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


Monday, March 03, 2003
I remember another impressive Superman episode. A two-parter. I think some oil interests dug a drill that went down farther by far than any drill had done before, and the strange denizens of the center of the earth came to the surface. They were squat, Yoda-like, and very strong. But it turned out they were not malicious, and the story ends with an agreement to seal off the drill-shaft. I remember how they came out of the manhole covering the shaft -- they were strong enough to lift it off or to unscrew it or something. Very eerie. I wondered why no one was guarding the hole at night.


posted by william 4:20 PM
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