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, August 08, 2002

I remember Eclair, the Austrian bakery on 72nd street. There was an old Austrian couple that ran and I think owned it. I found it interesting that a New York institution could somehow be run by an old couple very like my grandparents. The surprise about Eclair was that there was a little restaurant in the back. We ate there one night -- I thought we were just going to the bakery, or just getting desert, and then we sat down to dinner and got knoedel and palaschinken and such. What made it seem like a real restaurant was that they gave us water in water glasses when we sat down. They closed from one day to the next about ten years ago. I think they'd since been bought out -- their food wasn't what it had been. They used to make wonderful opera cakes, with lots of rum and lots of pink decoration. But I wasn't eating opera cake in the period that I first remember it -- more pischingers and florentines and other chocolatey things.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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