How to start a book

Whenever I pick up a book for the first time and read the first paragraph or two, I always wonder to myself how long the author took to create that particular opening. Starts have usually been difficult for me, and, usually, I write one that I know I will throw out in favor of a revised version, generally made after the completion of the work. I really like Nabokov's opening paragraphs to his story. I had never really thought about the world without me in it. Egocentric, perhaps, but unlike the chronophobiac in his first paragraph, I know nothing of a world before I was here, and so it has little impact on my personal consciousness. I do, however, like the idea of looking at our lives as "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." (p. 1) I can relate to this, since we cannot truly know what happened before our birth and we will never know what will happen after our death. To us, then, is left only a single span of time wrapped between a pair of eternities that we can know nothing about. I would like to end on the final sentence from the second paragraph: "In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much." (p. 2) To me this means that life might get boring if we lived forever. In order to properly appreciate the time that we are given, we must have an expiration date.

When did washable markers make their debute?

Lee Stickler's blog made me wonder: when did washable markers come out? I don't remember if the markers I used as child were washable or not, although judging from what I've found they probably were not. What I could find browsing the internet seems to indicate that Crayola introduced washable markers in 1987 and washable crayons in 1991 or 92. Here are the links if anybody is interested:
Binney & Smith History - document
Interactive Timeline
Condensed Timeline - pdf

My First Memory

My first memory goes something like this:

I wanted salt and pepper on my dinner; I don't remember what was for dinner, I just remember that I wanted salt and pepper on it. I asked for the salt and pepper, which Dad helpfully applied to my meal; I was just about two at the time. The reason that this memory stands out to me is because Dad put the pepper on the food first and I had specifically asked for the salt then pepper! I don't remember anything of the meal after that, but, checking the details of the memory with my parents, it turns out I threw my first big tantrum over that. Mom thinks we may have been having meatloaf, but Dad (who does the cooking [yeah, sort of reversed, I know]) thinks it may have been plain hamburgers with veggies on the side; it was ground beef, either way - YUCK!

So, like Nabokov, I don't always remember things as clearly as it seems I should. Being able to check with my parents was a big help. I wonder how Nabokov's autobiography would have been different had he kept a journal. Part of the reason that Mom was able to remember my tantrum is because she is a meticulous diary-keeper, and she keeps all of her diaries. It also helped that she knew what I was talking about, and knew the year that it happened, and was able to locate the date that it happened (August 23, 1983). I think that's an incredible feat of memory in and of itself, and I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that she writes everything down. I tried it for a while - keeping a diary (or journal, if you'd rather) - but it just made me realize that I never did anything worth writing down. But maybe, now that I'm starting a family of my own, I should re-evaluate the idea of diary-keeping, for posterity's sake (and just in case my son has a similar class assignment).

Why not Mnemosyne?, or The Problem with Memory

I feel that Mr. Nabokov received some bad advice when told he should not title this work Speak, Mnemosyne. It would really make for a more intriguing title; little old ladies be damned! But anyways, our first assignment (beyond, of course creating this blog) is to put ourselves in the shoes of Nabokov and tease from the hidden convolutions of our brains our first memory. Is this, I wonder, our first real memory or our memory of what we first remember? This is a difficult task set before us, and I must give some rumination to it before setting it to type. I do seem to recall it had something to do with salt and pepper, though.