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

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

I remember when Ford (I think! but it might have been Chrysler) introduced ignition keys that were symmetrical so that you didn't have to figure out which was the top. The commercials announced them with much fanfare, appropriate it seemed and seems to me. I think this was before ignition keys were put into the steering column, locking the wheel. They used to be in the dashboard, which I guess made it easier to hotwire a car and drive it away.

posted by william 9:22 PM
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Monday, August 30, 2004

I remember always wanting to read the Bantam Books logo (with its little bantam where Penguin Books had a penguin) as Batman Books. I had no idea what a bantam was. I think I didn't learn for years -- certainly I didn't think it had anything to do with the bird. (What exactly is a bantam, anyhow? For some reason I associate it with a shuttlecock in badminton, and maybe that's just because of the near abbreviation of the name of the sport that "bantam" looks like.) I think I learned about bantam-weight boxing first. But I knew there was something wrong with reading Bantam as Batman, only I never wanted to look carefully enough to figure out what it was.

posted by william 10:23 PM
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Sunday, August 29, 2004

I remember Lee and Judith C, who were run over and killed on Long Island Thursday night. I remember liking them both, Judith, especially, who I thought very beautiful. I remember Lee's 60th birthday party, to which my parents were invited; it seemed amazing to me that he was celebrating such a disaster. I remember that their son Dan had a jungle jim in their apartment, in the same place where my parents' room was, I think. (They had the same layout in 12-F that we had in 7-F). I remember that Lee was mugged after parking his car one night, jumped and beaten and I think robbed. I remember they had a female German shepherd and I would often meet Lee walking her while I walked Powell. I remember that Dan saw a shrink too (he was a couple of years younger than I) and that I found it weird that the children of shrinks always needed psychological help, which proved to me at the time that shrinks were bad parents, too concerned or protective. I remember that Lee first told me about Rollo May, who eventually led me to reading Binswanger, whose notion of extravagence -- wandering beyond the point at which you can still rescue yourself -- I loved. (I think de Man writes about it in Blindness and Insight or maybe it's Hartman somewhere.)

posted by william 11:49 PM
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Thursday, August 19, 2004

I remember our seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Donohue, describing his free vacation in Las Vegas, eating sandwiches and drinking drinks in the casinos at night and sleeping by hotel pools during the day. He was proud of this achievement. I wonder whether it was true.

posted by william 11:47 PM
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004

I remember that one of the differences between my status as a child and my mother's as a knowing adult was the she used an oral thermometer whereas they took my temperature with a rectal one. Knowing how to use an oral thermometer belonged to the set of beautiful talents that she had -- like knowing how to wear contact lenses and when to give aspirin and how to sing and how to draw and in general how to be beautiful. And also, interestingly, it never seemed to me that my father had any relation to having his temperature taken: he was as unlikely to have a fever as to ride in the passenger seat of a car. So I guess I thought of my mother as a person whose life I might one day have, or at least live within: what it would be like to be the adult version of my child-self. But my father was pure adult.

posted by william 3:44 PM
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

I remember confusing Solomon, "solemn" and my cousin Manny Salom; later came canned salmon. When I had to "solemnly swear" not to go swimming when my parents were away, I somehow thought that the solemnity reflected the seriousness of Solomon's wisdom, and that Manny and his family (related to my mother's mother) had a name that alluded to that tradition. When Finn McCool got wisdom from sucking on his salmon-impregnated thumb this all made sense. Later on, when I learned to ski with the Sterns, in Windham, I learned about slaloming, a word with power for me, like deconstruction and Hassid. It made sense that slaloming was such a major skill, since it belonged to that constellation of authorities who knew how to do things in the world, who could be solemn when they chose, and knew when to choose to be.

posted by william 6:46 PM
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Saturday, August 14, 2004

