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, September 26, 2003

I remember George Plimpton, who died today. For reasons I don't remember he spoke at my high school graduation. (I think he might have gone to my school.) This was in the days when he was doing his Paper Lion stunts, which were fascinating. He told us about being on the bench for the football team, and he told us about being the drummer who would strike with the cannon in a performance with maybe the New York Philharmonic of the 1812 Overture. He kept blowing it in rehearsal, and then he hit it much too loud in the real performance. He said -- I forgot that this is where I learned this fact until now -- that orchestra members applaud each other by rubbing their feet surreptitiously on the stage. He would watch them do this as he waited for his cue. After he hit the drum too loud, he was mortified. But then, from everywhere, he saw and heard the sussuration of the shoes on the stage. He told the story well, and obviously he'd told it many times. But it was obvious to me: I hadn't been around many stories that had been told many times at that age, and so I wass very taken with it. He was genial and surprisingly intelligent -- surprising to my seventeen year old obnoxious adolescent self, who assumed that anyone who was writing about this kind of thing wasn't culturally serious. I didn't realize at first that he was the same George Plimpton as the one who started and edited the great Paris Review, friend of Koch, friend of Merrill, even I think friend of Beckett, my god of the time (and still a member of my pantheon). Later he was friend of several of my friends, but I never saw him in person again, as in all likelihood I might have. I didn' t think to think about this until now, and now it's too late.

posted by william 1:33 PM
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