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, June 26, 2003

I remember another problem with record sleeves. The record would sometimes slice through the other side, whether because the glue weakened (when the other side was formed by a quarter inch fold of paper), or because the paper itself wore out over time. It wasn't a problem when the record actually cut the sleeve. It was a problem when you forgot that you were putting a record back into a sleeve that was already cut. The record would go skittering through the sleeve, the groove making a sickeningly rapid sound as it rubbed against the paper, and then the record would fall to the rug or floor. You didn't really want to catch it, because that would be very likely to scratch it. The best you could do was try to compress the sleeve as the record went through it, but even that made you feel that you were doing damage. When you had a damaged sleeve you were left with the unhappy choice of trying to remember to be cautious, or just putting the record into its jacket without a sleeve at all, hoping that doing so slowly and carefully would prevent the cardboard from scratching the record. (Now I think of cd's as having something of an analogous problem: I hate the sound of the cd scratching against the plastic central holder in the jewel box.)

posted by william 11:58 AM
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