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

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

I remember that Linda Rausnitz's phone number was SU7-7559. And mine was TR3-7595. In digits: 787-3559 and 873-7595. They were permutations of each other! What were the odds? (A question not quite as straightforward as it might seem: Neither the first, second or third digits of phone numbers then could be 0 or 1. I believe that AT&T caved first on the third digit and then on the second. The first digit still has to be 2-9. And also, at that time, you couldn't end a number with four zeros, as you can now. The first three digits -- before the hyphen -- were called "exchanges" at the time, since they were associated with neighborhoods. I also remember "message units," which were calculated according to what exchange you were calling. At any rate, the odds are at least 1544/1 against any two persons having the same phone number, and actually higher, but in a way I can't calculate, once you take into account that phone numbers repeat digits. I'd have to figure out how many digits the average phone number repeats. Watch this space.) This seemed to me significant. Alas, she wasn't impressed.

I remember also that I had an ID number during a Cornell-NSF summer program for high school students -- "Topics in Modern Physics" -- that was an 8 digit palindrome. What were the odds? 9999 to 1. That didn't turn out to be significant either.

posted by william 2:42 PM
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