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 19, 2002

I remember reinforcements. And also self-sticking reinforcements. And also fabric reinforcements. And how easy it was to come home with a reinforcement stuck on you somewhere. I remember spending lots of boring time tracing the outside edges of reinforcements with my pen -- this almost always ended up with the pen-point prying the reinforcement from the paper and crumpling it -- and testing the inner edges, first by twirling my pen around and then by forcing it out on a radius against the reinforcement. I would also try to rip the paper under the reinforcement, almost always with success. I remember the huge frustration of trying to save a ripped-out piece of paper with reinforcements. One wouldn't do, and if you used two you could never get them just right. I remember the experience of trying to pierce reinforcements with the open rings when trying to replace a sheaf of paper. I also remember how hard it was to write in a loose-leaf notebook with the paper still in the binder. Your hand would be blocked by the rings. But it was also a real pain to take the paper out of the binder. There wasn't really room on your desk, and the gouges on the desk made writing hard anyhow (and if you used the binder as a backing, you were so tempted to pierce the vinyl). If you put the binder on the floor, you felt constrained everywhere. It was all very frustrating.

posted by william 7:35 AM
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