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, February 15, 2003

I remember "Up up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon." I liked it. A small part of why I iked the song was because that was always what Superman said before taking off in the TV show, and I think in the early comics.

I remember a Superman episode where he gets blast frozen and loses all his powers. I didn't quite get the logic. He is all white -- a man of ice. At one point he says, "Up, up, and away," and tries to fly but can't. Very embarrassing to him. As Clark Kent he puts on Lois's make-up, and people remark on how tanned and healthy he looks, and make catty insinuations about his being on vacation in Florida during a crisis. I remember another episode where he learns from some Yogi type to pass through a solid wall, in order to arrest a guy hidden in an impregnable -- even by Superman -- chamber who will be declared legally dead at noon after being in hiding for seven years, and will therefore escape his crimes. Superman ends up not using this ability, but getting the atomic clock agency to speed up their clocks slightly so that the callibrating signal the bad guy is using tells him it's noon when it's only ten to, and when he breaks out of his fortress, using his back-hoe, he's arrested. I wonder whether these weren't late episodes.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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