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, September 09, 2002

I remember when I had to get something at the Garden Market (the supermarket on the West side Broadway between 89th and 90th), I went to the produce section and asked a wiry bald middle-aged man who worked there where to find what I wanted. "What's that, son?" he asked. It was the first time, and maybe the last, that I was actually called son in ordinary conversation with a stranger. I asked my mother about it, and she said it was pretty typical. At the Garden (and at the slightly higher scale Key Foods on 92nd) you had your produce weighed in the produce section by the people working there. They tied it up in a plastic bag -- I feel that staplers were involved somehow -- and wrote the price large with a grease pencil. They calculated in their heads, never using the graphite pencil behind their ears. I liked the idea of using your ear as a pencil holder, but my mother detested it. Later retro-greaser types would keep cigarettes behind their ears (and packs in the sleeves of their t-shirts). I did both, but only rarely, and for convenience.

posted by william 12:12 AM
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