It Was 20 Years Ago Today
Ah, the classic intro line to The Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band (which ironically is now celebrating it's 50th anniversary); back then, even their song "When I'm 64" seemed a distant thought to the lads just ready to leave their 20s. But I thought of all of this as my wife watched a special on Lady Diana, her death now 20 years past. At the mention of that, I was again amazed at how time had passed by so quickly. 20 years, I asked. Really? Indeed time can appear to slow down (as in witnessing an accident or in youth as in wanting to turn 18) or speed up (as in waiting for a vacation that seems to take forever to arrive and once there, is over quickly). What is that with our brain and its perception of what we've created, this thing we call time?
Recently, I've begun noticing a flurry of memoir-like books appearing, chronicles of people's lives as they describe their journeys, from aging rock stars to celebrity authors (the historical folks, such as sports fandom and those of historical importance seem to fall into some chasm of niche readers). The bulk of popular memoirs can come from a slew of writers, from Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid to the book I recently mentioned by Alexandra Risen, Unearthed. Even the collection of brief essays by Nicholson Baker (The Way the World Works) is interesting but puzzles me a bit at its popularity although who am I to judge for his writings have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, and The Washington Post. In an interview with the NY Times, it was said of Baker's writing: In an interview that appeared in The Paris Review last year, Nicholson Baker was asked about the importance of realism in his work. “It becomes interesting,” he observed, “to come up with words that wrap around reality’s utility pole.”
Many respected writers and magazines look back, the London Review of Books having its regular sections of "Short Cuts" and "Diary" with writers positing a glimpse of their view of life past or present. But looking back is difficult, or at least difficult to make interesting to another reader or listener. Think of your own life, trying to parse through the minutiae of the everyday and somehow present it to the reader over several hundred pages; was --is-- your life really that interesting? For the majority of us, we tend not to think so, although we're perhaps shortchanging ourselves. Our lives are interesting to us (for the most part) and build on our deeply personal life experiences, seeing something in a new way or witnessing an event (such as the recent solar eclipse that graced a swath of the U,S,). They somehow combine to become stories to share with friends and family, to talk about over a meal or at a gathering; and slowly over the years, they coalesce into a series of tales to both remember and forget. But the task of capturing a diary from early childhood to one's later years in life, well, it would be a Herculean task for most of us; memories twist and turn and become distorted, phrases and advice we thought were quite clear suddenly seem almost fictional and our life stories soon become almost mythical. So how do writers do it? How does a Keith Richards or a Will Durant capture their entire life within several hundred pages? Author Risen limited herself to ten years of her life, while author Sharon Butala keeps writing about her life experiences as she encounters new journeys (the unexpected death of her husband, in a marriage that almost everyone around her said would never work but one which proved all the naysayers wrong, caused her to just release yet another powerful work, Where I Live Now...here's a quick glimpse: Often as I lie down in my bed, pull up the covers, and put out the light, settling in to spend another night alone here in Calgary, Alberta, I yearn to have my husband, Peter, with me again. I yearn not to be alone. But that is an old story, and among people in the last third of their lives, it is anything but unique. But, still, I lie at night and think of the past. I dream of it too --our life on the Great Plains to the east-- and when I do, I wake filled with sadness. Once in a while a tiny part of me will for an instant take me over, allowing me to imagine there is a way to regain the past, but then reality returns, and my inner voice says, You know as well as you know anything on earth that he is gone forever. And yet, I am not sure I truly believe it.)
There are all sorts of books to help one begin to write a memoir, a topic I briefly mentioned awhile back. But it seems that writing a successful memoir is a bit like writing comedy...you have to find the universal points that people can identify with, those details of everyday life today or life as it was; or the outlook has to be unique, some part of life which many are curious about but few have experienced -- working undercover or playing guitar in front of thousands of people, being a host to world leaders or working at a makeshift emergency room in rebel-held territory. And the details have to be tight, tight enough to keep the reader wanting to read just a tiny bit more even if they knew nothing about that time period or that lifestyle. Take this quick example from Baker's writing describing his childhood street: ...some parts of the sidewalk were made of aged concrete, with seams cut into them so that they would crack neatly whenever a growing tree required it of them. These seams made me thing of the molded line running down the middle of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum, which you could buy in a tiny candy store in the basement of an apartment building near where we lived: the silent man there charged a penny for each piece of gum, machine-wrapped in wax paper with triangular corner folds. It had a comic on the inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at. Or, for the same penny, you could buy two unwrapped red candies shaped like Roman coins. These were chewy, and they let light through them when you held them up to the sun, but a red Roman coin couldn't do what a hard pink block of Bazooka gum could as it began to deform itself under the tremendous stamping and squashing force of the first chew: it couldn't make all your saliva fountains gush at once. Jonathan Raban's writing in the London Review of Books gives another example, his own reflection much earlier in time as a child listening to the radio at his mother's country home in England, his dad mysteriously gone and off fighting in a war Raban was too young to comprehend: First came the pips at one-second intervals, then: 'This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the News and this is Alvar Lidell reading it' -- a voice like God, from far-off London. My mother frowned as she listened, while I wriggled around to peer inside the set through the ventilation holes in its fiberboard back. The valves glowed and flickered like a miniature city in the darkness, and the whole mysterious apparatus gave off the smell of its own importance: oil, solder, burned dust, electrochemistry at work. It was magnificently incomprehensible.
