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

Saturday, September 27, 2003

I remember that Mr. Durocher, my seventh grade math teacher who would throw chalk at us, would actually make you stand in the corner. Michael Hobin and I would clown around in the back row. Once he made me stand in the corner, and then in the course of some demonstration he asked what 3% of a million was. My hand shot up, he called on me, I said about $33.000, and he gave me some gruff praise and told me I could sit down again. I wondered then why I wasn't more precise -- why not (what I knew) $33,333.33? But somehow it seemed that he wanted that rough-hewn practical ballpark answer. It was a quick and dirty answer, an appropriate response to his own admirable quick and dirty justice, and I think he understood that I understood and admired him.

posted by william 6:27 PM
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