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 09, 2002

I remember Tonettes. They gave them out in Music, in third grade. They still have them. I remember the cool kids who brought their recorders to Music, while the rest of us played Tonettes. I think Susan Steinmetz had a recorder. That was the first I knew of recorders, and the second thing I knew about them, years later, was that they were in Hamlet. It was cool that they had such a long pedigree -- that something I became acquainted with in third grade should reappear so glamorously in Shakespeare.

posted by william 10:46 PM
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