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

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

I remember my mother showing me that book margins were justified. I think I was just learning to mess around on the typewriter that my downtown grandparents owned (the only one, I think, in the family), and wondering about the way typed passages both did and didn't look like books. I learned later about proportional spacing from Doug Breitbart, whose parents had a Selectric (like those at issue in the Swift Boat Veterans forgeries). But I was I think still reading the Hardy Boys when my mother showed me that the right-hand margin was justified, something the bell on my grandparents' typewriter could only, barely, approximate. And I looked at page after page, and wondered how they did it. How did they get, as I thought, the same number of letters into every line? I so much assumed that the each line had an equal letter-count that I didn't even check, until several years later, maybe reading Marjorie Morningstar, maybe reading Hemingway, I saw the same words repeated at the beginning of two consecutive lines, but their spacing differed. So now I had to think about how they made that happen.

posted by william 5:07 PM
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