Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Carve Me A Girlfriend | Aug 11 2000

I’ve spent hours today (hours!) working on puny things for this website which no one, even if I receive oodles of traffic, will ever notice. Thus, just in case you were wondering, the code for letter spacing in Cascading Style Sheets is “letter-spacing.” Unfortunately (“unfortunately” is the first and most important word you learn in web development), the Netscape 4x browsers don’t recognize this part of the simple-as-pie CSS standard, so you have to live with the fact that a quarter of your audience will see unspaced letters. This matters, right? Of course it matters! I just spent hours (hours!) working on stuff like this so that you, my beloved multi-browser, multi-platform audience, will have the best possible online reading experience.

Speaking of which, here’s a brief passage from a well-known children’s book:

And the Fairy looked at him and laughed.

“Why are you laughing?” the puppet asked her, quite embarrassed and worried about that nose of his that was growing before his very eyes.

“I’m laughing at the lie you told.”

“How do you know that I’ve told a lie?”

“Lies, my dear boy, are quickly discovered; because there are two kinds. There are lies with short legs, and lies with long noses. Yours is clearly of the long-nosed variety.”

Pinocchio, not knowing where to hide himself for shame, tried to run from the room; but he couldn’t. His nose had grown so much that it could no longer pass through the door.

I bring up Pinocchio for several reasons. One is to speak of memory; or more specifically, the lies of memory. But before I get to that, I must confess something: I lied yesterday while quoting the dictionary definition of the word “lie.” Well, I didn’t exactly lie: the definition I gave is really what it said – “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive” – but I left out the second definition – “to create a false or misleading impression.” Why did I do this? I did this because the first definition worked better with my argument, which if you recall was that lies are intentional. The second definition leaves this open. The matter becomes clearer when we consider the three definitions of the noun “lie,” to wit: “1 : an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive; 2 : an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker; 3 : something that misleads or deceives.” Actually, it occurs to me that in the context of yesterday’s discussion of polygraph tests, the first definition was most relevant, so I can hardly be called a liar for not mentioning the others. Thus, I withdraw my confession. I won’t erase it, however, as this paragraph has been a bitch to write and I would hate to have to think of some other way to get to what I really want to talk about it – which is this: what do I mean when I speak of a lie?

I mean something that misleads or deceives, intentionally or not. The broadest meaning.

Which brings us back to the lies of memory. Or more specifically, my memory, which is horrendous. I was reminded of this by a site I found during one of my recent internet lie research forays. The site was for a 1996 film called The Adventures of Pinocchio. Did this film bomb? I’m figuring it bombed since I cannot recall having heard of it. (I rarely see Hollywood films of any stripe, let alone kiddie films, but I do tend to learn of their existence through the miracle of modern saturation advertising.)

Though not usually a sucker for such things, I downloaded a 30-second Quicktime trailer for this film. It was awful. Do not download this 2 megabite monster. It ends with a boy, presumably the boy version of Pinocchio, presenting a block of wood to the puppet maker Geppetto (Martin Landau) and saying wide-eyedly, “How about carving me a girlfriend?”

Speaking of girlfriends, my dear Susi is now asking where we should go for dinner, so I better get to my point.

What is my point? My point is that, intentionally or not, one’s memory is a great big liar. And one day very soon I’m going to write about what a great big liar memory is, and why I think it is, and all kinds of interesting lie-related stuff, only right now I need to stop ignoring my hungry girlfriend.