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

Sunday, July 20, 2003

I remember shading or trying to shade muscles onto the costumes of superheroes I was drawing. I tried to emulate the cross-hatched shadows in the comic books I read. The muscular arms seen through the skin-tight jerseys of the superheroes were a real challenge, like noses. It was unclear what the balance between elliptic outline and cross-hatched volumes should have been. The thigh muscles, when they were running right at you, were a little easier. I remember liking to draw one leg down on its toes, and the other cut off at the knee, the rest of the leg hidden behind the thigh, with sometimes the boot toe sticking out below the flexed knee. I drew this over and over again, on pieces of paper, in margins of books, everywhere when I was bored in school. I think this was one of the few superhero poses I drew well, so I liked to be able to produce it at will. And it was so elegant and graceful, that abbreviated outline for the supercharged vitality of the hero.

posted by william 12:53 AM
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