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


Sunday, November 09, 2003
I remember, maybe from Mission Impossible, that voice prints are like finger prints -- they are unique identifiers. I think this isn't so well accepted any more. I liked the idea of voice-prints. On the show they were large and rectangular, more like finger-paints than -prints. It was interesting that the voice was somehow rectangular. I remember another Mission Impossible, I think, where a murder was committed by the murderer using a tuning fork over a phone line which somehow killed the person who was on the other end of the phone. I think I was told to go to bed before I saw how the episode resolved. It was scary to think you could kill people that way. I guess it was an imaginary prelude to the cell-phone with plastic explosive bomb that the Israelis (and I think the British too) have perfected.


posted by william 8:07 PM
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