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

Thursday, June 27, 2002

I remember Peter Rogers always boasting that his father was in Who's Who. I hadn't known what it was before. It seemed like a mildly interesting fact about his father, but nothing more. So I was accurate about that. I met his father once: I think he was president of Rogers Peet; at least Peter claimed that the store was named after him. Peter's twin Ronnie had a Cross pen, and began in me, and in some of my sixth grade classmates, a vogue for Cross pens. My uptown grandfather had a Cross pencil, which I prevailed upon him to give me. But it wasn't quite the same, and finally for some occasion I managed to get a pen. It came with an explanation of 14 Karat gold, which was close to the explanation Goldfinger gives in Goldfinger.I liked its ridges. But I chewed away its black plastic top -- I couldn't help myself -- and it got beat up in other ways as well. I remember being surprised by the humdrum refills of the ink tubes and rollers. They were barely grander than those of Bic pens. I also remember how Bic pens would leak in your pocket, and how easy it was to suck ink out of them absent-mindedly, and how bad the ink tasted, and how much it ruined your shirt when it leaked. I think the ink is better now, the polymers longer and less deliquiescent.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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