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

Friday, September 10, 2004

I remember that in the Hering's bathroom in Stormville, which I think had a shaggy toilet-seat cover, they had a shelf which had what looked like Leaves of Grass in it. But when you tried to read it, it turned out to be a metal container with fake pages. Its cover was a lawn-greenish. I don't know whether it mentioned Whitman on the cover. This was the first time I'd ever heard of Leaves of Grass, so I didn't know what I was missing. But I remember liking the title, and later I think I associated Whitman and "leaves" with John Greenleaf Whittier.

posted by william 2:44 PM
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