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

Friday, May 24, 2002

I remember that when Marc Bilgray and I wanted to draw and write our own comics, my father offered to give us a corporation or to allow us to incorporate: I think he had registered or paid to register a corporation which he didn't need, and he was willing to hand it to us, obviously as a lesson in the workings of the financial world he hoped I would some day enter. (His father had been a lawyer in Vienna before the Second World War and when he came to the United States in his early fifties he retooled as an accountant. My father became a CPA and he and my grandfather formed a firm for a time, although my grandfather was never a CPA. My father hoped that I would become a lawyer: he and my mother -- who is a lawyer -- worked as a team.) I remember that I was intimidated by the idea of a corporation: somehow I thought it was a physical thing, a physical plant, a building full of offices that we would have to run; and when he explained that this wasn't true it still felt that there was some huge abstract responsibility that would devolve to us as real and palpable as a physical building. I somehow knew that we would never get anywhere drawing these comics, and I thought that we would therefore fail our responsibility to this corporation, and I wanted no part of it. I think now that this must have looked to him something like someone refusing with anxiety the idea of having a web-page of their own: as though this almost purely notional or potential thing were actual and demanding and real. This was I think my first timid and risk-aversive response to the modern free enterprise system.

posted by william 9:00 PM
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