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 03, 2003

I remember that my father told me that blood in movies was really ketchup. I was skeptical of this. Not that I thought it was blood; I just thought ketchup was not the likely blood-substitute. Why, in the black and white movies he was talking about, would it have to be red at all? And the red of ketchup wasn't quite right: it was too dark. But he insisted that it was ketchup, and I'm not sure whether this is because he thought I thought it was actually blood, or because he was right.

I remember ketchup vs. catsup. I liked knowing that catsup was pronounced "ketchup."

posted by william 11:02 PM
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