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 24, 2002

I remember that multi-platter albums -- from Beethoven's symphonies to Tommy by The Who alternated sides, so that the first record had side one and side 2n, the second side two and side 2n-1, the third side 3 and 2n-2, until you got to the nth record which had sides n and n+1. The sides interleaved like a sestina. This was so you could stack them on a turntable. The mechanism was really neat -- I remember the first time I saw it on my father's new stereo. I was particularly captivated by the hooked arm that you brought down over the stack of records yawing on the catch that would allow one record at a time to fall onto the spinning drum. The arm forced them out of their yaw into perfect horizontality and pushed them down when it was time for the next record to drop. You could listen to a whole stack of records, and then grab them all and turn them over to get the second half of the album. The tone arm would lift up and move out of the way while the next record fell. I liked the way the records fit over the tall spindle; and the way the spindle itself fit into its socket with a twist. Of course this all turned out to be bad for the records -- the fall, the stacking -- but the turntable seemed so friendly, calm and competent and sunny, with its two strong and reliable arms taking care of the records for as long as was necessary. I liked also that the tone-arm knew when the last record had dropped (since the catch on the spindle wasn't compressed), and just lifted off and stopped.

posted by william 12:41 AM
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