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, October 22, 2004

I remember when Rube Goldberg died and our eighth grade teacher explained Rube Goldberg devices to us. The Times had shown one with his obituary, but it looked like a hard diagram so I didn't pay any attention to it. But then when our teacher explained him, I did, and I was intensely disappointed that there would be no more Rube Goldberg cartoons (in The New Yorker) because he was dead. Somehow I wanted to see them as he produced them, and not what he'd done in the past.

posted by william 9:32 PM
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