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

Thursday, December 18, 2003

I remember being sick as a kid, but don't want to remember it because I've got a high fever now. I do remember my skepticism about aspirin making you feel better, but I'll certainly concede now that aspirin and its ilk can help. Not quite enough though. But that puts me in mind of a Bazooka Joe bubble gum strip where the scholarly professorial kid goes to the drug store and asks for salicylic acid. "You mean aspirin?" asks the silver-haired pharmacist. Nerdy kid: "That's the word! I never can remember it!" I admired him. I remember also learning that bazookas meant something else before it became a proper epithet for Bazooka Joe derived from the name of the gum which was its original meaning. At least I think so -- I'm not absolutely certain which came first. (I remember that like the color lemon, the color orange derives its name from the fruit, where I always thought it was so elegant to call the fruit simply by its vivid color.) I had friends, like Hugh, who knew what bazookas were (and had toy bazookas), just as they knew what the Blitz was in football, when I didn't.

posted by william 11:45 PM
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