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, September 25, 2002

I remember how frustrating it was to go clothes shopping: trying on different versions of hugely uncomfortable clothes. I remember going down to Barney's on 17th street (when it was still a discount store and not the bankrupt upscale Madison Avenue institution it has since become) and being forced into uncomfortable wool outfits. I remember that after we decided on something, the dapper salesman gave way to a tailor who would chalk the clothing -- cuffs (both hand and foot), shoulders, waist, all of this increasing the frustration and claustrophobia and overheatedness of the whole thing. He worked with a cigarette in his mouth, and would drop ashes amid the chalk, but that was ok because like the chalk they would be gone from the finished suit.

posted by william 9:15 AM
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