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

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

I remember how fascinated I was by Business Reply Mail envelopes. I loved the bars down the side, and the framed message to the post-office. I also liked it that occasionally what I had to do -- subscribe to a comic or Jock Magazine or the Book of the Month Club (one of my first four books was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) -- counted as business. Business! Like my parents'. "No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the United States." I remember that you couldn't send stamps in to cereal companies in lieu of money when you were sending away for something. This seemed obvious until much later I learned that stamps were legal tender. (I think. They are in England, anyhow.) And that there was once a time when cereal companies actually encouraged you to send stamps in as a form of payment. I remember, from later on, that Abbie Hoffman (in Steal This Book?) encouraged you to paste subscription cards for Time magazine onto bricks and drop them in the mail to bankrupt Time.

posted by william 8:27 PM
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