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

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

I remember the Famous Writers' School, the Famous Artists' School and the Famous Photographers' School. They had lots of ads on match book covers as well as in magazines. Geoffrey Stern had a 35 mm slr, and I wanted one desperately and eventually got a Honeywell Pentax. I also filled out the card for the Famous Photographers' aptitude test, which I received a few weeks later. No obligation! But you had to be over eighteen. You looked at photos and were asked what emotion they reminded you of. It was multiple choice. I remember one photograph, of clouds, rolling away over a plain to a distant horizon. The choices were three ridiculous ones and "infinity." I nailed that one. As it happens, I think I got 16 out of twenty, which they keyed as the lowest passing grade. Then they called during dinner. I went to the phone in the pantry, my mother sitting in the dining room with my sister. When they told me who they were, I gulped. The guy calling me heard me gulp and asked how old I was. I didn't even think to lie, and just said, "fourteen." He was very polite (this must have happened all the time), thanked me, asked me to get in touch with them again when I was eighteen... and I was off the hook. My mother didn't even press me about who called. I'd never gotten out of such sudden serious trouble so easily and quickly. I fully intended to call them back when I was eighteen and master of my own fate, but somehow I never did.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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