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 06, 2002

I remember Jock magazine. It was about sports in New York City. I think the cover of its original (and only) issue had the Knicks on it. I seem to remember that it had an article about Walt (Clyde) Frazier in it, about how fast his hands were. He was an extremely throughtful and introspective person. The interviewer (wherever the interview was) asked whether he was friends with all his teammates, and he responded with withering scorn that he took friendship very seriously. He thought most people didn't know what the word meant. He doubted that he could have five friends in the world, or that anyone could. I took this definition as my ideal, and used the word myself sparingly and with great respect. This made me liable to feeling very hurt if someone I thought of, and said I thought of, as a friend showed any coldness to me; and it also made me very chary of considering anyone a real friend. It fed into my natural secretivness, a quality I used to take a perverse pride in. I also took a perverse pride in seeing it criticized by others. Jock had a subscription blank, and I found the first issue so fetching that I immediately subscribed (we'll bill you later). No bill and no further copy came, and that was the end of that. I couldn't believe it though: it was like a restaurant or store closing: these things weren't supposed to happen. But it still had its influence on me -- both for benefit and for bane.

posted by william 4:19 PM
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