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

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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