Forgotten Stories
Provincetown curio shop window—photo by William E. Evans, ©1990
Seems I have discovered someone who’s worse than I am at keeping old stuff—other people’s old stuff at that—he collects photos from thrift stores of people he’s never met—silent picture storyboards.
Lost Photographs of Penang by Ted Anthony was published in Medium back in 2016, so even the piece itself is past tense. His story is melancholy; given the subject, it’s hard to think it would be otherwise.
“I asked the proprietor, Mr. Zhuang, how he came by these photos. He told me the images came from Penang houses that were left behind and torn down. The photos were found and sold to him in odd lots. ‘I just get phone calls, and people say, there are old photos that have been abandoned,’ he told me.
“I let that sink in. As an unrepentant archivist from a family of archivists, I find the notion of leaving family photos abandoned to be unfathomable and melancholy. And yet for much of my adult life, I have found, in flea markets and garage sales, piles of old images that leave me with a sense of vague, undefined longing about the people depicted in them and the journeys the images (and their subjects) have taken.”
from Lost Photographs of Penang by Ted Anthony
To compare, D says I just don’t throw anything out; Anthony says he’s an archivist. It’s fine—not everyone sees value in stories of the preceding. And I’ll never be a follower of Marie Kondo. We all find our own way. I dig a pony as Lennon said—precisely.
Photo of unknown Penang girls included in Ted Anthony’s article
Reading Anthony’s piece, this was the photo that stopped me: I’m guessing 1970s? Vietnam War era. Teenage girls with in-vogue hair styles and dress. Friends, schoolmates, relatives? Beatles groupies?
The U.S. influence in Asia was reflected in the photo. One might argue more generally the Western culture, however what still leads in the modern world is American—for better and worse. No doubt some sociologist has studied the rise of America’s soft side influence on the world.
When we were hiking the hill country above Bellagio, Italy, the only person who could give us directions in English was the ten-year-old boy, because he’d watched TV and movies, probably our most popular cultural exports to the rest of the world.
Published in the NY Times Magazine in 2006, The Perils of Soft Power by Josef Joffe, a German writer, discusses American influence on Europe. To borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom, Joffe writes of Europe’s own School of Resentment when it comes to American cultural influence. Joffe’s article closes with a caution:
“But [European] competition has barely begun to drive the cultural contest. Europe, mourning the loss of its centuries-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and ‘cultural exception’ clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic or stolen. If we could consult Dr. Freud, he would take a deep drag on his cigar and pontificate about inferiority feelings being compensated by hauteur and denigration.”
from The Perils of Soft Power by Josef Joffe
Rocky IV is a landmark in haute couture, to be sure. I’d be pissed if I were French. Even the Brits, god bless their little royal hearts.
What is perceived as the newest and most successful will always shine like a light. Can’t be helped.
It’s been called the American Era—more disparagingly, the American Empire—though the larger part of American influence comes from more than brute power. We humans are like moths attracted to the next new big thing. Something deeply embedded. Joffe suggests that by leap-frogging one cultural advances over an earlier one—as America has gone past Europe’s success, and that’s the way of things.
Skyline of George Town, Penang—photo by Vnonymous
Penang is in modern day Malaysia on the island of Penang off the mainland, populated by a polyglot mix of Malay, Chinese, Thai-Malaysian, Eurasian, Buddhist likely. Muslim women wouldn’t dare dress less pose like this. Again, pure speculation. Though in the 70s, Islamists hadn’t become such a reactionary wildfire, and the people remain more accepting. If you study a photo of modern Penang, the very high rise feel to the city suggests the Malaysians have adapted what they needed from America and are now about creating their own version.
The Malaysian girls of the photo would be older by decades now. Do they still wear jeans and short skirts? Have any returned to traditional dress, now weary of imitating a culture that isn’t theirs, or have they adopted Western styles to their needs? And their children—and grandchildren? One suspects they may be looking closer to Singapore and Hong Kong for a cultural identity. So Joffe’s leap-frogging continues.
