was just listening to that old This American Life about books that change your life.  the opening concerns a woman who fell in love with Moss Hart’s autobiography because it was one of the books that her playwright grandfather left when he died and it had markings in the margins. she became so obsessed with the book that she memorized passages and eventually tried to memorize the whole book.

this last bit struck me as crazy and impossible until i remembered that i tried to memorize whole movies when i was a kid (Gone with the Wind, for one —sorry if anyone has a bad reaction to that movie title. i know it’s full of paternal racism now. didn’t then. still love it for other reasons anyway). I used to memorize cast lists and try to play whole movies in my head. I specifically remember doing this on a middle school field trip to a science museum because i felt so left out and awkward on the bus and at lunch in their museum cafeteria and i tried to keep myself company this way. I won’t say what movie it was, because it’s embarrassing that it’s not Last Year at Marienbad or something. I will say that “this is steff’s party, Blane. you shouldn’t be allowed to invite just anybody.”

it would never occur to me now to memorize a favorite book or film. i don’t think it would occur to any of us to memorize the thriller dance like we did then or try to remake the lazy sunday video shot for shot like they do now.  i think this is a part of play or a bridge between play and adult work that comes between about age 8 and about age 18. and i think the clinical name for it is nerding out. i also think it has something to do with my 12 year-old urge to visit every standing landmark where my favorite beheaded british monarch ever slept or ate or peed, even though that served no practice-for-future work purpose, except maybe as prep for historiography or something.

i wish i still wanted to do stuff like this. i think i look for that feeling of obsession or addiction or commune  in books and movies and video games and even people now, but the older i get, the harder it is to find, and the more i realize that i have to go out and make my own stuff in order to recapture it. which is the point, i guess. if kids never outgrew playing with trucks and trains, we’d have no engineers.

this post didn’t recapture that feeling for me, by the way. article-length or longer, i think.