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, June 02, 2004

I remember that in, I think, The Great Escape, one person gets caught when he falls for the trick that he's taught others not to, which is to respond to someone talking English. He shows his papers, gets on a bus, and the Gestapo officer says, "Gut Luck!" "Thanks, old man," he replies, and gets pulled off and shot. Maybe he's one of the two who get shot when they're let off a truck for a minute to piss. I remember that in Stalag 17 the tip off about the chess game is the wire from which the bulb hangs over the board. I remember that in one or the other there's a character called "the scrounger" (James Garner?) and that I liked him so much I started stealing things (which led to big trouble), especially after Michael Hobin started calling me "the scrounger" as a term of praise. I remember Michael once kicked a pencil I was pretending was a knife or a gun in some game out of my hand. We were both amazed, and he yelled, two or three times, with delight, "Just like in the movies!" It was.

posted by william 10:59 PM
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