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

Sunday, September 28, 2003

I remember the test that you used to do to see if you were over- or undersexed. You closed your eyes, someone slapped your arm a couple of times and then pricked you with their fingernails going up your arm, and you were supposed to say when they reached some pre-determined point. If you were oversexed they'd get past the point; undersexed, you'd respond too soon. None of us had had sex yet, I don't think. For reasons that I didn't understand then, those who came out as oversexed were teased (cheerfully and mildly) as much or more than the undersexed. But why? Since at the time we'd already reached the age when it was clear that getting sex was good. But I guess girls weren't supposed to feel that way, even though the fact that they were interested in this game and introducing it to us (the girl who told us about it, whose name I forget, was pretty, but seemed a lot prettier after she introduced the game) made them seem like us boys: eager for sexual experience. But of course, being shown up, as the critical prefix to either state shows, trumped an anyway clearly false badge of sexual experience at the time.

posted by william 9:51 PM
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