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

Monday, March 15, 2004

I remember the posters for In the Realm of the Senses. They were plastered all over the post-no-bills plywood walkway down 28th street near the Fashion Institute of Technology where they were remodelling the building. The walkway was about the last quarter of the block east of Eighth Avenue. I'd get off the subway to go see my downtown grandmother and walk west and pass the posters. For a long time I didn't get what the doll-like object at the center of the poster was. It was a photo of a man holding a smallish doll. Then one day I realized it was his penis, dolled up. It wasn't quite a shock because by then I was so used to seeing that doll that it didn't become radically different when I realized what it was. Rather it seemed a slightly weird thing to be doing with your penis. I was surprised, therefore, that people found the movie, and the whole add campaign aroung it, including that poster, so scandalous. How shocking could it be, if this is what the producers thought would be a shocking poster?

posted by william 12:02 AM
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