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, May 18, 2004

I remember learning to play Simon Says in school. I sort of knew about it, because people had talked about it in the park, but only that it was a game. Then in school we played it. I was terrible. I always obeyed authority. It was somehow viscerally shocking to me that a teacher might tell you to do something, and you could just defy her. It wasn't that I didn't get it, it was that my behavior was pure reflex.

posted by william 11:41 PM
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Monday, May 17, 2004

I remember -- as the author of Danny and the Dinosaur -- Syd Hoff who died the other day at 91. I remember my mother giving me that book, and I remember that I was shocked by it, just as I was shocked by The Cat in the Hat. What shocked me was that a spirit of mischief -- the dinosaur, the cat -- should just be allowed to do all that stuff, should be allowed somehow in a book, which was after all under the control of adults, to act as he did. The Cat might be more obviously a mischief maker, but so was the Dinosaur, who shocked the cop at one point, and perturbed the adults around him throughout. Interestingly, I was never disturbed by mischief-making on cartoons, but only in books, maybe because they were for me the representations or ritual objects of serious and approved adult culture, whereas TV was TV. And then to contain that kind of misrule...! RIP.

posted by william 11:36 PM
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Saturday, May 15, 2004

I remember the vogue -- or maybe just the day -- when some kind showed us the contemptuous Italian gesture of flicking your nails out under your chin. Our teacher (Mr. Donahue) saw this and disapproved. When we asked him what it meant he said "Nuts to you," as the kid who was doing it looked on in superior conspiritorial approval. And that was the first time I heard that expression. So I sort of learned both expressions of contempt simultaneously, and probably thought "nuts to you" was stronger than it was because of my teacher's attempt at mitigating the gesture by explaining it through this mild paraphrase.

posted by william 7:59 PM
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I remember that when I used to walk to school from the subway I'd pass a property (in Riverdale) with "lehman-haupt" on the sign in lower-case, black on white Helvetica type. I assumed (and still assume) that it belonged to Christopher Lehman-Haupt, one of the New York Times's book reviewers. It was very odd to see that famous newspaper name on a sign on the street.

posted by william 12:07 AM
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

I remember the fuzzy, wooly tubular insulation around the power cords of high-wattage devices like irons. The insulation was soft and I seem to recall had a white pin-stripe running along it. It was big and friendly and old-fashioned, not like the colder, more plasticy double-lined insulation that's now standard. You could put the old cords in your mouth and feel them on your lips. They reminded me of my uptown grandmother -- I think maybe all her devices had this insulation, whereas my parents had newer things.

posted by william 11:38 PM
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Sunday, May 09, 2004

I remember my father singing "Standing on the corner," about which I've posted before (May 15, 2002). But what I'm remembering now is the way he'd sing "Matter of fact!-- [pause] neither do I," in "Brother you don't know a nicer occupation; matter of fact, neither do I, than standing on the corner, watching all the girls, watching all the girls, watching all the girls go by." And I remember my delight that this phrase he always used -- "matter of fact" -- was in a song. I didn't quite think it came from the song, but the song acknowledged and ratified it, and my father acknowledged and ratified the song, and they all belonged to this network of confident endlessly qualified, endlessly confirmed, practical knowledge.

posted by william 1:44 PM
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Friday, May 07, 2004

I remember that in maybe second grade someone brought a coconut into school. We'd been talking about coconut milk. She said that her father would open coconuts with hammers, and we tried this. This was surprising to me -- a fruit you opened with a hammer -- but the whole thing was surprising. I'd never seen anything so exoctic as a coconut -- like another one of those cartoon items materializing in reality.

posted by william 10:15 PM
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Thursday, May 06, 2004

I remember the Mary Renault books my parents had, and in particular The Last of the Wine whose title I found very evocative. Somehow that title came up -- I might have made a joke about it at a party where they ran out of wine -- and they asked me what I thought the title meant. I said I thought it was about war about to start (I realize that I still don't know for sure), which I thought because it had that August 1914 sense of the end of things: war starts because plenty fails as well as plenty fails because war starts. After this, the wine is gone. Anyhow they were very impressed with me for seeing this in the title, and I was proud that they were proud of me, especially because I didn't think it was such a big deal that I should be able to interpret it as I did.

posted by william 10:37 PM
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Wednesday, May 05, 2004

I remember that I had two nannies named Gisela. One used to tie me up, I'm told, so her name was a watchword for scary nanny, though I don't remember her. But when I had a second one named Gisela, I was afraid of her too, because of her name. Then my sister had a friend in elementary school named Gita (P u n j a b i) who my sister reported grabbed her own shit out of the toilet. So I basically turned against people with Gi--a names.

posted by william 11:22 PM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004

I remember thinking that only drakes yodeled. No, not even that, since I thought Drakes (as in Drakes Cakes) was a proper name. I thought ducks yodeled, because of Yodels (TM). And then I saw The Sound of Music and it turned out that Austrians and Swiss people yodeled too. I was puzzled.

posted by william 9:10 PM
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Monday, May 03, 2004

I remember a couple of things that I thought about passing City College on 135th street in my grandparents' car, going to or from their house. I remember going uptown and being threatened with being returned to the store. (This wasn't during a particular episode of discipline; it was really more-or-less idle talk about discipline.) I had an image of rack on rack of kids lying there waiting to be picked up, all of them like me: my age and height (and sex). And going downtown once I remember wondering how you could be sure you understood a language, that you could learn one accurately, since maybe you were understanding different things from what was being said, and being understood as saying different things from what you meant, with pure good luck leading to apparent agreement. Truth: I thought this myself! But didn't follow up on what I was thinking at 8 or so, till I read Quine years later.

posted by william 11:23 PM
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Sunday, May 02, 2004

I remember the way my father sat with his left elbow on the open car-window sill, casual and competent and cool and relaxed as he drove. I reached up to put my elbow on the sill but was made to bring my arm back in: too dangerous! So now it seemed a glamorous and adult thing to do; adults were just the right height, and they had just the right command of the space around them to do this. The pose was beautiful, maybe the automotive version of holding a cigarette casually. I like driving that way now, and recognize that it's not just a natural and relaxed thing to do with my arm, but (for me) a willed imitation of my father's posture.

posted by william 11:26 PM
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