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

Monday, April 29, 2002

I remember firecrackers. And the more dangerous cherry bombs and M-80s. There were lots of firecracker tricks, like lighting all twenty from their braided fuses so that they would go off either simultaneously or in rapid staccato succession. I had the idea, which impressed my friends, of putting a fire cracker into a piece of clay, so that you could throw it like a grenade and watch it explode in the air. And we sometimes put the clay into a Coke bottle, and then the glass would shatter in the air, which was impressive but I think a little too scary for us: we didn't do it often. I remember that if you break a firecracker in half and light the two tubes of gunpowder, you get a sizzler. We used to do this indoors as well, and the white counter of my book case/shelving has a scar from a sizzler that singed its top. I used to have to cover it up so my parents wouldn't notice it. It looked as though someone had left a cigarette burning there.

posted by william 9:26 AM
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