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

Sunday, November 17, 2002

I remember sandwiches. Sally Hoge introduced me to bologna, as I think it was spelled in the version I ate, with mustard, which she gave to Tommy, Ken, Butch and me. I fixed it for myself from then on till one day I was suddenly and completely disgusted with it. I remember American cheese with iceberg lettuce. I liked that, even if the lettuce was often rusty. I remember tuna made with mustard rather than mayo. Very dry. I remember the pleasure of rolling white bread into balls and cylinders of crushed rubbery dough. They tasted ok, and you could dip them in water. I remember bread sculptures sold as trinkets in Italy, made the same way and then allowed to dry, after which they would be painted. I thought about doing this a lot, but somehow I never had enough consecutiveness to do it.

posted by william 1:13 AM
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