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, 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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