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

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Agoraphiliac remembers:

I remember Highlights for Children, a magazine I saw only in doctors' offices. Maybe because of that, its comic-strip family (the Timbertots?) inspired dread and revulsion in me. They were so blank-faced.

I remember I never warmed to Peanuts, either. I never got that downbeat, non-punchline ending, at least not until much later.

I half-remember an animated film on television, animated the way the Rudolph the Reindeer show was. It featured a live actor I can picture but not name, and an animated sequence where somebody is expelled from a paradise: the sky turns dark and the wind blows and the sea gets stormy. It terrified me, and I only saw it that once.
(*later: an Internet search finally turned up Jack Gilford. The film was The Daydreamer, by Jules Bass of Rankin/Bass. I kept thinking of Vincent Gardenia, though I knew it wasn't him.)

I remember some Gustave Dore illustrations of Gargantua and Pantagruel that shocked me when I was about four years old. I saw them in a neighbor's basement rec-room. It was the giant child holding writhing adults in his pudgy hands that thrilled and frightened me. I regarded those neighbors as having some kind of special, secret knowledge that I probably ought not to have had access to.

--Cross-posted from her livejournal.

posted by william 3:04 PM
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