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, March 20, 2003

I remember Lyndon Johnson announcing he wouldn't seek re-election. Those were the days. I was a McCarthy partisan -- partly because my mother hated Bobby Kennedy so much. I think this was because of his association with Roy Cohn, but it might have been because of the way he handled being attorney general. I liked Bobby on TV, but she said he was slimey and mendacious, and I believed her. I remember how he said "can't," with that broad Boston accent -- Kahn't. I remember the cut over his eye in an interview, caused in the rescue of his son who'd been carried away by a rip tide or undertow. A week or so later, he was dead.

I remember Six Crises by Richard Nixon. Like The God That Failed it seemed like it had to be an important adult book.

posted by william 11:39 PM
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