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 08, 2003

I remember in Sveti Stefan that they had wonderful hand curled potato chips that came with the dinner -- cvapcicis! -- which I used to love. Then one evening I ate half of one only to find a dead gnat or mayfly curled up in the other half. I was nauseated and horrified. My parents, in a vain attempt to make me feel better, told me that all food was full of horrible stuff, that I wouldn't believe what was in hot dogs -- they mentioned spiders as an accidental ingredient, which didn't quite make sense to me, but I guess they thought rodents or roaches would be too much for me. From then on I thought spiders when I saw hot dogs. But none of this helped very much -- I just hated the idea that something so perfect could so easily flip into something so disgusting.

I remember reading an article in the Times saying that new health department guidlines in New York limited bread to being 2% cockroach parts. That seemed like a lot of roach to me -- a full slice of roach out of every 50 -- say two bags or Arnold's white. I somehow couldn't deal with this fact (which was almost certainly wrong: 2% is indeed a lot of roach), and eventually just settled back to eating white bread, which somehow began standing for the trivial unimportance of ingredients at the 2% or less scale.

I remember reading the health department citations in the Times every day, and seeing Party Cake -- my Party Cake on 89th and Broadway -- cited. It made me slightly hesitant to still go there, and I was happier the days we got anything from Cake Masters, but I still went to Party Cake a lot. At the time, the Times explained that you could fail an inspection for not washing the floor enough, so I convinced myself there wasn't anything seriously wrong there.

posted by william 12:46 AM
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