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

Thursday, July 29, 2004

I remember, now, that it was actually "Diahann Carroll." And when I thought of posting on her, I remembered there was an h in her name, and then it just didn't seem right -- that there was any reasonable place to put that h. But there are a ton of entries on Diahann Carroll, and so I'm glad to say that she's not forgotten at all: I'd been thinking of Frost's poem "Provide provide," which seemed just to grim to apply to anyone that famous (although I guess it was pretty true to Veronica Lake's experience).

posted by william 9:01 PM
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