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

Thursday, April 24, 2003

I remember the word "yikes!" and that I learned it from reading comics. I think I learned it from Superman or Batman, but it's possible that I got it from Peanuts. Who in Peanuts says "Yikes"? It could have been Linus. The characters changed what they said from decade to decade. Still, I think it was some vaguely comic character from an adventure series. I also remember that I had a Linus doll, made of rubber, which I liked, and which I had well before I ever knew about Peanuts. In fact I didn't put the character of Linus together with my doll for quite a while after I started reading it (this may be because when I came to read the strip the doll was just sitting on a shelf; I may have noticed it again when my sister got interested in it when she was two or three and I was eight or so). My doll had a red and white stripped shirt, and sucked his thumb and carried around his molded rubber blanket. He was pretty faded -- the whole doll rather like the blanket in the strip.

posted by william 6:07 AM
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