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, July 19, 2002

I remember Michael Hobin reading Candy,a book I knew was extreme. I never got my hands on a copy though.

I remember I am Curious (Yellow),the book, and also its sequel, I am Curious (Blue). They were on display at the candy store where I sometimes shop-lifted candy on 91st and Broadway. But we weren't allowed to buy them or look at them, and they were in full view of the counterperson. (I don't think I ever associated candy with Candy despite the middle term provided by the titillating books.) Later, I used to walk my dog Powell there, smoking, and buy a chocolate bar to disguise the stink of cigarettes from my father, who has a very acute sense of smell.

I remember the Green Lantern novel where a lightbulb explodes as a scientist is reading a paper at a lectern. (This was my first acquaintance with the word lectern.)The Green Lantern (or was it Green Hornet?) says, very authoritatively -- as a man with great savoir faire, a man who knows how the world works, "A normal light bulb won't just explode like that unless you put cold water on it." He's right, and it turns out that the villain has put some gas in the lightbulb and then set it up to explode in order to give the scientist amnesia. The next night in the bath I filled up my watergun and squirted the lightbulb over the sink, and it did explode. This was a very dumb thing to do.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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