Archive for the ‘Memory’ Category

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Billions of dollars in parrots

August 26, 2026

Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhyme

If you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song

Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.

And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …

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Posted in AI, Errors, Language and animals, Memory, Mishearings, Movies and tv, My life | 3 Comments »

A hi-D collage

August 25, 2026

(men’s bodies and tons of man-on-man sex, in crude street talk, so thoroughly unsuitable for  kids and the sexually modest)

About a single collage of mine, call it DNMe (‘Dick And Me’). One of my XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, eventually featured in the first of my artwork exhibitions, “They All Laughed When the Hot-Hot Man-Man Sex Started” of 2003. It is, by accident, associated with another current theme of my postings, dying and lamentation, since the exhibition came very soon after my man Jacques’s death. So I came to see the exhibition as a slap of vibrant life in the face of death: we display our dicks, we fuck, we laugh, death shrivels.

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Posted in Art, Collages, Death and dying, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lives, Marriage, Memory, My life, Names, Phallicity, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Mental blocks

August 25, 2026

The Zippy strip of 8/24:


The answers are: George Costanza and Leonardo da Vinci

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and mind, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Experiencing it again for the first time

August 16, 2026

It starts with the movies, dwells on a paradox of dementia — that it can allow someone to experience something again for the first time — and picks up another paradox — that it’s possible for someone to forget everything and still successfully follow enormously complex routines. I will illustrate the first from my guy (my husband-equivalent) Jacques Transue in the early stages of his life-ending dementia and the second from myself under the sway of a powerful steroid drug. This will be a lot less grim than it sounds.

Then some professorial reflections on what it’s all about. I’m sorry; the professor comes along with the story-teller, it’s a package deal.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Memory, Metaphor, Movies and tv, My life, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

turning point 2

July 30, 2026

A follow up to today’s earlier posting “turning point”; again, a lightly edited version of e-mail to family and caregivers.

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Posted in Academic life, Art, Collages, Language and medicine, Memory, My life | 1 Comment »

phantasia

April 21, 2026

A brief notice.

A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on  mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds (experienced in the phenomenon of auralia) — and how it works (or not) in different people:

Annals of Inquiry: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound: Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits — how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives”  by Larissa MacFarquhar on 10/27/25 on-line; published in the print edition of the 11/3/25 issue, with the headline “Phantasia” — on aphantasia (lacking these mental perceptions) and hyperphantasia (having extraordinarily vivid mental perceptions), with considerable reporting on the lived experiences of aphantastics and hyperphantastics

(more…)

Posted in Memory, Perception, Variation | Leave a Comment »

More questions for anauralics

April 15, 2026

Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on

an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes

focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:

in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams

I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.

Now: two further contexts to consider.

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Posted in Dreams, Memory, Music, My life, Perception, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Three nights on the hormonal rollercoaster

March 4, 2026

A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.

Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).

The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) (more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language disorders, Memory, My life | 1 Comment »

Yummy grub from around the planet

November 12, 2025

In full:

Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet

My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).

This is the food report.

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Posted in Friendship, Language and food, Memory, My life | Leave a Comment »

Memory, fragile and pliable

November 4, 2025

It’s about two memories of mine.

One is from decades ago, about a phone call from Monique Serpette Transue, my man Jacques’s mother, confessing that her mother had pushed her into having the infant J baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, weeping that she had done something awful to J’s soul (fiercely anti-clerical, Monique was startlingly ignorant of the beliefs and practices of the church she didn’t adhere to). Or so I recalled the event in a 2022 posting.

The other is from reports in 2016 and 2025 of a 1970 visit to the linguistics program at what was then the University College of North Wales in Bangor, which had several members with the same, characteristically Welsh, name.

As I write here every few weeks, memory is fragile and undependable; from the beginning, in which our very perceptions are selective and skewed, influenced by expectation and experience, and then through years of fragmentation and loss and further skewings and extraneous intrusions from a host of sources; our memories are not only fragile, but also pliable. If we tell the same story every time — hardly anyone does — that’s because we’re producing a memorized performance (and it’s probably inaccurate). If we’re dead certain that we have the facts right, we’re almost surely getting them wrong. The literature is immense, and sobering.

So: two examples, with reflections on them.

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Posted in Memory, My life, This blogging life, Welsh | 6 Comments »

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