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, May 21, 2002
I remember my father getting me cardboard blocks that you folded together to make bricks, and larger ones that were supposed to be a lot of bricks mortared together but whose surface I thought was just covered by abstract oblongs (partly because they were different colors). I remember being amazed when he folded them together, since they just came as sheets of thick cardboard. And later I used to unfold them and hide things inside them that no one ever found. Once when I was in trouble I had to produce something hidden there -- maybe a note from school or a bad report card -- but I managed to get it out without letting my father know where it had been hidden: I think I said it was hidden in the fold-out couch, so that this best of all secreting places remained undiscovered.

I remember Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials on TV in the afternoon. I don't think I ever saw a serial through, though I tried. Each episode was about five minutes long. I preferred Buck Rogers.

I remember that there was a Batman serial too, and it was rereleased as a movie. It never showed on TV, and I never got to see it.

I remember Officer Joe, host of "The Three Stooges."


posted by william 7:11 AM
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