I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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 24, 2002
I remember Seven-Up. The game, not the soda. (But which came first?) Seven kids stood in front of the class, and you put your head down and tried to guess which kid tapped you. If you guessed right you got to be one of the seven up there. I cheated by looking at their shoes.

I remember some other stores: Berman Twins, on 93rd street and Broadway; Dragos' shoe repair; Eclairs, on 72nd street; Lichtman's (86th); Cake Masters (between 85th and 86th); Party Cake (on 89th, which got cited by the Health Department -- the New York Times used to publish their daily citations); Charles Chemists on 89th; the Garden Supermarket, and a toy and bookstore right next to the Garden Market that wouldn't sell me airplane glue unless I bought a model to build (which is all I wanted it for); and several other bookstores like Pomander (founded by a Spanish teacher from my school who quit and started it with his lover: it was right next to the Thalia Theater on 95th street), Books & co., and, most notably, Parnassus on 89th between Broadway and Amsterdam. I saw one day on my way to school that its owner was asleep inside on a cot -- he must have lived there. The bookstore didn't tend to open until afternoon. I didn't really get along with the owner, although in college Madeline Kripke was working for him -- Saul Kripke's sister, it turned out, though I barely knew who he was then -- and she took an interest in me when I asked her whether she knew of European Caravan, edited by Samuel Putnam (Hillary Putnam's father, it turned out -- and Hillary will have been Saul's teacher at Harvard, as was my friend Burton Dreben. Later I audited classes with Saul. Hillary was uninterested the one time I mentioned European Caravan to him.) European Caravan contained Beckett's first publication between hardcovers. Madeline Kripke was so taken with the fact that I'd asked for it that she sold me her water-damaged copy of it for $8, as well as a copy of the famous transition 49 no. 5, containing Beckett's Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. I still have them both. But the owner of the bookstore sold it a bit later, and decamped it turned out for Rhinebeck in Westchester, where he established David Lewis books: I think David was the name of his nine-year-old son, and that his name was something else. At any rate, neither he nor his son was the celebrated metaphycisian of possible worlds (and colleague of Saul Kripke). David Lewis Books was the first to publish Blanchot in English: in 1973 they came out with Thomas the Obscure, well before Station Hill began a series of translations. I was to become obsessed with Blanchot and even to carry out a short correspondance with him. But all this was well in the future when I used to go to Parnassus to look for Edgar Rice Burroughs's science fiction there as well.

I remember building a batman model, and trying to fit the molded plastic pieces together. I got the model by searching all the chairs in the house for change -- eventually I came up with the $1.98 plus tax that it cost. There was a toy store on 83rd street where I got it. It looked so good on the box, but of course the problem was that you had to paint it when you were done. I don't remember the name of the toy store, but I took my sister there to spend the $20 she found in the men's room of the Amsterdam airport when she was seven or eight years old and we were changing planes. My father took her to the bathroom, and she saw the American money I always imagined in a urinal, but I now am not sure that I ever heard that detail: maybe just on the floor.

I remember that there was a tailor in the basement of our building. I sort of assumed that this was a standard building amenity in New York, like the milk machine downstairs where you'd get a quart of milk -- whole or skim -- for a quarter. Later they raised it to 27 cents, which was a pain. The tailor was an old man with spectacles who would sew up buttons and rips. You could get to him through the courtyard that led out of our building and up a ramp to 89th street (the main entrance was on 90th, but my school was on 89th so I would use this back entrance). The kitchen and dining room windows looked out on this court -- there was a large and impressive birdbath in the middle of a grassy triangular plot below. I was amazed and impressed with myself when I let a rope down from our seventh floor window to the ground, and a friend pulled at the other end (Tommy Hoge?). I'd made a connection from above to below that before seemed only notional. I had a similar experience, I now see, the first time I went sky-diving. It turned out that the level of the plane and the level of the ground really were part of the same world, and you could connect one to the other without the technology of the elevator or of take-off and landing, machines that one understood but that seemed to work more like telephones, mediating separate spaces in a way having nothing to do in a way that was quite real with actual physical relation.

I remember Murray's sturgeon shop. I remember Merrit Farms on 87th street where I would buy knishes. One person behind the counter had a concentration camp number tatooed on his forearm. I knew what it was the first time I saw it, but I don't know how I knew.

posted by william 7:40 PM
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