We Can Remember It For You Piecemeal

I do feel as though I might be playing more games again soon. I'm feeling that itch. Today, though, I don't have anything to report on that front so here's something on ephemerality instead. 

It's something I'm always aware of. Keeping a blog that records your momentary interests and holds them in stasis is altogether too similar to keeping a diary to avoid it. I used to think and sometimes said out loud that one of the blessings of a blog is that it allows you to revisit your past but, like Monk considering his idiosyncracies, I now wonder if that's not both a blessing and a curse.

I certainly find it uncomfortable to see just how wonderful I once thought things I now don't consider all that great at all. The overwhelming power of novelty is all too clear in the back pages of this blog. Contrapuntally, it's concerning to observe just how many times I say the same thing without seeming to realize it's not just not a new idea, it's not even a new idea to me.

The same, only more so, applies to all that writing I did back in the 'eighties and 'nineties. Not the fiction which, apart from a handful of contemporary references, feels moderately timeless now I revisit it, but the endless lists of favorite things and all those cultural opinions I couldn't keep to myself. 

I was brought to thinking about all this when I came across a file on an old floppy disk yesterday, the full text of a review of the year I did for the APA back in 1998. The year before online gaming swallowed me whole.

The first thing I noticed with discomfort was how much more I'd been doing then in terms of going out and participating. Cinema, live music, visting friends, foreign travel, rummaging through the detritus of other peoples' lives at all kinds of sales and in all kinds of stores. Of all those activities, I think the only one to survive the onset of live gaming was the travel. It took a pandemic to put an end to that.

Still, as much of that drifting down can be laid at the grave of youth as blamed on gaming. I was turning forty then and after that watershed many people, maybe most people, experience a sharp decline in interest in anything that takes them out after dark. Or out of the house at all.

It's later, when retirement arrives, that filling up the time requires the taking up of hobbies and activities. Or so I've heard. Personally, I have more to do than I can find the hours for and that's just here at home. Still, old people do go out more, I believe. Until they can't, of course.

So, shelve the angsting over age and lost engagement. That's not what really set me back when I heard myself speaking across a gap of more than a decade and a half. What surprised, maybe slightly shocked me was the intensity with which then-me recommended books and music and movies I now couldn't remember at all.

And these weren't just passing fancies like the tunes I share here every couple of weeks. I already know plenty of those barely ring any bells with me even a few months on, much less that they'll last seventeen years. No, remember this was my Pick of the Year round-up. These were supposedly the works of art that had had the most impact on me over the preceding twelve months. You'd think I might at least remember the names...

Here's an example. Talking about all the books I'd read that year

"Best of the lot, though, was Jean Thesman's The Last April Dancers, a novel so bleak it could almost be called Plathian."

Anyone heard of it? Anyone? Bueller?

I had to look it up. It was apparently my favorite novel of 1998 but I didn't recognize the name of the author or the title of the book. And guess what? After now I've looked it up I still don't.

Here's the entry on Goodreads. It comes with a handy thumbnail biography of Jean Thesman, who died in 2016 at the age of 86, " leaving behind a significant legacy in young adult literature." She wrote around 40 novels and was known for her "lyrical style, emotional depth, and strong female characters".

I can see why I rated the book so highly. I just don't get why I can't remember anything about it, not even that it existed, not least since I apparently found the experience of reading it "so harrowing I twice had to stop reading it to build up courage to carry on" . You'd think something like that would leave a lasting impression but it seems you'd be wrong.

I do read a lot of books and I do find most of them very hard to recall in detail but in most cases a glimpse of the cover or at most a glance at the blurb will quickly bring a flurry of images and incidents rushing back, even after many years. This one? Not a damn thing. 

Now I feel I need to go look for more of Jean Thesman's work but despite her success it seems there's not much left in print, even in her homeland USA. Used copies, if you can find them, are already acquiring collector's price-tags, especially in hardback. Missed my chance there, it seems.

Of course, it may be that I already have a copy of The Last April Dancers, somewhere in the house. I certainly have most of the other "juveniles" I praised in that 1998 round-up. I'd been going through a phase of scooping them up whenever I saw them, mainly in charity shops where, at the time they were ubiquitous. You never, ever see them now. There's little as ephemeral as a popular YA novel.

Still on my shelves from that 1998 list:  M.E. Kerr (If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever?  and The Son of Someone Famous) and Barbara Wersba (Tunes For A Small Harmonica  and  Crazy Vanilla). I was only thinking about re-reading Barbara Wersba last week, as it happens. As for "the left field Waltons -go- Survivalist ethos of Cynthia Voigt and her epic Tillerman family saga", I have re-read at least a couple of those since 1998. I can remember all of that lot, vaguely, and yet in the year I first read them all, The Last April Dancers supposedly made the greatest impression. Now it's the one I might as well never have read at all.

