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

Monday, March 17, 2003

I remember that my father never forgave my grandmother for an incident during the 1947 World Series. Bill Bevins was pitching a no-hitter for the Yankees, although he was wild, and in the bottom of the ninth the Yankees were ahead of the Dodgers 2-1 with two on (by walks and maybe a wild pitch) and two out. My sixteen year old father was sitting motionless in the wing chair, listening to the game on the radio. My grandmother was ironing. She finished and then went to the open window and slammed it shut, just as -- and in his mind acting as the cause for what ensued, viz. that -- Cookie Lavajetto hit a double to break up the no-hitter and win the game for the Dodgers. Later I read about this game as well as about Bobby Thompson's shot heard round the world in 1951, in a compendium of baseball lore. The Yankee outfielder tried to preserve the no-hitter by attempting to catch the ball, allowing what would otherwise have been a game-tying hit become the game-winner. much as I'd hoped that Cleon Jones or Tommy Agee might have dived for Jimmy Qualls' one-out line-drive single in the ninth inning of Tommy Seaver's erstwhile perfect game.

posted by william 4:13 PM
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