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

Tuesday, April 09, 2002

I remember "Snag on you" -- how one jeered when one was proved right.

I remember the cool kids in sixth grade being able to drum "Wipe Out" really fast on the school desks. I just didn't see how they did it -- their hands were a blur of movement.

I remember another distinction between my mother (Sephardic, lawyer, Herald Tribune reader, bus rider, etc.) and my father (Ashkenazy, CPA, New York Times reader, subway rider, etc.): she wore glasses and he didn't. I look like her and hated the fact that everyone said so (since I was a boy), and when I got glasses this intensified my sense of being placed in the wrong camp.

I remember a fight they once had (before we moved out of 2-G when I was 7 to 7-F): the first time I heard the phrases "Shut up" (her to him) and "Cut it out" (his response to her). I thought these were equally bad expletives (after I had been rebuked for saying "shut up" soon after), "shut up" being ranged on her side of things, "cut it out" on his.

posted by william 10:34 AM
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