I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Sunday, February 17, 2002

I remember 660-dialtone-9-dialtone-6. My friend Tommy Hoge watched a phone repairman dial this (on the actual dial of the time) and hang-up. The phone rang immediately. It was the number you called to see if you could receive calls. I showed my Haven Avenue grandmother this trick, and impressed her. The next day, the neighbors complained, the phone rang for four hours. I think it was
unrelated.

I remember exchanges. Ours (on Riverside Drive) was TRafalgar 3; my uptown grandparents' was WAdsworth 9; my downtown grandparents' was Algonquin 5.

I remember New York 24, N.Y.; not 10024.

I remember when the dial-tone and busy signal sounds changed. Not all at once, but the later changes to touch-tone seemed to track the same areas. For a while, when I called my grandmother, I still got the old busy signal, and at her house I got the old, reassuring dialtone, more a squawk, less a trill than the new one. It reminded me of her voice -- low, Viennese, accented, harsh but comforting at the same time.

posted by william 3:08 PM
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