I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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


Wednesday, November 17, 2004
I remember that after the movie, while the projector was still going, the pleated curtains would close, and it looked like they were transparent and you could see through them and read the credits (or see the figures) underneath; but they the lights would come up and they would be thick velvet opacities. (I think this was in the tonier, non-continuous showing movie theaters; not the New Yorker, but maybe one on 83rd, on the West side of Broadway (?), across from the Loew's 83rd which has itself been there forever.)


posted by william 7:04 PM
. . .
0 comments
Comments:

Post a Comment





. . .