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, November 19, 2004

I remember Cutty Sark whiskey, and that I always thought it was Cutty Shark, with an idea of the shark fin cutting through the water as representing the speed or impressiveness of the ship, till one day I was disoriented to see an ad for it in The New Yorker without the h. (The ads had a ship in a bottle, which never seemed like such a big deal to me, I guess because I imagined the bottom of the bottle unscrewed, until I saw a commercial where a father showed his son the last step of building one -- pulling the sails up with a thread through the mouth of the bottle which then detached from the ship and could be pulled out.)

posted by william 11:53 PM
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