memories

the archivist December 6, 2022

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down […]

the archivist October 30, 2014

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are. –George Eliot, Middlemarch I carried an undeveloped roll of film with me, through moves to no less than 11 houses and apartments, for at least 12 years. I had shot it with a cheap hand-me-down Vivitar camera, […]

the archivist August 22, 2013

Ground Swell Mark Jarman   Is nothing real but when I was fifteen, Going on sixteen, like a corny song? I see myself so clearly then, and painfully– Knees bleeding through my usher’s uniform Behind the candy counter in the theater After a morning’s surfing; paddling frantically To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me, […]

the archivist July 17, 2013

I wasn’t always a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Of course, I knew his music (or so I thought). Who didn’t? Every song on Born in the USA had been a single, and had been played to death, right? And then he did those mediocre movie soundtrack songs in the 90s, which, I was convinced, were actually the […]

the archivist July 7, 2011

J & I have been watching a TV show from the 90s on Netflix. Well, actually, several of them. The one we stream is a show that he learned to love in reruns, not so very long ago; I, on the other hand, occasionally caught a bit of it in its original run (if we […]