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2 comments about Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject (Great Barrington Books).

1. I thought reality TV would be a fad for a season or two -- boy, was I wrong. When I tune into The Apprentice or American Idol, I am faced the immense and lasting allure, but also the banality, of these shows: we want to see how other people behave, think, deal with success and embarrassment, how they make love and how they fail. What disappoints me about these shows is that, except in rare moments, we rarely actually get to see this. What we see, instead, are real people acting out plot lines as tired as old sitcoms and presenting themselves as flat, stereotypical characters--much less interesting than they real people (whom I presume) they are.
   
   Derek Sayer's Going Down for Air presents, in all its voyeuristic glory, the memories of a middle-aged, heterosexual English university professor. Sound boring? It's not. Sayer digs deep, and looks at his life and past squarely in the eye, and in doing so, he ends up asking the enthralling, sometimes disturbing question of how much we can ever know about ourselves, how we remember and forget. My favorite images in the book include a five-year old Sayer on his tricycle, unwittingly causing what might have been a fatal motorcycle accident, unabashedly homoerotic memories of being caned as a schoolboy, and a stark recollection of a hospital visit to Sayer's aging father--a hilarious and malicious character--that is ironic and deeply touching. This is reality TV better than as seen on television.
   
   The book is in two parts, with the memoir followed by a more conventional and scholarly essay exploring the processes and functions of memory. While not as thoroughly engrossing and addictive a read as the memoir, Sayer deftly incorporates the viewpoints of philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, writers and artists from Durkheim and Lacan to Baudelaire and Edward Hopper into an argument about why we can't take our personal and collective memories for granted.
   
   The whole book is illustrated with Sayer's own pleasing and provocative photographs of places around the world and from his childhood, which would form a striking photo-essay in themselves but here go a long way in bringing both texts to life in a manner which is distinctly Sayer's own, highly personal, ironic and communicative.



2. I thought reality TV would be a fad for a season or two -- boy, was I wrong. When I tune into The Apprentice or American Idol, I am faced the immense and lasting allure, but also the banality, of these shows: we want to see how other people behave, think, deal with success and embarrassment, how they make love and how they fail. What disappoints me about these shows is that, except in rare moments, we rarely actually get to see this. What we see, instead, are real people acting out plot lines as tired as old sitcoms and presenting themselves as flat, stereotypical characters--much less interesting than they real people (whom I presume) they are.
   
   Derek Sayer's Going Down for Air presents, in all its voyeuristic glory, the memories of a middle-aged, heterosexual English university professor. Sound boring? It's not. Sayer digs deep, and looks at his life and past squarely in the eye, and in doing so, he ends up asking the enthralling, sometimes disturbing question of how much we can ever know about ourselves, how we remember and forget. My favorite images in the book include a five-year old Sayer on his tricycle, unwittingly causing what might have been a fatal motorcycle accident, unabashedly homoerotic memories of being caned as a schoolboy, and a stark recollection of a hospital visit to Sayer's aging father--a hilarious and malicious character--that is ironic and deeply touching. This is reality TV better than as seen on television.
   
   The book is in two parts, with the memoir followed by a more conventional and scholarly essay exploring the processes and functions of memory. While not as thoroughly engrossing and addictive a read as the memoir, Sayer deftly incorporates the viewpoints of philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, writers and artists from Durkheim and Lacan to Baudelaire and Edward Hopper into an argument about why we can't take our personal and collective memories for granted.
   
   The whole book is illustrated with Sayer's own pleasing and provocative photographs of places around the world and from his childhood, which would form a striking photo-essay in themselves but here go a long way in bringing both texts to life in a manner which is distinctly Sayer's own, highly personal, ironic and communicative.

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