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

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

I remember Lark cigarettes. Do they still exist? I didn't know what a lark was till much later. I think I knew what having a lark was before I knew about the bird. I must have learned about the bird from e. e. cummings poems. Or possibly from some junior high school production of Blithe Spirit. But I knew about the cigarette before any of that. It was sort of like the "sick" in MAD magazine. Later when I saw the Latin sic in verbatim quotations I thought it was a variant of "sick." I knew that when you told a dog to "sic him" it was spelled s-i-c, and I knew my friend Marc Bilgray, like Marc Chagall spelled "Mark" without the k. So I thought that the sic in quotations meant that the thing quoted was "sick" -- that is deviant, and that the quoter was just pointing this out, as MAD magazine would point out their own deviance. So that I got the meaning right, but for the wrong reason.

posted by william 9:09 PM
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