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

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

I remember that the garbage trucks of my youth -- pre-Helvetica, pre-"Sanitation" -- had compacters that went around in a circle, like a water-wheel. Only later did trucks come in that scooped the garbage up into the body of the container. I remember how fascinating garbage trucks were, and how scary. The scooping ones seemed less scary because they brought the garbage up into a container that obviously had room for it. Whereas the earlier ones pushed it down, where it seemed there was no room at all. I sort of knew that it went around, but what was so eerie was that each vain or catch basin of the garbage-wheel came out empty, after going down full. How did it make that garbage disappear?

I remember that my downtown grandmother's building at an incinerator shute. Later incineration became illegal, but some people would still dump their garbage down that way. It became a very attractive place for roaches.

I remember that in my downtown grandmother's building (one of the ILGWU Union co-ops in Chelsea, on 28th street) there were two elevators, one for even and one for odd floors, and that the Ground floor was distinguished from the 1st, which made G even, and the odd floor elevator anamolous (since it stopped on G). My grandmother lived on the 11th floor, but I would take whichever elevator came first, and walk down from the twelfth floor if the even came first. Her building had criss-crossing stairways, so that you could switchback back and forth between floors, in either of two ways. I thought this was pretty cool at the time.

posted by william 1:00 AM
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