May 1, 2006 Web Wire Editor's Note Print E-mail
Written by Alicia Oltuski   

The New New Memory
As the year pulls to a close, graduating seniors look both ways. “Keep in touch,” they tell friends and also not-friends, and write off future addresses, places abstract and meaningless to even themselves.

Retrospect and prospect are considered two of the most polar perspectives, the latter tinged with naivité and the former with nostalgia. Then why not just give it up? What’s the advantage, other than magazine covers with the words ‘Year in Review’ or ‘New Year’s Predictions,’ plastered all over them? In an interview on identitytheory.com, Roger Angell mourns the compromise of baseball in memoriam. “Our memories are not what they used to be because some part of us says we can turn memory off and just find the replay,” he says.

But how are our memories so different from the replay button? 20/20 hindsight is a myth when it comes to anything but objective occurrences. The rest is sugared over with campy wistfulness. And while the past is reduced to relics, the future suffers bloating. Where does all of this leave writing? If our memories and retroactive analyses are doomed to musing and our projections to inflation, why write about anything but the moment? (Oh, the self-help section would glean such naches.)

But I think it is writing that bears the responsibility of challenging the myths of past and future. The only measure against these natural fallacies is to write with clarity, with a degree of self awareness.

In this issue, we cover the angsts of both beginnings and futures. What an observant actress can mediate between in the theatre (or television) world, why a graduate would head towards New Orleans after Katrina, the cultural failures of the modern campus. I would like to commend each one for maintaining a view of the past and future with something other than resignation to its stereotypes. For fresh perspectives, read on.
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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.


Alicia Oltuski
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