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

Saturday, August 10, 2002

I remember The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.The title, wittily, had the R in PETER reversed, like the R in Toys 'R' Us. Things always go wrong because people get promoted until the reach their "level of incompetence." My father and all his friends read this book. I read a bit of it. I remember one of Peter's example: the Astrodome, where the clouded-glass roof made it impossible for outfielders to see fly balls during the day. I think this was my first introduction to Darwinian theory, although of course what it was was a kind of dysgenic account of what happens when there aren't prices in survivability for the unfit to pay. It seemed a pretty interesting idea, though of course I didn't see why anyone would spend their time reading that book and not fiction.

posted by william 7:10 PM
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