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

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

I remember more about Party Cake vs. Cake Masters. When Cake Masters tied up your box (from those brass string dispensers that hung from the ceiling at intervals corresponding to the stations of the counterstaff), they would attach a handle; a high quality cardboard cylinder surrounding a piece of metal hooked at both ends which attached onto the string. I thought of this as the technique of the higher class place. I remember also trying to open the box so as to sneak cookies out of it without anyone knowing. You'd have to slip the string to the side of the front flap, pulling hard against its the other back edge and other side, and then pry the front flap open enough to get a cookie out. Or you could try to lift the string up and towards the front and try to open the flap a little bit in the space you'd opened up, pressing its lip against the taut string (red and white candy-striped! Party Cake just used white string). This was a delicate operation, since it was very easy to pull too hard and have the string cut through the flap, leaving evidence of your attempted depradations. Sometimes I would just rip the flap through the string, on the theory that it couldhave happened accidentally; but I don't think I tried this much.

posted by william 10:01 PM
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