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

Monday, July 05, 2004

I remember, thinking of Laugh-In, Walnettos. I just now discover they were a candy from the twenties that are stilla available. They sounded vaguely obscene. The dirty old man (Arte Johnson, it turns out) offers them to the dowdy woman (Ruth Buzzi, ITO), who is primly attempting to avoid him on a park bench.

I remembered this because I was remembering when our class went to see a taping of the dress rehearsal of the David Morse show. Ruth Buzzi was the guest star, and she sings a song a couple of lines of which I remember: "I [know how to do a lot of stuff] / I even know...where you can get Walnettos! But I don't come on too sexy, I don't come on too strong -- Where did Stella Swoboda go wrong?" I remember also that there was a baby who had to be hushed, and since he actually stopped crying on cue, our teacher said that they would almost certainly put that scene in the final version, since it was perfect. So I was glad to see that something I was seeing would actually be on TV.

I was impressed that they could memorize all their lines for the show that quickly.

For some reason I only got to see a couple of minutes of the show, though, and I was bitterly disappointed. Was I being punished? Was there a political crisis? Was the reception too bad? I still remember how larger than life the taping was, and also the explanation our teacher gave us, before we went in, about how TV flattened perspectives so that the sit-com stage room would be exaggeratedly long. It was a very interesting day.

posted by william 1:47 PM
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