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

Monday, June 16, 2003

I remember PL/I. This was the interesting programming language of my high school days. Harder core (and therefore cooler) than Basic, more intuitive than FORTRAN. I knew a kid named Rick Fortgang whom I thought of whenever I thought about FORTRAN. Rick was a charismatic humanist; FORTRAN was a tough and baffling computer language. The word had for me the same thrilling prestige that deconstruction would have later. Now deconstruction is quaint, but FORTRAN (FORTRAN IV, I think it was: I think i may have liked the two deviant "fours" there: FOR and IV) is still impressive to me: although long outmoded, still both powerful and difficult. Its I/O rules were the real pain. Nothing, though, to HTML, but in those days none of this sort of stuff was familiar. PL/I turned out to stand for Programming Language / One. I used to type commands onto computer cards, and the amazingly fast card readers would blow them in front of a strobe light to read them. I liked being able to read the cards too -- that is to decode their binary punches. I remember paper tape as well, as a storage medium, which I believe was in base-eight on our teletype.

posted by william 11:48 AM
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