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

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

I remember when people used to say, "Incidentally." "I am going to the store to get some milk, which, incidentally, I'd asked you to get." I noticed that people didn't say it any more when I happened to watch a movie of Nixon's Checkers speech, which incidentally should have destroyed, not saved, his career. Whenever he wanted to break out of his self-imposed humility he'd attack someone, incidentally. Now people say, "By the way." I think incidentally must have lasted from the forties through 1970 or so. I wonder where it came from -- a military term perhaps? I feel as though there's a song that made use of it, "Oh, and incidentally, I love you." Or is it the title of a song? Johnny Matthis? It should have been.

posted by william 7:27 AM
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