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

Saturday, August 14, 2004

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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