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 15, 2003

I remember that you always had to win sets in tennis by two games. Occasionally, sets would go as high as 20-18. Endurance really counted. (As a cross country runner, I had endurance, but not speed.) Then sudden death came in, but you still had to win by two points, as in a game. It was best of 12, as I recall, and the final score was 8-6 (or was it 7-5). Now (I believe) you can win by one point, with the final set score 7-6.

I remember subtleties of score-keeping. You might be ahead Fifteen-love, but if your opponent tied it up it was Five-All. Thirty-thirty was never deuce, even if it was the practical equivalent of deuce. If you won on a second serve, you were ahead Five-love instead of Fifteen-love. I never heard these conventions in professional matches, only in the games we played. I never understood why the first two points were worth fifteen each, and the third was worth ten (as in "Forty-thirty", or "Forty-fifteen"--but never Forty-five).

I remember that "Love" ("word known to all men") is derived from French l'oeuf, the egg, i.e. zero.

posted by william 1:56 PM
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