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

Saturday, July 03, 2004

I remember crushed ice. It was a great thing you only got with soda at the movies. Then later you could get it in soda machines -- do they still have these? The cup would come down, then a heap of crushed ice would drop into it, and then it would fill with soda. Orange soda was the best with crushed ice. Later, in suburban houses, you could get it from fridges. And once it became common, I think people lost interest in it, and now I don't know whether crushed ice is a thing people have any more. I remember when I started realizing it was a cheat: that with crushed ice the soda/ice ratio was even higher than with ice-cubs. But I did like it as a kid.

posted by william 12:17 AM
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