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, March 09, 2004

I remember that when The New Yorker came in its brown slip wrapper so too did Commentary. Commentary came once a month, The New Yorker once a week. I always loved slipping The New Yorker out. And once a month I was always disappointed when it turned out to be Commentary instead. The brown wrapping for Commentary was slightly stiffer and its dimensions slightly larger. It wasn't quite as brown nor quite as smooth. So my disappointment was sensory before it was cognitive -- I knew before I knew it that it was only Commentary.

posted by william 4:13 PM
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