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, July 15, 2003

I remember four color Bic pens. They were torpedo shaped, and there were four different plungers that you could push down and get one of the four colors: red, blue, black (maybe), green. They were unwieldy but imposing. Only red and blue really mattered, or at least green didn't. The other two colors were just there so it could be a four-color pen. I doubt the red mattered much either. I think we liked them because we thought we could draw color pictures with them. But I never drew with ink -- you couldn't erase mistakes! (I remember being impressed by a textbook I had that had a drawing of a horse in it, done, the caption said, in ink. That meant the artist couldn't erase anything. That was the most impressive part.) The pen itself was as I recall white on top and blue on the bottom.

posted by william 6:15 AM
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