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

Thursday, February 20, 2003

I remember that my uptown grandmother called "night sticks" what later (during the Chicago DNC riots) I heard referred to as "billy clubs." I wonder where the term -- where either term -- comes from. I remember that my favorite doorman at 175 -- Fred Kusk (who reminded me a lot of Lurch, or rather vice versa) -- had a baseball bat when he was on at night, which seemed to me strangely out-of-place since until then it hadn't really occured to me that a bat could be used as a weapon.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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