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, June 21, 2002

I remember National Lampoon's Foto Funnies. There were two per issue. One of them always had a frame with a topless woman. I read them avidly. I also remember that Time Magazine went through a period at about the same time when you could find one discreetly titillating photo in each issue. One that I remember was about T-shirts with photographic designs on them: it was illustrated with a picture of a woman wearing a T-shirt with a photo of bare breasts. Neither National Lampoon nor Time magazine was actually titillating -- finding these photos was more like scoring points. Unlike most of my male contemporaries, I never felt that way about National Geographic, though. I guess the photos there really did seem necessary to illustrate the boring stories.

posted by william 7:04 AM
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