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 02, 2002

I remember thick pencils at school. I guess they were for little hands. You could only get them at school. The pencil sharpener had two slots -- one for standard and one for thick. The thick pencils had no erasers, and were stubby and short. The wood they were made out of was darker and softer and splintered more easily if you chewed on them (and didn't taste as good). I don't recall ever doing any work with them. They were just unappealing, and seemed a thing only to be met with in school. I think this was also because they tended to be painted a kind of institutional green or brown -- not the bright yellow of Ticonderogas -- like the school walls, olive to about head height, then a dingy brownish yellow above that. (Why was this?)

I remember (as an element of my lunatic fastitdiousness) how upset I was when I got my first thermos. When you opened it up you could see two black circles with imprefect annealing -- where the glass was glued to the shell. But I hated them, and I kept looking for thermoses without these imperfections. Finally I would pour my drink from them without looking at the bottom. After a while I got over this.

I remember also how easily they would break. That's why I got so many.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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