Kondo vs. the rest of us
When I was in my teens, I had this unconscious need to emulate a person of letters. Which is the origin of all the letters I kept from that time. It was a phase. I drew the line at saving birthday cards, the ones with only a ‘love ya’ or some such too-brief-to-matter phrase.
It’s useless to count the number of times I’ve lugged those boxes from South Carolina to Connecticut to Florida to Virginia, between apartments, condo, to townhouse, back to apartment then condo, one house and finally last house. Along with drafts of poetry and fiction. And rolls of drawings, a small collection of vinyl records, CDs and paperbacks. Eat your heart out, Kondo.
To put it in context, other than letters, photographs and long distance phone calls, those were what we had growing up to stay in touch; the habit never left. And it wasn’t possible to replay a phone conversation an hour later, bad as you might want to. Memory’s a terrible thing to waste.
Jonathan Franzen claimed in an essay on modern life that movies and television have sapped interest in reading novels—no doubt, since we like our kicks quick as we can get them.
Any number of critics have declared the death of… fill in the blank… by modern replacements, so perhaps Twitter will eventually fade and we’ll all go back to reading longer than 240 characters by candlelight, because we forgot to stir the coals.
Why does the species value the historical artifacts if not so we stay connected to the past? There’s a lesson we’re forgetting.
The other evening, I mentioned at a gathering of friends and family the day of letter writing has shriveled to email and thumbing text messages, my point being it seems a loss.
All we know of our forebearers is what writings they left us.
One friend protested, saying everything that’s been sent electronically still exists in a server farm—somewhere.
The time and attention it once took to compose a letter can be put into an email, though who takes that much time? Likely there will soon be an automatic app, and it won’t even require AI to create credible facsimiles. And I won’t even need to post it.
What’s interesting is finding, midst the ordinary gossip and trivia, a spot of family history, or personal history I’d not heard or forgotten. Who was she? She really looked young in that one. Was my mother really that young playing tennis with friends?
When an entire industry is founded on ‘data mining,’ might things have possibly gotten out of hand? At best, the digital age is generating such a volume of blather, who could ever keep track of a fraction? Partly the result of +/- 7.9 billion squatters occupying the globe, and the twitterers who haven’t more to say than the birds. It’s ha-ha funny; the animal behaviorists hard at work interpreting the speech of other species? Just wait a few years and we’ll sound much the same. Twitter and Facebook are the perfect mediums for the age—twittering or getting in your face.
Pundits say even email is passé for this newest generation. They’re down to 240 characters per missive.
The movie that made Harrison Ford an even larger star—Raiders of the Lost Arc—that would raise so many protests if not hackles today, from archeologists hating the satire, to the culturists despairing of the ethnic slander, to the last three surviving feminists protesting the role of his better looking love interest, er archeologist companion, Karen Allen. But the point is: the movie’s last scene concludes with said Arc, having been fought over for the entire movie, is rescued only to be wheeled into a warehouse Amazon might manage, to be stored with ten zillion other items swallowed up in the cavernous space never to be seen again. Ha-ha-ha, and fade out.
240 characters per missive.
I wrote letters early because my mother wrote letters. As a teen, instead of pining, I wrote letters to girls, hoping they’d overlook the scrawny author. The basic flaw in the strategy was, of course, the distance separating us, though I received sweet sentiments for my efforts.
Years later, I found a letter from our grandmother written to her oldest child, saying she had at least a hundred in a savings account she could lend her. And my mother, far as I can tell from her letters, never asked for money. After our father’s death, she asked—or my grandmother volunteered—to pack up a life in Pennsylvania and move to the heart of the old South so her three young children might be cared for. Way more important to both of them than money.
So here I am—if not the best result, I’m the one at hand.
I have letters from my mother sent faithfully every week I spent in college. After all three of us had flown the coop, she’d carbon-copy the other two with her typed letters, a practice adopted from her social work—and say she felt sheepish about the literary shortcut. If she took the time to write, I surely should keep them.
Our fore-people (sic) wrote letters like documents for their descendants. And folks saved them—or at least some people did and others insisted on burning them after their death, so as to wipe the trail clean.
