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

Thursday, April 18, 2002

I remember wax bottle penny candy. You bit the top off and there was a little bit of sweet sugary liquid inside of it. The taste of the wax and then chewing the wax for the last remnant of liquid was what made it interesting.

I remember Razzles. ("Razzles is a candy! Razzles is a gum!") Razzles was awful. It started out like candy, but once you crunched it turned into gum. They had a contest asking kids to come up with a new term for it, to put to rest the debate whether it was a candy or a gum. This must have been the precursor to: Less Filling! Tastes Great!

I remember Now and Laters. Another awful tooth denter. Very hard cubes of some waxy candy, like petrified or stale Starbursts. It was supposed to take you hours to get through the whole pack, or maybe each individual cube, and I think it did. They came in oblongs, wrapped in cellophane, like modelling clay.

I remember Bonomo Turkish taffy. Chocolate, Banana, Strawberry, I think.

I remember the candy store where I bought all this stuff on 89th and Amsterdam. It was run by a middle aged black couple. I remember the husband, who was bald and very big and whom everyone called Curly. We had to wear blazers to the Franklin School -- a bit of pretentiousness that went by very quicky, once the narrow edge of desert boots was jammed in, and standing out like sore thumbs we would often get mugged by other kids on our way to or from school (once by the kid who called me a motherfucker), and I always liked the candy store because the owner (I never called him Curly) would protect us and tell the other kids, even when they were black, to leave us alone. I remember also in sixth grade, the first time I had to take "midterms," glamorous word, stopping with my friends to get some candy at that store before the test. It was dark and full of good things.

I remember stealing change left on the newspapers outside the New Yorker bookshop by people in a hurry -- either because they had to go quicky or because the bookshop wasn't open yet. I always stole some and left some -- that way if anyone came by just after I pocketed some, they would see that there was change still there and assume I was just reading the headlines or windowshopping. This is where we got money for candy from the candy shop.

posted by william 7:07 AM
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