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

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

I remember the New Yorker bookstore on 89th street. It was run by the son of some famous radicals. I shoplifted Edgar Rice Burroughs books there. I could never find the first Mars or the first Venus book though -- and I haven't since. But they cheated me when I sold a beautiful Howard Pyle edition of King Arthur for 12 cents, so I could buy a Jimmy Olsen comic. They were attached to the New Yorker theater through a passageway upstairs. Now all that survives of that nexus is New Yorker films. When you went up the amazingly rickety stairway of the bookstore (it would be closed now as a firetrap I'm sure) you confronted a life-sized poster of Humphrey Bogart with a gun. I didn't know who he was then, but he and his world seemed extremely glamorous.

posted by william 8:13 AM
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