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 08, 2002

I remember my (Washington Heights) grandfather's Ford Granada. (I think it was the first car he had with the parallel wipers.) I remember cars without bucket seats, and climbing into the front or the back seat over the top. I remember lying down and sleeeping (pre-seatbelt) in the back.

I remember (more fasitdiousness) how I didn't like the fact that the crankshaft raised the floor of the car down the center. I asked my grandparents why the floor was raised, and they said it was for the propeller shaft, which I think was as close as they could come to describing it in English.

I remember that my grandmother would always turn to my grandfather and say "Milo, ti" (Milo, you), whenever she made an observation that she wanted to share with him. It was affectionate, and a kind of template for me for easy grandparently affection.

I remember that I could understand my grandmother's German, but no one else's. (I now remember also that my grandfather conducted his bridge games in German, not the more usual Serbo-Croation that he and my grandmother spoke together and with my parents and my other grandparents.) I remember her greeting her friends with what sounded to me like Kris Kott, though later I found out it was Gruss Gott. I found this out when I went to Switzerland, and actually stayed in Wengen, where she and my grandfather used to summer.

I remember that she so wanted me to write her when she was away that she would give me blank stamped postcards with her address in Wengen. I was supposed to write once a week, but she was lucky if I wrote twice a summer.

I remember Royal Crowne Cola, half the price of Coke and Pepsi, and also Cott diet sodas: "It's Cott to be good." That sounds like it would be one of the influences on my mishearing Gott as Kott, but I think it went the other way around: I remember the Cott ad because I'd already somehow been sensitized to the Austrian G, harder than the American, through hearing Kris Kott so often.

posted by william 12:05 PM
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