Random
Splat in the Memory
From Strange-1's Flickr
This happened to my daughter, who is under 2, two weeks ago. She is still talking about it: “I-cream fell. I-cream. FELL. I. Cream. ISE. FELL.” When she wakes up, it’s one of the first things she says, and repeats, as though she’d relived the experience during her sleep. If something else falls, she mentions the ice cream fall again. It has become Something in her mind, an event, perhaps a trauma, certainly a point of reference. An image that has stayed.
It has been asked before, but it’s worthwhile to re-up: what is one image from a book that has become indelible in your mind?
And here’s the B-Side: do we put too much importance on “the memorable image,” or “memorability” in general, with regard to the books we read? Are the ones that stay with us automatically “better”? Because I’ve read plenty of books that have absorbed me fully in the reading, in the moment, but that seem to vaporize as soon as I’m done. Are such works somehow inferior? Which ones are you more likely to re-read, the ones that you remember, or the ones that you don’t? Is re-read value adequate for determining a book’s worth?
Tags: haunt, image, memorability, value
the image i think about the most is when moldenke is dying, he chooses to be an individual and jumps off the boat.
I remember the basic plot of Kelly Link’s ‘Stone Animals’ from Magic For Beginners, but there’s one image that sticks out in my mind and will not leave: the pregnant protagonist repeatedly painting her walls, while wearing a gas mask.
It’s just so lovely and so strange and so firmly pressed into my mind.
for the past 5 years, every day: Jarry’s baboon Bosse de Nage saying “Ha-ha.”
lately intermingled with Roubaud preparing jellies.
My 4-year-old daughter pressed a Tupperware lid to her face today and said, “I’m wearing this so I can’t smell you.” I think a writer who, competing with all the visuals of late-capitalist life, manages to lodge an image in your mind without even using pictures, has worked some magic.
“‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
ALSO:
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Almost all of the books I have read have become air over time. I like air, though. I need that. The month of February during Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom is memorable. I have used that book so much it has become sand. I’m sunbathing on it right now.
The scene in 100 Years of Solitude where lovelorn Pietro Crespi has committed suicide by thrusting his cut wrists into a vat of benzoin! All the windup toys and clocks in his shop are wound up and making an incredible din! For ten years, I have thought about this almost daily. What a rococo way to die.
I have not read the book in the original, but the translation is fantastic, and I think general a part of the memorability for me is in the word choices (in this case clearly the translator’s).
a tangerine floating in a pool of black oil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JfMCBh1sJQ
the image i think about the most is when moldenke is dying, he chooses to be an individual and jumps off the boat.
I remember the basic plot of Kelly Link’s ‘Stone Animals’ from Magic For Beginners, but there’s one image that sticks out in my mind and will not leave: the pregnant protagonist repeatedly painting her walls, while wearing a gas mask.
It’s just so lovely and so strange and so firmly pressed into my mind.
I probably care(d) more about Moldenke than any other fictional character.
for the past 5 years, every day: Jarry’s baboon Bosse de Nage saying “Ha-ha.”
lately intermingled with Roubaud preparing jellies.
My 4-year-old daughter pressed a Tupperware lid to her face today and said, “I’m wearing this so I can’t smell you.” I think a writer who, competing with all the visuals of late-capitalist life, manages to lodge an image in your mind without even using pictures, has worked some magic.
Me too. Moldenke will remain.
“‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
ALSO:
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Almost all of the books I have read have become air over time. I like air, though. I need that. The month of February during Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom is memorable. I have used that book so much it has become sand. I’m sunbathing on it right now.
The scene in 100 Years of Solitude where lovelorn Pietro Crespi has committed suicide by thrusting his cut wrists into a vat of benzoin! All the windup toys and clocks in his shop are wound up and making an incredible din! For ten years, I have thought about this almost daily. What a rococo way to die.
I have not read the book in the original, but the translation is fantastic, and I think general a part of the memorability for me is in the word choices (in this case clearly the translator’s).
a tangerine floating in a pool of black oil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JfMCBh1sJQ
I probably care(d) more about Moldenke than any other fictional character.
Me too. Moldenke will remain.
darl is going to jackson
darl is going to jackson
The end of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”
A few more from One Hundred Years of Solitude: at the beginning, when Jose Arcadio Buendia finds a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair; when the man watching Remedios bathe falls, cracks his head open, and dies.
It is remarkable that at least three of us thought of this work when we have all (I am assuming – please correct me if I’m wrong!) read it in translation. Shows pretty clearly that an image is not just about words.
(I mean Remedios the Beauty, by the way.)
fuck yes.
The end of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”
A few more from One Hundred Years of Solitude: at the beginning, when Jose Arcadio Buendia finds a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair; when the man watching Remedios bathe falls, cracks his head open, and dies.
It is remarkable that at least three of us thought of this work when we have all (I am assuming – please correct me if I’m wrong!) read it in translation. Shows pretty clearly that an image is not just about words.
(I mean Remedios the Beauty, by the way.)
fuck yes.
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.
Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much about Fresleven’s remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn’t let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures.
The thin smoke had blown away, we were clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side, just below the ribs; the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre. The fusillade burst out again. He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from him. I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend to the steering.
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.
Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much about Fresleven’s remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn’t let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures.
The thin smoke had blown away, we were clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side, just below the ribs; the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre. The fusillade burst out again. He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from him. I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend to the steering.