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, October 08, 2003

I remember a coin bank, that might have belonged to Geoffrey Stern, or to Conrad, or to Lem. It was a clear plastic coin sorter. You dropped a bunch of change in a funnel, and the coins rolled down past gradually increasing holes until they could drop in where they belonged, in a poker-chip like stack. I thought it was really neat. It had graduated markings up the sides so you could see how much money you had. It illustrated vividly how much more than pennies quarters were worth. The graduation up the quarters slot was in dollars, whereas the top of the pennies slot was only fifty cents.

I remember the brass change mechanisms that newspaper salesmen and bus drivers used to have. They dispensed a coin from one of four slots when the person giving you change pressed in a spring lever with his (almost always his; but I do remember an anomalous moment when a woman had such a dispenser) thumb. The old guys and the bus drivers were very fast, bewilderingly so I discovered when I got a toy version (maybe not a toy either but certainly not so heavy duty as the professional model). They were like those people who were faster with abacuses than accountants were with adding machines.

posted by william 12:33 PM
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