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

Friday, July 04, 2003

I remember how hard it was to get people's phone numbers from Information if you didn't know their father's first names. It was also hard from the phonebook, but a little easier, since you could make an educated guess about their addresses. (It would also depend on how common their last names were. And I remember that Dan Davis didn't hace a phone. His family used the pay phone at their corner.) I remember that the way to get someone's address from Information was to ask for their phone number first. Then you could ask for their address (on the theory, I think, that you were writing it into your directory.) But if you called Information and just asked for an address, they wouldn't give it to you. I was told this by an Operator, when I asked her in some emergency how to get an address which Information refused to give me. It was neat to know this secret, and she was right. I remember also the first time I heard a male Operator's voice. I commented on it to him, but he was imperturbable. Everyone must have done so. It was a reversal of the childhood pattern in which I was called "ma'am" by Operators until I was thirteen or so.

posted by william 6:37 AM
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