Jay Furman, 1942-2015

My old friend Jason's beloved father Jay died this weekend. I went to the funeral yesterday; there was not an empty seat in the house as people gathered to honor the memory of a great friend and benefactor.

It is difficult to describe how important the Furman family were to me during the crucial years of transition from adolescence to adulthood. From my first year of college, the Furman house at 170 Sullivan Street was my home away from home: at times I was actually living there, but even in my late 20s it was still the place to retreat to as a refuge when I needed a New York bolthole (I particularly remember holing up there for some days during a summer heatwave c. 1999 - I had no air-conditioning in my New Haven apartment during grad school years!), and when I walk by that corner it feels like home.

The Furmans among other things gave me my first glimpse into a world of hospitality that was only partly enabled by wealth. Money was an underlying condition that made possible the spare bedrooms, the amazing supply of theater tickets and restaurant meals, the weekends in the Hamptons - I grew up in a culturally rich milieu, but not one where the whole family regularly going out for dinner and a movie would have been casually affordable, and it was an eye-opener to me that such a thing was even possible. Money alone doesn't do this, though, and the Furman hospitality was really facilitated by the depth and quality of the generosity that both Jay and Gail brought to life in such exceptional measure. It has stayed with me as a vision of what one might aspire to in the matter of helping people of all ages find their way in the world.

Jay was an unforgettable character. Manic, intellectual, a disconcerting trickster figure, he was full of boundless energy, with interests in all sorts of unexpected topics and activities (I obviously didn't know him at this stage of life, but I believe that when Gail first met him, Jay kept a pet monkey in the bathroom of his New York apartment!). Jay was one of the greatest readers I've ever met, partly because he was curious about everything, and he never met a movie he didn't like (he probably saw one almost every day during some periods of his life). At the funeral, he was quoted as having said that his favorite movie was Snakes on a Plane; given that he must have seen every movie ever screened at the Angelika, the New York Film Festival etc., and was immensely knowledgeable about all contemporary art cinema (Korean, Iranian, etc.), this gives a nice flavor of his ecumenical tastes and his ability to surprise (also of the way you never quite knew how serious he was about anything he said). Jay was possibly the least snobbish person I ever met: everything was interesting and deserved his attention in equal measure.

Jay gave me a clerical job at RD Management during a year I needed work (that was where I learned to type from dictation and do a good job at least pretending to be a corporate secretary, though I remember getting called up on the carpet by Jay's brother-in-law once for wearing tights with holes in them!). Jay was an unusual businessman. He was a fast and associative thinker who often left other people behind, but this was of course what made him such fun to be around. His impatience was tempered by a deep temperamental kindness that stopped him from becoming the slightly nerve-racking boss he might have been otherwise!

At one point that year there was an embezzlement scandal at the office, and I remember the conversion of Jay's office and associated boardroom into a massive investigative archive, with boxes of papers spread over the tables. Amy Davidson was called in to work at that point too, it was perhaps our first extended acquaintanceship with the forensic pleasures of delving into archives (I still remember the day when Amy realized that many of the suspect checks bore vertical creases because they had been folded into three and slipped into a breast pocket), and the workplace had the sort of frenetic fun energy that you associate with a newspaper or magazine on production day: Jay's curiosity lent charisma even to an unglamorous kind of investigation.

When I was admitted to the PhD program at Yale with only partial funding for the first two years (they were in transition to a model of full funding for all students, but it hadn't yet been implemented, and I did not have the spotless undergraduate record that would have pushed me up to the top of their list), Jay made up the difference between my fellowship and the standard stipend: I suggested that it should be a loan, but he was adamant that it was a gift, and that the only thing I needed to do in return was to help others at some place down the road. I remember meeting him once to get that year's check from him at his fitness club in midtown before work. He was the most vibrant, physically energetic person you could imagine (his physical qualities to an unusual degree matched his intellectual ones): he had a towel around his neck and announced, with glee, "I just did a twelve-hundred-calorie workout!"

The stories I most loved hearing at the funeral yesterday all involved Jay reading a book in slightly unexpected circumstances. This is exactly how I remember him: reading a book as he walked down the street to the movie theater, reading a book as he waited in the elevator for the lobby back up to the office. Jay liked to go out and play a round of golf on his own, toting his clubs and reading a book all the while; in eminent company (John Sexton, Rudy Giuliani, etc.), in the owner's box at Fenway Park for a playoff game, Jay, who did not care for baseball, took out a book at the end of the first inning and calmly read for the rest of the game!

