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

Sunday, October 24, 2004

I remember the thrill of new cassettes. Cassette players had just come in (when I was slightly younger, it was really cool to have a reel-to-reel player, and during the transition you could sometimes get albums on reel-to-reels also; I spent a lot of time at the Hoges recording their records on reel-to-reel -- or maybe only once). So my friends' older, taste-making-siblings and their boyfriends had record albums, but you could get the same albums on cassette for a dollar more and play them much more conveniently. And it was wonderful to have the miniature version of the album cover as the insert for the cassette. There was something thrilling about being able somehow to possess the cover in this pocket-size format, in a way you could never possess an album cover, because it wasn't portable. And then, cassettes didn't scratch, so somehow you could count on them. I remember having James Taylor's rereleased second album (with "Carolina in my mind") and Emerson, Lake and Palmer on cassette. I had Crosby Stills and Nash (and CSN and Young) on vinyl, perhaps slightly earlier. And I had Donovan on cassette, but that object was somehow not as thrilling. There was something about the well-designed compactness of the whole experience that happened when something I guess that I knew first as a record was reduced to a cassette -- that was what was thrilling.

posted by william 5:40 PM
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