"I think I remember this."
#5 - January 1st, 2024, it's 4,805 words, "Post too long for email" thx I luv u all
“Original Flamethrower” - ??:??
On March 14th of 2020, I went to Vermont with some friends to help “flatten the curve” and on April 1st I started to write a newsletter about a video that has since been removed from the internet. It was about four minutes long and was footage of me, my step-brothers, and two of their friends, using a homemade flamethrower (gasoline and a Super Soaker), shot on a Mini-DV camcorder in (I believe) March of 2005. The middle brother added a light piano étude, for ambiance—which I suppose the reason for its interim deletion—and uploaded it to YouTube not long after where it was found, the next November, by their father, whose email helped build out this chronology.
Here’s what I had written: “I grew up in central Connecticut. I qualify the locale to differentiate it from Fairfield County (Greenwich and its kin) and the surrounding wooded and shoreline regions known, around this country, for their particular kind of obscene wealth, because the child in me still feels that, as writer Harold Brodkey said in an interview in 1991, ‘I was supposed to have been a rich boy in some better world,’ and I still possess within my person a large, resentful prick,” though the sentiment of the latter half of the second sentence I’m not entirely sure I stand behind anymore, nor am I entirely sure where I was going. At the bottom of my working file is a list:
BERNIE MAC
TRACY MORGAN
ROBIN WILLIAMS
KATHARINE HEPBURN
outlining the videos I was likely to also include, which I will not be including here so as to not shoot myself in the foot if I intend—which I do—to establish some reasonable pace to keep with writing here.
Earlier this year I went looking for a video of the late rapper Sean Price wandering a grocery store with his friend Dallas Penn (a co-host of the Combat Jack Show, whose titular host passed in 2017). Google has of late become rather difficult to use as an actual search engine unless you are hoping to find a link that is itself actively trying—through the efforts of SEO specialists worldwide—to be found, and so it took me longer to hunt down than I would have imagined, having forgotten the title of the video itself, “Sean Price is Right” (and there being two more, different videos on YouTube of Sean Price grocery shopping, one for Thanksgiving, another for baby food at BJ’s). I had remembered it not being on YouTube and thought it maybe on Vimeo—which it was once, I learned—only to find it, after twenty-minutes of searching from my phone, on dailymotion.com where it had been re-uploaded by “avsgirl69” fourteen years ago. I don’t have much to say about the video itself other than that I find it endlessly funny—both for the transcribable content (for example, a deliberation over which aluminum foil to buy, super strength or heavy duty, articulated through whether Super D would have been better, “at least by name,” than Heavy D, or the following remark about the Scott brand wet wipes he drops into his carriage: “keep some of this in the bathroom…and by the bed—P!”) and its overall, playful self-awareness. (MTV Cribs’ seventeenth—and temporarily final—season, which began airing in October of 2009, featured zero rappers compared to its first season which featured six, one of whom was Master P and his 40,000 sq. ft. home in Baton Rouge; one must imagine it more difficult to hold their tongue in their cheek when their mouth is so full, respectfully). Sean Price (who released a mixtape in 2007 called “Master P” whose opening track is called “6 Dollar Man” and declares him as “the brokest rapper,” a refrain he’d strike throughout his career) who “hadn’t had a hit since ‘96,” alongside three mixtapes and four full-length records, released, with the support of his label, Duck Down Records, more than a dozen parody videos and skits in the last ten years of his life: he gave us his take on Bob Ross and Narudwar, brought a potato he claimed was thrown at Martin Luther King to Chumlee of Pawn Stars, reported live from Hurricane Sandy about his new album (“No matter what, rain, sleet, snow, hail, Mic Tyson is still dropping tomorrow”) and saved MTV Cribs airfare for their team to visit a rental in Park City, UT: “Myspace paid for this, baby. You could have one of these, too.” It would take a long time to work through the available footage of Sean Price, a fact for which I am grateful, though I was no less upset at the thought of this one particular video disappearing forever.
