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, March 16, 2002

I remember going to get a Batman costume for Halloween. But the mask had the Batman logo -- the black bat on a yellow elliptical field that Comissioner Gordon would project into the sky -- on its forehead. The real Batman's mask was all black (or night blue); the bat silhuouette device appeared on his chest only. So this was intensely frustrating -- all the masks had the stupid logo. I went home and tried instead to get my (Chelsea) grandmother, who sewed very well, to make me a cowl. But she didn't get what I meant about Batman's ears, and I tried to figure out a way to prop them up myself so that they would look like bat's ears, but I couldn't. I was deeply disappointed.

posted by william 7:06 PM
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