From books to music. It's a truism that music's far easier to revisit than fiction. It's all in the length. Three minutes for a pop song; three days for a novel.

And surely to god you'd expect anyone to remember their favorite song of an entire year! I mean, okay, maybe they might not have it in mind but if they saw the name of the band or the title of the song, they'd at least recognize and presumably remember they liked it, right?

Guess what my favorite song of 1998 was, according to my 1998 yearly review? I mean, I took the trouble to put it in print so it has to be true...

I say that because I'm seriously questioning it now. According to what I wrote at the time,  "If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune". 

The what now? Is that a style? A genre?

No, it's a band. Here's "the Slacker tune" I was talking about.

It's called "Scared". It got to #36 in the UK in 1997, so it didn't even come out in the year I was writing about. That's what happens when you buy all your CDs from bargain bins. 

Slacker are at least a step ahead of poor old Jean Thesman in that once I'd gone to YouTube and listened to Scared I did vaguely remember it. And I do like it, even now. Even if Ihaven't thought about it in seventeen years. 

I find it very hard to believe it was the best thing I heard in the whole of 1998, though. Hard as in completely freakin' impossible. It's progressive house ffs!

Here's the full list of my favorite singles of 1998: 

"On CD, my favourite singles were Scared (Slacker); Song 2 (Blur); Glorious (Goya Dress); Kowalski (Primal Scream); Lazy (Suede) Rhino Rays E.P. (Dawn of the Replicants); Ginger  (David Devant and his Spirit Wife);  Pussycat  (Mulu) and  On the Soft (Magicdrive). If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune, but the third track on the Goya Dress  single, 20th Century Box, is pretty dam' magnificent."

Can you believe I rated that Slacker tune more highly than Song 2? Had I been hit in the head?

Not only can I can remember six of those eight songs very clearly (More, actually, since the Dawn of the Replicants CD is an EP.) but I've listened to all of them fairly consistently ever since and several have had their charms exposed here on the blog. How the heck did I think Slacker was the best of them if I then never listened to the damn thing again?

And here's the weirdest part: my runner-up is one of the others I have no memory of at all!  When I read that yesterday, I had no clue who Goya Dress were (Still don't, in fact.) and no memory of any track on their CD single, let alone the third, which presumably was the equivalent of a second B-side.

I listened to that one yesterday as well. It's good. I certainly wouldn't pick it now over On The Soft or Song 2, though.

What am I supposed to read into all that? that my tastes have changed even though my tastes haven't changed? That back then I had good range but poor focus? That my memory is terrible except when it's completely fine?

Dunno. I'll finish with something a bit more encouraging, for my mental state, anyway: movies. It seems in 1998 I was still going to the cinema often enough to have opinions based on experience. And what's more I can remember the movies I wrote about and going to see them at the cinema. Maybe it's that that sticks them in the mind.

"Films, then.  The one I remember most clearly is When We Were Kings, which I found to be a magical recreation of fragmentary memories and images."

I went to see that one, a documentary on Muhammed Ali's infamous Rumble in the Jungle, with my mother, who's always been a fan. I saw it at The Arnolfini, a gallery and arthouse cinema in Bristol. I remember the seats being very uncomfortable. The movie was great, though.

And finally, because I laughed when I read it and to show how much more snarky I used to be back then, my mini-review of the film I liked least in 1998:

"Most disappointing film, by far, was L.A. Confidential, which was pot-boiler twonk; the performances were ordinary, except for Kim Basinger's, which was too artificial and stilted to rise that far, (and would have been insulting to the memory of Victoria Lake, had Basinger actually resembled the Girl With the Peekaboo Bangs in any way whatsoever, which she patently did not); the photography was dull, not even a hint of the Technicolor sheen the reviews lauded; the direction was functional and uninvolving; the script was a mish-mash of incoherent cliche, simultaneously simple to follow and confusing (almost as if it had been very badly cobbled together from the plots of two or three complicated novels, in fact); worst of all was the ludicrous, prolonged shoot-out ending which actually made me feel angry for having paid money and wasted two hours of my life just to get to that climax of banality. All in all, I didn't much like it." 

Even now, I remember it as being two of the most tedious hours I've ever spent in a cinema. My opinion on the film has never shifted although I've had a few quite heated arguments with people about it, the most recent being this year at work. Nothing remotely ephemeral about it 

My opinion, that is. The movie's ephemeral as hell.