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

Thursday, October 10, 2002

I remember when you opened beer cans with a can opener -- with the triangular end. My uptown grandfather did that. It seems very odd now. I also remember my father opening Canda Dry gingerale cans that way, and Sally Hoge opening large quart cans of Kool-Aid. I wondered why you had to open both ends. I wasn't allowed to open the cans myself then. When I did I discovered the air-pressure answer: the cans didn't pour unless air could come in. Why were the openings diametrically opposite to each other? I didn't think to ask -- it just seemed aesthetically right, as it seemed right that the non-pouring breach should be as small as you could make it -- small as you could make it while allowing the can to pour freely. Beer cans dropped out of my experience for many years (I stopped going to my grandparents' house in the afternoon, when my grandfather drank his beer), and when I started drinking beer, pull tops were long familiar. (We made rings out of them, worrying the tabs off the pulls.) So I remember soda cans opened with can-openers much more vividly than those old Rheingold beer cans. And I remember not quite understanding, when pull tops came in, why they didn't need that second friendly winking opening on the other side of the can.

posted by william 1:18 PM
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