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 05, 2002

I remember The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace, I believe, who later did an almanac with his son and daughter. I often confused him with holocaust denier David Irving. The Seven Minutes was about a book of the same title (referring to the average length of the sexual act) put on trial for pornography. The book contained the pornographic work at its center -- that is you could read the pretty hot piece of porn that the trial was about. I learned a lot about sex, and about the first amendment -- just what a boy reading that kind of book wanted.

posted by william 9:33 AM
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