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 30, 2004

I remember "Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox." Sic. This sentence is 26 letters long, and is pangrammatical -- ie it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. A crwth is a kind of Welsh violin. W is a vowel (as in cwm /coom/ = valley). A dissatisfied crwth player takes off his crushed fez and asks it to take care of the crwth, whose sound is rather skimpy or jimp. He addresses his headpiece and asks it to blank or mute the sound made by the voice (vox) of the jimp crwth. Apparently this is the most famous and most perspicacious English sentence to use all 26 letters once.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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