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, November 21, 2002

I remember smoking unfiltered cigarettes (Camels, Pall Malls, Luckies) with the label end out. This was the way spies did it. That way they wouldn't be able to tell what cigarettes you were smoking from the butts. Andy Birsh was against this -- he thought it wasn't a good idea to inhale the smoke from the printer's ink.

I remember Hugh Cramer saying that the bad chemicals in cigarettes were in the paper. This relieved me: it made it ok that my grandfather smoked cigars, which didn't have paper.

I remember my father bringing in some Cuban cigars from Italy. He didn't smoke but wanted to give them out to friends and clients. He gave me a gray plastic shopping bag containing them which I was supposed to bring through customs. As I walked past the officer searching our suitcases, I turned around and went back to ask him where I should wait. He shooed me forward, and the bag wasn't searched, but I certainly wasn't very spy-like in the way I handled that.

posted by william 12:06 PM
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