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, April 28, 2003

I remember that you could call NERVOUS for the time. "At the tone, the time will be...X:YZ and W seconds. Beep." The tone sounded at five second intervals. I think you could listen to a minute pass before you were cut off. Some people called NESTLES instead of NERVOUS, but I thought that was silly. It was one of those numbers in which only the first three digits counted, like 555-XXXX. WEATHER was the same: you could dial 932-1111 instead, though the phone company always gave the number out as 932-1212. So there was a thrill in dialing a different number from the one they told you.

I remember also that pay phones always had a 9 as their fourth digit. XXX-9XXX. So if you tried to give the Operator a fake number to charge to, say, you'd be caught out if the fourth digit was a 9. I think this knowledge (plus the 660--dial tone--9--dial tone--6 way of getting your own phone to ring) was the extent of my knowledge of specialized phone lore. But I remember "phone phreaks" and how cool they seemed.

posted by william 5:48 AM
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