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 14, 2003

I remember that I could hear the foreign accents of my grandparents and of those of my friends' parents who were foreign (all of them more or less refugees from Hitler). But I couldn't hear my parents' accents, which my friends all could, though they were always surprised when I could hear their parents'. But I do remember that I hated how my father pronounced whore "hoor," which was a most embarrassing lapse on his part. Or so I thought till seeing The Sopranos, in which Ralphie pronounces it the same way.

posted by william 4:59 PM
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