American forefathers all wrote letters. It was the sign of an literate person—or at least a person who cared to be. The letters between John and Abigail Adams are worth reading still—as are those between Jefferson and Adams and a wide range of other personages of the day.
I recall that Philip Roth wanted a good bit of his correspondence destroyed on his death. What would biographers and historians do without the letters? In Roth’s case, perhaps no better than with them. Though that kind of success will unhinge even the least self-conscious.
“A control freak about his legacy and just about everything else, Roth wanted to ensure that [Blake Bailey], who was producing exactly the type of biography he wanted, would be the only person outside a small circle of intimates permitted to access personal, sensitive manuscripts… ‘I don’t want my personal papers dragged all over the place,’ Roth said.”
from Blake Bailey Had Exclusive Access to Philip Roth’s Personal Papers. Roth’s Estate Plans on Destroying Them. by Alex Shepherd in the New Republic magazine.
It is still is a big country—and a far bigger world. The U.S. Postal Service was an early necessity, with just the Eastern Seaboard to cover, so much it was one of the earliest Federal agencies. Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first Postmaster General by the Continental Congress in 1775.
I wrote letters—their practice seemed a kind of education in itself, and they weren’t aimed at dreaming. Early exercises as a writer, composing something entertaining, even revealing. I was conscious of needing to touch the heart of another person, with no way of knowing when the mailed missive arrived, or what mood the recipient might be feeling. Oh god, him again.
It’s easy to beat up on Facebook, et al. Like cleaning the zoo cages after the animals escaped. If a shrunken vision made Zuckerberg wealthy, that’s OK. Can’t do anything about it anyway. I’m fascinated how some folks post innocent snippets of family life on Facebook, while others plot to overthrow a government. All so free with their lives; seems people can’t help themselves. Some even write about writing…
I have these boxes, some in the attic, some in a second bedroom, and all of them remind me of stories. My brain works in stories, memories and readings and it’s all the same. I found a short story hiding in one box; maybe there’s more.
I’m finishing a thick book of collected essays by Christopher Hitchens, Arguably, published shortly before his death. One or two essays a night for bedtime reading. Bill Keller’s review in the NY Times introduces the book thusly:
“Let’s begin with the obvious. He is unfathomably prolific. “Arguably” is a great ingot of a book, more than 780 pages containing 107 essays. Some of them entailed extensive travel in inconvenient places like Afghanistan and Uganda and Iran; those that are more in the way of armchair punditry come from an armchair within reach of a very well-used library. They appeared in various publications during a period in which he also published his best-selling exegesis against religion, “God Is Not Great”; a short and well-reviewed biography of Thomas Jefferson; a memoir, “Hitch-22”; as well as various debates, reading guides, letters and rebuttals—all done while consuming daily quantities of alcoholic drink that would cripple most people. As Ian Parker noted in his definitive 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens, the man writes as fast as some people read.”
from Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words by Bill Keller in the NY Times Book Review, 2011.
I’ve always been seduced by writers who welcome you into their club of the erudite. Or as Keller says, Hitchens was “a master of the essay that not only spares you the trouble of reading the book under review, but leaves you feeling you have just completed an invigorating graduate seminar.” Guilty as charged.
Maybe sometime I’ll get around to pulling the blogs together, polish them and publish a paperback. You’ve been warned.
Why I Love the Man
Music, art, god help me, even NYC and its fashionistas, he cares about these things. We debate—argue—drink and debate further. And we don’t always settle important things about why David Bowie sucks and Don Henley couldn’t possibly write a bad line.
Where we part company is how he’s on a tear to unload anything he can send to the cloud. It’s like he’s boarding the last jet to nowhere and needs to unload it all.
Me, I still want to hold a book in my hand when I read.
His wife throws in, as does D, but largely it’s the two of us going at it. Good food, good wine and conversation are what we hold in common. He expected Trump to win both times; fortunately he was only half wrong. He’s expecting the world to end shortly, and I keep telling him ‘ain’t no way’ or the other way around—but we’ll both be in the ground before too long, so it doesn’t matter. I’m ahead of him by a decade in that department.
He studied music, and I studied architecture to get the hell out. We’re still looking for similar happiness by dissimilar means.