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


Saturday, June 07, 2003
I remember that The New Yorker used to have most of its cartoons sandwhiched between the second page of "The Talk of the Town" and the first ad after the front of the book material. Occasionally there'd be other cartoons and whimsical drawings later. But it was great to just be able to page through those ten to twelve pages -- Talk, then a short story or two, then the ads -- and see the whole, or nearly, quota of cartoons. It was only when my parents told me about the news breaks (which the magazine still occasionally does) that I started paging through the every page. When Conde Nast bought The New Yorker I'm sure they pleased advertisers by scattering the cartoons throughout the magazine, kind of like Playboy. But I stopped reading the cartoons assiduously, so at least one reader became a lost less loyal.


posted by william 7:17 AM
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