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, March 04, 2003

Dick Moran writes a propos of the entry about two Superman episodes, 2/15/03:

Boy, do I remember this one (or two)! The make-up he steals from Lois's purse, the pathetic attempt to fly. I can't remember if it was Lex Luthor or someone who somehow inflicted this on him. (Probably not, since as I recall Lex Luthor doesn't appear in the TV show, but I could be wrong.) But the other episode you mention probably made a bigger impression on me. I remember the scenes of Superman's failed attempt to pass through the thick wall to the bad guy's fortress, and how he gets half-way through and can't go any further (it's just TOO thick). I can't recall just how they filmed that part, but I remember my anxiety that, having only got half-way, he wouldn't be able to get back out. I think both those episodes create an anxiety about the nature of super-powers. I mean I could handle the fact that, although practically omnipotent, he did have an Achilles heel in the form of kryptonite. In fact, I welcomed this, and I think did all young fans of Superman. But these two episodes are disturbing in proposing new variations and limitations on his super-powers. I mean, nothing in his nature prepared us for the idea that getting too COLD could somehow render him impotent. (Especially since his only real home on Earth was the frozen Fortress of Solitude.) And then the other episode was even more disturbing, because it involved Superman trying to learn a new super-power that he didn't have by nature or by virtue of his Kryptonian birth. I didn't like the idea of him trying to do something he had no idea whether he could do, something he had to learn from a human being, something that nothing in his array of super-powers suggested he could do. It brought the whole world of effort, and training, and risk into the world of super-powers, which had heretofore been purely a world of natural possession or non-possession, like the ability to see or not.
--Dick Moran
------------------

I remember that my father told me that FDR got polio by going swimming after a hard morning gardening (or was it croquet)? He was hot and sweaty and then the cold water shocked his system into polio. Over the years I went from: fear of getting into a cold pool, to: realization that polio was caused by a germ, not cold water, so that what my father said was an old wives tale, to: realization that there was some truth to the swimming pool story since polio used to be passed along by fecal matter in public swimming pools, to: discovery in today's Times that when the body temperature is lowered humans become more susceptible to polio, so that the coldness of the water does make a difference.

posted by william 11:06 AM
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