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

Sunday, March 24, 2002

I remember PhisoHex. It came in a green squeeze bottle. It tasted terrible if you got any in your mouth. After it became illegal in the U.S. you could still get it in England, which I did when I went to England in college. Once it was illegal it seemed to work much better on acne than it had done before.

I remember school desks, with their cubbies for your stuff beneath the surface. The new ones were of blond wood (or maybe plastic) that resisted carving; the old ones were of darker wood and were hacked up with initials. I remember the paint and the blue ink that would get into the grooves forever. (I remember our smocks when we fingerpainted too). The dark wood desks had a round hole for ink bottles (although we didn't know that that's what they were for, knowing only ballpoints), which was also unpleasant -- it broke the symmetry and the integrity of the surface of the desk.

I remember Bic pens leaking in your pocket. Also chewing and sucking on the ends of them.

posted by william 7:08 AM
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