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

Thursday, March 18, 2004

I remember how much I loved e e cummings, after Mr. Luke taught us "in just -- / spring;" he liked how the "little lame balloon man" turned into the "goat-footed ballon man." So I read pretty much everything, including i: six non-lectures and what mattered about that were the readings of canonical poetry cummings did (and printed) at the end; for me the most important were the ballads and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, which I first read there. I remember all this because I remember that The Enormous Room had a kind of privately legendary status for me, and that when I finally got a hold of it I found it unreadable -- all that French! And yet it was probably his best book, I now realize.

posted by william 5:44 AM
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