Topical Guide 228
Mark Dorset
Real Reality versus Fictional Reality
I went into the kitchen. From a cupboard I took a package of the popcorn favored in my family at that time, a kind that came in a plastic pouch that was divided vertically into two rectangular pockets. The smaller of these pockets, the one on the right side of the package, held a rectangle of solidified vegetable fat that resembled an elongated bar of soap. The other pocket held just the right amount of popcorn for a family a little larger than ours.
Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
Memorious Ones: Peter Leroy, Ireneo Funes, Chris Rea
My mother put her hand on my head and stroked my hair. “You mustn’t let little things bother you so much,” she said. “Why, when you’re grown up you probably won’t even remember any of this.”
Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
He had lived, he said, for nineteen years as though in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without listening, forgot everything, or virtually everything. When he fell, he’d been knocked unconscious; when he came to again, the present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories. . . . Nor were these memories simple—every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” (translated by Andrew Hurley)
Drivin’ down from the Highland line
We done some gigs on the Clyde and the Tyne
They flew us in from the Hamburg strip
The taste of Dusseldorf still on our lips
And on the bus there’s a friend of mine
We go way back to the scene of the crime
We sit up front and share a cigarette
And try to remember what we tried to forget
He said “Do you remember?”
He said “Do you recall?”
I said “Yeah, I remember
I remember it all”Chris Rea, “Windy Town”
As performed by Chris Rea:
As covered by Rod Stewart:
[more to come on Friday, April 1, 2022]
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