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

Thursday, July 03, 2003

I remember "Lonely Girl," a song by Eddie something. "Hey hey lonely girl, my only girl, ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta." And then "Lonely girl, my only girl, something break your broken heart in two." "You said that only his two lips, could kisss your lips, ta ta ta ta ta ta, But no one can kiss your lips, can kiss your lips, the way I will, The way I will." This was a hit when I first started listening to contemporary music on the radio a lot, on the stereo with 8-track system that my parents had gotten me. This must have been seventh grade, when, as I remember, Michael Hobin got me into listening to WABC, then a top forties station: 77, Double You Ay Bee Sea! I could never figure out if Eddie, the singer, was male or female (I'm now sure he was male). He sang in a very high falsetto, and the song was thrilling to my adolescent self as a lesbian come-on -- the singer's rivalry with the boy who broke her heart was not a rivalry with another version of himself, as in so many pop songs, but with a different sexual stance. I liked that it was ambiguous too, that is that the singer was excitingly indeterminate (which that other boy wouldn't have been). As I say, I now know (having more experience with the tradition of rock falsetto) that the song was not the daring sexual tease that I thought it was. But of course, falsetto must preserve some remnant of what I felt was going on in the song, and so I wasn't completely wrong either. Oddly, I didn't like the song much.

posted by william 12:15 PM
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