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 27, 2002

I remember penmanship classes in sixth grade. I remember the Palmer method. You had to move your whole arm, and not just your hand. It seemed really inefficient. But I never learned to write legibly. I remember that my parents told me they learned to write script ("cursive!" said our penmanship teacher) before print (block letters), whereas we learned it the other way around. My mother has a beautiful hand. But no one I ever knew alternated thick and thin strokes (except a few affected calligraphers). I remember my uptown grandmother's handwriting (those self-addressed postcards to Wengen), and I was surprised to find when I got a letter from Maurice Blanchot that the handwriting on the envelope was almost identical (I think it had been addressed by his sister-in-law who would be almost exactly contemporary with my grandmother, but French, not Croation).

posted by william 9:23 AM
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