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

Friday, October 03, 2003

I remember reading lots of James Michener. I read The Source and learned the history of the Jews. I read a novel in eleventh or twelfth grade about college kids going to Morocco and taking drugs, which I liked. I read another novel, which was the same vintage as The Source whose name and subject I'm now failing to recall. In The Source I remember a character who gets himself uncircumsized (yuch!) so he can join the Roman army. His elderly father sees him wrestling in some games, and is so shocked and outraged that he lifts up his cane and kills him. I also remember that I first saw the term El Shadai in The Source. I tried reading Hawaii but was bored to tears. But I derived important sexual misinformation from it, namely that it takes roughly four copulations to produce a pregnancy. (Some missionary's wife gets pregnant on the boat over.)

I also got sexual misinformation from the Shulchan Aruch, the seventeenth century code of Jewish Law, which I read obsessively in my phase of religious mania, inspired both by The Source and by my best friend Geoffrey, to wit: the hymen prevents conception during a woman's first copulation. (This had to do with some woman who gets pregnant in the Bible -- it might have been Eve.) Later I thought this knowledge would come in handy. Fortunately, when it did become relevant I wasn't so sure about it any more.

posted by william 12:02 AM
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