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, May 20, 2002

I remember "Give a damn." A button and also a poster in the busses and subways: white characters on a black ground. Only the G was capitalized, so it felt like stunningly understated design. I had the button. Ths logo made for a powerful equation of liberalism with adult seriousness, whose grim determined frisson I can still recollect and evoke in myself. Its effect was probably intensified by the way it recalled the somewhat earlier Time magazine "Is God Dead?" cover, which also seemed of an unusual seriousness, and was also made of light-colored letters on a funerally black ground. The Time cover seemed to me what intellectual and moral seriousness would mean -- I was shocked later on to find out about Henry Luce. This was much later: before that I had met Richard Clurman, father of my friend Michael Clurman, who had been vice-president of Time. (I suppose there were more than one, but I didn't know it then.) He seemed to be very impressive -- not in the same way as the cover, but not inconsistently either. But the cover was not as impressive as "Give a damn." with its extraordinary period. The propagators of the sign didn't want anything from you for themselves: they just wanted you to care, in the severe, unsentimental adult mode of caring. The period had a stripped down finality about it that made the imperative feel irresistable. I wore the button around for a long time.

I remember that at roughly the same time people were carrying around "Schlep" shopping bags. And wearing T-shirts and buttons that said "Don't bother me, I can't cope." But I think all the chaff made "Give a damn." all the more severely effective.

posted by william 6:43 AM
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