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 28, 2003

I remember "...and so flexible, you could pick up a dime." An ad about dishwashing gloves -- Playtex I think. What impressed me about the ad was the way they knew what the experience of rubber gloves actually was. They weren't meant for picking up dimes, and yet sometimes you just wanted to pick up something small without peeling the glove off your sweating hand. And when you saw the actress pick up a dime on the commercial, it just looked like an amazing magic trick, with all that magic tricks imply of the magician's knowledge of the difficulties and obstacles to be met with in every day experience. It was as though through the glove she could interact with the milled edges of the coin. The magician trades on common knowledge of everyday fate that she is nevertheless exempt from. That's one of the neat things about magicians: they're like us but also like our god-like parents. And the commercial also combined the absolute authority of the Creator -- font and origin of the Product -- with knowledge of how it felt like to be one of us creatures. Most ads didn't really seem to know what it was like to be a consumer or TV viewer. Who poured all the oil, except one tablespoon, back into the measuring cup? But you could pick up a dime: I tried it myself. I could do the magic trick.

posted by william 8:17 PM
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