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

Friday, November 29, 2002

I remember eight-track tapes. "Eight-track, record, or cassette." I'm not sure what their point was. You couldn't record, as you could on a cassette, and it was hard to get where you wanted to be, as on a record. All four "sides" had to be the same length for any reasonable sense of continuity, so that songs would break in the middle as the eight-track switched from one side to the next. The only thing you could do was quickly reverse from side one to two to three to four, and so you were never more than 25% of the program away from where you wanted to be. But it wasn't worth it. I remember trying to figure out how they worked -- that is how you could essentially be at four places at once. I think we were led to believe that eight tracks meant greater fidelity and detail, not just four programs on one stretch of tape. I think I didn't really get how they worked until I saw cassette players with auto-reverse -- then it dawned on me, and eight-tracks seemed stupider than ever. I think I had two or three eight-track tapes, but I can't remember what they were now. Just possibly Grand Funk: Railroad.

posted by william 7:06 AM
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