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, February 03, 2004

I remember finding (and stealing) the low-class porn the doormen kept in their little office/lounge/locker-room behind the milk machine room. They kept it on top of a locker where they hung their coats. I was sometimes left in this room when they were looking for a passkey or tool of some sort. I also played chess here with the Albanian doorman who had once been the junior champion of Yugoslavia, and who was great. But I set a trap and won his queen once! For a knight. (I was way ahead then, but still lost the game.) At some point I discovered the porn, mainly magazines showing women with absurdly large breasts. They were unappealing, but it was porn, so I managed to make them appealing to myself. I didn't much think about why the doormen had the porn: I assumed they were roughly as interested as I was (that is, without any of the cynicism or attitude of porn as purely instrumental), and that somehow that interest was (for them) entirely visual. They liked paging through the pictures, not taking the magazines to the bathroom with them. To think now of paging through other people's porn stash! I treasured the stash I found carefully. I hid it in the foldout couch where I used to hide comics. And yet I still think that they only paged through the porn, as a way of alleviating their boredom. It felt (and feels) as though they would have been too old and too bored to get more excited or more active than that.

posted by william 12:29 AM
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