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, May 07, 2003

I remember the ribbed sleeveless undershirts I used to wear as a child. Do they still have them? I never liked them. My father wore the same kind -- the kind that Clark Gable ostentatiously didn't wear in It Happened One Night. I didn't like the way they clung to your body, or stretched, and sometimes became shapeless and sometimes didn't. I didn't like the thick heavy seamlike borders. I didn't like the way the felt on my shoulders, or bunched up under my clothes or rolled into a ridge over my pants waist In high school the other kids wore T-shirts. I didn't know you could do that. It seemed a real improvement.

posted by william 6:08 AM
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