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 19, 2003

I remember the fruit sellers on the beach at Milano Maritima. They came walking down the beach every ten minutes or so, calling their wares. I remember in particular the fresh coconut vendor. He'd yell, in a powerful bass voice, "Allo, coco! Allo coco-oah!" And the fresh coconut slices were great. Other people sold candied fruit on sticks, and what I remember about that was the taste and texture of the candy: very different from anything I can find now. The candy was thin, and somehow not sweet on the outside. It broke against your tongue like thin glass or room-temperature ice, and it tasted and felt as though only the inside -- the fruit side -- of the candy was the sweet side. The sharpness of the broken glaze and the sweetness came together, and to mitigate the sharpness was the fruit -- cherries, apples, oranges, coconut again -- that the crunching candy would mix with immediately. I'm sure it was terrible for the teeth, but it didn't feel terrible, the way crunching candy usually does, but benign, like most other things at Milano Maritima.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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