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

Friday, January 23, 2004

I remember Captain Kangaroo, perhaps with somewhat more fondness than I did, now that he's dead and I've already resuscitated my own childhood distaste and perhaps diffused it into the general atmosphere of early TV in a former post, just about a year ago today (27 January 2003). I guess what I hated about him was, now that I think of it, that he would die. He was so unlike the pure types that inhabit the worlds of children, whether the inhabitants are young or old. He was not a type. He wasn't a Kangaroo! He wasn't a captain! And yet he wasn't a fraud, which would also be a type, either. He was a somewhat ridiculous ersatz version of a TV show personality we could love. And now that he has died, he's somehow conformed to the type he was destined for, and that makes him ok.

posted by william 3:46 PM
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