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

Sunday, June 29, 2003

I remember Divorce Court. I think that it essentially depicted condensed versions of actual trials, performed by actors, but now that I consider it, the script was probably original and just based on stories that came out in divorce cases. I only remember it vaguely: in particular I remember one distraught woman, tears streaming, who looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor and (therefore) a bit like my mother. I remember that my father didn't want me watching it, although to me it just seemed like the soaps: what you watched only if there was absolutely no alternative. The housekeeper we had at the time liked it: I think she was the one who also liked soap operas. When I asked her why (why she liked soap operas), when they were so ridiculous, she told me, "No: these things are real. This is what happens to people." Yes and no, I've since discovered. At least there's no organ music. Later I went to school with a kid -- Ross! -- whose mother was a soap opera actress: she went in four or five days a week to perform live. He was a Texan (I think his parents were themselves divorced and he'd just moved to New York). He smoked Nat Sherman cigarettes, but I could never really get into them.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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