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, July 01, 2002
I remember Chicken on the Run, a pizza place on Montauk Highway.

I remember malteds. You can still get them, but not often. I also remember real custard. Another thing that's very hard to get. For a while we called soft ice-cream custard, and then we stopped. And once, in Italy I think, I ordered custard and got a hideous adult version of the thing. Oh well.

I remember Yugo Cocta, the Tito-era Yugoslav monopoly on soft-drinks. It was terrible.

I remember when people tended to write Yugoslavia as "Jugoslavia." I always hated it, though I think that was the way Jugoslav National Airlines did it.


posted by william 12:58 AM
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