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 24, 2003

I remember x-ray specs. The ad at the back of the comic book showed a guy with goggle-eyed spiral lenses looking at the bones in his hand. And also, as I recall, towards a big-bottomed girl in a skirt. It was obvious to me that this was a scam. No one I knew had ever fallen for it, until one day a boy came in with the specs. I assumed that what they did was to show silhouettes. He let a couple of other guys look through them, but no one else. They claimed that it worked, but even though I was a little wistful about not getting to have the experience of trying them on, I felt confident that they didn't.

I also remember the throw-your-voice device. The ad showed a man with a trunk on his back, and a voice from the trunk calling "Help! Let me out!" We were encouraged to fool our teachers with this device. I was willing to believe that this one worked though I couldn't really figure out how.

posted by william 11:08 PM
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