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

Saturday, January 25, 2003

I remember that it wasn't called "script" but "cursive." And not "printing" but "manuscript." My teachers told me script was a false antonym to manuscript. I wonder whether that's true. I remember as well that we didn't "carry" the one, but "exchanged" ten ones for one ten. (This was the new math, which I really liked, both then and now.) All of this precisianism had the effect of lending prestige to the anathematized script, print, and carry, and I carried ones with abandon.

posted by william 12:33 AM
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