The Dandelife Blog

Saturday night I’ll be going to a party, as is the custom this time of year. I’ll also be thinking of my TiVo, who at home will be snagging a little gem for me to watch when I get home. Ali Rap is an upcoming entertainment special on the life and words of Muhammad Ali. They hype for this show is all over the place. There’s some highbrow praise from NPR as well as regular commercial rotation on the Disney network stations (ABC and ESPN) including this article from ESPN the Magazine. (more…)

The art of remembrance as a literary form is called memoir. Alternatively (and less dramatically) we also call it autobiography: literally, “the writing of one’s own life.” Whereas autobiography seems to have an emphasis on getting to the truth of matters, memoir acknowledges that human perception is itself flawed. When writing a memoir, the writer is somehow in cahoots with the reader, knowing little more than what’s printed; the memoir reader is simply along for the ride and the memoirist is free to employ literary technique to make the ride more memorable. Neither side of the reader-writer equation can know what is not known, after all. That’s the problem with memory.

Of course there are many problems with memory. Memory problems range from physiological to pharmacological to psychological. All of our human knowledge has its foundations in memory - the humanities and sciences depend on quick, easy access to memories. The limitations of memory are at the root of our need to invent campfire stories, books and eventually libraries. Memories are best stored in shared social spaces. Anyone suffering from amnesia will tell you, memory is nothing without accessibility.

Here at Dandelife, memory is the factor of demand. Our members come to this site so that they can recollect and relate with one another. You could say memory is our business.  Visitors come to the site to be reminded of events in their own pasts. Together, members as publishers, visitors as readers and us as the venue owners are engaging in a rather old experiment. Dandelife follows in a long tradition of personal story-telling; whether it’s a story told by a constellation, printed matter or in a social network, there are advantages and limitations beyond the medium itself. That is, memory is imperfect. When it is accessible, it is unreliable. When it is inaccessible, it is at time even ‘inconjurable.’ (What’s the word for something you cannot bring yourself to remember? No pun intended.)
For the next couple of weeks I am going to be reading and writing extensively about memory. More specifically, “The Problem with Memory.” I’ll be posting entries that are practical and informative both. They will cover topics ranging from the many types of memory to how memory works, from how to improve memory and retention, to recognizing and dealing with common memory problems such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, I’ll also be writing extensively on how you can preserve your own memories both on this site and elsewhere.

One of the questions that people ask me when they see my Dandelife page is “How do you remember all that stuff?” The short answer is “Dandelife!” After all, that’s why I created this site.

The long answer is something like this…

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Nobody but nobody writes like Nabokov. Perhaps better known as the author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir of his youth called Speak, Memory is a revisited self-translation of an older work called Conclusive Evidence. Self-translated? He originally wrote in French about his youth as a young Russian aristocrat. Then he re-worked some of the memories and language. In the first chapter, he comes ponders the meaning of time:

I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it — just as excited bathers share shining seawater — with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment, quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive.

And then later, pondering the moment he became aware of the arrow of time, in the midst of a joke told by his father:

[The] first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.

Nabokov is the kind of writer who is best taken in very small, undisturbed doses. Don’t both with background music. You needn’t a cup of coffee, or a vista. Nor do you need fresh air. His is the world of all that stuff. You can scarcely read a single page of Nabokov and not feel the need to take a walk and soak it in before the next. It’ll take you a while to finish, but as he also writes, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”

I read about this insanely detailed, very well-written, astutely-researched e-Book on the Beatles Revolver album in this week’s Rolling Stone. Sure enough, I found an insanely detailed, very well-written, astutely-researched e-Book on the Beatles Revolver album at the end of the road. Any student of rock, fan of the Beatles or armchair pop-culturist would love to mosey on down abbey road and download a free copy of this e-Book. It’s long so you may want to print out a few pages and consume over a few nights.
Abracadabra: The Beatles: Revolver