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


Tuesday, September 30, 2003
I remember how Hugh Cramer used to use the word "strategy." It had a sort of magical aura to it. You could do things by strategy. It was vaguely military, and some of the group feints and dodges and scrimmages we did in the park were guided by Hugh's strategy. I didn't quite get what strategy was: it was somewhere between a well-formulated right way of doing things and the occult unexpected. This is what gave it that faintly talismanic sense: there was a right thing to do -- it was strategy -- and only Hugh really knew it. The game Stratego, which Hugh introduced me to, derived some of its initial interest from the idea of strategy, which I still didn't quite get, or which at least was an idea he could still brandish to good effect. When I heard Brian Eno's wonderful "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)," named after the Mao-era Chinese opera, I was reminded of that expert mystery to which I had never been quite initiated (as Chiang Kai Chek's followers never had either), strategy.


posted by william 11:17 PM
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