A few years ago, I found that a series of videos NYC radio shock jock Troi Torain aka Star (of the Star and Buc Wild Show) had made for the YouTube channel Vlad TV in 2009 were gone. After a few hours on the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, I was able to salvage a handful, which I stored on an external hard drive in the same folder as—to my surprise—a rip of “Sean Price is Right.” They are short rants where Star, sometimes with Buc Wild, stands in front of a green screen where a slideshow of images snaps along while Star talks up Drake for opening space for a “light-skinned revival” (The Beastie Boys: “remember those losers, they were light-skinned, some people thought they were white”) or apologizes to Mary J. Blige—“oh Queen Mary, supreme ruler of dirty project girls in need of direction”—for “years of being disrespectful, where I once thought you got too much air play from radio stations, I now stand corrected,” and begs her “to put some wheels on your heels, some battery cables on your nipples, and eat this bitch Beyoncé like a plate of baby back ribs in Harlem,” and ends a tirade about the rise of texting culture: “In addition, and for the record, I would like to say, right now, in the last eight months, I have told fifteen bitches ‘I love you’ at three o’clock in the morning, okay? when, in reality, I haven’t been in love since 1985, and that was with a pit bull that I had to put down because he lost a fight.” So far as I remember, there were dozens of these, just as many about drama in the world of music as broader categories, like “coochie,” all gone unless someone who has them saved puts them back out into the world (I’m uncertain as to exactly why I myself haven’t). Whether or not one finds Star entertaining—he is nothing if not unceasingly and astoundingly offensive, the foregoing generous and affable by comparison to, frankly, most of his career (actually, that’s probably why)—he represents and helped define an era in western culture, for better or worse. I mention him and all this less to remark on the facts, challenges, and controversies of one DJ than by way of a lingering preoccupation with how the mid-late aughts were dominated by an air, largely huffed by ignorant boomers, that one must be careful because anything that found its way onto the internet was permanent.
In the spring of 2007 I was arrested, with two friends, for graffiti. Without knowing some of the details, it’s relatively difficult to sort out with just Google, though at one time it was one of the first results when one looked up my name. A few days after the newspaper stories had been printed, I emailed one of the journalists charged with covering it. Mostly I was confused as to our prominent placement in the paper for which he worked, and wanted—in naïve earnestness—to be given some reasonable perspective as to the coverage our story had realized, given the rather light weight of our crime. (It did not help that I had, and would go on to, do worse, at least as legal hierarchies go.) He wrote back, CCing two other people at the paper and a cop from my town, and talked about how we were, yes, being used as a deterrence, of the cops “amaze[ment]” that two of us were students at schools of a certain repute and so “smart enough not to engage in such childish behavior,” that “I'm certain it's embarrassing to have this pop up every time someone Google's your name. Luc, it's a shame but that's life,” and was sure to, before wishing me “All the best in your future endeavors,” remind me how lucky I was not to be one of the potentially dying or wounded serving my country in Iraq and Afghanistan, because I have “another chance” and “Unfortunately, they won't get the same opportunity.” I forwarded his response to the other concerned parties and then my father, to whom I added some remarks that epitomize a time in my psychosocial development but are not worth appending here because, now, this is all more easily found, even if my feelings, when my better angels are tired and lazy, remain the same.
It feels odd, drawing lines to perceptibly fading points in history; it complicates already complicated feelings of conflicted lamentation. Death, it seems, however sad, has never been that difficult to wrap my mind around—one just needs enough gauze—but the notion that something could have been preserved but wasn’t, whether due to indifference, negligence, or naïveté, can be maddening, particularly in the digital age in which storage capacities increase against the exponentially decreasing size of containers. So much is saved and so much more is lost, the deciding factors seemingly weighed against gold, so dense and so bright. Who remembers Stanley Elkin?1 Who remembers Harold Brodkey? MFA programs and loud enthusiasts drum up readers for these middle-west writers here and there, but time marches on, no? A Dutch news program, somewhere between 1993 and 1995, produced a video profile of Brodkey and eventually it disappeared from the internet. In 2015, I anticipated this, forgot, and in March of this year, 2023, found it on an old laptop (whose battery had exploded but files were not lost), and uploaded it to YouTube. I’m sure it’s stored somewhere else, too, but what’s storage without access? I met Howard Stern’s archivist once and she’d signed a strong NDA and could only tell me she enjoyed her job. Brodkey’s first novel, The Runaway Soul, took 32 years to write, and for a majority of that time was the most written-about novel that did not exist, or so go the claims. In 1988, he told New York Magazine, “I associate being recognized with being dead. I write like someone who wants to be posthumously discovered,” as though he’d never been photographed by Richard Avedon or claimed to have slept with Marilyn Monroe. (When asked how it was, he said, “Well, it's not that much fun going to bed with someone who has 10 times more sexual confidence than you do.”) It’s an understandable sentiment, that one is besieged by a semi-conscious desire (—or fairer measurement of one’s odds—) underlying the more conscious labors, step by step, of one’s time: to remain invisible and so without the need to account for how a life has been spent, to say nothing of expectations, both of oneself and from others. “Publishing would interfere with working on it,” he said, which reminds me of the joke at the end of Annie Hall, “A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken, and the doctor says, why don't you turn him in? and the guy says, I would but I need the eggs.”
