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

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

I remember different ways of picking up tennis balls. I remember seeing a girl pick up a ball by raising ball, racket, and foot simultaneously, right up to her other hand. I learned to do this, but then preferred the American way of pulling the ball towards yourself while compressing it slightly, using the follow-through from the downward, selfward angled compression to pull the racket below the expanding, rising ball, to let it roll on to the strings. I remember that this was harder with Wilson T-1200's, which gouged clay courts when you did this and which got badly scuffed by hard courts. I remember the baskets we used to pick up scores of balls after serving. You pressed down over the ball and it popped through the slats and into the basket, with a sudden satisifying give that had a little bit of anal eroticism about it. I remember trying to fill up those baskets, but that there were limits before you couldn't do it any more, well before the baskets were close to capacity.

posted by william 7:34 AM
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