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

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

I remember "The Saint." I think I read the books first before watching the Roger Moore TV series. Roger Moore was amazingly slim then, before he got beefy for his James Bond roles. The Saint because his name was Simon Templar (ST). He was a good guy though the police didn't know that; I think his skills were those of a cat burglar, or they thought he was a cat burglar, or something. The books were by Leslie Chartres, although for some reason I think that was a pseudonym. But that might just be because "Leslie" seems studiously gender-ambiguous, and I might have been making a confusion with Ellery Queen. I remember a talent the Saint had and I envied: he could read as well as hold a conversation at the same time. Chartes notes this authoritatively as a rare and spectacular ability, like a photographic memory. I remember I was reading this under a beach umbrella, in Milano Maritima. As I read it I tried to pay attention both to it and to the conversation the adults were having around me, but I didn't quite succeed. My parents' Welsh friend Ted George used to bring me Saint novels from Swansea every summer.

I remember also, remembering those Penguin copies of The Saint, all the other Penguin books in their plain covers for sale at the Bellagio tourist stalls. And I remember that for some reason or other, we owned Hudson Rejoins the Herd, I don't know by whom, and Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson (which is why I remember both together: that and the Hudson river), whom I later imagined completely forgettable until I read Ford Maddox Ford's praise of him. I remember the Penguin legal warnings: "Except in the United States of America this book is sold under the condition that it shall not be lent, given, or traded, in any other cover than the one provided by the publisher without the publisher's express written consent, and that it shall not be sold without the same condition, including this condition, being imposed upon any subsequent purchaser." I'm certain about the phrase "including this condition." I thought -- as with the tags not to be removed under penalty of law on the furniture (on my desk chair in particular) -- that I was doing something illegal by having these books in the U.S. I didn't quite get the Exception for the United States of America. (Or there might have been some other stipulation instead, that I did understand accurately.)

posted by william 1:01 PM
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