“I was slapped and hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this,” opens The Runaway Soul. “Well, I imagine it anyway—” I’ve listened to the two-part interview of his with the great Michael Silverblatt of KCRW maybe a dozen times, but I always remember the remark I quoted three years ago as “I was supposed to have been [born] a rich boy in some better world,” and mistake it for having been said by Brodkey, not Silverblatt (who is perhaps painfully aware of Brodkey’s having been adopted, bloodline relegated to coincidence in the circumstances of one’s own rearing). They’re talking about “European irritants”—Elias Canetti, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank.2 Brodkey misremembers a line from Firbank’s Vainglory (“With a string of pearls Mrs Shamefoot flicked at a passing bat.”) as “She flicked her pearls at a passing bat,” and then shifts the conversation, momentarily, from a question of the “irritants or the non-irritating” to “the rich and the poor” (“poo-er”). Looking for himself in the left-wing or proletarian writers when he was young, he said, “But that’s not what I’m like, I’m like the ones who have mothers with money,” and Silverblatt says, “I was supposed to have been a rich boy in some better world,” and Brodkey agrees, “Yeah, me too.” Brodkey was born Aaron Roy Weintraub; his mother died when he was seventeen-months-old, and his father—an “illiterate, a junk man, a semi-pro fighter,” who said he shot off the face of a Ku Klux Klansman but definitively drank—let his second cousins, Doris and Joseph, adopt Aaron as Harold. Joseph suffered a stroke when Harold was nine and was an invalid until Harold was fourteen, when he died; Doris came down with cancer the year before the stroke and died by the time Harold was nineteen. “Reading about Mia Farrow and Woody Allen,” Brodkey writes in an essay, “The Woody Allen Mess, “gives me the willies, but that is because I am an adopted child. Well, an adopted child grown old; I am sixty-one at the moment.” He goes on, “For twenty years now, I have been writing in the voice and persona of a character named Wiley Silenowicz, who was adopted at the age of two, greatly damaged, ill, silent, beaten, semiautistic, starved. He was adopted into a family where there was a blood child already in place,” and, later back to Woody and Soon-Yi and Mia, “One forgets what life-and-death matters these are in individual lives.” (The lives to which he alludes, of course—“I have written about this”—are those of Aaron, Harold, and Wiley.) “Part of the patriarchal setup is to take away responsibility for the lives interfered with, is to forestall tragedy while causing dislocation by the imposition of will. Considering what a compromise life is, the patriarchal compromise isn’t so bad,” he writes, as though the difference between Alvie and Aaron was only their patrimony, or between Woody and Wiley were only three letters, smack dab in the middle, both men figures who reverberate from the dense fists of will, both men victim and violator, at least in the realm of art. “Life is always a defense against grief. You’re below sea level, like the Netherlands,” Brodkey quips in 1988 before he publishes his novel three years later, and dies in five more from AIDS. For some reason I am thinking of how I once said to a room of about ten people, “I’m not a control freak,” and then, two weeks later, to a slightly different but also identical group of people in the same room—the basement of a north Brooklyn synagogue—“I am a control freak,” this not so much a testament to the notorious and flat healing faculties of time, but rather time’s relationship with will.
