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, October 02, 2002

I remember Compoz. "Honey, take Compoz." "I don't have a headache!" "Compoz isn't a pain reliever. It will calm you down." Later: everyone is happy, since the mother/wife is her Stepford self again. I was impressed by her irritability though -- so different from the way commercials usually represented women, who so cheerfully did, and discussed, scut work. I imagine that Compoz was particularly intended for women with PMS. The FCC made them withdraw the ads, and I think the FDA the drug, when it turned out not to work.

I remember Geritol: "for iron-poor, tired blood." My uptown grandparents used it.

I remember how my uptown grandparents smelled of menthol. Ben-Gay, I found out in high school, where some of the athletes used it. It was very odd to find the same smell in the locker rooms.

posted by william 12:24 AM
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