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 13, 2002

I remember Theodore H. White's series of books beginning with The Making of the President 1960 and going on, I think to 1968 or 1972. They were part of the gravitas surrounding the office and the institution. Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972took specific aim at White's books. But I remember them as part of the array of adult books which supported the adult world which surrounded me. The Britannica Book of the Year,their yearly supplement, to which my father subscribed and which he made more room for on the bookshelf every spring, had some of the same effect, but less so since it seemed about ephemera, unlike the great permanence of fact in the Encyclopedia proper.

posted by william 8:48 AM
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