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

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

I remember the variety of record sleeves: the inner envelopes that you put vinyl records into before slipping them into their cardboard slip-cases. There were two essential kinds: those with a circular opening that allowed you to see the label at the center of the record, and those that were just a solid square envelope. It was good to be able to see what the record was when you had a bunch of records piled up but not slipped back into their covers, records in their underwear. Some of the sleeves -- the solid ones mostly -- had ads on them, mainly small photos of other records. There were very few liner notes on the sleeves. (So what, technically, is a liner, then?) Those with circular windows varied as well. Sometimes the window would just be cut out of the paper. Sometimes it would be protected by clear plastic. Sometimes there would be a plastic lining within the whole sleeve, with the paper cut out in the center so that you could see through the lining. I think I liked those best. But in the ones with the plastic only at the cut-out, I liked the fact that it was a square of plastic glued on the inside of the sleeve so as to cover the round hole. I liked the play of circle and square in record albums in general. I don't get that feeling about cd's, maybe just because I'm older now. But somehow the relation of cd to case is too visible and obvious. There was always a kind of pleasure in the peering and hollowing and warping that you had to do to figure out where you stood with a record.

posted by william 12:16 AM
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