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

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

I remember where I used to get my hair cut on Broadway on 88th street. Haircuts were a dollar. I used to give the barber a quarter as tip. The barbers there were never talkative, and I didn't get the jokes in movies about talkative barbers -- I mean they didn't seem true-to-life. These barbers had a shaving-cream machine -- black with a chrome nozzle, and after they cut my hair they would shave my sideburns, unnecessarily. They'd sharpen the razor on a leather strop, very impressively. I remember the odd loud sound of the razor scraping near my ears. But I think they thought of themselves as one of the institutions that prepared you for adulthood. In the age of AIDS this preparation turned out to be useless. There was a sign in the window: "We cut hair only." I never quite understood as opposed to what. Ears? Cloth? I remember that as they hovered around me they would always be snipping the air very rapidly, as though ready to pounce on a wayward lock, a practice which when I idly did at home my mother told me was very bad for scissors.

posted by william 7:37 AM
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