Think back on your life, your memories likely as vivid as those above; but getting that down on paper, detail after detail...it's tough. And in the end, would there be enough details to make a book? And even if that were the case, would it be something someone else (other than family and a few friends) would want to read? As Baker wrote in a speech before the opening of the Library Service Center at Duke University: ...sometimes I feel a slight envious resentment rising within when I cruise down a big highway near New York City and I see buildings that have fifty truck bays. What are they holding? They're holding cheese products, or truck parts, or Happy Meal toys, or Pentium computers that will be scrap in five years. They're not holding books. One tank depot or tire warehouse would hold everything that our national library has been sent, free, by publishers and has rejected every year. All those memoirs mixed in with other nonfiction and fiction books alike, all rejected, all carrying the memories or the creations of someone but their hard-fought writings not considered valuable enough or marketable enough by a lone clerk in a lone building, a someone possibly waiting to release his or her own tales of life, even at the ripe old age of 33.
As I watch my mother slowly forget more and more things, I realize that my chances for capturing what memories I may have missed from her grows dimmer and dimmer. Her life, like a memoir lost at sea, is likely as full as it will ever be for me. Are there unanswered questions I should have asked? Probably. But there's no denying that while I watch her approach the end of that moving walkway, I need only look down to realize that I am on that same walkway just a tad farther back, my own life and memories shooting out there like some wild lasso suspended in the air and hoping to land on something; some years hence it may well dawn on somebody else that what shell is left of me is now as sealed and as unattainable as the strongest vault. The amusement park might not yet have closed for me for there are rides and attractions still to experience...but I can vaguely notice the lights turning on in the shops and the sky turning a bit more crimson. It must be what goes on in these memoir writers' minds, to valiantly put down some sort of last gasp effort to grab that ring or to pass that baton. Please someone, take these. But whatever the reason we write or read such memoirs --to educate and learn, to share and to hope, to experience or to want to trade places, or maybe sheer vanity-- each of us is unique and our experiences, as joyous or as horrible as they might be, are pretty much ours alone. There's nothing wrong with that; in truth we should be quite proud of whatever we've become. We are all lucky to still be here, young or old. And as the sun cracks through each morning's chill, we should look forward to finding much more to discover. Go out and make more memories...as George Harrison wrote on the Sgt. Pepper album: We were talking about the space between us all. And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...And the people who gain the world and lose their soul...Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away...When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you. One final note, I remember those Bazooka gum comics...I never laughed at them either.
Recently, I've begun noticing a flurry of memoir-like books appearing, chronicles of people's lives as they describe their journeys, from aging rock stars to celebrity authors (the historical folks, such as sports fandom and those of historical importance seem to fall into some chasm of niche readers). The bulk of popular memoirs can come from a slew of writers, from Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid to the book I recently mentioned by Alexandra Risen, Unearthed. Even the collection of brief essays by Nicholson Baker (The Way the World Works) is interesting but puzzles me a bit at its popularity although who am I to judge for his writings have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, and The Washington Post. In an interview with the NY Times, it was said of Baker's writing: In an interview that appeared in The Paris Review last year, Nicholson Baker was asked about the importance of realism in his work. “It becomes interesting,” he observed, “to come up with words that wrap around reality’s utility pole.”
Many respected writers and magazines look back, the London Review of Books having its regular sections of "Short Cuts" and "Diary" with writers positing a glimpse of their view of life past or present. But looking back is difficult, or at least difficult to make interesting to another reader or listener. Think of your own life, trying to parse through the minutiae of the everyday and somehow present it to the reader over several hundred pages; was --is-- your life really that interesting? For the majority of us, we tend not to think so, although we're perhaps shortchanging ourselves. Our lives are interesting to us (for the most part) and build on our deeply personal life experiences, seeing something in a new way or witnessing an event (such as the recent solar eclipse that graced a swath of the U,S,). They somehow combine to become stories to share with friends and family, to talk about over a meal or at a gathering; and slowly over the years, they coalesce into a series of tales to both remember and forget. But the task of capturing a diary from early childhood to one's later years in life, well, it would be a Herculean task for most of us; memories twist and turn and become distorted, phrases and advice we thought were quite clear suddenly seem almost fictional and our life stories soon become almost mythical. So how do writers do it? How does a Keith Richards or a Will Durant capture their entire life within several hundred pages? Author Risen limited herself to ten years of her life, while author Sharon Butala keeps writing about her life experiences as she encounters new journeys (the unexpected death of her husband, in a marriage that almost everyone around her said would never work but one which proved all the naysayers wrong, caused her to just release yet another powerful work, Where I Live Now...here's a quick glimpse: Often as I lie down in my bed, pull up the covers, and put out the light, settling in to spend another night alone here in Calgary, Alberta, I yearn to have my husband, Peter, with me again. I yearn not to be alone. But that is an old story, and among people in the last third of their lives, it is anything but unique. But, still, I lie at night and think of the past. I dream of it too --our life on the Great Plains to the east-- and when I do, I wake filled with sadness. Once in a while a tiny part of me will for an instant take me over, allowing me to imagine there is a way to regain the past, but then reality returns, and my inner voice says, You know as well as you know anything on earth that he is gone forever. And yet, I am not sure I truly believe it.)
