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

Saturday, January 31, 2004

I remember going to see the Broadway musical (?) version of Superman. He flew on a wire, and even though you could see the wire it was still pretty impressive. I remember one curtain-raiser on a set made to look like the page of a comic book -- about sixteen different frames over four levels in which different things were going on, some simultaneously, some sequentially. I remember that I thought this was witty -- not a concept that I quite had at the time, but that maybe this scene helped me to have. (My parents were always calling people or observations witty -- I think that this is now a slightly outmoded word, like "cute" and "commotion.")

posted by william 11:33 PM
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