Odd Impressions

[Peterkin]

Genady posted a passage from a book I read 50-odd years ago, and I recognized the source instantly.

It's a book with no political or philosophical significance whatsoever, and at the time, I was intensely political and philosophical  - who isn't at 21? So why did Three Men in a Boat (to say Nothing of the Dog) leave a life-long impression? I read Stephen Leacock, Mark Twain, Thurber, Mikes in that same decade, and can't recall much from any of those books - not even Connecticut Yankee. Humour generally doesn't leave a deep impression. Why this particular story?

Do you have any books like that? Unimportant, non mind- or life-altering books that, nevertheless became embedded in your psyche?

[Genady]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Genady posted a passage from a book I read 50-odd years ago, and I recognized the source instantly.

It's a book with no political or philosophical significance whatsoever, and at the time, I was intensely political and philosophical  - who isn't at 21? So why did Three Men in a Boat (to say Nothing of the Dog) leave a life-long impression? I read Stephen Leacock, Mark Twain, Thurber, Mikes in that same decade, and can't recall much from any of those books - not even Connecticut Yankee. Humour generally doesn't leave a deep impression. Why this particular story?

Do you have any books like that? Unimportant, non mind- or life-altering books that, nevertheless became embedded in your psyche?

I don't think it is a matter of depth and significance of the contents or its effect on one's mind and life. To me, it is rather a memory thing. Same mechanism that makes some poetry lines and some musical tunes easy to come into one's mind.

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, Genady said:

I don't think it is a matter of depth and significance of the contents or its effect on one's mind and life. To me, it is rather a memory thing. Same mechanism that makes some poetry lines and some musical tunes easy to come into one's mind.

Do you understand the mechanism? I always assumed ideas, narratives, series of events etc. were fixed in long-term memory through association. Either because they were significant in themselves, or because they are part of a pattern or system of thought and experience. But then, there are these seemingly random pieces of flotsam that bob up for no reason. 

 If I remember poems, that's due to diligent memorizing - and subject to fragmentation if not practiced often. Half The Highwayman (Gr eight) and Walrus and the Carpenter (around the same time, but extracurricular) are gone now. Song lyrics flake away, as well, even the ones I used to sing often are down to the refrain. The old folk songs my mother used to sing have fared better - maybe because there was so much vacant room in my head back then. 

As for contemporary songs, I don't understand a word of them to begin with and there's no melody to hook onto.  

[TheVat]

I've noticed there are impressionable ages in life, when books, lyrics, etc sink in deep.  Teenage years seem to be good for that, because you are sampling adult narratives then, and there's the general excitement of entering that grownup world.  Oddly, I will still recall a science fiction short story in an anthology which I only read once, because it seized my imagination and/or had a powerful emotional impact.  Whereas whole novels I read just a decade or two ago tend to vanish over a mental horizon unless I talk about them a lot with others or there was some special quality  e.g. a character who was very similar to someone I know, or a mind blowing plot twist, or a thematic tie-in with other artforms.  

46 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

The old folk songs my mother used to sing have fared better - maybe because there was so much vacant room in my head back then. 

Same here.  Vinyl records heard as a child.  Irish folk songs, from the Clancy Brothers.  Pete Seeger.  Satirical political songs from Tom Lehrer.  Sixties rock albums my uncle played a lot.  Broadway musicals.  Top Forty songs from the seventies, when my peers and I first had cars with radios and eight-tracks.  And all the pre-sixties classics from Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern et al, that popular crooners were still performing.   

[Genady]

No, I do not understand the mechanism. I agree with both of you about what and when got remembered and what not. But I think it is more like a resonance phenomenon rather than associated contact points. IOW, memorization and retrieval works with some kind of Fourier transform of the thing rather than the original signal.

Introduction to Pushkin's poem, Ruslan and Ludmila, brings to mind a mix of scenes and characters from fairytales, and they, together with a sweet flow of words make me feel like honey pouring over my heart:

У лукоморья дуб зеленый,
Златая цепь на дубе том:
И днем и ночью кот ученый
Всё ходит по цепи кругом;
Идет направо — песнь заводит,
Налево — сказку говорит.

Там чудеса: там леший бродит,
Русалка на ветвях сидит;
Там на неведомых дорожках
Следы невиданных зверей;
Избушка там на курьих ножках
Стоит без окон, без дверей;

...

(Maybe TheVat gets it)

When I started playing an instrument, not long ago, my wife told me, why won't you play Red River Valley? What is Red River Valley, I asked. Never heard of it. This is what you are humming to yourself all the years I know you, she said. I looked it up, and yes, that was the tune, and I don't have any idea when and how it got into my brain.

[Peterkin]

29 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Vinyl records heard as a child.

My father bought a record player - Telefunken, big extravagance - at the first CNE we ever attended. It came with a selection of LP's. Tea for Two, I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen, Ghost Riders in the Sky.... Yes, they stuck with me. The awful Caruso numbers he played over and over are totally erased. But then in the 60's I got my own clock radio and woke up every morning to the hit parade... day after day after Groundhog Day. Couldn't forget those songs if I tried.      

The red river valley song was featured in the soundtrack of several popular films: you could easily have picked it up there without ever knowing the title. 