“Proust had a bad memory,” wrote Beckett in 1957 of France’s once-living memorial to lost time; born in 1871, he was familiar with both Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward James Muggeridge) and Étienne-Jules Mary, the first to have really captured movement in some reproducible form, a gauntlet-thrown challenge—in real time—to the existing formal concepts of realism, and, what’s more, he lived in 1985 less than a kilometer from where the first motion pictures were projected in Paris. “The photograph possesses an evidential force [whose] testimony bears not on the object but on time,” wrote Barthes in 1980, to say nothing of the horse captured, all four hooves off the ground at once, as though mid-flight. Proust worked on À la recherche du temps perdu up until his death in 1922, about two hundred years after the publication of Robinson Crusoe’s memoir3 about being twenty-eight years shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Venezuela, and Lemuel Gulliver’s memoir4 about his travels to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, Japan, and to the Land of the Houyhnhnms. In a world of photographs and moving pictures, one wouldn’t want to hear tell of a talking horse exclaiming, in his native tongue, “take care of thy self, gentle Yahoo,” they would want proof. Will in accordance with the pursuits of truth; will in cahoots with time and tool: I will this moment into some form of permanence. The commonplace antagonistic retort, “pics or it didn’t happen,” came about in the early aughts on message boards teeming with the already terminally online (of which I was one), and presaged a time—WorldStarHipHop launched a couple years later, Instagram another five—when everyone really did have the means by which to record their every moment and thought and share it with the world. On Kawara’s postcards and telegrams and maps, once a strange revelation, have been relegated to a few rows on endless spreadsheets sold to better curate reminders of how few minutes there are left to buy the life you’ve always (you think) wanted; in the meantime, it helps to share the minutiae so you’re not—by your community or your market—forgotten. Machines remember better than you or I; they even make a point of showing it off, knowing—because having been built so—the pain of forgetting what one wanted to remember; we do not keep track of time, clocks do. More and more we hand over the burden of memory to our tools, but no one in their right mind would ask to be like Borges’ Funes the Memorious who “remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it,” keeping both the wheat and chaff of every instant in life life which became “only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Borges’ aestheticization of himself as Borges writes, “I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”
I believe I was early on drawn to writing by the illusion of control in the articulation of thoughts and feelings, as though if I could get them down and ordered right I would for once be understood—hell, me and a billion others—and I find it difficult to do not only because every word precipitates the idiomatic head-scratching of “what’s the word” frustration, but because it requires, after so much time spent in careful deliberation, the absolute surrender of all control. It is both a relief and pain. “The idea that his suffering will cease is more unbearable than that suffering itself,” wrote Beckett about Proust, but this could just as easily have been said of Brodkey; 32 years working on one book is a whole life. “I think I remember this”—what a strange claim. There are a few novels where the narrator recounts their own birth, but it isn’t exactly common. Tristram Shandy goes back even further, narrating his famously interrupted conception that “scattered and dispersed the animal spirits” when his mother asked his father, mid-hump, “Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind-up the clock?” Tristram does right by his reader, though, and clarifies the trajectory of this genetic anecdote, leaving out—by necessity—its impact on the culture: “Alas, reputable, hoary clocks, that have flourished for ages, are ordered to be taken down by virtuous matrons, and to be disposed of as obscene lumber, exciting to acts of carnality!” writes a disgruntled clock-maker whose business suffered in the less than one year after The Life and Opinions was first printed. “Nobody will know how the time goes, nor which the hour of prayer, the hour of levee, the hour of mounting guard...and we must be prepared for the reign of that dreadful being so long foretold.”5 Italo Calvino quotes Carlo Levi paraphrasing Giuseppe Gioachino Belli—“Death is hidden in clocks”—a line from one of 2,279 sonnets that Anthony Burgess claims were familiar to James Joyce, author of that Irish novel known for stretching the boundaries of perceived time. Walter Shandy may have owned a clock and kept his copulations by it, but it wasn’t until Proust and Joyce and Thomas Sterns Eliot, “chief poet of the alarm clock,” (Kenner) when the world, in concert, began to count the ever moving present in earnest. For “indeed there will be time,”
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea
echoing Ecclesiastes 3, “a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant,” pluck, kill, heal, break, build, weep, laugh, mourn, dance, cast, gather, embrace, refrain, get, lose, keep, cast, rend, sew, silence, speak, love, hate, war, and peace. “Indeed, there will be time.” Sterne fights death by fighting time by digressing, says Levi: “if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and torturous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows—perhaps death may not find us;” Tristram isn’t born until halfway through the book, thought dead, and christened as such because the chamber maid couldn’t remember Trismegistus. Sterne filled time with more than it can hold because only what can be held can be lost, and because he didn’t have our means of storage. Proust, Joyce, Eliot—“At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool”—all felt this, benefactors of new ways to save “time present and time past[…]in time future,” Brodkey and myself both nodes in the wreckage of time now held apace by quartz that oscillates at 32,768 cycles per second. Clocks keep time in clicks like cameras. A particle of light takes 0.000000000000000000000000247 seconds to travel across a single atom. Last year—it is now January 1st, 6:58 7:52 8:19 8:39 9:01 in the morning—a camera clocked me doing 30 in a 25 and the state of New York sent me a bill for $50. “A story will not, by and large, work as well as a clock,” writes Stuart Sherman, but don’t these new ways of holding onto history just mean that we will? That where there’s a way there’s a will? Or that to imagine one’s own birth is only as far fetched as one can throw the book in which it’s print?
