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

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

I remember Peter Max -- his posters at the back of the bus. They replaced the interest of riding on the rear bumper with that of pulling one out of its metal frame. I think it was the same finger-tip experience: trying to get purchase on an extremely narrow surface. I remember waiting for busses with Peter Max on them, so as to try to get a poster. I once almost got one out, but then the bus took off. Marc Bilgray tried more assiduously than I did, and he did get one eventually (unless his father arranged to get him one through his entertainment world connections). It turned out to be amazingly larger than I thought it would be. As in college later so did the I-95 signs that people had managed to wrestle into their rooms.

posted by william 2:42 PM
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