18 jul 2005
What if I woke up one day with amnesia and tried to figure out what all these poetry books are doing here... Suppose I had all the normal mental facilities, was able to drive a car and order in a restaurant, but that I had no specific knowledge of the contents of any of the book, or of poetry specifically.
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Sounds like the makings for a great Philip K. Dickesque novel.
Get to work!
--Gary
...and you wanted to get rid of the clutter. You could send your books to me, I'd even pay for the postage.
I like the idea of a novel. The amnesia thing is a little cliché, but what can I say?
Hey Jonathan,
Check out *The Vintage Book of Amnesia* edited
by Jonathan Lethem, sci-fi author of such excellent
novels as *Gun, With Occasional Music*, *Amnesia Moon* and *She Called Across The Table*.
The*Vintage Book of Amnesia* contains stories and articles about amnesia, by Shirley Jackson, Julio Cortazar, Robert Sheckley, Jorge Luis Borges, Jonathan Lethem, Phillip K. Dick, Anna Kavan, Thomas Disch and many others. The one by Oliver Sacks is about a man with a frontal lobe injury who can remember nothing that happens in the present or the past, except everything he experienced in the 60's having to do with the Grateful Dead.
In life, I might add, surely it is every bit as important to have a good forgettery as it is to have a good memory.
Nick
Yeah, I told it was cliché. What about Walker Percy?
And, Jess, I'll need those poetry book in order to write the novel.
Yeah, I told you it was cliché. What about Walker Percy?
And, Jess, I'll need those poetry book in order to write the novel.
OK. But Is an idea, like amnesia, that has been employed innumerable times, even very recently, successfullly and unsuccessfully, necessarity a cliche? (*Total Recall*, -Blade Runner- etc). I have to admit, I didn't read all the stories in the *Vintage* book, but now that you remjnded me of them, I think I'll go back and read more of them.
What makes an idea a cliche? Our culture is riddled with repetition- advertising, recycled "news" stories that feel very old within hours, plot lines repeated infinitum:- still, there are ideas, like amnesia, that remain intriguing, even when repeated, because they continue to strike a chord.
So, what was that about Walker Percy?
n.
Percy has a novel in which a character has a particular kind of amnesia called "fugue state." I forget the title of the novel. Not an amnesia kind of forgetting, just a "read the novel 20 years ago and simply don't remember" forgetting.
I agree that amnesia remains powerful, tapping into fantasies of starting anew. What with Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Happy Mind, Awakenings, it is like the number 1 movie plot of our time. There was another one with Harrison Ford. He gets shot in convenience store robbery and gets amnesia. I can't remember the title of the novel.
the movie I mean. I can't remember the title of the movie.
Then there's *Groundhog Day*, where the main character is unable to forget...
The Harrison Ford movie is Regarding Henry.
I don't think it was amnesia. I think you/he read a poem or a poet that destroyed all memory of peotry.
Go Dick!
I enjoyed Letham's Motherless Brooklyn which is a pretty normal story told in a Tourette's voice.
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