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


Friday, April 12, 2002
I remember Wink. Grapefruit soda. I think it's still available in the South, or at least is intermmitently available there. It was wonderful, and I think it was the only soda that tasted best in cans. A can of Wink was just great -- something about the alkaline taste of the aluminum combined with the citric acid of the soda itself. And the soda was always slightly flatter than other sodas, which was perfect.

I remember Tab. It's still around of course, but it used to be ubiquitous, in the saccharine days between cyclamtes and aspartame.


posted by william 8:47 PM
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