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, August 25, 2003

I remember Bobby Bonds. I remember hearing, maybe from Tommy Hoge, maybe from Freddy Cooper, that he was the strike-out king of the majors, and I thought this meant he was a bad player. A little later when I found out that he was also a home-run leader, I realized that sluggers strike out a lot. This was an interesting thing to discover about baseball, and to discover on my own (like realizing that Leopold Bloom was Jewish); and it never seemed to me to have any relevance, positive or negative, to life.

posted by william 10:47 PM
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