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, December 02, 2003

I remember my parents' friend Ken Boyer, who was an interior decorator. He lived in Long Island, eventually moving in to a servants' bungalow next door to us. But he drove a Rolls Royce. He was friends with the pianists Whittemore and Lowe. (One of them was a pianist, anyhow: I don't quite remember how they performed together. Baldwin featured them in their competing-with-Steinway ads: "Whittemore and Lowe's accompanist.") My parents met them through him, as well as several other members of the gay intelligentsia. Ken Boyer got on very well with my sister. He struck me as very effiminate, his boyfriend -- Raoul! -- not. Raoul was maybe from Brazil. He was a doctor. His English was bad: I doubt he practiced here. One day I took Raoul and some other friend of theirs out in my boat. Or maybe it was Dr. Taylor, a confirmed heterosexual MD. At a discrete place Raoul made me stop, since he "had to go pipi in the water." ("PiPI" was how he pronounced it.) He pissed a nice lovely arc off the side of the boat. I had somehow expected that a gay man would be as embarrassed to piss in front of other males as I would be in front of girls. But it was all interestingly unexceptional.

posted by william 8:56 PM
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