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, February 13, 2003
I remember Run for your life, a show not unlike The Fugitive. The protagonist is dying of a brain tumor, as you are reminded by his occasional winces when his head hurts. Because he's dying he's fearless, and has undertaken some impossible mission -- whether to clear himself of a crime, or find the beast who committed some crime against him, or on behalf of the government, I don't remember. I do remember that there was a Mad Magazine parody of the show, where the protagonist smokes a pack of cigarettes all at once, because he doesn't have enough time left to smoke them serially. I think that in the opening credits he might be given two years to live. I don't know whether the show lasted that long.


posted by william 4:08 PM
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