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

Saturday, April 05, 2003

I remember a paperweight that I had which had a ticket stub from Superbowl III (the famous one, Jets vs. Colts) encased in glass. I liked it. I forget where they played -- maybe the Astrodome? I want to say the New Orleans Superdome, but I know it hadn't been built yet, since later I walked by it abuilding with Michael Kelley and Andy Apter. Some kids threw rocks at us. But I remember the heavy feel and the relatively sharp corners of the glass brick. I remember another (I think it was another) paperweight I had that had money in it, shreded I think, but I somehow knew there was a hundred or a thousand dollars inside. I had various low-energy fantasies about getting the money, but nothing seemed worth following through as a fantasy in my mind. I think I got bored and somewhat contemptuous of the Superbowl paperweight when I went off to college.

posted by william 10:55 PM
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