Jay loved many things, but one of my favorite things about him was how proud he was of his sons Jason and Jesse. He lit up when he talked about them; he loved it that they both were able to excel in so many different ways in the world, and he rejoiced in their remarkable accomplishments (Jesse is a federal judge and Jason is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors) but he would have loved it if they were elementary-school teachers or jugglers or indeed anything else worthwhile and interesting, which in his book would have meant just about anything, so long as it was done with love and conviction.

I can't pin down this anecdote with enough specificity to tell it really well, but one thing Jay particularly enjoyed in the mid-90s was taking the shuttle from LaGuardia to Boston or Washington for the day to visit with one or the other of his sons, and I particularly remember one occasion (I cannot say which way round it was) when he was so used to the Boston option that he absent-mindedly strolled onto the Boston shuttle instead of the Washington one, even though Jason was at that point living in Washington! He roared with laughter when he told this story - he only realized he'd made the mistake when he landed in the wrong city (it is the hazard of reading a book everywhere you go, and it was in any case an easy mistake to make), and the comic nature of the confusion made it a source of pleasure rather than irritation.

On Monday, Jason sent me this picture of one of Jay's bookshelves. It means a lot to me that my book is there. It couldn't have been written without the support of the Furmans (the same thing goes for my first academic book), and I will continue to hold up Jay in my mind as an extraordinary example of what it really means to be a friend and benefactor. I have made a modest donation to Lungevity in his memory, and encourage others who knew him to do the same; most of all, though, we should all aspire to follow his example in our own small ways. He was a remarkable person. He will be much missed.

Tower poppies

Blood swept lands and seas of red. Wish I could see this one in person! (Link via B.)

Cryptamnesia

A wise piece by Oliver Sacks at the NYRB on the distortions of memory (link courtesy of Dave Lull):

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten. Similarly, while I often give lectures on similar topics, I can never remember, for better or worse, exactly what I said on previous occasions; nor can I bear to look through my earlier notes. Losing conscious memory of what I have said before, and having no text, I discover my themes afresh each time, and they often seem to me brand-new. This type of forgetting may be necessary for a creative or healthy cryptomnesia, one that allows old thoughts to be reassembled, retranscribed, recategorized, given new and fresh implications.

Sometimes these forgettings extend to autoplagiarism, where I find myself reproducing entire phrases or sentences as if new, and this may be compounded, sometimes, by a genuine forgetfulness. Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.

School year blues

I have nothing interesting to say when I see colleagues and students except for the ever-present observation that it is a bad time of the school year!  This coming week will again be very busy.  I have managed to finish all my reading for Monday today (for the final undergraduate seminar, Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot" and several pieces of criticism including a very lovely essay by David Womersley with the suggestive title "'now deaf 1740'" from this volume, and for my graduate class David Markson's haunting novel Reader's Block).  A long list of tasks to get done tomorrow before the whirlwind final end-of-semester week, which includes a department meeting, two committee meetings, a dissertation defense, one final independent study meeting (better remember to read that book this week!) and a host of other student meetings.  If I do my grading promptly, though, I could submit grades on Monday the 19th (I also have a review due that day) and transition shortly thereafter to novel revision...

Not much time for light reading this past week, but I have read a few books here and there around the edges of the vast mounds of paper that have demanded my more immediate attention (dissertations, writing samples, job letters, etc.)  Finished Moneyball, which I enjoyed a great deal despite knowing virtually nothing about baseball.  Read Michael Connelly's latest, The Drop - Connelly's novels are a very consistent pleasure, and he never just seems to be going through the motions even in these installments of long-running series.  Read a very unusual mystery novel by Alice LaPlante, called Turn of Mind, after reading about it here: it has some flaws as a crime novel, but as a portrait of a narrator/protagonist with Alzheimer's it is mesmerizing.  About halfway through Stephen King's 11/22/63, as I knew I would need something long and narrative and relatively undemanding to get me through the week.

A ticket to Buffalo

I fear I am about to explode from stress at the amount of work I need to get done in the next four days in and around other commitments!

Finished Colson Whitehead's Zone One.  The writing is incredibly sharp, and I loved the first third or so, but I found my enthusiasm slightly cooling due to relative lack of plot.  I definitely still recommend it, but not as passionately as I might have on the basis of early passages like this one:

There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers.  Most skels, they moved.  They came to eat you--not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague.  Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they'd gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action.  The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.

The stragglers, on the other hand, did not move, and that's what made them a suitable objective for civilian units.  They were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond.  An army of mannequins, limbs adjusted by an inscrutable hand.  The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur.  The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters.  The pock-faced assistant manager of the shoe store crouched before the foot-measuring instrument, frozen, sans customers, the left shoes of his bountiful stock on display along the walls of the shop on miniature plastic ledges.  The vitamin-store clerk stalled out among the aisles, depleted among the plenty, the tiny bottles containing gel-capped ancient remedies and placebos.  The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop's customers were hearty, for wasn't every citizen on the grand island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn't need much sunlight. . . .

