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

Monday, July 07, 2003

I remember the old license plates in New York. The first ones I remember were orange letters on a blue field. I was shocked by the modern seeming of their reversal when I was in my early teens into blue on orange. It was about this time that I realized that the Mets cap was different from the Yankees cap, since I'd seen the Mets only on black and white TV (my father had taken me to a Yankees game). I didn't know that the NY on the Mets cap was orange. I found that out just when I found out that New York State's colors were orange and blue. This explained the license plates. (I think we all called them licenses then, maybe from the movies: "Did you get his license?") Then they went back to orange on blue, but the letters were more streamlined, less like the boxy letters of my youth which reminded me of my uptown grandfather's boxy Ford. (He was the only person in the family to own a car. His last one was a Ford Granada.) I liked those older letters: you can still see them, I think, in North by Northwest. Then the black and white Statue of Liberty plates came in, and the whole tight relationship to the State colors came to an end.

posted by william 12:39 AM
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