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

Saturday, February 23, 2002

I remember cyclamates.

I remember a book my parents had in the library: The Loving Couple. (They also had Modern Marriage, a manual that I discovered a little bit later in a high shelf, and tried unsuccessfully to find titillating. I thought at the time that it was mildly depressing, and mildly competent, that they should have and know how to use this manual. I think now, though, that it was probably just a joke purchase. How little one analyzes one's own settled judgments.) The Loving Couple was bound so that you could start at either end by flipping it upside down and backwards: one half gave you "His Story" and one half "Her Story." They started with the same sentence. As I recall from flipping to the end, her story ends happily, his not. I never read anything else in the book, but it seemed a neat idea. Whenever I scanned the spines of the books in the library I would notice it, since its spine was the title repeated vertically up and down -- neither story was privileged. I think it was copyrighted on both sides too, though I'm now not certain of that. It had a black cover, with the type in that sixties semi-cursive style. I liked that the book existed: it seemed to stand for something pleasant about the adult world: not that it was sophisticated, but that it didn't have to be. I got what kind of fun the book was; it was a kind of fun I understood, and it seemed that if adults had that kind of fun with their books then there was a continuity between where I was and the adult world.

I remember everyone reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. (This turned out to have been ghosted by Alex Haley of Roots fame, but I'd never heard of him then.) This memory is specific: it was on the beach of the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio on Lake Como that people were reading this. I liked the name -- the X. I probably related it to the X-Men; I must have been more into Marvell comics by that time.

I remember Lance Loud.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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