…

Steve Paulson is on the radio, on “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” talking to Jill Price, a 42-year-old woman who can remember with perfect clarity every day of her life.  Someone asks her what happened on May 1, 1990, say, and she rattles off the day’s events as if they took place last week.  No one can figure out why she’s able to do this, and of course I’m skeptical, because for all we know she could be a brilliant con artist who’s very good at faking this uncanny talent.  But the thing that’s most convincing to me is that she hates her capacity for total recall.  She says that as she remembers all the things she’s done as if they happened yesterday, she regrets all the wrong, misguided she’s done as if they happened yesterday.

Memories are supposed to fade, and I suspect that forgetting is a function that ensures our mental health.  If everything I did in college, in high school, and even before then, were as immediate to me now as the conversation I had last night about Milwaukee’s Best, I don’t think I could live with myself.

I’m interested in Jill Price’s memoir, maybe even enough to read it, because unless I’m mistaken one of the things that memoirs hinge on is the fickleness of memory; the uncertainty of an author’s capacity to remember is part of what makes the writing a challenge, and it helps to define the form.  You know you’re reading a memoir when the author resorts, for the sake of remembering, for the sake of getting things right, to describing photographs relevant to the subject at hand, to admitting the haziness of a memory.  You can have a memoir with that element missing, but still, I wonder how a flawless memory affects the attempt to work in this form.

From Wikipedia:  “The claim of Price’s perfect memory has been contested as manifesting merely as an obsessive compulsion with herself and her own life and past, and she seems not to have any extraordinary ability to memorize things not related to them, and shows no signs of above-normal ability to memorize new data not related to her own life.”  Sounds likely enough to me.

More about Mark Sanford

As I inhabited my cage this morning, curiosity took hold of me and I followed a web site link to another web site where I read the e-mails sent by South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to his mistress south of the border, like the Frank Sinatra song “South of the Border.”

What a bad writer.  It is no wonder, when he told his wife that rather than party with Argentinians he was going to isolate himself (like I do in my cage) and work on his writing, she believed him.

I’ve been reading essays by Gore Vidal, and in one he discusses the art of reviewing a book so as to indicate how poorly written is the book under review; he indicates one such reviewer who would simply quote strategically from the text and leave the excerpt there, without comment, for the reader to marvel at its poverty of eloquence on his or her own.  I haven’t perfected it yet, but here is my first attempt at this, from one of Sanford’s emails:  “You are glorious and I hope you really understand that.”

Imagine, then, that you read an e-mail from your secret American lover, and after he implores you to comprehend your own gloriousness, he tells you this:  “You do not need a therapist to help you figure your place in the world. You are special and unique and fabulous in a whole host of ways that are worth a much longer conversation.”  Not only are fabulousness, uniqueness and specialness qualities that do not necessarily rule out therapy; one might wonder why, if Sanford is serious concerning the recipient’s full comprehension of her glory, he does not spend more time addressing this oversight.  Why move on, so immediately, to trashing therapy?

The answer, of course, is plain:  any worthwhile therapist would tell this poor woman, as soon as the subject arose, that the first thing she should do with her life is to ditch the governor of South Carolina.

But the governor of Montana – that’s another story.

South Carolina

The thing I like most about the governor of South Carolina going to Argentina to cheat on his wife is that he told his wife that, rather than have sex with a different person, he was taking some time off to write.  The equivalent excuse for me would be to tell SW that I was going to meet with a state legislator, when I instead intend to travel south of the border for an illicit interlude.  But I’m not into that sort of thing.  I am not a politician.  I am not Jimmy McNulty.

Since when is going away to write an appropriate lie for a cheating politician to tell his wife?  What would stop him from doing that at his office?  Must one retreat from the world, seek the solace of quietude, enter the sphere of the Muse, so that one can better compose legislation?

Moviez

SW and I went to see “The Hangover” last night. It made me wish I were eight years younger, because then I might have liked some of it.  Probably not, though.

Memoir

This is the sign in front of a nightclub in Missouri.  When I am finally done writing my memoir, I will go there and have a good time.

Spanish class

Virginia Woolf writes, “Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary.”  If she’s right, then what will keeping blogs get us, three centuries from now?

Up!

I slept 8-1/2 hours last night and I feel better than I did yesterday.  I think the trick to not letting a class you have to take but don’t want to that lasts from 10-12 every day from getting to you is to wake up early enough that it feels less like the first significant thing you do in the day and more like a fleeting nuisance in your daily life.  We’ll see if it works!

More of New Orleans

This is a bicycle SW and I saw in New Orleans.  We thought it might be made of wicker.  I envied its sturdiness, because my bike is made out of straw.

Late in the night, on Bourbon Street, we ate these oysters:

And I missed my friends:

Breakfast #3

I took a trip to New Orleans last week, and came back engaged, which was almost as life-altering as this breakfast I ate.

iPodz

When I am at the airport, and I see that iPods are being sold in vending machines for hundreds of dollars each, I can’t help recognizing how much money there is in the world that I don’t have.