Anyway, it is very lovely writing, in a hybrid satirical-elegiac vein.

Also, and this really was the perfect light reading, the first installment of Denise Mina's new series, Still Midnight, which really is pretty much exactly what I most enjoy in this vein.  Unfortunately I purchased that and its sequel in haste without realizing that I had already read The End of the Wasp Season - I had it in the form of a 'real' book, and even the Amazon website is not capable of telling me that I bought a paper version of the book at a Chapters in Ottawa in June!  (If memory serves...)

Upcoming

events:

At the next meeting of the Columbia University Cultural Memory Colloquium, on Monday, Sept. 26 at 6pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Professor Jenny Davidson will present on the work of filmmaker Helen Hill. Helen Hill, experimental animator and handmade film advocate, was shot and killed in her home in New Orleans in January 2007. Her last film, completed posthumously by her husband Paul Gailiunas, is 'The Florestine Collection.' One Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans some years earlier, Hill found more than a hundred handmade dresses in trash bags on the curb; she set out to restore them and recover the story of the woman who had made them, a recently deceased African-American seamstress named Florestine Kinchen. Both the dresses and the footage were seriously damaged by Katrina; the completed film includes Helen's original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies. Three of Hill's films will be screened - 'Madame Winger Makes a Film' (9:29), 'Mouseholes' (7:40) and 'The Florestine Collection' (31:00) - followed by a discussion by Professor Davidson that will touch on questions about memorialization and the materiality of film, the persistence and contingency of archives and the imperatives of preservation in the wake of catastrophe.

On a totally different note, I'm speaking about my ABCs of the novel project at Columbia's Cafe Humanities on Monday, Oct. 17 at 6pm.

Ruined choirs

On the occasion of the death of Dr. Kevorkian, Andrew Solomon remembers his mother.

It is the sort of detail

that can hardly be noted without plunging into sentimentality, at least in fiction, and yet it seems to me quite persuasively true. From John Henley's profile of Henning Mankell for the Guardian:

Besides the theatre, Mankell does a lot of charity work in Africa, including a project called Memory Books, which helps parents dying of Aids to record something of themselves in a book, to be passed to their children when they go. "I was in a small village outside Kampala, Uganda, years ago now," Mankell says. "It had only very young and very old. Everyone in between had died. There was a small girl who showed me a folded scrap of paper in her hand, and in it was pressed a dead blue butterfly. She said her mother had loved blue butterflies. That was one of the most important books I've ever read."

(It might be that the italics on the words most important are also an attempt to counter readerly cynicism and the threat of the sentimental?)

When the rainbow is enuf

Amy Davidson's subway memories.

Waterloo

I am almost painfully in love with Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Its bits are woven together in a silkwormish net-like quincunx, but this is a passage I find particularly evocative, not least because I spent part of Sunday morning wandering around the fields on which the first battle of Manassas was fought (coincidentally, it took place on the day of my birthday, July 21):

Why I went to Waterloo I no longer know. But I do remember walking from the bus stop past a bleak field and a number of ramshackle buildings to a sort of village, which consisted solely of souvenir shops and cheap restaurants. There were no visitors about on that leaden-grey day shortly before Christmas, not even the obligatory group of schoolchildren one inevitably encounters in such places. But as if they had come to people this deserted stage, a squad of characters in Napoleonic costume suddenly appeared tramping up and down the few streets, beating drums and blowing fifes; and bringing up the rear was a slatternly, garishly made-up sutler woman pulling a curious hand-cart with a goose shut in a cage. For a while I watched these mummers, who seemed to be in perpetual motion, as they disappeared amongst the buildings only to re-emerge elsewhere. At length I bought a ticket for the Waterloo Panorama, housed in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle - a favourite subject with panorama artists - in every direction. It is like being at the centre of events. On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses, and cut-down infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-legers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one's gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position? Near Brighton, I was once told, not far from the coast, there are two copses that were planted after the Battle of Waterloo in remembrance of that memorable victory. One is in the shape of a Napoleonic three-cornered hat, the other in that of a Wellington boot. Naturally the outlines cannot be made out from the ground; they were intended as landmarks for latter-day balloonists.

Trick memory

Luc Sante on the Thirteen Most Wanted.

Collisions

FT reporter Justine Lau has a rather amazing piece on her recovery from the traumatic brain injury she received when she was hit by a Hong Kong bus (site registration required) - I wish there had been more about swimming, but I can well imagine that hydrotherapy is especially beneficial...

Demons

Terry Pratchett on Alzheimer's. (Via Neil Gaiman's blog.)