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

Saturday, November 13, 2004

I remember my mother bringing me to New Orleans, which I really wanted to see, and eating at Brennan's (screwdrivers!), The Court of the Two Sisters (where I had a hurricane, and which I think boasted was where the cocktail was invented), Antoine's, where they then took your order without writing it down, no matter how complicated it was (they don't any more), and Buster's Rice and Beans, the best then, where a meal was 75 cents. (Does it still exist?) I liked it a lot then. Then she left and I met my friends Michael and Andy and we hung out for another week, staying with a bass player friend of Michael's in the Garden District. He worked days and we went to the French Quarter and hung out with some hilarious addict street musicians we'd gotten to talking with in Jackson Square, because Andy was a violin and player and played some good stuff on the fiddler's fiddle. As the tourists (shudder) started coming in, the musicians would arrange themselves to play, and when they got a little money I remember one of them announcing to the world, "Well either we're bucking for breakfast at Brennan's or we can go get rice and beans at Buster's." I loved the rhythm of bucking for breakfast at Brennan's. I liked the fact that the rhythm was all you needed to know to get the meaning of the word, like trim in Jeremiah: "Thou trimmest thy way to destruction." Which I guess is what he might've thought of New Orleans too.

posted by william 1:52 PM
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