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

Thursday, September 30, 2004

I remember the Expos's first season, which was the first season I was a baseball fan -- a Mets fan: the Yankees were ludicrously bad in that era. And the Mets' first game was against the Expos. I remember the Mets always won their first game, and then did terribly after that. (But it might be actually the next season that their first game was against the Expos, and that they lost it.) I remember thinking I understood their logo, until a kid came into school one day with an Expos hat on, and I couldn't resolve the logo into ME (Montreal Expos) at all. I was first taken aback that it was multi-colored. TVs were black and white, or at least the local stations were. I didn't realize, later that season, that the Mets and the Yankees had different caps: not only the slightly different dispositions of the NY's but also that for the Mets it was orange, so that Mets caps were the colors of New York State (as were the license plates too: blue and orange), whereas Yankees caps were (and are) navy blue and white. I had a Yankees cap (but why?) which I wore to a softball game once, thinking it was indistinguishable from a Mets cap, but all my friends cried, "Yankees! Kill him!"

I remember the Yankees wear pinstripes at home. I remember my father showing me the retired numbers in Yankee stadium: Di Maggio, Ruth, Gherig.

I remember the Washington Senators, and Frank Howard -- their great and pointless slugger.

posted by william 7:32 AM
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