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 02, 2004

I remember ping-pong diplomacy. And I remember a lot about ping-pong: that you're not allowed to touch the table with your other hand (or you lose the point); that you have to toss the ball or maybe let it drop at least an inch or two (or something) when you serve it. I remember the way you lean the racket-wing on the ball when you leave the table, each reciprocally keeping the other stable. I remember two kinds of rackets (I'm sure this is a misnomer): the pipped paddle with the same friction-producing surface that my goalie gloves were covered with when I played soccer, and the three-ply padded paddle that somehow seemed more evocative of ease. I remember that the padded paddle seemed to have a slightly more lacquered grip too, with those stripes on it (corresponding to the tape on a tennis-racket handle holding the leather or whatever twisted round the grip in place). I remember that I could play almost as well left-handed as right-handed. I remember learning the Chinese grip, and picking it up immediately, though it wasn't particularly better (for me) than the American grip I already knew, though my high school classmate Wei Chi was great and used the Chinese grip. And I remember playing strip ping-pong in her basement with Mary C and Jimmy B, an early and gratifying sexual experience. Every game anyone lost, the loser had to take off an item of clothing. Fun to win, fun to lose.

posted by william 1:04 AM
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