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, July 28, 2004
I remember that Diahanne Carroll lived in our building. This was when she was starring on The Diahanne Carroll Show, which was in some ways a forerunner of Seinfeld. On the show she used her real name but was involved in fictional activities. She lived in New York on the show too, but not at 175, rather in a more modern, post-war building. And I was never sure whether to think that building counted as a representation of our building (after all, it was the building where Diahanne Carroll lived), or whether on the show she lived in a different building. In some ways I'm still not sure, since the building on the show wasn't real (presumably) to begin with. So there wasn't another building that was different from ours, only a fictional one. But was it a fictionalization of ours or not? (One problem was I think it was downtown from 90th street.)


posted by william 9:02 PM
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