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

Friday, August 01, 2003

I remember that baseball cards that were multiples of ten were the star players, and multiples of a hundred were the superstars -- like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. I think Bobby Murcer was a multiple of ten. I remember the backs of baseball cards had statistics, and often a strange cartoon (although that might instead have been the strange sports cartoon in the Daily News); the stats were: at-bats, batting average, doubles, triple, homeruns, BBs, errors. But I was always startled by the fact that when you turned over a pitcher's card you got statistics for pitching, not hitting. I was always newly disappointed by this, because I was always curious about how bad pitchers really were at the plate. I'd been surprised to learn from Tommy Hoge that pitchers were always bad hitters, and glad to find Fritz Peterson the counterexample, and I always wanted to find others. After all, Babe Ruth had been a pitcher. But instead we got ERAs, a statistic that I couldn't understand until much later, and fractional innings. And for some reaon, unlike for the batters, you only got the previous season or two, not a table of the batters whole career, including those interesting early seasons when they were only at bat nine or ten times, yielding a series of one or two digit numbers, followed by that surprisingly detailed 3 digit batting average -- the same three digits everyone else got. I liked that such sparse date could yield so long a result. Rookies (identified as such on the front) had their minor league averages on the back, so they always looked impressive till you saw that this was in the minors. But for pitchers you got very little, and yet I knew enough to love them, without yet knowing how to evaluate them.

posted by william 2:26 PM
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