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, July 11, 2002

I remember Ellery Queen. How strange to think now that this was the name of a detective hero. My father really liked the Ellery Queen stories. There was some odd relationship between the name of the hero and the pseudonym of the author(s). I think that the stories were supposed to have been written by Ellery Queen, Sr. and Jr., or that they were framed by the two men discussing the case, and maybe (as with Poe's Dupin) EQ, Sr. figured out the case in armchair discussion with his son? I don't know, but I do remember there was something thrilling about the actual author, who belonged to the actual world, being the same person as the fictional detective. Yet I didn't read much Ellery Queen, but I did read the famous one (which my father loved): The Chinese Orange.In it the murdered man is found in a room in which everything is reversed -- the books on the shelf are upside down and backwards, the plates on the table, the tablecloth, the carpet, etc. The murdered man, whom no one can identify, is dressed backwards too, his pants and shirt and jacket pulled on so that they all close behind. Why? Ellery Queen notices the victim has no tie -- therefore the backwards shirt was in fact nor backwards for him: he is a priest, with reversed collar, and once you figure that out it's easy to figure out who murdered him. The murderer tried to distract attention from the missing tie by reversing everything else. I remember finding it interesting that priests reversed their shirts.

posted by william 6:57 AM
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