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 24, 2003

I remember that Curt Flood sued (and lost) to have baseball's antitrust exemption overturned. I was against him. I loved baseball! I wanted my teams to be my teams. I was surprised when it turned out that Curt Flood's lawyer -- Norman Topkis -- lived across the hall from us. I was against him too. But I was always civil, and he was always kindly towards me. Years later I heard him on May it Please the Court, where he was effective and witty -- a nice revelation. I thought of him as personally inoffensive, and wasn't really worried that Curt Flood would win. After Topkis moved out a gay couple moved in. I liked their domesticity: they got the paper, and left for work, and kissed in the morning and kissed in the evening when they reunited. Their hallway was very neat -- much neater than ours. I don't recall knowing their names, although we must have sometimes got their mail, as we got the Topkises'.

posted by william 1:24 AM
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