned awhile ago that I have come up with several ideas for post here that don't involve too much work on my part. Here's another.

When I read Nabokov's Speak, Memory in the not so distant past, I came across this article from Salon Magazine, which supplements his story a little.

All families have secrets, and I suppose all writers suppress certain aspects about their family that are hard for them to admit, for whatever reasons. However, when you invoke memory deliberately, you are setting a higher bar for yourself, and editing out your younger brother in the kind of ways Nabokov apparently did involves some effort.

I admire Nabokov as a writer, though my reading of the novels is patchy at best. I did not care for Speak, Memory, though. I am wonder if this particular lapse of memory may hold some of the reasons why.

It Never Really Went Away, You Just Forgot About It

Or that's the explanation over at Slate.com about what happened to the avian flu that everyone was panicked by a few years ago. Pediatrician Sydney Spieisel's account of this is here.. On the one hand, it's lazy of me to just let him tell it, but on the other, you know he knows a lot more about this than I do.

Now that swine flu has reared its ugly head, we are thinking once again about deadly flus. But if it peters out, and I certainly hope it does, we will all put it on the back burners of our minds again.

Luckily for us, sometimes the organizational aspect of society works a little differently than our own small brains--in other words, our collective mind isn't so easily diverted by the next new thing. Many things have been thought through by the health care professionals while we as individuals forgot about this--things like how to distribute anti-viral medicines on a mass scale and how and when to impose a quarantine. So, as a result of the avian flu scare, we are better prepared to deal with a pandemic than we would have been otherwise.


Here's hoping you don't get any of these scary flus. And by the way--Gesundheit!

Past Continuous

At times I feel that of my several blogs, this is the one that ends up languishing on the vine. But in the past couple of weeks I've had several great ideas for topics. Great, because none of them involve a whole lot of work on my part!

I've been following Sucharita Sarkar's constantly thought-provoking blog Past Continuous for awhile now, though it is in some ways the opposite of this one--it's all about memory. But her latest post brings the two themes together: Her question to us all is "Do you remember when you first forgot something?" You can answer her question here.

Or I suppose I should say, you can try to. Remembering about forgetting is, I find, a slippery proposition.

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.