There are all sorts of books to help one begin to write a memoir, a topic I briefly mentioned awhile back. But it seems that writing a successful memoir is a bit like writing comedy...you have to find the universal points that people can identify with, those details of everyday life today or life as it was; or the outlook has to be unique, some part of life which many are curious about but few have experienced -- working undercover or playing guitar in front of thousands of people, being a host to world leaders or working at a makeshift emergency room in rebel-held territory. And the details have to be tight, tight enough to keep the reader wanting to read just a tiny bit more even if they knew nothing about that time period or that lifestyle. Take this quick example from Baker's writing describing his childhood street: ...some parts of the sidewalk were made of aged concrete, with seams cut into them so that they would crack neatly whenever a growing tree required it of them. These seams made me thing of the molded line running down the middle of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum, which you could buy in a tiny candy store in the basement of an apartment building near where we lived: the silent man there charged a penny for each piece of gum, machine-wrapped in wax paper with triangular corner folds. It had a comic on the inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at. Or, for the same penny, you could buy two unwrapped red candies shaped like Roman coins. These were chewy, and they let light through them when you held them up to the sun, but a red Roman coin couldn't do what a hard pink block of Bazooka gum could as it began to deform itself under the tremendous stamping and squashing force of the first chew: it couldn't make all your saliva fountains gush at once. Jonathan Raban's writing in the London Review of Books gives another example, his own reflection much earlier in time as a child listening to the radio at his mother's country home in England, his dad mysteriously gone and off fighting in a war Raban was too young to comprehend: First came the pips at one-second intervals, then: 'This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the News and this is Alvar Lidell reading it' -- a voice like God, from far-off London. My mother frowned as she listened, while I wriggled around to peer inside the set through the ventilation holes in its fiberboard back. The valves glowed and flickered like a miniature city in the darkness, and the whole mysterious apparatus gave off the smell of its own importance: oil, solder, burned dust, electrochemistry at work. It was magnificently incomprehensible.
Think back on your life, your memories likely as vivid as those above; but getting that down on paper, detail after detail...it's tough. And in the end, would there be enough details to make a book? And even if that were the case, would it be something someone else (other than family and a few friends) would want to read? As Baker wrote in a speech before the opening of the Library Service Center at Duke University: ...sometimes I feel a slight envious resentment rising within when I cruise down a big highway near New York City and I see buildings that have fifty truck bays. What are they holding? They're holding cheese products, or truck parts, or Happy Meal toys, or Pentium computers that will be scrap in five years. They're not holding books. One tank depot or tire warehouse would hold everything that our national library has been sent, free, by publishers and has rejected every year. All those memoirs mixed in with other nonfiction and fiction books alike, all rejected, all carrying the memories or the creations of someone but their hard-fought writings not considered valuable enough or marketable enough by a lone clerk in a lone building, a someone possibly waiting to release his or her own tales of life, even at the ripe old age of 33.
As I watch my mother slowly forget more and more things, I realize that my chances for capturing what memories I may have missed from her grows dimmer and dimmer. Her life, like a memoir lost at sea, is likely as full as it will ever be for me. Are there unanswered questions I should have asked? Probably. But there's no denying that while I watch her approach the end of that moving walkway, I need only look down to realize that I am on that same walkway just a tad farther back, my own life and memories shooting out there like some wild lasso suspended in the air and hoping to land on something; some years hence it may well dawn on somebody else that what shell is left of me is now as sealed and as unattainable as the strongest vault. The amusement park might not yet have closed for me for there are rides and attractions still to experience...but I can vaguely notice the lights turning on in the shops and the sky turning a bit more crimson. It must be what goes on in these memoir writers' minds, to valiantly put down some sort of last gasp effort to grab that ring or to pass that baton. Please someone, take these. But whatever the reason we write or read such memoirs --to educate and learn, to share and to hope, to experience or to want to trade places, or maybe sheer vanity-- each of us is unique and our experiences, as joyous or as horrible as they might be, are pretty much ours alone. There's nothing wrong with that; in truth we should be quite proud of whatever we've become. We are all lucky to still be here, young or old. And as the sun cracks through each morning's chill, we should look forward to finding much more to discover. Go out and make more memories...as George Harrison wrote on the Sgt. Pepper album: We were talking about the space between us all. And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...And the people who gain the world and lose their soul...Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away...When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you. One final note, I remember those Bazooka gum comics...I never laughed at them either.
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