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, April 06, 2002

I remember pitching pennies. There was a public service ad on TV about finishing high school, which said that with a high school diploma you could go somewhere. So the choice was up to you -- did you want to do something? "Or you could keep pitching pennies all your life." So that's where I learned about pitching pennies, which my friends and I then did -- tossed pennies against the wall so that they would land as close to the wall as possible. The winner of each round kept all the pennies. This never came to much money won or lost either way.

posted by william 7:10 AM
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