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

Monday, December 01, 2003

I remember worn coins. In particular I remember how worn dimes might get, so that you couldn't tell the difference (especially on the reverse) between Roosevelt and Mercury dimes (with their three torches). Once the zinc-copper coins came in (I remember being fascinated by the brand new band of copper in the milling of the dimes and quarters!) they got replaced faster; but it was still possible to find worn pennies, especially the pre-1959 wreath ones. But then pennies started being coined out of zinc instead of copper (when copper came to more than a penny a penny-weight -- I wrote about the penny shortage during high school here -- scroll down to April 1, 2002). Since a worn silver dime had less silver than a new one, and since a new one was supposed to be made of roughly ten cents worth of pre-inflationary silver, it was more cost-effective to use old coins. Melt a hundred old dimes and you might only have silver for 98 new ones. But now the metal isn't worth the paper its printed on, so we get shiny but worthless new specii all the time. But I miss those friendly coins, comfortable somehow like the old shoes my feet were then growing too fast ever to have experienced.

posted by william 3:26 PM
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