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

My father bought a record player - Telefunken, big extravagance - at the first CNE we ever attended. It came with a selection of LP's. Tea for Two, I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen, Ghost Riders in the Sky.... Yes, they stuck with me. The awful Caruso numbers he played over and over are totally erased. But then in the 60's I got my own clock radio and woke up every morning to the hit parade... day after day after Groundhog Day. Couldn't forget those songs if I tried.      

The red river valley song was featured in the soundtrack of several popular films: you could easily have picked it up there without ever knowing the title. 

Interesting. My father loved opera and played the records - none stuck with me. My mother liked classical music and played records - I remember many of these. Surely Freud would have something to say about it.

Yes, perhaps I picked that tune from a movie - there was a period when USSR got bunch of old American movies.

[Peterkin]

Here's a list : Red River Valley, The Grapes of Wrath* , The Ox-Bow Incident* , The Last Picture Show, Sweet Savage, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Desperate Hours, Tombstone, A Prairie Home Companion, Hemingway & Gellhorn, Wild, Lucky

*most likely candidates for earworm

8 minutes ago, Genady said:

My father loved opera and played the records - none stuck with me. My mother liked classical music and played records - I remember many of these.

My tastes ran similarly toward my mother's. I wonder whether genetics has a role in musical - or, more broadly, aesthetic - sensibility, as well as musical/artistic talent.

I have some reason to think it's not because we felt closer to one parent. HM A whole new, interesting subject to explore. I wonder how to broach it as a topic of discussion.  

[mistermack]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

*most likely candidates for earworm

I find that songs that go round and round my head are not necessarily songs that I like. Some are actually stuff I dislike, or not my kind of music at all. It seems to be random in me.

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

Here's a list : Red River Valley, The Grapes of Wrath* , The Ox-Bow Incident* , The Last Picture Show, Sweet Savage, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Desperate Hours, Tombstone, A Prairie Home Companion, Hemingway & Gellhorn, Wild, Lucky

The first half I never saw (I think). The others are too recent.

 

12 minutes ago, mistermack said:

I find that songs that go round and round my head are not necessarily songs that I like. Some are actually stuff I dislike, or not my kind of music at all. It seems to be random in me.

Certainly not so for me. And now, that I can play some of them, it's like an orchestra - main part in my head and the glockenspiel accompaniment outside. 

[Genady]

Back to the OP question. I think that Jack London's stories are in that category.

[Peterkin]

For me, just Call of the Wild . I know I read several others and one passage from - I'm pretty sure it's The Star Rover stands out. Otherwise, blank. Same with most of the books I read in those years.

Only a few authors from my early 20's have stayed with me: Bradbury, Vonnegut, Golding, Findley... Atwood, I guess, though I don't like all of her books.  In those years, I bought paperbacks for $0.10 at the thrift store and carried one at all times.

One notable exception: the first year I was working, I gave myself an extravagant Christmas present, a great big illustrated hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh.  Cost $25, two weeks' rent.  Damn silly, but I loved that book.    

Edited July 30, 2023 by Peterkin

[Genady]

For me, Bradbury as weel, also Simak. There are couple others in sci-fi that stayed with me, but you perhaps never heard their names, e.g., Strugatsky Brothers.

One of the popular Russian sci-fi writers, G. Altov, and his wife were family friends with my parents. However, in spite of his efforts to make me interested in sci-fi, I was only lukewarm to it.

How about Conan Doyle?

[TheVat]

An American of my generation found Vonnegut and Bradbury almost inescapable, because they were both widely read and chatted about.   I remember Simak for short stories that really stayed with me, as was also the case with Brian Aldiss, Bradbury, Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe, RA Lafferty, et al.  For novels, there was Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Philip Dick, the usual pantheon.

I didn't read the Strugatsky brothers when young (my loss), but heard praise for Roadside Picnic and it is still on my list to read.   Maybe I will bump it up.

Early innovators in sci-fi and horror, like HG Wells and EA Poe, I read as a teenager.  Wells was more my taste than Poe.  I had acquaintances who also liked HP Lovecraft, but I never warmed up much to his style of prose.

1 hour ago, Genady said:

How about Conan Doyle?

I read him.  I remember the character and his methodology more than specific stories.  Though later good-quality screen versions, like the ones with Jeremy Brett, brought them to life again.  It's funny how everyone here remembered Hound of the Baskervilles, which really was not one of his better stories.

[Peterkin]

2 hours ago, Genady said:

How about Conan Doyle?

Only the Sherlock Holmes stories, and those later in life, when I traded sci-fi and social commentary in for mythology and history, with murder for dessert. Those books left hardly a trace - but I did recently revisit and enjoy the tv series with Simon Brett.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Peterkin

[Genady]

I liked most of Sherlock Holmes stories but was particularly impressed by the very first I've read, The Speckled Band. It happened completely by accident while I was waiting for my parents in some house with book cabinets along the walls. I picked a book, opened it randomly, started reading, and couldn't stop.

[Peterkin]

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

It's funny how everyone here remembered Hound of the Baskervilles, which really was not one of his better stories.

Probably because it was so often made cinematic. There were stories I liked better, too. Vividly recall the Red-haired League and The Blue Carbuncle... maybe because an affinity to colour.