If Brodkey is right, that “Life is always a defense against grief,” than grief here is perhaps less the lamentation of Achilles than long-winded Wiley’s obstinate assertion, “I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning”—not the loss of what one knew, but knowing what one has lost and refusing to let it go. This can be dangerous; again: how many people remember Harold Brodkey, “the poorest writer, you know, with my kind of status, that's ever lived.” Who, besides me, even knew that video was gone? Time can lay bare the tricky pain of one’s own will. Photographs capture images differently from mirrors. Somehow over the two weeks between those nights in the synagogue basement, hard as I tried to stay my course, I realized everywhere I was happy to relinquish control was only everywhere else from where I refused to not.
When the Wichita Lineman Glen Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s he wrote and recorded his last song, “I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” the title of which states outright the song’s whole thrust: I will not grieve because I will not remember there is anything to grieve, hammering at Keats: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” Recalibrating my earlier remark, that death sounds fine, but forgetting a kind of torture, I’d amend the latter half to side with Borges: forgetting brings the gift of thought. Some things are more permanent than others, like scars. Homes burn down and entire histories are lost; one more dumb move and what would’ve happened to the home my step-brothers step-sister and father all lived in? What would be in its place—out there, in the woods of central Connecticut, and here?
I am sad the flamethrower video is gone, and that the memory of the evening fades too, but I am grateful for the opportunity to say with Wiley—“I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—” and in its place erect a brief monument to trying, these words a shred of one small piece of time in life.
Hnuy illa nyha maiah Yahoo, and Happy New Year!
Luc
“His hope had been for a peaceful afterlife, something valetudinarian, terminally recuperative, like his last years in the Home perhaps, routinized, doing the small, limited exercises of the old, leaving him with his two bits worth of choice, asking of death’s nurses that his pillows be fluffed, his bed raised inches or lowered, and on nice mornings taking the sun, watching game shows on television in the common room, kibitzing bridge, hooked rugs, the occupational therapies, the innocuous teases and flirtations of the privileged doomed. And hearing the marvelous gossip of his powerless fellows, his own ego—though he’d never been big in that line—sedated, sedate, nival, taking an interest in the wily characters of others, in their visitors and their visitors’ calm embarrassments. He could have made an afterlife of that, not even arrogating to himself wisdom, some avuncular status of elder statesman, content to while away the centuries and millennia as, well, a sort of ghost. It would have been, on a diminishing scale, like hearing the news on the radio, reading the papers. A sort of ghost indeed. Dybbuk’d into other peoples’ lives, their gripes and confidences a sort of popular music. What could be better? Death like an endless haircut.” In his Paris Review interview, he said, “I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.…I’d rather be a putter-inner than a taker-outer,” and I agree.
The others mentioned: Bertolt Brecht, Italo Svevo, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green (B: “too sentimental…that’s Updike’s man,” S: “Oh, Updike is sentimental, but I don’t think Green is”), Thomas Bernhard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isaac Babel, Eugenio Montale, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The link, one word before—to “Peabody’s Improbable History”—was my first encounter with the story of Robinson Crusoe, however slight its resemblance to the novel by Defoe; it is from an episode of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends I had recorded on VHS and watched over and over as a child, and is infinitely funnier than I remembered, which was not necessarily at all. This took more than five minutes to hunt down, and required that I look for Rocky and Bullwinkle on archive.org and navigate to the specific episode. I have a more clear memory of Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, and abstract ones of Boris and Natasha. The clip at the beginning of this note has a wonderful moment where you can see the voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle as guests on a radio show introducing a song by KISS.
Both of these books were originally published without their actual author’s names. “The reader is meant to respond to Crusoe's book exactly as Crusoe responded to Friday's footprint,” wrote Hugh Kenner. “He is to assume that the system of reality accessible to him contains one more man than he had previously surmised.” There was no reason to think Crusoe not a real man and the story of “my reign or my captivity, which you please,” whose “editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it” to not be exactly as described: “How strange a chequer work of Providence is the life of man!” “There is an Air of Truth apparent though the whole; and indeed the Author was so distinguished for his Veracity, that it became a Sort of Proverb among his Neighbors at Redriff, when any one affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it,” wrote Gulliver’s cousin, Richard Sympson, a man who did not exist about a man who did not exist. Even Dr. Johnson died not knowing to whom A Tale of a Tub was attributable.
And then blames it on Laurence Sterne’s being Irish! “Old England is not guilty of the Birth of so fell a monster.”