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

Friday, November 22, 2002

I remember that on my little record player, you played 45s by pulling up a little plastic semi-circle or three-quarters circle and latching it so it stayed up around the 33 spindle. At first I didn't get what it was for, till my father played a 45 on it; and then I liked the way it came up and also the way it stayed up. I liked 45s too, and the way their sleeves had a one-inch hole in the middle, so you could hold them easily with your thumb in the hole. But they were (by design!) harder to keep than 33s, since they didn't have the outer cardboard casing -- no spine, nothing protecting them. My record player had speeds ranging from 16 to 78. I don't know whether 16 rpm records were ever produced. I guess they thought that the technology would improve sufficiently that they could get records that slow. I wonder where these numbers come from -- what induced the original records to be recorded at 78 rpms? And then why 33, and not 39? 78 can be divided by 6, so perhaps they were anticipating scaling down eventually to 13 rpms. (But why not 72 and 12, or the intuitive 60 and 10 -- 60 would mean one rotation per second.) I remember that my uptown grandparents had albums full of 78s, including, I believe, Caruso. I sort of knew that this large collection of short records was an album; but I think I didn't put it together with the LPs that I got later. It made sense that the brown Crosby Stills Nash and Young album was an album, since it had two record in it and lots of evocative photos. I liked thinking that they all lived together in the house in the album. I didn't get what was so Long-Playing about LPs, though, since 78s seemed like ancient history to me.

I remember that older records (roughly the same vintage as the olive-wreath pennies that were replaced by the Lincoln memorial ones) were thick and brittle. If you dropped them, they shattered. They can't have been made of vinyl -- they were practically porcelain -- they were like plates. Ralph Meeker (as Mike Hammer) smashes -- wait: that too was Caruso; but I'm sure my grandparents had Caruso, although maybe not on their 78s -- a record in Kiss Me Deadly when he's trying to get information. What I liked about the older records was that they didn't warp, unlike the later vinyl. It also felt as though they might be harder to scratch, but I doubt this could be true.

posted by william 11:49 PM
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