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

Monday, August 26, 2002

I remember reading Herman Wouk. Marjorie Morningstar might have been the first adult novel I read. I liked the title. But I didn't realize till maybe 80% of the way through that her name was Marjorie Morgenstern. I saw the "Mor..." and read it as "Morningstar" from the beginning. I think it was when she reflects that both she and Noel had changed their names (Noel Airman from Saul Ehrman) that I looked back and found my error. I think the passages about Noel Airman might have been when I first heard of Noel Coward (whom Airman is said to admire). Noel always hold his elbow, but at one point he bows to Marjorie and she sees that he has a crooked arm. Much later, she's considering some void in herself and she thinks that it's like something. "Or a crooked arm." I remember being in raptures about "a crooked arm." A little later I started reading Wouk's book about a guy who buys a hotel in hte Carribean, and decides he's going to try to read Ulysses, "that difficult novel." My father had Ulysses on his bookshelf, so of course I tried to read it. And it wasdifficult -- there were no quotation marks around reported speech. But I persisted: it took over a year, and only half-way through, I remember, I asked my father whether Leopold Bloom was Jewish. So I got nearly nothing out of it. But I was impressed by Molly's monologue, and her use of "fuck" and "shit" (words she wants to cry while kissing Stephen all over his "clean young cock"). I also liked the letter from Joyce to Bennet Cerf and Judge Woolsey's opinion at the head of the Random House book. I think I learned the word "leer" from that opinion ("not with the leer of the pornographer"). Previously I'd known Bennet Cerf as the compiler of 1001 Jokes, which my downtown grandmother gave me, along with The Wit and Wisdom of John F. Kennedy, edited by someone who made a specialty of those sorts of books (I think he had an Adlai Stevenson one as well).

posted by william 7:24 AM
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