I remember blind beggars selling pencils for a nickel. The pencils were unsharpened, which I thought was a mistake. My mother and I passed a pencil-seller once, and I gave him a nickel, at her urging, I believe, and was about to take a pencil. She told me not to, and said that the pencils were really there just to preserve their dignity. But then why did they need so many? It seemed to me that if they weren't really selling them, one would have been enough. I thought it would be ok to take the pencil I purchased. But I didn't. It would have been hard to get it out of the rubber-banded bunch it was in anyhow.

posted by william 8:09 PM
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I remember spitballs, like everyone else. I don't mean the baseball kind (which I thought legal for a long time, just like slowballs, later called change-ups, short for change-of-pace balls, curveballs, knuckleballs, and screwballs), but the kind kids shot in school. You got a straw, rolled and compressed the paper wrapping in your mouth and saturated it with saliva, and blew it through the straw. I think some episode of a TV show -- not Diver Dan but the one that came after it and from which I learned pressure points: it might have been a Korean War era adventure show, because I remember the hero and a Chinese enemy of the would-be brainwashing type holding each other by the shoulders, trying to get their pressure points -- showed blow guns; or maybe it was Diver Dan; it would have been set either in the Amazon or in New Guinea. Wait! There was also a safari show. Was it called "Safari"? The hero in one episode is attacked by a tiger which he wrestles to a draw. I was impressed by this. Anyhow, the blowguns were the local origin of this idea, which I think was reinvented countless times, like my own proud invention of the imprecation "Holy shit!"

posted by william 12:43 AM
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Thursday, August 12, 2004

I remember that the trainer at the place we stayed in Milano Maritima played in long white pants. I think this was the first time I saw full length white pants, and I liked the lazy, aging, dissolute Italian way he moved slowly but deliberately around the court, always returning my mother's shots with smooth, calm ground strokes. The white pants were an important part of the effect: no need for the freedom of movement nor the exposure ot the breeze that we more active but less dissolutely skilled duffers required.

posted by william 7:14 PM
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Tuesday, August 10, 2004

I remember Nixon's resignation. I was in the hospital, recovering from the water-skiing accident in which I injured my arm. My favorite nurse, who'd been flirting with me in very pleasant ways, came in and said, "We've got to turn on the TV. That wonderful man says he's about to resign." He did! We all cheered.

posted by william 11:46 PM
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Sunday, August 08, 2004

I remember the pleasure of peeling Elmer's glue off things: the top of the glue dispenser, the carved up desks, your own fingers. It was like tape, a little, but held together somehow of its own consistency and not because of the backing that the sticky stuff was put on. When you peeled it off it wasn't sticky any more, so that the glue was somehow at some point everything at once: Elmer's was both what stuck and what was stuck, at once the uniform surface and the thing that made that surface adhere to something else. I loved that about it.

posted by william 11:10 PM
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Saturday, August 07, 2004

I rember Kiner's Corner, the post-game interview show with a couple of players when the Mets played at home. I think maybe they only held it when the Mets won, but I'm not sure. Maybe I only watched it when the Mets won, as a way of prolonging the pleasure. I remember that Ralph Kiner (now the surviving member of the trio which also included Bob Murphy, who just died, and Lindsay Nelson) had been a Pirates player, and I wondered what he thought about when the Mets played the Pirates. I remember being surprised to find out that Kiner was one of the greats, with (I think) 475 home runs.

And I remember, remembering those stats, when Willie Mays got his 3000th hit: Sports Illustrated had a cover which said "Say hey! 3000 hits!"

posted by william 8:26 AM
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Thursday, August 05, 2004

I remember Bob Murphy, who did Mets games with Lindsay Nelson and Ralph Kiner. Murphy was the most jovial one, the guy I liked best, the one who seemed happily reassuring and genuinely appreciative of all that went on. RIP.

posted by william 12:08 AM
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004

I remember that British sailors were called "limeys" because they discovered that sucking on limes would prevent scurvy on long sea-voyages. I remember learning this at P.S. 166. It was interesting that something of genuine historical interest -- since I loved stories about the sea: Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall -- should matter as well in my practical life, since we were always being told of the importance of eating fruits with vitamin C in them.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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