I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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, 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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