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, April 29, 2003

I remember "the beer with the ten minute head." Was it Rheingold? Or Ballantine's? I remember it in association with my uptown grandfather's drinking Rheingold (I was amused later to find that this was the first opera in the Ring Cycle), but only perhaps because I then wondered how long the head on his beer would last. I had no idea of the obscenity of the ad at the time. Amazing that they got away with it. Especially since, as I remember, you can't show people drinking in a beer commercial. (Just as you couldn't show women wearing just bras -- Playtex pushed the limit with their cross-your-heart bra commercials in which they'd show a model with a bra on over her blouse.)

I remember being asked whether I was "a head," and having no idea what that meant. Later it was explained to me. Then I was at least on the verge of inclusion since I knew the lingo.

I remember head shops. They developed out of the discount cigarette shops that suddenly appeared all over Broadway in the early seventies, and that still persist today. It turned out you could go in and get: rolling papers, hash pipes, bongs.

posted by william 12:05 AM
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