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, November 11, 2002

I remember Growing Up Absurd, by Paul Goodman, a book everybody seemed to be reading somewhat after they were reading Catch-22, and before Cat's Cradle, or maybe it was Mother Night. I assumed that like Catch-22 it was funny. This was when "absurd" seemed to be synonymous with "hilarious." I wonder, now, whether that was my misunderstanding -- did I take "That's absurd!" for "Too funny to be serious"? -- or the lingo of the time. I know that Beckett was supposed to be both funny and absurd, and I thought that the so-called "theater of the absurd" was supposed to be hysterically incongruous. I guess in my mind, and maybe at large, "absurd" and "hysterical" paralleled each other. I know that I made the same mistake about the word "famous," which I thought meant great. My father had told me (in the elevator, coming down from 7-F) that either FDR or Lincoln was the greatest president. "What about Washington?" I protested. "Wasn't he the most famous." Most famous, probably, but not the greatest. On the other hand this is not completely out of line with the British slang use of famous, as when you get along "famously." But I wouldn't, I don't think, have been affected by that.

posted by william 11:42 PM
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