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, July 02, 2003

I remember our English teacher, maybe in eighth grade, reading aloud a New Yorker story which was a hilarious mystery based on puns. Someone kept setting things up so outrageous puns would appear in the local newspaper. At least part of the story was set in Quebec. In that part, the town priest, whose last name was Squegg, loved to get up town theatricals. But someone interfered with the casting of the latest production, which was about fox-hunting and such, and Squegg was not given the central role he usually had in the town's plays (just as I had to play a wolf instead of the king of the wolves or the adventursome boy, etc. in our second grade play). That made it possible for the next day's banner headline to be: PERE SQUEGG IN HOUND ROLE. I like that no one got it, no one laughed, that our teacher had to explain it to us. And then we all found it hilarious. So I like that we were at an age where explaining a joke worked.

posted by william 7:54 PM
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