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


Friday, April 25, 2003
I remember that I liked the rhythmic rhyme of "175 Riverside Drive" (better than the building across the street: 180 Riverside Drive). I liked also the rhythm of New York 24, New York, where the first York had a kind of surprising emphasis, and the second was a kind of completing confirmation: New YORK twenty-FOUR, NEW York.


posted by william 12:42 AM
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